THE POWER OF WITNESS: IMAGERY AND MASS ATROCITIES
by Micah Zenko
Council on Foreign Relations
March 29 2012
Warning: This blog post contains graphic images.
Last week, I was fortunate to attend a workshop at the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, “Power of Witness: The Use of Technology in Preventing
Mass Atrocities.” Among the topics discussed were the current and
potential use of journalists, victims’ reporting, satellites, aircraft,
and drones (presented by myself) to reveal to the outside world what
is happening on the ground. It was remarkable to hear from a wide
range of dedicated people who utilize innovative technologies and
collaborative arrangements to document prospective war crimes for
dissemination to the media, people in the target country, foreign
leaders, criminal tribunals, the global public, and others.
Of course, harnessing the power of witness is not a new endeavor. As
Martha Finnemore notes in her book, The Purpose of Intervention:
Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force, the domestic debate
surrounding intervention for humanitarian purposes is highly
contested. Finnemore describes the influence of the media to “arouse
public opinion and influence policy…by increasing exposure and
creating familiarity where little existed previously.”
Over the past 150 years, intervention proponents have increasingly
relied on vivid and graphic imagery from the target country to rally
support to their cause-including U.S. policymakers, for better or for
worse. In 1995, U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright fought to
declassify three CIA satellite photographs of Srebrenica in order to
show them to a closed session of the UN Security Council. Of course,
such imagery is subject to interpretation and exploitation internal
opposition groups, exiles, or foreign governments to justify military
interventions. On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell
briefed the UN Security Council on “Iraq: Failure to Disarm,” which
included photographs (remember the “mobile biological warfare agent
production plants?”) and audio clips that purportedly confirmed the
existence of Iraq’s WMD program, which did not exist.
Consider this brief survey of how powerful imagery emerged from foreign
conflicts or major wars, and the impact it had on the homefront,
policymakers, or the international community.
Crimean War (1853-1856)
The Crimean War is considered to be the first media war, in which
the telegraph and camera enabled news and images from battles to
be transmitted to the homefront in hours instead of weeks. For the
first time, the British public saw photographs of the front line that
brought far-off battlefields to life.
Armenian massacres (1915-1916)
The Ottoman Turks deported hundreds of thousands-some argue more than a
million-of Armenians to the desert of Syria. Western news organizations
captured the unfolding events, as many Armenians died en route from
starvation or were killed by Ottoman forces. Today, most scholars
and historians consider this a clear act of genocide, although the
Turkish government strongly rejects the claim and resists the use of
the word by any government to describe the Armenian mass deaths.
World War II (1939-1945)
World War II was a watershed in the global understanding of atrocities
and genocide (a term coined in 1943 by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin,
which combined the Greek prefix genos, meaning family or race, and
the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing), largely due to the horrific
images that emerged from concentration camps in Europe after the
arrival of Allied soldiers. The construction of a new global human
rights regime was a direct response to the Nazis’ Final Solution, in
the hopes that signatories to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide would ensure that the five
specific acts that comprise genocide wouldn’t happen again:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children
of the group to another group.
Vietnam War (1960-1975)
The Vietnam War was the first fully televised war, in which the
American public received regular updates on the conflict through
photographs and videos. (For just one example, see the real-time CBS
News video that captured an Army platoon under fire from mortars and
sniper.) Photojournalism played a large role in shaping public opinion
on the war, particularly through its more graphic images. Now-infamous
images, such as the photograph by Eddie Adams of a general shooting an
unidentified man in the head, defied the U.S. government’s portrayal
of the war effort fueled the Vietnam protest movement in the United
States.
This photo ran on front page of the New York Times under the headline
“Street Clashes Go On in Vietnam, Foe Still Holds Parts of Cities;
Johnson Pledges ‘Never to Yield.'”
Cambodian genocide (1975-1979)
The Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot carried out a widespread
and systematic genocide, killing approximately 1.7 million people,
or roughly 20 percent of the population. In its policy of internal
“purification,” the regime deported the urban population to the
countryside where brutal labor conditions, disease, and starvation
killed hundreds of thousands. The government also targeted and executed
political groups and suspected opponents or rivals.
The killing ended when the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in January
1979; the first images of the atrocities committed were taken by
Vietnamese soldiers.
Images of victims from the Tuol Sleng Prison, also known as the “S-21”
interrogation and extermination center. In total, there are over five
thousand photographs of prisoners at the facility; the vast majority
of victims are unknown.
The exhumation of the Choeung Ek killing fields in 1980 offered some
of the first concrete evidence of the atrocities committed by the
Khmer Rouge regime (Yale Archives/Ben Kiernan).
Bosnian War (1992-1995)
In August 1992, a number of Western newspapers, including Newsweek
and Time Magazine, called for intervention by publishing images as
proof of a “new Holocaust” occurring in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over
the course of the conflict, an estimated 200,000 Muslims were killed
by Bosnian Serb forces.
Rwandan genocide (April-June 1994)
Over three months, Rwanda witnessed an ethnic cleansing campaign that
killed an estimated 800,000 people, largely carried out by the Hutu
majority against the Tutsi minority (although moderate Hutus were
targeted as well). The international community reeled at the speed
and scale of the genocide, which defied all conventional norms of
conflict prevention and early warning.
Horrific images emerged from Rwanda over the course of the genocide
as the world stood paralyzed.
Kyrgyzstan (June 2010)
On June 10, 2010, violence erupted in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, between ethnic
Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities. Over the next four days, it is estimated
that between 500 and 2,000 people were killed as well as over 400,000
displaced. Satellite images (as seen below) tracked and mapped the
conflict as it escalated. In particular, such images captured “SOS”
signs written on roadways and buildings.
Map of “SOS” signs throughout Osh (© 2010 Digital Globe).
For most of recent history, news and images of conflicts and atrocities
reaching the outside world were dependent on reporters, photographers,
and a small number of activists on the ground. However, technology
and social media such as camera phones, blogs, YouTube, Facebook,
and Twitter have permanently and dramatically altered the way the
world communicates and receives news.
During the so-called “Green Revolution” in Iran in 2009, the brutal
suppression of non-violent protesters by the regime was extensively
documented by ordinary people organizing demonstrations and sending
updates, photos, and videos on Twitter. An excellent report by the
RAND Corporation describes the power of social media as a particularly
effective tool to “generate political opposition, shape political
discourse, and facilitate action in the face of a powerful regime”
in Iran and beyond.
Today, news reports on the protracted conflict in Syria rely heavily on
reports from citizens on the ground via Skype, videos taken on phones
uploaded to YouTube, and updates posted on Facebook. According to
one estimate, 80 percent of the videos of the Syrian conflict that
have been broadcasted by mainstream news organizations were shot
by amateur videographers. In addition, unmanned U.S. intelligence
drones have flown over Syria, collecting information and monitoring
the Syrian military’s movements. Due to technology and social media,
there is unequivocal evidence of atrocities committed, but still
amost no on-the-ground access for UN or human rights investigators
to better verify the accounts.
In 2009, former British prime minister Gordon Brown reflected on the
emerging power of social media: “You cannot have Rwanda again because
information would come out far more quickly about what is actually
going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action
would need to be taken.” While we hope that will be the case, it is
the responsibility of the international community to use the power of
technology to better inform and shape its decision-making process in
order to take actions commensurate with the political will, available
resources, and potential to make a real impact.