Confronting the Human Rights Crises Left in the Wake of the Iraq War

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Confronting the Human Rights Crises Left in the Wake of the Iraq War

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following briefing was written by Jeena Shah and published by the Center for Consitutional Rights on 24 March 2014]

The Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq spurred the largest outcry and anti-war protests in the history of the world. More than ten years and hundreds of thousands of lives later, U.S. veterans and Iraqi civil society groups have come together to demand accountability for the U.S.’s fateful and lawless decisions. As one of the region’s principle mechanisms for the promotion and protection of human rights, and given its location in Washington, D.C., the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) seemed the natural human rights body to begin to confront the human rights crises resulting from the war.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, joined together last year on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to launch the Right to Heal Initiative, which seeks acknowledgment of and accountability and reparations for the shared harms from the war. The initiative surfaces the joint suffering of Iraqis and U.S. veterans from the war’s long-lasting and inter-generational health and environmental damage, post-traumatic stress, and gender-based violence. While some of these demands have been raised in other forums – such as legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate to create civilian oversight of military sexual trauma cases – no forum has considered these harms holistically and how they have affected both Iraqis and U.S. service-member communities.  Nor is any court hospitable to such claims.  While victims of the war’s environmental harms and incidents of torture continue to (separately) seek accountability in U.S. courts, it has been an uphill battle, with courts dismissing their cases or adding significant hurdles to their prosecution on political question and extraterritoriality grounds.

The groups in the Right to Heal Initiative thus turned their attention to international human rights mechanisms like the IACHR and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which recently reviewed the United States.  These bodies, they presumed, have a strong interest in protecting those most affected by the U.S.’s decade of war and deterring the U.S. from future war-making, which is always accompanied by serious and widespread human rights violations.  

The Right to Heal Initiative first sought a thematic hearing before the IACHR in 2013.  Though its request received support from 9,427 individuals from 76 different countries, including 2,135 individuals who hand-signed petitions in Baghdad, Basra and Samarra, Iraq, and by 125 human rights organizations across the Americas, it was denied.  The Initiative resubmitted its request for a hearing during the Commission’s current session. It was again denied.  

At the same time, the initiative submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Committee, but was disappointed once more when the committee – with the world’s attention on it – failed to question the U.S. on its war in Iraq (or Afghanistan) altogether.

Why these human rights bodies are ignoring the U.S.’s war crimes, along with the U.S.’s failure to redress the harmful consequences of its wars, is unclear. The U.S.’s war-making, particularly in Iraq, has serious implications for the Americas – the region the IACHR is charged with protecting – as it has been increasingly reported that the U.S. government is using tactics honed in the Iraq war in its ever-expanding “war on drugs” throughout Latin America.  For its part, the U.N. Human Rights Committee is the leading international body charged with protecting the fundamental right to life – a right most obviously violated on a widespread basis through the act of war.

These bodies face no procedural obstacles to questioning the U.S. on these issues. Indeed, they are fully competent to do so. Both the IACHR and the Human Rights Committee have interpreted a state’s obligations under their respective treaties to extend to human rights violations occurring outside its borders – either when the violations occur on territory within the effective control of that state’s forces or the state’s actions contributed to the rise of those violations.  Both have also recognized their jurisdiction over human rights violations resulting from war.  

For decades, international human rights practitioners have pushed for the creation of these and other international human rights monitoring bodies, encouraged marginalized communities to bring their concerns before them, and warned governments to abide by their recommendations. It is incumbent on us to push the same bodies to fulfill one of their most important functions: to provide spaces where a war’s victims on all sides can come together to provide a complete picture of its devastation.  Such a role is beyond the capacity of most national judicial mechanisms. And until there is accountability – real accountability – for the decisions to wage war like this, the state of ‘perpetual war’ as President Obama described, will continue to be the norm.

While human rights bodies may have ignored their plight, these groups most affected by the U.S.’s war on Iraq have not given up.  Having been denied a hearing on the impact of the war before the IACHR and effectively ignored by the Human Rights Committee, the Initiative is planning a People’s Hearing in D.C. on March 26th – during the IACHR’s period of sessions. These human rights defenders are determined to show the true costs of war. They are mobilizing communities to call on their elected officials to account for and repair the full extent of the harm they have caused and to prevent them from resorting to the next war.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412