Readers of PeacePundit may wonder why most of my posts — at least so far — concern civilian casualties. Today’s conflict-filled world certainly raises many other important issues, e.g., military casualties, legacies of old-world colonialism, effects of modern economic colonialism, the economic cost of war, the corporate beneficiaries of war, and the methods used by war-mongering politicians to drum-up public support for their wars.
The simple answer is that the issue of civilian casualties makes me angry like no other. The lack of (truthful) justification for the Iraq war and the incredible arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence with which it has been waged gets me out to anti-war demonstrations. But reading week after week — sometimes day after day — about Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed and maimed in the crossfire — and sometimes direct fire — is what got my blood boiling, prompting me to take a step beyond carrying a sign at demonstrations.
Why do civilian casualties get me all riled up? Because it’s so freaking unfair! Civilians are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unlike combatants, they did not sign up to be in combat; they are not paid to be there. The conflict came to them against their wishes.
The U.S. military and its allies claim that the “bad guys” (terrorists and insurgents) commit civilian casualties on purpose, but that the “good guys” (our troops and their allies, including private mercenaries) commit civilian casualties only by accident; they don’t intentionally target civilians.
It is true that suicide bombings and car bombings of street-markets, buses, and restaurants show that insurgents intentionally target civilians. For that, they should be caught and tried as the (war-)criminals that they are.
However, it is false that U.S. forces and their allies never intentionally attack civilians. To recall some well-known historical examples: the civilian residents of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and My Lai were not massacred by accident. More current examples come from reports of U.S. marines and Blackwater mercenaries overreacting to perceived threats, firing indiscriminately at everyone around them.
Even unintended civilian casualties are usually caused by negligence rather than true accidents. If I ran through a crowded room carrying a pan full of boiling hot oil, a court would find that the burns I caused as oil sloshed onto people were due to my negligence, even though I might argue in my defense that I had to get quickly to the other side of the room and did not intend to slosh hot oil on anyone.
Similarly, if police ended a standoff with a mass-murderer by burning down the entire building in which he was hiding, courts would not accept a police excuse that the deaths of others who happened to be in the building were “accidental”.
Therefore, if military troops fire a remote-controlled missile at a man in the mountains of Afghanistan because he is tall and so might be Osama bin Laden, or drop bombs on a house because Iraqi, Taliban, or Palistinian insurgents are thought to be inside, or respond to a nearby explosion by firing at everyone in sight, then any civilian casualties that result are due to negligence, not accidents.
To put it bluntly, militaries commit civilian casualties largely because they don’t give a crap about those civilians, and because they seldom are punished for their actions.
That is why civilian casualties make me mad.
Here are two recent reports of civilian casualties from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Somalia:
- SF Chronicle, 3 Aug 2008: Kandahar, Afghanistan — A road mine blasted a bus carrying a wedding party in southern Afghanistan…, killing 10 civilians, a police official said. Provincial police chief Matiullah Khan blamed Taliban militants for planting the explosive in Spin Boldak district of the southern Kandahar province.
- Bangkok Post, 17 Aug 2008: Mogadishu, Somalia — Almost 50 people were killed in Somalia after separate roadside bombs targeting allied Ethiopian and government troops went off and led to retaliatory attacks. In one clash… Ethiopian troops opened fire on civilians along a road out of Mogadishu when an explosion went off in the middle of their convoy. “I heard a big explosion and a vehicle in [the] convoy exploded,” said Abdirahman Adan, who lives alongside the road leading out of the capital. “Ethiopian soldiers in the convoy started to shoot indiscriminately. I ran away, but when I came back … I saw 38 people had died and 16 injured.” In a separate attack, about five people were killed when a roadside bomb exploded in the capital as government troops were … clearing a street ahead of a presidential motorcade.
For more comprehensive coverage of civilian casualties, see War Victims Monitor, a blog hosted by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict.
