Opportunities for addressing explosive violence

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Drawing by David Shrigley.

On 14 November 2012, the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) hosted a lunch-time briefing to present research carried out by UNIDIR’s Norms on Explosive Weapons project and to offer different perspectives on how to address the humanitarian concerns raised by the use of explosive weapons.

Considering that sandwich lunches at the United Nations Office at Geneva are not known for their culinary appeal, the large number of people attending the event seems to signal growing interest among an increasingly diverse group in addressing the humanitarian concerns raised by explosive violence.

Presented at the briefing was the main output of the Norms on Explosive Weapons project, the study Protecting Civilians from the Effects of Explosive Weapons: An Analysis of International Legal and Policy Standards. The study concludes that existing legal and policy standards fail to articulate the serious risk of harm associated with the use of explosive weapons in populated areas in a manner that adequately protects civilians from the effects of explosive weapons, and suggests ways in which standards, particularly rules of international humanitarian law (IHL), could be enhanced to reduce civilian harm.

In this study and in policy discussions over the last years, harm from the use of explosive weapons has been mainly formulated as a challenge to the protection of civilians, and of children in particular, in situations of armed conflict. Such an IHL-indebted framing has its limitations. As Professor Brian Rappert explained at the briefing, concern about the humanitarian consequences of explosive violence can also be framed as a public health issue, which would, among other things, be more conducive to recognizing the debilitating effects of explosive violence across all affected communities (not only “civilians”) and enable coalitions to be built with different stakeholders (See Rappert et al. in Social Science & Medicine 75 (2012) for a detailed discussion).

The particular impact of explosive weapons on the provision of health care has already been highlighted in the framework of the Red Cross’ Health Care in Danger campaign, but there is certainly scope for more focused engagement with medical and public health communities on explosive violence, for example, through WHO’s armed violence prevention stream of work.

As developments over the last three years have shown, addressing explosive violence also offers opportunities to engage in new ways with existing conventions and agendas. There are, for example, obvious linkages between the work of AOAV and others aimed at gaining a better understanding of the patterns of harm associated with explosive violence through improved collection and analysis of data, and the efforts of actors associated with the Every Casualty Campaign, working toward the recording of all casualties of armed violence, as well as with the goals of The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development and of The Oslo Commitments on Armed Violence.  The specific impacts of explosive weapons on the built environment and on the provision of public services could further be explored from a development, peacebuilding, habitat, forced displacement, or environmental perspective. A gender perspective would also produce critical insights into the patterns of harm associated with the use of explosive weapons.

Particularly in relation to harm from drone strikes, the human rights dimension has received a lot of attention. A systematic articulation of the human rights implications of explosive violence more generally, including of how economic, social and cultural rights may be affected, could be one way of building full recognition of the rights of victims and of the responsibilities of users to victims. Data on direct casualties and other impacts of explosive violence is significant for ensuring redress to victims. This ties into the work of organisations associated with the Making Amends Campaign. Focusing on explosive violence also allows conceiving of victim assistance responsibilities in a broader sense than how they are articulated under existing disarmament treaties regulating particular explosive weapon types (such as in relation to the Mine Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions or CCW discussions on mines, IEDs and explosive remnants of war).

Finally, focusing on explosive violence also invites debate about the acceptability of the use of force and the relations of accountability between the users of force and populations amongst whom force is used. The use of explosive weapons, particularly by a state among its own population, has been proposed as an indicator of crisis developing and of a shift to a military orientation in the use of force. Growing recognition of the extreme risk of harm associated with the use of explosive weapons, particularly in populated areas, raises expectations that users of explosive weapons publicly explain the conditions under which such use might be  justified, what practical steps they take to measure its impacts, how harmful consequences will be addressed, and how accountability to local populations will be ensured.

Hopefully, states committed to addressing this humanitarian concern will soon cease an opportunity to make available information on harm from the use of explosive weapons and to issue policy statements outlining the conditions under which certain explosive weapons may and may not be used in populated areas, as called for repeatedly by the UN Secretary-General. States and other actors should also be expected to reflect on the humanitarian assistance and protection, crisis management, and mine action responses that use of explosive weapons in populated areas calls for.

UNIDIR’s Norms on Explosive Weapons project formally concludes at the end of November 2012. Since its creation in 2010, this website has attracted quite a number of visitors from all over the world and I am grateful for the feedback I have received from some of you.

This website will no longer be updated after 30 November 2012, but its content will remain accessible online. To stay informed on explosive weapons related work, follow @explosiviolence on twitter (the feed will be maintained by AOAV), join the mailing list of the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW) and subscribe to AOAV’s explosive violence updates. To receive news about UNIDIR’s work, sign up here.

War shatters, breaks apart, levels the built world

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Smoke rises over Saif Al Dawla district in Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012. (AP Photo/ Manu Brabo)

Smoke rises over Saif Al Dawla district in Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012. (AP Photo/ Manu Brabo)

It’s Not Berlin 1945, it’s Not Beirut 1989 – It’s #Aleppo 2012… (@MWNader, 4 Oct 2012)

Syria’s civil war leaves its cities, economy and cultural heritage in shambles. New images of the devastation and the victims of this war reach us every day. They show entire blocks of apartment buildings that have been shattered, their top floors reduced to pancaked slabs of concrete. Centuries-old markets have been gutted by flames and shelling in places like Aleppo and Homs – an irreplaceable chunk of history wiped out.

Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. (Sontag, 2003)

Explosive weapons, especially those with wide area effects, play a prominent role in the devastation of Syrian cities, towns and villages, as they did and continue to do elsewhere, in other conflicts.

Destruction in the Juret al-Shayyah neighbourhood of the Syrian central city of Homs.

Destruction in the Juret al-Shayyah neighbourhood of the Syrian central city of Homs. (via http://www.timesofmalta.com)

Material destruction of the kind we are witnessing in Syria today is often interpreted as a phenomenon contingent to and dependent upon violence against people: Their health and survival are indirectly affected by the material destruction caused by explosive violence. Clinics may be damaged, medical supplies destroyed, medical professionals unable to provide effective health care. Markets and shops may be destroyed, bakeries and water tanks damaged, disrupting the supply of food and drinking water. The power grid may be affected, telephone lines may be down, cutting people off from each other. People’s houses and farms may be damaged, animals killed, crops burned, leaving people without shelter, possessions and sometimes, without the means to make a living. The destruction of bridges, roads and railway tracks makes it difficult to flee the violence, to seek and to provide assistance. Damage to schools and other public infrastructure may negatively affect human and socio-economic development for many years to come.

Al Qussor (Photo: Lens Young Homsi, 31 Oct 2012)

Al Qussor (Photo: Lens Young Homsi, 31 Oct 2012)

To be sure, a cityscape is not made of flesh. Still, sheared-off buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street. (Sontag, 2003)

Clearly, the survival and protection of architecture are important to the survival and well-being of people. But the destruction of buildings poses questions in its own right that are as fundamental as those posed by the destruction of human life. Reducing the built environment to rubble can be seen as a distinct form of violence.

The buildings in and through which individuals live their lives, Coward (2009) argues, are more than merely equipment for living. They are constitutive of the nature of those lives. Roads, bridges, squares, churches, mosques, old towns and market halls are places experienced collectively. They offer the collective the possibility of duration as a community. Architecture, monuments in particular, is the keeper of a recounted story and thus a keeper of identity. The structures that people create are part of their cultural heritage. People shape public space and are, in return, shaped by it (Zaprianov, 2012).

In a space of 100m², in a road inside Bustan Al Dewan, a district located within the besieged Old Homs, Syria, you can see religions uniting, hand in hand and side by side. The unity seen in these districts is like no other, like nothing seen across most of the globe. Muslim and Christian unite inside these besieged districts as one body. Jamal Aldeen Mosque, Lady Alsalam Church, Thee Alkala' Mosque, Alsenodes Anglican Church. (Photo: Lens Young Homsi, 28 Oct 2012)

Jamal Aldeen Mosque, Lady Alsalam Church, Thee Alkala’ Mosque, Alsenodes Anglican Church. (Photo: Lens Young Homsi, 28 Oct 2012)

The “Young Homsi” who took the photo on the left described it as follows: ”In a space of 100m², in a road inside Bustan Al Dewan, a district located within the besieged Old Homs, Syria, you can see religions uniting, hand in hand and side by side. The unity seen in these districts is like no other, like nothing seen across most of the globe. Muslim and Christian unite inside these besieged districts as one body.”

What is at stake in the destruction of this site and of other shared spaces in Homs and Aleppo, in Grozny, Misrata, Mogadishu, Sarajevo and elsewhere, is the destruction of the possibility of being-with-others. It is an assault on shared or public spatiality, and thereby an attack on the possibility of plurality or heterogeneity (Coward, 2009). It is a process of killing memory (Riedlmayer, 1994). It is place annihilation (Graham, 2004).

Paul Sahre graphic for the Week in Review section of The New York Times, July 10, 2005.

Paul Sahre graphic for the Week in Review section of The New York Times, July 10, 2005.

Coward believes that explaining the material devastation in terms of the legal notions of military necessity, civilian objects and cultural property privileges certain forms of destruction over others and fails to recognize the substantial and widespread devastation of the built environment in general. It also does little to help us understand what it is that is being destroyed - predictably and preventably so, when explosive weapons with wide area effects are used in cities, towns, or villages.

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flame. (Sontag, 2003)

But there is some good in acknowledging the suffering caused in the world we share with others. And, in Sontag‘s words, images of human suffering and devastation caused by war are an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. “Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?”

Mercifully, even the vast destruction and violence wrought by war and terror tends to be transient. Cities, in particular, are resilient (Graham, 2004).

Of life under shelling and drone strikes, and some reflections on the framing of explosive weapons

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Civilian homes in Killi (Idlib province) destroyed by indiscriminate attacks.© Amnesty International

Civilian homes in Killi (Idlib province) destroyed by indiscriminate attacks.© Amnesty International

Two reports came out earlier this month documenting the devastating humanitarian effects of the use, in populated areas, of explosive weapons with wide area effects. And, a new book invites reflection on the framing of explosive weapons. These publications are briefly presented below.

Amnesty International‘s brief report, Syria: Indiscriminate attacks terrorize and displace civilians (19 September 2012), provides harrowing accounts of the horrors of daily life for the residents of several  towns and villages in the Idlib, Jabal al-Zawiya and north Hama regions of Syria.

It was a massacre. Three of my daughters were killed and the fourth one was badly injured; the other children had horrible injuries … Why bomb innocent civilians in their homes?  How can this be allowed?

asks Ahmad Sulayman, after a missile strike on a house in the village of Tarmala. In this attack alone, fifteen family members were wounded.

Amnesty International’s research shows that “the relentless indiscriminate air bombardments and shelling are killing mostly civilians, including many children.” Beyond civilian casualties, the report draws attention to the massive displacement of civilians and the destruction of houses, shops and public infrastructure.

The report stresses that these attacks take place in residential areas and other places where civilians gather, including market squares and places where civilians have sought shelter from the bombardments. With regard to these locations, Amnesty International underlines that “when parties are fighting in the vicinity of civilians they must choose appropriate means and methods of attack” – a requirement that “rules out the use of certain types of weapons”. 

In particular, the widespread use, in populated residential areas, of “battlefield weapons that have a wide impact radius and/or wide margin of error, or cannot be directed at specific targets, such as artillery shells, mortars and free-fall unguided bombs and rockets” has inflicted and will continue to inflict heavy civilian casualties and cause massive damage to civilians objects.

In Amnesty International’s assessment, continuation of such attacks in the full knowledge of the grave civilian harm they cause violates the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks under international humanitarian law (IHL). “[A]ny use of artillery, mortars, and unguided rockets in populated residential areas”, as documented in the report, “violates this prohibition and may constitute a war crime”.

The view that “battlefield weapons…which have a wide impact radius” should not be used in residential areas is in line with calls by the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW) and others for an end to the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects in populated areas.

Wide area effects may be due to a variety of factors. Amnesty International’s report emphasises that insufficient precision in the delivery of an explosive munition is highly problematic. The report distinguishes between “precise” and “imprecise” weapons and  between “pinpoint targeting” and “the targeting of areas”, and expresses concern at the use of “unguided bombs dropped from the air and imprecise artillery shells and mortars”, and with “indiscriminate air and artillery attacks from a distance“, because these “cannot be directed at a specific military objective and may result in indiscriminate attacks”. 

But even if delivered accurately, the detonation of an explosive weapon in a populated area can affect people and structures within a wide area due to a large blast or fragmentation radius. Civilian harm from drone strikes – typically involving “precision” weapons - brings this problematic aspect to the fore.

The recently published study, Living Under Drones : Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan (September 2012), conducted by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), addresses a host of legal, moral and policy concerns arising in connection with US drone strikes in Pakistan. It describes what drones do to people in these terms:

The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss. (p. 56, fn omitted)

The study includes interviews with survivors and witnesses who recount three separate drone attacks. Two of these attacks took place in locations where a number of civilians had gathered: On 17 March 2011, at least two missiles were fired into “a large gathering near a bus depot” in the middle of Datta Khel town. Close to 40 civilians died in this attack.

Everything was devastated. There were pieces – body pieces-lying around. There was lots of flesh and blood…none of the elders that had attended survived. They were all destroyed, all finished.” (p. 59, fn omitted)

An attack of 23 January 2009 targeted a compound in the village of Zeraki, North Waziristan where relatives and neighbors had gathered for tea and conversation. According to a survivor

[T]he missile slammed into the center of the room, blowing off the ceiling and roof, and shattering all the windows. The immense pressure from the impact cracked the walls of the attached house, as well as those of the neighboring houses. (p. 70, fn omitted)

Beyond immediate death, injury and destruction, the study emphasises the far-reaching and often long-term impacts on survivors, their families and entire communities, having to cope with mental trauma, physical disability and severe financial hardship.

… often strikes not only obliterate the target house, usually made of mud, but also cause significant damage to three or four surrounding houses. Such destruction exacts a significant cost on communities … (p. 77, fn omitted)

In spite of their common concern about the use, in populated areas, of explosive weapons with wide area effects, neither the Amnesty International report, nor the Standford/NYU study use the term “explosive weapons”. Both make sense of armed violence and question its acceptability trough reference to IHL. As Brian Rappert explains in his recent book, How to Look Good in a War: Justifying and Challenging State Violence (September 2012), structuring understanding through the rules of IHL may have some limitations (p. 119).

In Chapter 6 of the book (available here, courtesy of Pluto Press), Rappert discusses  frames (central ideas or organizing principles through which we make sense of events, which provide us with a way of understanding) in relation to the use of explosive weapons and explains how they help us define problems, identify causes, and suggest recommendations. Noting that any frame both enables and constrains, he describes efforts to achieve a re-framing of conventional attitudes to “explosive violence” and proposes a public health oriented framing of the issue.

Rappert points out several differences between an IHL-indebted frame and frames recognising “explosive weapons” as a coherent category. One is that the latter attach a general pattern of harm to an overarching category of weapons (uniting technologies like drone strikes, artillery shelling and bomb attacks), whereas the rules of IHL direct attention to individual events (attacks), the precautions taken and the consequences that resulted in that instance.

In terms of the nature of the problem at stake, the identification of a pattern of harm shifts attention away from individual attacks. From this vantage point, deaths and damage from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas become readily foreseeable and should be expected. They cannot be dismissed as “human error” or due to the “fog of war”. This shift away from attending to specific instances to general conditions also indicates the breadth of what is needed to redress harm: “this is not simply a matter that should be left to commanders in the field; responsibility lies elsewhere too” … (p. 113, fn omitted).