Aegis Trust

Apart from an attempt to use video games as way of educating people about Darfur, the games industry isn't noted for its contribution to educating people away from violence.  Indeed our friends at TRIAL spent many (no doubt enjoyable) hours breaking many of the Geneva Conventions in games such as Call of Duty.

No doubt, there's a concern about life imitating art.  For instance, P.W. Singer in Wired for War:  The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century worries about the distancing effect of the video game tools (joysticks, modified XBox controllers, and video screens) on drone pilots based in Nevada firing real-life missiles in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

However, for the forseeable future the traffic will mostly be in the other direction:  art imitating life.  My nephew and I can't be the only ones who have noticed the similarities between the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto - Niko Bellic - and some of the alleged former Balkan war criminals who have washed up in the US such as Marko Boskic.  Both couple a past they don't want to talk about with an alleged propensity towards assault and driving offences:

 A Peabody construction worker accused of being one of the executioners who slaughtered some 1,200 Bosnian Muslim men in 1995 was charged yesterday with entering the United States illegally by claiming refugee status and not revealing his role in a notorious Bosnian Serb Army unit that took part in the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since the end of World War II.

Despite being a suspected war criminal, Marko Boskic, 40, was able to enter the United States four years ago under his own name and moved to Peabody, where he hardly kept a low-profile. Boskic had repeated run-ins with the law that led to numerous arrests on charges of drunken driving and serious assaults.

In April, he was arrested by Peabody police and charged with drunken driving and possession of an open container of alcohol after he crashed his Dodge Intrepid into a pole at 2:41 a.m. Most recently, on Aug. 11, Peabody police cited him for leaving the scene of an accident.

US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said federal authorities launched an investigation of Boskic after receiving a tip. Sullivan said authorities methodically built a case against Boskic, leading to his arrest Wednesday night at his Peabody condominium. During an initial appearance at US District Court, Boskic was ordered held without bail.

In an affidavit dated Wednesday -- exactly one year to the day after Boskic was accused of participating in the massacre during testimony at the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague -- a federal immigration agent alleged that Boskic committed fraud when he failed to disclose that he was part of the 10th Sabotage, or Diversionary, Unit that was among the Bosnian Serb Army units that killed some 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the town of Srebenica in July 1995.

Specifically, Boskic is accused of carrying out the orders of others when he was one of eight men who gunned down 1,200 men at a farm in Pilica, a village near Srebenica.

 Source:  Boston Globe, 27 August 2004

Saturday 9th January marked the fifth anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended nearly 20 years of civil war between North and South Sudan.  Experts, academics, and NGOs have been highlighting the fragility of the CPA for some time now.  2010 is a critical year for Sudan. Without adequate preparation, the upcoming national elections and referendum could re-ignite conflict between the north and the south. The Sudan365 campaign is calling on the international community to use its influence to press the parties to resolve outstanding issues and prevent a return to all-out conflict.

Two new reports on Sudan are well worth a read.  The first, Decisions and Deadlines: A Critical Year for Sudan is written by Dr Eddie Thomas for Chatham House.    It explores the challenges around the April 2010 elections and the organisation of the three referendums in the coming year, including the one in which Southern Sudanese voters will decide on unity and independence.  The report outlines the critical period that Sudan has entered into and the need for the country's powerful elites to reach agreement on a wide range of complex processes.

The second, Rescuing the Peace in Southern Sudan is from Oxfam.  It focuses more on the humanitarian and security situation in Southern Sudan and calls on the Government of Sudan, the Government of Southern Sudan, key CPA guarantors, donors, UNMIS and the UNSC to take urgently needed measures to prevent conflict ahead of  Sudan's 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum and its aftermath; protect civilians from violence; strengthen humanitarian assistance and access; and provide much needed development to the people of southern Sudan.

David Cesarani is a historian and researcher whose judgment is always sound.   His book, Justice Delayed, about the campaign to bring to justice Nazi war criminals living in the UK, was a great influence on us as we campaigned (successfully) to change British law on suspected genocidaires from modern conflicts.

Therefore, its noteworthy that he's come out and called the Demjanjuk court proceedings a 'trial too far'.  Essentially, his argument goes like this: justice isn't served when this sick man is dragged into a courtroom.  Even if he is found guilty - which Cesarani thinks is extremely likely - whose interests are served by sending him to send his last years in a prison hospital bed?  Another possibility, Cesarani argues, is that he's given an extremely light sentence - which will make the process seem ridiculous.

But is that last part of the argument right?  Is it not a sign of moral progress that we can hold a trial, hear the truth, judge a perpetrator, and then pass a sentence that reflects their age and ill-health?  I agree that the idea of sending this sick old man to die in prison is repulsive.  But allowing the scales of justice to work, while sparing her sword, is to offer a glimpse of the humanity which concentration camp guards never showed their victims.  

Five years ago, when helping to write a Government strategy paper on weak and failing states - Countries at Risk of Instability - we looked long and hard at the so-called 'drivers of conflict'.  Those factors which quantitative and qualitative studies found increased a countries 'proneness' to civil war.  Several such drivers were clearly and consistently present: low income; economic decline; a history of past conflict.   Others needed more careful contextual analysis:  the presence of 'point-sourced' natural resources, like oil, or a partial democracy in which elections gave birth to a government unfettered by checks and balances.  Looking to the future we speculated that global warming might be such a factor.

To be honest, I was the sceptic within our team - believing that such a factor would be transmitted through other mechanisms.   I'll try to put that without using jargon.  Competition over resources - say arable land, or access to water - or climate refugees could be associated with conflict, or, indeed, they might not.  A lot, I speculated, would be determined by the relative strength or weakness of institutions - whether informal local mechanisms of negotiating over sharing land 'rights' or formal systems of electoral or legal systems providing a peaceful forum for the airing and settling disputes.

Now academics have modelled the effects of global warming on civil war - finding that, by 2030, climate change will lead to a 54% increase in the incidence of civil conflict - leading to an additional 393,000 battle deaths.

The authors posit that the transmission mechanism is through the effect of climate change on agricultural output (the major factor for household welfare in much of Africa) and therefore economic performance - which is said to be linked with civil wars in a number of ways including making it cheaper to recruit young men to join rebel groups and reducing the military reach and deterrent capability of the state.

If true, the authors of the study suggest that, as well as trying to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions the world should be preparing to mitigate the effects of global warming.  Specifically they suggest insurance schemes for climate caused harvest losses and the introduction of better adapted crop varieties.

The measure of political institutions used to control for the effect of 'democracy' is the well known Polity 2 dataset - very useful for cross-country analysis but certainly not fine grained enough to examine the effect of both formal and informal institutions.

Its time for all those on their way to Copenhagen to start putting money and political capital into both technocratic solutions like crop insurance and the deeply political effort needed to mediate local level conflicts such as those we're seeing in South Sudan at the moment.

Today was the day in which the far-right, racist, British National Party, were invited on to the flagship BBC political debate show 'Question Time'.

It was billed as a big day for the British National Party.  It was not, and will not be a breakthrough moment.

Nick Griffin came across, to put it mildly, badly.  He was often flustered and incoherent, stumbling over lines and laughing inappropriately when faced with difficult questions.   A far right party might have some success if given a chance to move on from its monotonous single-issue focus on immigration and allowed to talk about housing, unemployment and competition for jobs on the lower rungs of the labour market.  Instead Nick Griffin was invited by the Question Time panel and audience to ramble on about his Holocaust denial, Islamophobia, his disgust at homosexuality, whether 'white British people' are the aborigines of Britain, and his description of a non-violent Ku Klux Klan sect.

He took the bait.

He looked like a swivel-eyed, sweaty, weirdo.  His recent comparison of British generals with the Nazi generals tried at Nuremburg was not the move of an adept politician able to expand beyond his hard-core support.  This is not a platform for long term growth in the far right vote. This is not a recipe for complacency - a more sophisticated leader may pose a greater threat - but Nick Griffin is not that leader.

---

A postscript:  The BBC took the controversial decision to host Nick Griffin on Question Time.  On free speech grounds, and on the strictly narrow interpretation of the BBC's constitution, this is, just about, defensible.  However, the huge amount of accompanying media that surrounded his appearance - on local BBC news, on the BBC website, in every newspaper and on almost every radio station - carries with it a small, but real, risk.

The risk is of establishing a social norm in which expressing racist views are acceptable.  We are conformist creatures.  One of the major risk factors in obesity is whether our friends are obese.  Informing people about average energy usage in their homes helps to influence them to cut their energy bill to that average.  If people are seen every day on TV interviewed by BBC reporters who are seeking to find BNP voters in the interest of 'balance' will have the effect of making voting BNP, and expressing racist views, socially acceptable.

Two seats in the European Parliament might have bought a seat on Question Time - they don't justify, on the strength of this meagre electoral showing, any more extensive coverage.  Each BBC producer needs to take a long hard look at their motives when considering future invitations - should the BNP get more exposure than the UKIP (who have 13 seats in the European Parliament and get treated, rightly, as a one-trick pony)?   

We recommend this very concise but useful policy brief from the Lowy Institute:

In this Policy Brief, Fergus Hanson looks at the Australian government's current approach to suspected war criminals living here. It finds Australia has inadvertently become a safe haven for suspected war criminals and needs to do more to meet its international obligations to end impunity for the world's worst criminal offenders. It suggests a number of modest reforms the Rudd government could implement to meet its election commitment that suspected war criminals be brought to justice.

Reading Kathleen Taylor's Cruelty recently (an good summary of the latest research on cruelty and sadism from the fields of neuroscience and socio-biology - on which I'll blog more when I have a bit more time) there was an intriguing reference to a Anglo-Peruvian firm involved in rubber extraction in the Putumayo region of the Amazon.  Brutal punishments, enforced labour and sexual violence - all familiar to us from the rubber industry in King Leopold's Congo - reduced the population of the local Huitoto people by about 30,000 in 12 years.  This crime against humanity - in the early years of the Twentieth Century - caused a outcry at the time but is forgotten now.

Intrigued, I promised myself to look into this further  So I was delighted to find a new book:  The Devil and Mr Casement which covers this episode.

I'm only on chapter 6 so far but it's a gripping tale of witnesses coming across a hidden corporate kingdom ruled through brutality, and desperately trying to get the story out.  I fear it won't end well...

04 Sept 09 - by James Smith, Director, Aegis Trust

If the war is over in Darfur it begs the question why 2.5 million displaced people stay put in the camps.   

As the military commander of the UN force in Darfur (UNAMID) leaves his post, the up-beat analysis that the six-year conflict in Darfur is over raises some questions.

General Agwai is right that the key security issue in Darfur is no longer massive brutal attacks on African villages but is now low-level banditry.  That is because the Government of Sudan ceased to support atrocity operations on the scale it did between 2003-6.  But why did the Darfur crisis enter this different phase?  Some of it might be on account of UNAMID's presence, to give General Agwai some credit.  The leadership of the atrocity campaigns were also rattled when the UN Security Council referred the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court, leading to the indictment of a Government Minister, an Arab Janjaweed leader and eventually the President of Sudan and leader of the National Islamic Front (NIF), Omar al-Bashir.   

But the key reason for the change of level of violence is that after 2.5 million people had been displaced into camps, both inside and outside Sudan's borders, the status quo suited the NIF.  Ethnic cleansing has already taken place in Darfur.  They are content to keep it that way. 

I was on the Kosovo-Albanian border in the summer 1999 after the ethnic cleansing had been orchestrated by the Serbian Government.  Once NATO made it safe for people to return to their homes, I witnessed how the refugee camps emptied within days.  It begs the question then if the war is over in Darfur why these 2.5 million people in stay put in the camps.   They know that the causes of violence have not been addressed and the Government of Sudan and its allies who committed crimes against humanity have not been brought to account.  Banditry is not the main fear.  It is the real threat that if they go home villages will be burned, wells poisoned and the women raped. 

Gen. Agwai is also right that divided rebel groups are a factor in the region's problems.   But the rebels have always been divided - and still there was conflict.  It happens that the rebels being divided in Darfur also suits Khartoum.  Indeed, it is an age-old tactic deployed by the NIF to keep their enemies divided among themselves: because then Khartoum doesn't need to agree to a peace deal that might address their crimes.  Division among rebels is not a cause of the war being over; quite the opposite.  It is a barrier to finding a long term peaceful solution in the region.

Some rogue rebels are accused of killing soldiers under Agwai's command, and one suspect has handed himself in to the ICC this year.  It is unhelpful however to characterize the Darfur rebels as though they are the underlying cause of violence in Darfur.  That is plain wrong.  The crisis will never be solved if the structural issues beyond the rebels are not addressed - principally the wealth and power sharing arrangements. 

As with the rest of Sudan, talk of an end to conflict in Darfur is optimistic indeed.  In the next two years there is risk of not only in Darfur, but in South Sudan and other volatile regions of Sudan.  If wealth and power sharing issues are not addressed with a degree of urgency, intractable violence may erupt in many parts of this largest country in Africa.    The conflicts have the same root causes and the same consequences:  marginalised, oppressed people rising up; bloodshed and mass atrocity in response to subdue them.

Political solutions to Sudan's conflicts are encapsulated by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended the civil war between the North and the South. It has lasted more than two decades and killed nearly 2 million people.  The CPA is imperfect and groups such as the Darfuris in the West of Sudan felt left out. But it is a framework - the only framework with signatories - upon which the future of Sudan can be structured.  Within its provisions, in 2010 there should be elections in Sudan and in 2011 a referendum in which Sudanese may determine whether Sudan will remain unified or whether the South may break away. 

It is these elections and especially the referendum that could spark conflict and violence on multiple fronts causing fragmentation of Sudan and a humanitarian disaster that will inevitably affect other countries, not only those neighbouring Sudan.

The key to the future of Sudan of course lies with the Sudanese: with the National Islamic Front, who hold power in Khartoum and are responsible for most of the atrocities in this troubled region, with the Government of South Sudan who have a fragile coalition with the NIF and somehow also responsibility lies with the rebels in Darfur to unite. 

However the focus to prevent this looming catastrophe for the whole of Sudan must come from those with influence in the region:  The world's only super power, the United States, China who exports the majority of Sudan's oil, the African Union as the regional political body, the Arab League who encourage Khartoum's shameless acts and the European Union and its member states including the UK. 

Consider their diplomats as doctors for a minute.  If doctors covered a wound with a bandage when gangrene was setting in, serious questions would be raised about their competence and duty of care.  Likewise, if diplomatic efforts are not refocused and redoubled many innocent people will perish in Sudan, raising questions about the commitment of world leaders to prevent mass atrocities. 

The implications go beyond Sudan.  Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was born the same year as the CPA, in 2005, when world leaders agreed at the UN World Summit there is a collective responsibility to protect people from genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.   Should those same world leaders allow the CPA to sink in the sea of indifference they should be mindful that R2P may be sucked down with it.

In today's Guardian Lubna Hussein's comment piece, 'When I think of My Trial, I Pray my Fight Won't be in Vain', is certainly worth a read.  Lubna Hussein is a courageous Sudanese woman due to stand trial in Khartoum next week.  She is charged with wearing trousers in a public place.  If she is convicted of breaching Article 152 of Sudanese law, which prohibits dressing indecently, she will face up to 40 lashes and an unlimited fine.  Lubna was a UN employee at the time she was arrested and as such was offered immunity and the chance to escape trial.  She has taken the brave and courageous decision to resign from the UN so that she could face the Sudanese authorities and put Sudanese justice in the spotlight.