Women report from the wars

From Ukraine:

 

Kateryna Kibarova is a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha.

Recently, I read that the best warrior is the one who has lost everything. There was a story about a man in Odesa who went out for groceries at Easter. A rocket flew into the house and killed both his wife, his two-month-old baby, and, I think, the mother-in-law. He came back home to find his relatives—three generations—gone. And so he went to fight.

There are so many like him. It’s not only patriotism, but also boundless grief. It's like total courage—but it's different from when you are walking next to your mom as a child, and you're not afraid of anything. This is when you have so much pain inside, when you already know what pain—maximum pain—feels like, and you're not afraid of anything any more. This is a mix of anger, pain and aggression, all bubbling up in you.

I don't know of any punishment in the world that would be fitting for the people who are responsible for this. But I very much believe that the Russians will bear the consequences of their atrocities. They will be held accountable before God—and the Hague.

Africa encounters Saudi Arabia: 

Lydia Polgreen came up in journalism by way of years reporting from the civil conflicts of West Africa in the first decade of this century. Now from her perch at the New York Times editorial department, she insists that we not look away from reported Saudi massacres of refugee Ethiopians, desperately seeking to enter by way of war-torn Yemen:

We are living through a brutal new era of realpolitik, where might equals right amid a frenzy of global jockeying. This world has been very good to Saudi Arabia, a very rich and very important country by dint of its geography and natural resources. China brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and its archenemy, Iran; and now the Biden administration seeks a grand bargain between the Saudis and the government of Israel. For the West, the dictates of our current moment are clear: Counter China. Contain Russia. Keep unwanted migrants out.

The Biden administration came to power with many promises and good intentions. Two years ago, speaking after the chaos of the necessary and long overdue withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, Biden declared: “I have been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.”

Biden made similar commitments about migrants. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said in his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.”

I am certain that President Biden believed these words when he said them and believes them still. His administration is playing the hand it has been dealt. But as the events in the Saudi desert illustrate, this century is going to be nasty, brutish and long. ...

Photo via Human Rights Watch which made the story accessible in the US.

Constraining lawless power: ideas matter

Perhaps dogged, seemingly naive, efforts emanating from the relatively weak can help bend that arc of history which we're enjoined to hope bends toward justice. A couple of years ago, I wrote about The Internationalists, a lucid argument which seeks to rehabilitate the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928 in which 63 nations declared they had outlawed war -- just a decade before World War II engulfed nearly all of them. And I found it did convince me. I came away believing that movements of citizens and battalions of lawyers could, slowly, step by halting step, build frameworks of rule of law and practice that reduced immediate physical violence in international relations. And further, I became convinced that, as Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro argue, in the tortuous process of a global society struggling to be born, "ideas matter and people with ideas matter."

Last week a couple of significant, if not immediately fruitful, developments in the arena of international rule of law floated by in the news firehose:

• A Dutch team of prosecutors charged four men, three Russians and a separatist Ukrainian, with having fired the Russian missile which shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 enroute from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in 2014.

  "These suspects are seen to have played an important role in the death of 298 innocent civilians", said Dutch chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke.
  
  "Although they did not push the button themselves, we suspect them of close co-operation to get the [missile launcher] where it was, with the aim to shoot down an aeroplane."
  
  Investigators, he added, had "evidence showing that Russia provided the missile launcher".

  BBC News

  Though there is little reason to expect Russia to hand over the accused men, a trial will start in November 2020 whether or not the defendants are in custody.

• Meanwhile, a United Nations human rights investigation has provided what the Washington Post calls "the clearest picture yet" of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi's kidnapping and dismemberment by Saudi agents inside the Kingdom's consulate in Istanbul.

  The months-long investigation by Agnes Callamard, a human rights expert at the United Nations, faulted the United States and other countries as not exerting enough pressure on Saudi Arabia despite “credible evidence” of the likelihood that [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed [bin Salman] was involved in Khashoggi’s killing.
  
  She called for sanctioning and freezing the prince’s assets until he is either cleared or definitively implicated.
  
  With access to audio recordings provided by Turkish intelligence, Callamard laid out in graphic detail how Saudi government agents prepared to kill and dismember Khashoggi.

  The U. N. has no police force, but it can hope to bring to bear continued international blaming and shaming. That may not seem like much, but in a moment when the Saudi kingdom's oil is becoming less essential to many states and its war in Yemen seems more barbarous than ever, such conclusions can hurt a surprising amount.

Step by step ...