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1 | Who Dies in Armed Conflicts?
- University of Michigan Press
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1 | Who Dies in Armed Conflicts? From the militaristic perspective, the realities of armed con›ict are often invoked to explain the civilian devastation that so often sadly results. Civilian fatalities are seen as routine, unavoidable, and in most cases excusable . For military commanders, the inevitability of civilian devastation is incontestable, and its scope is as broad as the battle‹eld. Purely by virtue of their physical location, hapless civilians become part of the landscape of war, objects embedded in the ground of combat. And once the dogs of war are unleashed, no human agent can prevent the ensuing havoc wrought upon whatever objects (human or otherwise) lie in their path. But there is another angle to the argument of proximity. Trained soldiers typically specialize in speci‹c tasks, which are in and of themselves remote from the overall effects of the larger military force—links on a chain. And when effects of technical acts are unseen to the soldier, the moral tests are easily met or simply ignored. It is easier to deal death when it can be done at a distance. How many civilians die in armed con›ict generally? How many die in the aftermath of the ‹ghting? And what is the proportion of civilian fatalities to those of combatants? These questions are rarely addressed by academic researchers and almost never examined by military commanders . A vast majority of academic studies on war understate the plight of civilians in armed con›ict, overstate the centrality of martial forces to the essence of con›ict, and as a consequence sustain the militaristic perspective. We believe that this inattention fosters a narrow vision of war’s devastation. There is simply no way, as moral beings, we can attempt to understand the nature of human con›ict without addressing, 15 in a rigorous and scholarly manner, the role of and impact on all of the participants of violent con›ict. Our contribution to the subject matter is primarily explanatory. We seek to explain civilian devastation through the kind of social-psychological positioning that encompasses characterizations of both the militant Other and the nonmilitant (or noncombatant) Other. The discovery of the speci‹c roots of con›ict affect our understanding of why civilian fatalities occur in such numbers. What factors lie in the basis of the con›ict dynamics? How do these factors in›uence the transformation of civilians from innocent citizens to collateral damage? The Reality of Combat In virtually all large-scale violent con›icts, civilians suffer most. Whether by rape, extreme poverty, displacement, or mass murder, civilians—more so than soldiers—pay a catastrophic price for the goals of opposing forces. The twentieth century has witnessed the willful destruction of human life in staggering proportions; it was a century of unimaginable horror. Yet how do we measure civilians’ sacri‹ce? Who makes sense of noncombatants ’ role in combat? From the perspective of military science, noncombatants do not begin or end war. Their plight has little impact on combat operations or outcome of war. Their demise is as impersonal as the rubble that litters the landscape of a bombed city. Military commanders often rationalize “collateral” devastation of civilians by associating their destruction with strategic objectives. And the results of that rationalization are not only stunning but dif‹cult to comprehend . From the few studies that have been conducted, the evidence is clear: in cases of protracted violent con›ict (wars of many kinds), noncombatants die in far greater proportion than do combatants. According to United Nations reports published in 1998, civilians account for at least 75 percent of all war deaths in wars of the late twentieth century (Annan 1999). This kind of disproportionality is reported in studies commissioned by the Human Cost of War Project, which concluded, Since World War II, Asia, Africa and the Middle East have become the world’s primary battlegrounds. In the con›icts that raged in Angola and Mozambique from the 1960s to the 1990s, more than 75 percent of the victims were civilians. A large number were also children: between 1985 and 1995, some two million children died 16 | Why They Die [54.152.43.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:04 GMT) from warfare, and another 10 million to 15 million were maimed physically or psychologically. (Clemens and Singer 2000: 57) A study published in 2005 showed that the majority of con›ict-related deaths in poor countries occur off the battle‹eld. And combatant fatalities represent a small proportion...