Collective punishment sends the wrong message

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Express-News December 20, 2003
Collective punishment sends the wrong message

A front-page headline in the paper Dec. 7 stunned me.

"U.S. tactics now look like Israel's." I read the story. I read it again. I still don't quite believe my eyes.

According to the article, originally published in the New York Times, U.S. soldiers have begun "wrapping entire villages in barbed wire."

"They've begun imprisoning the relatives of guerilla suspects in hopes of pressuring the insurgents to turn themselves in."

They are "demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers."

These tactics, known as collective punishment, are morally repugnant and illegal — in short, war crimes. We should be ashamed.

Collective punishment is the practice of punishing entire families, communities or groups for the act of an individual. It is illegal under Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which states, "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed."

Here's another example, published in October in Britain's Guardian newspaper.

"U.S. soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops. "Farmers said that U.S. troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance, which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district."

Do you remember two years ago when seven convicts — two killers, two rapists, a child abuser, an armed robber and a burglar — escaped from a prison in Kenedy with a cache of weapons?

During their seven weeks on the lam, while robbing a sporting goods store, they killed a policeman. We really wanted to catch those guys.

So did we throw their grannies in jail, holding them hostage until the killers surrendered? Did we bulldoze their families' homes because their wives might suspect where they are and wouldn't squeal? Of course not. That would have violated every word of our Constitution.

So why are we doing it in Iraq? What message are we sending to the fledgling Iraqi government about the rule of law?

The wrong message. They know these tactics. They were the ones Saddam Hussein practiced 15 years ago when he gassed the village of Halabja, killing 5,000 as collective punishment for Kurdish opposition to his regime.

It is a slippery moral slope, just a short slide, from razing date groves to gassing villages.

The drafters of the Geneva Conventions were remembering reprisals against the resistance in World Wars I and II when they incorporated the ban on collective punishment.

According to the book "Crimes of War," the Red Cross commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to "intimidatory measures to terrorize the population" in hope of preventing hostile acts, but such practices "strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice."

If we are using Israel's relationship with Palestinians as a best practices case study in how to get along, we are doomed. They have been killing each other for a generation, with no end in sight.

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, the equivalent of our Red Cross, 2,590 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the second intifada on Sept. 29, 2000. In that same time period, the Israeli military has recorded 898 Israeli deaths.

Many of those killed — 490 of the Palestinians and 106 of the Israelis — were children. Is this success? Is this security? Is this our role model?

Any schoolchild will tell you that getting punished for something you didn't do breeds anger and resentment. Anger and resentment don't bring peace; they spawn violence.

These new tactics are illegal, morally wrong and ineffective. They are opposed to all principles of humanity and justice and should cease immediately.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.