(81).
Everyone is scared all the time. When we’re sitting together to have a meeting, we’re scared there might be a strike. When you can hear the drone circling in the sky, you think it might strike you. We’re always scared. We always have this fear in our head. (81)
Drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are there. (83–84)
When [children] hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they’re always fearful that the drone is going to attack them.… Because of the noise, we’re psychologically disturbed—women, men, and children.… Twenty-four hours, [a] person is in stress and there is pain in his head. (86–87)
Our minds have been diverted from studying. We cannot learn things because we are always in fear of the drones hovering over us, and it really scares the small kids who go to school. (90)
Amnesty International’s interviews with survivors of nine separate drone strikes in North Waziristan also highlighted these psychological impacts. “Children have lost their mental balance, they are afraid all the time,” said a resident of the village of Zowi Sidgi, a transit point a few miles from the Afghan border, where eighteen men were killed and at least twenty-two wounded in a drone strike in July 2012 (Amnesty International 2013:33). On October 24, 2012, in Ghundi Kala, a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Mamana Bibi was picking okra in the family field when she was blown to pieces by two Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. drone aircraft. A second strike followed several minutes later. The aircraft had hovered over the farm for perhaps two hours before unleashing the missiles: not exactly the fog of war. From the perspective of the villagers, the killing was completely arbitrary. “I wasn’t scared of drones before,” said the woman’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Nabeela, “but now when they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?” (Amnesty International 2013:7).
Terrified children, sleep disorders, traumatic stress, lives arbitrarily snatched away, residents paralyzed by fear: whether the drone strikes were legal or not is almost beside the point. A witness to the killings in Zowi Sidgi pleaded, “At least for the sake of human rights they should stop these drone strikes” (Amnesty International 2013:56).
Rights serve as a touchstone for what is right and wrong amid the turmoil. For its People on War Report the ICRC commissioned a survey of 13,000 combatants and civilians across 12 war-torn regions. The norms cited by the respondents centered around notions of human rights, “humanness,” and “staying human.” Certain kinds of conduct were wrong because they violated human rights and human dignity. Overall, 49 percent based their judgment on rights, by far the most common reason cited. Soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina referred to “a human rule … basically, human dignity is a stronger rule than any written one.” “I know prisoners should be treated as human beings and not as animals”; “God forbid! I think that we’re not on the level of such savages”; and “one of the battles we fought in this war was a battle to stay human.” In Lebanon, respondents said war brought out “animal instincts,” “which meant no respect for human rights” (ICRC 2000:14–15).
In the recent wars in Chechnya, human rights practices became “one of the only ways to recover the dignity Chechens had been so crudely deprived of.” Lawyers in Moscow or London publicized abuses and helped victims petition the courts. But ultimately these were the Chechens’ own claims. Documenting human rights abuses became “an organizing principle around which fears, anger, and disillusionment could coalesce and find new direction in a search for authenticity and truth” (Gilligan 2010:162). During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), violence and displacement shattered many traditional social arrangements based on religion and patrimonial ties. A kind of creole, or localized rendering of universal right, took their place. This was especially true with regard to the just and fair treatment of “strangers,” that is, people who had been displaced from the chiefdom of their birth, such as traders, migrant workers, or refugees.23 In Pakistan, many victims of drone strikes have filed lawsuits against government officials for failing to protect their rights as citizens, including the right not be assassinated by a foreign government (Shah 2014). In Nepal, where civilians were squeezed between extortionist Maoists and heavy-handed government forces, public discontent has been channeled into a regenerative social movement led by a human rights clearinghouse known as the Informal Sector Service Center.
More surprising, human rights norms can transform the identity and interests of combatants. Rights become part of the normative culture in which belligerents think and act. As the reputation, or “audience,” costs of violating rights rise, it becomes clear that military attitudes and practices are not completely dyed in the wool of Realpolitik. As researchers have shown in the case of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (1997), for example, human rights and other civil society actors can mobilize to reverse basic military practices (Price 1998). Security communities can undergo similar transformations. In recent years, middle powers such as Canada and Australia have emerged as arbiters of humanitarian norms; that identity has infused their foreign and military policies. Although it struggled to square ends and means during its high-flying intervention in Libya or on the ground in Afghanistan, even NATO has arguably reinvented itself as a champion of civilian protections.
Normative and pragmatic motivations can also converge on rights. For much of the Iraq War, e.g., the coalition struggled to achieve military goals and protect civilians. In Afghanistan, however, civilian security was at the core of the mission. “What are we here for?,” Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan at the time, shouted to his troops in the run-up to the Marja offensive in February 2010. “The people,” the marines yelled (de Montesquiou and Riechmann 2010). This was not just parade ground zeal, but studied doctrine that protecting Afghan civilians from Taliban tyranny as well as from American bombs was the way to win. The quest to protect civilians and ostracize insurgents arguably led straight down the path of human rights—not just security and subsistence rights, but the civil and political rights of Afghans to order their own affairs. Some Pentagon brass sounded like evangelists for the Rights of Man, framing the war on terror as “a historic debate about the rule of law and human rights,” as a U.S. marine reserve general put it (Serwer 2009).
This isn’t to say that militaries don’t push back. They do, sometimes ferociously. For institutions schooled in humanitarian law, the turn to human rights is not obvious. As we will see in the next chapter, states often cry foul, saying the turn to rights constitutes “lawfare,” or legal overreach. Indeed, violations of human rights can become the norm. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a number of signatories to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights adopted repressive anti-terror policies or rebranded ongoing counterinsurgencies as more aggressive counter-terror operations (Darcy and Collinson 2009:6; International Commission of Jurists 2009). Still, while human rights may struggle for recognition, no serious discussion ignores them altogether. Even if states can legally derogate from certain of their human rights obligations in wartime, they can’t escape the residual effect of rights. There’s no covering up how people should be treated.
Human Rights and New Media
There’s no covering up the abuses either. The civilian is a cause tailor-made for the media age. During the Vietnam War, U.S. Army combat photographer Ronald Haeberle published his iconic photographs of the My Lai massacre 20 months after the killings. Released over the Pentagon’s objections, the pictures—of women pleading for their lives, and of the contorted bodies of villagers, some belonging to infants, jumbled together on a dirt levee—first appeared in grainy black and white on the front page of Haeberle’s home town newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Today, digital images of atrocities circle the planet in seconds. A surge of visuality and viral outrage has been dubbed the “Neda effect,” after Neda Agha-Soltan, a twenty-six-year-old student who was
