Deathwatching

Some voices I have heard all day in the between moments:

“At 4:00pm they took my husband away. And then my son Esmir….It is just so hard to talk about this, I can’t, it just breaks my heart…I was holding him in my arms…We were hugging, but they…grabbed him and just slit his throat. They killed him. I just can’t say anymore. I just can’t, you have to understand that is it breaking my heart” (from Power, p. 402).

Somewhere in the same chapter is a short story of a girl of 14 who hung herself. She had been taken by soldiers and then returned with blood running down her leg.

I am reminded of Roy Gutman’s A Witness to Genocide (1993) The Pulitzer Prize winning collection of Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia. In an interview with Dr. Melika Kreitmayer, a gynaecologist who examined many of the rape victims of Brezovo Polje, she said the object of the rapes was “to humiliate Muslim women, to insult them, to destroy their persons and to cause shock…These women were raped not because it was the male instinct. They were raped because it was the goal of war”(Gutman, 1993, p.69).

Drazen Enrdemovic aged 23 taking aim at the next line in the relentless stream of Muslim men from Srebrenica who came by bus to be executed. Amidst the cries and the curses, a boy of 15 or so (my son is 14) knelt down in the field full of dead men at Branjevo Farm and called out for his mother. He was one of 1200 men and boys shot to death in that field in one short day by one small group of Serbian soldiers (Drakulic, 2004).

Huseinovic, aged 52, was taken to a warehouse. Serb soldiers randomly fired sporadically into the warehouse to kill everyone. Huseinovic hid beneath two dead bodies for several hours. Those who were not dead were found out by their moans and shot. At last a bulldozer came, demolished one wall of the warehouse and then began removing the bodies. It came closer and closer. Huseinovic resigned himself. At the last moment, the Serbs stopped for the day. Later that night, Huseinovich escaped  with just one other man (Honig & Both,  1996)

Here are some resources I reviewed to follow up on Samantha Power’s chapter in A Problem From Hell (2002). I was interested in the arms embargo on Muslims but was not able to read much about that, haunted as I was by some victim testimony I had read and been thinking about all day.

Aldrich, R. (2002) Americans used Islamists to arm Bosnian Muslims: The Srebrenica Report reveals the Pentagon’s role in a dirty war. Guardian April 22, 2002. http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/yugoslav/0422us.htm  Retrieved 30^th March, 2009.

Daly, E. (1994) UN Mediator backs lifting arms embargo on Bosnia: Stoltenberg forsees an end to arms ban on Muslims. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/un-mediator-backs-lifting-arms-embargo-on-bosnia-stoltenberg-foresees-an-end-to-arms-ban-on-muslims-1376924.html Retrieved 30th March, 2009.

Drakulic, S. (2004) They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial at the Hague. London, UK: Abacus.

The chapter on Enrdemovic’s involvement in the massacre at Branjevo Farm brings home the tragedy that is lived by the perpetrators as they come to grips with what they did. Enrdemovic was a locksmith by trade, conscripted into the Serb army very reluctantly and threatened with execution himself if he did not participate in the massacre that day.

Gutman, R. (1993) A Witness to Genocide. New York, NY: MacMillan.

Numerous short articles in this book find the people who suffered and brings their voices to the reading public. Gutman was very influential in stirring public opinion and keeping people aware of what was going on. However, even his potent journalism couldn’t save Srebrenica.

Honig, J.W., & Both, N. (1996) Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime. London, UK: Penguin.

Both and Honig are academic experts on the Balkans.Their book was one of the earliest to provide not only a recounting of the actual events, but also an analysis of the way the international community responded.

Human Rights Watch website, search “country – Bosnia-Herzogovina” yields four pages of reports! http://www.hrw.org/en/publications/reports?filter0=**ALL**&filter1=178. I read just one: “Safe Areas” for Srebrenica’s most wanted: A Decade of Failure to Apprehend Karadzic and Mladic, published June 2008 http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2005/06/28/safe-areas-srebrenica-s-most-wanted Retrieved 30th March, 2009.

The thrust of the report is to express outrage that the two Serb army commanders (Mladic and Karadzic) responsible for presiding over the genocide of some 8000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in the space of about 10 days had still not been arrested and brought to trial at the Hague (International Criminal Court) ten years later. Karadzic was finally apprehended last summer (2008) http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2196241820080722?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews Retrieved 30^th March, 2009. Mladic is still a fugitive http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1423551.stm Retrieved 31st of March. Time I went to bed.

Power, S. (2002) A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Like her other case studies, Power’s account of Srebrenica provides a keen analysis with a journalists eye for detail and the human experience.

Srebrenica Genocide Blog. http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2008/02/bill-clinton-shameful-legacy.html

Polemical, but not saying much more than Power does in her account.

This is what I do to learn - let my search take me out and back like the ebb and flow of the tide washing the same stretch of sand with new waves, stirring the grains of sand between my toes and sometimes shifting the ground beneath my feet. Just this immersion for a few hours today, the stirrings in my gut - round my heart, in my stomach, the gorge rising in my throat, my tears leaking out and the clamping of my jaws as the pain of all these people: those who died, those who survived, those who tried and those who failed, and those who watched helplessly while I was….what was I doing? Well I had a tiny child of my own and was trying to figure out mothering and I felt almost as helpless about Bosnia as I do now about Darfur. Something to think about.

Yesterday I was blogging about Grayling’s book, half unfinished on the floor by my office door. I didn’t put it away because when I do that, I forget what I am doing. I mentioned then that there was another book I had begun at the same time. This is Gary Bass’ Stay the Hand of Vengeance. This one was gathering dust on my treadmill where I had hoped to read more. Neither book nor treadmill have been touched in some weeks.

I picked this book up because I ask a final question in my Crimes against Humanity class about Nuremberg. In a quotation I share, Overy (2003) suggests that the choice of defendants was political rather than based on criminal culpability. I ask if it matters.

Bass illuminates what is the theme in most of the answers I receive from students (which is that it does matter) by suggesting that among western nations there is an ideology of legalism which tells us that justice is served by the rule of law imposed through tribunals hearing cases of offenders who commit what have been called “supranational crimes”: crimes which are of an order that they exceed the capacity of individual countries to deal with them.

While Bass suggests that these principles are most often associated with idealist liberal democracies, he also notes that sometimes even these nations fall short of their declared beliefs in law and order:

“First, even liberal states almost never put their own soldiers at risk in order to bring war criminals to book. Second, even liberal states are more likely to seek justice for war crimes committed against their own citizens, not against innocent foreigners….The war crimes policy of liberal states is a push-and-pull of idealism and selfishness” (p. eight)

Realists, argues Bass (2000), propose that tribunals are instances of victor’s justice and no more. However, Bass refutes realism and while acknowledging that “there is no such thing as appropriate punishment for the massacres at Srebrenica or Djakovica but Bass suggests that the phrase “victor’s justice” is not helpful because of how important it is which victor it is, and what justice is upheld. In fact this may be the importance of these tribunals in terms of the performance of justice-seeking they proffer to the watching world, to the victims and to those who are defendants. Bass observes that liberal states behave entirely differently when they “take up the cause of international justice, treating their humbled foes in a way utterly divorced from the methods practiced by illiberal states” (p.18) One of the chief reasons for this is that leadership in liberal states is constrained by domestic norms which are often not designed to reckon with crimes of this enormity.

And so I see how my question in the Final spawned a whole class which would examine the conflict between Human Rights and Crime Control. For this is the cleft stick that liberal democracies fall into (and interestingly these comprise most of the key players in international affairs): if we cannot have both process and outcome then which do we prioritise? Bass argues that we sacrifice “just” outcomes for process; risking failure, acquittal and lesser sentences by holding trials – but from his introduction it is not clear whether he concludes…conclusively…that this is morally wrong.

I have only just made a start on the second chapter, a discussion of justice seeking with Napoleon. So I think I may start the book again. But not immediately. First, I want to reread Power’s chapter on Srebrenica (Power, 2002).

Reference

Bass, G.J. (2000) Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Overy, R (2003).  The Nuremberg Trials: International Law in the Making. In P.Sands (Ed.) From Nuremberg to the Hague: The Future of International Criminal Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

Power, S. (2002) A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Now we have colour changes…I am not sure how that happened!

Last time I was teaching the Crimes against Humanity class I picked up three different books to read. I only finished one of them. I read most of another and I began the third. My secret fear is that I am someone who doesn’t finish things. I am so afraid of this that I am not even sure if it’s true or not.

But each time I leave my home office for the living room where most of my books are stored I step over the half finished book which has lain neglected since December: A.C. Grayling’s  Among the Dead Cities.

Since January I have been commuting an hour each way to work. This gives me an unprecedented opportunity for uninterrupted reading not enjoyed since my dissertation days ten years ago. I have to say it’s one of my favorite aspects of my new position!

Since I intend to read relevant content alongside my classes, I think I will aim to complete the reading assignment I set myself last September.

So where did I get to?

Grayling sets out to analyse the carpet bombing carried out by the allied forces in both Europe and Japan prior to the end of the Second World War. His central question is whether these acts could be justified as necessities of war, or whether they were crimes against humanity as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Article 5 defines the crimes which fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/icc/statute/part-a.htm#2)Article 7 describes Crimes against Humanity and Article 8 defines War Crimes.

Crimes against Humanity:
(a)     “Attack directed against any civilian population” means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts … against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack;
(h)     Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender …, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;

War Crimes include:

(iv)     Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;  

(v)     Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;

Grayling examines arguments that suggest that without the carpet bombing of Dresden, Cologne, Tokyo, and then Hiroshima and Nagasaki the war would have continued with massive loss of life and destruction to social and economic infrastructure from which it would have been very difficult to recover. Using Kant’s argument which states that it is never right to do wrong for the purposes of doing right, Grayling dismisses these presentations by saying, “the thought that extreme situations license extreme remedies is part of an outlook which says that moral rules are instrumental” (p.216).

Grayling’s book was published in 2006. While his own discussion (so far) is exclusively tied to his extensive research into British and American decisionmaking during the Second World War, and into the impact of those decisions on the unfortunate and doomed civilians in the towns and cities that were razed to the ground, the book jacket blurb and the reviewers all tie the significance of his conclusions to the conduct of the War on Terrorism and “how far governments can go in the name of national security” (jacket blurb).

The book is arranged such that a thorough examination of the historical facts is provided from both the bombers and the bombed’s perspectives. Then two chapters frame the defense and the prosecution cases respectively. I am midway through the case for the prosecution.

The longer I have been reading and thinking in this area of national and international conflict the stronger my own inner conflicts have become about “what must be done”. Sometimes the accounts of the egregious harms are so horrifying that at times I wish we could resort to decisive levels of violence that are just so overwhelming that defiance and opposition are simply wiped out. But that moment of triumph doesn’t even last a minute! That peaceful silence lasts mere seconds before the first baby’s wail for a lost mother can be heard echoing through the ruins.

So the wielding of this kind of power is the pursuit of a delusion: that we can rise above the rest and live, forever unmolested and unashamed, on the mountaintop.
Instead, we must descend to the plain and live hugger-mugger together. This is the human toil: to struggle for peace. To deal. To work with one another unceasingly to build peace which is not a destination but a journey we make side by side through life. We need leaders who are here with us too, and who understand this and help us keep our eyes on the ball. There is no “away”; we cannot throw each other away or ignore each other any longer. Yet, in the thick of the fray I can become confused. Who is right? Can I definitively say that my morals are correct, that this or that cultural tradition is better than another? I swing between moral certitude and relativism. When the time comes to be decisive I am not always - oscillating among various perspectives.
So, I am very relieved to read Grayling’s proposal for he models not only a decision, but a process by which he came to that position. His moral compass is unerring and I appreciate that when mine seems more faltering at times. He shows me how to engage with these very difficult questions and encourages me to make the effort to analyse and evaluate so I can fully participate as a citizen instead of shying away from what is too difficult to think about. Every time I take this risk I step into the task of peacemaking.
I want to be like Grayling when I grow up. Unafraid of the hard questions, trusting in my mind and the models that have gone before me. And confident in the capacity of a committed community to solve problems that seem intractable. This is, in large part, why I keep offering the Crimes against Humanity class. It’s a place to air our questions and attempt our solutions; to turn towards the really difficult stuff and step up.
Reference

Grayling, A.C. (2006) Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. New York, NY: Walker & Co.

Something has gone weird with the formatting. Bear with me.

Today has been spent preparing for my crimes against humanity class. I have been cogitating about the class and the revisions I want to make to it this time. I notice this is the 8^th iteration. I haven’t made many changes to it over the years really, but this time I want to do a different assignment, the blogs, and I also want to intensify and sharpen our study of transitional justice.

Transitional justice, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice, is “a response to widespread or systematic violations of human rights” (http://www.ictj.org/en/tj/ retrieved today). While I am familiar with the definitions of crimes against humanity from the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court, and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, my previous experiences in this class, and more recently in discussions in the Human Rights and Crime Control class that I also teach, have revealed that we are far from universal norms on either subject. International Law is claimed as normative, and these documents also make these claims. We act as if they are normative and incontrovertible. But I have become interested in learning more about the thinking of those who deny them. Because it is in those communities that these crimes against humanity occur.

Transitional justice is comprised of a multitude of actions taken by a plethora of stakeholders and players. To that extent, having a topic “Transitional Justice” is perhaps limiting our imagination of what might be involved. In the past I have organized my class into three principle topics: Hate and Crimes against Humanity; The Problem of Atrocity; and Seeking Justice and Building Peace in the Aftermath. This class is the third of a triune in which I specifically seek to promote non-violent responses to atrocious violence. Consequently, perhaps, I have not looked at the whole of transitional justice strategy, focusing more on the more restorative initiatives.

Reviewing the activities and discussion queries I have designed, I see no reason to change them so much as to think about how I want to participate and guide those discussions in a different way which is more critical of all approaches.

One of the advantages of my lectureless teaching style is that I have more time to study myself. Today I subscribed to the Journal of Transitional Justice Studies. I am looking forward to the first issue arriving. Also there seem to have been an explosion of books on the subject in the criminal justice publishing field with the result that I have several unbroken spines on my bookshelves after my recent trip to the Academy of Criminal Justice conference in Boston.

Working in two offices has its distinct disadvantages…they are on the OTHER shelves. But here I have my trusty steeds: Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Larry May’s brilliant Crimes Against Humanity, and Geoffrey Robertson’s more polemical and passionate book by the same name which peoples the drier more abstract discussion of May’s philosophy of international law.In addition, I have been pawing through the tables of contents of a couple of  new books. The first is edited by Alette Smeulers and Roelof Haveman: Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes. Several of these chapters look fascinating and now I want to go and curl up by the fire and read. A second book, written by Mark Findlay and Ralph Henham is called Transforming International Criminal Justice: Retributive and Restorative Justice in the Trial Process. This book deconstructs trials and asks if new formats might not serve transitional justice better. Already I am intrigued. It’s a big book and hardcovered which for some reason I find more intimidating, but the idea that something I have held to be true will be taken to pieces and examined is more than intriguing.

I actually really enjoy this class. Mainly because I am so amazed by the resilience of people despite unimaginable suffering. While the horrors they suffer become more difficult to bear I think particularly as my own changes through parenting become more apparent to me and my own aging makes me appreciate the unique value of each individual life more, the way people are somehow able to rally themselves and reach out to each other to foster healing and growth is truly astounding. Learning more about these examples fills me with hope and gratitude.

I have been disciplining myself not to title my blog post before I write today, after seeing that I was ending up writing about something quite else than I had started with. This post is no exception. Thinking I was going to write about teaching transitional justice, I have ended up writing about learning about it. But perhaps that is always the paradox: teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin and the coin is constantly spinning between parties to educational encounters. I am feeling that wonderful sense of excitement as the dawn of the new quarter pinks the eastern sky.

It has been a long time since I wrote anything here. Life became chaotic just shortly after I opened this blog and it was impossible to maintain a regular routine of writing. And yet, here I am, writing again and nothing could feel more right and natural than to share these journal-like thoughts about topics which interest me. My impetus, I confess, is that I have assigned a blog to my students in a crimes against humanity course that I am teaching this coming quarter. After a very interesting presentation last week on collaboration online, and after thinking all this past year about both invitations to virtual dialogue and criminal justice blogging I suppose it is natural that I would end up back here wondering what I might write about.

What are the purposes of writing a blog? What do I intend to achieve in this space? First, I rather lack confidence that my invitation to dialogue will be taken up, therefore I definitely want the writing to achieve something for me: clarity of thought, recording of impressions that otherwise would be lost, wrestling with an idea, building theory. Then, should dialogue ensue, I would like to share in building conversation and deepening my knowledge about the subjects I write about as others engage.

It is inevitable that my interests would shift from time to time. I see that I had already created a category for restorative justice. I think I’ll create another one for crimes against humanity and transitional justice which I am looking forward to exploring this quarter. What does this have to do with deathwatching? Well I believe we cling to the death penalty because we do not know what else to do about the truly outraging, ghastly things people can do to one another. So, given that I would like to think we could give up that particular coping mechanism, it is obvious that I would want to explore the strategies that people use to cope with the most egregious wrongs without killing back. So, yes. I will use this place to reflect on the work that I am doing on restorative justice both local and international and hope that people will join me to think about alternatives.