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J H Wooding on "The wrong target: air strike, legal limit, human voice "

J H Wooding — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:41:19 +0100

Thank you for these interesting and important points. You are entirely right to stress the practical steps which militaries take to avoid killing non-combatants, and I should have given more weight to this in my article. With respect, the omission does not detract from my core argument that civilians should have more of a voice in shaping the development of humanitarian law than is currently granted to them.

I am keenly aware of how difficult the military’s culture of discipline can be for civilians to grasp, and I oriented my research programme around finding concrete examples of situations where commanders took active steps to protect those caught in conflict zones. Succinct descriptions of militaries’ efforts to this end can be found in Michael W. Lewis’s 2003 article, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War” (97 AJIL 2003); Rogers at p.73; and Tom Ricks’s 2001 article, “Target Approval Delays Cost Air Force Key Hits”.

Unfortunately, these efforts do not make it acceptable for commanders and elected officials to be entrusted with deciding for themselves whether a given attack warrants investigation, without reference to the actual experience of the civilian population as mediated by impartial observers. Full impartial investigations allow us continually to evaluate the law and its underlying morality; without this process of continuous reappraisal, the law goes dormant – that is, it loses its vital ability actually to guide warriors’ targeting decisions on the battlefield. For further discussion of this idea see Del Mar’s article in EJIL 19(5), 2008.

The eminent human rights scholar Conor Gearty noted in his outgoing LSE lecture that power must be harnessed, controlled and reworked; and each new system must be continually subjected to this same process. Protecting civilians in war is a continuous struggle. It is not enough to try to protect civilians before pulling the trigger; questionable episodes must be fully investigated in the aftermath, or the law’s moral roots will be worn away.

AgilisLux on "The media and the war: seeing the human "

AgilisLux — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:48:23 +0000

As a photographer I was used to write my captions that included details of what, when, where & who. This times are over!

Its okay when keywords contribute to exact searches, but I find the language exactly streamlined to reach the widest possible audience is alarming. When we “google” with keywords, we are distancing ourselves from the victims in an overflow of information.

For some years I even did not picked up a free newspaper when entering a plane that got me to the destination of a assignment because I have had enough of all kind of information I downloaded and printed out to brief myself with before start working there. This habit was born out of my personal experience that a very personal story was often used to stir the pot.

Fact is on the example of the fate of one single person, a victim, a conflict can not be explained. In one case a NGO who was reading the story evacuated some children that would hardly survive. This NGO vehicle in which the children where transported was attacked and the children badly wounded.

I have become very reluctant to contribute to Human Rights organisations and think that it is professionally not right for a journalist to follow the “do good approach” of “Humanitarian Organisations”. We as journalists can not lift the finger and fulfil the position as a “headteacher” for a better world. We are also not a instance for common moral. After all, - what actually is moral?
I might be driven personally by injustice, or what I believe injustice is; the main question simply remains for me as a freelance journalist: does the story has the market value to cover the costs, “the hazards and expense of reporting”?

In the past also some editors told me straight: if I get this out, I can loose my job (it was about disgusting behaviours among German troops in A-Stan) . This what they published was sometimes totally the opposite of their personal views just to please their employers.

Iraq and A-Stan are for the Western Media what is Cechenia for Russia. And here we have again a similarity to the “Humanitarian Organisations” who refused to help the people in Iraq knowing the occupying army's are behind them. I was embedded and also spend time with insurgents. The photos that have been sold where those of our armies...

We don't move away from our “human views”, it is maybe just the tsunami of information.

davidmatzdorf on "The media and Africa: doing bad by doing "good"?"

davidmatzdorf — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:29:14 +0100

I read the article with a growing sense of disappointment. I always look forward to articles that aim to puncture the auto-pilot mentality of lazy journalism and to champion clear and original thinking in place of clichés. As I read on, it became clearer with every paragraph that this was, instead, just another loosely-disguised attempt to have a pop at the "liberal media consensus" - that in itself being just the kind of easy, lazy buzz-phrase that the article set itself up to expose. The underlying assumption throughout the article, despite a token protestation to the contrary, is that "liberal" media are lazy and formulaic, whereas all vigorous attempts to puncture their consensus must, by definition, come from the right - a desperately sloppy assumption. Even the content - the several references to the failure of aid as a tool for development - turned out to be just an excuse to promote a right-wing agenda. On first reading, I thought "too right, aid just keeps developing countries dependent, what we need is liberation, not aid". But that was not what was being said: the hidden intent was that aid should be reduced to "make them stand on their own two feet". Thatcherism revisited. A letdown, the whole article.

george.carrano on "Ryszard Kapuscinski: from Poland to the world"

george.carrano — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:37:26 +0000

Excellent, perspective and well-deserved.