Former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt (Credit: AP/Moises Castillo)

Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt was just less than two weeks ago convicted of committing genocide against his own people during his time in power. According to the charges against him, Rios Montt was aware of the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Mayans during the country’s lengthy civil war, and did nothing to stop it. As punishment, the 86-year old former dictator was sentenced to eighty years in prison, the first time a national court had convicted a former head of state for committing genocide.

Instead of sitting in a cell for the rest of his life, however, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court has overturned the conviction and ordered that the trial jump back down to the tribunal that originally tried the case. Additionally, the trial has to rewind to where it stood back on April 19, to cover what Rios Montt claimed were violations of due process. As a result, it seems that Rios Montt will likely be released from custody in the near future, while many involved with the prosecution have already fled the country for fear of reprisals from those who sought to have the conviction reversed.

When it was first announced, Human Rights Watch called Rios Montt’s guilty verdict an “unprecedented step toward establishing accountability for atrocities.”

“The conviction of Rios Montt sends a powerful message to Guatemala and the world that nobody, not even a former head of state, is above the law when it comes to committing genocide,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, at the time.

The overturning of the ruling should be particularly disappointing for Americans, given the role that the United States played in enabling Rios Montt’s rule and subsequent abuse of power at the height of the Cold War:

When General Ríos Montt was installed in a coup in March 1982, Reagan administration officials were eager to embrace him as an ally. Embassy officials trekked up to the scene of massacres and reported back the army’s line that the guerrillas were doing the killing, according to documents uncovered by [Kate Doyle, a Guatemala expert at the National Security Archive].

Over the next two years, about $15 million in spare parts and vehicles from the United States reached the Guatemalan military, said Prof. Michael E. Allison, a political scientist at the University of Scranton who studies Central America. More aid came from American allies like Israel, Taiwan, Argentina and Chile. In the 1990s, the American government revealed that the C.I.A. had been paying top military officers throughout the period.

President Bill Clinton in 1999 traveled to Guatemala to apologize for the U.S.’ support for the dictator, saying that “support for military forces or intelligence units which engage in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the [Commission for Historical Clarification] report was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

(Credit: AP)

The International Crisis Group (ICG) on Tuesday published a new report “Drones: Myths And Reality In Pakistan,” examining the ongoing war against militant groups located in Pakistan. The report calls on both the United States and Pakistan to come clean about the ongoing use of drones against suspected terrorists, saying that more than strikes are needed to end Pakistan’s ongoing problem with militants.

Since 2004, according to the ICG, at least 350 U.S. drone strikes have taken place on Pakistani soil, within the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). Complicating operations against militant groups based in the area, the vast majority of Pakistan’s laws simply do not apply to the FATA, with the region instead following its own set of tribal laws and codes. Given the lack of control Islamabad exerts, the FATA has long been a haven for armed groups, including those who strike across the border in Afghanistan, including Mullah Omar’s Taliban and the Haqqani Network, as well as the Pakistani Taliban, which strikes against Pakistan itself.

One of the major issues ICG raises regarding drone strikes in the area is the lack of firm intelligence about precisely who is being targeted. In place of firm data, the U.S. often utilizes what are known as “signature strikes” or “personality strikes.” Groups of men between 16-55 who meet a certain profile are often considered legitimate targets, based on “pattern of life” data including where they’ve traveled while under surveillance and whether or not they were in the vicinity of known targets when the strike occurred.

As the report details, Pakistan and U.S. are locked in delicate dance over the actual use of drones within Pakistan, each concealing the full truth from the public. The U.S. still won’t officially confirm that the CIA-run targeted killing program within Pakistan even exists. The IGC says Pakistan often displays behavior that “borders on the schizophrenic” when it comes to the drone program. The Pakistani government often claims to have no forewarning about the use of drones and publicly denounces many of the strikes, even with ample evidence that they provide permission for the operations to occur, especially when carried out against its enemies.

ICG suggests both Washington and Islamabad become more transparent about the relationship the two have on drone strikes, while shifting their policies away from relying solely on military options, and instead taking a more comprehensive approach to combating militancy:

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Guantanamo Bay (Credit: AFP/Getty)

For the last several weeks, a hunger strike has been spreading throughout Guantanamo, as detainees refuse to accept food what is now widely understood as a protest of their indefinite detention. In response, the military has begun force-feeding several of the inmates through a nasal tube to keep them alive. According to AFP, the United Nations’ main human rights office has taken notice:

“If it’s perceived as torture or inhuman treatment — and it’s the case, it’s painful — then it is prohibited by international law,” Rupert Coville, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights, told AFP.

A bipartisan task force on detainees assembled by the Constitution Project earlier this month condemned force-feeding and one member also suggested that it could be torture. “The World Medical Association and international officials have clearly identified that process as cruel, in human and degrading treatment,” said Dr. Gerald Thomson. “And given the level of brutality could extend to torture.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who has long advocated for the closure of Guantanamo, reiterated her call for the prison’s closure when the hunger strike first began. “Given the uncertainty and anxieties surrounding their prolonged and apparently indefinite detention in Guantanamo, it is scarcely surprising that people’s frustrations boil over and they resort to such desperate measures,” Pillay said of the hunger strike at the time.

Coville’s statement is in-line with the opinion of the American Medical Association (AMA), which recently wrote to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel condemning the practice. Both the AMA and United Nations base their conclusion on the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo in 1975, which holds that when a prisoner “refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially.” In 1991, the group also declared that force-feeding is “never ethically acceptable.”

As of Wednesday, 100 of the 160 prisoners held within Guantanamo are on hunger strike. According to the Department of Defense, 23 of those striking are being force-fed, an increase of two from yesterday. Military doctors have been rushed to Guantanamo to provide additional support to the base’s medical facilities.

President Obama on Tuesday said he would renew his attempt to close Guantanamo Bay, saying that the prison is not in the United States’ interest and is “not sustainable.”

Over the last several days, the Syrian crisis has exploded back into the news. As the U.S. debates how to respond to the now two-year long struggle, here’s the what you need to know:

How this all began

The current crisis in Syria began in 2011, with civilian protests launched during a wave of pro-democracy sentiment known as the Arab Spring. Those protests were met with harsh repression from the Syrian government under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s regime continued to crackdown on protesters, eventually resorting to massive human rights abuses including torture, disappearances, extrajudicial executions and detention of medical patients. In response, civilians began to take up arms against the Syrian government, transforming a peaceful movement to increase democratic freedoms into an all-out civil war. Since the beginning of the conflict, more than 70,000 Syrians have died.

Who’s doing the fighting

Over the past two years, the make-up of the Syrian opposition has shifted considerably. In the beginning, the opposition was composed mostly of civil society leaders and Syrian citizens with a small armed group taking shape across the border in Turkey. Since then, the rebels have spawned an entire network of loosely affiliated groups fighting against the Assad regime — and each other at times. Instead of hiding across the border, rebels now openly control a large swath of territory in the north and west of the country as the Syrian government continues to push back.

While many of the rebel groups are secular, recent months have shown an influx of foreign fighters into the country, seeking to impose a harsh version of Islam upon Syria once the Assad regime falls. The U.S. has labeled one such group — Jabhat al-Nusra — a terrorist group for its close ties to Al Qaeda. These murky connections between the rebels and jihadis have proved difficult for Western governments seeking to effect the situation on the ground.

The effect on the Syrian people and the region

As time wore on in the conflict, the Syrian government unleashed more and greater violence was against civilians, including the use of armored vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft and mortars against whole neighborhoods. Making matters worse, rebels are now accused of taking part in atrocities as well.

This has all led to a massive humanitarian crisis in Syria and the surrounding region. As of March, more than one million Syrians have fled into the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, placing a massive strain on those states’ governments. According to the United Nations, over 4.25 million Syrians are now internally displaced within the country.
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Tuesday morning, a consortium of human rights organizations launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a joint project to enact an international treaty banning the use of “fully autonomous robots” — machines that kill without direct human oversight — in combat. The launch highlights a net of thorny ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of these weapons, ones that have yet to be fully resolved by the US government or international community.

The campaign to ban robot soldiers began in response to rapid advancements in military robotics in roughly the past decade and a half, developments that most famously produced the armed Predator and Reaper drones in common use by U.S. armed personnel today. In 2009, several concerned researchers founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), the first NGO dedicated to pushing an international treaty that (among other things) would ban autonomous weapons. Debate over the topic heated up in late 2012, when Human Rights Watch released much-debated report arguing that autonomous weapons were in-principle inconsistent with international humanitarian law.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots joins ICRAC and HRW with 20 other like-minded organizations, including Amnesty International and Code Pink, in a renewed effort to codify a ban on autonomous weapons. There is no currently existing fully autonomous weapons platform and the U.S. Department of Defense, which supervises what is by far the most robotically advanced military in the world, has a self-imposed moratorium on deploying weapons capable of autonomously using lethal force. However, the Campaign’s member groups are worried that technological advancement will make the deployment of such weapons inevitable without a treaty ban:

Over the past decade, the expanded use of unmanned armed vehicles or drones has dramatically changed warfare, bringing new humanitarian and legal challenges. Now rapid advances in technology are permitting the United States and other nations with high-tech militaries, including China, Israel, Russia, and the United Kingdom, to move toward systems that would give full combat autonomy to machines…”We cannot afford to sleepwalk into an acceptance of these weapons. New military technologies tend to be put in action before the wider society can assess the implications, but public debate on such a change to warfare is crucial,” said Thomas Nash, Director of Article 36. “A pre-emptive ban on lethal autonomous robots is both necessary and achievable, but only if action is taken now.”

These efforts are obviously in their infancy, and militaries have some pretty obvious reasons to want autonomous weapons, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see a treaty banning robot soldiers anytime soon. Moreover, it’s not even clear if it’d be a good thing: lawyers and ethicists are sharply divided as to whether autonomous weapons would be illegal, unimportant, or potentially even an improvement over human soldiers.

Critics of autonomous weapons argue that they’re incapable of complying with critical provisions in international humanitarian law aimed at protecting civilians. That Human Rights Watch report concludes that no algorithm or artificial intelligence could sufficiently distinguish, for example, between civilians and insurgents in an Afghanistan-style counterinsurgency, meaning that no army employing autonomous weapons could satisfy the legal principle of “distinction” (that all armies must, over the course of fighting, identify civilian populations and military targets and treat the two differently). Critics also believe that autonomous weapons would have difficulty making the kinds of contextual moral judgments necessary to comply with the principle of proportionality, the idea that any unintentional cost to civilian life must be proportionate to the military benefits, or “military necessity,” the legal principle requiring armies to hold off on attacks (even on military targets) that aren’t necessary for winning.

Opponents of a treaty ban, by contrast, argue that such criticisms are missing the point. All weapons, they hold, can be used illegally — obviously, armies using machetes alone can violate the principles of distinction, proportionality, or military necessity. Indeed, they might be more likely to: while humans are driven to massacre by anger or sadism, a properly programmed robot will never lash out (Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology is working on just this sort of programming). It’s much smarter, they argue, to attempt to identify the specific circumstances under which autonomous weapons could be used lawfully or unlawfully rather than tilt after the windmill of an international treaty.

While some of these quandaries depend on technical assessments — How well can we program robots? How good are their sensors? — others are more conceptual. One such challenge comes from Monash University Professor Robert Sparrow, who argues that robots create problems of moral responsibility for atrocities that are in principle impossible to resolve. Sparrow argues that, the more autonomous a combat machine is, the less predictable its behavior in combat zones becomes, and hence the less fair it is to hold either its programmer or commanding officer responsible for any atrocities it commits. But if it’s wrong to hold anyone responsible for atrocities, then the entire system of international law and the morality of war — which depends on being able to hold particular individuals responsible for war crimes — falls apart.

Others, like Jeffrey S. Thurnher and Michael Schmitt, counter that it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a robot could commit a war crime without the person who ordered it into combat knowing that atrocity was a possible outcome of their order, suggesting that a person could always be responsible for the machine’s actions.

These issues have yet to be resolved as a matter of law, philosophy, or even robotics. Yet one thing is clear: the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots won’t end the end of debate about the use of robots in war. If anything, it’ll escalate it.

(Myanmar civilians with weapons approach a Muslim village already on fire Photo credit: Human Rights Watch)

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report — titled “‘All You Can Do is Pray’: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State” — documents the clash between two ethnic groups in Myanmar’s Arakan State. The majority ethnic Arakanese population, according to the report, sought to remove the disenfranchised Rohingya group living within the Arakan state from their communities. The Arakanese are majority Buddhist, while the Rohingya are Muslim.

Further, the report accuses the Myanmar government and local authorities of not only complicity with efforts to forcibly evict the Rohingya from their homes, but also overt support for the campaign:

“The Burmese government engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya that continues today through the denial of aid and restrictions on movement,” said Phil Robertson, [Human Rights Watch's] deputy Asia director. “The government needs to put an immediate stop to the abuses and hold the perpetrators accountable or it will be responsible for further violence against ethnic and religious minorities in the country.”

The majority of the violence Human Rights Watch documented took place during a surge in violence in Oct. 2012. HRW says at least 70 Rohingya were killed in one day and that police assisted by disarming the Rohingya of the sticks and other weapons carried to defend themselves. The group also claims to have found evidence of at least four mass graves dug in the aftermath of the massacre throughout Arakan. Currently at least 125,000 Rohingya and non-Rohingya Muslims reside in a displacement camp, while the Myanmar government drags its feet on following through on its pledges for reconstruction aid.

Clashes between ethnic and religious communities have not quieted in Myanmar, however, nor are they limited to Arakan state. Rakhine state just last month was home to a renewed spate of the majority targeting Muslim communities, spurred on by hardline Buddhist monks. According the United Nations, more than 12,000 Muslims were forced from their homes during the most recent fighting. The BBC on Tuesday released newly obtained video showing Myanmar police officers standing idle while Muslim shops and houses were set ablaze, lending further credence to the Human Rights Watch reporting.

Despite the ongoing violence, the European Union on Monday lifted most of its sanctions on Myanmar, citing the country’s “remarkable process of reform.” Asked about the Human Rights Watch Report on Monday, U.S. State Department acting spokesperson Patrick Ventrell said, “We continue our engagement with Burmese authorities and we also continue to urge the government to bring justice to affected communities, to address the root causes of this violence, and put in place mechanisms to prevent future outbreaks so that ethnic groups in Burma can coexist.”

A searing op-ed in the New York Times on Monday broke open the floodgates of public interest in the remaining detainees at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detention center. Combined with news of a violent clash between the guards and the detainees on Saturday, Guantanamo is in the spotlight like it hasn’t been in years. Here’s what you need to know:

Who is left in Guantanamo?

Despite pledges to close Guantanamo Bay’s detention facilities in his first year in office, the base still remains quite open and recently received a new commanding officer. Human Rights First has a look at the numbers of who remains in Gitmo, including those who have been approved for release but still remain behind bars:

• Detainees currently held at Guantánamo: 166.
• Remaining detainees approved for release: 86.
• Detainees convicted by military commission before 2009 and still held at Guantánamo: 1
• Detainees Obama Administration designated for trial or commission including those tried since January 2009: 36.
• Detainees Obama Administration has designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial: 46.

Of those remaining, the U.S. military says that 42 detainees are currently on a hunger strike under military guidelines, which includes nine missed consecutive meals, with 11 force-fed via nasal tube to keep them alive.

Is this the first hunger strike in Guantanamo?

No, this is not the first time detainees have launched hunger strikes to protest mistreatment. A similar case occurred in 2005, when as many as 200 detainees refused food and water while maintaining their innocence and protesting their handling while in detention. Another such case took place in 2007 and yet another in 2010. Each of those incidents also included detainees’ force-feeding through nasal tubes.

Why are the detainees striking this time and for how long?

The strike goes back to early February, launched against guards at Guantanamo searching for weapons hidden in detainees’ copies of the Quran. Word spread among detainees that these searches involved possible mistreating of the Quran, leading them to forgo meals in protest.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense William K. Lietzau wrote in a letter in response to the Center for Constitutional Rights’ inquiries about the searches, denying that any mishandling had occurred. In his letter, Lietzau insisted that incidents have occurred with detainees “storing contraband in their Qurans; items found have included improvised weapons, unauthorized food and medicine” and other other items deemed able to harm themselves, other detainees, or Gitmo personnel.

At present, no data has been provided to the media regarding confiscated contraband supposedly hidden within the searched Qurans. Defense lawyers also insist that their clients would not hide weapons within their own holy books, as that would itself be desecration. There is also no sign that the hunger strike will voluntarily end in the near future.

What’s the story behind this weekend’s violence?

The clash this weekend began following the decision to move the hunger-strikers currently being force-fed into single-cell, rather than communal, facilities. According a media statement from U.S. Southern Command on the incident, the decision was not well met among detainees:

In order to reestablish proper observation, the guards entered the Camp VI communal living spaces to transition detainees into single cells, remove obstructions to cameras, windows and partitions, and medical personnel conducted individual assessments of each detainee. The ongoing hunger strike necessitated these medical assessments. Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons, and in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired. There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees.

The “weapons” wielded included “batons, broomsticks, and plastic water bottles” precisely how many detainees and guards were injured has yet to be provided to the media.

Why is Guantanamo still open?

Despite President Obama signing an Executive Order in 2009 to have Gitmo closed within a year, several Congressional acts have prevented the transfer of detainees from the Cuban base to the United States. In light of accusations of torture, however, the Central Intelligence Agency lost its ability to hold and interrogate suspects in detention centers around the world, also stemming the flow of new detainees into Guantanamo.

The result has been a broken detention policy, seen in a sharp fall-off in the number of captured foreign fighters and a sharp increase in the use of armed drones to kill suspected terrorists. The Obama administration has recently warily begun to send suspected terrorists to civilian courts, rather than trying them in military tribunals in Guantanamo, but Republicans have heavily derided even this small step towards reforming detention policy.