Conference on World Affairs

Panel 2304 - Noncombatants and the Fallout of War
University of Colorado at Boulder | Boulder, Colorado, USA April 11, 2006

        Summary of remarks made by Jacob Gelt Dekker:

• Collateral damage under noncombatants is often regretted as if it were an unfortunate but necessary side effect of a holy task.
   

• Too bad. We are very sorry. We will pray for you. Good luck to you and God bless.
   

• At war news briefs, officers tell us that with modern precision weapons, laser guided bombs and missiles, civilian casualties will be limited to an absolute minimum. Nevertheless, fallout reports and damage assessments often show that immediate collateral destruction is enormous and far greater that anticipated.
   

• My claim of this presentation is:
  Collateral noncombatant damage easily takes two generations and often far exceeds damage of the target hit.
  
  A strong example:

• Rinderpest, taken from Yemen to Abyssinia by invading Italian troops in the late 1890?s, eventually killed over 100 million civilians all over Africa in the next 30 years.
   

• Rather than boring you with statistics and damage impact evaluation reports, let me illustrate my statement with observations of a few weeks ago in Cambodia.
   

• In the middle seventies, towards the end of the Vietnam War, US bombers raided targets in Laos, in order to sever supply lines to the Vietcong. The border areas of Laos with Cambodia, Cambodia with Vietnam and the Mekong delta were showered with 285 million cluster bombs, according to the Pentagon.
   

• As collateral damage, Cambodian rice fields went up in smoke and with it the livelihood of thousands of rice farmers, who already lived an extremely fragile balance between survival and starvation. Rice farmers in Cambodia may make as much as US$200 per year, with extremely hard work and with the help of their entire extended family.
   

• In 1976, Pol Pot, a Stalinist-communist extremist, manipulated the fury of the farmers in his favor. Pol Pot was much, like Deng Xiao Ping, a product of European communism as practiced, for instance, in the Renault car factories of France - the colonial motherland of Cambodia in those days - where many Asian elite youth received their training.
   

• Soon tens of thousand of farmers marched on the capital, Phnom Pen. Pol Pot's new regime, the Khmer Rouge, revenged the demise of the rice farmers on all intellectuals and, eventually, on all those who could read and write or wore glasses.
   

• Pol Pot's gang of children, mostly adolescent boys, armed with no more than kitchen knives, executed the unimaginable task of decapitating three million people, "three million cockroaches", as the regime branded the victims in a dehumanizing effort.
   

• I spoke with a few of the "executioners". They told me that their frustration was not from killing the cockroaches, the enemy, but Pol Pot's strict rules that forbade them to use the prisoners for sexual purposes, since they were young and full of lust. Fear of being killed for trespassing the rules, sexual frustration and long working hours in the shifts of the killing fields, led the boys to commit unimaginable cruelties, in the most matter-of-fact, every day manner.
   

• China experienced very much the same during its Cultural Revolution in the late 60's and early 70's. Officially, 55 million people were eliminated, resulting in a slow-down of economic development. Still today, China is one of the poorest countries in the world.
   

• The world was aware of all these genocidal atrocities but did not want to know. Today, we are aware of the Hutu-Tutsi genocide, Sudan atrocities, Chechnya and many more, but nothing is done to stop it.
   

• After nearly ten years, the Hutu-Tutsi Tribunal in Arusha dealt with less than 50 murderers.
   

• In Cambodia, nobody was ever charged. It was Vietnam that ended the genocidal Pol Pot regime. Today, thirty years later, Cambodia still has a distinctive generation gap of all those victims who would have been 50-60 year old today; a group of intellectuals and experienced workers who could have formed the backbone of the economy with middle and top management.
   

• Noncombatant collateral damage of a few misguided bombs in the US-Vietnam war is still crippling a country today, thirty years later.
   

• It is like a butterfly that flaps its wings on one side of the world and therewith creates a hurricane on the other side.
   

• That hurricane is now on the steps of our front door in the form of desperation and what we call "terrorism". As long as we, in the Western World, here in the USA, prefer to live in oblivion and spend a hundred dollars on a round of golf rather than feeding the hungry, we will live with increasing threats to our existence.
   

• Responsibility and accountability do not end with a damage assessment press conference. It will be with you for generations.
  
  Thank you.

Conference on World Affairs

Panel 3202 - Philosophies of Peace and Just War
University of Colorado at Boulder | Boulder, Colorado, USA April 12, 2006

      Summary of remarks made by Jacob Gelt Dekker:

• Our finest hour, said Winston Churchill battling Nazi Germany.
  Our finest hour, said the 9/11 bombers flying into the World Trade Center towers.
  Today, in millions of Muslim living rooms, one can refer the portraits of the 9/11 heroes in the highest place of honor.
   

• Churchill believed that he was fighting a just war. 9/11 bombers believed that they were fighting a holy war, a fatwa, a just war.
   

• For the sake of this discussion, the definitions first.
   

• 1. War is an armed conflict between two or more parties, mostly nations. I am aware of many more definitions but for this discussion I limit myself to this one.
  2. Just war, Jus Bellum, deals with the justification of how and why wars are fought. It is ethically justifying war.
   

• Aquinas and his Scholastics in the 15th century, Erasmus and Grotius in the 16th, and the West Falen Peace Conference of 1648 in Munster, set the parameters for ethics of war in the Western world.
   

• It only stood up between countries that sooner or later had to meet each other again and work together, not between totally different cultures.
   

• Osama bin Laden, as a fundamentalist, justified his war with the Koran. Bush used the justification of weapons of mass destruction, WMD and so frequently that many of us started to believe that WMD was the only word in his vocabulary.
   

• In Europe hundreds of wars were fought, always with the blessing of the Biblical God on the winning side.
   

• In my opinion, whether Koran or Bible is quoted, one god or another, theories of justification of war are and remain a pee-ing contest.
   

• There is no justification for any war, ever! After you have seen the horrors of war, the collateral damage, the refugee camps, the destruction and the dead, I am sure everybody will agree with me.
   

• 3. Jus Ad Bellem , defines the rules of engagement. When parties kill each other, it should be done according to the rules of the game. The Conventions of Geneva en The Hague deal with rules.
   

• If parties decide to torture, they are allowed to break a prisoner?s nose but when they cut off his penis, a war crime is committed. The War tribunal in The Hague can summon a person, like Milosevic for his crimes in Yugoslavia, or the war tribunal of Arusha, that is trying to rule in the Hutu-Tutsi genocide case of 3 million dead.
   

• Last but not least: Jus in Bello , more or less proportional response of forces. When a person is punished for a traffic violation, it would be disproportional to throw a nuclear device in his back yard. The same goes for armed response in case of a conflict. It should be proportional.
   

• I like to concentrate our discussion on Jus Bellum. No Jus Bellum exists . We set up International Institutions to deal with all aspects of war, as stated in the definition of war. I repeat the definition:
  - War is an armed conflict between two or more parties, mostly nations.
   

• Arms: For decennia disarmament discussions around the world have been very productive. Reagan and Gorbachev were heading for the zero nuclear option. Unfortunately, your present US- president totally neglects all disarmament talks.
   

• Conflict : The League of Nations, Volker Bund, later, the United Nations was set up as an international conflict resolution institute. Also this institute is being neglected by the present US president.
   

• Two or more parties : With the formation of blocks of allies, the NATO, the former-Warsaw pact, and later, the EU etc. the number of parties has been reduced. Conflicts within a block of allies cannot be solved with arms. That option does not exist between allies. Unfortunately, also here, the present USA government is neglecting internationally recognized institutions.
   

• The theory or the philosophy that formed the motive power, the drive of the US over the centuries was (Pragmatism), as defined by philosophers James, Dewey and many more. Bluntly stated it means that:
   

• The truth is that, what is good for us.
   

• So justifications of war has become very opportunistic; one day it is transshipment through the Suez canal, the next day the Panama canal, and today it is oil.
   

• US-Ambassador for Kuwait, His Excellency Lebaron just informed us that oil was not the motive for Desert Storm, neither for the Afghan nor the Iraq wars. Many of you do not believe his words. Distortion of facts in the Iraq war, the lies coming out of Washington DC and the media are overwhelming. It reminds me of the Jesuit motto: The goal justifies all means.
   

• To mention a few : Weapons of mass destruction; Iraq aids Al Qaeda; 2,500 US- casualties, but never any mention of the 85,000 dead Iraqi civilians, not to mention the hundreds of thousands wounded, maimed and unsettled for the rest of their lives.
   

• Pragmatism, our unquenchable thirst for oil does not justify the killing fields of Iraq or killing fields in any other part of the world, ever!
  
  Thank you