Human Rights and War Through Civilian Eyes. Thomas W. Smith

the Holocaust. New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks’s stunning images of four boys killed by an Israeli airstrike while they played on a beach in Gaza prompted one of the IDF’s few formal investigations into the conduct of the war. Some images, such as the Abu Ghraib jpegs, reflect the naïve gaze of the tourist-as-torturer. Others are deliberately composed to create “witnessing publics”—not passive onlookers but responsible, implicated viewers forced to take a moral stand (Torchin 2006). Sharon Sliwinski’s description of Francisco de Goya’s harrowing etchings of the Napoleonic wars in Spain, “The Disasters of War” (1810–1815), could easily apply to many recent images from Bosnia, Darfur, or Iraq:

      Spectators are positioned to gaze upon these terrors from the viewpoint of a bystander. Each composition is carefully arranged as a fragile bridge between the spectator’s perspective and the events occurring in the picture. The sense of proximity transforms the viewer into a witness … spectators are called into these scenes, summoned to face these terrible events as if they were present. (Sliwinski 2011:51)

      This kind of image politics is central to the promotion of human rights. Pictures put a face on abuses, often training attention on individuals in a sea of suffering. Advocacy campaigns increasingly use locally sourced content remixed with global ideas. “See it, film it, change it” is the mantra of the Witness Project, whose “Cameras Everywhere” initiative sought to put movie cameras in the hands of people in the midst of conflicts.

      This democratization of access and exposure has unsettled what had been the carefully managed visual landscape of war (L. Kennedy 2009). During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland decried the unfiltered television coverage of the first living-room war. “Without censorship,” he said, “things can get terribly confused in the public mind” (quoted in Tsouras 2005:65). When the Abu Ghraib story broke in a flurry of digital photographs, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lamented the difficulties of operating “in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photos” (quoted in L. Kennedy 2009:817). Rumsfeld was worried that the Abu Ghraib pictures were being circulated in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war against “insults and public curiosity.” But he was also watching the official narrative of the war slip away. It was impossible to reconcile a “humanitarian” war with photos of prisoners being humiliated and tortured by American M.P.s. (who are mugging it up for the camera). The pictures revealed what is usually unseen and unknown in wartime: the interior environments of detention centers, interrogation rooms, and prison cells, as well as the tools of torture—leashes, black hoods, dogs, chemical light tubes, broomsticks, electrical wire. Glimpses of the banality of abuse in situ made systematic torture seem all the more plausible (Whitty 2010:696).

      Cameras are everywhere in today’s wars. Overhead, drones, satellites, and remote sensing reveal panoramic effects of conflicts. This “human rights mapping” has identified artillery placed in civilian zones, mass executions and grave sites, homes targeted based on the ethnicity of the inhabitants, political prison camps, the removal of civilian populations, and the destruction of villages (Marx and Goward 2013). The UN monitors humanitarian crises via its proprietary UNOSAT satellite system, sometimes publishing images of events as they unfold—of civilian convoys fleeing Chad’s war-riven capital N’Djamena in February 2008, or of pockmarked fields where the Sri Lankan Air Force bombed a civilian “safe haven” in spring 2009. The technological capabilities of NGOs to remotely monitor conflicts now outstrip the capacity of many state governments. Amnesty International’s “Eyes on Darfur” project shows before-and-after satellite photographs of villages burned and depopulated by the Janjaweed. Working with experts from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Amnesty has used similar geospatial technologies to convey displacement and destruction in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, in Kyrgyzstan, New Orleans, Sri Lanka, Chad, Georgia, Lebanon, Burma, Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Syria, and Burundi.

      Images from the front line convey the day-to-day reality of war, the visceral as well as the mundane. These are YouTube wars (N. Cohen 2010). Soldiers upload combat videos to the web; e-mail souvenir jpegs to friends; tweet from the war zone; or post text and image on “milblogs.” Much of this content humanizes military experience, showing the decidedly anti-heroic life of the enlisted man or woman. But other images show spectacular levels of violence. One clip filmed by U.S. ground troops in Iraq showed two airstrikes on a large, apparently new, mosque that possibly had been used by insurgents as a firing position or a weapons cache—the video gives no context. The first missile flattens the main body of the mosque; the second explodes the minaret. A billow of dust lifts, and nothing but rubble remains. The ground soldiers seem awestruck. “Bad-aaaaas. That was sweeeeeet,” says one.²⁴

      With this much information in play, media management teams can’t be far behind. Belligerents marshal evidence and tailor information much like public relations firms. In 2007 the U.S. Department of Defense launched its own YouTube channel, MNFIRAQ (Multi-National Force—Iraq) (“the clips are ours, the conclusions are yours”). The site offered what it called a “boots on the ground perspective on the war,” but the propagandist’s hand is also evident in the selective focus on American soldiers engaging in clean combat and aiding local Iraqis (Andén-Papadopoulos 2009:923). At the low end, combatants organize on Facebook and proselytize on Twitter. With barriers to entry virtually nil, it’s a rare insurgent movement that doesn’t have a web site. Heightened visibility has increased the propaganda value of the other side’s targeting errors or collateral damage. Davids fighting Goliaths often seem perfectly willing to draw their brothers and sisters into the fight in hopes of making them, willing or not, front-page martyrs for the cause (Skerker 2004).

      During the Gaza Wars, Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) waged breaking-news media offenses. Both sides plied the internet with blogs, You-Tube, and Facebook. An IDF “vlog,” or video blog, provided a running narrative of Israeli restraint and precision in contrast to Hamas’s reckless and deliberate endangerment of civilians on both sides of the conflict. In one clip, a Hamas fighter, gun slung over his shoulder, dashes across a street carrying a young boy as a shield against Israeli snipers.²⁵ In another, unexpectedly gruesome, YouTube skirmish, the IDF and Hamas accused each other of deliberately slaughtering animals in the Gaza Zoo: animal rights meet modern warfare.

      Very different sorts of images are found on the so-called “war porn” websites. Billed as an unedited look at war, the sites feature soldiers’ photographs of severed arms, legs, or fingers, spilled intestines, or decapitated heads (“headshots,” in the posting lingo), often accompanied by crude or flippant remarks (“name this body part”; “that’s gotta hurt!”) as well as technical chat about what kind of weapon likely caused the damage depicted. This is the digital flotsam of today’s wars. But many soldiers who post pictures or contribute comments say the images force viewers to reckon with the true costs of war; that they’re a corrective to conventional media coverage that sanitizes war as a matter of decency and taste. “Maybe then the public will not be so rah-rah about killing people,” noted a user named “some more gore from the Q” (quoted in Andén-Papadopoulos 2009:924).

      Of course, information and images of this sort are easy to manipulate. Iconic photographs mislead by abstraction and saturation. Some images go viral while others languish. Information activism has its moral hazards, too. Susan Sontag (2003) reminds us that a barrage of war images can be overwhelming and paralyzing. The privacy and safety of those uploading pictures can be put at risk (images and audio leave digital traces that can be used to identify the originator). Spin is endemic. While information broadcast by human rights groups usually adheres to certain standards of proof, user-generated and edited content usually doesn’t. Images are often shorn of context. Truth can dissolve in a mash-up of borrowed jpegs and bad information. On the user end, shallow “clicktivism” can replace meaningful study and engagement (Witness 2011; Carpenter 2012).

      Greater transparency won’t of itself lead to greater accountability or better human rights outcomes. But the ubiquity of new media makes it more likely that the truth will out and that we will have a more detailed and less curated grasp on the reality of war. WikiLeaks was able to obtain, decrypt, and post on YouTube a 38-minute audio-video clip filmed from the turret of a U.S. Apache helicopter that showed the killing in July 2007 in