Via Africa Is a Country, an appeal for Africans to send their spare radiators to warm freezing children in Norway:
A project of the The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund, Radi-Aid asks us all to “[i]magine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway” video and this was the only information they ever got about Norway.”
Way to show, not tell, guys!
I recently read David Scheffer’s All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals. It’s a fascinating memoir of life as the U.S.’s first ever Ambassador for War Crimes Issues. I highly recommend it if you’re into either detailed negotiating histories of international institutions or snarky observations about UN bureaucrats and French people.
Scheffer’s discussion of the Rwandan genocide and the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is particularly eye-opening, especially when compared to other former policymakers’ accounts of the same events. (Looking at you, Madeleine “it was complicated” Albright.) I suspect most readers will be drawn to the story of how the US and the UN bogged down in endless discussions of the meaning of the word “genocide” rather than reacting to the mass slaughter, but, being me, I found the blow-by-blow of the bargaining process between the new Rwandan regime and the international community over issues like the temporal jurisdiction of the ICTR and the possibility of the death penalty equally interesting. Not just because I love me some jurisdictional issues, but because when we talk about the impact of the tribunals, we’re generally comparing to the counterfactual of no accountability mechanism. Scheffer’s accounts of setting up the ad hoc tribunals, the hybrids, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) let us think about the courts we might have had instead.
Descending further into law-nerdery, in the section on the ICC, Scheffer advances a surprising interpretation of the applicability of the Rome Statute to nationals of non-party states. This is an issue Amanda and I touched on a couple of months ago with regard to the potential for an ICC investigation into recent attacks on civilians in Sudan, a non-party state. Scheffer suggests that Art. 11(2) and Art. 24 of the statute together preclude the jurisdiction over nationals of non-parties (except in the case of a Security Council referral) entirely.
For those who aren’t following along at home with a well-thumbed copy of the Rome Statute: Art. 11(2) says that if states join the court after the entry into force of the Rome Statute (on July 1, 2002), the court’s jurisdiction only reaches back to the date the state joined, and Art. 24 says that no person can be held responsible for crimes committed before the Statute’s entry into force. Reading these in combination, Scheffer argues that a blanket extension of the court’s jurisdiction to non-party nationals would pre-empt the effect of possible future ratifications. He explains that:
“[A] nonparty country … would have to accept the proposition that a future ratification of the Rome Statute would be meaningless because their nationals have been covered by the statute since July 1, 2002.”
Because this result would be absurd (although I actually think the more likely absurd result would be that a non-party state that commits an atrocity in 2012 would self-protectively ratify in 2013), Scheffer concludes that non-party state nationals must only be covered by the statute in cases where the state consents (under the Art. 12(3) special declaration procedure) or the Security Council refers the situation to the ICC.
I’m not sold on this interpretation. As Scheffer acknowledges, Art. 12 is clear that the court has jurisdiction over crimes when either the national state of the alleged perpetrators or the state where the alleged crimes occurred is a party to the Rome Statute. Scheffer’s reading would knock out the ability of a state party to request the ICC’s involvement in a case where a non-party state’s nationals commit atrocities on the state party’s territory, against their civilians. So, if Freedonia (a non-party state) sends raiding parties into neighboring Sylvania (a state party), and while there, Freedonia’s nationals commit mass rape against Sylvanian villagers, Sylvania couldn’t refer the case to the ICC. While I agree that this would make the court less controversial, especially for those non-party states that have widely deployed military forces (ahem, U.S.), it seems to me to be clearly against the intent of the statute, of which Art. 12 is an unambiguous expression.
Climbing back out of the law-nerdery pit, there’s also quite an interesting domestic politics angle here. The bits on the negotiation of the Rome Statute underscore both what a difficult job war crimes ambassadoring is, and how complicated the development of foreign policy can be in a democracy. Scheffer’s negotiating position at the talks was developed through coordination between the Departments of State, Justice, and Defense, each of which had different interests and concerns relating to the creation of an international court. Set against the backdrop of the Lewinsky scandal, with Jesse Helms in Congress vowing to torpedo the whole thing, the process of representing the Clinton administration’s position at Rome reads as a colossally discouraging experience.
On the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining side of things, after several years in one of the world’s most frustrating jobs, minor irritations like this review by John Yoo probably barely register. But for those of us who make a career out of being annoyed, the scare quotes around “impunity” and “atrocity crimes,” coming from the man who gave us “Torture Memos” as a defined term, are not to be missed…
New Year, New Blog… New World? Check us out, we’ve gotten so fancy!
(And by “fancy,” we mean “we have a WordPress blog hosted on a real URL, like normal people.”)
Feeds should have transferred automatically, but please update your links elsewhere. We think we’ve ironed out most of the kinks in the transition, but appreciate your patience as we address the problems that we’ve almost certainly overlooked.
Happy New Year!
Amber Peterman, Dara Kay Cohen, Tia Palermo, and Amelia Hoover Green have an excellent piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs on the difficulties associated with getting an accurate picture of wartime sexual violence and the prevalence of “false facts” about rape during violent conflict. They raise two issues that I found particularly worth repeating.
First, that while rape is generally underreported, the underreporting isn’t evenly distributed through the population. In other words, it’s not the case that a random 1 out of every 10 victims turns up to a hospital to report an assault. As Peterman et al. point out, the sample is likely to be biased in favor of those who can most easily get to a medical facility and those whose injuries place them most in need of medical care. Consequently, conflict researchers relying on hospital data may draw inaccurate conclusions about both the geographic distribution of the phenomenon, and its character. (In case you don’t spend as much time thinking about wartime rape as I do, and this is therefore not obvious, the logic regarding the type of the violence is that severe injuries are more likely to be produced by gang rape or other particularly brutal assaults. If the data only includes women who have suffered horrific injury, we may conclude that a conflict’s sexual violence component is characterized by atrocious conduct and group attacks, and thus miss a significant spike in rates of less violent single perpetrator rape.)
Second, that sometimes rape isn’t underreported. In fact, in contexts where the status of rape survivor can confer benefits, it may be overreported. Peterman et al. note research by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern in the DRC (which I discussed last year) and by Mats Utas in Liberia suggesting that women know that identifying themselves as rape victims is “an efficient way to procure material assistance from aid agencies.” This incentive to misrepresent further obscures efforts to accurately capture the scope and scale of sexual violence.
The article is short, smart, and interesting, so I encourage you to read it in full.
In my last post, I asked my journalist readers what should be done about obtaining meaningful consent in situations where there is a language barrier between the reporter and the trauma victim/subject:
Finally, a question for my journalist friends: what do you make of the fact that Mac apparently asked her NGO intermediary for consent from the victim and her mother, and he assured her that they had consented? Mac doesn’t speak Haitian Creole, and the other women don’t speak English, so it sounds like an intermediary was necessary. I don’t like the idea that consent rules should be loosened for sources who don’t speak the same language as the reporters who write about them. But if you must rely on third parties, how can you be sure that consent has been given, and given meaningfully?
Ask and ye shall receive: Jina Moore has written an incredibly informative and thoughtful response. I strongly, strongly, strongly urge you to go read the entire, detailed version here, but here is a summary of her rules, from her companion post on the topic:
I think that last point is especially important. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but I think that issue is at the heart of so many of the stories that I have had a problem with over the years. As Jina explains:
The rules of traditional journalism are written for a game in which the journalist is the disempowered party. Those rules are designed to get as much information as possible from people who, for reasons of self-interest, probably don’t want to give it to us. That’s why we have things like “on the record” – it’s public, no going back. Or “on background” – you can use the information, but you can’t name the source. Or even, “on deep background,” which is “for your edification only, and you can’t print/broadcast any of this.”These are rules powerful people know. If you interview a State Department official, the first thing they will do is say, ‘This OTR” or “This is on background” or “How will this be used?” And you negotiate the rules. They know how the game works. Indeed, they know that it’s a game.
So we have to rewrite the rules. Trauma journalism requires that journalists acknowledge a major power shift – one that favors the journalists. We have to rewrite our playbook. The premise is still the same – protect the vulnerable – but now, we’re not the vulnerable. Our sources are.
Like I said, go read the whole thing.
Man, you guys are awesome – my Lara Logan post from last week got some really excellent comments.
I recommend you go check out the whole debate for yourself if you haven’t already, but here are some highlights that were particularly deserving of recognition:
From Jina Moore, in response to an anonymous comment about the dangers of “a mob of Muslim people”:
“[...] When you say “If you have a mob of Muslim people — and I use that term literally, because that throng of people was whipped into a political and ideological frenzy” you make it clear that you think the word “Muslim” signifies a political ideology. I’ve been lax on the Twitter lately, but isn’t what we’re seeing across the Arab region a demonstration of precisely the opposite? There’s a lot of Muslims out there in Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain… and they seem to have very different politics and ideologies from each other. A fact which we should have known, of course, but which has been made rather abundantly clear, no?Putting to rest the problems in the sloppy language of that comment — this makes me wonder what’s happening to other women we haven’t heard about. I saw some action on Twitter, in the late days of January, to share albums of photos of women in the Cairo protests, and clicking through them made it abundantly clear to me how missing their images were from my news sources (note: I don’t have access to TV, which I know has been the lead on this).
If we don’t see images of women claiming agency at a remarkable moment, what else are we missing?”
Yup.
From Melinda, who I think really nails the heart of the issue:
“What I find crazy about all this (besides all the stuff you’ve mentioned) is everyone seems to see Logan’s courage as a bad thing. Yes, she knew she was going into a dangerous situation, and yes, she paid a price for it. That’s called being brave. When soldiers do it, they get medals. Why is it that a girl who did it (to do a job that I consider as necessary as the military’s) gets scolded?”
Word. As she pointed out to me later, if a fireman rescues a child from a burning building and gets hurt in the process, we don’t yell at him for being so temptingly flammable, we thank him for saving the kid. When we yell at Lara Logan for not being more careful, we’re implicitly also saying that her work wasn’t valuable enough to be worth it. Not cool.
And from Vivyenne, responding to the idea that Logan should have covered up with a headscarf because she was in a Muslim country:
“Having lived in Egypt, as a foreign (though not blonde) woman, I would offer a few remarks:I would agree that some measure of sexual harassment is endemic in the society; I’ve heard it described as “Egypt’s cancer”, as in, a particular social problem in that country, and the various bits of north Africa and the Middle East I’ve been through so far have shown it to be more pronounced in Egypt than elsewhere; it’s supposedly linked to the larger social problem that men are unable to marry until they have ‘established’ themselves (hard to do in a poor country). There are no excuses for it, and Egypt is going to need to deal with this sooner rather than later.
But regarding covering up – yes, wearing a headscarf makes you blend into the crowd, at least until they see your face and/or hear your accent, so it is unlikely a woman (in a headscarf or not) speaking into a television camera for a foreign station in English would go unnoticed. Wearing a hijab is not a question of (respecting a) culture, it’s a question of religion (any time I was wearing a hijab and not in a mosque I was repeatedly asked why), though covering up otherwise is expected. And finally – my colleagues and friends told me that women in niqabs (the burqa-like covering with a little window for the eyes, or sometimes with mesh over the eyes) were often harrassed more “because the men were convinced they were missing something”. Headscarves do not make it go away.
That said, mob violence isn’t a reflection of culture. It has absolutely nothing to do with Egyptian, or Muslim, or anything else – genocide can be committed in Germany or Cambodia, massacres happen in Algeria, Congo, and East Timor, torture happens in Argentina and China and all kinds of other places, and a vast majority of the more “heinous” atrocities is related to mobs and mob dynamics. The fact that it was expressed as a sexual assault is probably because she’s female, but men have been raped in these kinds of attacks as well. I can refer you to extensive literature on this subject if you’re curious. [...]“
You guys make me feel very smug about how cool our readers are.
Like many of you, we’ve been obsessively following events in Egypt. (And compulsively posting about it on Twitter at @WrongingRights.)
As we write this, it’s 15 minutes before sunrise in Cairo and protesters in Tahrir Square have come under heavy gunfire overnight from Mubarak supporters. Four people are confirmed dead, many more injured. The eyewitness accounts from protesters being interviewed by Al Jazeera are both heartbreaking and inspiring in their bravery. Their message to the world is simple: We will die before we give up.
If you’re not watching, you should be.
I know you’ve all been on tenterhooks since my last post, but it’s okay, you can relax: New York has redeemed itself after The-Text-is-too-Damned-Small-Gate. Or, at least, I think it has. The following anecdote has me approximately 85% impressed, and 15% terrified by the big-brothery possibilities.
A few days ago, my friend K took a cab in from the airport to her office, and accidentally left her blackberry in it. She hadn’t gotten a receipt for the ride, but had paid with a credit card. She figured that she’d never see her phone again. However, she called 311 anyway, just in case they could do something.
The operator informed her that all taxis have GPS that tracked all credit card transactions. So, if she could determine the exact time and amount she had paid, the TLC would be able to figure out who her driver had been, contact him, and ask him to look for the phone.
K got the transaction information from AmEx, and gave it to the operator. The operator put it into the system, found her transaction, identified her driver, and called him. He immediately pulled over, found the blackberry on the back seat, and then told the operator that he would drive it back to K’s office. A few minutes later, she had her blackberry.
This is kind of an amazing level of service for a city to provide, no?
(If you’re wondering what else they offer, Wired has a cool graphic tracking a hundred million 311 calls here.)
(Oh, and “K” is not “Kate.” Abbreviating her name on our own blog would just be weird. Also, I have more than one friend with that initial. Really.)
I’ve been curious for a long time about whether and how the “all rape all the time” characterization of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo affects the situation on the ground there.
My concern is that the narrow focus on sexual violence as the defining feature of the conflict is both an input and an output of a cycle where:
Lather, rinse, repeat.
A recent SIDA working paper by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern fills in another potential piece of this cycle. Its authors argue that:
“Focusing and continuing to channel resources to SGBV specifically—whether in terms of prevention, access to justice or services to survivors—contributes to rape allegations becoming increasingly entangled in survival strategies.”
Their conclusions arise out of interviews conducted with soldiers and with local organizations in the eastern DRC between 2006 and 2009. In their more recent interviews, they began encountering references to what they call “the commercialization of rape.” They note two manifestations of this phenomenon: accusations of rape as an “income-earning strategy” (essentially, extortion) and allegations of rape for access to services and opportunities earmarked for survivors.
The Marias explain the second trend:
“The lack of basic health services and the lack of resources for women who have not been raped—plus the widespread poverty—have created a situation in which destitute women and girls who are not rape survivors sometimes present themselves as rape victims in order gain access to these opportunities.”
Leaving alone the issue of what the disproportionate focus on rape at the expense of other serious violations means for the victims who can’t claim the status of rape survivor, I hope I’m not the only one worried about how this affects our ability to talk accurately about the scope and character of sexual violence in the region.
The entire report is well worth a read, as it discusses a number of other interesting and under-explored issues, including the sometimes perverse incentive structure of demobilization efforts.
Hattip to Patrick at Benetech for forwarding the report.
As some of you probably know, I’m based in Kampala for the summer. If you’re around, or have tips about things I might want to go poke my nose into, please get in touch via the blog email address.
And speaking of poking my nose into things: Last weekend I went with Siena Anstis and TMS (Teddy) Ruge of Project Diaspora to visit the Women of Kireka, a jewelery-making business owned by a group of women living in the Acholi Quarters outside of Kampala (background here).
The situation in the Acholi Quarters is rough -tens of thousands of internally displaced persons
(IDPs) from the north inhabit slums on the side of a hill in Kireka. They support themselves by working in the local quarry (pictured at right), carving out rocks and crushing them into gravel. This is a grueling and dangerous line of work.
The quarry has been the subject of a number of press reports (see, e.g., Glenna Gordon’s excellent reporting on Stephen Batte, the “Ugandan orphan with a web presence“). However, the attention has not yielded an improvement in the lot of the people living there. Their plight exemplifies a broader problem of urban IDPs being left out of official resettlement and humanitarian aid efforts. As this 2008 bulletin by the Refugee Law Project makes clear, while rural IDPs (those living in camps) are the target of significant assistance, urban IDPs’ low visibility often means they “slip through the cracks.”
Founded by Siena, and advised by Project Diaspora, the Women of Kireka project is an effort to provide a sustainable means for the women to support themselves and their children outside of the quarry. The women make beaded jewelry out of found paper, the partners help them with marketing and sales, and they use the proceeds to reinvest in the business and pay for their children’s school fees. Below are some of their completed products. (Note: One of the women showed me how they make the beads – not an easy process!)
You might be thinking to yourself: “What a great idea! Why aren’t there more projects like this?” There are a number of them, but, as Teddy explained, handouts are still the default because it’s far more difficult to secure funding for an entrepreneurial enterprise than a charity. In other words, if you want to pay school fees for IDP children, great, register yourself an NGO and you shouldn’t have too much trouble convincing donors to fund you. But if you want to help the mothers of those IDP children form a business that will enable them to pay their children’s school fees themselves, well, good luck.