Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Crimes Against Humanity

Children are taught to avoid unnecessary violence. When we're small, we learn that it's bad to hit or bite or kick people, and that we should try to work out our differences without resorting to fighting. We're in for a frustrating surprise when we learn that grown-ups, even those who are in charge of countries or their armies, don't always play by the same rules.

Sad but true, people struggling for political power continue to engage in horrifying atrocities to achieve their ends. When political violence and human rights abuses within a particular nation rise to extreme levels, people and leaders of other nations have to wonder, "Should we intervene?" The United Nations says that when national governments are failing to protect their own people, intervention is necessary. The question was the topic of an episode of the radio program America Abroad this week, and the program left me wondering about human rights atrocities around the world, their history, their scope, and what people have tried to do to redress the suffering and animosity they have caused.

Clea Koff was a student forensic anthropologist studying for her master's degree when she was offered a position with a group of forensic investigators for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal, examining the evidence in mass graves left after the Rwandan genocide. She jumped at the chance to put her skills to practical use, and eventually served four missions for the Tribunal in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. In each place, Koff and her colleagues worked sixty-hour or longer weeks in awkward, sometimes dangerous conditions with poor supplies and patchy institutional support, coaxing little bits of people's stories from their bones, bodies, clothing, personal possessions, and surroundings. Koff's account of her experiences in The Bone Woman strikes a compelling balance, contrasting her interest in scientific inquiry and the search for truth with the very human consequences of her work for genocide survivors and the families of victims.

The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention offers a more big-picture philosophical approach to some of the same questions. Essays by fourteen academics, journalists, and human rights activists detail the recent history of ethnic violence in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor; but also they explore questions of responsibility and accountability, such as: What are the consequences of non-intervention? How do guerrilla and military leaders convince individuals to participate in ethnic violence? Do regular people in the West have the power to compel their governments to attempt to stop genocide abroad?

To get a sense for the scope of humanitarian crimes and their history, I recommend Adam Jones's Crimes Against Humanity. This short, accessible text is divided into chapters explaining different types of humanitarian crimes – genocide, "ethnic cleansing," slavery, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, rape and sexual crimes, forced disappearance, and Apartheid. Along the way, Jones also provides information about international human rights law, and the history of grassroots efforts to stop ethnic and political violence.

By now you're probably feeling a little down, even if you find this topic utterly compelling. But, where humans have had to face the most incredible horrors, we often also find inspiring stories of perseverance and resistance. Return of the Maya: Guatemala, A Tale of Survival is a collection of photographs by Thomas Hoepker, recording the landscapes, communities, and people of Guatemala in the last years of its devastating 36 year long civil war, and in the first years of peace. The book includes a chapter on Guatemalans' efforts to locate and identify the bodies of civilian victims, to re-bury the dead with respect, and to hold war criminals accountable. But it is also full of photographs of the landscape, of communities, and of people engaging in all the day-to-day activities of life.

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Update (Monday, March 23): Sometimes when I have a subject on my mind, it seems like I hear about it everywhere, all the time.  So I wasn't that surprised when I came home last night, turned on my radio, and heard Speaking of Faith's Krista Tippett interviewing Mercedes Doretti, co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.  Doretti and the team have unearthed graves and investigated atrocities in more than 30 countries, always at the request of victims' loved ones.  In the hour-long program they talked about the practice of forensic science as a tool for human rights, and discussed the mechanics of reparation, the human need to bury our dead, and many other subjects. 

As the program ended I realized I want to read more about Argentina's history of human rights abuses.  So in case you're on the same page as me, here is a short list of a few of the books I'm going to read next:

• The Ministry of Special Cases, by Nathan Englander – a novel about a middle-class Jewish Argentinian family whose son is "disappeared," and their struggle with the mechanisms of government bureaucracy to find him and learn the truth of how he was kidnapped.
• An Absence of Shadows: Poems, by Marjorie Agosin – a collection of poems honoring kidnapped people and their families, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.  Agosin's poetry was featured in the Speaking of Faith episode.
• The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, by Horacio Verbitsky – Verbitsky, a respected journalist, interviews Francisco Scilingo, the first military officer to come clean about his participation in the Dirty War.