Tom Lodge
IN the kind of civil war which South Africa’s liberation struggle represented, what constitutes a human rights violation? Testimony to the truth commission has ranged from evidence from newspaper editors concerning their publications’ degree of complicity with apartheid oppression, to submissions from criminals and torturers.
Of course, any action which infringes upon another person’s freedom and well-being or aids such an infringement, might be held to constitute a human rights violation. Normally, though, in a war, combatants are not generally considered uniformly guilty of human rights crimes. This is especially the case when armies confine themselves to fighting each other, and in which – on each side – violence is directed against people who, themselves, are armed.
But in guerrilla wars, matters are not quite so straightforward. In such conflicts, professional armies are arrayed against amateur soldiers in irregular formations whose survival often depends on the degree to which they integrate themselves with a supportive civilian population. In such circumstances it often becomes very difficult to make distinctions between insurgent soldiers and non- combatant civilians.
Moreover, battles and skirmishes often take place on the terrain chosen by the guerrillas, in the midst of their communities rather than in areas from which civilians have been evacuated.
Conversely, from the point of view of the guerrillas, their prospects of victory scarcely ever depend upon outright military superiority. Rather, they employ violence in such a way that it demoralises their foes and undercuts the legitimacy of the regime: successful guerrilla campaigns often seek to disorganise society and demonstrate to the regime’s supporters the authorities’ incapability to guarantee security and protection. If guerrillas dispense with such tactics then they have to confine their warfare to the arenas favoured by military professionals, arenas in which they can only be losers.
Certainly there are rules of war, though most armies seldom conform to them rigorously. Normally it is losers who get penalised for breaking them. Such rules attempt to protect civilians and prisoners from military violence, as well as regulating the kinds of weaponry which can be used to kill and wound soldiers.
After World War II, German and Japanese generals were punished for executing captured soldiers and massacring civilians. But not all kinds of massacres were considered to be war crimes: “carpet” bombing of German and Japanese towns with the deliberate intention of killing thousands of civilians was not held to constitute a war crime.
In the South African case, the African National Congress endorsed principles in the Geneva Convention which were written to govern the behaviour of irregular armies in guerrilla wars. It breached those principles on several occasions when it attacked targets which had no military significance and in which the intention must have been to hurt and terrorise civilians.
To be fair, it undertook such actions relatively infrequently and not all of the terrorism undertaken by its cadres was sanctioned by Umkhonto weSizwe’s senior command. ANC representatives argue that their breaches of human rights can be distinguished from the government’s in two ways: there were fewer of them and they were committed in the course of a struggle which had noble ends.
Such arguments may seem reasonable enough, but a more intellectually convincing response to accusations of human rights violations directed against guerrilla forces would be that guerrilla struggles would be futile if they did not hurt civilians in one way or another. In any case, all wars breach human rights.
Many of the human rights crimes of which the South African security forces are often accused today may also be explained, if not defended, on the grounds that such actions are inevitable and even necessary in the business of fighting a war. That doesn’t exonerate policemen or soldiers who plot the murder of civilian political activists, or who sadistically mistreat captives and detainees.
Much of the violence committed by security forces was probably counter-productive in terms of their own objectives of maintaining order and suppressing rebellion: for example, the harsh methods of riot control used by the former South African Police probably prolonged and extended civil insurrections. Political murders often removed identifiable leaders, making the task of locating subversive organisation more difficult. Very little of the torture inflicted by the police yielded information they did not already have.
However, some of the violence and violations for which senior commanders are today expected to seek amnesty were consequences of actions which had quite reasonable military objectives. Cross- border raids were sometimes directed at targets which accommodated guerrilla commanders, or at least which defence force generals believed to be inhabited by Umkhonto or Azanian People’s Liberation Army officers. Guerrillas in front-line territories often lived in communities which included civilians: this was a consequence of the kind of war they were fighting. Inevitably non-combatants were killed – though sometimes such killing was undertaken with brutal gratuitousness by South African soldiers and policemen.
The truth commission is not a moral tribunal, but rather an institution which is intended to establish the extent of the casualties of South Africa’s liberation, to make arrangements for restitution where this is possible, and to protect former adversaries from the normal legal penalties which otherwise they might be exposed to. Inevitably, though, people on all sides will make moral judgements about the evidence presented to the commission. In making such judgements there may be a good case to separate acts of war from violations of human rights.
In some recent debates about the moral culpability of individuals and parties, this distinction seems to be lost.
Tom Lodge is a professor in the department of political studies, University of the Witwatersrand