Balkans, War Crimes and The Legitimacy of War on Trial

In Australia, we typically have a loose nationalism. Sometimes it raises its head when people feel threatened by other nationalities who don’t speak English or is whipped up in media coverage of boat people ‘refugees’. In 2007 the immigration test was upgraded for foreigners wishing to migrate here. They would have to answer 20 out of 200 questions on Australia’s culture, history and sporting past, just to qualify to swear the Oath of Allegiance to Australia. Some laughingly said they were questions that an average Australian couldn’t answer. The great aspect of Australia is that the majority of Australian’s were early immigrants from Europe and the United Kingdom, so nationalism does get watered down here. The Indigenous Australians were really the first Australians. In Australia, you don’t see many people with Australian flags waving outside their houses. I think that is a strength. I personally like multiculturalism. There does have to be a shared social code of behaviour, but in Australia there is what is called tolerance, and indeed acceptance of different cultures and ways of living. We have every culture in the world living in Australia and every religion, I like the diversity, but what I like most is that we don’t impose on each other. ‘Live and let live but don’t impose’ is a good motto. I grew up with many different nationalities and having travelled a great deal, feel comfortable with all sorts of people. Diversity is what makes the world an exciting place.

The announced arrest of Ratko Mladic, the former Serbian leader who was labelled the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’, a title that was given attesting to his brutality, is to face trial at UN International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague citing Crimes Against Humanity. The UN indictment against Mladic cites the 44 month siege of Sarajevo, the creation of camps and detention centres during the Bosnian war and the Srebrenica massacre where almost 8000 muslim men and boys were rounded up and killed. The Courier Mail reports it was Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II. The Judge Foud Riad presiding stated the evidence was of ‘unimaginable savagery’. Mladic was found north of Belgrade and has been a fugitive for 16 years.

The Brisbane Courier Mail reported that in the Bosnian war there were 104,733 deaths, I shake my head at the carnage, a person a family behind those statistics. The breakdown of figures reveals 68,101 Muslims, 22,779 Serbians, 8,858 Croats, 4,995 ‘others’. Of those deaths 9,502 were in Sarajevo siege (9%) and 7,495 casualties in Srebrenica (7%).

The media also showed photos of protestors opposing his arrest I was curious about those who supported him and why. The essence of what I understood was there was still Serbian nationalism associated with Mladic. He was viewed by some as a hero. The notion of the war hero is part of all cultural stories in comics, books, movies as stories from past wars. An individual is seen as a savior through the use of violence. The ends justifies the means.

It is an interesting line that is drawn in respect of International law and military strategy. On the one hand governments train men to kill in war which is legitimate in a military theatre of war, whereas in society murder is a crime under domestic law. In civil wars groups of people form under nationalist banners to fight for their ethnic group or to save them from genocide. Therefore civilians become part of war and indeed in a range of wars they are the innocent victims of war. So the enemy becomes blurred between civilians and combatants. For governments to legitimise war there are rules, it is conducted under the rules of law. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols are at the core of international humanitarian law, the body of international law that regulates the conduct of armed conflict and seeks to limit its effects. They specifically protect people who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians, health workers and aid workers) and those who are no longer participating in the hostilities, such as wounded, sick and shipwrecked soldiers and prisoners of war speak about the rules of war, within that it is considered legal. http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/treaties-customary-law/geneva-conventions/index.jsp

I sense that in many respects ‘war’ is increasingly on trial as it is predominantly conducted in civilian areas where terrible atrocities are taking place clearly on innocent civilians. Indeed they are targetted. Our ‘humanity’ is on trial as images of children been shot with fathers, or mothers raped in front of their families and mass graves sends a shudder of horror through any person with a sense of value for human life. This contrasts with the mindset of the military who have formulated a strategy and will use terror to psychologically breakdown and destroy the ‘enemy’. They are not trained in peacekeeping or problem solving to ensure peace. Typically, their role is to win a war, to destroy who they perceive as the enemy and to control enemy territory. The language is clear and humanitarian considerations run counter to military objectives. Or they can be used to further military objectives through the use of terrorising civilians. In a civilian battleground, those of the ‘other’ group based on ethnicity, religion or culture become the ‘enemy’. So the enemy broadens from soldiers/militias to the identified group ‘enemy’.

To try Ratko Mladic, Radavan Karadzic (former Serb Leader) raises questions about war, how legitimate is it really? Soldiers are trained to kill and traditional battlefield of two militaries facing each other is no longer the format. Now war is carried out in civilian areas. How can murder be legitimate? Increasingly war is losing ‘the war’ as a legitimate way of winning, perhaps now it is time to ask should governments be solving the real underlying problem instead?

Indeed the notion of violence is increasingly seen as the greatest failure of our humanity and in the end, no-one wins. Increasingly those leading wars are being held accountable for their actions and tried as war criminals. Thus, international law is beginning to mirror domestic law. Justice becomes the legitimate theatre for reasserting our shared humanity rather than the law of tooth and claw (Hobbes).

The Legitimacy of War Today

Martin Shaw is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Here is an overview of ‘The Legitimacy of War Today’.

The Legitimacy of War Today

War is one of the oldest social institutions and has been extensive throughout the period of large-scale civilisations. Although war has always been understood fundamentally as a violent contest between different bodies of armed combatants, as well as of the rulers who organised them, it has very widely involved violence against non-combatants, including women and children. Prohibitions against such violence have existed throughout history, but they have usually been violated as much as they have been observed.

The modern age is unique in that centralised nation-states have sought to achieve what Max Weber famously called the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’, through which they have controlled political violence within their jurisdictions. Turning states, in Anthony Giddens’ phrase, into ‘bordered power containers’, rulers have simultaneously mobilised society for greater violence than ever before, projected mainly externally against other states and in the conquest of far-flung regions (until 1945, most Western nation-states were also empires). Yet just as they regulated violence internally, states also sought to regulate it internationally, with the development of the laws of war from the Hague Regulations of 1907 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

The paradox of modern warfare, however, is that while its legal boundaries became more tightly defined, its practice became ever more murderous. The expansion of international law coincided with the industrialisation of warfare and the development of total war, the central dynamic of which was the dialectic between total mobilisation and total destruction. Before the Second World War, in any case, the development of the laws of war was primarily concerned with the protection of formal combatants, members of formal armed forces, rather than of civilians. During that war, even ‘liberal’ states regarded the mass murder of civilians – as in the British bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and many other German cities, and the US bombings of Tokyo and (with atomic weapons) Hiroshima and Nagasaki – as a legitimate extension of military strategy. The Axis powers, in their invasions of China, Poland and the Soviet Union, had often seen civilian populations as enemies to be decimated through starvation as well as slaughter. The war was, after all, the context of multiple genocides, not only by the Nazis but also by the Japanese, Soviet and other regimes.

After the war, in the 1949 conventions, the victors belatedly incorporated serious civilian protection into the laws of war. Yet the late 1940s were also the years in which the Cold War was taking shape, and the Soviet Union and United Kingdom followed the USA into becoming nuclear powers. While they were signing civilian protection into law, the great powers were also preparing the greatest potential destruction of civilians ever imagined, with hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles which would make the Hiroshima bomb seem like small beer. (Something similar happened with the new Genocide Convention, adopted months earlier at the end of 1948: the UN member-states who adopted it were the same powers who ratified the mass expulsions of Germans from eastern Europe, the two-way mass killings of the Indian partition and the destruction of Arab society in Palestine.)

From the 1960s, however, the total mode of warfare, with its ruinous dynamic of mass destruction, began to give way to new relationships between war and society. The hi-tech weaponry which nuclear weapons epitomised no longer required mass mobilisation, and in the end the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ made less and less sense to the great powers. Even the military loss of life and civilian destruction involved in limited war began to be seen, with the US failure in Vietnam, as imposing unacceptable political costs. After this crisis, the USA, UK and others began to develop a new Western way of war, based on quick fixes, risk avoidance, media management, precision targeting and eschewing the deliberate imposition of harm on civilians. Following the British success in the Falklands (1982), the US-led and UN-backed Gulf War (1991) was seen as a triumph of the new method, in which (as President George Bush Senior put it) the USA ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome’. Yet although the raining down of massive firepower on Iraq led to as few as 3,000 direct civilian casualties, maybe a hundred thousand or more died as an indirect consequence of this campaign, through disease (as a result of the US destruction of infrastructure) or the repression of the Shi’ite and Kurdish revolts which the war provoked. The less direct responsibility of the US-led coalition for these latter deaths, however, facilitated the avoidance of the political harm which could have come from large number of direct civilian casualties. Behind the claimed ‘more surgical’, ‘cleaner’ way of war lay a massive risk-transfer from Western military personnel to innocent civilians.

For in the new mode of warfare, media appearances were (almost) everything. War was increasingly fought, especially but not only by the Western powers, in a context of general global surveillance, mediated through international organisations, NGOs, public opinion, electoral contests, and international law, for all of which media coverage was critical. And in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington DC, the Bush administration believed that it could mobilise overriding patriotic sentiment to successfully manage the media coverage of its new military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet internationally, while governments, publics and media were initially convinced of the legitimacy of the Afghanistan invasion, as a response to al-Qaida and its Taliban protectors, the Iraq ‘regime change’ was always an invasion too far. And even in the USA, media and public opinion which initially backed the war was eventually ground down by the success of armed resistance in inflicting casualties on US forces and in demonstrating, through mass murder, the failure of the USA to manage the aftermath of its initially successful invasion.

Iraq has demonstrated that the legitimacy of war as a method of policy is increasingly problematic for Western states in the era of global surveillance warfare. While insurgents and ‘terrorists’, who need to satisfy only limited constituencies, can utilise spectacular mass murder as a means of making a political point, democratic governments face potentially volatile public and international opinion, electorates and media, and must also take account of increasing legal surveillance. George W. Bush’s belief that, in order to wage ‘war on terror’, US and world opinion would forever write blank cheques for any kind of military action and treatment of prisoners took him a considerable way, including his 2004 re-election, but in the end, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the mounting US and civilian death tolls in Iraq have undermined the legitimacy of the US war and occupation. Bush will leave office probably the least popular president of recent decades, while there is a growing consensus that the sooner the USA leaves Iraq, the better.

It would, however, be too simple to believe that the long-term disenchantment with war in the West, which can be traced at least to the disaster of the trenches in the First World War, and which was resumed in more recent times with the debacle of Vietnam, has now reasserted itself over the new Western way of war. The underlying legitimacy of war in Western and world society continues to allow new illusions to emerge: Barack Obama, for example, seeks to balance his commitment to US withdrawal from Iraq with a larger commitment of US forces to the increasingly futile war in Afghanistan. The tension between the growing demand for civilian (as well as force) protection and the enormous investments of states (especially the USA) in force-projection will remain a central contradiction of Western and world politics in decades to come.

Martin Shaw is Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex. Graduating from LSE in Sociology in 1968, he taught at the universities of Durham and Hull, where he was Professor of Political and International Sociology, before coming to Sussex in 1995. His books include Marxism and Social Science (1975), Dialectics of War (1988), Post-Military Society (1991), Civil Society and Media in Global Crises (1996), Theory of the Global State (2000), War and Genocide (2003), The New Western Way of War (2005) and What is Genocide? (2007). He was founder-editor (2000-04) of www.theglobalsite.ac.uk and his personal website is at www.martinshaw.org.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. It is usually the belief that a nation has a right to statehood. In the ‘modernist’ image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity.[1] There are various definitions for what constitutes a nation, however, which leads to several different strands of nationalism. It can be a belief that citizenship in a state should be limited to one ethnic, cultural or identity group, or that multinationality in a single state should necessarily comprise the right to express and exercise national identity even by minorities.[2]

It can also include the belief that the state is of primary importance, or the belief that one state is naturally superior to all other states.[3][4] It is also used to describe a movement to establish or protect a homeland (usually an autonomous state) for an ethnic group. In some cases the identification of a national culture is combined with a negative view of other races or cultures.[5]

Conversely, nationalism might also be portrayed as collective identities toward imagined communities which are not naturally expressed in language, race or religion but rather socially constructed by the very individuals that belong to a given nation.[6] Nationalism is sometimes reactionary, calling for a return to a national past, and sometimes for the expulsion of foreigners. Other forms of nationalism are revolutionary, calling for the establishment of an independent state as a homeland for an ethnic underclass.