August 08, 2015
This week’s seventieth anniversary of
the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed 200,000
people coincided with intense debate in the United States Congress in
particular about the recent agreement that prevents Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons (which Iran claims it has never sought). The matter of mass killings
using weapons of mass destruction has preoccupied humankind for some time now,
and it raises four related issues that deserve much more attention than they
have received:
• accountability for crimes
committed,
• intervention to protect civilians,
• deterrence to prevent possible
future atrocities and crimes against humanity, and
• whether political agreements that
end active wars should allow leaders who presided over mass atrocities to enjoy
amnesties and not be held accountable legally or politically.
These issues matter more than ever in
the Arab world because we seem to be the world’s most problematic arena for
mass killings, refugee flows, and the use of violence by states and non-state groups
that is rarely if ever subject to any accountability. While we remember this
week the 200,000 Japanese who perished at the receiving end of American nuclear
weapons, we are reminded regularly that well over 200,000 people have died in
Syria in the past four years; over a million have died in Iraq since the 2003
Anglo-American invasion; estimates say that in Sudan over the past two decades
at least 2.5 million people died in civil wars. Thousands have died in
Palestine at the hands of the Israeli armed forces, against a much smaller
number of Israelis killed by Palestinians. We now also witness thousands dying
in the new war in Yemen, while in once rock-solid Egypt government forces and
opposition militants routinely are killing each other by the dozen. Even Saudi
Arabia now witnesses terror attacks that kill scores of civilians or military
personnel at a time.
Perhaps so much death and destruction
take place around the Arab world, at the hands of Arabs, Israelis, Americans
and others, because no serious process exists that holds individuals or
governments accountable for the atrocities they commit. The International
Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir for war
crimes a few years ago has never been followed up by a serious effort to bring
him to court for a fair trial. This means that other Arab autocrats, the
Israeli government, and many non-state killers go about their routine business
that includes killing thousands of people, often their own citizens. The extent
and nature of the mass killings in our region make it all the more imperative
that such criminal action be dealt with in a serious court of law. Accusations
against Arab, Israeli, American, British, Iranian or other governments of
criminal actions usually seem to be well deserved, but only a legal indictment
and a fair trial can prove the guilt or innocence of the accused.
The fact that no such actions occur
means that active killers go about their criminal deeds with total impunity,
which may explain why so many governments and non-state organizations kill at
will across the region. The current increasing talk of moving towards a
political process in Syria that ends the fighting rests heavily on a single
issue: What will be the fate of President Bashar Assad and his family if a
political agreement does end the fighting, and make way for a transition to a
new government?
Will Assad be allowed to step down
and retire quietly somewhere? Or should he be held accountable for most of the
hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have died in the war there? Is there
enough evidence of his use of chemical weapons and inhuman barrel bombs against
civilians to indict him and his officers? Or is it preferable to allow him to
retire in peace, for the sake of ending the fighting and sparing the lives of
perhaps several hundred thousand other Syrians who are alive today?
While we debate this, we also face
the related issue of whether and how regional and foreign powers should
intervene inside Syria to slow down the mass routine killing of civilians by
the Syrian air force. The international doctrine of the “responsibility to
protect” was largely discredited by the heavy-handed manner in which NATO and
Arab forces intervened in Libya four years ago to overthrow the Gaddafi regime and
lead the country into its current chaotic and violent state.
The mostly Arab, Turkish, American
intervention in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS) is another example of how to react, but its outcomes remain unclear. These
really tough issues cannot be ignored for long, because hundreds of thousands
of people at a time are dying in assorted wars across the Arab world, mirroring
the hundreds of thousands who died in Japan on two days seventy years ago.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice
weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding
director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public
Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri -- distributed by Agence Global