by Mitchell Plitnick

Like many of us, I’ve been very busy on social media since Israel began its military operation in Gaza. I see a lot of ignorant nonsense there, and it’s not limited to the pro-Israel side. I also see a lot of shoddy thinking and ignorance of the facts. Since [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Mitchell Plitnick

Like many of us, I’ve been very busy on social media since Israel began its military operation in Gaza. I see a lot of ignorant nonsense there, and it’s not limited to the pro-Israel side. I also see a lot of shoddy thinking and ignorance of the facts. Since I had to study up a lot of this for my job as the Director of the US Office of B’Tselem, I thought I might set the record straight.

“War crimes”

Various memes make the rounds in discussions of war crimes. One that I found particularly laughable was “Even the UN says Hamas is committing war crimes but they say Israel only might be.” I’ve also seen defenses of Hamas’ firing of missiles at civilian targets in Israel based on Palestinians’ right of self-defense.

Here is the long and short of it: War crimes are defined as “Serious violations of international humanitarian law constitute war crimes.” That’s going to encompass pretty much every violation that might become a public issue in any conflict.

International law recognizes that civilians are going to be hurt, killed and dispossessed in war. The obligation of combatants is to do all they can to minimize the death and destruction if they do need to operate in areas where it is likely that civilians will be hurt.

As a result, when Israel proclaims its innocence of violating these laws, no matter how suspicious we may be, enforcers of international law cannot declare that war crimes have been committed without an investigation. Reasonable people who are not international lawyers can make assumptions, but the investigation needs to happen, and it is always possible, especially when the conflict involves an area as densely populated as Gaza, that it will turn out that the state in question did its best to avoid civilian casualties. High civilian casualty numbers are not proof, but they obviously raise suspicions.

On Hamas’ side, this is true as well, but Hamas makes no secret of its use of weapons which, by their very nature, cannot be used in a manner that can discriminate between civilian and military targets. So, while the UN or other bodies would still investigate and make a case before taking any action, Hamas is committing war crimes. It’s not unfair to say so.

In this case, however, Israel has declared that the homes of leading Hamas activists (and those of other factions) are legitimate targets. They have, in fact, willfully bombed such houses during these engagements as a result. Unlike the 2002 assassination of Salah Shehade, where Israel claimed (falsely, many say) to have believed Shehade to be alone in the building they bombed, Israel has made no such claims this time around. Therefore, it is also not unfair to say that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, even before an investigation.

If not for Iron Dome, there would have been many more Israeli casualties

This statement seems to make sense, but the numbers don’t back it up. A study done through July 14, when rocket fire into Israel was at its most intense, showed that the number of rockets being fired from Gaza was fewer than in Operation Cast Lead and the frequency of hits was about the same.

I’m all for Iron Dome. Any defensive system whose purpose is to protect civilians is something I consider an absolute positive, and I only wish more countries would invest in such systems, endeavoring to protect, rather than avenge, their civilians. The concern that iron Dome would make Israel even more reckless and grant it even more impunity does not seem to be borne out by its actions in the current onslaught. Those actions, brutal as they are, are no worse than what Israel did in 2008 and 2012 to Gaza or what it did in 2006 to Lebanon. So, yeah, please let’s see more Iron Domes in the world.

By the same token, however, it doesn’t seem like Iron Dome is actually protecting Israeli civilians nearly as much as the rockets’ lack of any sort of targeting ability.

Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people

Opponents of Israeli policies in the United States and in Israel itself have an uphill battle against an entrenched propagandistic view of the entire conflict. We do ourselves no favors by using bombastic, easily assailable language in making our arguments.

Genocide has a specific meaning in international law. It does not mean large scale killing. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide provides that definition:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of thr group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There is no evidence that this is what Israel is trying to do. Indeed, the best evidence that Israel is not doing this is the simple fact that the Palestinian population, in both the West Bank and Gaza, continues to grow, despite the occupation and all its concomitant hardships.

Would Israel like to find a way to get rid of the Palestinians in the West Bank and cut off Gaza? Sure, but that is not genocide, it is ethnic cleansing, and frankly, that’s bad enough. Israel has done that very gradually over the years, confiscating more and more land, forcing Palestinians into ever smaller enclaves and turning Gaza into one big open air prison.

Making claims that are contradicted by the facts, especially the weighty accusation of genocide, is irresponsible and self-defeating; it plays right into Israel’s propaganda hands.

Hamas is exercising legitimate self-defense

It is absolutely true that an occupied people has the right to resist its occupiers. It is also true that the unusual nature of Israel’s occupation makes it very difficult for guerrilla groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and others to take any violent action that would conform to international legal standards. As international legal expert Noura Erekat puts it: “Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested.”

It is also true that Israel itself does not differentiate between attacks on its civilians and its soldiers. It views them as equally illegitimate and labels it all “terrorism,” even though legally, Israeli soldiers are combatants while on duty. Take, for example, the killing of IDF soldier Natanel Moshiashvili in 2012. The IDF statement about his death plainly states: “The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm Israeli civilians or IDF soldiers, and will operate against anyone who uses terror against the State of Israel.”

Nonetheless, the fact that Palestinians are mostly unable to strike exclusively at Israeli military targets does not mean that it is suddenly legal to use indiscriminate weapons or to target civilians. These are war crimes, and any credible investigation must investigate both sides while also taking into account the massive differences in capabilities and power of the two. Israel must also be scrutinized more closely because it has a far greater ability to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants than Hamas.

Hamas is using human shields

Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true, but it does make a whole lot of people believe it. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu willfully and repeatedly lied to the Israeli public and the world about Hamas’ complicity in the kidnap and murder of the three young Israeli settlers, which sparked this latest round. He kept saying he had proof that he never produced, and now the Israeli police are admitting what everyone who was actually paying attention at the time knew: this was an independent act of violence.

It’s the same with the human shield argument. Like genocide, the term “human shield” has a legal definition. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “… the use of human shields requires an intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.” Again, as Erekat wrote: “International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true.” Erekat correctly cites reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which focused on past engagements. There is also doubt being cast by journalists in Gaza today.

In fact, no evidence has ever been presented to support the accusation apart from the high number of civilian casualties and Israel’s word. On the other hand, Israel’s own High Court had to demand that Israel stop using human shields. That happened in 2005, but the practice continued.

In any case, even the presence of human shields does not absolve or mitigate Israel’s responsibility to minimize civilian casualties. Again quoting Erekat: “Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties…In the over three weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.”

Finally, one last point and one more citation of Noura Erekat. The claim that Israel is merely acting in self-defense fails on a number of counts. As I and others have been saying from the beginning, the Netanyahu government willfully and cynically used the murders of three Israelis as an excuse to provoke Hamas with mass arrests and widespread activities that included the deaths of nine Palestinian civilians before this operation started. That removes the self-defense argument from the start. But more than that, the Gaza Strip, despite it being emptied of settlements and soldiers, remains under Israeli control, and is thus occupied territory, contrary to Israel’s claims. Please check out Erekat’s excellent write-up of what this means for the right of self-defense. And please note, she never denies that Israel has a right to protect its own civilians, but that is not the same thing.

Photo: International and Palestinian volunteers accompanied Civil Defense and other rescue crews, as well as family members, into Shujaya, a neighborhood by the separation barrier in the east of Gaza City, in an attempt to locate survivors of overnight and ongoing shelling by the Israeli army on July 20. Credit: Joe Catron

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by Jim Lobe

A Guatemalan court this afternoon found former President Efrain Rios Montt guilt of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the indigenous Mayan Ixil population as a result of the counter-insurgency campaign he directed as president from 1982 to 1983; that is, in the middle of Elliott [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Jim Lobe

A Guatemalan court this afternoon found former President Efrain Rios Montt guilt of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the indigenous Mayan Ixil population as a result of the counter-insurgency campaign he directed as president from 1982 to 1983; that is, in the middle of Elliott Abrams’ tenure as the Reagan administration’s assistant secretary of state for human rights. While human rights, church groups, and the American Anthropological Association repeatedly denounced that campaign (with some actually calling it “genocide”), the administration moved during that period to restore and increase military aid to the government. In fact, after visiting personally with Rios Montt in Honduras in early December, 1982, Reagan himself declared that the born-again president was getting a “bum rap” from rights groups and journalists and that he was “a man of great personal integrity” who faced “a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala.”

Here’s what Human Rights Watch, with which Abrams clashed quite frequently over rights conditions in Central America, including Guatemala, during Rios Montt’s reign, said tonight after the verdict was announced:

Guatemala: Rios Montt Convicted of Genocide

Landmark Ruling against Impunity, Judicial Control Needed in Handling Appeals

(New York, May 10, 2013)—The guilty verdict against Efraín Ríos Montt, former leader of Guatemala, for genocide and crimes against humanity is an unprecedented step toward establishing accountability for atrocities during the country’s brutal civil war, Human Rights Watch said today.

“The conviction of Rios Montt sends a powerful message to Guatemala and the world that nobody, not even a former head of state, is above the law when it comes to committing genocide,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Without the persistence and bravery of each participant in this effort – the victims, prosecutors, judges, and civil society organizations – this landmark decision would have been inconceivable.”

Rios Montt was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the crime of genocide and 30 years for crimes against humanity in a sentence that was handed down on May 10, 2013 by Judge Yassmin Barrios in Guatemala City. In her decision, Barrios said Rios Montt was fully aware of plans to exterminate the indigenous Ixil population carried out by security forces under his command.

The genocide conviction was the first for a current or former head of state in a national court, Human Rights Watch said.

Clearly, tonight’s conviction should prove rather embarrassing for Abrams, as this genocide occurred “on his watch,” so to speak, and there’s no on-the-record indication that he ever disagreed with the defense that the administration mounted on Rios Montt’s behalf or that he opposed its repeated efforts to provide Guatemala’s army with military aid. Nor, of course, did Abrams resign in protest over those efforts.

Precisely what his stance vis-a-vis Guatemala policy was during this period remains somewhat cloudy, as the American Republic Affairs (ARA) bureau, then led by the late Tom Enders (the man who oversaw the secret bombing of Cambodia), was the main public spokesman for the administration’s policy. Hopefully, the National Security Archive, whose dogged work played a major role in making Rios Montt’s prosecution possible, will soon release declassified documents that will shed light on what Abrams did or did not do on Guatemala during this period and specifically whether he signed off on/objected to/tried to amend testimony and other public statements made by Enders and other officials. (It would be very interesting to find out whether he may have, as the chief human rights official, personally briefed Reagan before the “bum rap” statement.)

For example, after Amnesty International issued a searing report detailing 112 incidents in which from one to 100 men, women and children were reportedly massacred by Guatemalan troops, Enders sent a letter to Congress contesting the findings, noting, among other things, that Amnesty had relied on groups “closely aligned with, if not largely under the influence of, the guerrilla groups attempting to overthrow the Guatemalan government.” His letter was based on an unpublished memorandum from the U.S. embassy in Guatemala which, among other assertions, concluded that “a concerted disinformation campaign is being waged in the US against the Guatemalan Government by groups supporting the leftwing insurgency in Guatemala; this has enlisted the support of conscientious human rights and church organizations which may not fully appreciate that they are being utilized.”

At about the same time, Enders’ principal deputy, Stephen Bosworth, testified before the House Subcommittee on International Development — the administration was moving to increase balance-of-payments support to Rios Montt and lift Carter-era, human rights-related bans on U.S. support for loans from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank — that Rios Montt was doing great things for the native population in the Ixil Triangle:

Political violence in rural areas continues and may even be increasing, but its use as a political tactic appears to be a guerrilla strategy, not a government doctrine. Eyewitness reports of women among the attackers, Embassy interviews with massacre survivors, the use of weapons not in the army inventory, and most importantly, the increasing tendency of rural villagers to seek the army’s protection all suggest that the guerrillas are responsible in major part for the rising levels of violence in rural areas.

Given what we have learned about Rios Montt’s “Beans-and-Bullets” strategy, these assertions today seem utterly laughable, if the actual events were not so terrible.

But the question remains: what was Abrams doing during this period about Guatemala. Did he review the embassy report? Did he clear Enders’ letter or Bosworth’s testimony? Was he — by all accounts, an effective bureaucratic infighter — in the loop while this genocide was taking place and the administration was pushing hard to arm the genocidaires? (We know his office received this cable.) How did he respond?

Rios Montt’s conviction may prove embarrassing not only to Abrams, but also to some of his fellow-neocons who also defended Guatemala during this period. Here’s the Wall Street Journal celebrating Reagan’s blessing as a “Guatemalan Breakthrough” (Dec 15, 1982):

Change in Guatemala would vindicate the Reagan administration’s much maligned human rights policy. Unlike the Carter administration’s confrontational posturing, the quiet argument of Reagan’s men seems to be finding an audience. Much of the changed atmosphere is undoubtedly due to the coup that installed General Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian. The early promise of Rios Montt’s rule was tarnished by reports of massacres of Indians and of renewed “death squad” activity. But perhaps General Rios Montt had recognized the key point — that human rights not only make moral sense but also are the only practical base on which to build a legitimate government.

Thus General Rios Montt seems to have ordered his troops in the field to observe strict rules not to molest or steal from peasants, borrowing a page from the guerrilla textbook. At the same time, the peasants are being encouraged to join government forces in return for food and shelter, thus denying a source of manpower to the guerrillas.

Doubtless the Rios Montt approach also owes something to the way the Reagan administration is handling human rights. An absolute insistence on every detail of the most advanced democracy can prove devastating to our authoritarian friends.

Sounds a little naive in retrospect, doesn’t it?

Also likely to be somewhat embarrassed is the government of Israel which moved into the vacuum created by Carter’s and Congress’s cut-off of military and intelligence assistance and subsequently expanded its involvement with Rios Montt’s counter-insurgency efforts with the Reagan administration’s encouragement. In 1982, just before Reagan’s visit, Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success in allegedly defeating the guerrillas was due the fact that “our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” It was the same year as the Sabra and Shatila massacres by Israel-backed Phalange militiamen in Beirut. Now, its Central American client has been convicted of genocide.

What if another wave of xenophobic violence unfurled, like the one that shook South Africa to the core a year ago? It left 50 dead and about 150,000 displaced, [...]]]>  When friends ask me about the World Soccer Cup in South Africa in June 2010, I say there is only one if, but a big if.

What if another wave of xenophobic violence unfurled, like the one that shook South Africa to the core a year ago? It left 50 dead and about 150,000 displaced, terrified and destitute immigrants – black, African and foreign. (Click here to see a slideshow)

The army stepped in and the violence subsided. But xenophobia still simmers. In June, IPS reported on yet more murders of Somalis in the Western Cape province. These are so common – 52 in 2008 – they don’t even make national news.  Only a really gruesome murder of Somalis – a mother and her children killed and dismembered in their spaza shop last year – makes the front page. Otherwise, murdered Somalis earn only a short news item.

Zimbabweans, Congolese, Tanzanian, Ethiopians and Bangladeshis were also murdered this year – shot, burnt alive, and pushed off a sixth floor from Durban to Cape Town.

“Violence against foreigners is rapidly becoming fully integrated into the standard politics of some townships,” Loren Landau, director of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Forced Migration Studies Programme, told IPS.

A recent report by the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa notes that there were no convictions for rape and murder committed during the 2008 attacks, sending a message of impunity.

The report “Protecting refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in South Africa” says there is little reason to believe that attacks against “outsiders” will not happen again.

For now, the country is in honeymoon period with the new government elected in April on a platform of service delivery and job creation, topped with the success of the soccer Confederations Cup in June.

But if disappointment over unmet expectations coupled with recession sets in, frustration could turn into xenophobic violence.

Violent  masculinities                                                         

Earlier this year, an insightful and distressing collection of essays, “Go Home or Die Here”, analysed the 2008 attacks.

Photo: IPS

 From a gender perspective, the authors argue that “negrophobic xenophobia is couched as a battle between two sets of men. (…) the anxieties provoked by economic exclusion and social fragmentation have found expression in violent masculinities, in which weapons are an extension of maleness, and women are no more than bodies to be possessed.”

The striking photos by Alon Skuy  illustrate this point. Most are men – rioters armed with sticks and machetes, rifle-toting policemen, bloodied corpses. The few women are at camps for the displaced.

The book’s graphic layout is so sleek that I found it disturbing – a coffee table book on xenophobia? It is borderline with the glamorisation of violence – the  gold light bathed photos of angry young men grinning as they chase hapless foreigners.

The photos gave me the same eerie feeling I had in the cholera camps of Goma, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talking to genocidaires, I felt in them pure hatred and a taste for violence. “The problem is that we didn’t kill all the Tutsi cockroaches,” one told me.

The Consortium report notes that “rumours of groups mobilising to finish the job started in May 2008 (…) may easily lead to further violence and displacement”.

If that happens, don’t expect many Africans to come watch soccer in South Africa in 2010.

What happens when the relatives of the murdered confront their murderers? What happens if they have to live with the murderers?

This is the theme of “My neighbour, my killer”, a film about Rwanda’s extraordinary attempt at reconciliation. This documentary by Anne Aghion, which premiered in New York two weeks ago at the [...]]]>

Remembering in Rwanda. Courtesy Anne Aghion

What happens when the relatives of the murdered confront their murderers? What happens if they have to live with the murderers?

This is the theme of “My neighbour, my killer”, a film about Rwanda’s extraordinary attempt at reconciliation. This documentary by Anne Aghion, which premiered in New York two weeks ago at the Human Rights Watch film festival, follows a gacaca or community court during five years.

Rwanda has set up some 12, 000 gacaca where killers face the relatives of those they killed during the genocide in 1994. (Read an interview with Aghion here).

A world and an age away, the same questions emerge in “Katyn”, the magnificent, sombre and sober epic movie made in 2008 by Polish director Andrzej Wajda about the Soviet massacre of 20,000 Poles during World War 2.  During the ensuing five decades of occupation of Poland, the Soviets falsified history in a web of institutional lies and blamed the Nazis for the mass murders.

Both films are meditations on memory and history and their distortions, on loss, cruelty and forgiving, on imperfect justice, atonement and healing.

Women are central to both films – they are witness to horror and keepers of memory.

Think of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo haunting the Argentine junta with the photographs of their disappeared sons and daughters in the 1980s.

Gendering truth, gendering abuse

At truth and reconciliation commissions across the world, the bulk of testimonies by women dwell more on their loved ones and less on their own sufferings.

This is changing, as truth commissions become more gender-aware and seek gendered narratives. Earlier commissions, such as Argentina and Chile, were gender-neutral (some say gender-blind). South Africa was gender-neutral in its mandate but had special hearings for women. Peru’ commission had a gender unit. Later ones, like Haiti, Sierra Leone and Timor Leste, have looked specifically at sexual violence.

And more: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have ruled that mass rape, sexual assault, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced abortion and forced pregnancy may be crimes against humanity, torture and genocide.

A third film that I saw recently is “Persepolis”, Marjane Satrapi’s wildly popular graphic novel turned animated movie, about her life growing up as a girl who likes Michael Jackson and punk music under the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1980s.

Protesting in Tehran. Photo: M. Avazbeigi

Its charming animation overlays a dreadful national and family history of imprisonment, torture, disappearances, failed revolutions, dashed political hopes, war and Shariah.

The movie conveys a poignant description of another form of gender abuse: the repression of women’s freedom to dress, move about, work, study, divorce, inherit, love and have fun.

Repressed, but not cowed into submission: as I write, on the streets across Iran, women are protesting, being beaten up, arrested and killed, challenging theocracy, demanding their rights.

(Read about women protesters in Iran and about dismantling a culture of impunity in Guatemala, Peru and Democratic Republic of Congo)