By Hugo Slim
Book Review from The Economist
The idea of a limited war, in which certain groups of people should be protected, is not new. In the fourth century St Augustine was already advocating the doctrine of a “just war”, based on civilian protection, proportionality and restraint. The same principles were enshrined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and in the mandates of the various international tribunals set up over the past 15 years. Yet the moral ideal of civilian protection remains very much a minority view.
As Hugo Slim explains in “Killing Civilians”, marking out a special category of people called “civilians” from the wider enemy group in war “is a distinction that is not, and never has been, either clear, meaningful or right” for many perpetrators of war—nor even for many civilians themselves. A former humanitarian field-worker, Mr Slim is now chief scholar at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Switzerland. In this book he begins by examining in great and gory detail the appalling ways in which civilians have suffered in wars down the ages—by rape, massacre, torture, mutilation, famine, disease, trauma and so on. He goes on to look at why unarmed, supposedly harmless civilians so often turn out to be the victims in war.
The reasons, he suggests, include a desire to exterminate an entire group of purportedly inferior beings (genocide); a lust for power and domination (Genghis Khan); a thirst for revenge (as in so many of today's African wars); necessity (claimed by Palestinian suicide-bombers in their “asymmetrical” war against Israel); or plunder (common in the past, but rarer today). Civilians may also be killed or wounded through calculated recklessness (as when Israeli bulldozers raze Palestinian homes) or the inevitable accidents that are associated with inaccurate weapons (“collateral damage”).
Read on
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Civilians in war: How best to protect them
