Well, the world - or much of it - is focused on "flattening the curve" to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, and rightly so. The better nations, such as Denmark, have been taking measures to address the effect of this on everyday people, whereas demagogues like the one in charge of the USA have been either ignoring the situation or looking after their mates in business.
It is the everyday people who will bear the brunt of this, sadly (I am particularly concerned for my honorary brother and his family in Africa). Businesses have started making layoffs in my nation (not the one I work for, which has trialled work-at-home systems, and taken actions ahead of those recommended by our neoliberal government), and our responses for those who are vulnerable and of limited mobility has relied on individual people and businesses more than an organised, government-led, coordinated response.
Some people, concerningly, are still ignoring the gravity of this situation - for instance, all those idiots who thought they were being "brave" by going to a beach a couple of days ago. Still, it can be difficult for those who have not had to endure something like to make changes, but previous generations have had to adapt to and endure things like: the coming and going of Ice Ages; the collapse of various Empires and States; the Great Plagues of the Mediaeval Ages; political,intellectual and other revolutions, rebellions and wars - including world wars; the Great Depression; and so on. I've lived through the Cold War, recessions, the Internet-technology revolution, the arrival and spread of neoliberalism, and various major personal events. Also, as a light-hearted article pointed out, as an introvert/ambivert, I'm pre-adapted for living in a lockdown ☺ - which is also aided by my growing drift towards being a hermit.
As a species, despite some people being flummoxed by the unfamiliar, we have a history of adapting: we are pre-adapted to adapt to what is needed to survive this pandemic, and with some caring and thoughtfulness, will do so.
And in the spirit of thoughtfulness, I would like to move to the concept of interventions in crises. This has actually been spurred on by by a book I am reading, written by the US military on the topic of military interventions of mass atrocities. It starts off fairly well, with an overview of the issues, but then dives into giving lots of consideration to the pseudo-intellectual arguments against intervening, and NO consideration to reasons FOR intervening. I'm still dragging my way through it, and it may improve, but it is infected by the plague of pseudo-intellectualism that infests so much of our society, including too many higher education institutions.
Now, a cautionary note here: I don't have much time, little energy, and very few resources other than what I can find that is public and free, so this exercise will be flawed. Maybe one day someone with exactly what I lack can perform a better analysis.
I want to look at:
- the Rwandan genocide; and
- the Syrian civil war.
The Rwandan genocide
The basic facts of the Rwandan genocide are fairly well known. In just a few months (100 days over the period April to July, 1994), nearly a million Tutsis, maybe more, in Rwanda were brutally and systematically identified, found and killed or raped in a pre-planned, prepared and meticulously organised and directed operation. Despite the warnings of those on the ground, the rest of the world - especially the USA - did nothing, in part because of a stuff up that took many lives in Somalia just a few months beforehand (in October, 1993), partly - in my opinion - because of lack of caring, caring affected by out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and racism - and all the factors Samantha Power identifies in her masterful book "A Problem from Hell" (Pub. Harper, 2010, ISBN 978-0007172993, Amazon) - such as limited imagination, leading to a limited understanding that there are real human beings on the other side of news headlines and statistics. In addition to the the staggering death toll and the devastation caused to that nation, there were counter-genocides, disease outbreaks, and impacts on other nations, including a massive refugee crisis and two wars.
The atrocities happened at a great rate - this was not like the breakup of Yugoslavia, which was a series of wars and clustered atrocities, with pauses in-between; this was like a landslide, it started and was (almost) inevitable from then on. You can find timelines here and here; these show that what stopped the rape and slaughter was the resumption of the civil war, with Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front, perhaps helped by government resources being so heavily committed to committing rape and slaughter, certainly motivated by the desire to stop what was happening, but still exercising military strategic thinking, won - despite being delayed by the French - the civil war.
In the lead up to the genocide, an unofficial radio station had been broadcasting hate speech, and during the genocide it broadcast the names, addresses, and car licence plate numbers of Tutsi and moderate Hutu, who were also subjected to the atrocities. Many of the killings were by neighbours, due in part to the hate speech broadcast by that evil radio station, but due also to the broadcast of details of people. Road blocks had been set up the day after the President's assassination, and the details of people at those road blocks were checked - and at road blocks set up by Hutu, not military, I suspect it would have been the radio broadcast details that were used to do the checking. Those identified as being Tutsi or moderate Hutu were killed. An academic assessment identifies that at least 10% of the killings can be attributed to that radio station - and in "full radio coverage areas increased the number of persons prosecuted for any violence by about 62–69%". (Some people have claimed this is disputable: from the abstract, I consider this more an exercise in pseudo-intellectualism than a valid criticism.)
This is something well covered in Ms Power's book.
10% of the widely accepted death toll of 800,000 people is 80,000 people. Let's say the critics are right and it is maybe half that - that is forty thousand human beings, many of them CHILDREN. From Ms Power's book (p. 334);
[on a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi man who tried to save her children] ". . . she saw the assailants butcher eight of the eleven children. The youngest, a child of three years old, pleaded for his life after seeing his brothers and sisters slain. "Please don't kill me," he said. "I'll never be Tutsi again." But the killers, unblinking, struck him down."You cannot be aware of that and not react without sacrificing your humanity. Objectivity in such situations is either a psychopathic ruse, a device to hide one's pain, or an intellectual lie.
Now, the specific issue I wished to consider, more so than the flaws of some pseudo-people, is the topic of blocking that evil radio station.
This option was raised at the time, and the USA abandoned its morality and decided not to do so.
There were unquestionably military risks associated with this - the plane broadcasting the blocking signal would have to fly close enough, thus being in the air space of a nation with an air force and air defences.
The US military book I referred to above concluded (I peeked ahead) that the principles of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) would have been sufficient to justify taking action during the Rwandan genocide, "had they existed".
Now, the first point here is that this shows boots-on-the-ground is not the only option required that will make a difference. In the case of that radio station, one of the aspects I suspect has been underrated is the value of time. Had the details needed to be transported by other means, more people would have got through road blocks (i.e., before their details were there), and the rate of killing would have slowed. The RPF had resumed fighting on the second day after the President's assassination, the day after the genocide began. They were coming, at a time when every day was costing 8,000 lives. Blocking that radio station would have saved lives in several ways. Anyone who doubts that is lacking in thinking, humanity, or both, in my opinion.
The second point is that, much as Newton described an existing phenomenon rather than "inventing" gravity (I do know cretins, stupid thought they be, who argue the latter - fair dinkum), human rights and the principle of R2P always existed: what is new is that they have been described in a way that makes the matter clear to more people.
There have ALWAYS been people who were so decent as human beings that they didn't need the face saving excuse of "education" to salve their warped and bigoted personality on matters such as racism, misogyny, trans-/bi-/homophobia, bullying, or any other situation involving human suffering. I met evolved souls who were comfortable with treating trans people with respect in the 80s - and every jerk (male, female, other) since then who insisted on education, a formal one-sided disclosure of pronouns, laws or anything else, was less of a human being than others.
That also applies to all those who argue for inaction (as opposed to better action) on the topic of any mass atrocity or mass suffering - and we have major food insecurity verging on famine in Zimbabwe, Yemen and North Korea, for example, apart from the current COVID-19 pandemic. I can still remember seeing the images of starving Biafran children on TV in the 60s, and being horrified; I still remember the misogynistic and other brutal atrocities committed by the Taliban through the 80s,90s, and this century, and being horrified; I see frequently the still ongoing horrors in Yemen and Syria, and am horrified.
I then move beyond the horror, without forgetting it, so I can work out what I, a civilian without political office or any other particular influence (realistically, these blogs are still minnows in the internet world), can do.
And in that spirit, let's now turn to Syria.
The Syrian civil war
I write to local politicians fairly frequently - I can be the snowflake adding itself to an avalanche that leads to action. Partly, what gives me some weight there is being a voter, but moral weight/credibility should not be underestimated, nor should being part of a crowd.
It was in hope of the latter aspects having an influence that led me to write to US President Obama fairly early in the Syrian civil war in support of a "no fly" zone.
My thinking was:
- artillery has less range than planes and helicopters, so if the Assad regime is limited, it gives people more time (there's that word again) to flee before the regime's butchers get in range;
- it evens the contest somewhat, and leaves it more likely that the Syrian people can have a chance of choosing - or fighting for - the future they want; and
- it avoids the problems of boots-on-the-ground.
At the start, the first few months (March - July, 2011) were a time of protests as the airs of the Arab Spring reached this nation. I was always a bit concerned about how that would turn out, given that Assad was a second generation despot who had grown up in an atmosphere of violent suppression and, notwithstanding some early promising signs, had already shown his willingness to be a violent despot.
Whether that violent despotism was innate or at the influence of others is relevant. If it was because the influence of his father's old guard, that would explain why it took some time for the initial protests to become a civil war - it would have taken time for the oldies to work their influence. It could also simply be that Assad realised eventually his attempts at placating the protestors with pseudo-change weren't going to work, and he would have to make real changes.
Either way, it doesn't say anything good about Assad that this escalation happened. This period, from July, 2011 to April, 2012, is when the Syrian air force first became involved, in September and October. People were already fleeing to other nations, but there were also a lot of defections to the rebel forces from the regime's armed forces.
This time, when that nation was balanced between the fading hope of the Arab Spring-inspired protests and the coming unrestrained violence of asymmetrical warfare, is when an external intervention had most chance, in my opinion, of success.
We know a few things about air campaigns from history:
- they are bloody - right from the Zeppelin raids of World War One through Guernica to the horrors of bombing campaigns on all sides in World War Two and the politically driven excesses of the Viêt Nàm War, they are destructive, devastating, and bloody, and . . .
- they rarely work.
The carefully directed bombing campaigns of advanced nations in the former Yugoslavia and the active military phases of the First and Second Gulf War were successful, but their targets were largely specific military objects - except the bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia became effective only when it disrupted the daily lives of Serbians.
Syria did not have, as far as I am aware, the capability to be accurate in its air bombing, but, even if it had, under Assad it had no desire to do so. So at this stage, in my opinion, it was clear that that nation was heading for bloody escalation of the conflict.
My thinking was that a "no fly" - which would have to include helicopters, given the experiences in Iraq after the First Gulf War - zone/campaign would send a strong signal of disapproval to a despot who had already shown some susceptibility to external influence, would have encouraged more defections, and would have encouraged the rebels - before the troubling external parties had become involved.
At this stage:
- deaths were less than ten thousand - still a major toll, and every one a tragedy, but less than what was to come;
- the spillover into neighbouring nations was limited to refugees;
- Turkey and Saudi Arabia were calling for regime change, and the USA had edged its way into saying the regime had lost legitimacy (I would have thought that was clear under R2P principles), but there doesn't seem to have been much direct, if covert, military aid; and
- the number of "foreign fighters" grew from mid-2012, but only became significant in2013.
On the other hand, what I wasn't aware of was that Russia was already covertly supporting Assad - and I didn't give enough weight to the implications of the need to destroy the Assad regime's air defences. Furthermore, Iran was already involved, Hezbollah probably was involved, and Iraq was involved - including allowing passage for Assad regime planes.
After this initial phase, we had:
- around 20 - 30,000 refugees at the end of 2011 growing to half a million internally displaced and refugees by around April, 2012, which became 1.5 million by the end of 2013, 9.5 million in 2014, and around 11 million in 2017;
- the use of cluster bombs in September, 2012;
- the chemical weapon attack at Ghouta in 2013 that killed hundreds, possibly as many as 1,700 people, and led to an authorisation by the US Congress for the USA to use direct military force, probably stopped by the presence of UN inspectors (Ben Rhodes writes, in "The World As It Is: Inside The Obama White House" [Pub. Vintage, London, 2018, ISBN 978-1473554511], "To this day, I wonder if Obama would have launched a strike early that week if the UN team hadn’t been in the way" [loc. 3260] ), and the internationally supervised destruction of most of Syria's chemical weapons;
- overt Russian (military) intervention from September, 2015 on;
- Russia's thermobaric ("fuel-air") bombs in December, 2015; and
- a death toll that had grown as follows:
from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Casualties_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War&oldid=946509818#Death_tolls_by_time_periodsIt is not as clear cut that intervention in the Syrian civil war would have led to a constructive outcome - certainly not when compared to the Rwandan genocide.
from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Total_deaths_during_the_syrian_civil_war_%28October_2013%29.png
from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Deaths_per_week_during_the_syrian_civil_war_%28October_2013%29.png
from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Fatalities_in_the_Syrian_civil_war_%28SOHR%29.png - after October, 2014
It is also clear, in my opinion, that regime change, although probably desirable, would have been even more difficult than in Iraq, so avoiding that was probably reasonable. (I keep pointing out to people who argue that the chemical weapons attack at Ghouta in2013 was an opportunity to achieve regime that, if that is what they want, they should say so openly and up front, and not try to achieve that in an underhanded way. Apart from anything else, saying so openly gives the Syrian people a chance to indicate whether they want that or not.)
What is also clear is that, if an effective intervention could have been found, before mid-2012 is the time it should have been used. The deterioration after then, just as with the failure to stop after retaking Korea in 1950, shows that, as well as actions having to be appropriate and effective, there is a need for actions to be timed properly - and Rwanda shows that the timing needs to be timely.
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