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 of human 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 rights and humanitarianism or an option of combining these two, but nothing less than the battle around how we shall look at life and death, by which I mean power over life and power over death, the right of life and right of death. This lies at the heart of most conflicts around 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 and humanitarian assistance in conflict. While human rights is politics and humanitarian assistance civic activities, the eventual culmination of conflict is war. War is conquest or a battle to defeat the conqueror; it is politics by other means. In order to understand the complexity, 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 the right to wage war, the right to inflict death on the ultimate offender, and imposed the duty to protect life. International laws are based on this recognition; laws of war and peace derive from an acknowledgement of this fact and the recognition of the necessity to regulate this situation of equality. But, in posing this question, we are visualising a situation where this right 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 rights monitoring and humanitarian assistance no longer remain issues of right of life and death but become mere expressions of power. In such a situation the challenge is: how to monitor human rights violations during war which is itself a violation of human rights, or decide how humanitarian assistance can be provided. 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 of sovereignty to the politics of empire.

Human rights and humanitarian assistance were the markers of the politics of
sovereignty 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 has become outdated. These are now tickets of imperial power, simply its functional variables. Under these altered conditions, when the right of life and right to protect life are governed by power of death, human rights can only be monitored (not ensured) and humanitarian assistance only partially given. For example, the 1991 Iraq war was a decade long war, not less-than-a month war as portrayed by the media, in which many actors played aggressors or silent spectators. The actors included global media giants who bayed for Iraqi blood, and even the UN Security Council which imposed a strict economic blockade on the country and disarmed it completely, 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 troops from 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 plan which Iraq had accepted. On 26 February 1991, as the long Iraqi convoy was moving towards Basra along Highway 80, the coalition forces launched a combined ground and air offensive and hit both ends with heavy explosives. The slaughter continued for the next 40 hours with petrol tankers and tanks exploding in cascades of red flame amidst figures of soldiers perishing like little ants.

The air campaign alone was responsible for 32,000 deaths and the total Iraqi casualties
added up to 62,000. The coalition forces reportedly dropped a total of 99,000 to 140,000 tons 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 treatment plants. It was estimated that Iraq needed US $22 billion to repair the civilian infrastructure. Then came the burden of war reparation to be paid out of the oil for food

programme a UN humanitarian programme to save life in conditions of slow, gradual and sure death. This continued for the next ten years while shadowy men like Wolfowitz and 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 New Empire? Will it probe at the margins, the vanishing margin between war (the right of death) and the deployment of humanitarian strategy (the right of life), reducing it to a matter 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 and
humanitarianism, the near impossibility of coordinating the two, the reality of their coexistence, and the simulated acts of life and death in this relationship. Human rights speak of the rights of the people, humanitarianism speaks of population the target to be fed, 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 be claimed, but it demands uncoupling two connected realities rights and power in life and death. 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 in this scenario. On the other hand, populations may be somewhat protected from the destruction of war, which is what humanitarian activities are acts of mercy, hospitality and care. These are ethical acts the techniques of self in relating to other selves. They are essentially private, that is truly public or non-state. Organisations of care and charity have always emerged in human societies, at times encouraged by royalty, emperors, kings, princes, churches, mosques and temples, but as interventions they were non-state. Today, in the condition of modernity these organisations are akin to states or huge corporations; in their mode of functioning they reveal 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 (from sentiment 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 these two planks of human rights and humanitarian acts, turn them into acts of justice that will not be bound by the closure caused by the self-foundation of law? In other words, if the laws of war are a fallacy (beyond a point), if neither the right of life nor the right to save

life can escape the closure or the aporia, what are the conditions under which such interventions become possible and help make life a sign of justice? Can we think of a politics 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 the greatest social security programmes of the modern era was planned at a time when one of the most terrifying mass murders was being enacted. The French Revolution gives the signal for the great national wars of our days, involving national armies and meeting their conclusion or their climax in huge mass slaughters. A similar phenomenon can be witnessed during the Second World War. In all history it would be hard to find such butchery as in World War II. Yet it was precisely this period, this moment, when the great welfare, public health and medical assistance programmes were instigated. The Beveridge programme was, if not conceived, at least published at this very moment. One could symbolize such coincidence by a slogan: Go get slaughtered and we promise you a long and pleasant life. Life insurance is connected with a death command (cf. The Political Technology of Individuals). If we know what the intended consequences were or are, it is possible to think of the other 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, the life of Florence Nightingale, the activities of Norman Bethune, the Kotnis Medical Mission to China, the work of the Peoples Relief Committee in the Bengal Famine, and the 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 marked by 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 the language 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 instruments of social control rather than social transformation?

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

possible to assure many that their lives would be spared. Consider therefore the advances in the technology of killing targeted killing. This does not necessarily mean fewer deaths, 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; in the 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) cause outrage; states would now find it possible to defy the massive public outrage as we witnessed throughout the globe and support the punishment of a recalcitrant state, even to the 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 juridical punishment; similarly as more countries acquiesce to the most extreme right wing form of globalisation, the necessity to punish will reduce. Controlling the bodies, physically regulating the lives of millions an ever present imperial dream is now more than ever closer to realisation.

With satellites, precision bombing, television, micro-inch mapping, genetically

modified food, drug-food-clothing-chains, monitoring of small economies, and much more the imperial dream of controlling millions of people, turning them into population groups to be administered, is becoming an exciting reality for the empire. One may remain neutral or non-neutral the agenda of neutrality is becoming irrelevant because right 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 (CNN or Fox News style mafia operation), withholding food supply from reaching the garrisoned town/country thus killing children, the weak and infirm (economic blockade), asphyxiation and mass terrorisation (cluster bombs and daisy bombing) all that the laws of 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 life
at every level unconnected to the power of death. The agenda of humanitarian aid must be questioned aid under what conditions, reaching whom, given by whom, and reaching when? In this situation, when the right to life is linked to the power of death, whose humanitarianism is it anyway? When efforts to give life-masks to groups of human beings on the verge of death meet the reality of power, that is the moment of truth: the ultimate compromise of rights with power, of life with death.

Take again the noblest principles of impartiality in recent times. The Amnesty International made ten demands on the combatants on 18 March 2003 as the attack on Iraq was to begin. The demands were: Do not attack civilians; do not use weapons that kill and maim indiscriminately; treat civilian detainees fairly and humanely; treat combatants according to the Geneva Conventions; prioritise the safety and needs of the Iraqi people; protect and help refugees and the internally displaced; bring to justice perpetrators of crimes under international law; allow independent investigation of their conduct; deploy human rights monitors throughout Iraq as soon as practicable; support the UNs humanitarian and human rights work. These are the noblest principles of neutrality. But they also reflect the tension between humanitarian laws, called the laws of war, and the human rights law they mirror. The first six demands derive from international humanitarian law, with distinction and proportionality as the guiding principles with the aim to restrain the destructive force of war even while recognizing its inexorable necessities. Obviously, it will be difficult to assess whether or not and to what extent these principles of distinction and proportionality were adhered to until the parties involved in the war (as Amnestys demands 8 and 9 show) submit to independent investigation of their conduct and permit human rights monitors in the terrain of their operations. But under conditions of a victors justice, 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, including the ongoing devastation and its impact on the quality of life because of the way the war has been conducted by the victorious party. In such circumstances, the issue of reparation is linked to human lives, indeed the basic right to life. But I am not aware, judging the trajectory of international human rights law and international humanitarian law and the contrasting history of colonial wars, plunder, murders and loot, that such law can ever agree on either a computation of the overall damage or the need for securing reparation from 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 total aggression when combatants and civilians together mobilise in the war against an invasion. How will human rights law and humanitarian law react to resistance, even if it manifests itself in such desperate and suicidal acts as the British people would have taken recourse to had Nazi German troops crossed the English Channel in 1944? Shall we recall the American Revolution as perfidious because its harbingers had encouraged the participants to sneak up to the British military formations and shoot at them

surreptitiously? It is time we rethink the laws to bring them into conformity with the current reality of colonial and neo-colonial wars of aggression and conquest. How do we work for peace and raise concerns relating to human rights? How do we achieve peace with justice?

Let us maintain our critical approach in reflecting on the question. Of course, we are all
for peace, because we think it serves our desire for justice. But for this, we must remember that peace is war by other means. Therefore, peace is also contentious politics; behind the innocent tale of peace are the suppressed stories of contention and war. This is true of all varieties of peace social peace that the industrialists and neo-liberals want; peace after state-formation that the leaders of both India and Pakistan wanted in their respective countries in the late forties after the British handed them the power to rule; peace after an accord when the state wants to disarm the rebels; and, of course, peace when the night has settled on the killing field, that is conquerors peace, for instance the return of peace in Iraq. What will be transformed in the course of conflict depends therefore on this life-death game. We can ask: will conflict be transformed into something else? Or, will conflict transform others, everything around it? As the saying goes, what is cooked is not decided in the kitchen but outside. Similarly, the destiny of peace will not be decided in the arena of peace, but elsewhere that is where we need a new argument for justice.

Take the issue of disarmament, that is, disarming the defeated. As we know,
disarmament means arms control. The practice of negotiating arms control among sovereign nations in international forums in peace-time with a view to making the agreed measures applicable to all nations, began a century ago with the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, both held at the initiative of Russia, then lagging behind in the European arms race. 188 delegates from 26 countries participated in the first conference; 256 delegates from 44 countries participated in the second. The goals of disarmament remained distant. Proposals for limiting the calibre of naval guns, the thickness of armour-plate and the velocity of projectiles were rejected. There was no agreement on limiting the number of the armed forces personnel and war budgets, though certain types of weapons such as asphyxiating gases, expanding bullets, or submarine contact mines were prohibited or use restricted. The territory of a neutral

country was declared non- violable and the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the predecessor to the International Court of Justice, was established. I do not know how the NGO-sponsored Hague meet of 1999 wrestled with the onecentury 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 and human security. But what we do know is that in less than ten years of the Second Hague meet (1907), the massacres of World War I started; the massacres then gave way to the Treaty of Versailles that disarmed Germany, dissolved its general staff, allowed only a token navy, ordered demilitarisation of the Rhine zone on the East, and yet in twenty years mass murders commenced again.

The annual publication of Armament Year Book by the League from 1924, attempts by
the permanent advisory commission of the League to regulate the arms trade and production beginning with The Brussels Act of 1890 (controlling the production and supply firearms and ammunition to parts of Africa), the 1924 Geneva Protocol and the 1925 Geneva Convention on the arms trade, and finally the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928 leading upto the 1932 Disarmament Conference, all ended with a renewed clash of arms marked by new weaponry. Even as our humanitarian instincts impel us to respond to the calibrated calls on weapons of mass destruction, outlawing of landmines and so on, we must also remember this curious history. The ICRC considers a total ban on the production, export and use of anti-personnel mines 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 reducing the disparity of arms, eradicating manufacture of weapons of mass destruction by the empire, and without an end to the present polarity we see in warfare the massively organised warfare of the empire and the recolonisers, and the fragmented wars everywhere. It needs to be re-emphasised that noble humanitarian aims cannot be realised by claiming that international humanitarian law has developed quite independently from human rights law. 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 crisis situation, a neutral and independent intermediary can find practical solutions for humanitarian problems (ICRC n.d.), or that humanitarian law can protect human rights (for instance, through visits to prisons and detention camps thus preventing disappearances, or through providing essential supplies thereby promoting the right to life).

Living and letting others live is no innocent act. All social and political contracts are the
results 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 to forge new practices of human rights, justice and peace. An ideal of justice has to link, not de-link the two. Let me conclude with reflections on the rules governing the conduct of hostilities in internal armed conflicts the distinction between combatants and civilians, immunity of civilian population, prohibition of superfluous injury, prohibition of perfidy, respect for and protection of medical and religious personnel and of medical units and transport, prohibition of attacks on dwellings and other installations used only by civilian population, or precautionary measures in attack, plus the customary rules on chemical and 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 a humanitarian agency like the ICRC believes, because ambiguity allows efforts to push the threshold of application? We have of course determinants of what constitutes an armed conflict (cf The Law of Internal Armed Conflict by Lindsay Moir), but note here the politics of recognition. Recognition, legal recognition of the party in revolt or the insurgents depends on possession of an organised military force, an authority responsible for its acts, acting within a determinate territory. Also on the de jure government recognising the insurgents as belligerents, the insurgents (having) an organisation 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 to admit that the phenomenon of revolt constitutes a paradox it is both a reproduction of the old form against which it rises even as it carries new elements not associated with the old state. The determinants mentioned try to understand insurgency in the language of state law, therefore subordinate them to state logic, while refusing to admit that the party in revolt represents a dangerous supplement. The law of internal armed conflict therefore fails. The politics of war can be tamed not by the laws of war but by a politics of 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 all
seriousness. I am not referring to the cyclical theory of war and peace. My plea is for a critical politics of justice that will make us aware of the script of modern war detailing various roles, including the ones that human rights and humanitarianism will play in the

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

Drawing inspiration from the cinematographic industry, the script of war realises, in
advance, all its plans and ventures. That is why in modern imperial war the script is so sacred and inviolable, dictating to everyone associated with the war, including human rights and humanitarian groups, the role/s to play. The casting, technical and financial means of the cinematic war are meticulously planned to ensure an exceptional success long before the war is launched. War, literally, cannot be waged without cinema, without the 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 to gain complete control over all channels; only then can the magical marketing wand erase even the most trivial scripting, casting and directing errors. The one crucial requirement is that there has to be film in the reel, sound bytes and abundant images, so that expert mixers 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 our lenses a little, by showing discomfort with the chairs we are given, by asking time and again, where do rights come from? From law or from contentious politics that sense of justice, that extra, that remainder, which cannot be consumed by the regime of law?