After Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Iran-Iraq War, the First Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Iraq War, Libya and Lord-only-knows how many clandestine operations, after the Guantanamo prison torture center, Abu Ghraib, countless bombing strikes,and drone strikes - it should be hard for any American to be surprised that Our Side may break the rules and commit war crimes in a military conflict.
So, I'm both surprised and not surprised that the Ukrainian government and its supporters are verbally trashing Amnesty International for its recent report that criticized Ukraine for stationing its forces near to populated areas and noting, "Such tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians, as they turn civilian objects into military targets."
Gerald Knaus of the European Security Initiative (ESI) cites this report from two weeks earlier by Human Rights Watch, Russian, Ukrainian Bases Endangering Civilians 07/21/2022 as showing why the AI report was what Knaus calls "a serious mistake."
Gerald Knaus in his academic and professional work has been an enormously effective figure on defending the rights of refugees, and is one of the most perceptive critics of the immigration practices of self-proclaimed defenders of "European values" like the US, the EU, and Australia which crassly violate international humanitarian law on refugee matters.
But it escapes me, the point he's trying to make about the AI report in those tweets and in a Deutschslandfunk interview (Umstrittener Amnesty-Bericht – Int. Gerald Knaus, ESI 08/11/2022). The main criticism seems to be that the AI report was presented in a way that made it too easy for the Russians to exploit for propaganda purposes.
As I noted in an earlier post, causes and meanings of a war are not determined by particular crimes and atrocities committed by either side. Although that doesn't fit well with a sports-event approach to war, where we pick a side and cheer for Our Side while we trash the Other Side.
Maybe there is some kind of dodgy behavior on AI's part that I'm missing. But both AI and Human Rights Watch have criticized both Russian and Ukrainian forces for positioning themselves too close to or within civilian areas. Reports by NGOs like AI and HRW need to be read critically, of course. But if there is reason to condemn that particular AI report, I haven't yet seen anything that has convinced me.
It's worth noting here that when Israel attacks targets in civilian areas in Gaza, Israel routinely condemns Hamas for launching attacks from civilian areas, if only because that claim rarely draws much skepticism from American commentators.
Two Ukrainian scholars, Dmytro Koval [d-MA-tro KOV-ul ] of the National University of Kyiv und Kateryna Busol [ ka-TER-in-a BU-sol] of Chatham House, write about the investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine in a report (Russlands Aggression in der Ukraine: die Dokumentation der aus dem Konflikt resultierenden Verbrechen 31-July-2022) for Ukraine-Analysen 272 , a (mostly) German publication of a group focusing on Eastern Europe. Their own description of their publication can be found here.
As Koval [KOV-ul] und Busol [BU-sol] discuss, human rights authorities and NGOs have been actively investigating Russia war crimes in Ukraine since 2014. They describe concerns about coordination of the various investigations and the need for more standardized research procedures, including respecting the risks that victims can be newly traumatized by investigations of atrocities if the correct professional approaches in dealing with victims are not applied.
But, Russian war crimes and atrocities are definitely being investigated, and that has been the case since 2014. Headlines on an Amnesty International report that might be considered tempting for Russian propaganda to quote hardly seem much of a danger for the actual investigation of war crimes by the Russian side.
And, of course, any Ukrainian war crimes should also be investigated by competent authorities and experts.
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