Crimes Against Humanity. Essay #3 Evdience

David Kennedy -- A vocabulary argument about force ● Humanitarianism and force -- “the framework for these differences has become, in this case, the ‘necessary’ and ‘proportional’ damage which may be inflicted on civilians.” (271) ● “International law, it is said, is more conversation than trial. Made by the people who use it, international law catalogs the arguments people have used to assess the legitimacy of state behavior. … A way to discuss what is appropriate in world affairs, international law only rarely offers a definitive judgment on who is right. Disputes do sometimes get resolved in courts -national or international -- but far more often they are resolved, or not resolved, diplomatically. In this conception, the most important court is the court of world public opinion. … When they exceed the authority they were thought to have, they pay a price -- the action will be more difficult and might generate negative consequences because it is perceived by a relevant and potentially powerful constituency of other actors to be inappropriate. When states are perceived to have violated international law, it can affect the legitimacy of what they do. … State behavior can also affect the legitimacy and change the terms of international law. … it becomes important for states to defend their prerogatives -- and back up assertions of their authority with action to maintain their credibility. ... The vocabulary used to define these prerogatives becomes significant -- not because it represents an external limit, but precisely because it does not.” (273) Road to Srebencia or whatever ● “Albright concluded that all parties had an obligation to stop the crimes, and if they could not, to bring those responsible to justice.” (105) ● Whole passage on 106 about human rights follow-through being an afterthought for the US and NATO in the peace process… Wetiz on Cambodia ● “As all the cases in this book demonstrate, the lines between race-based and political and social forms of population purges are fluid indeed.” (188) ● “[the Khmer Rouge] approach combined an extreme nationalism that held deep roots in Khmer culture, but that also developed in the context of French colonial control and the decades-long struggle of Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, against French and American influence and intervention. In their drive to refashion radically Cambodian society, the Khmer Rouge created their own synthesis of communism and racialized nationalism.” (145) ● “World War II opened up new possibilities for Cambodia, as it did for so many places in the colonial world. Western colonial domination had been undermined by the burdensome costs of the war, by the West’s own proclamations in favor of national independence and democracy” (145) ● “The Khmer Rouge were in fact establishing new lines of division and reasserting some older ones. In the process, large segments of the Cambodian population would lose their lives, and certain religious and national minorities would become the victims of genocide.” (159) ● “They [Khmer Rouge] blended political, social, and ethnic criteria, and parsed individuals into particular slots often in a highly arbitrary manner. …. The first and most fundamental delineation the Khmer Rouge adopted was that between ‘old’ and ‘new’ people. ‘Old people’ were those who had been partisans of the Khmer Rouge or had lived in areas under their control before the seizure of power. Sometimes, though, poor peasants, no matter where they had lived, were consider old people. ‘New people’ were city dwellers or those who had lived in areas under the control of the Lol Nol regime. Anyone who had served the old system, in however lowly a position, was also categorized as belonging to the new people.” (159) ○ ^ THIS IS AN EXAMPLE THAT THESE LINES COULD OFTEN BE ARBITRARY AND DRAWN NOT ON RACIAL NOR POLITICALLY EXTREMIST LINES, BUT RATHER LINES BASED ON ECONOMICAL SITUATIONS??? ○ ADD IN FROM THE FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER BOOK ● “Within the overall campaign of political violence, the regime carried out genocides against distinct nationalities -- Chinese, Vietnamese, Chams -- that, to the Khmer Rouge, were by definition hostile to the effort to establish an egalitarian, homogeneous Khmer society.” (165) ● “Communist systems, with their rhetoric of inclusion, of creating a better society for everyone, had to hold out the promise of transformed lives, of making good Khmers out of the detritus of the old society.” (170) ● “They [Khmer Rouge] blended together ethic, social, and political criteria -- the tribal people were suspect because of the ways of life associated with their particular ethnicity, and became even more dangerous when they proved hostile to the allure of the communist future.” (172) ● “The Khmer Rouge racialized nationality by making every single member of the group the bearer of the same dangerous characteristics.” → “to define politics by being” (174) ● “The Khmer Rouge racialized class and nationality, making all members of the three groups bearers of identical characteristics, no matter what they had done” (175) ● “In essence, the Khmer Rouge layered a racial concept of being Khmer -- forged, as we have seen, partly out of indigenous Khmer ideas, partly out of influence of French colonialism -- upon the models of the twentieth-century communist revolutions.” (188) Kosovo Chapter: ● “The experience [Yugoslav Tribunal] reminded everyone of how fragile the weapons of international justice can be when confronting political and military interests and, of course, legal challenges by skeptical governments and seasoned defense counsel.” (293) ● “The Kosovo conflict showed how a sharp focus on atrocity crimes during the fighting can galvanize public opinion and be a potent weapon against the enemy.” (293) ● “But governments must have the flexibility to speculate, based on information streaming in from an atrocity zone, about the meaning of how certain criminal conduct related to genocide or other atrocity crimes. That is the first step to prevention of genocide and to ending the massacres already occurring. … The only way to ensure the best possible outcome, once a determination has been made that precursors of genocide exist, is to take their predictive character seriously and then to act to prevent full-scale genocide from succeeding.” (294) Evidence for Hope: ● “...we must look at human rights issue by issue since it is impossibly to make accurate general statements about all human rights.” (227) ● “Human rights progress is always a process and never an endpoint. Moreover, it is a process that can be reversed, that has often been reversed. Vigilance is necessary to sustain human rights progress and prevent retrogression.” (228) ● 2 barriers that are intrinsic to human rights issues which complicate our efforts to measure effectiveness: ○ “Many human rights violations are invisible harms” ■ Like population erasure through language, and ethnic cleansing those ways? ○ “Human rights movements are dedicated to raising the bar of what constitutes a human rights violation, thus creating a changing standard of accountability. Human rights is thus a moving target, with its definition constantly being expanded through the ongoing work of activists and institutions.” (228) ■ Like the push for privacy rights to be human rights → STUPID ● “Understanding the information paradox and the changing standard of accountability shouldn’t make us complacent, but it can make us despair less and be more informed users of data measuring rights violations.” (228-229) ● “Human rights institutions are mainly tools and arenas.” (233) “Although they can be put to good use … these institutions can also be captured and tamed by repressive regimes.” (233) ● She argues human rights came from the _____ in Bogotá, the global south: ● “Since the international protection of human rights did not come from the Global North, we should not design solutions in which powerful governments like the United States will necessarily be the leaders. I don’t believe in an elite club of ‘stewards’ of human rights.” (240) ● “The United States should be a vital part of the coalition to protect and promote human rights internationally.” (243) → I acknowledge the nuances in phrasing of these two points, that the US should be a member and supporter of the coalition to protect and promote global human rights, but not build the structures in which they are advocated for. However, it is evident that the US, speaking from a stance acknowledging “hard power” as a tool in the development of global human rights, alongside other Global North powers, is the best suited to work to coordinate the charge for international human rights protection and prevention of abuse. I agree with _____ fundamentally that nations should be invited to the metaphorical table, or physical at the United Nations, but realistically, it is problematic to see how international human rights protections could not be enforced or sought out without the military and diplomatic capabilities of the United States, and our formidable partners within the European Union and the United Nations, which control the ability to react militarily and diplomatically respectively through NATO, UN Security Council, and the UN Human Rights Commission. Again, I fundamentally agree that in the perfect scenario we would have an equitable balance between world powers in the global promotion of human rights, but in the status quo, this balanced system is unrealistic and frankly ineffective. ● “ Human rights will continue to be a discourse that can mobilize both domestic and international publics.” (244) ● “Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were not persuaded by arguments about international norms and law, but they eventually understood that they were unable to pursue their interests because of the resistance they faced, including the possibility of criminal accountability for US officials.” (244) → the crew didn’t refrain from these regressions in human rights acts because of international codification, but out of fear of US laws and punishments → and sure you can argue that this is a special case given that the US isn’t always held by international doctrine, I mean look at the ICC, __% of the cases tried there are from Africa, it is clear that currently there is a disconnect between human rights doctrine and global North powers → WHICH BUILDS my point further, these international mechanisms did not prevent or even really punish USG “enhanced interrogation efforts” THEY DON’T WORK. → and again, we can say this is an unfair comparison because it is in the US, and of course the US wouldn’t be held to the ICC or elsewhere, but this IS THE PROBLEM Weitz Conclusion Chapter ● “Human rights advances emerge out of a confluence of popular struggles, state interests, and the workings of the international community.” (410) ● “Anticolonial movements found major support at the UN, an organization whose breadth and depth surpasses any international association that preceded it. Its establishment marked a major departure in international politics. UN staff, not just the Security Council and General Assembly, played a significant role in fostering decolonization, independent nation-states, and human rights around the globe. … as in the past, new sovereign states could come to fruition only by greatpower recognition.” (411) ● “But the creators [of global human rights] knew they also had to go further and explicitly establish rights for all people, whatever their national citizenship, whatever their race or gender. They also believed that the proclamation of rights had to be backed up by global means of enforcement.” (413) ● proclivities of the nation-state (420) ● “Fifty years after the passage of the UDHR, the Rome Treaty created the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the prosecution of those who had perpetrated genocide, crimes against humanity, and other violations of human rights” (421) ● “The bulk of the cases before the ICC have originated in Africa. It is unlikely that any of the Great Powers will be hauled before the ICC.” (421) ● “The Responsibility to Protect has been sharply criticized as mere rhetoric that fails to account for Only the weak have to worry about international the reality of state power and state interests. intervention. Without planning for what comes after, greater violence and human rights Great Powers have nothing to fear, certainly not violations may ensue as in the case of Libya. with the veto authority five of them exercise in the UN Security Council.” (422) ● “The limitations, the cracks and fissures in the postwar human rights sytem, the violations that we see all around us, run deeply and are not simply the result of reprehensible individuals or states. Every chapter of this book has shown the partiality of human rights advances when they have been nuilt around national citizenship. Exclusion as well as inclusion, human rights and their These contradictions are blatant and violations, lie in the nature of the beast, the nation-state. cannot be easily resolved, nor wished away. They are, in fact, irresolvable, an intrinsic part of the human rights system based in nation-state citizenship.” (425) ● “The UN Charter explicitly affirms state sovereignty and the right of self-determination, as do many subsequent declarations and conventions.” (425) ● “ Self-determination has become enshrined as a fundamental principle for the modern state system. … Self-determination in its modern version is about collectives -- nations -- not individuals. It expresses the dilemmas, the limits, the very contradictions of human rights anchored in nation-states. Who, after all, constitutes the self-determining nation?” (425-426) ● “The condition of refugees underscores the limitations of human rights when they are based in national citizenship. The fate of those wholly outside the borders of the state is highly tenuous and often deadly.” (426) ● “The tragic, poignant condition of refugees powerfully expresses the problem examined in this book in different cases around the globe. Nation-state citizenship is still fundamental to our ability to exercise rights. We are literally nothing without a state structure around us. Statelessness, as Hannah Arendt wrote, is the worst condition imaginable, ,just short of physical annihilation. Yet citizenship is always exclusive as well as inclusive, even if the state defines So long as rights are fundamentally linked citizenship internally in the broadest way possible. to the nation-state, they will always be limiting.” (427) ● “Human rights have never proceeded in a straight line. They are complex and move in crooked paths.” (428) ● “Amid all of these developments, the nation-state remains. It will not disappear any time in the foreseeable future. In the best of circumstances, the nation state is our protector if we live within the charmed circle of rights-bearing citizens. It is also our greatest threat, the powerful violator of human rights and the exclusion-enforcing institution that drives out, removes, forcibly assimilates, and kills those denied the right to have rights within its borders.” (429) ● “Human rights will never be implemented in the all-embracing fashion of the declarations like the UDHR; … (430)