Monday, April 18, 2005

Why the Geneva Conventions matter.

Freeman Dyson, reviewing Max Hastings's Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 in The New York Review of Books (April 28, 2005) (subscribers-only link here):

The history of World War II teaches us . . . the immense importance of the Geneva Conventions on humane treatment of prisoners in mitigating the human costs of war. All through Hastings's narrative, we see a stark contrast between two kinds of war, the war in the West following the Geneva rules and the war in the East fought without rules. A large number of witnesses of the western war, German as well as British and American, owe their lives to the Geneva conventions. In the western war, soldiers fought as long as fighting made sense, and surrendered when fighting did not make sense, with a good chance of being treated decently as prisoners of war. Many of the prisoners on both sides were killed in the heat of battle before reaching prison camps, but most of them survived. Those who reached prison camps were treated in a civilized fashion, with some supervision by delegates of the International Red Cross. They were neither starved nor tortured.

At the same time, on the eastern side of the war, brutality was the rule and the International Red Cross had no voice. Civilians were routinely raped and murdered, and prisoners of war were starved. Soldiers were expected to fight to the death, and most of them did, since they had litle hope of survival as prisoners. It is not possible to calculate the numbers of lives saved in the West and lost in the East by following and not following the Geneva rules. The numbers certainly amount to hundreds of thousands in the West and millions in the East.
Dyson concludes, "Americans who are trying today to weaken or evade the Geneva rules are acting shortsightedly as well as immorally." (For more about Dyson, see this and this.)

The war in the Pacific had much the same character as the fighting in Eastern Europe, though we Americans like to attribute the savagery to the Japanese. John Dower's War Without Mercy is sustained treatment of this topic (and one I recommend enthusiastically); a short glimpse comes in this San Francisco Chronicle obituary for Hugh F. Harnsberger, a WWII veteran who passed away earlier this month:

Mr. Harnsberger landed on Iwo Jima on the Pacific island's D-Day, Feb. 19, 1945. In his effort find some code books, Mr. Harnsberger joined up with front line companies in the 5th Marine Division, showing Marines a sample Japanese code and telling them, "If you guys find any weird stuff that looks like this sample, please get it to me."

"But even with their help," he wrote in his diary, "I never found any Japanese code materials! Nothing! No code messages, no codebooks, no code machines." One morning, after he had spent a month at this fruitless effort, Mr. Harnsberger was ordered to help interrogate a Japanese prisoner.

The prisoner kept saying, "I don't know" when asked by the U.S. company commander about the positions of Japanese army units. Finally, the exasperated captain told Mr. Harnsberger, "He is worthless. He is yours."

Mr. Harnsberger was told to check the prisoner in at battalion headquarters. During their walk, they became acquainted. When Mr. Harnsberger asked him, "what did you do in the Japanese army," the man said, "I ran the code room of the Japanese Army headquarters on Iwo Jima."

From then on, because no one else appeared willing to be responsible, Mr. Harnsberger took over the care and feeding of the young man, enlisting him, one day, to help Mr. Harnsberger coax some Japanese soldiers from a tunnel.

Shouting deep into the tunnel that U.S. forces would "repatriate you to your homeland in Japan as soon as this war is over," Mr. Harnsberger wrote, "I said over and over, 'We do not kill prisoners!' I can still remember how unsure I was in saying that, for I had observed several times Japanese being shot when they attempted to surrender. Iwo Jima was very close to a 'take-no- prisoners battle.' "

Sitting next to him, the Japanese code expert was equally cajoling, imploring his comrades, "The U.S. lieutenant (Mr. Harnsberger) tells the truth! He saved my life! And he can save yours!"

When the nine soldiers eventually emerged, "the U.S. Marines shot them all dead immediately...", Mr. Harnsberger wrote in his diary.

Eventually, he added, "the Japanese code-POW and I became friends." Mr. Harnsberger, in an effort to keep his POW alive, brought him back to 5th Marine Division headquarters and convinced the colonel that he had a highly valuable prisoner with him. The Navy flew the POW to Hawaii for interrogation and Mr. Harnsberger lost contact with him.

It's not clear that Harnsberger scored an intel coup, but he did succeed in keeping his prisoner alive, a small good thing..

Comments:
You would not expect that having a reputation for observing Geneva would help your soldiers or citizens against opponents who exclusively use suicide attacks and have no immediate aim but to kill you. The administration's line is that they are fighting that kind of war and that they're only abusing the people they capture because they're not dressed in GI Joe uniforms and so they don't qualify for GC protections. I suppose they're hoping that by repeating this line over and over on international TV the people who dress like GI Joe and carry guns for other countries will believe it and such that the precedent the administrating is setting will stimulate no desire for payback when they form their phalanxes to fight us conventionally. Perhaps they also believe the US will never fight such a conventional war again and have a hunch that all the non-uniformed folks in the world with access to weapons and training all hate us enough already that we can't hurt ourselves to piss them off more. These beliefs may be naive and/or flawed in a zillion different ways, but the Dyson excerpt and the obit don't really attack or undermine it. Not that they weren't interesting reads.
 
You can think that Geneva is a good thing and will save lives, even if it's not going to save the lives of people caught by insurgents in Iraq. Insurgents generally are less likely to take prisoners -- they lack the resources to deal with them properly, and they see collateral benefits to brutality. I think Dyson is trying to take a broader perspective, as befits his stature.
 
Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]





<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Subscribe to Posts [Atom]