Remembering the Dead and the Crimes Against Them
by Dr Lily Hamourtziadou
Nobel Peace Prize Nominee for her work on Iraq Body Count
US President Biden has said NATO "would respond" if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine, at a summit in Brussels. Western nations have warned Russia could be preparing to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. Russia has used chemical weapons during past conflicts, in Chechnya and Syria, in violation of international law. Terrorists have used chemical weapons too, in Syria and in Iraq. Under the Biological Weapons Convention, Russia is not supposed to have any biological weapons, but they are thought to be violating that convention. Similarly, under the Chemical Weapons Convention, they’re not supposed to have any chemical weapons anymore, but are believed to have significant stocks. They have used small amounts of chemical weapons in assassinations or assassination attempts against dissidents, against Alexey Navalny and against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
The Russian military has supported al-Assad in Syria since 2015. It is estimated that it “has used chemical weapons at least 50 times since the Syrian conflict began.” Russian Federation assistance to the Syrian regime may have facilitated and enabled the regime’s continued use of chemical weapons. Since September 2015 the Russian Government has been directly involved in the Syrian civil war, assisting the Syrian regime to execute its military offensive by providing Russian airpower and other material support to the regime, including support in siege and starve offensives in Aleppo and Damascus.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear agents (CBRN) have four key properties in common.
• Toxicity: a measure of the ability of a toxic substance to cause harmful effects or death.
• Latency: the interval between exposure to an CBRN agent and the first signs and symptoms of illness or disease.
• Persistency: the capacity of an CBRN agent to remain capable of causing significant harm for a prolonged period of time.
• Transmissibility: whether an agent can be transmitted from one person to another. The main means of transmission of CBRN agents are cross-contamination and direct physical contact.
Officials have confirmed that the US military fired thousands of rounds of depleted uranium (DU) during two high-profile raids on oil trucks in Islamic State-controlled Syria in late 2015, the first confirmed use of this armament since the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was used hundreds of thousands of times, setting off outrage among local communities, which alleged that its toxic material caused cancer and birth defects.
In 2014, in a UN report on DU, the Iraqi government expressed “its deep concern over the harmful effects” of the material. DU weapons, it said, “constitute a danger to human beings and the environment”. DU is radioactive. It is both a toxic chemical and radiation health hazard when inside the body, if ingested or inhaled targeting organs such as the kidneys and lungs. DU—a waste product of nuclear power generation—is effective in anti-tank projectiles. The radioactive metal reaches high temperatures on impact with tank armour, melting it into minute particles that are carried on the wind as dust. Scientists argue that this radioactive dust contaminates air, water and soil, and has harmful consequences for human health: high incidences of cancer, leukaemia and severe birth defects.
Iraqi scientists with the Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Science and Technology identified at least 350 sites in Iraq as being contaminated with DU. Even mild radiation is dangerous and increases the risk of cancer. In 2004 Dr Janan Hassan of the Basra Maternity and Children’s Hospital said that as many as 56% of all cancer patients in Iraq were now children under 5 years old, compared with just 13% 15 years earlier. She stated: “it is notable that the number of babies born with defects is rising astonishingly. In 1990, there were seven cases of babies born with multiple congenital anomalies. This has gone up to as high as 224 cases in the past three years.”
As Russian forces suffer heavy losses, Putin may believe that chemical weapons attacks could provide a military advantage or boost his war’s domestic legitimacy. In a move reminiscent of the Iraq invasion by the US-UK coalition, Moscow has sought to justify its invasion and delegitimise the Ukrainian government through accusations regarding Kyiv’s alleged intent to develop or use weapons of mass destruction. In a tweet on March 9, the Russian Embassy claimed that "recently found documents" showed components of biological weapons were made in Ukrainian laboratories - with funding from the US Department of Defense.
Russian officials and media have also claimed that Ukraine was planning to build a so-called dirty bomb - which disperses radioactive material, while Russia's foreign minister has claimed Ukraine had been seeking nuclear weapons. It is feared that such claims could be used as the basis for a "false flag" event, a phrase coined for the practice of pirate ships flying the colours of other nations to deceive ships into thinking they were dealing with a friendly vessel. Over time, the term ‘‘false flag’’ came to be applied to any covert operation that sought to shift the responsibility on to a different party from the one carrying it out. Should Russia stage a “false flag” operation, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that “there will be a high price to pay”.
US President Joe Biden has labelled Vladimir Putin, a “war criminal” for the war in Ukraine. l It was after Russian forces had bombed a maternity and children's hospital in southern Ukraine, injuring at least 17 people in the attack. At least 13 people were killed in a Russian attack on an industrial bakery in the town of Makariv and it was estimated by the UN ’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rightsthat two weeks into the Russian invasion at least 549 civilians in Ukraine had been killed, 41 of them children. By April 12 this had risen to 1,892 killed and 2,558 injured.
This included:
a total of 1,892 killed (478 men, 308 women, 30 girls, and 52 boys, as well as 71 children and 953 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
a total of 2,558 injured (291 men, 219 women, 51 girls, and 51 boys, as well as 144 children and 1,802 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
In Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 1,957 casualties (675 killed and 1,282 injured)
On Government-controlled territory: 1,599 casualties (600 killed and 999 injured)
On territory controlled by the self-proclaimed ‘republics’: 358 casualties (75 killed and 283 injured)
In other regions of Ukraine (the city of Kyiv, and Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr regions), which were under Government control when casualties occurred: 2,493 casualties (1,217 killed and 1,276 injured)
Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes. In one attack, a man was killed as he waited in line outside a supermarket.
Russia’s defence ministry reported the death toll only once, on March 2, saying that 498 servicemen had been killed in Ukraine.
Russian officials and state media claim they are only attacking military sites. To date, Russia has not publicly accepted responsibility for a single civilian death, in Ukraine or in Syria, where Russia began its military engagement in support of the Assad government in 2015, in a campaign dominated by intense airstrikes, and later also by artillery actions. According to Airwars, which has been tracking military actions and related civilian harm claims in conflict zones such as Iraq, Syria and Libya since 2014, drawing on media, social media and NGO reports, Russia has caused civilian deaths or injuries in 4,615 incidents in Syria, bringing the total estimate since 2015 to a minimum of 14,216 civilians killed.Overall, Russia has been linked to as many as 23,400 alleged civilian deaths in Syria, and more than 41,000 civilians have also allegedly been injured.
Russian actions in Syria suggest its military does little to mitigate civilian harm. In a report dated February 18, 2022, Human Rights Watch raised concerns about the shelling of residential areas in Ukraine by Russian-backed groups, a tactic Russia has been repeatedly accused of pursuing in Syria.
Yet Russian state television is describing videos of missiles striking Ukrainian cities and reports of Russian soldiers killed in action as “fakes”, as the country’s media try to account for information emerging from Ukraine that contradict official reports of the invasion.
The underreporting of civilian casualties has been a consistent feature of the war on terror, from Gen. Tommy Franks’ “We don’t do body counts” in 2002 to the significant undercounting of civilian deaths by the US-led coalition in the campaign against ISIS since 2014. In the West, civilian deaths are often referred to as ‘collateral damage’ and are always ‘regrettable’. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, declared that Russia did not “invent collateral damage” with Ukraine: “I’m not justifying any actions that lead to deaths of civilians, but it wasn’t us who invented this collateral damage,” he said. “This was invented by our western partners from their adventures in Iraq, in Libya and so on”. It may be the closest Russia ever comes to admitting some degree of civilian harm in the wars it fights as a great power trying to maintain its hegemonic status.
In May 2019 the US Department of Defense released a report to account for civilian casualties of US military activities in 2018: 120 deaths and 65 injuries in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. 793 civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria as a result of US and coalition military activities in 2017 were also acknowledged. While certainly an undercount -Iraq Body Count and Airwars put those figures in the tens of thousands- there is at least some attempt to accept responsibility for harms inflicted.
Russia’s complete failure to gather and share accurate data regarding the harms it has inflicted globally suggests that its leadership believes those harms to be at best unimportant and at worst non-existent.
The deaths of Alisa, 7, Polina, 10 and her brother Semyon, 5, killed in Russian bombings and shootings show that when a state invades, no one is safe. Targeting civilians in warzones is banned under international law. In August 1949, the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, defined humanitarian protections for civilians in a war zone. In the General Provisions, Article 3 states that the parties to any conflict must as a minimum adhere to minimal protections described as: non-combatants, members of armed forces who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely (Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War).
Article 4 defines who is a Protected person: ‘Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.’ Those persons are to be protected regardless of race, nationality, religion or political opinion. Article 32 states that a protected person/s shall not have anything done to them of such a character as to cause physical suffering or extermination.
The aim of international humanitarian law is to protect those who do not take part in the fighting, such as civilians and medical personnel, those who have ceased to take part, such as wounded, shipwrecked and sick combatants, and prisoners of war, all of which are entitled to respect for their lives and for their physical and mental integrity. In addition, medical personnel, supplies, hospitals and ambulances must all be protected. Grave breaches of the Geneva conventions in the context of armed conflict like the killing or torture of persons such as civilians or prisoners of war; intentionally directing attacks against hospitals, historic monuments, or buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes are war crimes.
International tribunals have been created to punish war criminals. An international criminal court, with the responsibility of repressing inter alia war crimes, was created by the 1998 Rome Statute. Jus in bello carries the requirement of discrimination, or distinction. The Institute of International Law adopted a resolution at its 1969 Edinburgh meeting concerning the principle of distinction. The resolution declared:
·The obligation to respect the distinction between military objectives and non-military objectives, as well as between persons participating in the hostilities and members of the civilian population, remains a fundamental principle of international law.
Existing international law prohibits the use of all weapons which, by their nature, affect indiscriminately both military objectives and non-military objects, or both armed forces and civilian populations.
In 2002 Iraq Body Count, a pioneering casualty recording NGO, was founded to document civilian deaths in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003. The UN started a body count of its own in 2006 while projects such as Airwars and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights followed a few years later.
The need for documenting the effects of military action on civilians was underlined by John Chilcot in his report, published on July 6, 2016. It is the government’s responsibility, he stated, to identify and understand the likely and actual effects of its military action.
The Charter for the recognition of every casualty of armed violence is founded on the principle that no person should die unrecorded and calls on states to uphold this principle for the victims of armed violence. All casualties of armed conflicts must be recorded, identified, and publicly acknowledged.
States and their military bear particular responsibility for populations under their control or jurisdiction, or who are endangered by their actions.
Casualty recording plays a central role in the understanding of failures in civilian protection, to prevent future failures. It can support the rights and recognition of victims and their families; fuller knowledge of the trends and consequences of conflict, which can help inform humanitarian response planning and violence reduction policies; and processes to uphold the law. Casualty Recorders provide information that may counteract misinformation or ignorance about casualties. Collecting and sharing knowledge about human losses could achieve positive changes in policy, humanitarian response or planning and could contribute to the on-going assessment of a conflict.
Most of all, recording the casualties of a conflict is vital in remembering those who died. The remains of the dead: their physical remains and what remains of their identity. Those who knew them will remember them and even those who did not know them will come to know something about who they were: their names, affiliations, images. Each person is identified as an individual and as a member of a group (familial, ethnic, religious, professional) through their name and title. Our names are at the core of who we are and of who we are perceived to be by others. When we die, we leave behind something of ourselves through our name, through the recollection of all that name enclosed. To remember and honour the dead is important for nations, for states and for families all over the world. It is important for each individual too, for we all want to be remembered, we all want our death to be a loss to someone, just as much as we want our lives to have mattered.
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