War Kills Human Rights (But NGOs Want to Be Seen as Neutrals)
Mega-Problems That Don’t Go Away, Part 4
War is hands-down the worst environment for human rights, guaranteeing atrocities and suffering despite an entire body of international law dedicated to mitigating the worst humanitarian outcomes. It is no accident that the modern human rights movement emerged from the ashes of World War II. The stunning atrocities and genocides of that war galvanized nations to realize that existing international humanitarian law was inadequate to protect against a repetition, leading to the creation of the U.N. and an outpouring of human rights treaties.
Yet by and large, the human rights movement is not an anti-war movement, and many international organizations will strictly avoid pronouncing any particular armed conflict unjust on the rationale they must retain a position of neutrality to influence all warring parties. Is this short-term interest or long-term positioning? It’s hard to say, but one thing is certain: human rights groups are seldom viewed as real “neutrals” by warring sides, as their mandate is to call out abuses. But for sure, adopting a non-political stance helps with fundraising and charitable status, not to mention media coverage where newspapers see presumptively impartial experts as more authoritative to quote.
War is always with us, but only some wars receive heavy media coverage in the West. The war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia has produced more than half a million deaths, tens of thousands of rapes, and untold civilian starvation and suffering. While the Ukraine war is covered daily in most European and US major news media, the much more deadly situation in Tigray was largely out of view, while the Ethiopian authorities have tried to extinguish independent reporting of abuses. A truce agreed November 2 of 2022 appears to be holding, even while there were some reports of continuing violence as Eritrean forces withdraw and new outbreaks between the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups. In the meantime, the economy of Tigray has been shattered, and its infrastructure largely destroyed, leaving people’s health, welfare, education, and shelter in peril.
Burma has been at war for much of its brief existence as a nation. Its economy collapsed after the 2021 military coup, and this year full civil war resumed with the Arakan Army posing serious challenges to the Burmese military in Rakhine. This is another war that receives minimal coverage in the Western media, even while war crimes, displacements, killings of civilians, starvation, and internment of Rohingya mount. The International Court of Justice rejected all preliminary objections by Burma’s government to a case filed against it by the Gambia, accusing the military of genocide. 2023 may be a key year for Burma’s military leaders, in that they are under intense pressure and condemnation, and it’s vital that the human rights “industry” start looking at every means to isolate them and keep the situation high on the agenda of global powers.
The war in Ukraine, which has become a proxy WWIII, looks as though it will get far worse before it resolves. So far, the conflict has avoided nuclear confrontation, but that’s not guaranteed. The actual death toll from this war, while possibly over two hundred thousand, is lower than that of the Tigray war, while the threat to the world’s food supply has been serious, and only partially mitigated by the UN-brokered grain export agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
Where wars resolve, there is a possibility of accountability for abuses and international crimes, and here is where the investigative reports of human rights activists will figure heavily and have an impact. But accountability is far from inevitable.
In Tigray, both sides are implicated in war crimes and abuses according to a UN Commission of Human Rights Experts. The truce agreement, however, only charges the Ethiopian government with implementing a transitional justice policy “aimed at accountability, ascertaining the truth, redress for victims, reconciliation, and healing,” placing the credibility of investigations in doubt.
In contrast, approximately 50,000 war crimes are under investigation in Ukraine, while the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has concluded war crimes have been committed. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is investigating alleged war crimes after a referral by 43 states, and Ukraine has filed a case against Russia for genocide at the International Court of Justice. There is a lot of international law that will be coming out of this conflict in the coming years, a fact that the victims of other wars will not ignore. And beyond international law, nations will be looking closely at the methods of warfare and the costs associated with Putin’s fateful aggression and drawing lessons for their own international adventures.
The toll of these wars and others goes far beyond the immediate human suffering of those involved. Each war radiates outward, producing economic devastation, migration, health, and livelihood setbacks, as well as global effects, from disruption to economic chains to climate repair. Conflicts inflict multi-generational harm to those not yet born, from malnutrition and educational loss to sowing the seeds of further conflict, especially if accountability measures are weak or fail.
Wars are also an incubator and refinery of technology, most often the technology of death. Long after the Ukraine war settles, we will be feeling the effects of drone-led warfare, and assessing the cyber-war damage and defenses needed. If either Russia’s or Burma’s governments survive their wars, they will emerge prepared to fight even more brutally than before.
Occasionally human rights groups catalog longer-term effects, but social scientists and humanitarian data are more focused on the cumulative and systemic harm. There are relatively few international NGOs that engage in conflict-prevention through a human rights lens.[1] Although some human rights groups have put their muscle behind issues of humanitarian disarmament, notably in pressing for the international ban on anti-personnel landmines, blinding lasers, and cluster munitions, it’s difficult to get them to pronounce that war itself is bad for human rights. That sort of statement leads to awkward and partisan questions, such as whether using overwhelming force to bring a war to a more rapid close is on balance better for humanity, or whether nations should make peace with bloody and repressive adversaries.
Acknowledging that war is a very difficult context for the long-term protection of human rights does not have to get you to these inscrutable utilitarian trade-offs. It can lead instead to much deeper efforts to prevent conflict by addressing disinformation and its nasty co-joined sibling, media repression. Giving voice to the damage incipient conflict will wreak on the world could increase pressure to back away from conflict. Some activists try to influence warring parties to protect civilians and mitigate long-term civilian harm.[2] This is legally risky work that is often left as a by-product of humanitarian efforts, but those that do it should be supported and protected.[3]
But the prevention of war and mitigation of abuses in armed conflict are seldom pursued as human rights protection. It is tempting to argue that war or third-party military intervention is justified against particularly abusive actors, whose victory might result in long-repression. There are certainly those who fault the US for ceding to the Taliban in these terms, and just such a rationale was used to rally nations against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. We need to keep in mind that the outcome of even unequal wars is very uncertain, and the utilitarian calculus is exceedingly difficult to solve. Would conflict and the continuing rule by warlords be a quicker path to rights for everyone in Afghanistan? Can we say human suffering in Libya turned out less for the international military intervention? I simply don’t know. It seems more honest to admit that nations made these decisions for reasons other than human rights. This also points us to a general problem in measuring the impact of human rights interventions: it is very difficult to capture the actual deterrent effect of standing on principle, especially on third parties or the global order generally.
This year the political decisions on whether and when to pacify, negotiate, constrain, or intervene are more fraught than ever. It is critical for the US to engage China for numerous reasons, among them progress on climate change, managing Russia and North Korea, avoiding conflict over Taiwan, and avoiding global recession. A random PRC spy balloon floating over Montana derailed diplomacy. North Korea and Iran, also nuclear powers renowned for their human rights abuses, are even more closed and difficult to influence. If either country entered into hostilities, massive abuses are a likely result, and no clear path to democratic transition is yet visible. Theories of change in human rights cannot ignore these realities, even if they offer no easy solution.
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[1] The Carter Center in 2019 created a guide for such groups, most of which are national or regional.
[2] The Center for Civilians in Conflict is a rare international human rights organization dedicated to this work.
[3] See, e.g. this list of 25 civil society organizations calling on the UN Security Council to protect civilians in armed conflict in 2021, the majority of whom are humanitarian organizations with the remainder either organizations that focus on humanitarian arms control or human rights groups.
