Policemen stand guard near the partially demolished compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces in May, in Abbottabad this February 26, 2012 file photo. Al Qaeda's leaders were increasingly worried about spies in their midst, drones in the air and secret tracking devices reporting their movements as the U.S.-led war against them grinds on, documents seized in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout and obtained by Reuters reveal. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood/Files
Carpet-bombing. Collective responsibility. Genocide. These are the words of modern warfare.
More civilians die in modern warfare than soldiers. While we have become better at most things, we have not become better at war.
Our ability to kill and mutilate has reached levels never seen before. Whether it’s Gaza, Israel, Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, Congo, Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan or Nigeria, civilian deaths in war have remained unacceptably high.
Over the past 23 years, more than 5.5 million deaths have occurred because of war, the vast majority of those being civilians killed in acts of war. The political decision-makers of war never die in war. It is the sons and daughters of ordinary people who die in war.
Religion, nationality, race, land and borders are all reasons why world leaders send their citizens into battle, to a war they themselves will only see from a distance. There is no “front line” anymore.
Seated safely thousands of miles away, military strategists and their political leaders gather in secure offices directing their troops where to fire their missiles to kill other lives in the battle, and unfortunately, also lose their own.
War is no longer just about two companies of soldiers fighting. Modern warfare intends to obliterate both military and civilian resistance and all infrastructure associated with both.
I will never forget the horror I experienced in 2011 when I watched how casually Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, with their military leadership, watched the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Televised for all to see, the world crossed a line at that moment. While we mourn the death of our own, the killing of our enemies is still a thing we take great pleasure in.
Modern warfare has given us entirely new words that didn’t exist previously to describe its horrors. It was Polish Jew and lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who came up with the term genocide to describe the horrors he had seen in the massacre of the largely Christian Armenian people in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.
He was committed to helping the world understand mass killings and spent the rest of his life petitioning the United Nations to recognise the term “genocide”. The word itself didn’t exist until 1943 when Lemkin coined it, pairing the Greek “genes” meaning race or family, with the Latin “cidere” for killing.
Lemkin defined genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, race or religion”.
In the documentary on his life, he is quoted as saying: “Why is the killing of an individual a greater crime than the killing of millions?”
The UN finally adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. Later, Professors Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn improved on Lemkin’s definition by saying: “Genocide is a form of onesided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator”.
How long will we allow our religious, and sectarian divisions within religion, racial, national or ethnic prejudices to condone acts of genocide, which includes the carpet-bombing of civilian areas, and then silence us, because of the side we have chosen to be on?
When US presidential candidate Nikki Haley says, “The first thing I said to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when this happened was ‘Finish them’,” referring to Hamas, and when Hamas says it wants to take the land from “river to sea”, then we have sown the seeds of genocide. And then civilian Gazans and Jews – and their children – have become ”legitimate targets“in this war of “collective punishment”.
Demands for justice and an end to oppression are legitimate.
The mass killing of people is genocide. No matter who perpetrates it. On any side. That’s what the Genocide Convention states.
It’s a shame that some politicians are too fearful to call it what it is.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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