 Welcome everyone to the fourth annual Genocide Studies Conference at the Naval War College. I'm Professor Hayat Alvi at the National Security Affairs Department. I sponsor and organize this event every year and we are very very privileged to have outstanding scholars join us for this virtual event. We were hoping to have a live event but due to circumstances at the campus of remodeling and renovations of certain venues and particularly the venue that we prefer every year we had to resort back to virtual. So apologies for that but thank you again for for joining us and our theme for this year is War Crimes Accountability. I will quickly go over some of the kind of administrative issues and outlines before we get into our speakers. Let me begin by saying our normal disclaimer that everything that all the speakers say represents their own personal views and not those of the United States Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy. Also I wanted you to be aware that usually the president of the college Admiral Chatfield gives the opening remarks live for the conference. However unfortunately her schedule was such that she is on travel this week but she did the most gracious thing for us and that was she recorded her opening remarks for the conference before she went on travel. So in a moment I will show you the video of her pre-recorded opening remarks to kick off our conference. After her opening remarks we will have another guest speaker our honored guest major general David Puster who will offer his opening remarks for in a live version for the conference. Following that I will give brief introductions and biographical information of the two panels beginning with panel one and then panel two. And then once we finish with all of these speakers and panelists we will then transition to the Q&A session. You should on the bottom of your screen see a button for Q&A. You can type your questions and indicate which individual panelist your question is for or is it for anyone who wants to answer. Please keep your questions brief and do not engage in commentary, a long commentary especially. We want to keep the questions brief so that we can give everyone a chance to have their question read for the for the conference. So without further ado let me let me transition this to the opening remarks from Admiral Chatfield's video and while we're doing that let me just say thank you very much Naval War College Foundation. I'm Rear Admiral Shoshana Chatfield the 57th president of the United States Naval War College. I am honored and excited to kick off this fourth annual genocide studies conference and open this very important discussion. I would like to first acknowledge our Naval War College Foundation for the generous financial support that made this conference possible and welcome any Naval War College Foundation members present today. I'd like to thank our alumni for remaining connected with the college. I'd like to also welcome our partners from academia, our faculty and students and a special welcome to all who have decided to view this through our website or through our social media channels. To our events audiovisual public affairs and graphics teams that always make these events a success thank you and to Dr. Hayat Alvi. Thank you for your committed work in this important Naval War College area of emphasis. Welcome to all to the Naval War College's fourth annual Genocide Studies Conference and webinar. For the past three years the Naval War College Genocide Studies Conference has been convening key scholars from around the world to explore critical issues in genocide. This annual conference brings together numerous participants from a wide spectrum of organizations and it's designed to explore past, current and future challenges in genocide. This year's theme will focus on war crimes accountability. The proliferation of polarizing ideologies seems to be increasing around the globe and we need to better understand how those ideologies threaten the integrity of democracy and human rights and how they could potentially lead to genocidal ideas and acts. Our role here at the Naval War College is to inform today's decision makers and educate tomorrow's leaders. The Naval War College is committed to excellence in our research, war gaming and academic courses which include examining all facets war including the prevention of war. We embrace our role to be a leading voice within the Department of Defense and through our outreach activities among international militaries. Our goal is to better understand a diverse range of perspectives in order to improve our abilities to better respond to a wide variety of destabilizing situations. The Naval War College Genocide Conference is an important event that educates attendees, provides a venue to discuss new research and records content available to a global audience. Our professional military education prioritizes the study of ethics in our curriculum and we proudly offer a genocide elective to our residential students. We know that our military members must be ready to recognize and stop genocidal acts during warfare or humanitarian interventions and they must also consider the prevention of destabilizing factors in war termination. Therefore the Naval War College values the genocide studies elective which is in great demand and has been highly successful in each of its iterations and it is also why we are so pleased today to open this fourth annual Genocide Studies Conference. My challenge to all of you today is to think outside your own area of specialty or academic discipline. Listen closely to each other, think critically about these important topics and provide feedback to one another to make your discussion today as meaningful as possible as we together drive toward better understanding and more effective and principled responses to present and future atrocities. Thank you so much and have a productive and successful discussion. Thank you very much Sharla for making that work and making it a success. Now allow me to introduce Major General David Puster and I'm going to read to you his brief bio. David Puster is a retired U.S. Army Major General with over 36 years of global experience in five regional theaters. Pacific, European, Central American, Middle Eastern and African helping to build partner capacity addressing civil military challenges. He last served as the deputy commanding general of 8th United States Army in South Korea. General Puster most recently provided strategic planning expertise to the ministries of defense in Guatemala, Nigeria, Djibouti, Uganda and Mongolia. He also worked on the Saudi Arabia military transformation as part of project Quincy. Major General Puster currently works as a defense consultant. Sir, we are very honored to have you. The floor is yours. Thank you Dr. Albee for that nice introduction and I want to welcome all of you out there to the fourth annual genocide conference. I'm very honored to provide this year's opening remarks to such an illustrious audience. Genocide is an important topic. Acts that constitute genocide are great breaches of the Geneva Convention and represent war crimes when committed in the course of international armed conflict. So this year's theme is war crimes accountability. I want to thank Professor Hyatt Albee for organizing this event. I've known Hyatt for some time now since her groundbreaking work on events pertaining to the Arab Spring. Her work was important at the time because people were trying to understand what impact these events had on the Middle East. I've admired her work ever since. I also want to thank all of you for your participation in this conference. It's your inquisitive minds and experience that will help us better understand genocide and formulate better answers. I believe you are in for a real treat with a fine panel of experts and scholars leading our presentations and discussions today. Considering that this year's theme focuses on accountability, I want to begin by speaking about democratic institutions and international bodies. They help bring accountability to those committing genocide as it is uncovered. I also want to provide an example of the role that the international community plays in accountability. I think that everyone can agree that fundamental to democracy is the idea of free speech. The Nobel Committee awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize to two journalists. Clare of the era Marcus of the Bloomberg opinion postulated that the Nobel Committee was trying to send a message that you can have no peace without free speech. The Nobel Peace Prize was given to two journalists at a time when free speech is under attack and many reporters run daily risk to investigate the truth. Maria Reza from the Philippines and Dmitry Murat from Russia were this year's winners. According to Marcus, both continued to publish critical work in countries run by strong men who will stop at very little to silence them. Marcus goes on to say that free speech is being assaulted by demagogues and misinformation is under fire everywhere and by extension to democracy and peace. Why do I mention the Nobel Peace Prize? Genocide usually occurs in countries or places run by strong men where there's an attempt to suppress the truth. In the words of Reza, quoted in the Marcus article and hearing about the peace prize announcement, she said, a world without facts means a world without truth or trust. We need the voice of journalists to help uncover the truth. They can be very important in the accountability piece of the equation. So I applaud the thinking in announcing this year's winners. The international community also plays a role in accountability as we saw the genocide in Guatemala. I reviewed a case study by Victoria Sanford on the Yale University genocide studies program website. I think it is a good case study on how the international community prosecuted a case when the Guatemalan government was unable to do so. In fact, the case study shows that the Guatemalan government at the time was contributing to the systematic extermination of the indigenous Mayan people. The Guatemalan genocide also referred to as the Mayan genocide or the Silent Holocaust was the massacre of Mayan civilians during the Guatemalan government's counterinsurgency operations. The Civil War spanned from 1960 to 1996 and the Silent Holocaust occurred during 1981 to 1983. The Guatemalan government and local militias attacked Mayan people through forced disappearance, genocidal massacre, torture, sexual violence, and crimes against humanity. The plan to Sanchez case was considered by the Inter-American Court at the request of the Inter-American Commission, which received the original petition from relatives of the massacre victims. These survivors requested consideration within the Inter-American Court because of the lack of justice in the Guatemalan legal system at the time. Since the plan to Sanchez case was initiated in 1995, there have been more than 200 exhumations of other clandestine cemeteries of massacre victims in Guatemala. Each of these exhumations was included the filing of a criminal case with forensic evidence against the Guatemalan army and its agents. The findings show that the massacres were a systematic and strategic campaign of the army as an institution in the government violated personal rights. The court indicated that the armed forces of the Guatemalan government violated the following rights, each of which is enshrined in the Human Rights Convention of the Organization of the American States. The right to personal integrity, the right to judicial protection, the right to judicial guarantees of equality before the law, the right to freedom of conscious, the right to freedom of religion, the right to private property. Again, I am emphasized in the importance of exposing the truth, the role of international bodies to expose the atrocities and hold parties accountable. As we talk about these case studies, we can better understand history and various tendencies of governments in different parts of the world. This understanding has implications for US policy and demonstrates the importance of training our military on the various aspects of human rights violations and issues when called upon. This genocide conference has evolved over the last three years. The first conference was devoted to the concept of slow genocide and systematic processes that attempt gradual genocide over time. Despite the convictions of the global community in the post-war war II era, genocide still takes place. The value of studying inhumanity of man against man is that we cannot let this happen. The second conference focused on definitions and semantics and why they matter in the 21st century. It also discussed hate and extermination in the warning sides of genocidal tendencies. David Simon mentioned that the way we think of genocide influences what we do about genocide. The third conference focused on genocidal ideologies, warning signs and prevention. In many cases, the regimes that commit genocide also claim to represent the people. As you can see, genocide is multifaceted and needs to remain an important topic of discussion. Again, I want to emphasize the importance of this conference and ideas we would discuss and generate. I also want to emphasize the importance of our institutions and training, the importance of conferences like this at the US Naval War College. I go back to my time in college and ROTC. We studied the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Rule of Law. We studied and discussed the Mylite Massacre from Vietnam ad nauseam. Lieutenant Cali, a US officer, was convicted as a war criminal by court martial. It impressed upon me the importance of ethical small unit leadership. This training stayed with me throughout my career as a fundamental baseline for principles and ethical behavior as an officer. As we begin to understand and formulate US policy pertaining to genocide, we need to understand that the United States is the leader of the free world and help to start many of the international body so important to our global community. The study of genocide today may not prevent genocide in the future, but it certainly can bring attention to our democratic principles, democratic institutions, and international bodies that are vital in keeping the atrocities identified and accountable. I look forward to the presentations and robust discussions in this year's conference. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was fantastic and very, very profound in your insights. And I think it was the ideal opener for the conference. So thanks again, General. Now, yes, thank you. Now we will begin panel one. So let me give the brief biographical introductions of the panelists. The three panelists and panel one are Dr. Azim Ibrahim, Dr. Laura Graham, and Dr. Pauline Shanks-Corin. So bear with me while I read their bios. And then I'll hand the floor to Dr. Ibrahim. Dr. Azim Ibrahim is the Director of Special Initiatives at the New Lines Institute. And I have to emphasize New Lines is one of the most outstanding sources of analytical articles and reporting from the ground all around the world, but particularly in areas like the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia. So congratulations for being there at New Lines and congratulations for marking one year of New Lines. If you all are interested, you can find New Lines on Twitter and I believe other social media as well. He is also an adjunct research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. Dr. Ibrahim completed his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, pardon me, Harvard, and a World Fellow at Yale. Over the years, he has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development and was ranked as a top 100 global thinker by the European Social Think Tank in 2010 and a young global leader by the World Economic Forum. Dr. Ibrahim is also the author of the Rohingyas inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide that's published by Hearst and OUP and also Radical Origins, Why We Are Losing the Battle Against Islamic Extremism by Pegasus, New York. The other panelists, let me just quickly read their short bios as well. Dr. Laura Graham is a former professor of genocide studies at Tufts University and specializes in atrocity crimes. In a few weeks, she will take up the role of assistant counsel at the FBI as part of the DOJ's honors program. Congratulations, Dr. Graham. For the past three years, Laura has served as the executive director of the Yemen Accountability Project at Case Western Reserve School of Law, which is working towards assisting international prosecutors in bringing war criminals to justice. Dr. Pauline Shanks-Corin holds a PhD in philosophy from Temple University, specializing in military ethics, just war theory, and applied ethics. She also serves as the Stockdale Chair and Professor of Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College and the College of Leadership and Ethics. Panelists, thank you very much, and we will begin with Dr. Azim Ibrahim. Dr. Ibrahim, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Hayat. Absolutely wonderful to be back at the Naval College. Shall I share my screen here, Hayat? Okay, I assume you can all see that now. It's all working. Good stuff. Well, the presentation today will be looking at accountability for war crimes and the legal processes and the challenges that we face when trying to hold those responsible for these crimes accountable. First, let's start off with the definitions. The UN is essentially two definitions for genocide, and I want to make it absolutely clear that what I'm referring to here is not war crimes, but actual genocide. The first is Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, and also the 1946 General Assembly definition, which is a denial of the right of existence of an entire human group. And so, clearly, this excludes war crimes, mass murder, even instances of ethnic cleansing. So, genocide can be war crimes, it can be mass murder, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. But the most important word in the definition is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group. And there's been significant problems throughout history in terms of finding a judicial route to resolve the problem of genocide. So, even in 1946, it wasn't very clear in terms of what the legal process was, when the trials of the access powers used special courts, to some extent, the longer-term process of dealing with those responsible for the crimes of genocide fell to the appropriate national-level courts. And sometimes, for example, in the case of Israel, they undertook the process themselves through their own legal process. And a significant challenge is obviously, how do you define an event as actually being a genocide? International governments are very reluctant to define a crisis as a genocide simply because this automatically triggers a responsibility upon them. So governments, you will find, they will obfuscate and will delay and will confuse the situation until it's too late to actually do anything, hence that there's very little obligation upon them. And then in the eventuality, when a charge of genocide is actually upheld, then what exactly happens after that? That's another significant challenge because the international apparatus does not have the legal means by which to bring some of these people to justice. So obviously, the framing of this came out of the Second World War, the Nazi Holocaust, and we have to be very careful here in terms of the definition is about the eradication of a distinctive group. So for example, in Xinjiang, China, it's trying to eradicate the Uyghurs as a social community, while it is still a brutal tool, what the Communist party is doing to the Uyghurs, it is not necessarily mass murder in the same way that we understand it. So you can essentially try to eradicate an entire group, as they are doing in China, with forced sterilization without them actually trying to murder the entire group. And so this leads to the complication of Victor's justice. At least in China, they are now under pressure for his actions in Xinjiang, but there's still no practical route to bring those officials responsible to justice. In the former Yugoslavia, obviously they had the international tribunal. NATO spent a considerable amount of time and effort working with its successor governments, Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, to bring those accused of working to justice. And the motivation of the successor governments to cooperate was that they were keen on joining the European Union, and this was one of the conditions that the EU placed upon them, that you have to hand over the war criminals, but that is not always the case, obviously with successor governments, where the previous government still will have lots of authority and lots of sway in society. And currently the main legal route is either domestic, and that assumes that there's going to be a regime change, like there was in Serbia, for example, or through the ICC. And this was the first practical test of the ICC that was set up in 1998. The aim was to have a permanent court with issues of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes could be heard. Before then it was completely ad hoc on whomsoever when the security cameras were decided, but now the ICC can also act as a court of the domestic system either cannot or will not conduct the relevant trials. And the system is still quite imperfect. It can only take on a case on two instances, the ICC, and that's if the UN Security Council demands of it, or if the signatory state that's a member of the convention actually brings the case to the ICC. A recent example of that is obviously the Gambia bringing the case against Myanmar. And even then the ICC has to rely on state support as no authority in its own capacity, even if it finds an individual guilty. It cannot arrest them. It has to rely on domestic law enforcement of various countries to do that. So it has to rely on the state good will to arrest individuals to bring them to the Hague. And in the case of the former Yugoslavia, this improved as the politicians who were in charge in the 1990s were replaced by those that were much more outward looking and much more eager to try to rehabilitate the image of their country. The UN Security Council system is still fundamentally flawed. The bigger issue is the role of the Security Council. Many of the regimes that are likely to be charged with genocide are protected by the vetoes of Russia and China, and neither of them will allow a reference to the ICC for one of its allies. So we have this in the case of Myanmar, for example, and also many other countries are protected by these vetoes. A good case study to look at is the Rohingya situation. The Rohingya is essentially their citizenship was downgraded when the country became independent of British Burma in 1948. And since 1962, the discrimination against them, the persecution, reached murderous levels until they were stripped of all their citizenship. And even though there was a democratic revolt, the Saffron Revolution, when Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate in the National League of Democracy came to power, people anticipated the international community anticipated there will be some significant change, but none of the change was forthcoming. And in the 2008 Constitution, stripped them of their citizenship and its entirety made them amongst the largest stateless people around the world. And since that time, they faced substantial persecution and there's considerable evidence that the Myanmar military and the civilian leadership have enacted a policy of genocide to remove and eliminate the Rohingya, their identity from the lands of their birth. This is probably one of the clearest cases of genocide that we have today. And there have been many, many attempts to bring cases like this to the ICC, the ICJ, which have not been so successful until 2019 when the Gambia, which was a signatory to the ICC, brought the case against Myanmar. So this was a mechanism in international law, which existed for one country to actually bring a case against another country. So it's very important to understand that this is not the Rohingya bringing a case against Myanmar. The Rohingya are actually just a, they're not even a party to the case. It's essentially state to state, which is what the ICJ actually is. It's the court of state to states. And the current position of the IC, the case is still going on, but it seems to be running into some complications at the moment. So this is one of the key kind of flaws that we have in the international system, that there's no evidence that has any effect on the NLD from the 1980s. There have been so many attempts to try to bring these kinds of cases to justice. No court would consider it. And as I was supposed to say, Gambia in 2019, the Gambia bought the charge. The NLD government denied it. And the ICC demanded that the Myanmar government protect the rights of those Rohingya that are still in Myanmar, but the NLD have just continuously ignored that case. So this is still going on. And it will be very interesting to see since the coup in Myanmar, what the situation is and whether the ICJ recognizes a new government, which does not have actually any legitimacy whatsoever. The same military architects of the genocide are now in power, are now in control of the complete state apparatus of the country. Yeah, I'll just go through this quickly in terms of because of the time factor here. So there was lots of faith that was put in Aung San Suu Kyi until she ended up in the ICJ herself defending the military regime. And so once again, as I indicated, Myanmar has been continuously protected by the likes of China for various reasons. Yeah, so this is one of the core the legal frameworks around the war crimes in genocide assumes that relevant states will cooperate and handle key individuals. But in the case of Sudan, for example, we had the president, former president who was accused of genocide, but he seemed to be traveling around the world openly without any sort of hindrance for years upon years. And so that indicated a clear demonstrator and fundamental flaw in the international system. And in the same case in Rwanda, there was even when mass murder was being undertaken, there was complete reluctance from the international community to intervene. And there was a very famous memo which Samantha Power talks about in her book that went between US government departments that said, be careful, legal at state trying to classify this as a genocide will obligate us to do something which clearly indicated we have to avoid the term genocide at all costs of what's happening in Rwanda, hence less that we actually have to intervene and try to do something about it. And that seems to be the modus operandi of most countries at the moment. And so this is the fundamental problem is that there is an international process that exists, but doesn't always work effectively. There's far too much relying on local state actors to actually intervene and try to uphold international law, which when there's very little motivation for them to do so. And the international system only works by consensus. And there's that fundamentally flawed. You cannot, it's difficult to hold those perpetrators to account. The role of the ICC and the ICJ advantages that removes the ad hoc nature before it was at the discretion of the victorious powers, whom so they will be to hold those responsible to account. And the ICC is now on a permanent basis. I know Ben Kiernan will speak about the Cambodian situation that he has looked at extensively. And that's also exposed some of the shortcomings in the international process. Just the sheer cost of putting something like that together has put off a lot of countries in terms of having a permanent system of that nature. And there's obviously huge limitations in terms of only signatory states. Cases can only be initiated by signatory states. And those are actually signatory to the wrong statute. So once again, this is indicates, in the case of the Rohingya Victors Justice, even if it's completely unintentional, is that only those are actually able to bring these kinds of cases will do so. And Myanmar itself, obviously the military leadership has benefited immensely from, you know, after the coup they're extremely wealthy benefited immensely from the protection they are getting from Russia and China and they have no intention of cooperating as it stands at the moment with the ICC and the ICC. And there's no obligation on them to do so as long as they have that protection, even from the Security Council. So it's a relatively depressing conclusion in terms of trying to bring those that are responsible for these kinds of crimes to justice. But we can certainly hope that will be a deterrent if you can actually do so to others if something like this, you know, if you can actually bring people like that to justice and not just through, you know, situations like that happened in Serbia with Milosevic. And it's far too easy as it stands at the moment for authority in states to ignore the process in its entirety. Political regimes, China and Russia are always available as protectors to undermine the international rules based order that was created by the Allied Powers after the Second World War. So anything that undermines it is actually part of the world view. And the only good item of news I would say is that, you know, there is now some sort of democratic opposition that's forming in Myanmar that's taken the Rohingya situation a bit more seriously, tried to make them a bit more inclusive. The names of the leading military regimes that carried out the general side is now in the public domain. Actually much of this evidence is held by Facebook, which they are now under legal obligation to review. And also Anksan Soki who the world had put so much effort in and so much confidence in to actually do something about the general side. They always believe that, you know, she was going to make the change that has now been put to rest. And now she actually shares the blame with the military elite. So overall, the international process is relatively still flawed. It still does not exist a sufficient mechanism to bring those cases of general side to justice, to bring the perpetrators and organisers of general side to justice. But it's still moving in the right direction and there's still cases to be seen. And in the case of the Rohingya, in the case of the ICJ, if this case fails, then I don't believe it will be, I don't believe you'll see another case of genocide brought to the ICJ. I think this was probably the clearest case of genocide. And if it fails, I think basically the genocide convention, this is my personal opinion, I think genocide convention will probably be dead in the water. So on that note, I'll just stop there. Thank you so much. Dr. Ibrahim, I just want to ask a clarification. Earlier, you were talking about the Gambia, the Gambia. Is it the Gambia or Ghana? The Gambia, sorry, that was a misspelling. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Great talk. Thank you. We will move on now to Dr. Laura Graham. The floor is yours. Thank you. Hi. And thank you, Azim, for setting up the genocide convention in the legal context. So clearly that will help a lot for the rest of us today. I'm actually going to be speaking about a subsidiary issue of genocide today with respect to starvation crimes. And before I do so, though, I'm just going to send a link to the panelists in the chat box. This is a link to the Yemen Accountability Project's recent white paper on prosecuting perpetrators of starvation crimes in Yemen. In 2017, the United Nations declared Yemen the world's worst humanitarian crisis. And the reason for this is because at the time that Yemen's civil war broke out, some 13 million civilians were at risk of death by starvation and related diseases or were otherwise food insecure and suffering from malnutrition. And this was all related to the civil war taking place. It created a lack of access to food as well as clean water. And that was a result of the Saudi-led coalition's campaign against the Houthi rebels. Now, over the past three years, I was the executive director of the Yemen Accountability Project at Case Western Law School. And I did a significant amount of research on not just the evidence that existed for starvation crimes, but how we might go about building successful prosecutions against perpetrators. And I feel that this is particularly important, not just because of the 13 million people in Yemen who have suffered from starvation, but because starvation has never been prosecuted before in any of the international ad hoc courts or the ICC. And importantly, my research shows that the Saudi-led coalition targeted intentionally food production, water supplies, food markets, knowing that in doing so they were causing significant food insecurity and starvation of civilian populations in violation of the Geneva Conventions. So just to give you all a little bit of a roadmap of what I plan to do in the next 15 minutes or so, I'm first going to set out the legal context of starvation crimes. Then I will show you some of the evidence that I've gathered of starvation crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen between 2015 and 2018. I'll briefly discuss some of the reasons why the international community stands by while perpetrators commit these crimes with impunity. And then I'll try to set forth some of the ways that we might pursue accountability for starvation crimes, not just in Yemen but elsewhere. So then looking first at the legal context, starvation of civilians and the destruction of objects indispensable to survival is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. And that is also codified in the Rome Statute. The Geneva Conventions additional protocols one and two both prohibit the use of starvation as a method of warfare against civilians during both international armed conflicts and non-international armed conflicts of which Yemen may be considered the latter. And this also includes the destruction or the rendering useless of objects indispensable to survival. Now you might wonder what I mean by that. Objects indispensable to survival has been interpreted by courts to certainly to mean food and access to water, but it can also include medicine as well as other materials that make human existence possible, such as even the use of blankets and shelter. Now there are some loopholes in the Geneva Conventions that allow starvation of civilians incidentally and that would include when a military is engaged in a legitimate blockade as the blockade at the port of food data may be considered under the auspices of Security Council Resolution 2216, as well as sieges conducted against enemy combatants and perhaps also when there are attacks that only incidentally cause reduction and an access to food and water. Now in addition to the Geneva Conventions the Rome Statute which is codifies this under Article 8 which is the war crime subsection of the of that treaty. And what Article 8 does is it makes the use of starvation in war and the destruction of OIS or objects indispensable to survival against civilians a war crime. There are four elements to that. The first is that the perpetrator deprived civilians of the objects indispensable to survival. The second is that the perpetrator intended to starve the civilian population. Starvation is a specific intent crime meaning that you have to demonstrate that it was not just a general intent that it occurred but that they in fact specifically intended to cause starvation. The third and fourth elements are what are known as the chapeau elements so that it took place in the context of an armed conflict and that the perpetrator was aware of that fact. Now I would add to this a fifth element which is that the crime must have either taken place within the territory of a state that is a state party to the International Criminal Court since territorial jurisdiction or that the perpetrator is a national of a state that falls under the the state party to the Rome statute. Okay and so the problem here as you may have predicted is that neither Yemen nor Saudi Arabia nor Iran nor any of the coalition parties that have committed airstrikes in Yemen are parties to the Rome statute. So the only way in which the International Criminal Court could potentially charge perpetrators of starvation crimes is if the security council refers the situation for investigation and eventually prosecution to the ICC under Article 13 of the Rome statute and Nazim mentioned that just a little while ago. So already we have the cards stacked against us but I believe in groups like the Yemen Accountability Project are working towards documenting evidence of these crimes because there will eventually be a time at which there will be an ad hoc tribunal or there may be other prospects for prosecution and so it's very important to document evidence so that we don't lose this. And my research shows that the Saudi led coalition targeted its airstrikes against objects and indispensable to survival in a way that was not incidental to a legitimate military purpose but instead intentionally targeted civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions at the Rome statute and potentially even the genocide convention if we can establish that specific intent element. Now specifically I found two primary contributors to starvation in Yemen and the first of these was the Saudi coalition's campaign of targeted airstrikes against civilian objects and the second occurs through the blockade of the port of Hudaida under the arms embargo and I'm not going to talk about the blockade today if you're interested in that I will put a paper on that into the chat in a little bit. I'm going to talk about the Saudi airstrikes today. Now at the Yemen Accountability Project we looked at the period of 2015 to 2018 and found that there were five principal targets of Saudi airstrikes that led to starvation of the civilian populations. The first of these might be categorized as attacks against farms and agricultural facilities. Specifically we found that there were 568 attacks on food production this included attacks against farms, dairy facilities, cattle ranches, plant nurseries, agricultural equipment as well as UN distribution centers for food aid. Now this is especially egregious considering that Yemen is very arid country only three to five percent of the land in Yemen is arable for agricultural production so attacking those very that very small geographic area in which food can be produced has a very large impact on the civilian population. In addition to this we also found that the coalition was conducting airstrikes against water supply and production facilities in particular they targeted water drilling equipment, areas where wells were being drilled, active drilling project, intact wells, water supply development infrastructure, as well as trucks that were conveying water in water deprived regions. We also found that they attacked desalination plants which is critical to producing clean water for the population and there were 43 separate events recorded on attacks on water supply production within that three-year period. We also found that water treatment and sewage plants were contaminated as a result of these attacks leading to the cholera epidemic that broke out in 2017. There were approximately 20 attacks targeted against the Tehama Development Authority which is responsible for irrigation in the Tehama region which was once considered the bread basket of Yemen until 2018 when 43 percent of Tehama's residents became food insecure as a result of those attacks on the irrigation facilities. Now it's possible that the water production facilities and water supply was a primary target of the coalition because in 2011 experts predicted that Yemen would run out of water by the year 2017 so I think given that Yemen's water scarcity was a well known fact before the war started makes it very unlikely that the the coalition did not know that it was acting knowingly or intentionally to target the water supply areas and for that reason that makes the demonstrating or proving the the specific intent element much much easier for prosecutors. We also found that fishing the fishing industry was targeted before the war the fishery sector constituted two percent of Yemen's GDP but during the war it was targeted by the coalition targeting fishing boats and fishermen so for example in between 2015 and 2018 220 fishing boats were destroyed by airstrikes and 146 skilled artisanal fishermen were killed and this was done in broad daylight from helicopters and warships above of the bay that makes it very unlikely that these fishing boats would have been mistaken for other legitimate military targets. You may have also heard in the news that the coalition targeted food markets this is usually demonstrated in the news as killing civilians and of course that itself is a war crime but important to the starvation analysis is that these food markets were the primary way in which urban dwellers or people living in cities were able to access food and so for that reason that has contributed to the starvation food insecurity in urban areas as well and then finally we found that there was destruction of medical facilities targeted by the coalition so there were a number of airstrikes targeted against hospitals, ambulances, clinics, health clinics including facilities where cholera victims were being treated which would also be a violation of the prohibitions against destruction of objects and dispensable to survival. So the takeaway here is that when you take all of these conditions together the fact that Yemen already was water scarce that very small percentage of the land was arable and you put that together with the specific sites that were targeted during this campaign by the Saudi-led coalition this points to these casualties being part of a systematic policy of using starvation as a method of warfare against civilians which makes it a lot easier for prosecutors to fill their cases. Now we have to ask ourselves why it is that the international community would stand by while the Saudi-led coalition attacked civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute and I think that there are a lot of reasons for this but three that I think are important for our discussion today one of which Azim touched on already is that there is an institutional weakness with the International Criminal Court the fact that the ICC can only prosecute perpetrators when it has the territorial personal jurisdiction over them makes it incredibly difficult to bring any kind of accountability and situations such as these. Now of course there is that other avenue that the Security Council can refer the situation to the ICC but the problem that we have today with the Security Council is that it there is a paralysis that has been created by the too much infighting among the P5 the permanent five members of the Security Council so we've seen that that power struggle play out recently with inaction and vetoes regarding accountability mechanisms for Syria and Myanmar and so there's even though the Security Council did refer two situations to the ICC in 2005 for Darfur in 2011 for Libya it's very unlikely at least in the near future that there is going to be some cooperation among the P5 in order to refer the situation in Yemen to the ICC and then I think it's also worth talking about and related to the P5 that superpowers either have strategic interests in doing nothing or they don't have a strategic interest and so the United States in particular Yemen serves no real strategic interest to the United States but the U.S.'s relationship with Saudi Arabia certainly does and so to the extent that the Saudi-led coalition would be the most probable perpetrators to be charged it's very unlikely that the U.S. will do anything to support accountability mechanisms against them at least in the near future so with their accountability right so what what I have come up with and with the help of members of the Yemen accountability project are some suggested courses of action that might help to eventually bring about accountability in the region so the first of these is diplomats can lobby the Security Council the P5 members in particular to refer the situation to the ICC and that may not be forthcoming anytime soon as I noted before but it is one option in addition to that states can bring charges against war criminals under their universal jurisdiction statutes that typically cover use Kogan's violations such as starvation crimes and genocide in addition to that groups like the Yemen accountability project a cloud Yemen data project and others can continue to conduct investigations and to catalog and archive that evidence for the use of future prosecutions some of the work that the Yemen accountability project is doing for example is to create the most responsible parties dossiers to get to prosecutors they know who to go after as well as sample indictments that would include what charges they think are appropriate and the evidence that would support those charges states can also target sanctions against Saudi Arabia and Iran to bring an end to the war and international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Committee on the Red Cross as well as states can name and shame the Saudi coalition for using starvation against civilians and this would draw attention to the problem and it would you know increase the efforts to shame the coalition into compliance with the Geneva conventions and then finally states and international organizations can support civil society groups to develop capacities not just to provide food aid to those in need in Yemen but to also train civil society groups to be able to collect and document evidence of starvation crimes while they are attending to the needs of the victims and there are groups that have been involved in this the public international long policy group in Washington DC is one group of attorneys that is training civil society groups in Yemen to be able to do that so perhaps a less depressing conclusion and in the case of starvation crimes and accountability but certainly it's not going to we're not going to reach that accountability with a without public pressure and attention for the issue and with that I thank you all for your attention today I'm happy to discuss this further in the Q&A but I want to be mindful of the time and keep things on track thank you thank you very much it brings to mind so many other regimes that have used similar tactics and for me it's the Assad regime in Syria that comes to mind because most recently they're doing similar tactics there as well so thank you Dr. Graham we're on to next with Dr. Pauline Shanks Corrin the floor is yours thank you and thank you to everyone for attending and to my previous panelists for setting things up so wonderfully I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you all I don't have any conclusions I'm trained as a philosopher so I'm going to lead you through some reflections and ask some questions and perhaps invite us to reframe things a little bit hopefully that will help with the discussion so just a little context I am finishing up right now teaching a course at the naval war college it's an elective course on just war thinking something I work on as a philosopher but I also have a background in philosophy of law I taught philosophy of law for a long time at the undergraduate level and I'm especially interested in questions of intent and responsibility so some of this is coming out of my teaching context and some of the discussions we have been having this semester in class so I hope this will be interesting to people the other thing I would say is to the general's comments earlier I too have a connection to me lie my dissertation topic was moral agency moral character and me lie and so war crimes whether in the context of what we think of as something like conventional or unconventional war or as parts of campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing fill in the blank whatever your favorite euphemism is is something that is interesting to me so what do we usually think of when we think of war crimes of all sorts right and as I said fair warning my dissertation was on me lie and right now I'm reading the new book on Eddie Gallagher because I wrote an op-ed on the pardon process a few years ago we normally think of the use in bellow requirements whether that's in the legal sphere or in the in the moral sphere of holding military members accountable responsible for their conduct via the law of armed conflict international humanitarian law and in some countries via notions of the military profession and professionalism so I think that's normally at least what people approaching it from my vantage point I'm not a lawyer I tend to think of but it seems that we think of these kinds of crimes committed especially in the context of genocide ethnic cleansing and related activities that that these may be crimes committed by the military but they're not always crimes committed by the military they may be committed by individuals by paramilitary groups by other social groups in coordination perhaps with government forces or people who want to be government forces so I think there's a more complicated picture here and so how do we get a handle on this so given the contemporary context of genocide and ethnic cleansing especially in the last say half century I think taking the topic seriously means thinking about this in the context of what's called use add them which is the justice of resort to force below the threshold of what we think of as more so and some of those things may be violent in the case of drone strikes and other things may be less obviously violent starvation certainly is one of those things sanctions is another and so thinking about genocide and ethnic cleansing and accountability questions in the context of this what we're calling a gray zone between war and peace so this is what I've been doing use add them in my class and thinking about a lot of these questions so so I started thinking about this panel and this discussion today in in those terms in addition one of the books that that we read in the course has an article called moral injury mission drift and limited war by James Gilcrest and Nick Lloyd but they make the point that they see moral injury which is something that's something about important topic nowadays that moral injury is more likely in limited wars so that got me thinking about the question about whether war crimes genocide ethnic cleansing are more likely in certain kinds of conflicts or in certain kinds of conflict context than others right and of course there's lots of people who study this question so I'm not going to go into the literature on that here but this is this is sort of what was framing my thinking about you know is the crime what happens in war what happens in conflict or is it is the crime the war itself the resort to force itself and if the crime as Michael Walser suggests and Justin and just wars at least one of the crimes is in fact aggression or the resort to some kind of force itself then maybe you said them helped us think about resorts to force that don't fit into the framework of what we think of as war even asymmetric war so so what are the implications of that for our discussion the first is that I think if we think about you said them so think about the discussion about you know competition within the gray zone where there may be some strikes there may be some violence but there may be lots of things that might be forced might be coercion but stop short of actually directly killing people starvation does kill people but it takes a while right so so things like that the first implication I see and this is and part of what I'm going to reference is a group of just four thinkers called the revisionist I think that one is more likely to criminalize the opponent your adversary in war whether that's a combatant or the non-combatants which we see with discussions by the revisionist for example Jeff McMahon and Helen fro who focus on war focus on conflict as as really done by individuals that it's a question of individual self-defense and individual liability and culpability rather than war conflict as a collective activity so in just war think it's huge debate right now between the individualists and what are called the traditionalists who view war war as a collective activity so Michael gross who's an Israeli philosopher in his book the ethics of insurgency has some really interesting discussions about this question of of not viewing your your combatant adversary as a combatant but more as a criminal the revisionists have taken on what's called the moral equality of combatants this view that combatants in a conflict have the right to target each other and the son I was saying that they're morally the same but that they are in the same position in terms of using resort to force the moral equality of combatants has come under a lot of fire in the last at least 10 years from the revisionists and while they want to maintain it as a legal category they disagree with it as a moral category but one of the consequences of that is then we start to look at things more in a law enforcement model perhaps where our adversary is a criminal and if that applies to combatants that then tends to apply to non combatants as well and how do we treat if we criminalize the other side what are what are the consequences of that and does that make war crimes especially genocide and ethnic cleansing kinds of war crimes more likely the second piece is related to the revisionist account as well as do we start to view these things more as an individual issue as opposed to a collective issue and so what part of my interest is thinking about and I don't think it's an either or I think we we can think about collective responsibility and agency although that's tricky I understand from a legal point of view but we can also think about individual responsibility and agency but we may need to think about and this is the closest I come to a conclusion or suggestion is that we may need to think about folks I don't think that the the binary there is is helpful right but if we view things if we view conflict especially usad vim as a question of an individual strike an individual activity an individual thing that is happening does that then make genocide or ethnic cleansing more likely and the first panelist already referenced Rwanda where there was a a lot of linguistic attempts to say was that genocide it's acts of genocide right in other words individual acts of genocide and then of course my students always ask how many acts before now we have genocide right but that gets at the individual collect as long as it's acts of genocide somehow it's not the same thing as genocide itself right the other thing is that I think if they use that vim level the resort to force below what we think of as the threshold of war we're actually dealing with war it's just that nations don't want to call it war because if we call it more than that triggers certain domestic issues and also may trigger things you know like we might might say well you know as in the case of Guantanamo Bay does does the Geneva convention really hold because you know it's not war right so there's this question of things keeping things below the threshold of what we think of as war certainly has legal implications but it has moral implications too right and so is some of this a tricked or a subterfuge to say well you know it's not really war so we don't have to think about it in the same way and I think there are lots of conflicts I'm thinking particularly you know I mean Rwanda certainly won Sudan as another one but then what's going on in Ethiopia right now seems like a lot of what we're seeing in terms of things that look like ethnic cleansing genocide however you want to categorize them are happening in these contexts that it's not clear we fit into a full-blown we would think of as a full-blown war category and in which case like what do we do about those and I think there's a tendency then to say well especially from the international community or from great powers perspective well you know when it's a war then you know then maybe a bigger threat and we'll have to deal with it but right now it's just it's an internal affair and people or it's a family fight and we're not going to get in the middle of that so I think many of these kinds of many atrocities many things we think of as genocide or war crime can be thought of as happening in the context of some kind of internal civil issue that's certainly how the government's involved would frame them and so it's not really war so that does USADVIM help us give language to thinking about these things and thinking about that they we still need to apply moral categories to them even if it's not what we usually think about as war so so so what is accountability so how can we start to think about accountability at this lower threshold and some of the elements of the USADVIM framing of this gray zone framing that might be helpful we think about things as was mentioned Dr. Graham mentioned mass starvation for food insecurity or food control the distribution of humanitarian aid often becomes a point of conflict right becomes a point of control some sanctions whether those are targeted or otherwise drone strikes targeted killing assassination which couldn't happen to members of military paramilitary but it could also sometimes happen to who we think of as civilians rape and sectional assault as a weapon of war or a weapon of genocide and as many cleansing even if there is in the full blown war I think the sterilization issues sort of could fall into this and of course torture which doesn't just happen in the conflict in the context of of war so in these cases collective agency and responsibility is trickier and harder to prove because you have to prove coordination and you have to prove intent but individual responsibility and agency alone doesn't seem to capture the horror and the moral trespass or transgressions of these acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide so it's not as simple as just saying Ed over there did this stuff right it seems that there is a an element of you had an individual but there is something collectivish going on even if it's not full blown collective agency because it's this individual act in the context of some kind of collective ideology or collective campaign or collective way of thinking about things that that that generates horror beyond an individual murder beyond an individual rape beyond starving specific individuals so individual actions have more power because they're seen as representing or participating in a collective activity a campaign of continued and ongoing harm against the collective or members of the collective based on their group members membership participation history identity and so on so we have this like it's individual and it's collective at the same time and this is also what we have when we think about it said yeah we have collective groups engaging in resort to force which might be below the threshold of what we think of as conventionally organized warfare but it's not just individuals engaging in criminal acts either there's like this seems like there's something in between right and even if we think about the show as we even if we think about the european holocaust right i mean that was arguably within initially within the context of the internal affairs let's say of germany right or at least that's where that starts right and then it expands later on and so um and i do want to be mindful of time like i think there's something to this individual and collective uh agency it's not clear to me like what that is or how we move forward especially in terms of uh legal questions and legal accountability because then i think we have to i think i have to go through philosophy and law and ask people well what is the point of accountability and punishment in the international sphere for these kinds of crimes is it retribution is it rehabilitation is it deterrence is it restoration to the community and reconciliation like what's what are you trying to do here right and i think that's a complicated question um but one thing that i might point out just to not depress everyone as i as i end is that i think something like uh john ral's the law of peoples which is a book really it's about the question of humanitarian intervention military humanitarian intervention where he says he doesn't think we should think in terms of sovereignty applying to nation states but we should think of sovereignty as applying to peoples or um nations which he defines in a very particular kind of way and that doesn't necessarily track borders it doesn't track our conventional sort of westphalian notion of sovereignty so he thinks that we need to rethink the notion of sovereignty and whether sovereignty belongs to nations the sovereignty belongs to individuals or does it belong to collectives uh and groups below the threshold of the nation state and i think one thing ral's is trying to play there play with there is that is this question of individual agency uh collective agency and collective on a nation level responsibility so it may be that something like that analysis is a useful starting point i would just point out that this isn't just this individual collective issue is not just an issue in the military domain or with regard to war crimes i taught at the undergraduate i taught business ethics for 15 years um and we have the same issue with our corporations uh moral agents or is it just the individuals within corporations that are moral agents and in that you know context once again uh punishing ken le who was the CEO of say enron doesn't seem to capture like all the harm that enron did and on the other hand like what is enron if it if it isn't include individuals but it's not reducible to individuals so i think there's really interesting questions about individual agency some kind of collective agency short of an institution and then more institutional agency so there's some exploration and and maybe people will have some some good ideas but that's what i've been thinking about what i've been talking about with my students so thank you thank you so much uh you prompted me to think about the 2020 doha agreement between the united states and the taliban and the agreement if you read it mentions more than once that the united states according to this the stipulation of this this agreement will not get involved in afghanistan's i.e the taliban's internal affairs and that raised my eyebrows several times because it's mentioned several times in the doha agreement uh hopefully that's not setting a precedent in dealing with um particularly uh what were formerly considered non-state actors extremist groups that now have some sort of political agency um so there's a lot of as you were speaking i i felt that there's a lot of evolution a lot of evolving issues and structures that we are witnessing globally but the doha agreement came to mind right away because i couldn't believe how many times it was repeated we will not interfere in internal affairs thank you so much we are going on to panel two and we're supposed to have dr dong themee who i think is not here yet he's teaching a class and that's okay he'll join us when as soon as he's finished what we can do is go to sarah mackintosh who is uh unable to attend us live however she has person participated through a prerecorded video so we'll go to sarah mackintosh's video in just a moment but let me take a moment to read the bios of panel two participant so dr don themee is a professor and is an old old homestead scholar an mit seminar 21 fellow who has served in a variety of infantry reconnaissance and planner assignments he served as the naval attaché in war saw and marine attaché in london after retiring from the marine corps he worked for the war gaming department at the naval war college prior to joining the maritime advanced war fighting school faculty um so he will be joining us shortly sarah mackintosh is the associate at the simon sculpts uh how do i pronounce this kyo dot i i hope i said that right center for the prevention of genocide at the us holocaust memorial museum where she has been working since 2017 she is the author of pursuing justice for mass atrocities a handbook for victim groups and is an australian lawyer with a master of law from harvard law school and then dr ben kiranin is the a white a whitney griswold professor of history at yale university he was the founding director of the cambodian genocide program and the genocide studies program at yale university from 1994 to 2015 and chair of yale's council on southeast asia studies from 2010 to 2015 his books include how pol pot came to power 1985 the pol pot regime 1996 genocide and resistance in southeast asia 2007 blood and soil a world history of genocide and extermination from sparta to darfur one of my favorite books uh 2007 and i do use that book in my genocide elective and his latest book vietnam a his vietnam a history from earliest times to the present 2017 so now uh we will go to sarah macintosh's video college and especially to hayat well let me begin by extending a huge and heartfelt thanks and word of congratulations to the naval war college and especially to hayat and all those who worked behind the scenes to make this genocide conference possible it's a real privilege to be joining you i'm only sorry that i'm not able to join you live and hope that in the future particularly if we are ever able to meet again in person um that i will be able to be there and and meet many of you for the first time uh myself um thank you also to my co-panelists and to everyone who's tuning in i'm sure that today's conversations have been and will continue to be rich and thought-provoking and to keep keep on our um on our minds a really critical important topic of war crimes accountability my name is sarah macintosh i am the policy and justice associate at the united states holocaust memorial museums simon scott center for the prevention of genocide and today i want to speak about a topic that is close to my heart and to the work of our center at the museum which is considering options for justice beyond criminal accountability and really working with victims to develop meaningful justice goals before i get into that i thought it might be helpful to contextualize my remarks within the backdrop of the center of what we do at the museum of why we exist and some of our recent work that will be informing my remarks today the us holocaust memorial museum was uh established in order to serve as a living memorial to the victims of the holocaust and our center the simon scott center focuses on contemporary genocide and related mass atrocities particularly the crime against humanity of persecution some may be surprised to learn that the holocaust has a center that focuses on contemporary cases and i think it's a real testament to the museum's commitment to furthering the goal of never again and to doing for today's victims that which was not done for the Jews of europe our work at the simon scott center has a number of dimensions we do early warning work in an attempt to shine a spotlight on cases before they unfold into mass atrocities and to put them on the attention of policy makers and so that timely action can be taken to prevent prevent their occurrence we also do work to bear witness to cases that are unfolding this includes bringing the voices of people who have experienced these crimes and atrocities including through exhibitions in the physical museum itself we for a number of years had an exhibit on cambodia and then we recently had one on syria and currently have one on the plight of the rohingya which is also available online and i encourage you all to take a look at that it's really quite an outstanding effort that that my colleagues have undertaken and then in addition to this work we also do work to advance accountability transitional justice and particularly victim-centered forms of justice and that that that kernel of victim-centered justice is one that i think is no doubt important it's absolutely universally i would say recognized in the field as being absolutely critical to the effectiveness of any justice effort and at the same time i think it is a term that that sometimes has an unclear meaning sometimes it's not entirely clear what what justice institutions do for victims directly particularly when things like reparations are sometimes seen as somewhat of an afterthought or are really not enforced all that well and so in that spirit of thinking through what does a victim-centered approach to justice actually mean we wanted to develop a handbook and i bring it up because it is as i said earlier one of the sort of kind of starting points for for my remarks when i was reflecting on what i wanted to share with you today we published this handbook which i authored earlier this year it is called pursuing justice for mass atrocities a handbook for victim groups and it's not a scholarly resource as the name would suggest it is a practical guide written for victim groups about what they can do to take the lead in their own quest for justice and it canvases an array of tactics and techniques perhaps if you think of it as almost looking through the toolbox of what available tools there are to press for justice including building diverse and sustainable victim-centered coalitions to strategic communications political engagement gathering information and fundraising assessing and taking steps to mitigate risks and and many other tools and tactics that victim groups can use and the idea was not only to feel a gap that we had noticed in the existing literature that revolved around the fact that there was a considerable amount of material written for the international community by practitioners and scholars about what the international justice system can do to make itself more victim friendly but not all that much if anything at all for victims themselves and particularly for victims operating as groups about what they can do to use the system despite its flaws acknowledging that the burden does not and should not fall on them to rectify the system and that in the meantime while it is imperfect as it is and may be for some time to come what they can do to make sure their own quest for justice isn't forgotten or ignored and so that that is sort of the the genesis for the handbook and really what I wanted to get going on today in my remarks with you and sort of starting at two questions that are animating my remarks the first being and I should say both of them are relatively simple questions but but perniciously difficult to answer and so I hope that I can make a modest contribution to expanding our collective thinking on these ideas to spur further scholarship and consideration and and so what I want to do is to look at what accountability in the aftermath of mass atrocities actually looks like and to encourage us to consider expanding the notion of accountability beyond criminal accountability but to other forms of of transitional justice more broadly and to make sure that's included in in the discussions when we talk about when we talk about justice for war crimes and and other mass atrocities and then perhaps another element that that is again harkening back to the subject of the handbook itself which is the role that victims can and should play in this process and I'm going to examine these two questions through the lens of post-holocaust justice initiatives and in doing this I'm enormously indebted to my former colleague Meg Omani who conducted some really compelling research into this topic as part of our research for the handbook and indeed she authored a portion of the introduction of the handbook on this very topic that you're welcome to consult if you would like to dive deeper I would also like to acknowledge another team of colleagues in a different department of the museum who've been conducting similar research into post-holocaust justice initiatives also in an effort to expand our understanding of what what justice can look like after crimes so grave and in and in that case to inform a series of trainings with criminal justice sector actors so I guess what I wanted to do was start by thinking about this this first question of what is accountability what does accountability look like when the crimes are so grave when so many people were involved in the commission when there are so many victims and I wanted as I said to sort of turn a somewhat well-trodden narrative on its head about post-holocaust justice and what I wanted to say is that it is it was a much more holistic process than we sometimes realized and involved many components of what we would now call transitional justice even though the concept itself did not yet exist at the time and in that regard as well I think relatedly is the fact that these efforts continue to this day and to say that transitional justice is not a is not a one one time goal but rather a long and ongoing voluntary process as time goes on and as our understanding of the past changes it was also imperfect and I think that in in my remarks I will highlight some of the lessons that can be learned and at the same time acknowledge the reality that some of these challenges are exceptionally difficult to overcome and they're ones that I think we can continue to grapple with and again perhaps can be sourced for further scholarship and consideration by those of you who are in a position to do so. I'm going to start by talking about sort of the most widely recognized component of post-holocaust justice which is of course the criminal accountability efforts. There was of course the Nuremberg trials in which 22 major war criminals were tried for crimes of conspiracy, crimes against the peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity and then the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings that tried a broader range of Nazi perpetrators including in the Einsatzgruppen trial which the former, the last living Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Forens prosecuted. He is also, we are also indebted to him for the existence of our initiative within the Simon Scott Centre which is named in his honour and these trials which as I said are widely discussed and I don't need to explain the ins and outs of them to this audience here today but they achieved an incredible amount. I mean not only did they create important legal precedent which continues to be cited to this day and established a framework for reckoning with crimes of such an enormous scale. It also showed that perpetrators including heads of state or very very senior government officials could be held to account for their actions and so I say that just to say that by acknowledging that this is one of the most widely recognized and discussed aspects of post-holocaust justice it's not to suggest that in any means it's the least important but rather to say we can take as given that this is something that that we know about and yet there are other aspects that are sometimes overlooked. Another sort of aspect of post-holocaust criminal accountability that is perhaps somewhat less receives less attention than the Nuremberg Tribunals are the ordinary trials that took place in ordinary German courts where perpetrators were prosecuted for murder and manslaughter under the criminal code for their activities during the Holocaust. Now all in all many Nazi perpetrators went without being punished. There was a really interesting effort again this may not be so well known led by a German Jewish prosecutor who had been imprisoned during the Holocaust by the name of Fritz Bauer who wanted to overcome anti-Semitism and obstructionism within the German criminal justice system and so pushed for there to be what was called the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1963 where 360 witnesses spoke 22 defendants were tried over 20 months and 20,000 people viewed the proceedings. Now ultimately despite this extraordinary step forward in holding to account more perpetrators of Nazi crimes ultimately only 29 of the 6500 SS members employed at Auschwitz actually received sentences and so just to say again that the criminal accountability as important and prominent as it figures in our understanding of post-holocaust accountability accounts for a mere fraction of those who actually perpetrated criminally wrongful acts. It's also worth noting that these these efforts continue just this month. I believe there is a former SS concentration camp guard who is being tried for the murder of 3,500 individuals and these and similar trials continue to this day. Another widely discussed and recognized component of post-holocaust justice and accountability is reparations, restitution, material compensation and this came out of an announcement that Konrad Adenauer made in 1951 promising that Germany would pay reparations and this eventually led to an initial promise of $845 million to be paid to Israel and to engage in direct negotiations with victims. Soon after this announcement a group of 20 or 23 Jewish organizations came together in what is now known as the claims conference around the goal of getting recognition for what had happened and to help individuals navigate the claim process. Since these beginnings the German government has paid more than $90 billion for Holocaust survivors and this is not without some controversy. At the beginning there were concerns in the Jewish community that receiving payment from Germany for unforgivable acts would be a form of blood money and that no amount of money could ever make up for the crimes that they had committed. Eventually the state of Israel agreed in negotiations to receive the compensation but it's just to say that this is a process that is not without controversy indeed within the survivor community itself. It also as our research has shown was at times a re-traumatizing process often individuals who were seeking to claim compensation had to undergo invasive medical examinations. Sometimes we'd format Nazi officials in order to demonstrate their eligibility for reparations and then there's also the question that came up and which comes up in contemporary cases of seeking reparations is who should receive reparations and how. It's only just this week I believe that the claims conference has secured almost $770 million for Russian Jews who enjoyed the Nazi siege in Leningrad who up until now have not been able to make claims for reparations under the available reparation scheme. This I should say as I've said in the previous discussion about criminal justice this is a process that is also ongoing. But it's important to note that from an international law perspective it was a real step forward because previous reparations cases had framed awards as going to states rather than individuals and so we now saw for the first time a pivot to acknowledging the individual harm suffered by victims. Another component of post holocaust justice that is perhaps quite evident when we think about it but is not necessarily part of the narrative is memorialization. It is not always at the front of our mind and yet we know that it is one of the most important things in terms of reckoning with the past and coming into terms with that and holding those who perpetrated the Holocaust to account. We know many many stories of Jews who documented often at great personal risk what was happening during the Holocaust. Most famously perhaps we have the diaries of Anne Frank but we also have the notes of Chaim Kaplan and then as well an initiative that Emmanuel Ringelblum started in the Warsaw ghetto called Oneg Shabbat which sought to chronicle life in the ghetto and to keep a record of it which was able to be preserved and consulted for generations to come. In addition Jewish communities came together and created what they call Yizkor books which are essentially community memorialization projects that include photographs, diaries, documents, testimonies that aim to record hometowns, cultures and fates of those who are lost and in the decade since we've seen larger scale initiatives in 1953 Yad Fashem was created and in 1980 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which I spoke about earlier and where I work was launched and opened to the public in 1993. Another component and I'm now racing through I realize that I'm coming up against the end of my time here is that in addition to memorialization and reparations and criminal accountability there were also efforts to implement what we'd now call guarantees of non-recurrence in the aftermath of the Holocaust. These were fairly imperfect and difficult again I think partially due to the scale and scope of what had occurred during the Holocaust and the level of entrenched anti-Semitism that persisted after the Holocaust ended but these efforts to reform laws to repeal Nazi laws establish a German constitution in 1949 which recognized human rights to criminalize acts such as Holocaust denial and to do essentially what was illustration and vetting process referred to as denazification at the time where SS, Nazi party Gestapo etc were prevented from serving in public office. It should be noted however that in many cases Nazi policemen, judges, prosecutors etc reintegrated into society and indeed resumed their careers. Another the final aspect of post-holocaust justice that I'll flag that I think is sometimes overlooked is the search for missing persons and again this was hugely important for Jewish survivors particularly in the immediate aftermath. Earlier this year I conducted an interview with Judge Tom Birkenfold who described how the need to eat and to find missing loved ones were the most important priorities for him and his family as they were recovering in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and so in the spirit of searching for missing persons the Red Cross established what has later become known as the International Tracing Service and its work to trace missing persons and make information about them accessible continues to this day and it indeed has millions of digital images online that governments and individuals who are interested in finding out more about missing persons and what happened to them. So I'm going to again in the interest of time I'm going to cut to my second point about the narrative of post-holocaust transitional justice that is sometimes not as well advertised and that is the level of victim group involvement. The post-holocaust justice narrative often focuses on political machinations at the macro level at negotiations between allied powers and kind of these major initiatives that were established due to a great amount of political will that was garnered at a very high level. And yet the mobilization of Jewish survivors and other survivor groups as I'll talk about in a minute has also been critical to allowing the justice mission to proceed and I want to make this point for a few reasons but mainly because this notion of victim group mobilization is one that was of particular interest to us in writing the handbook that I mentioned earlier in earlier in this presentation. In thinking through the handbook the former director of the Friends Initiative Anna Cave who came up with the concept for the handbook was particularly inspired by the way that victim groups in the years since the Holocaust have mobilized around the demand for justice. We're thinking particularly of groups in Chad and Guatemala and in researching our handbook we were really thrilled to learn that in fact similar efforts to mobilize around the demand for justice could be seen in the Holocaust as well. So we had some of the documentation and memorialized initiatives that I mentioned earlier as well as the claims conference but one of the most interesting aspects of victim group involvement that that we sort of uncovered particularly through our research by a scholar named Claire Greenstein into the mobilization of Romani groups where essentially at the start they weren't able to organize in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust Gita fears for their own safety. They remained in Europe where they had no allies or resources and no way to get media attention and so as a result they received very little attention and and didn't receive for instance reparations weren't included in original reparations programs but in the 1970s and and it's often said that this was inspired by civil rights movements here in the United States children of the survivor generation formed Romani organizations and they were able to gain allies among high-profile Jewish Holocaust survivors and ultimately through some public advocacy including a hunger strike at Dachau where Romani wore their old camp uniforms in 1980 the West German government finally recognized the Romani and set up a hardship fund for them. So I'm going to wrap up with my remarks now. I hope that what I have done today is to widen the aperture a little on what accountability can look like in the aftermath of mass atrocities and particularly to shine a light on what role victims can and should play. I hope that it can prompt further research consideration and scholarship and I hope that it can prompt some interesting discussions in which I look forward to taking part with you at some stage in the future. Thanks again and it's been a real pleasure. Bye-bye. Excellent thanks to Sarah McIntosh and I apologize for mispronouncing the Simon Scott Center. It's not spelled as easily as it sounds. Okay so I believe we still don't have Dr Don Thimi so if it's okay Dr Kiernan is it okay if we go to you next. Yes thank you Haya and thanks to the Naval War College for organizing this. I've learned a lot already from the previous presentations. My talk will be a bit different. I'm just going to give you the title of my talk but I want to relate it to some of what I've heard already. The title of my presentation is the role of US war crimes in the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan. Unlearned lessons from the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia 1969 to 1973 and I was interested to hear from Azim Ibrahim some of the parallels between the Rohingya genocide and the attempts to derive justice and accountability for that genocide. The parallels with the Cambodian case because there was an effort during the 1980s in the decade after the Cambodian genocide to bring a case against the Khmer Rouge who still represented Cambodia despite the fact they had committed genocide and they had been overthrown and were no longer in power. There was a determined attempt to convince a government anywhere in the world to bring them to justice by taking a case to the international court of justice and that was unsuccessful. There wasn't a single government in the world that had standing in the international court of justice that was prepared to, if you like, take the risk against the superpowers, particularly China and the United States and bring a case against the recognized government in the United Nations, the Khmer Rouge regime in the international court of justice. However, in the case of the Rohingyas, Gambia has done that and has taken the case to the international court of justice and it's now proceeding. There are some complications, as Azim Ibrahim mentioned, but I think that is progress myself. I think that compared to the Cambodian situation, that is progress and although the Cambodian situation was not brought to the international court of justice, eventually it did receive international attention, albeit 30 years later, when in 2006 the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia were set up by negotiations between the UN Secretary-General, not the Security Council, which China basically vetoed any Security Council initiative, China being the mentor or the protector of the Khmer Rouge regime, but the UN Secretary-General engaged in negotiations with the Cambodia successor government and established a hybrid international court sponsored by the United Nations and in the last few years or in the last decade or so has convicted the top surviving members of the Khmer Rouge regime, first about 10 years ago for crimes against humanity and in 2018 for genocide, in fact for two cases of genocide against the Muslim population, very similar case to the Rohingyas in Myanmar and against the ethnic Vietnamese population and in fact the former head of state of the Khmer Rouge regime became in that conviction the first head of state ever to be convicted for genocide in an international tribune. Kirsten Pond is now appealing that verdict and we don't know if his appeal will be successful but the precedent has been set despite many years of attempting to bring the case before the international court of justice accountability has been found by another route by a hybrid national international tribunal and as well as that although Pol Pot died in the 1990s his number two Nguyen Chia was convicted of both of those genocides against the Chum Muslims and the ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia and so I think there is hope for the Rohingya case to be pursued and there is hope for other cases to see some possibilities in international accountability. So my presentation is going to look at not just the war crimes themselves, excuse me, but also the political fallout in a particular society of the commission of the war crimes. So we're looking not just at the criminal nature of the crimes but also the need for accountability for their political fallout and also like the case that Dr Laura Graham mentioned in Yemen we're talking about an external involvement. I'm talking about US war crimes in Afghanistan and in Cambodia mostly bombing and the airstrikes in particular just as in the case of Yemen where Dr Graham talked about the Saudi Saudi-led coalition's airstrikes causing starvation. I'm going to be talking about similar cases but particularly mass killings as a result of airstrikes in both Cambodia and Afghanistan but I'll be talking mostly about Afghanistan. Many commentators have compared the Taliban capture of Kabul just a couple of months ago to the fall of Saigon in April 1975 but fewer commentators have mentioned the fall of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh two weeks before the fall of Saigon. Now the Taliban less closely resemble Vietnamese communists than they do Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communists in Cambodia. Now there are of course important differences but also several similarities between the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge. More than two decades ago when the Taliban who are a Sunni Islamist group held power in Afghanistan until 2001 they massacred members of their countries cheer Muslim minority and others. In the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide against Cambodia's charm Muslim minority along with others. In March 2001 the Taliban deployed dynamite to blow up their country's monumental sixth and seventh century stone sculptures the Bamiyan Buddhas part of Afghanistan's historic heritage. That act of vandalism resembled the Khmer Rouge's demolition stone by stone of Phnom Penh's Catholic Cathedral and their repression not only of Catholicism in Cambodia but of Cambodia's majority Buddhist religion. Two months ago Ashley Jackson wrote in the New York Times quote many Afghans I've spoken with in cities now fear the worst recalling what life was like under Taliban rule before 2001 the urban areas arguably suffered worst as they represented moral danger and corruption to the Taliban. Does the Taliban's anti-urban thinking recall the Khmer Rouge and their forced evacuation of Phnom Penh and Cambodia's other cities in 1975? Now it remains to be seen whether the now reinstalled Taliban regime will launch a new campaign of Islamist fundamentalist repression recent statements from female Afghan journalists that quote we see silence filled with fear and reports of the murders of opponents and severe beatings of journalists are ominous. So is the news that in Bamiyan province the Taliban have blown up the statue of a Shia leader whom they killed in 1996. A possible guide to the future of Afghanistan cities may lie in the history of its rural areas. Another parallel between Cambodia and Afghanistan is the way since 2005 the Taliban recruited and rebuilt in the countryside the armed following that has swept them back to power this year. In some cases the brutal prosecution of an external war may damage local moderate forces but help generate the ascendancy of a hard line or even genocidal insurgent group. This did happen in Cambodia in the early 1970s when the spread of the Vietnam War there facilitated the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime led by Polkot. What happened was in a neutral country Cambodia in the 1960s President Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger began in 1969 a program of secret B-52 bombing of Cambodia. This was a change from the bombing that was already taking place under President Johnson which was tactical bombing targeting individual sites of military value and it did not involve B-52 bombing. What Nixon and Kissinger did in 69 was introduce B-52's carpet bombing of entire areas to the extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and then in 1970 as the wars spread across Cambodia from those border areas President Nixon made an announcement gave an order to Henry Kissinger in which he said they have got to go in there and I mean really go in. I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget is that clear. As a result of that order from President Nixon Henry Kissinger called up General Alexander Hay to relay the order. Nixon he said quote once a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia he doesn't want to hear anything it's an order it's to be done anything that flies on anything that moves you got that and so from 1970 to 1973 a total of nearly 500,000 tons of bombs were dropped largely by B-52s in a carpet bombing of the Cambodian countryside. In 1973 Donald Dawson a pilot who had been participating in this campaign discovered that wedding parties had been bombed and he refused to participate in any more sorties over Cambodia. William Harbin who was a political officer in the embassy in Phnom Penh decided to determine what was the impact of this bombing and he cut out a scale model a box of the area that was covered by a B-52 strike and he placed it on a scale map of Cambodia and discovered in central Cambodia that virtually no area that was bombed in the area of a box hit by a B-52 strike would spare a Cambodian village in central Cambodia and he started to get word of a funeral possession or villages being bombed in large numbers. What was the impact what was the political fallout of the carpet bombing of Cambodia? In 1969 the Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement was very small and not very powerful it numbered less than 10,000 guerrillas. By 1973 when Congress brought the bombing of Cambodia to a halt the Khmer Rouge numbered more than 200,000 troops and militia. It wasn't just the bombing that brought new recruits to the Khmer Rouge more than 200,000 of them it was also the support of then Prince Sihanouk and also the support of the Vietnamese communists but the bombing played a big role impact the popular outrage in the Cambodian countryside in response to the bombing and the casualties which I estimate to be between 50,000 and 150,000 killed by US bombing and additional casualties from the Lon Nol regime which was the US backed regime T-28 bombings and the two regimes South Vietnamese Air Force which had open sky policy for bombing the in Cambodia as well. But the Khmer Rouge recruited a large number of recruits they built an army which was capable of taking power and they did so in 1975 two years after the bombing halted. Now as in Cambodia one important factory in Afghanistan was the rural revulsion against heavy United States bombing of the countryside and other excessive uses of military force there. As early as March 28 2002 Donald Rumsfeld sent this memo to his staff quote please see me about having a weekly meeting on Afghanistan I'm getting concerned that it is drifting. However late that same day Rumsfeld gave a long interview to MSNBC without mentioning his concern about the drifting situation in Afghanistan instead he argued that there was no point in negotiating with Taliban remnants of the regime the United States had overthrown the year before. Rumsfeld stated that quote the only thing you can do is bomb them and try to kill them and that's what we did and it worked they're gone. Well no the Taliban weren't gone and the strategy to bomb them and try to kill them often hitting innocent rural bystanders helped bring the Taliban roaring back with an army of new recruits from the countryside. The Afghan civilian casualties inflicted by the US and its allies resulted in a political windfall for the Taliban insurgents who already by 2009 posed a much stronger threat than they had in 2005. In 2006 Hasti Muhammad a resident of Zangabad village in Kandahar province lost 18 of his relatives in the Canadian led operation Medusa their family group had fled intense fighting and they were sheltering in tents in open desert scrub an airstrike was called in it killed them all along with 14 relatives of Sardar Muhammad who was no relative the NATO mission later admitted that its attack had killed about 30 civilians plus it asserted a similar number of Taliban militants. According to human rights watch US and NATO airstrikes killed 116 Afghan civilians in 2006 and then another 321 civilians in 2007. The London Guardian reported in 2007 that quote a senior UK military officer said he had asked the US to withdraw its special forces from a volatile area that was crucial in the battle against the Taliban after the US forces were criticised for relying on airstrikes for cover when they believed they were confronted by large groups of Taliban fighters. The London Guardian added British and NATO officials have consistently expressed concern about US tactics notably airstrikes which kill civilians sabotaging the battle for hearts and minds and quote NATO's secretary general stated that NATO commanders quote had changed the rules of engagement ordering their troops to hold their fire in situations where civilians appeared to be at risk but the toll kept rising in 2008 US aircraft killed more than 30 Afghan civilians in each of two bombardments of rural wedding parties no fewer than 828 civilians were killed in 2008 by US or Afghan government forces airstrikes took the lives of 530 of them up from 321 in 2007 and 116 in 2006 in the first half of 2009 alone 310 civilian deaths were recorded in Afghanistan of which 200 were caused by airstrikes now US officials made attempts to limit the killings of innocent civilians in late 2008 after the bombings of the two wedding parties the top US commander in Afghanistan general David McKiernan ordered a tightening of procedures for launching airstrikes and he proclaimed that minimizing civilian casualties is crucial in December 2008 McKiernan issued another directive ordering that quote all responses must be proportionate after an investigation into an early 2009 airstrike in Farah province that killed at least 26 civilians although the Afghan government reported 140 dead McKiernan successor general Stanley McChrystal issued new guidelines intended to minimize civilian casualties in testimony earlier that same month to the senate armed services committee McChrystal had stressed the strategic importance of protecting civilians he said quote a willingness to operate in ways minimizing casualties or damage is critical although i expect stiff fighting ahead the measure of success will not be enemy killed it will be shielding the afghan population from violence unquote and the policies seem to bear some fruit overall during the year 2009 the UN reported that 2400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan but that the number killed by foreign and afghan troops had fallen by 25 percent unfortunately it was the longer term trend that persisted the death toll from airstrikes while periodically falling and then rising again remained high with the escalation of the u.s. ground war in response to the now greater Taliban threat in february 2010 alone 46 afghan civilians were killed in just three airstrikes an errant rocket attack on february 14th killed 12 four days later and nato airstrike mistakenly killed seven afghan police officers another nato strike on february 20th 2010 killed 27 civilians nevertheless the march to june 2010 quarter compared to the same period of 2009 saw a 44 drop in civilian casualties caused by the coalition however much of the damage may already have been done in march 2010 the new york times reported that in afghanistan quote civilian deaths caused by american troops and american bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency unquote three weeks later the paper reported the senior nato soldier in afghanistan command sergeant major michael hall as having argued that many of the insurgents being held at bagram airbase had joined the insurgency due to deaths of people they knew major hall told the troops there are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed unquote the same report quoted a village elder from hodkile corroborating this argument quote the people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners and we can't suffer it anymore the people do not have any other choice they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners there are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people there seem to have been two responses to micristals directive first an increased use of unmanned aerial drones to deliver air strikes and second intensification of the ground war at the convoy and checkpoint levels but neither strategy seems to have been very effective in reducing civilian afghan casualties in 2008 human rights watch reported that the majority of civilian casualties in afghanistan had resulted not from planned airstrikes on taliban targets but in more fluid rapid response contexts where strikes were conducted mostly in support of quote troops in contact unquote drones may in fact have facilitated more frequent resort to such less well planned support strikes in february 2010 a drone strike killed 23 civilians a u.s military report on that incident blamed quote inaccurate and unprofessional reporting on the part of the drone operators the new york times reported in march 2010 that the persistence of quote deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings by u.s forces has led to growing resentment among afghans fearful of western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation unquote general mccrystal expressed regret that quote instinctive responses by an afghan man to defend his home and family are sometimes interpreted as insurgent acts with tragic results mccrystal added that in afghanistan quote we have shot an amazing number of people but to my knowledge none has ever proven to be a threat unquote even so the casualties from such shootings were still reported to be quote fewer in number than deaths from airstrikes and special forces operations over the next year for instance official statistics reveal that u.s special operations forces killed more than 1500 afghan civilians in night raids in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011 early in the morning of march 11th 2012 u.s sergeant robert bales walked out of his base in kandahar province and into the nearby village of zangabad the same village which had lost 32 of its residents in the 2006 canadian airstrike in cold blood bales now murdered 16 more of the villages nine of them children his victims included the wife of haji muhammad was here their four sons and their four daughters and two other relatives he shot the children in the head and then tried to burn their bodies the london guardian reports three years later in 2015 zangabad village was hit again lala muhammad lost five of his children age six to twelve all killed in an explosion while they were playing in front of their home he believes the attack was a u.s airstrike but that remains unconfirmed at any rate he was soon detained and imprisoned in bagram airbase for the next six years i was not with the taliban lal muhammad insisted my family members were not with the taliban but once these things happened most of us joined the taliban contrary to general mccrystal's frank earlier observation lal muhammad and many other afghans who had known the victims of these shootings airstrikes and special forces operations eventually did become a threat they joined the taliban army which won the war in 2021 the fact that specific u.s military operations contributed to or even perhaps provoked rather than prevented the resurgence of the taliban after its 2001 defeat is a tragic not merely ironic repetition of history the initial u.s involvement in afghanistan after the after the september 11 2001 attacks and the taliban sheltering of al-qaeda had the justification of self-defense unlike the subsequent illegal u.s invasion of iraq in 2003 but just as the iraq war saw the rise of the genocidal isis group in iraq and syria the prolonged conflict in afghanistan and in particular the u.s resort to aerial bombardment of rural areas there helped fuel the return of the taliban as a formidable and eventually victorious force the u.s war in afghanistan might have been conducted very differently especially in the light of the lesson of what had earlier happened in cambodia thank you thank you very much dr kiranin a lot of food for thought uh now we turn to dr don themy uh are you ready to go dr themy it's been a very dynamic day um yes thank you the floor is yours all right let me see if i can share a screen okay do you see my slides hi it yes okay wonders will never cease all right well let's just kick this off in the beginning you know in the beginning when we take a look at this there are a lot of complex issues done pac so what i wanted to try to do is sort of take a longitudinal view um and literally go back to the very beginning you know so in the beginning can slew able humans kill other humans and all of the holy scripts regardless of faith tradition address this reality of what hanah arant labeled the human condition and the banality of evil when we take the lives of others though is it justice is it accountability is it vengeance or is it just plain bloodlust revenge so while the title of this year's conference seems to have three really simple words war and crime and accountability the title itself is tremendously valued in and of this trinity of words that demand our closest attention we are all called listen to the better angels of our nature yet frequently those subtle whispers are drowned out in a cacophony of competing interest perceptions and emotions to make the definition and then the application of accountability tremendously complex and to add to this when we say accountability do we know what we actually mean by that now accountability is a process to be endured where the results are not foreordained and the answers if there are any can be really elusive now for example if you look at the backdrop picture the forms this year's poster or flyer you will see a building with some English and some Polish script I see something entirely different just down the street from block four in Konstantinos Lager Auschwitz Stamliga are blocks one and two where the archives are I spent a week there looking for the arrival and transfer cards of my wife's uncle Stefan who we know left KL Roscoe's needs are known by its German name is Bruce Wilson bound for KL Auschwitz what ensued was a two decade search for records closures and accountability now it's been said that the only good war ever raised was the Trojan War it was fought over a woman and everybody knew what they were fighting for but in fact when we take a look at these things we have to ask ourselves is peace the unnatural thing that happens in between periods of war or is war the natural thing that happens in between periods of peace and what does that mean now many a philosopher has burned the midnight oil and trying to define the causes of war and what the nature of those wars are and what they should be but meanwhile across town decision makers likewise contend against the urge to resolve competition conflict questions with the resort to armed force fully aware of the ancient admonition legacy silent inter-army the legacy of war and its attendant violence makes most recoil from this practice and yet time and again given the choices between a rough and less than perfectly satisfying peace nations and their people choose the path of passion laden policy over pragmatic application of diplomacy and just over a hundred years ago in just 37 days the great powers of Europe decided to go to war unleashing a period of 31 years of war economic turmoil attempted appeasement and finally cataclysmic killing now there's many ways to achieve accountability by deal making fiat and force but does that necessarily make them square with our concepts of accountability is conceived rather than apply if we take the Lord Palmer student approach then we can better understand the natural reluctance of nations to conduct peacekeeping operations it's hard to conduct peacemaking and set the conditions for effective peacekeeping it is fraught with risk and it does not offer the prospect of an easy quick or enduring reward or payoff today for example there are 87 000 peacekeepers and peacemakers from 121 countries involved in 12 major operations around the globe from Sinai which we started over 40 years ago to the Balkans over 25 years ago and some more and yet despite these interventions large powers are what i would call hyper reluctant to pursue force-enabled accountability it's not that they're necessarily callous or indifferent but rather it's a fear of what i call the accountability conundrum the upfront and sustain the cost are not small and once on the ground the protagonists are separated this peacemaking come peacekeeping mission not only has to deliver peace they're supposed to also deliver some form of use post bellow in a contested moral environment a bookshelf of books from st augstein to r2p concepts provide little if any sucker to the newly in place to practitioners of justice now a large part of the challenge though is gathering and sorting the facts you just heard you know dr carene give a long list of here's what we think the facts are and each one of those is really hard to put together and figure out and they all have to be placed in their historical and cultural context now for those of us who are parents of large families we've all wrestled with ex post facto challenge of determining just who threw the first lego which then resulted in escalation to wiffle bats and wooden swords all before the first plaintive whaling came from down the hall while you're trying to get your taxes in order or fix the lawn mower and even if you had perfect intelligence as to what happened that still does not provide the why of causality to provide a template for adjudicating results and repairing the peace the last 20 years alone are full of enough examples to keep an army of peacekeepers and barristers employed for decades with results that are certain to pacify few and enrage many so when you go to clean up this human landscape with justice and accountability it's an enormously complex operation one of the challenges for example that the u.s. faced in afghanistan was whether or not to comport with known leaders who would certainly be branded as a war criminal in the haig but were in fact perhaps simply advancing and protecting the interest of their fighting factions in what can be termed as a fractious ethno-political landscape. Abdul Rashid Dostum may be the most infamous of the afghani warlords over the past few decades but does that make him unique or simply proficient in the pursuit of accountability for war crimes of the 9-11 attacks if we consider them as part of a larger jihad and they're somehow falling within the purview of war does the proverbial enemy of my enemy necessarily make Dostum my friend what price war crime accountability and what gets sacrificed in order to attain other objectives and what may be a long-term Faustian bargain now similar challenges faced the u.s. and iraq both in 1991 and in 2003 who can you trust with whom should you partner and what should you be trying to do in the pursuit of a better peace the hussain family were criminals from soup to nuts a minority ethnic faction oppressed and terrorized their own population for decades and the u.s. knew that the gates to every single prison would be flung open as the u.s. forces advanced releasing both victims of tyranny and hardened felons into a landscape awash and weapons bitterness and score settling and we should recall in europe after world war two it was not only the scene of the nuremberg trials but also a great deal of vengeance from italy to ukraine where populations were removed bloody small actions took place in remote forest and only what i think is of the combination of war fatigue economic devastation two brutal winters crushing tyrannical communism and the hope of the marshal plan restored some semblance of justice and normalcy against this backdrop of war crimes and sought after justice trials seeking accountability actually required new words and new terms and concepts to describe the nature of the thing as observed and if we go back to play on Aristotle who's going to be the guardian who will be the philosopher judge and what ethics are to prevail in a clash of mores culture and civilization in france there was not only the distant echoes of catholicism versus protestants city versus provincial and conquered versus collaborator there was also the seeking of a rough accountability for the crimes of quiescent vision now if you're sitting in the library on a dreary saturday evening pondering week and weary the palpinesian wars the republic and the body of thought that emanated from that period of Greek history that's challenging enough but trying to simultaneously serve as the judge the jury the emancipator the prisoner and all those things in real time with real people and real consequences is much much harder than trying to wrap your head around meet your fuko and with far more permanent effects forces that served in northern iraq the first time during provide cumbers for example were confronted with no the bewildering array of competing alliances tribes religions and no small amount of cross border entry between Kurds turks syrians iranians and iraqis all competing for access activity and accountability young marines and soldiers on the ground helicopter and jet pilots in the air ngo's and senior commanders all had to wade through the cross currents of history conflict and no small amount of ethnic cleansing and determining what was a crime in the land of hamarabi viewed through the lens of a judo christian perspective was exhausting to say the least a 12 years later preparing to go back to iraq and this time all the way with no half measures a senior judge advocate general officer told a group of assembled three and four star commanders and their planners that the purpose of the war was to instill the rule of law and ensure justice and accountability when this officer was asked whether by the rule of law was meant to be understood sufi salafi sudi shia hamarabi napoleonic code british common law or perhaps some other melange derivation the room was silent understandably then the young sergeants and lieutenants who were charged with this at best nebulous mission statement were confused but they did not so much fail to account for war crimes as the leaders who placed them there with this vague so-called mission which failed to clearly articulate the why and the how of this concept in terms that can be understood by the men and women charged with delivering justice and accountability for all so as a result of these many factors and functions governments are reluctant to intervene and sustain that intervention because the after requirements of reconciliation and accountability actions are tough while introducing the initial force is complicated making enforcing and sustaining any form of peace rough or otherwise is complex at the heart of the suffer is accountability in my earlier example of the squabbling children this is challenging enough in a violent hatred fueled volatile chaotic operational environment where the unknowns greatly exceed the knows this is orders of magnitude more challenging one of the factors that makes this so challenging in fact is the competing audiences and their perceptions about just what is their concept of accountability the idea of responsibility while protecting addresses some of these but does not fully grasp the existential challenges of the people on the ground a peacemaking force and its attendant processes of a judicial accountability is not simple there's accountability for actions taken and actions not taken both in the country and external and this internal has to be placed in context and realize that while we're sitting here on this final autumn day what we look at is accountability may be very different from what that tired dirty and frustrated sergeant in a vcp sees is accountability in the moment not in a sanitized courtroom afterwards and we can use some other historical examples to refine our understanding when Stalin was asked at yalta about the crimes that his soldiers were committing on the way across Europe on the way to Berlin his response was words to the effect of after all the suffering of the soviet people of over the last three years what am i supposed to do to deny these soldiers some sense of justice and accountability as they now go on the offensive and on the western front less we think that's unique at the beginning of the battle of the bulge nazi soldiers executed 84 us soldiers in albany the next day december 17th 1944 11 black us soldiers were murdered by an ss patrol and a couple weeks later in january us soldiers of the 11th armored division executed roughly 80 german soldiers at shannon is this fair is it just one thing it certainly is is battlefield accountability in the pacific theater japan's us 731 ran covert chemical and biological warfare experiments on prisoners members of the makin island raid force were executed after being captured the japanese commander seen here on the left was captured after the war tried and executed in 1947 the allies ran a series of trials after the war in both theaters and additional trials were run by other countries including in poland where rudolf host was tried found guilty of murder oschwitz and hung and maria mondale who was the head of the female guards at oschwitz and later at robinsbrook okay was also tried and hung by a polish court after being captured by us forces certainly this was accountability but in the maelstrom of world war two some question if this was liberator justice or victor justice as opposed to antiseptic accountability was this the accountability that we would seek today perhaps a more pressing question actually is what should the roles missions and responsibilities of the local small unit commanders be in the same questions i can tell you the devil peacemaking force commanders in the balkans kongo rwanda and somalia what is fair what is just and what are the mechanisms and measures of accountability time and again force commanders found their ethics morals and mission parameters to be divergent and even more challenged to create the command climate that would prevent a repeat of the 11th armored division's actions and certainly countless others known but to god and the perpetrators and bystanders if we fast forward to afghanistan burma bangladesh and iraq and that's bypassing the russian actions in chechnya we see that while the places and the peoples are different the same themes echo across the camps the trails of tears of deportation and the countless scenes of privation and worse the challenge is a recent foreign affairs article by rory stewart noted is to apply a middle ground approach to rebuilding peacemaking and sustainable peace if by peace we mean the absence of large-scale war both of which are terribly difficult constructs in an academic setting and much much harder when you're actually there and on the ground now others of course disagree with this moderate approach whether it's patty ashdown or shura kunye there was a school of thought that thinks a military force alone could somehow solve these problems and provide the framework of accountability now the challenges of introducing a force are not small up palace or by the brits in syria leon 21 years ago was seen by a model and it was a massive effort to focus against a very small and precise target set at the same time the disbanding of the canadian paratroops after an incident somalia provides a glimpse into why many governments are reluctant to intervene because accountability happens at home as well as overseas there's not only risk to the deployed force but risk to the perceptions and the reputation of the nation that attempts such work and whether one believes that under the right circumstances you can walk across afghanistan or that a few dozen armored personnel carriers could have prevented 100 days in rwanda the fact is that seeking not only some form of peace but applying an approach to accountability is daunting a challenge that is huge where the apparent risk greatly outweigh the perceived possible benefits and yet despite all of this we have a responsibility to first call things by their right names and then endeavor mightily to make them not necessarily right but at least better you know there's a concept in judaism to come around to repair or make the world better that conveys a deep sense of what we ought to at least try to do it will not always meet with success or at least not the success that we might wish for but there is a goodness in the doing of the thing itself a goodness that transcends all of the many challenges inherent in seeking to define war and crimes and then apply accountability the hunt for joseph coney is almost a decade old now it has not resulted in his capture but it has resulted in the displacing of his so-called army and the defeat capture or killing of all but about 200 estimated fellow travelers you know jfk famously said although in a different context you would choose to do these things not because they're easy but because they are hard lest we forget though joseph's brothers threw him in a hole and left him there to die accountability and justice were very slow and coming when yan karski pictured here the courier who made his way from the shores of occupied poland to the banks of the patomic briefed president uh roosevelt and justice frankfurter fdr's response was that the best way to help the inmates of not only Auschwitz but the rest of the 2200 camps in the system was to win the war as fast as possible with whatever level of violence was required a panel accountability comes in many forms hence the decision made by church hill Stalin and fdr to bomb dresden the week after the altar conference well in the end we never found the records of stefan this i've spent time in grusrussian auschwitz math house and several other places in the archives and correspondence with bat orlson archivist and researchers we know that he survived the first two we can only assume that he died in the last week he never reappeared in poland and he never shows up in any record of any of the small towns in austria around moth house ironically he probably died not far from where hitler was born and hitler died not far from where he was born in some small way our family has to accept this circle of accountability our final family visit to auschwitz a few years ago we had a chance to meet an italian survivor my italian is it best functional but i was able to ask him to take a picture with our children they will never know what happened to this relative who disappeared during the soviet and nazi occupations and invasions of poland but they will never forget meeting the survivor it's far from the perfect accountability that we might want but it's enduring and indelible nonetheless thank you for your time and attention thank you so much dr themy again just as our other colleagues you have provided a lot of food for thought and profound insight i would like to transition now to q&a and what i'd like to do is give privilege to the panelists first to see if you have any questions or comments regarding each other's briefs and just feel free to speak out and if you want to specify which panelists you're directing your comments or questions to please do so who would like to begin and while we're doing that the audience can start populating the q&a button down on the bottom of the screen with your typed questions and we'll get to those momentarily panelists who would like to begin hi can i just make a couple comments absolutely all i can say is wow how thought-provoking and the panelists were absolutely incredible i think i'm more confused now than i was before the start i thought i thought it was a little simpler before this started and um two two conclusions i came to one you really have to be careful in introducing a military force you really have to be careful there and then this idea of accountability really it has a blurred resolution i mean uh what's accountability it depends on your historical context and and situations and so forth um and the eye of the beholder really but uh really uh incredible conference and and i i thought all of the uh presenters were were just absolutely incredible so thank you for letting me participate thank you i don't really have a well i'd have a question but um there were so many thank you thank you general uh pauling i saw your hand go up and is it okay if i call you all by your first names it's all right okay pauling go ahead thank you and i really appreciate our last speaker mentioning some philosophers as as the philosopher on the panel um and the thing that struck me and the the general just sort of um stole stole some of my thunder it just seems that so much of the discussions um you know revolve around different conceptions of what accountability really is um and so it does remind me of my days teaching philosophy of law and thinking about different punishment theories because if it's to deter future war crimes that's one kind of thing if it's to rehabilitate or to restore the perpetrators back to the community as it often is with child soldiers who commit atrocities that's a different matter if it's to sort of stop the genocide or ethnic cleansing in in in progress and then and then try to figure out who's responsible in a legal sense so is it about legal accountability so it just seems like there's so much sort of swirling and and and you know some of the reflections on accountability in a broader sense from the from the show off from the home the european holocaust i think are really interesting because i think we do focus on legal accountability very often or perhaps political accountability um but it seems like and this is back to my point i don't have it as usual as an academic i actually have a question uh this is more commentary um it just seems like there's individual accountability that we might want to think about there's sort of some forms of social accountability below an institutional threshold and then there may be collective accountability for people i think neuroberg and the tokyo trials are good examples of sort of more institutional accountability but as as people have pointed out uh like they had to make up they had to invent new terms they had to do some legal innovation in order uh to do that so i think that that shows what our first speaker said about how difficult uh accountability is and in a way it's depressing but then in another way maybe it's an opportunity uh for some innovation and creativity and thinking more broadly about accountability because i think if it's just the legal accountability question then i'm going to need to go have a strong adult beverage uh if that's all i'm thinking about because that piece is depressing but maybe there's other opportunities for accountability or at least i think many people coming up the holocaust viewed their role as to witness to what had happened so maybe witness is a form of accountability thank you pauline thank you i saw dawn's hand go up yeah i was just going to add i apologize for being late because i was teaching hobs theory of social contract and accountability to undergraduates and that i ran straight from hobs to this so pauline i'll meet you at the bar i can use several adult drinks right now um but i i i think you hit on something really really key there's these different levels of accountability and that you sort of like you know russian nesting dolls you're trying to figure out do they stack neatly do they overlap like a sloppy then diagram you know do they look like a four-year-old who's been finger pain you know and and how do you tie those together um you know if you read the memoirs from um jackson and several of the others from the nuremberg trials they were really deeply disturbed um in setting up the trials the conduct of the trials and then afterwards wrestling with these competing ideas of accountability and justice and putting things in context you know individual actions versus collective actions um and a very good friend of mine uh john than you know he made a great point once you know if you want to go after everybody after the holocaust well okay let's go for the right one well that's only 1.1 million people all right so you know which of those 1.1 million do you go after and so this this is really hard um the good news is all the really smart bright young you know undergrads that i was talking to hobs about two hours ago their heads were exploding at least as much as ours are right now and they're young and you know adept in a number of these big ideas so i i think pauling's point is absolutely spot on and it's wrestling with seeking that convergence and in alignment um that's a necessary ethical and moral requirement but it's really really hard that's not to say it's harder than the guy at the vcp okay who's you know has a split second decision to make about that vehicle but it is its own kind of fatigue and exhaustion that comes after the fact thank you very much um i'd like to throw out a question uh to add to the complexity um and by the way so far i don't see any questions in the q and a box yet but we'll give them some time my question is what happens when your culture has in a an unwritten code of revenge and one one actually i'm aware of and that's the pashtun wali which is of the pashtun code for uh essentially the taliban who are pashtuns and that unwritten code includes within it revenge as an actual social policy any anyone want to tackle that all right i guess is the resident southerner i'll take that one on so you know that that's not the only place this happens uh luckily in america we solve our problems in baseball you plank one of mine i plank one of yours um but having spent a lot of time in the middle east you know on various joy rides um yeah it's really really tough um you know when i was up in kurdistan the the curds have a different way of dealing with it in the turks and yet in some places they're you know completely intermixed um you know when we went to beirut on one of my deployments um that was a that was a difference since there uh i can tell you that talking to you know several of my jewish friends in europe who still live in europe as opposed to living in israel there's a difference between israelis and jews about what what that is what's and you know hence my opening comment what's vengeance what's justice what's just plain revenge and so it's it's really really tough and the comment i made about the jag ag you know i mean my boss turned to me and said you know what do you think don and i i'm the one who made the comment about it well okay which code of law would you like me to put in place um and there was no good answer and you know i said well look i've actually stood on hamer robbie's bridge uh you know so i've got a little time in country um and we're gonna have to think this through and getting whether it's a policymaker like dick holbrook or some young sergeant you know to be able to think through all of that to turn that into a normative performance standard that's that's really deeply deeply tough thank you anyone else yes ben i think what's important um to add to this discussion is the um increasing importance of international criminal law uh that's that's happened with beginning with the genocide convention in 1948 uh but then it was ignored for so long but since the 1990s uh and and uh i think increasingly but but slowly since then we do have a definition of genocide we do have definitions of crimes against humanity including extermination which i think doesn't get enough attention the definition of extermination different from genocide more easy to prove than genocide and and i think these definitions and the nature of international criminal law or sorry the the implementation of international criminal law is uh is increasing and uh so what what might be the case in uh individual cultures and various countries is different from international criminal law and and international criminal law can be applied and it might conflict with cultures of revenge or so on but but but many countries now have signed up to the genocide convention and the citizens or their leaders in particular are accountable to international criminal law no matter what their local cultural traditions might might be their their regimes are accountable to international criminal law that's that's progress i think in terms of accountability legal accountability it also undermines i think the concept or the criticism that accountability is just victor's justice uh which was you know used as a criticism of the post-war tribunals both in tokyo and nuremberg that it was somehow unfair to for the victors to impose accountability but when there is a worldwide acceptance or a more or less universal acceptance of international criminal legal uh measures like the genocide convention um then when those are applied it can't be just considered victor's justice it's it's a it's a legal measure which is determined to have either been contravened by the accused or not and so that undermines the criticism that it's just victor's justice and it also distinguishes the implementation of victor international criminal law from uh and and therefore the punishment of the perpetrators from some of the measures that sarah macintosh was talking about uh reparations for victims tracing of uh missing uh survivors and so on which are all very important uh and they're in some sense accountability but they're not related to the legal concepts of accountability which i think are increasingly universally uh accepted that the number of states that have now signed on to the genocide convention is is much greater and the number of cases that have been judged uh by international tribunals or even national tribunals uh they're starting to happen as well so i think that's all adding to the uh increasingly precise concept of accountability and not not to rule out other conceptions of non-legal accountability which are uh and and support for victims and reparations and so on that they're all important too could i um yeah uh so i would have the question of um what is international criminal law and i go back to a comment that uh dr teamy said that um you know pick your pick your poison or pick your uh law that you want to pull from um and and oh by the way uh i believe that the um united states is still not a signature on the um uh international uh or on the icc so uh when when you say international criminal law what are you referring to thank you right well that's a good point i think the united states should sign up to the international criminal court but uh it is a signatory to the genocide convention that was quite a struggle it didn't happen until i think 1988 which was 40 years after the un and and most other countries other countries have signed the genocide convention since the united states did so uh so the united states doesn't regard itself as currently subject to uh the punitive measures and judgment of the international criminal court but it does uh subscribe to the law of the genocide convention it does regard genocide as a crime uh it does uh in fact subscribe to uh the united nations implementing the genocide convention and punishing criminal violations of it so the united states is is part of the international jurisdiction of of international criminal law in terms of the genocide convention and and uh and the uh more uh pliable terms such as crimes against humanity and so on that it was a founding sponsor of the nuremberg tribunal and so on so the united states uh i think uh wouldn't be taking too too uh too much of a departure by by signing up to the international criminal court uh it it's presumably only not doing so in order to avoid uh criminal prosecutions of its own actions uh it would have a lot more credibility in its uh current protests and i think correct protests against other countries committing genocide if it was prepared to submit to international criminal scrutiny of its own actions but uh it does subscribe to the provisions of international criminal law which does exist and i think despite the differences in law for instance the cambodia tribunal did use french legal processes to uh which which apply in cambodian law to try the perpetrators of the cambodian genocides but that didn't mean a great deal of any particular injustice it was just using french law for the criminal proceedings rather than british or american law so there are different types of law but that doesn't mean that there either of them is is particularly unfair or or unjust so you can still pick your poison if you like but but that doesn't mean that there's any injustice involved and can i just add to that you know when lawyers are talking about what international criminal law is we're not just talking about treaty-based law which is what we've sort of been discussing here the rome statute is a treaty um the genocide convention is a treaty so that is one area in which the members of those treaties must comply but we're also talking about customary international law right so uh you know genocide as a crime has reached the level of customary international law such that if it's committed uh and i think the the icj is going to comment on this very soon in the case with the cambodia but you know such that if it's committed in the international community the the party committing genocide need not necessarily be a member of the genocide convention in order to hold them to account that's what customary international law is but there's also uh you know out of all of these bodies of ad hoc tribunals over the years there's been established case law of international criminal law and even the the international criminal court cites to that body of case law too so as you know as that case law continues to emerge this creates this sort of broad paradigm of what international criminal law is such that we need not only rely on treaties in order to hold perpetrators to account good point great question and great answers thank you anyone else want to chime in on that one if not there are some questions in the q and a box okay so let me read the first question by paul smith bear with me while i read it how does technology in warfare affect many of the ethical issues raised in today's discussions for example we are moving towards ai driven systems on unpersoned or unmanned systems like drones where the human role may be reduced vis-à-vis computers this may result in even more quote-unquote collateral damage impacts on innocent civilians as was described in afghanistan compared to entirely human-based decision chains anyone want to take that pauline go ahead i'll take that because this is we have been talking about technology in my just war class and so and i've also been attempting to write on ai and this is part of what's pushing me towards some kind of hybrid concept because i think um the the individual concept is especially with human machine teaming uh is going to be problematic and then the more that ai takes over what were formerly at least some of the human functions there's a whole debate about whether ai can be like morally responsible and all that kind of stuff and we don't need to go into that um but i do think like you know we are going to have to develop some kind of hybrid notion between individual and collective agency because it is no longer just going to be the case that we can trace x action back to x individual like they're going to be different people who have contributing factors or contributing elements into any given thing and there was a you know i forget what the satirical magazine or online thing was um this must have been like 10 years ago so whatever the earlier version of like the duffel block was and it was it was talking about how do you hold a predator and you know if a predator drone was unmanned right like you know and it was like imagining like trying an unmanned vehicle for war crimes right and it was sort of supposed to be satirical but i don't think we're that far off from from i mean to face these kinds of questions about you know is it you know who is responsible and that i think all the fussing and all the arguments about having a human in in the chain are an attempt to deal with that i don't think that's going to be enough to deal with that right so so i do think we need to start developing a range of notions of collective or pluralities of agency because i think it's going to be increasing my comment thank you laura sorry yeah no no i you earlier that's okay i forgot there's a raise hand feature but yeah no i i mean i i did some research on on the issue of lethal autonomous weapons systems over the past couple of years and of course you know we're not that far off from uh having well certainly having the capability but also uh using fully autonomous lethal weapons um in war very very soon and there have been you know expert groups that have been discussion discussing this within the conventional and certain conventional weapons and other other treaties that you know might prohibit the use of these things but it's the the idea of accountability and and i'm only speaking in terms of legal accountability here for my expertise but trying to pin down accountability for ai is hugely problematic right because who do you hold accountable and i think that you know what we're going to find is that there are different avenues for holding people accountable for ai that commit genocide or other mass atrocities and that might be all the way down to the developer level right if there is if there is some sort of culpability to be found there but more likely it's going to come up to the level of the state where state actors are involved with asking designer developers to design ai that can target religious ethical racial national groups for genocide or other types of human rights violations and and mass atrocities and so you know that uh you know certainly that goes up to the level of the state and then your pathways for accountability there would be for example the international court of justice issuing some kind of opinion on it but it obviously that is you know that is something that ethicists particularly military ethicists but also lawyers that are dealing with these these issues need to to grapple with because we're there if you know that this is warfare of the future thank you don i saw your hand go up and let me just mention real quick i should have mentioned it earlier sorry about that dr azim ibrahim had to leave early and that's why we don't see him in the gallery so sorry about that don go ahead no i was just going to make the comment there wasn't much ai involved in rwanda um you know so we probably need to keep our eye on the ball that that being said so i do a lot of work with ai um in my day job at the naval work college and there are a whole bunch of different issues there one of which is you know i call it rspl range speed precision lethality the rspl factors of modern weapons are starting to compress decision cycles and and here's the way you can think of it um part of the reason jfk was so upset about cuba is that by putting missiles in cuba his decision time went from probably 90 minutes to 30 months so we get the missiles out of cuba once the soviets could put subs off the virginia capes with cruise missiles in the early 80s the decision window went back down to about 30 minutes okay um with hypersonics you might be down to seven minutes okay with a space-based weapon system you might be down to 30 seconds with hyper okay and with a cyber weapon you could be down to milliseconds so if your competitor is push is accelerating the decision cycle you you've now got some ethical and moral decisions to make that are really really hard okay do i race to the top and be faster and take some risk okay or do i wait to get punched first okay and then hopefully i still have systems that work and i can punch back um so with i i don't think you have to worry about so much about ai and mass killings genocide like livens you are going to have to worry about it with collateral damage um just because people are going to be forced to make decisions fast all right and like you heard ben say you know when it's a unstructured event and you're trying to get some fire on a target okay um if for no other reason than to preserve the life of your own force if you can get some ai to help you do that faster um it's going to be really hard to ignore the siren song or something that helps you be faster and deadlier so i mean there's there's a tremendous amount to unpack here from very very precise desired effects to large-scale effects um and i thought the comment about hey you know maybe we have to go after the coders who wrote the code you know wow that that's all that's almost like my example so do we go after the whole reichmann um there's a lot to really think about there and i'm too old for this but maybe one of my children will become like you know um an ai ethics lawyer and then spend his or her career dealing with this because there's there's a whole career field open for the next deck several decades i should think excellent anyone else want to chime in on that one we do have more questions coming in okay so i'll move on to the next question it's by ryan arvizu i hope i pronounced that correctly with war crimes perpetrated by state actors and their militaries how do civil civil military relations and civilian oversight of the military affect both legal and moral accountability regarding those crimes and also how does civilian oversight of the military affect individual versus collective accountability anyone want to take that civil relations i guess um uh go ahead ben sorry i didn't see your hand go up well i was just going to say that um in the cases i discussed the leadership uh at the political civilian level uh made the decisions uh the military forces that were involved were were implementing decisions uh made uh at the civilian level and uh although uh i think they had some autonomy i think it's quite clear that the uh some of the statements in the orders given by the civilian and political leaderships were were criminal if not genocidal statements like everything that flies on everything that moves uh could be interpreted as a genocidal order and i think that the uh importance of leadership in cases of genocide should never be underestimated i think it has been sometimes in the in the cambodian case there uh perhaps this is a parallel argument to the a i argument we've just been discussing uh where some scholars have talked about the responsibility for the cambodian genocides and the mass murders that took place really being a result of the nature of cambodian society at least as it emerged from the from the war in 1975 and that two people at the top pol pot and yang siri or pol pot and new and cheer couldn't have been responsible for what happened it was more like something that grew out of the nature of of history and cambodian society and so on i think that's a vast exaggeration uh or a vast diminution of the responsibility not just of two people but of a number of people who were in leadership positions i think it's it's a pity that the tribunal in cambodia was only able to try a small number of people partly because pol pot was dead partly because the cambodian government wanted to limit the number of cases and and partly because there were a huge number of people who could have been tried and that would have made social chaos but there should have been many more people tried and there are still some cases that still could be live but the tribunal doesn't look as if it will be able to pursue them so so leadership is is is more than just a couple of people but it's it's it's much wider than that but it's usually at the political level although i would say in the cambodian case again it was a couple of military commanders the chief of the armed forces and the deputy chief were absolutely criminally involved in the in the mass murders and so there's a there's a perhaps a parallel case with with cambodia with analogizing ai with cambodian society and blaming the society for the mass murders in a similar way to what might be in the future blaming ai i think that the in the future it's going to be the political leaders who make the decisions to implement ai and weaponize it they're the ones who should be held responsible and and perhaps the ones who who authorize the the the development of such weapons as well but leadership is is the key you can't just say that the leaders were incapable in these cases and that has been said in the cambodian case and i think it's quite wrong but i was about to say you've given me the idea for another conference theme and that's genocidal leadership so thank you for that alline i saw you were going to respond as well um i'll see i thought don had his hand up so i'm happy to see to don if you want to jump okay sure don well i was just going to give a real world example where um when we planted the invasion of iraq initially there was to be no debathification and then when bremer came general order number one was no booze which yeah that's really good from morale um but then general order number two was you know now commence massive debathification and so we were really caught off the back foot as planners so part of what we did is we started using biometrics and it never occurred to me until right now listening to this discussion the fact that we could biometric people and put them into massive databases and then use ai to troll those databases and then start running missions based on what we thought we knew from the ai scrub of those databases it's not exactly blade runner but you can see where a policy change reinforced by certain kinds of you know deep data diving and technology can really change the way things actually get done so i don't i don't have a real good answer but i'm i'm very thankful that all of you just made me think about how we did this um and part of it was done probably faster than we would have liked because there was such a radical departure from what had been approved as the strategy and the campaign plan for going into country so um yeah again there's just a whole lot to really think through what is ai you've got narrow ai you've got general ai you've got hmt i mean there's just a whole bunch of different things that come into this um that are really interesting to consider uh and will probably keep me awake for at least the next couple of nights as i try to tease this out thank you anyone else want to chime in on that one okay i'll read the next question it's from andrea cameron how do you think climate change and climate related migration will connect with the potential for genocide and holding people accountable for genocide okay go ahead laura okay so yeah i mean i think this is um certainly a driver of genocides that are you know happening in this decade and in the future um looking at yemen just as an example uh there was water scarcity before the war even broke out when you have countries that are already um in situations where they have a lack of natural resources water food um and other things that are driven by climate change um you already have the the preconditions for uh for ethnic conflicts uh as well as other types of human rights violations um in turn to where people are effectively um competing for those resources so i think that you know the more that climate change begins to drastically change the ways in which people are living the greater chances we're going to see for for genocide and ethnic cleansing and other types of of mass atrocities of that type thank you holly um yeah i agree with with all that i think some of it's going to be resources but i also um think that to the degree climate change is going to precipitate certain kinds of crises like flooding or or something like that fires that kind of thing so you have that piece but i also think you know andre did mention you know climate rooted climate change based migration so as migration patterns change um or as there's pressure put on those natural resources i mean i think that will precipitate and i think i mean i know a lot of the discussion has been around state actors right i'm i'm a lot more worried about non-state actors who may be alive with some state actors or who may be used by the state actors so the state actors have uh plausible uh plausible deniability say oh what we didn't have to do you know is this crazy like that crazy group and you know we don't control them i think there's a lot more potential for those kinds of groups to make mischief and to cause crises or have climate change like precipitate events that then can be used especially with vulnerable groups where the vulnerable group is used as a scapegoat and this is something that we've seen in lots of historical contexts where there actually is a legitimate crisis but what happens is that a particular group is made uh the scapegoat for that right and so people are looking for someone to blame they're looking for a vulnerable group perhaps to take their land or uh to move them off the land or to uh restrict their rights to certain kinds of things i mean even in our own country the conflicts with with natives and first peoples right and and and rights to water and rights to forests and all those kinds of things i think those kinds of conflicts are going to create the backdrop for lots of uh mischief and especially mischief related to what laura was talking about mischief related to food and food insecurity and water because those are super basic things that people have to have and so and we we saw this you know in places like you know somalia and we see in yemen where different actors aren't stupid and they know that that's a lever right they know that that's a route to power or that's a route to control and so of course they're going to try to you know make mischief in the midst of a famine or a flood or some kind of you know humanitarian um you know crisis i mean we see what happens even in our own country when you have a massive hurricane in louisian or wherever a massive snowstorm and and and that's challenging enough in our own context much less in context where you know the deprivation could be much more immediate and much more catastrophic so yeah i think that's a real danger i think um our students you know and all of us should be thinking about that as a that's a strategic question right so we need to be thinking about how we're constructing our strategy and our national policies to think about those kinds of questions i'm a big fan of stoic pre rehearsal like um when they happen super bad time to be thinking about it like we need to be thinking about it now absolutely i do remember not long ago that when isis in iraq was threatening to bomb dams there and that was uh everyone was kind of you know on the edge of their seat about is this going to happen or not who's going to be able to control this who's going to be able to prevent it so i'm also very worried about non-state actors ben i saw your hand up yes i think that this has all been very well put by the the three of you um we're talking about causes of genocide or causes of mass murder and i find it helpful to talk about the difference between long-term causes and immediate causes what you've been talking about the long-term causes and the question was talking about the connection between the long-term causes and the immediate causes causes like climate change or climate disasters and poverty war political instability or economic crisis the the long-term causes of genocide but the immediate causes are still required in order to to start the genocide to spark it and those immediate causes are the sorts of groups which correctly are could be state or non-state groups that that have certain proclivities that want to actually give the orders to their followers to start a genocide to make use of these long-term causes to to profit from them and recruit supporters and launch a genocidal campaign and so what we have to look out for in advance of these developments is groups that have ethnic conflict in their in their makeup that want to create an ethnic conflict out of out of a climate crisis or or out of a political crisis or a poverty situation that drives people to look for other solutions and they want they want to invent so you're looking for groups that either or usually all have all four of these categories characteristics the racist territorially expansionist have a view of a long lost past that they want to recreate what I call a cult of antiquity and that's usually an agrarian past it's not it's an anti-modern view that that focuses on recreating an ideal agrarian society even in some cases like ISIS they want to go back to the 12th century vision of what they thought a muslim society should be and so if you find groups insurgent groups or others that that want that have all these characteristics or even just three or two of the four of them they need to be to be watched especially if they can capitalize on the long-term causes of genocide that that might appear thank you anyone else on this topic I do not know of anyone in particular who would like to speak but we are we have gone through all of the questions that came in in the q&a box which means I can ask you more questions so there is one thing along the track of the the discussion on non-state actors there are a lot of atrocities by organized criminal networks including drug cartels and other non-state actors like ISIS Al Qaeda Taliban who are now becoming state actor and a whole host of others that can be considered non-state actors and or terrorist organizations how do you see or do you see any means of bringing them to account particularly for things like what drug cartels in Mexico for example have done they they have rendered many countless civilians disappeared or killed outright tortured all kinds of crimes against humanity at the hands of drug cartels but also other organized criminal networks and non-state actor groups so tell let's talk about a little bit about that that aspect of accountability and whether or not it's something governments and legal frameworks should be pursuing more aggressively or are we so far behind in even just bringing state actors into the fold of accountability that that's something long-term what are your thoughts on that who wants to tackle that go ahead Laura so I think I mean I think there already are some options for holding members of drug cartels accountable like for example within the inter-american court of human rights and the convention on human rights certainly enforced disappearances fall under the declaration of the rights of man and similar treaties and violations of customary international law can be brought in the American inter-american court but also you know matters related to human rights violations against migrants coming into Europe same thing with the European Court of Human Rights so I think that there are mechanisms there for it and you know those but we we have to continue to actually support these these bodies right because so for example the United States and Venezuela interestingly enough don't want to be a part of the inter-american court and convention on human rights for reasons you know your guess is as good as mine so you know it does it does take support particularly by superpowers who like the United States that would have a lot to lose if they were to subject themselves to to international criminal courts to actually stand up and support those mechanisms not just for other countries or other state actors non-state actors etc but even for themselves that's the first thing another thing is that we so when you think about the genocide convention and the Geneva conventions and all of these other treaty-based sources of law when they were written they were directed towards state actors they were not directed towards non-state actors and so there has been some discussion about this particularly among the UN special advisor on the right to life Philip Alston and others to talk about how we might amend those treaties those sources of law to be able to account for non-state actors like ISIS and making sure that we can hold them to account as well so there has to be you know those types of collective movements to to progress the law and into the century we're in instead of you know looking back to the things the way things were in 1948. Thank you Laura anyone else any questions you want to ask each other if not I will bring the conference to the to close I know it's been a long day and you all have been very patient and also thank you for your participation and earlier we had Dr. Azim Ibrahim want to thank him and acknowledge him as well as Sarah McIntosh and also the admiral for taking the time in her very busy schedule for recording the opening remarks and we look forward to next year's fifth annual genocide conference I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your hard work and the time you've put into this for making this a very successful conference and I look forward to seeing you again hopefully down the road in future participation in future conferences I also want to thank a general poster from the bottom of my heart again for agreeing to do a more live opening remarks for us so thank you and we're very very appreciative so with that let me bring this to a close and remind everyone that this has been recorded and I will send out the link of the recording when it's prepared it's going to take a few days so please be patient on that and thank you again please keep going with your hard work on this very very important topic and I'll very likely tap you again next year all right so thank you have a wonderful weekend and hopefully see you next year goodbye everyone