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HOW DO YOU PERSUADE A SOLDIER NOT TO KILL CIVILIANS?
Written by: Ruth Gidley
Reuters, UK
Jan 17 2008
A Bosnian Muslim man searches for the name of a killed relative
amongst gravestones of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
REUTERS file photo by Damir Sagolj
>From Genghis Khan on horseback to Winston Churchill in his underground
Cabinet War Rooms, from Osama Bin Laden in a mountain cave to the
dreadlocked militiamen of northern Uganda, wartime leaders have
unleashed horror on civilians.
The limits that might seem reasonable in peacetime can be a lot less
clear cut in the heat of conflict, a humanitarian expert argues in
a new book.
Killing civilians isn't anything new, but if we understand how people
justify the act, maybe we can make it less acceptable, argues author
Hugo Slim, who's seen plenty of wars and their aftermath as an aid
worker in Africa and the Middle East.
"Dragging a stick around a huddle of people to mark them as sacred
is exaggerated because civilian identity is ambiguous," Slim writes
in his book, "Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War".
"But it's necessary because without it everyone would be fair game,
and then mass killing and suffering become the norm."
There's nothing uniquely modern about civilians being targeted in
large numbers, according to Slim, who's the grandson of celebrated
British military commander Field Marshal the Viscount Slim.
Throughout history and across the world, civilians have been massacred,
raped, rounded up and been forced to flee. They've died from famine
and disease after wars have reduced them to poverty, and had their
dignity and their identity taken away.
What's going on in leaders' minds when they get on their mobile phones
or sit down in air conditioned rooms and decide to target civilians?
Commanders, governments and soldiers regularly dehumanise their
enemies by describing them as animals or germs, but they justify
their actions in wide-ranging ways, Slim argues.
At one extreme you have genocidal movements who dehumanise their
enemy completely and want to wipe out a whole group, Adolf Hitler
and the Nazis being the obvious example.
In the middle of the spectrum, Slim groups Hamas' attacking Israelis
from its base in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah's doing the
same from Lebanon or British World War Two Prime Minister Winston
Churchill's bombing the German city of Dresden - all examples of
leaders targeting civilians deliberately and justifying their acts
as exceptional cases.
They use the argument that it's necessary to break the rules because
the cause is so righteous, or the fight is so asymmetrical, and
because the method is effective.
At the pro-civilian end of the spectrum, Slim places armies like the
British, the United States and the Israelis, which he says on the
whole do their best to avoid killing civilians, and sometimes even
prosecute soldiers for it as a crime.
When they do kill people - which he says they do quite often - they
say it's a regrettable accident of war, not their explicit policy,
although they sometimes cushion the blow with euphemisms like
"collateral damage".
In contrast, Al Qaeda head Osama Bin Laden argues that it's
legitimate to kill Western civilians in revenge for the actions of
their governments. Civilians are complicit, Bin Laden argues, because
they've elected their leaders and so deserve to be punished as a group.
What is a civilian anyway? The word itself didn't appear until the
20th century, but the idea that certain groups should be off limits
in conflict is an ancient and pervasive concept.
As far back as the 13th century, Slim writes, Pope Gregory IX was
saying that some people should be protected from war if they were
priests, monks, pilgrims, travellers, merchants, peasants, women
or children.
Yet once you start looking at it, the category of people who are not
involved in war and therefore "innocent" is very hard to pin down.
Even in the Geneva Conventions, it's only defined as people who are
not combatants.
You can see why governments and their armies often don't accept
civilians' neutrality, when it's true that civilians often aren't
neutral, either in their actions or their thoughts, Slim says.
Is a militia leader's girlfriend innocent?
Or a newspaper editor who's spewing racist hate rhetoric on a daily
basis?
In Colombia's complex and long-running conflict, right-wing
paramilitaries have attacked butchers, saying they were justified
targets for having sold the meat of cows stolen from landowners by
guerrillas and exchanged with peasants for food.
By profiting from the spoils of war, are the butchers really complicit?
Slim's response is that you have to be realistic and acknowledge
the ambiguities, but then say we need to put these people off limits
anyway.
"(Because)... when we stop seeing the enemy as people like us we
become truly terrible," Slim says.
MORAL SELF-INTEREST
But how do you tell that to an angry man with a gun, especially if
he's got revenge in his heart?
Slim - who is director of an organisation called Corporates for Crisis,
working to boost investment in post-conflict societies like northern
Uganda - has looked into the fields of business theory and psychology
to come up with strategies and suggestions.
To start with, he says, you have to find the arguments that will
resonate with what people know, so they'll remember the individual
humanity of their enemies and make them feel that it's right that
civilians should be left out of the battle.
And then you might have to back it up with coercion, upholding
international laws and coming down with military force if necessary.
It's important to find incentives, not just the reasons why it might
be to someone's political or financial benefit in the long run,
but appeal to their moral self-interest too, he says.
They'll be wondering: "Can I love if I have done these things?" says
Slim, who studied theology at Oxford University. "Can I return to my
family? What happens to my soul?"
Slim doesn't think he's being naive. During his work with Save the
Children, the United Nations, Oxfam, the British Red Cross and the
Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, he's seen wars up close.
And he's talked to dozens of people who have survived them, as well
as to men, women and children who've done their share of killing. Yet
he still seems to think it's possible to change things.
Because in every conflict, in every place where moral rules of how
human beings should treat each other have been trodden into the ground,
there are moments when soldiers show compassion.
>From the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1994 war between Azeris
and Armenians to Liberian villages razed in the 1990s, Slim argues
there have always been some soldiers who let the people of their
enemies survive in the midst of massacre.
When they explain why, it's because they saw the civilians at their
mercy as people like their own families, and treated them that way
for the seconds when it counted.
And that recurring compassion is what societies who want to protect
civilians can build on, he says.
Look at how little it takes to make us killers. Slim cites repeated
studies that have found that when put in the midst of a group expected
to kill, 80 percent of us will not resist.
Only 10 percent of us will ask to do something else instead, and just
10 percent will actively resist, the researchers say.
"As with playing the violin or gutting a fish, the worst time is the
first time and then we get used to it and get better at it," he writes.
But the flip side of that, Slim argues, is that if you change the
group's attitude to one of immense disapproval towards killing
civilians, then individuals will go along with that.
"I don't think it's a hard thing to persuade people at all," Slim says.
Written by: Ruth Gidley
Reuters, UK
Jan 17 2008
A Bosnian Muslim man searches for the name of a killed relative
amongst gravestones of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
REUTERS file photo by Damir Sagolj
>From Genghis Khan on horseback to Winston Churchill in his underground
Cabinet War Rooms, from Osama Bin Laden in a mountain cave to the
dreadlocked militiamen of northern Uganda, wartime leaders have
unleashed horror on civilians.
The limits that might seem reasonable in peacetime can be a lot less
clear cut in the heat of conflict, a humanitarian expert argues in
a new book.
Killing civilians isn't anything new, but if we understand how people
justify the act, maybe we can make it less acceptable, argues author
Hugo Slim, who's seen plenty of wars and their aftermath as an aid
worker in Africa and the Middle East.
"Dragging a stick around a huddle of people to mark them as sacred
is exaggerated because civilian identity is ambiguous," Slim writes
in his book, "Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War".
"But it's necessary because without it everyone would be fair game,
and then mass killing and suffering become the norm."
There's nothing uniquely modern about civilians being targeted in
large numbers, according to Slim, who's the grandson of celebrated
British military commander Field Marshal the Viscount Slim.
Throughout history and across the world, civilians have been massacred,
raped, rounded up and been forced to flee. They've died from famine
and disease after wars have reduced them to poverty, and had their
dignity and their identity taken away.
What's going on in leaders' minds when they get on their mobile phones
or sit down in air conditioned rooms and decide to target civilians?
Commanders, governments and soldiers regularly dehumanise their
enemies by describing them as animals or germs, but they justify
their actions in wide-ranging ways, Slim argues.
At one extreme you have genocidal movements who dehumanise their
enemy completely and want to wipe out a whole group, Adolf Hitler
and the Nazis being the obvious example.
In the middle of the spectrum, Slim groups Hamas' attacking Israelis
from its base in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah's doing the
same from Lebanon or British World War Two Prime Minister Winston
Churchill's bombing the German city of Dresden - all examples of
leaders targeting civilians deliberately and justifying their acts
as exceptional cases.
They use the argument that it's necessary to break the rules because
the cause is so righteous, or the fight is so asymmetrical, and
because the method is effective.
At the pro-civilian end of the spectrum, Slim places armies like the
British, the United States and the Israelis, which he says on the
whole do their best to avoid killing civilians, and sometimes even
prosecute soldiers for it as a crime.
When they do kill people - which he says they do quite often - they
say it's a regrettable accident of war, not their explicit policy,
although they sometimes cushion the blow with euphemisms like
"collateral damage".
In contrast, Al Qaeda head Osama Bin Laden argues that it's
legitimate to kill Western civilians in revenge for the actions of
their governments. Civilians are complicit, Bin Laden argues, because
they've elected their leaders and so deserve to be punished as a group.
What is a civilian anyway? The word itself didn't appear until the
20th century, but the idea that certain groups should be off limits
in conflict is an ancient and pervasive concept.
As far back as the 13th century, Slim writes, Pope Gregory IX was
saying that some people should be protected from war if they were
priests, monks, pilgrims, travellers, merchants, peasants, women
or children.
Yet once you start looking at it, the category of people who are not
involved in war and therefore "innocent" is very hard to pin down.
Even in the Geneva Conventions, it's only defined as people who are
not combatants.
You can see why governments and their armies often don't accept
civilians' neutrality, when it's true that civilians often aren't
neutral, either in their actions or their thoughts, Slim says.
Is a militia leader's girlfriend innocent?
Or a newspaper editor who's spewing racist hate rhetoric on a daily
basis?
In Colombia's complex and long-running conflict, right-wing
paramilitaries have attacked butchers, saying they were justified
targets for having sold the meat of cows stolen from landowners by
guerrillas and exchanged with peasants for food.
By profiting from the spoils of war, are the butchers really complicit?
Slim's response is that you have to be realistic and acknowledge
the ambiguities, but then say we need to put these people off limits
anyway.
"(Because)... when we stop seeing the enemy as people like us we
become truly terrible," Slim says.
MORAL SELF-INTEREST
But how do you tell that to an angry man with a gun, especially if
he's got revenge in his heart?
Slim - who is director of an organisation called Corporates for Crisis,
working to boost investment in post-conflict societies like northern
Uganda - has looked into the fields of business theory and psychology
to come up with strategies and suggestions.
To start with, he says, you have to find the arguments that will
resonate with what people know, so they'll remember the individual
humanity of their enemies and make them feel that it's right that
civilians should be left out of the battle.
And then you might have to back it up with coercion, upholding
international laws and coming down with military force if necessary.
It's important to find incentives, not just the reasons why it might
be to someone's political or financial benefit in the long run,
but appeal to their moral self-interest too, he says.
They'll be wondering: "Can I love if I have done these things?" says
Slim, who studied theology at Oxford University. "Can I return to my
family? What happens to my soul?"
Slim doesn't think he's being naive. During his work with Save the
Children, the United Nations, Oxfam, the British Red Cross and the
Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, he's seen wars up close.
And he's talked to dozens of people who have survived them, as well
as to men, women and children who've done their share of killing. Yet
he still seems to think it's possible to change things.
Because in every conflict, in every place where moral rules of how
human beings should treat each other have been trodden into the ground,
there are moments when soldiers show compassion.
>From the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1994 war between Azeris
and Armenians to Liberian villages razed in the 1990s, Slim argues
there have always been some soldiers who let the people of their
enemies survive in the midst of massacre.
When they explain why, it's because they saw the civilians at their
mercy as people like their own families, and treated them that way
for the seconds when it counted.
And that recurring compassion is what societies who want to protect
civilians can build on, he says.
Look at how little it takes to make us killers. Slim cites repeated
studies that have found that when put in the midst of a group expected
to kill, 80 percent of us will not resist.
Only 10 percent of us will ask to do something else instead, and just
10 percent will actively resist, the researchers say.
"As with playing the violin or gutting a fish, the worst time is the
first time and then we get used to it and get better at it," he writes.
But the flip side of that, Slim argues, is that if you change the
group's attitude to one of immense disapproval towards killing
civilians, then individuals will go along with that.
"I don't think it's a hard thing to persuade people at all," Slim says.