States of exception

The attack by Israeli commandos on the flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to the blockaded inhabitants of Gaza was just one of the scores of raids against Palestinians whose territory has been under illegal occupation for six decades. The memory of the murderous raid on Gaza in December 2008 is still fresh in the minds of those who suffered and those who watched it. Further down memory lane were the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres by Ariel Sharon whom George Bush preferred to call a ‘man of peace.’

Murder, genocide and massacres of unarmed civilians are not the sole monopoly of Israel. In the recent past one has witnessed the illegal occupation of Iraq, the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, renditions of suspects to countries where torture is legal, and the ongoing butchery of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan through occupation and the illegal use of unmanned aerial vehicles. A number of states and nations are complicit in murdering innocent civilians with impunity, and committing war crimes without a shred of accountability.

The post World War II regime of human rights and international humanitarian law seems to be coming apart at the seams. By re-naming, re-defining and re-interpreting the accepted meanings in international parlance, moral discourse has been overturned. Resultantly, Prisoners of War (PoW) are re-named ‘enemy combatants’, a category that did not exist prior to 9/11. The new category easily escapes the boundaries set by the Geneva Conventions.

The Israeli attacks on occupied populations, the treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and of hundreds held illegally in Guantanamo Bay, violate a large number of international treaties, laws and conventions. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Additional Protocols of 1977, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, regard the killing of non-combatants a violation of international humanitarian law. Other articles that are violated through these killings include Additional Protocol I: Article 17 (Role of the civilian population and of aid societies), Article 51 (Protection of the civilian population) and Article 52 (General Protection of civilian objects).  Some of the basic principles of law and justice presume a person to be innocent until proved guilty. No one has ever discovered the guilt of all those held at Guantanamo Bay or those walked around on a leash, like dogs in Abu Ghraib.

In a curious reversal of moral discourse Israel and the US define all actions committed by themselves and their allies as self-defence and those committed by their adversaries as aggression. The genocide of occupied populations, whose defense is a responsibility under international law, is deemed necessary for ‘national security’. The deceptive and all-empowering ‘national security’ discourse is deployed as a weapon against any criticism of the violations of UN resolutions and treaties. Security is pitted against human rights as its anti-thesis, while the security of subject populations becomes irrelevant for they are considered ‘bare life’, mere biological bodies which have none of the rights to which human beings are entitled.

The US and Israel, along with some of their allies, have long created permanent war along with permanent ‘states of exception’ where entire populations are excepted from the normal course of justice and law. When Donald Rumsfeld threatened to block funds for the Nato headquarters in Brussels, Belgium changed its laws so that George Bush and General Tommy Franks would not be charged for war crimes. The US has made several moves to scuttle the International Criminal Court to protect its soldiers implicated in war crimes. Tony Blair admitted to the Chilicot inquiry that he would have invaded Iraq irrespective of whether or not it had WMDs.  His is an open and shut case of war crimes.  As long as powerful states and nations continue to commit war crimes, it will be very hard to convince non-state actors to lay down their arms and refrain from committing terror against innocent populations.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 9^th, 2010.