Getting to Know International Humanitarian Law

Speech to the International Humanitarian Law and the Media Workshop
Ottawa University
March 18, 2005

By David Pratt, Advisor and Special Ambassador, Canadian Red Cross

Good Morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is a pleasure for me to be here today to speak to you about international humanitarian law or IHL. It is a subject I think is tremendously important and one which should be of profound interest to you – especially those of you who plan to engage in careers that will take you to zones of conflict. For you, a knowledge of IHL will not only make you a better reporter; in certain instances, it may actually save lives – yours included.

Perhaps the best place to start is to describe what IHL is all about. It begins with an idea that is simple but compelling: the idea that some things are not permitted even in war, that there have to be limits to the violence that people inflict on one another so as to establish a firewall between civilization and absolute barbarism. Using this idea as a starting point, international humanitarian law sets forth a number of rules aimed at protecting certain categories of people who have not or are no longer taking part in hostilities and at restricting the means and methods of warfare.

IHL is rooted in practicality. For instance, it does not call into question the lawfulness of war. Rather it aims first and foremost to limit the superfluous suffering that war can cause. Notwithstanding the fact that war is officially outlawed (subject to some important exceptions contained in the UN Charter), it is still, as we know, very much with us.

IHL is also rooted in universality. Many cultures have sought to limit the suffering that war can cause. International humanitarian law simply expresses the idea in legal terms. By making respect for the human being in war an international obligation, the States party to IHL covenants commit to the high ideal that they want international humanitarian law to be binding on all.

Where and how did IHL get its start? That is hard to pinpoint with any amount of precision. Primitive peoples put limits on warfare and indeed the ancient code of Hammurabi speaks to the subject as well. It stated, for instance, “I establish these laws to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.” If any of you have read Plato’s Republic, you will find a reference to putting humanitarian limits on war. But Plato’s Greece was a far cry from being considered an idyllic example of IHL. In fact, Plato’s humanitarian impulse extended only to war between Greeks, but certainly not to war between Greeks and say, the Persians. Interesting as well is the fact that Plato had no problem with slavery or children going off to battle as spectators so they could learn the arts of war.

Nevertheless, let me give you some of the flavour of what Plato had to say about conflict between Greeks: “Accordingly, the Greeks being their own people, a quarrel with them will not be called a war. It will only be civil strife, which they will carry on as men who will some day be reconciled. So they will not behave like a foreign enemy seeking to enslave or destroy, but will try to bring their adversaries to reason by well-meant correction. As Greeks they will not devastate the soil of Greece or burn the homesteads; nor will they allow that all the inhabitants of any state, men women, and children, are their enemies but only the few who are responsible for the quarrel. The greater number are friends, whose land and houses, on all these accounts, they will not consent to lay waste and destroy. They will pursue the quarrel only until the guilty are compelled by the innocent sufferers to give satisfaction. For my part, I agree that our citizens should treat their adversaries in that way, and deal with foreigners as Greeks now deal with one another. We will make this a law, then, for our Guardians: they are not to ravage lands or burn houses.”

The motivation for Plato’s humanitarian inclinations was not really unique even for the ancient world. Bias, one of the Seven Sages wrote: “Treat a friend as a future enemy, an enemy as a future friend.” That sounds like the type of advice that would be as useful in ancient Greece as it would be around the table at the UN Security Council today.

Still, I don’t know about you, but when I read those words it is hard not to think about how little progress we have actually made over the 2,500 years since Plato uttered these phrases. Think about his words: “they are not to ravage lands and burn houses” now think about the twentieth century and the Nazi bombing of civilian populations in Guernica, Rotterdam and London, the rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the ethnic cleansing and prison camps of the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities of child soldiers and amputations in Sierra Leone. It’s not all one-sided. You may also want to think about the Allied retaliation with the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki or My Lai or even Belet Huen in Somalia.

Recall again the words of Plato, “We will make this a law, then, for our Guardians.” The statutes of ancient Greece have been lost over the two and a half millennia since Plato and his kind grappled with subjects that still occupy us today. So how did humankind bridge the historic gap of over 25 centuries and actually codify the laws of war or IHL as we know it today? As we saw in the video, the answer can be found in the person of Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman. Dunant in my estimation is one of the great figures of civilization and humanity - if I can use those two words in the widest possible sense. His life was all about the power of a great idea.

Still, in fairness, Dunant was not the only person trying to puts rules on warfare in the middle of the 19^th century. Francis Lieber, in 1863 wrote the Lieber Code which applied to Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Still, Dunant remains the individual who was able to internationalize IHL.

As the video describes, Dunant was travelling in Northern Italy in late June 1859 and found himself in the position of being a battlefield tourist at a place called Solferino. It was here that the Allied armies of Victor-Emmanuel of Italy and the Emperor Napoleon III clashed with an Austrian Army under Emperor Franz Joseph on June 24, 1859. Let me try to set the stage somewhat. The Austrians had been marching all night. The French moved forward at 3:00 in the morning and barely had time for coffee. The two armies of 300,000 men facing each other along a battle line approximately 15 miles long. The struggle began at 6 am in the morning and continued for fifteen very hot, very dusty and very bloody hours. Dunant, who was not a journalist, but whose description of the battle is graphic and detailed gives us as good an account as any that exist of the abject horrors and chaos of a 19^th century battlefield. As I will explain a little later Dunant account of Solferino mobilized all of Europe. Allow me to quote at length from Dunant’s account and to the squeamish go my apologies:

“Here is a hand to hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness; Austrians and Allies trampling each other under foot, killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses, felling their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with sabre and bayonet. No quarter is given; it is a sheer butchery; a struggle between savage beasts, maddened with blood and fury.

A little further on, it is the same picture, only made the more ghastly by the approach of a squadron of cavalry, which gallops by, crushing dead and dying beneath its horses’ hoofs. One poor wounded man has his jaw carried away; another his head shattered; a third, who could have been saved, has his chest beaten in. Oaths and shrieks of rage, groans of anguish and despair, mingle with the whinnying of horses.

Here come the artillery, following the cavalry, and going at full gallop. The guns crash over the dead and wounded, strewn pell-mell on the ground. Brains spurt under the wheels, limbs are broken and torn, bodies mutilated past recognition – the soil is literally puddled with blood, and the plain littered with human remains.”

Dunant accepted the anthropological inevitability of war. He was not a pacifist. Still, he was clearly horrified and deeply disturbed by both the battle and its aftermath. In the hours and days following the fighting he chronicled pitiful accounts of individual suffering. Again I quote from his account: “Another wretched man had a part of his face – nose, lips and chin - taken off by a sabre cut. He could not speak, and lay, half blind, making heart-rending signs with his hands and uttering guttural sounds to attract attention. I gave him a drink and poured a little fresh water on his bleeding face. Another with his skull gaping wide open, was dying, spitting out his brains on the stone floor.”

Dunant was not just an observer. He was determined to do whatever he could to be of assistance. The battle of Solferino had left 40,000 dead and wounded and soon after the fighting Dunant recruited those around him to assist the wounded and dying. He summoned a couple of English tourists, a French journalist, a German surgeon, a Swiss merchant and local townspeople to provide food, water and medical attention to those in need. Three years later Dunant put pen to paper and his recollections of the battle became “A Memory of Solferino.”

His book raised quite a sensation. Shortly after it was published in 1862, people across Europe were talking about his proposal for a reserve of trained volunteers who would be skilled in attending and caring for the wounded on the battlefield. Someone once said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Dunant’s ideas fit that description to a T. His thoughtful proposal also called for these volunteer auxiliaries to be declared neutral and organized around what he described as “national relief societies.”

In February 1863, a preliminary meeting was held in Geneva and it was agreed that an international conference should be convened. Dunant and five others, who called themselves the “Permanent International Committee” set to work organizing a meeting for October of 1863. That conference, which was attended by 36 delegates was the first of two historic meetings in Geneva. The second, which was held in August 1864, succeeded in taking the resolutions and recommendations from the previous meeting and transforming them into a draft convention or treaty.

In September 1864, about a month after the second Geneva meeting, France ratified the treaty. Others were quick to follow. By 1870 all of the major European powers and most of the smaller one had ratified what became known as the First Geneva Convention. Interestingly, it was at the first meeting in Geneva in October 1863 that someone, we don’t know who, came up with the idea of providing for identification on the battlefield to ensure that the neutrality of those caring for the wounded would be respected. It was decided that a Red Cross on a white armband, the inverse of the Swiss flag, would be that symbol of neutrality. The national organizations were officially called “Societies for the Relief of Wounded Combatants.” In 1867, the Netherlands became the first country to call its national body the “Red Cross Society” and by 1875, Dunant’s “Permanent International Committee” became “The International Committee of the Red Cross.”

To digress briefly and inject a little Canadian content into this discussion, just as the Dunant’s Red Cross was born on the battlefield, so was the Canadian Red Cross. In the spring of 1885, during Louis Riel's North West Rebellion, George Sterling Ryerson, an assistant surgeon with the Royal Grenadier Guards, needed something to distinguish the horse-drawn wagon being used to transport the wounded at the battle of Batoche. He obtained red material from the artillery, tore off two strips and sewed them onto a white factory cotton. This was one of the first Red Cross flags ever flown in Canada and it holds a place of prominence on the seventh floor of the Red Cross office on Metcalfe Street. In 1896,Dr.George Sterling Ryersonfounded the first overseas branch of the British Red Cross, which later became the Canadian Red Cross.

Getting back to the first Geneva Convention, what it did was lay the foundations for contemporary IHL. First, it provided standing written rules of universal scope to protect the victims of conflicts. Second, as an international instrument, it was open to all states. Third, it created an obligation to extend care without discrimination to wounded and sick military personnel. And fourth, it called for the identification and protection of medical personnel, transports and equipment through the emblem of the Red Cross. That, if I might suggest, was major progress in how countries conducted war. And as Michael Ignatieff said in the video, better to have some standards than no standards at all.

In the 145 years since the first Geneva Convention, the body of international humanitarian law has expanded considerably. There have been twenty or so major treaties dealing with everything from the use of dum-dum or hollow point bullets at the Hague Convention of 1899 through to the prohibition on the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of bacteriological methods of warfare at the Geneva Convention of 1925.

IHL took a major step forward following the Second World War with the Genocide Convention of 1948 and the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 which addressed the amelioration of the condition of wounded, sick and shipwrecked members of armed forces at sea, the treatment of prisoners of war and the protection of civilian persons in time of war. These rules were further bolstered in 1977 by two protocols additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 which dealt with the protection of victims of international and non-international armed conflict. These four conventions and two protocols contain almost 600 articles and are the main instruments of IHL.

As many of you know, there have been further advances in IHL in the last decade or so in terms of prohibitions on the development and use of chemical weapons, the use of blinding lasers, the anti-personnel landmines treaty, the International Criminal Court (also known as the Rome Statute) and the optional protocol on the rights of the child and the involvement of children in armed conflict.

But there is a cruel paradox at work here. Just as international human rights law and international humanitarian law have probably never been as developed, the number of innocent victims of warfare keeps climbing. We saw the trends emerge clearly over the twentieth century. In the First World War, the ratio of civilian to military deaths was 1:10. In the Second World War, it was 1:1. And within the last fifteen years or so, it has reversed itself and is now 10 civilian deaths for each military death.

That is precisely why the protection of civilians in armed conflict is more important today than ever. That is why it is necessary, not just to have the rules in place, but to ensure they are enforced. That is why tribunals like the International Criminal Court and the international criminal tribunals involving the former conflicts in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the Special Court in Sierra Leone, are so important in terms of acting as a deterrent to those who would commit war crimes. I was in Freetown, Sierra Leone three months after the RUF assault that was captured on Sorious Somura’s video. That attack killed 5,000 people and went almost completely unnoticed at the time in the West. Having seen the destruction and met people who had limbs chopped off, I am personally anxious to see the perpetrators brought to justice.

I hope that all of you after viewing the video are firmly convinced of the importance of IHL. Lindsey Hilsum, the British reporter in the video, really says it all. Let me re-quote her words: “Had I realized right at the start that I wasn’t reporting anarchy but genocide, I would have reported it differently. In that first terrible week, I could have explained that governments had an obligation to stop it.” What a terrible admission for that reporter to have to make.

If you are reporting conflict, it is extremely important to know what is permissible in war and what is not permissible. If you are reporting conflict, it is extremely important to know what constitutes legitimate military action and what is a war crime. If any of you are unconvinced as to the importance of IHL, let me put it another way. As a sports reporter, you wouldn’t dream of covering a hockey or basketball game, unless you felt you had a good grasp of the rules of the game. I don’t need to tell you that the stakes are a lot higher when people are carrying automatic weapons instead of hockey sticks. But the public deserves a least the same level of journalistic professionalism and knowledge from its war correspondents as it gets from its sports reporters. War reporters in my view have a profound moral obligation to know the rules.

But the rules of war as Roy Gutman said in the video don’t belong to the generals, to the politicians or to the media. They belong to everyone. The general public should know the moral and legal benchmarks contained in IHL. But for the media and the public, this becomes incredibly challenging in conflict zones which by their very nature are chaotic, confused and rife with disinformation. As Michael Ignatieff also said, warfare seems to always one step ahead of morality.90

So as journalists, it is your job – not an easy one by any stretch – to report accurately, to understand the rules of the game and to be able to draw attention to violations of IHL when they occur. To do this you have to be armed with the knowledge of what IHL is and who it covers. But you should also know this: the Red Cross, as the custodians of the Geneva Conventions, is there to help you. And you should use us as a resource. And finally, you should never forgot the story of Henry Dunant. His life was a testimony to the power of an idea in mobilizing humanity and he showed quite clearly that the words of one person can make an enormous difference.

Thank you.

International Humanitarian Law and the Media Workshop

Posted March 21, 2005