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UNTIL recently, the National Museum in Phnom Penh featured a wax sculpture of a UN peacekeeper, wearing the iconic blue beret, with his arm around the throat of a downcast Cambodian prostitute. It is an image in striking contrast to the UN’s preferred self-depiction,  exemplified by an image of a meek-looking peacekeeper cooking for Darfur refugees on the newly-launched UN Conduct and Discipline Unit website.

The new millennium witnessed a surge in peacekeeping missions. Nine were launched between 2002 and 2007, and the 2010-2011 budget totalled US$7.83 billion. But it has also brought a crescendo of complaints regarding peacekeeper delinquency and immunity to prosecution that highlights the acute vulnerability of populations under peacekeeping mandate.

Some of the worst examples have been in Haiti. A cholera epidemic that killed more than 5,500 Haitians and infected at least 300,000 has been convincingly linked to a Nepalese battalion of the UN Mission to Stabilise Haiti (known by its French acronym of MINUSTAH). New evidence published in the July issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases presents the strongest case yet that contamination of the Artibonite River was caused by poor sanitation at a MINUSTAH camp. This is merely the latest in a string of scandals that have dogged the mission since it begain in 2004. Aside from allegations of run-of-the-mill kickbacks and corruption, members of the Haiti mission have been accused of multiple sex crimes against children. The UN expelled more than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers after charges of underage prostitution could no longer be ignored.

Allegations of sexual exploitation of local women and children are common enough among modern military operations. They clash with liberal narratives of peacekeeping presented by Western institutions.

Contemporary peacekeeping operations have many dimensions. They are meant, according to the UN, not only to maintain peace and security, but also to “facilitate the political process, protect civilians, assist in the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants; support the organization of elections, protect and promote human rights and assist in restoring the rule of law.” These tasks entail monitoring and “rehabilitating” post-conflict populations to promote security and democracy. A number of academics have argued that these therapeutic depictions of peacekeeping are misleading, and actually help to rationalise coercive international intervention.

Carol Harrington, for instance, has argued that the rise of peacekeeping operations programmes in the “new wars” environment of the past two decades has served to “re-make individuals in post-conflict populations according to liberal norms set by the ‘international community’ and give credibility to narratives of violent liberal intervention.”

“The picture that emerges when peacekeepers are monitored by the same criteria as the locals is deeply disturbing for peacekeeping projects,” she writes.

And yet, measures to prosecute criminality among peacekeepers are minimal at best. Many feel that UN inactivity and blame-shifting add to a culture of impunity within peacekeeping missions. A UN panel sidestepped the role of peacekeepers in introducing cholera in Haiti, choosing to focus instead on local conditions such as poor access to healthcare that widened the scope of the outbreak. “It's like blaming a building for catching fire to take pressure off the guy who dropped the match,” tweeted AP Haiti correspondent Jonathan Katz at the time.

“There is strong sentiment that the UN has failed to take responsibility for [its] role in the introduction of cholera into Haiti, and that the UN and MINUSTAH behave as an arrogant supranational organisation without the responsibilities of a sovereign state,” said a senior Western aid official in Port au Prince, where street graffiti commonly denounced the UN “occupayson” well before the disease outbreak.

Peacekeeper impunity is often institutionalised by loopholes in international law. Status of forces agreements (SOFA) signed by the UN and host countries effectively waive all criminal and civil liability, erecting “a big barrier to accountability for UN members, especially military” according to Nicole Philips, staff attorney with the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. This means that Haitians cannot file charges against the Sri Lankans who hired underage sex workers in Haiti while working as UN representatives, as they are not subject to host country jurisdiction.

“The SOFA’s lack of any real accountability for civil or criminal human rights violations of MINUSTAH members breaches the occupied country's sovereignty,” said Philips. (You can read the IJDH’s report here). There is no evidence that the expelled Sri Lankan peacekeepers were ever prosecuted for their crimes back home.

Finally, MINUSTAH is the only Chapter VII deployment occurring in a country with no active conflict or civil war. A Chapter VII mission authorises peacekeepers to use force for reasons other than self-defence. “MINUSTAH troops patrol Haitian streets in tanks with their weapons drawn at unarmed civilians,” said Philips. And yet, “Haiti has had a democratically elected government since 2006 and has experienced no acts of aggression that threaten its peace and stability or that of its neighbors.”

The wax sculpture was eventually removed from the Phnom Penh historical museum, and it appears that no charges have been brought against the alleged sex offenders who served in Haiti. But if history has a habit of erasing the outward signs of peacekeeper misconduct, marks of abuse are surely engraved in popular memory.

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Hannah Armstrong is a freelance foreign correspondent currently based in London. Her reporting has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN and Africa Investor.

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PEOPLE interested in tackling insurgencies, rebellions and humanitarian crises spend a lot of time discussing the right balance to strike between security and development. A liberal trend in global thinking tends to assume that you need development (things like education, aid money, reduced poverty, healthcare) to deal with the underlying causes of a conflict, and you also need enough security (in other words, you need to shoot enough rebels, terrorists and other spoilers) to allow you to carry out that development work in the first place. In post-Cold War thinking, it has become a truism that “security without development is questionable, while development without security is impossible.”

However, it is easy to take our understanding of ‘development’ and ‘security’ for granted. Whose security are we talking about? Is a development-centred approach really as humanitarian as it is often presented? Can welfare schemes wean people away from insurgent groups? Below I explore these questions with particular reference to the Maoist insurgency in India.

Development is just another offensive weapon

The state seeks to present development as an altruistic, benevolent force driven by moral impulses, but in reality it has never existed outside the state’s desire for control and security. In Development, Security & Unending War, Mark Duffield shows that development – in the sense of improving the lives of the poor – first emerged in nineteenth century Britain as a way of ensuring order during the tumultuous early decades of the Industrial Revolution. This paternalistic impulse went beyond a moral concern for poor individuals and was motivated by the need to formulate a liberal response to the basic problem of capitalism: what to do with all those people left behind in the relentless march of progress? Capitalism’s furious and incessant quest for expansion into new territories and communities inevitably creates what Duffield calls ‘surplus life’ – “a population whose skills, status or even existence are in excess of prevailing conditions and requirements”. In other words, they are Marx’s “useless people” – the detritus that washes up on the shores of the glittering capitalist paradise. These people can be dangerous, since the governing system has very little legitimacy in their eyes.

The concept of development-as-control was gradually transferred to Britain’s colonies in response to various mutinies and rebellions. Duffield argues that the political freedoms granted to colonial societies and the trusteeship in which they were placed were not part of a gradual move towards decolonisation, but were actually designed to legitimise colonial control, dampen discontent and thereby delay the granting of independence.

While this liberal approach was certainly a step up from arbitrary rule or the fascist solution of simply eradicating surplus people and opponents, it was directly opposed to real freedom for the governed. The people were given incentives to accede to colonial rule, but did not have the option of rejecting it. Development was a tool of state security, just as it is today in fragile states and conflict zones around the world. In post-Cold War humanitarian interventions, governments explain the need for development on the grounds that poverty breeds dangerous radicalism, which is why the US government spends millions of dollars on new roads and irrigation facilities in Helmand province and the West pumps billions of dollars into Pakistan in the hope it will stop acting as a training centre for suicide bombers. 

The Indian government plays the same game. Its anti-Maoist Integrated Action Plan provides large amounts of discretionary money to the 60 most “Maoist-affected districts” in the country to spend on development projects. Rs. 250 million ($5.5 million) was allocated last year, with another Rs. 300 million this year. District officers can use the money to provide facilities like drinking water, electricity, roads, sanitation and health services. Home Minister P Chidambaram said the idea was based on the concept that “abject poverty breeds extremism … No matter how much we romanticise life in the forest, let us remember that they are very poor.”But just as elsewhere, concern for the poor is framed as a security dilemma, and the security that really matters to the government is that of the wealthy elite living far away from the conflict zone. The poverty and malnutrition of tribals and lower classes are not a threat to the Indian establishment in themselves, but Maoist leverage of these issues does pose a potential existential threat to the state in the future, and poses an immediate economic threat through their disruption of trade and resource extraction. Development schemes are explicitly understood as a way of altering the way of life of the tribals, regardless of their own desires: “They must know that the government is friendly to their way of life, but wants to help them change their way of life,” said Mr Chidambaram.

At the same time as it draws people out of the forest and away from the influence of non-state groups, the Integrated Action Plan also aims to extend the writ of the state by encouraging reluctant officials to travel into rebel-controlled areas – the most obvious incentive being the opportunity they will gain to syphon off funds from the scheme. The construction of new buildings also has practical uses for the police and paramilitary forces, given their predilection for camping out in schools, while the success or failure of construction projects provides a useful gauge of which areas are under Maoist control.
Of only marginal interest to the authorities is whether any of this really improves conditions for the locals, and that is because at some level they understand that…

Development is ineffective at stopping recruitment

The link between poverty and militancy is increasingly being questioned. A group of US academics recently interviewed 6,000 Pakistanis and found that, contrary to received wisdom, militancy was less popular among the poor than the middle class. The authors argued that this was because the poor bear most of the brunt of terrorist attacks.

On the surface, this should not directly relate to the Maoist insurgency in India, whose leaders are much more explicit in stating that they fight for the poor and oppressed, and who have shunned random terrorist attacks on civilians (even if the conflict has occasionally spawned such attacks). And yet, the statistics show that there is no real correlation between economic grievances in India and the Maoist insurgency. A defence analyst recently crunched the numbers on this topic, and shared his findings in a telling series of tweets:

Out of the 100 districts in India with highest poverty rates (population below poverty line), only 26 districts are Maoist afflicted.

Out of the 100 districts in India with lowest literacy rates (gender-sensitive), only 20 districts are Maoist afflicted.

Out of 100 districts in India where households do not have enough food for all their members, only 15 districts are Maoist afflicted.

Out of the 100 districts in India with highest Infant mortality ratios, only 9 districts are Maoist afflicted.

This being India, of course. Not being on the list of 100 poorest districts does not necessarily make you a wealthy district. In a country where almost half the children are malnourished, an insurgent group does not have to look too far to find some poverty to exploit.

Nonetheless, other factors are clearly at work beyond lack of development. A recent paper by Jason Miklian, Kristian Hoelscher and Krishna Chaitanya Vadlamannati found that the key determinants of where the Maoists operate were the presence of mining operations and forest cover. “Our results do not support the grievance-based arguments presented by Maoists as a current explanation for the insurgency,” they argued. “Due to the mobility of the Maoists and their lack of ties to one particular ‘homeland’ or other essential territory (like a separatist movement would have, for example), strategic decisions about where to fight may outweigh the rationales for fighting.”

In social science jargon, economic grievances are ‘a necessary, but not sufficient variable.’ There has to be some poverty or exploitation in the district for the Maoist message to have relevance, but the realities of fighting a guerrilla war mean that other factors must also be present.

Clear empirical research on why people join the Maoists is hard to come by, but those with close experience of the movement say that recruits are often motivated by a range of emotions not directly related to their economic prospects. People can put up with a great deal of structural violence in their lives, finding ways to cope psychologically with the slow burn of poverty and low status, particularly when it is all they have known. Instead, what tends to trigger acts of violent rebellion are specific flashpoints of injustice. The murder of a friend, harassment by a local moneylender or landlord, the rape of a family member that goes uninvestigated by the police – these are the things that push an individual into the arms of an insurgency.

“Can you imagine how angry you would be if your sister was locked up for three months without charge and then came back and told you she had been tortured? This happens all the time,” said Gladson Dungdung, a human rights activist from a tribal area in Jharkhand. “So many people I talk to say they picked up the gun just to shoot a policeman and get revenge for the way their people have been treated.”

Economic grievances tend to be corollaries of a broader injustice against the tribals and lower classes in rural India. Maoists appeal above all to feelings of structural injustice rather than a lack of development, not least because they are far more effective as a tool of immediate reprisal than as a solution to long-term problems, however much they wish to be both.

Some individuals will indeed join simply for the wage packet – around Rs. 3,000 to Rs. 4000 ($66-$88) per month for the lowest cadres – but there are plenty of other reasons for donning the olive green uniform which are only indirectly linked to economic prospects. Some may be attracted by the lure of guns and the power they bestow, others may be looking for a more adventurous life than their humdrum village existence. A study by Lucien Pye into Communist insurgents in Malaya in the 1950s found that a quarter of the former insurgents he surveyed had joined the movement simply to stay close to their friends, even before they had developed any particular dislike for the government. Discussing this study, Ken Payne writes: “hostility to the government followed the adoption of the insurgent social identity, rather than preceding it. The identity of the group shaped the attitudes of its members, rather than the other way about.”

Development as propaganda

There is a great scene in last year’s Peepli Live, a funny yet coruscating look at debt and farmer suicide in rural India, when a local government official decides he must be seen to take action on the family’s problems. A truck suddenly appears in the village and dumps a brand new water pump in the family’s garden, then disappears again. No one hangs around to make sure it is installed properly, or to ask whether it is actually useful to anyone in the village.

Similarly, the Integrated Action Plan promises new school buildings, roads and government offices, but seems completely disconnected from more fundamental problems such as the lack of teachers, the lack of political representation and the lack of jobs. No one hangs around to ask whether the plan has improved the lives of the locals. Rather, its success is measured by asking local officials how much of the money they have spent.But perhaps that is beside the point, since the more crucial rationale from the government’s perspective is how these development schemes play as a form of propaganda aimed, once again, at those areas that are far away from conflict zones.

The one group of people that are clearly motivated to join the Maoists by issues of poverty and underdevelopment are the leaders of the insurgency, the middle class urbanites who give up their relatively comfortable lives to come fight in the forests and villages of rural India. It is their Marx-inspired rhetoric that colours the ideology of the movement and places the immediate impulses of the local people within a political framework. At one level, the government’s development schemes are a rather ham-fisted attempt to counter this rhetoric – to show that the government does care about the people and can provide for them. It is propaganda designed to show that the government is applying liberal solutions to conflict rather than the purely exterminatory policy that would define it as the opposite of liberal.

Fortunately for the Maoist leadership, the Integrated Action Plan runs little risk of being an effective piece of propaganda for the government. Initial figures suggest that, of the money released so far, less than a quarter has been spent and only 15.5% of projects actually completed. Not only is the scheme dubious in its ability to live up to its own promise, but it also misses the central point of the Maoist critique, which is that the system is structurally geared against the poor and therefore incapable of providing real, long-lasting improvements in their lives. While the announcement of the Integrated Action Plan might create the momentary mirage of a state that caters for its most deprived, the reality of meagre hand-outs and inept implementation only serves to support the Maoist argument.

Security is for those who are already secure

A key argument in Duffield’s book is that the world is divided into insured and non-insured peoples. To illustrate the point, he compares the Asian tsunami of December 2004 with Hurricane Charlie which hit Florida a few months earlier. The hurricane cost reinsurers an estimated $14 billion, and claimed 25 lives. The tsunami cost reinsurers half that amount, and killed 200,000 people – a stark example of how lives in the developed world are (quite literally) worth more than those in developing nations. Around 80% of people in industrialised countries are part of a contributory welfare scheme, compared with less than 10% in most African and Asian countries. Although the life insurance market in India grew five times larger between 2001 and 2009, it still covered less than 5% of the population. As with other developing countries, the state is intrinsically geared towards protecting this small band of insured and successful people, whose economic strength gives them a hugely disproportionate influence in parliament.

Development schemes are presented as the alternative to insurance for those less valued in society, but their real benefit lies in the tactical advantages they provide for security operations against therebellious poor, and their potential as propaganda in convincing the middle class not to feel too guilty about rapidly amassing wealth.

In some cases, the Indian government’s development initiatives have started to have a positive transformative impact on the lives of the poor. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which gives 100 days work to the poor, is basically a cash-transfer scheme – and one that has been beset by corruption in its first few years of practice – but it has also become a powerful entitlement around which to mobilise the poor, thanks largely to the way civil rights groups involved themselves in the formation of the Act, ensuring there were powerful ways to monitor its progress and punish offenders. The Right to Information (RTI) Act also has vast potential for reconstituting power relations at the local level. One recent study found that an RTI request was now as effective as paying a bribe in getting officials to do their jobs.

Elsewhere, however, the government’s attempts to alleviate poverty and provide for the betterment of rural India remain superficial and ineffective. The fact that the largest chunks of aid money go to conflict zones (particularly Kashmir and now Maoist areas) exposes the extent to which development is primarily about securing the elite – those who, ironically, are already secure – and protecting a capitalist structure that has brought only limited benefits to the vast majority.

It is a common misconception of the anti-war liberal that a choice exists between security and development – that the state might one day be convinced to choose altruism over inhuman military action. At its heart the priority of the capitalist state is to protect its most successful capitalists, and all the tools at its disposal are geared towards this goal. The state is benevolent only until an individual refuses its help, at which point its true character is revealed.

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"Can Tho Floating Market." Photo Credit: Flickr/Janne HellstenCAN THO, VIETNAM – I arrived in this hub of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region to a steady rain and a swift wind pushing waves just up to the edge of the sidewalk that lines the Can Tho River. The city of Can Tho is similar in size and style to Virginia Beach, with a typically  slower coastal pace than the much larger and denser Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Its sense of tranquility almost masks that this town and the region surrounding it are among those locations most vulnerable to climate change.

In the Mekong Delta, the effects of a changing climate  could trigger destabilizing economic and political forces, their domestic impact altering regional geopolitics, international trade and more. 

Standing on the banks of any Mekong tributary, it is impossible to ignore the inherent problems of being located at or just slightly above sea level. Elevation through most of the delta region rises to less than 1.2 meters, worrisome given that many sea level rise projections would put most of this land under water in the coming decades. With weather trending more extreme – one local expert tells me that the delta has experienced three of what used to be 100-year disasters since the 1950s – both floods and droughts are major concerns. As sea levels rise and storm surges increase, salt water intrusion is a growing risk to agricultural production, hastened by upstream damming and mangrove decline.

These conditions are already apparent around the Delta, and the world’s best climate change models indicate that the worst is yet to come.

At risk is the steady economic development Vietnam has enjoyed over the past 15 years.  The Delta provides 90 per cent of rice exports, and Vietnam is one of the world’s top suppliers of this staple. It meets more than half of the country’s fruit and seafood needs, and the majority of seafood exports. This food production adds up to about 20 per cent of the country’s GDP. Looking ahead to increasingly saline soil, and the disruption to agricultural production caused by changing weather, experts in the Delta region expect many farmers to turn to fishing, as often happens to compensate for poor yields. Yet fisheries are also strained, and trawlers are increasingly targets of China’s maritime aggression as it works to protect its claimed territory in the South China Sea. 

For Western audiences, the risks associated with climate change are most oftend discussed in terms of the impact on agriculture. But while agricultural conditions are extremely worrisome, they don’t do justice to the extent of the region’s vulnerability. In Can Tho and its surrounding areas, extensive new construction characterizes the landscape. Massive sewer pipes and steel piles line roads, awaiting placement. Housing construction is a common sight – though rarely elevated or on stilts (as the government is now encouraging as a hedge against flooding). Local and provincial officials are also actively encouraging diversification in the economy. A subsidiary of Vietnam Airlines just initiated a new route from Can Tho to Con Dao Island, for example, with the hopes of encouraging a broader trade profile. 

Such development can offset the costs of climate change adaptation by diverting people to new jobs when their fields are lost to salt water intrusion and rebuilding infrastructure lost to disasters. But the region’s new construction raises the real financial costs and insurance risks of potential losses as well. 

With this fuller picture of the region’s potential vulnerabilities in mind, it becomes clear just how important adapting to the effects of climate change in the Mekong Delta will be for Vietnam’s prosperity and stability. A primary topic of my own research here has been how this adaptation is going. 

Prognoses vary widely depending on whether you ask local officials, central government representatives, NGO experts or academics. My overwhelming sense is that many of the first steps needed for adaptation are happening, and that with the proper resources, the prospects are fairly good that Vietnam can avoid some of the most destabilizing conditions that climate change could trigger.  

More so than in many other vulnerable countries, central government and local officials appear to be laying a solid foundation for adaptation. First, levels of knowledge and scholarship on climate change are significant, with many researchers contributing to UN reports, independent impact studies and forming cooperative partnerships with universities in Europe, Australia and the United States to enhance the country’s indigenous capabilities. Second, several cities, including Can Tho, have spent the past few years integrating projected climate change impacts into their infrastructure planning and engaging local communities in education and outreach programs. Additionally, international and domestic institutions are focusing on developing new strains of rice and other plants that can better withstand flooding, drought and salt water intrusion. Finally, I’ve seen much evidence that local, provincial and central government agencies are beginning to share information and coordinate plans. 

These positive signs should be music to the ears of developed countries focused increasingly on funding adaptation rather than (or in addition to) overcoming the steep political hurdles of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there is much critical work left to be done. The extensive planning in the Mekong Delta and elsewhere must be implemented, and it will require funding. The central government reshuffled its agencies to handle climate change on a few occasions, but these structural changes must lead to policy changes as well. And while there is coordination within the country on projections and plans, it will be even more important to focus on the implementation that must follow.

Overall, the Mekong Delta holds both peril and hope as it faces the daunting effects of global climate change. Can Tho and Vietnam broadly show signs of what may – and must – happen globally as countries work to adapt to these changes. 

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Christine Parthemore is a Fellow at the Centre for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., where she directs the Natural Security Program. She writes its Natural Security Blog, and can be found on twitter @clparthemore. 

The entire exchange, (available at the View from a Cave blog), is well worth reading. This is not the first time the Rwandan President has used Twitter to engage with people. In March, 2011, the tennis playing President arranged via Twitter a visit to Ibirunga Tennis Court in Musanze to meet the children there. There have also been discussions about arranging a conference in Kigali, all on Twitter and in the public domain.

I have some doubts about the appropriateness of the use of these tools in Rwanda. Barely 3% of Rwandans in Rwanda are online. Who are they intending to communicate with? The diaspora? Investors? The donor community? Or are we in for more of the endless tit for tat battles that play out in comments on blog posts and newspaper articles about Rwanda?

It remains to be seen when and how members of parliament and other decision makers begin to establish a presence online. As someone who’s spent the best part of the last eight years training journalists and others in what these tools are and how to use them, I fully expect to see mistakes being made – and that’s normal.

Each tool attracts a different community and different ways of communicating. Each tool has a distinct culture which needs to be learned if you’re to get the most out of it. Forcing anyone to use Facebook or Twitter is a recipe for failure.

I can’t recall ever seeing a similar Q&A exchange between a head of state and a journalist on Twitter. I’m not sure Twitter is the ideal place for tit-for-tat arguments on substantial questions – 140 character messages leave little space for nuance or depth. In addition, while I see engagement in general as a largely positive step for Rwanda, I do worry that it spends an unusually large amount of time responding to critics across social networks, blogs, newspapers and other media.

Criticism aside, the geek in me likes the fact that both the President and the Foreign Minister tweet from Blackberry phones. It’s also worth noting that since April, 2011, you can tweet in Rwanda via SMS text message. It’s been surprisingly useful in traffic jams, during power outages and Internet downtime in the capital.

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Graham Holliday is editor & publisher of Kigaliwire, and an associate editor at Current Intelligence. Earlier versions of this comment appeared in Kigaliwire on 15 May 2011 and 17 March 2011.

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Eichmann In Jerusalem. Photo Credit: Wikimedia CommonsMANY Americans rejoiced upon hearing news of Osama bin Laden’s death on May 1. President Obama announced that “justice had been served.” But when Ratko Mladic was captured yesterday – an individual whose alleged crimes against humanity dwarf those of al-Qaida – it was hailed as a triumph of a different sort of international justice.

The satisfaction over Mladic’s capture recalls claims by human rights and humanitarian law advocates who criticised the bin Laden execution as a form of faux “justice”: Bin Laden was a criminal, they argued, and both justice and peace would have been better served had he been tried and punished rather than summarily executed. Such a trial, it is argued, would have been likelier than an execution to deter future atrocities and delegitimate jihadist terrorism.

This argument has been met with various counterpoints: a trial would have been impossibly messy and politicised; it would have become a “media circus” and possibly a terror target. It may not have proceeded at all due to jurisdictional and evidentiary complications. Had it proceeded, it would not have deterred future attacks but rather invited a global legal and political debate about whether or not bin Laden’s ends or means were justified. This might have weakened, instead of strengthened, international norms against terrorism. 

In the debate over the value of judicial mechanisms, both sides invoke claims about the nature and effect of international trials – claims thrown into sharp relief with the capture of Ratko Mladic. Many of these claims are based on misconceptions and wishful thinking and have been debunked by history and statistical analysis. Here are some of the most important fallacies in the ongoing debate. 

MYTH #1: OBL Could Never Have Received a Fair Trial. Those making this argument tend to assume that bin Laden would have been tried in the United States. It is true that he would be unlikely to receive a fair trial in either a US civilian court (where it would have been difficult to find a jury of his peers who were not biased) or a military commission. 

But these are only two on a long menu of options for putting those accused of crimes against humanity on trial. Bin Laden could not have been tried at the International Criminal Court (it didn’t come into force until 2002) but the UN Security Council could have established an ad hoc international tribunal, similar to those established after the Bosnian war or the Rwandan genocide. Or, it could have established a "hybrid" tribunal, like those set up to prosecute perpetrators in Cambodia or Sierra Leone – combining elements of international and local judicial traditions and personnel. A court for bin Laden might have been shaped, for example, by a combination of Western and Islamic legal traditions, since it has been shown that the best way to marginalise criminals is to hold them accountable to their own standards, and Islamic law also prohibits the killing of non-combatants. And it might have included judges from the Western and Islamic countries, since a significant number of bin Laden’s victims have actually been innocent Muslims.  

However such a court were constituted, the ad hoc model provides an answer to those who believe a fair trial was impossible or infeasible. Shortcomings aside, it allows the Security Council the flexibility to tailor a court to the situation at hand, balancing law and politics. Logistically, such a court could have been seated anywhere in the world willing to offer soil and facilities, with any sort of statute on which the Permanent Five and two thirds of other members could agree. It should have been no harder to secure than any other military installation, given the tremendous political will and resources of the world’s last remaining superpower. The court’s mandate could have been as broad or narrow as the Security Council envisioned; its judicial procedures could have been tailored to the case at hand, resolving concerns that bin Laden would have been difficult to convict under US law. (Many international tribunals, for example, permit hearsay evidence, which is not permitted in many national courts.)  The Security Council could have chosen carefully how to construct a court most likely to be perceived to be fair and yet just, by constituencies around the world. 

MYTH #2: OBL Would Simply Have Used the Court as A Way to Promote Jihadism. No doubt he would have tried to do so if given the chance: many indicted world leaders have trumpeted their respective ideologies, and in the case of both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein this did have the effect of galvanizing their constituencies. But it is not at all clear trials need have had the effect: as Michael Sharf argues, it is possible to design ad hoc tribunals so as to avoid these pitfalls. For example, the architects of such a court can disallow or minimize the defendant’s ability to use the stand as a soap-box: the right to represent one-self is not enshrined in international law. And internationalised tribunals are generally viewed as more legitimate and fair than those organised by a party to a conflict, like the Iraqi High Tribunal – making it harder for defendants to claim the courts are simply tools of the victor.  

A properly conducted international trial would have been well within its means to forestall demagoguery. Moreover, in the court of global public opinion such a trial would have represented an opportunity for the international community as well as a risk. Personal and expert testimonies from former jihadists, moderate Islamic scholars and lawyers, and Muslim victims of attacks could help undermining claims made by bin Laden or his lawyers that the court constitutes merely a puppet of the West. Such trials have been shown to have an important socialising effect in affirming international norms. Bin Laden’s trial could have reaffirmed the common normative standard of non-combatant immunity shared both by Islamic and Western legal traditions as well as international law. 

Myth #3: A Trial Would Have Become a Focal Point For Further Attacks. Precisely because no international tribunal has ever been created to try a non-state terrorist accused of a crime against humanity, it is hard to evaluate this claim for this type of conflict. However, critics of international tribunals as post-conflict justice mechanisms have often made the same claim: that trials can exacerbate ongoing conflicts by making it difficult to contain spoilers and providing the perpetrators’ in-group with a propaganda tool. The implication of this hypothesis is that the existence of trials should correlate with more human rights abuses and longer conflicts. But empirical evidence from trials for conventional wars and for repression within states shows this is false. Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Walling studied the impact of human rights trials on democratic stability, human right and conflict in 17 Latin American countries. They found that trials do not have any of these harmful effects. The same authors’ larger statistical study of 93 countries, with controls for other indicators of repression, found that transitional countries with trials are less repressive than those without, as are countries experiencing civil war. While it is hard to know whether the effect would be the same for an international tribunal for the leader of transnational non-state network, the results from previous trials are cause for encouragement. 

MYTH #4: A Trial Would Have Helped Deter Future Acts of Jihadist Terror and Build a Culture of Human Rights.  Yes and no. Transitional justice advocates make a package of claims – that trials deter terrorism, that they promote reconciliation, that they marginalise extremists (in this case jihadists) and that they demonstrate adherence to the rule of law. Actually, as Oskar Thoms, James Ron and Roland Paris have shown, scholars don’t yet know much about the validity of several of these claims because systematic studies are rare and findings inconsistent.

It’s not clear, for example, that tribunals deter atrocities (and many make the same argument about domestic judicial processes). A statistical study of 100 countries by Kathryn and Hunjoon Kim strongly suggests trials do deter, both within the countries where the trials occur and also among neighboring countries. However, separate research  by Tricia Olsen, Leigh Payne and Andrew Reiter has found that this effect occurs only when trials are combined with truth commissions and amnesties. Researchers continue to explore these relationships, but so far the jury is still out. 

However, a number of studies have shown that international trials after a bloody conflict do have a positive effect in one area: they marginalise extremists and encourage the emergence of moderate leaders. Payam Akhavan’s research on the Balkans shows that the ICTY marginalised Serb ultra-nationalism in this way, leading eventually to President Milosevic’s overthrow and extradition. A cross-national study by Jane Stromseth, David Wippman and Rosa Brooks confirms this finding: while international and hybrid tribunals may not fulfill their goal of buttressing local judicial mechanisms, they do serve the broader political goal of delegitimizing perpetrators.

MYTH #5: The Question is Whether Trials Work. A better question is, “relative to what?” Trials may or may not deter, but clearly executions of terror leaders don’t – and they may in fact spur on future atrocities. In fact a study of different decapitation methods for terror groups has found that killing rather than arresting terrorist religious leaders results on average in 73 more people killed in future attacks that would have occurred otherwise. (Only two weeks after bin Laden’s death, Pakistani Taliban militants killed over 80 people in northwestern Pakistan, stating this was an act of revenge.) 

What is certainly true is that a wider menu of options for judicial redress, and international justice more broadly, is available than many think. But trials, as a specific type of redress, do involve significant political trade offs. And some of the claims about their beneficial effects by trial advocates – like their deterrent effect or positive impact on peacebuilding– are not yet confirmed by hard evidence. 

Yet trials have also been proven to work pragmatically at one thing the US has tried endlessly to achieve in the global war on terror: winning hearts and minds by empowering moderates and isolating extremists. This is the best evidence that upholding the rule of law as a matter of principle can also yield pragmatic gains. In executing Bin Laden without trial, the US missed an opportunity to delegitimise his brand of jihadism, and may instead have turned him into a martyr.

In the final analysis, however, whether summary executions of terrorist leaders are preferable to trials is not a question of pragmatics. It is a normative issue. It is about whether an easy, illegal option with few benefits and certain drawbacks is preferable to a harder, legal option with equally uncertain outcomes. It is ultimately about whether or not the leaders of civilised nations believe they themselves are above the rule of law.

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R. Charli Carpenter is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, and the author of several books on human rights, human security, and gender. She blogs at Lawyers, Guns & Money and the The Duck of Minerva. 

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South China Sea // Credit: Perry-Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas at AustinIN MID-2010, the newspapers were full of revelations that China had expanded its core interests to include the South China Sea. China’s statement is said to have first emerged in a March 2010 meeting between US National Security Council Director Jeffrey Bader, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Chinese officials. Now, though, research indicates that it may never have happened.  

This revelation suggests that US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton may have been mistaken - or even deliberately stoking tensions - when she said that Dai Binguo, China’s Senior State Counsellor for Foreign Relations, had also described the South China Sea as a core interest in May 2010.  It is not clear how or why this misunderstanding arose.  Perhaps the phrasing was unclear, perhaps China did make the statement and now wants to back down in the face of US reassertion, or perhaps the US deliberately misinterpreted the comments in order to regain influence in the region.   

Tensions in the Sea rose after Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam filed papers with the United Nations Commission on the Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in compliance with a May 2009 deadline to formalise their legal claims and prompting an angry response from China.  The militarisation of the sea continues.  China has established a significant submarine base in Yilun in Hainan, to add to its naval bases in Guangdong province, and is now showing off its nearly finished aircraft carrier.   The US maintains an active presence through its Seventh Fleet, Vietnam and Malaysia are buying submarines, and the Philippines, the weakest power by far, is receiving US support for its navy and coast guard.  

The relationship that seems to define the dispute, though, is that between Vietnam and China.  It is a paradoxical connection, framed in large part by Vietnam’s much smaller size.  Indeed, Vietnam’s Red River region was the province of Annam (the Peaceful South) in the Chinese empire from 111 BC until 939 AD, when Ngo Quyen founded the country’s first independent dynasty.   This (and later) history is commonly cited as reason enough for hostility, but the truth is not so simple.  Chinese rule had a profound impact on Vietnam.  The country instituted a governing bureaucracy, selection for which was by examination.  Its scholar elite had a profound reverence for Chinese poetry, and used Chinese characters until the French reforms of the early twentieth century introduced the Roman script.  Vietnam’s society was and remains deeply Confucian, with traditional hierarchies emphasised by the use of family words in lieu of pronouns.  Indeed, it could be said that Vietnam is more Confucian than mainland China, since its revolution was less destructive of its traditions than was Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  

And yet the Vietnamese are acutely conscious of their differences from China.  The impact of Chinese thought on Vietnamese international relations is instructive in this context.  For all of its history, Vietnam has operated as a small entity within China’s regional sphere of influence, which revolved around Chinese emperors demanding tribute from smaller neighbours.  This system actually involved a good degree of autonomy – indeed, some historians argue that the benefit devolved largely on those states sending tribute, since they tended to do better in the trading relationship.   Yet realpolitik also played a role, with China continually seeking to balance regional powers, such as Vietnam, Thailand or the Khmer kingdom, against one another.  Within this context, Vietnam, conscious of its neighbour’s great size, generally sought to maintain good relations with China, even as it worked to subvert the system to its advantage - for instance by establishing its own tributary system and winning territory from the weakening Khmer kingdom in the eighteenth century.

The modern relationship shows these paradoxical tendencies.  In the 1920s when various nationalist groups sought to free Vietnam from French control, all looked to China for inspiration, sanctuary and support.  Ho Chi Minh, for one, spoke fluent Cantonese and Mandarin, and spent much time in China after his return from France and Russia in the 1920s.  He forged strong links with the Chinese Communist Party, even travelling with Mao in the same train back to China in 1950 after the signing of the Sino-Soviet Pact.  The Cold War prompted China to provide sanctuary in the struggle against the French, and Beijing took an even more supportive stance in the 1960s in the war against the US.  The People’s Liberation Army actually fielded as many as 300,000 troops in North Vietnam, carrying out road maintenance or manning anti-aircraft weapons, thereby freeing Vietnamese forces to take the struggle south.  

Yet the relationship soured in the 1970s.  As the Sino-Soviet split worsened, Vietnam found itself caught between Russia and China.  Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 was particularly damaging, coming as it did when Washington was bombing North Vietnam.   It was not until Hanoi’s victory in 1975, though, that a rupture with China occurred.  The break emerged because of Vietnamese assertion within its neighbourhood, embodied in Hanoi’s invasion of Cambodia in late 1978.  Deng Xiaoping responded in turn in February 1979 with an attack on northern Vietnam.  That action faced strong resistance and the People’s Liberation Army quickly withdrew, but the destruction was significant. Casualties amounted to about 40,000 on the Chinese side and about 100,000 on the Vietnamese side.  The two countries broke off relations, Vietnam working closely with the Soviet Union for the remainder of the Cold War.  

Relations thawed in the 1990s. Formal diplomatic ties were re-established in 1991.  The two countries issued a 16-character guideline on improving bilateral relations in 1999, and resolved land and sea border issues in the north and the Gulf of Tonkin in 2000, before publishing a Joint Statement for Comprehensive Cooperation in the New Century.  They established a Steering Committee for Bilateral Relations in 2006, and then raised their bilateral relationship to the status of strategic partnership in 2008, suggesting close and special links,.  Limited defence ties were in 2005, and in November 2010 China and Vietnam held their first Strategic Defence Security Dialogue.  The trading relationship is now substantial. China invested about US$250 million in Vietnam in 2010. Bilateral trade is worth about US$25 billion, though it is unequal, with Vietnam selling unfinished commodities and running a trade deficit with China of about US$12 billion in 2010. 

These economic links are even strengthening.  Vietnam is running a current account deficit of about 8% of GDP and foreign exchange reserves are dangerously low.   The government pushed its state owned banks to expand credit rapidly in the last few years, at the cost of a glut of non-performing loans. A default by national champion Vinashin has led to a debt downgrading.  Perhaps the main concern is that inflation is running wild.  Official estimates place price rises at over 12%, partly because Vietnam’s currency, the dong, has seen several devaluations in the last two years.  A balance of payments crisis is a growing possibility and Vietnam may be forced to turn to external lenders for succour.  In this context, some commentators argue that Vietnam’s leaders would prefer to deal with Beijing than with the IMF; while politically challenging, Chinese conditionality may prove preferable to any obligatory asset sales.  Indeed, in late April China Development Bank offered Vietnam US$1.5 billion to fund housing development, suggesting that China is becoming a preferred commercial partner. 

Yet do not expect Hanoi to depart from its long tradition of professing tributary status to China while hedging.  Indeed, Prime Minister Dung stated in October 2010 that foreign warships may use facilities in Cam Ranh Bay on a commercial basis.  Vietnam is also moving forward with plans to modernise the port with the equivalent of over US$200 million in Russian funds, and will take possession of its first diesel electric Kilo class submarine this year, with five more to follow.  Vietnam is thus seeking to deter China as it did when permitting Russian use of Cam Ranh Bay from 1979. The US for its part is now hoping for access to the port, although Vietnam may be hesitant to grant it for fear of angering Beijing.  

The interesting question is whether the US chose to stoke the “core interests” issue to push Vietnam into opening Cam Ranh Bay, or whether China backed down in the face of US pressure.  Either way, Vietnam will maintain its policy of living with China while trying to maintain its autonomy as best it can – as have other states in asymmetric relationships. Mexican caudillo Porfirio Diaz once bewailed his country’s plight, saying: “Poor Mexico; so far from God, so close to the United States”.   Ho Chi Minh was more robust, saying in 1945:  “I’d rather smell French shit for five more years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life”.  

The sentiment is akin, but Diaz had the more appealing turn of phrase. 

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Kit Dawnay is Current Intelligence magazine's Far East Correspondent. He lives in Hong Kong.

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The tall building occupied by Iran’s shipping agency looks a lot different from other government offices in Tehran. Instead of ideological symbols, the dominant theme here is nautical – anchors, lanterns and sails. The staff, too, look different. There are more smart suits, ironed collars and well-shaven faces around.

The general air of tidiness reflects the seriousness with which Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, IRISL, goes about its business. With a commercial fleet of 169 ships carrying nearly a third of Iranian exports and imports, the firm is the dominant player in Iran by a long stretch, although there are a number of private shipping companies as well.

Staff at IRISL see themselves as waging a full-scale, if hidden, international war to circumvent international sanctions and keep the freight moving.

In 2008, the United States Treasury Department placed IRISL on its sanctions list on the grounds that its vessels were carrying military freight. Then it was barred from taking out insurance and loans in London, and finally, last year, the United Nations Security Council approved a new set of sanctions which included the right to inspect, confiscate and where necessary destroy the IRISL freight.

The UN resolution provoked a strong reaction from Tehran, where parliament instructed the government to mete out equal treatment to ships belonging to states that inspect Iranian vessels, and to provide naval protection to commercial shipping where necessary.

Its most recent financial statement, for the Iranian year ending March 2010, indicates that its 35 customers include Iran’s Defence Industry Organization.

Even so, IRISL always insists that it complies with all laws and regulations. At the same time, it says it cannot be responsible for the content of freight, and must trust statements made by owners and by port officials. But officials there, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledge that the company uses whatever loopholes it can to get round restrictions on what it can carry.

A recently-retired ship’s captain says IRISL’s long experience and intimate knowledge of the laws of the sea means it is well equipped to get round obstacles.

“Most of the experts working for this organisation were educated in Europe, they know the international rules very well and can identify loopholes that were not foreseen when embargo laws were passed,” he said.

A mid-ranking IRISL official said, “Many of the employees are no fans of Iranian government ideology or policies, but regardless of their political views, they care about the national interest and also about safeguarding their jobs, so they’re ready to take on challenges in unpredictable situations.”

The official admitted that the company used a range of tactics such as changing a vessel’s registered name or owner, setting up shell companies, sailing under flags of convenience, counterfeiting shipping documents, and sometimes even repainting a ship.

“Everyone knows we use these hide-and-seek tactics, but the point is whether they can catch us out,” he added.

Since the United States blacklisted IRISL and all its vessels in September 2008, 73 of the 123 ships listed at the time have changed hands – on paper, at least. Some are now registered with companies based in locations from Hong Kong to the Isle of Man.

An international law expert with IRISL explains that these places are chosen because “they don’t have rules and regulations that will disrupt our operations”. If steps are taken to blacklist vessels under new management, he said, “it’s a very time-consuming process, so we’ll have time to change the place where ships are registered”.

The head of a private shipping company in Iran said that because sanctions were primarily political, they were not communicated to the international shipping industry effectively, so that some European transport firms were still unclear what their obligations were.

One measure that has hit IRISL is the refusal of Lloyds in London to extend marine insurance to its vessels. When insurers in other European states refused to provide cover, Iran obtained it in Bermuda. But this arrangement ended in 2010, so the government in Tehran invested one billion US dollars in a domestic consortium called Moallem Insurance, whose cover and credit was accepted by some trading partners in Germany, Japan, Britain, China and Cyprus.

But this is only a partial solution. IRISL still faces the danger that banks in Europe will confiscate vessels in lieu of payment on loans, on the grounds that they do not recognise Moallem Insurance. The risks are real – Tehran has had to pay cash to reclaim three ships in Singapore and one in Hong Kong, seized by French and German banks, respectively, and is in negotiations to secure the release of another vessel in Malta.

“European banks are in poor economic shape and are tempted to do the same, recouping loans by confiscating ships. If that happens, we will definitely have problems with making cash repayments to release the vessels,” the IRISL official interviewed for this report said.

IRISL’s chief executive Mohammad Hossein Dajmar told the last shareholder meeting that 41 vessels still on order were subject to similar loans. This means they too are at risk of being seized.

Despite such pressures, and the general sluggishness of the international freight transport market, Dajmar remains bullish.

He says the volume of cargo shifted from March to November last year was 25 per cent higher than in the preceding 12 months, and the company’s gross revenues were 40 per cent higher by the same comparison. However, he noted that net profits were down on past years.

An economist in Iran, who did not to be identified, said he believed the company would not be showing a profit unless its accounts included government assistance designed to cushion the blow of sanctions.

Staff at IRISL are well aware that any tightening up of the regulations to which their vessels are subjected would be damaging. According to the company official, if vessels start being checked systematically, the risk factor and thus cost of shipping under an Iranian flag will rise considerably, even if inspectors do not uncover illegal consignments.

That will alarm shareholders in IRISL, which was formerly state-owned but is evolving so that some 90 per cent of its stock is now in private hands.

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Mehrafarin Bahrami is the pseudonym of an Iranian economic journalist based in Tehran. This article originally appeared in IRN issue 74 (17 Mar 2011). Produced by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, www.iwpr.net.

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The authorities in Tashkent have blocked access to the website of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, one of the last remaining sources of independent news still accessible inside Uzbekistan

The move is especially regrettable as it came on the eve of World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, and underlined the importance of that event.

IWPR’s site joins the ranks of several dozen websites to which access is blocked in Uzbekistan, including the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Eurasianet.org, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Ferghana.ru, Uznews.net and the Russian human rights group Memorial, all of which cover events in Central Asian state.

Officials in Uzbekistan say the country has over 1,200 media outlets of its own, but their news content is fairly uniform, uncritical and follows the government line. In recent years, the internet has taken off as a source of alternative information, especially among younger people.

While the practice of blocking website access is common in Uzbekistan, it is unclear why the IWPR site has been targeted at this particular time. There are several possibilities.

One is that a story currently on the site’s front page, called Unique Insights From Central Asia, features a picture of TV journalists protesting, ironically enough, against censorship of the Uzbek media.

“The official press gives out extremely sparse and selective information about this subject,” a journalism student in Tashkent said. “It’s only on the internet that we can read the truth.”

Another possible reason is our extensive coverage of the unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, which Uzbek officials may feel is inappropriate for a local readership. The uncomfortable parallels have certainly been noted in Tashkent, as local web users report difficulties getting into popular social networking sites since early February. After people in Uzbekistan began discussing the Middle Eastern protests, linking to full-text reports on others’ pages, and adding their own comments on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Livejournal, these pages stopped loading properly, although the websites are still available in principle.

Censoring the web is just one element in the government’s all-out campaign against the expression of alternative views.

Local human rights defenders say the National Security Service has a whole department that specialises in trawling the web to identify “hostile” sources of news, analysis and comment on Uzbekistan. Armed with that information, the security agency then instructs the state-run internet provider UzPAK to filter and block sites.

According to Bahodir Namozov, head of the Association of Prisoners of Conscience in Tashkent, “The authorities are afraid that hidden facts about their ruinous policies might come out via the internet.”

An internet expert in Tashkent said the SNB web censorship department also monitors email and chat systems. These surveillance techniques led to the popular forum Arbuz.com being partially blocked in January and a number of its users arrested. They had taken part in online discussions about Uzbekistan, Islam, and last year’s ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan.

What the government fails to note, however, is that internet use has grown to such a scale that it simply cannot be controlled any more. Around a quarter of Uzbekistan’s 28 million people already have access to the web, and despite low living standards the percentage is forecast to rise rapidly.

Attempting to shut off the internet is no longer possible; curtailing access to undesirable parts of it is increasingly difficult. Doing so will merely prompt keen users to find technical ways round the blocks. Plenty of young people in Uzbekistan are au fait with proxy servers and programmes that get round filters.

As one young web expert called Aziz put it, “The more they tighten the screws, the greater the interest in 'virtual resistance'."

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Inga Sikorskaya is IWPR’s Senior Editor for Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. This article originally appeared in New Briefing Central Asia (15 Mar 2011). Produced by the Institute For War And Peace Reporting, www.iwpr.net

Robust “shoot first” tactics said to reduce rate of serious offences.

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Afghan police have attributed a substantial drop in the crime rate in the capital Kabul to a recent authorisation to open fire on suspected criminals.

Colonel Mohammad Zaher, head of criminal investigations for Kabul province, said the number of recorded serious crimes fell by 17 per cent to 546 in the last quarter of 2010 compared with the previous three months.

“Six months ago, there were two kidnappings in Kabul every day, but only four cases have occurred in the last four months, and the perpetrators have been arrested,” Mohammad Zaher said.

He attributed the improvement to a combination of enhanced intelligence gathering, better recruitment and training, and an anti-corruption drive in which around 20 police officers were suspended for alleged association with criminals or insurgents.

Another major change, the colonel said, was an order issued two months ago by Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi permitting police to open fire on suspected criminals if they attempted to escape.

Interior ministry spokesman Zmarai Bashari noted that the recruitment of female officers – while still very limited because of traditional attitudes to women doing this kind of work – had already made a difference to crime detection.

“When the number of female police officers increased, it contributed to falling crime. Preciously, male police officers were unable to search women carrying weapons and drugs, or female members during a house search,” he said.

It is not known how many suspects have been shot since minister Mohammadi sanctioned the policy, but the tactic has proved controversial.

“No international law grants permission to open fire unless the criminal poses an immediate life-threatening risk,” social scientist Jawid Kohestani said, adding that the net effect was likely to be a higher, not lower level of violence.

“The interior minister can in no way be above the law,” he said. “Even if the president were to issue an order to opening fire, he would be acting in contravention of the constitution, and the order would not be enforceable.”

Abdul Wadud Ferozi of Afghanistan’s Institute for Law and Political Sciences said the presumption of innocence was paramount.

“Unless it is proven that a suspect has committed some act, he cannot be punished,” Ferozi said. “Only if citizens’ safety is threatened in such a way that there is no option but to kill the suspect is it permissible to open fire.”

Kohestani said that while the number of kidnappings might have fallen in Kabul, he was unconvinced that overall crime levels had fallen, especially outside the capital.

“There’s been no reduction in crimes in the provinces. The roads are not safe. Violence against women, sexual abuse of children and the increasing number of drug addicts are all symptoms of organised crime, and the police have failed to curb them.”

Political scientist Ahmad Sayedi agreed, saying, “The security forces are trying to shift public opinion to suggest that crime has fallen, while robberies, kidnappings, murders, abuse and other crimes are happening in many provinces.”

The international community has prioritised assistance for the Afghan National Police, and around 30 countries have been involved in providing training and equipment to the 122,000-strong force.

However, public confidence in the ANP remains low. An opinion survey commissioned by the United Nations in 2010 and published last month revealed a widespread lack of trust in the police. Some 60 per cent of the 5,000 people polled across all 34 provinces of Afghanistan reported significant levels of corruption among police officers, and about half said they would not report a crime to them.

“People lost trust in the police from the very beginning,” Kohestani said. “It’s going to take a lot of time before people begin trusting and cooperating with the police again. And the police will not be successful unless this happens.”

Faisal, an economics student at Kabul University, said many ANP members were formerly part of the armed factions that fought one another in the 1992-96 civil war, and continued to bear old ethnic or factional grudges.

“Many policemen come from the ‘jihadi’ factions who were involved in the civil war,” he said. “They have massacred people and looted their property. Many of them aren’t even literate. So how can we claim that our police have been successfully reformed?”

Yet some Kabul residents say they have seen the improvements in police efficiency with their own eyes.

Hajji Abdul Jabar, a money-changer in the city’s Saray-i Shahzadah neighbourhood, said armed men kidnapped four months previously and demanded a ransom of three million US dollars.

“Many of my friends told me not to inform the police, who might be colluding with the kidnappers,” he recalled. “But when we told the police, they arrested the kidnappers within a few days and my nephew was released.”

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Mina Habib is an IWPR-trained contributor in Afghanistan. This article originally appeared in ARR Issue 393 (14 Mar 2010). Produced by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, www.iwpr.net

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