In Life In Death

7/29/2019 In Life In Death

1/10

In life, in death

RANABIR SAMADDAR

MY purpose here is to present a few hypotheses on one of the great questions of our time,the arrangement of power and rights in life and in death. I shall argue that the interface ofhuman rights and humanitarianism presents a strategic game between life and death,between power and rights. Further, what is at stake is not a choice between human rightsand humanitarianism or an option of combining these two, but nothing less than the battlearound how we shall look at life and death, by which I mean power over life and powerover death, the right of life and right of death. This lies at the heart of most conflictsaround us today.

What can be learned from the interaction between human rights monitoring,

humanitarian assistance and conflict?

Let us begin with the issue of the interaction between human rights monitoring andhumanitarian assistance in conflict. While human rights is politics and humanitarianassistance civic activities, the eventual culmination of conflict is war.War is conquestor a battle to defeat the conqueror; it is politics by other means. In order to understand thecomplexity, we must bid farewell to the theory of sovereignty which resided in the states(roughly in equal measure) or those who controlled the states; that sovereignty meant theright to wage war, the right to inflict death on the ultimate offender, and imposed the dutyto protect life.

International laws are based on this recognition; laws of war and peace derive from anacknowledgement of this fact and the recognition of the necessity to regulate thissituation of equality. But, in posing this question, we are visualising a situation where thisright has been challenged, de-anchored from its habitual source that is sovereignty,because the power of empire has redefined sovereignty in a way where human rightsmonitoring and humanitarian assistance no longer remain issues of right of life and deathbut become mere expressions of power.

In such a situation the challenge is: how to monitor human rights violations during warwhich is itself a violation of human rights, or decide how humanitarian assistance can beprovided. In other words, since war has redefined conditions of the right of life and death,the resultant politics becomes the politics of war, a continuation of war by other means.In effect we face a reversal of the situation with a paradigmatic shift from the politics ofsovereignty to the politics of empire.
http://www.india-seminar.com/2004/533.htm


2/10

Human rights and humanitarian assistance were the markers of the politics ofsovereignty in two different forms, both signifying the right and power of life and death.Now, with the emergence of a new empire, the return of colonial wars and an extreme

right wing form of globalization waging resource wars, that right of life and death hasbecome outdated. These are now tickets of imperial power, simply its functionalvariables. Under these altered conditions, when the right of life and right to protect lifeare governed by power of death, human rights can only be monitored (not ensured) andhumanitarian assistance only partially given.

For example, the 1991 Iraq war was a decade long war, not less-than-a month war asportrayed by the media, in which many actors played aggressors or silent spectators. Theactors included global media giants who bayed for Iraqi blood, and even the UN SecurityCouncil which imposed a strict economic blockade on the country and disarmed itcompletely, thereby rendering Iraq defenceless in the face of impending aggression. The

January-February 1991 war followed the UN Security Council Resolution 687,authorizing all necessary means to obtain an unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi troopsfrom Kuwait.

The story of the 1991 Gulf War is well-known and does not bear repetition. It is useful,however, to recall the indiscriminate carnage towards the end of the war when Iraqi

forces were withdrawing from Kuwait following Moscows 24 February 1991 peace planwhich Iraq had accepted. On 26 February 1991, as the long Iraqi convoy was movingtowards Basra along Highway 80, the coalition forces launched a combined ground andair offensive and hit both ends with heavy explosives. The slaughter continued for thenext 40 hours with petrol tankers and tanks exploding in cascades of red flame amidstfigures of soldiers perishing like little ants.

The air campaign alone was responsible for 32,000 deaths and the total Iraqi casualtiesadded up to 62,000. The coalition forces reportedly dropped a total of 99,000 to 140,000tons of explosives equivalent of five to seven nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

The 1991 war also witnessed a near total destruction of Iraqs civilian infrastructure,including electric power stations, irrigation facilities and water and sewage treatmentplants. It was estimated that Iraq needed US $22 billion to repair the civilianinfrastructure. Then came the burden of war reparation to be paid out of the oil for food


3/10

programme a UN humanitarian programme to save life in conditions of slow, gradualand sure death. This continued for the next ten years while shadowy men like Wolfowitzand a dozen or so lobbyists pressed the case for war on Iraq.

Where would human rights monitoring begin in this case? Will it monitor the inhuman

nature of humanitarian assistance that is conditioned by the appearance of the NewEmpire? Will it probe at the margins, the vanishing margin between war (the right ofdeath) and the deployment of humanitarian strategy (the right of life), reducing it to amatter of power of life and death?

What are the ways in which human rights and humanitarian assistance groups can

coordinate their work to enhance the effectiveness of their intervention?

The reality we are talking of here is the divide between human rights andhumanitarianism, the near impossibility of coordinating the two, the reality of theircoexistence, and the simulated acts of life and death in this relationship. Human rightsspeak of the rights of thepeople, humanitarianism speaks ofpopulation the target to befed, clothed, sheltered, maintained and protected.

There are at least a couple of anomalies to be noted: first, war is a suspension of rights.Inter arma silent ledges in times of war laws are silent. A right against war may beclaimed, but it demands uncoupling two connected realities rights and power in life anddeath. A claim may be made that it is a war to establish rights, yet I doubt if one can

speak of rights in the time of war. Rights come after the war. That is how people figure inthis scenario. On the other hand, populations may be somewhat protected from thedestruction of war, which is what humanitarian activities are acts of mercy, hospitalityand care. These are ethical acts the techniques of self in relating to other selves. Theyare essentially private, that is truly public or non-state.

Organisations of care and charity have always emerged in human societies, at timesencouraged by royalty, emperors, kings, princes, churches, mosques and temples, but asinterventions they were non-state. Today, in the condition of modernity theseorganisations are akin to states or huge corporations; in their mode of functioning theyreveal the exact relation between care and power. In this metamorphosis we can see two

aspects: one, from humanitarian acts to humanitarianism, which is an ideology (fromsentiment to doctrine); and second, care as an arm of power. As Dostoyevsky remarked,we love humanity but we hate human beings.

The question that we need to think through is: how can we, perched as we are on thesetwo planks of human rights and humanitarian acts, turn them into acts of justice that willnot be bound by the closure caused by the self-foundation of law? In other words, if thelaws of war are a fallacy (beyond a point), if neither the right of life nor the right to save


4/10

life can escape the closure or the aporia, what are the conditions under which suchinterventions become possible and help make life a sign of justice? Can we think of apolitics that can anchor the issue of conditions of life to justice?

How should such groups and other intermediaries address the unintended consequences

of their interventions?

We must work rigorously to under-stand what the consequences have been in the past.There is no other way to approach the question. Foucault once pointed out that one of thegreatest social security programmes of the modern era was planned at a time when one ofthe most terrifying mass murders was being enacted. The French Revolution gives thesignal for the great national wars of our days, involving national armies and meeting theirconclusion or their climax in huge mass slaughters. A similar phenomenon can bewitnessed during the Second World War. In all history it would be hard to find suchbutchery as in World War II. Yet it was precisely this period, this moment, when thegreat welfare, public health and medical assistance programmes were instigated. The

Beveridge programme was, if not conceived, at least published at this very moment. Onecould symbolize such coincidence by a slogan: Go get slaughtered and we promise you along and pleasant life. Life insurance is connected with a death command (cf. ThePolitical Technology of Individuals).

If we know what the intended consequences were or are, it is possible to think of theother consequences. A rigorous study of the history or the histories of care is needed.Take the history of the birth of the Ramakrishna Mission founded by Vivekananda, thelife of Florence Nightingale, the activities of Norman Bethune, the Kotnis MedicalMission to China, the work of the Peoples Relief Committee in the Bengal Famine, andthe history of the Edhi Foundation in Karachi. There are three aspects to be noted: its

character as protest, its links to politics, and finally its subsequent development markedby the game of care and power. It is important to see the diverse and complex aspects the protest against death, the normalisation of death, and the disciplinary power of thelanguage of care.

In the wake of concerns relating to human rights violations is neutrality possible? What

ethical questions emerge from the focus on impartiality in conflict? Does neutrality

suggest that aid workers and other intermediaries run the risk of becoming instrumentsof social control rather than social transformation?

I have already answered a part of the question earlier, but there are other reflections aswell. The question of neutrality is being posed at a time when many regimes, mostly theimperial regime, have been able to wage wars killing countless people as managers oflife and survival. Once this logic is firmly established, the idea is to kill as few people as


5/10

possible to assure many that their lives would be spared. Consider therefore the advancesin the technology of killing targeted killing. This does not necessarily mean fewerdeaths, but that a war, such as the Iraq war, will now be two wars simultaneously virtual war and real war. In the real war slaughtering men and women will continue; inthe virtual war there will be targeted killing, fewer killings, lower body count, a

simulated situation where neutrality becomes increasingly possible.

No longer will neutrality (as the Anglo-French neutrality in the Spanish Civil War) causeoutrage; states would now find it possible to defy the massive public outrage as wewitnessed throughout the globe and support the punishment of a recalcitrant state, even tothe point of the destruction of the country. But we can also see a different development as control over life grows, the necessity to kill becomes less a form of juridicalpunishment; similarly as more countries acquiesce to the most extreme right wing formof globalisation, the necessity to punish will reduce. Controlling the bodies, physicallyregulating the lives of millions an ever present imperial dream is now more than evercloser to realisation.

With satellites, precision bombing, television, micro-inch mapping, geneticallymodified food, drug-food-clothing-chains, monitoring of small economies, and muchmore the imperial dream of controlling millions of people, turning them into populationgroups to be administered, is becoming an exciting reality for the empire. One mayremain neutral or non-neutral the agenda of neutrality is becoming irrelevant becauseright in front of our eyes, ethics and law are adjusting themselves to the new type of war

being evolved by the empire. Thus, the assassination of leaders (decapitation),incarceration (Guantanamo Bay prison), manipulation of media and the info-war (CNNor Fox News style mafia operation), withholding food supply from reaching thegarrisoned town/country thus killing children, the weak and infirm (economic blockade),asphyxiation and mass terrorisation (cluster bombs and daisy bombing) all that the lawsof war seek to prohibit have been granted moral and legal sanction.

The question is no longer one of rights and care, but resistance politics in defence of lifeat every level unconnected to the power of death. The agenda of humanitarian aid mustbe questioned aid under what conditions, reaching whom, given by whom, and reachingwhen? In this situation, when the right to life is linked to the power of death, whosehumanitarianism is it anyway? When efforts to give life-masks to groups of humanbeings on the verge of death meet the reality of power, that is the moment of truth: theultimate compromise of rights with power, of life with death.


6/10

Take again the noblest principles of impartiality in recent times. The AmnestyInternational made ten demands on the combatants on 18 March 2003 as the attack onIraq was to begin. The demands were: Do not attack civilians; do not use weapons thatkill and maim indiscriminately; treat civilian detainees fairly and humanely; treatcombatants according to the Geneva Conventions; prioritise the safety and needs of the

Iraqi people; protect and help refugees and the internally displaced; bring to justiceperpetrators of crimes under international law; allow independent investigation of theirconduct; deploy human rights monitors throughout Iraq as soon as practicable; supportthe UNs humanitarian and human rights work. These are the noblest principles ofneutrality. But they also reflect the tension between humanitarian laws, called the laws ofwar, and the human rights law they mirror.

The first six demands derive from international humanitarian law, with distinction andproportionality as the guiding principles with the aim to restrain the destructive force ofwar even while recognizing its inexorable necessities. Obviously, it will be difficult toassess whether or not and to what extent these principles of distinction and

proportionality were adhered to until the parties involved in the war (as Amnestysdemands 8 and 9 show) submit to independent investigation of their conduct and permithuman rights monitors in the terrain of their operations. But under conditions of a victorsjustice, how would the primary evidence of violations of the principles of proportionality,distinction and accountability be judged?

The implication is that unlike the traditional practice of securing reparation by the

victorious power from the vanquished (which is what the food for oil programme was),we need a process of reparation which takes into account the cost of damages, includingthe ongoing devastation and its impact on the quality of life because of the way the warhas been conducted by the victorious party. In such circumstances, the issue of reparationis linked to human lives, indeed the basic right to life. But I am not aware, judging thetrajectory of international human rights law and international humanitarian law and thecontrasting history of colonial wars, plunder, murders and loot, that such law can everagree on either a computation of the overall damage or the need for securing reparationfrom the victorious party.

Alternatively, take the case of suicide bombings. The distinction between combatants and

non-combatants assumes obscure dimensions in the context of resistance against totalaggression when combatants and civilians together mobilise in the war against aninvasion. How will human rights law and humanitarian law react to resistance, even if itmanifests itself in such desperate and suicidal acts as the British people would have takenrecourse to had Nazi German troops crossed the English Channel in 1944? Shall we recallthe American Revolution as perfidious because its harbingers had encouraged theparticipants to sneak up to the British military formations and shoot at them


7/10


8/10

country was declared non- violable and the Permanent Court of Arbitration, thepredecessor to the International Court of Justice, was established.

I do not know how the NGO-sponsored Hague meet of 1999 wrestled with the one-century old ghost when it adopted An Agenda for Peace and Justice dealing with the

root causes of war, international humanitarian and human rights laws and institutions,prevention, resolution and transformation of violent conflicts, and disarmament andhuman security. But what we do know is that in less than ten years of the Second Haguemeet (1907), the massacres of World War I started; the massacres then gave way to theTreaty of Versailles that disarmed Germany, dissolved its general staff, allowed only atoken navy, ordered demilitarisation of the Rhine zone on the East, and yet in twentyyears mass murders commenced again.

The annual publication ofArmament Year Bookby the League from 1924, attempts bythe permanent advisory commission of the League to regulate the arms trade andproduction beginning with The Brussels Act of 1890 (controlling the production andsupply firearms and ammunition to parts of Africa), the 1924 Geneva Protocol and the1925 Geneva Convention on the arms trade, and finally the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928leading upto the 1932 Disarmament Conference, all ended with a renewed clash of armsmarked by new weaponry. Even as our humanitarian instincts impel us to respond to thecalibrated calls on weapons of mass destruction, outlawing of landmines and so on, wemust also remember this curious history.

The ICRC considers a total ban on the production, export and use of anti-personnelmines to be the only effective solution to the humanitarian catastrophe they have caused(ICRC, 1995). Yet, such a solution cannot hold in the absence of measures for reducingthe disparity of arms, eradicating manufacture of weapons of mass destruction by theempire, and without an end to the present polarity we see in warfare the massivelyorganised warfare of the empire and the recolonisers, and the fragmented warseverywhere.

It needs to be re-emphasised that noble humanitarian aims cannot be realised by claimingthat international humanitarian law has developed quite independently from human rightslaw. In the light of our experience, it is time to think whether it is realistic to claim that

by not focusing on violations of human rights but instead on the need to act in a crisissituation, a neutral and independent intermediary can find practical solutions forhumanitarian problems (ICRC n.d.), or that humanitarian law can protect human rights(for instance, through visits to prisons and detention camps thus preventingdisappearances, or through providing essential supplies thereby promoting the right tolife).


9/10

Living and letting others live is no innocent act. All social and political contracts are theresults of war; humanitarian law is no exception insofar as it has the nature of a contract.The duration of its imposition is defined as the time of peace, which ends with new wars

requiring new contracts. We have to keep in mind the permanence of wars in order toforge new practices of human rights, justice and peace. An ideal of justice has to link, notde-link the two.

Let me conclude with reflections on the rules governing the conduct of hostilities ininternal armed conflicts the distinction between combatants and civilians, immunity ofcivilian population, prohibition of superfluous injury, prohibition of perfidy, respect forand protection of medical and religious personnel and of medical units and transport,prohibition of attacks on dwellings and other installations used only by civilianpopulation, or precautionary measures in attack, plus the customary rules on chemicaland biological weapons, poison, mines and incendiary weapons.

Take the controversy around Common Article 3: What defines internal armed conflict?That is not international is that enough? Or is ambiguity an advantage, which ahumanitarian agency like the ICRC believes, because ambiguity allows efforts to pushthe threshold of application? We have of course determinants of what constitutes anarmed conflict (cfThe Law of Internal Armed Conflictby Lindsay Moir), but note herethe politics of recognition. Recognition, legal recognition of the party in revolt or theinsurgents depends on possession of an organised military force, an authorityresponsible for its acts, acting within a determinate territory. Also on the de juregovernment recognising the insurgents as belligerents, the insurgents (having) anorganisation purporting to have the characteristics of a state, and so on.

In all these, we see state logic reproducing itself at every level, alongside a refusal toadmit that the phenomenon of revolt constitutes a paradox it is both a reproduction ofthe old form against which it rises even as it carries new elements not associated with theold state. The determinants mentioned try to understand insurgency in the language ofstate law, therefore subordinate them to state logic, while refusing to admit that the partyin revolt represents a dangerous supplement. The law of internal armed conflicttherefore fails. The politics of war can be tamed not by the laws of war but by a politicsof dialogue, of which one expression can be legal pluralism.

To carry forward the work of justice in the shadow of war we need to take war in allseriousness. I am not referring to the cyclical theory of war and peace. My plea is for acritical politics of justice that will make us aware of the script of modern war detailingvarious roles, including the ones that human rights and humanitarianism will play in the


10/10

event. Francois Bernard, the architect of an astonishing website on globalisation, drawsattention to the fact that modern imperial wars are like political blockbusters: the last warwe witnessed gripped to our seats was not like a film, but was precisely a film, down tothe last detail.

Drawing inspiration from the cinematographic industry, the script of war realises, inadvance, all its plans and ventures. That is why in modern imperial war the script is sosacred and inviolable, dictating to everyone associated with the war, including humanrights and humanitarian groups, the role/s to play. The casting, technical and financialmeans of the cinematic war are meticulously planned to ensure an exceptional successlong before the war is launched. War, literally, cannot be waged without cinema, withoutthe cinema effectively becoming the paradigm of the ongoing war which most imagine as

real, while it is only a mirror of its cinematographic being. No wonder, the attempt is togain complete control over all channels; only then can the magical marketing wand eraseeven the most trivial scripting, casting and directing errors. The one crucial requirementis that there has to be film in the reel, sound bytes and abundant images, so that expertmixers can continuously dish it out to consumers with ever-weakening critical faculties.

How does one disturb such a script? By refusing to play given roles, by shifting ourlenses a little, by showing discomfort with the chairs we are given, by asking time andagain, where do rights come from? From law or from contentious politics that senseof justice, that extra, that remainder, which cannot be consumed by the regime of law?

In Life In Death

Documents

Transcript of In Life In Death