My friend Sarah does truly amazing and inspiring work to help ensure innocent victims of war receive compensation by those who harm them (regardless of intention). Her work focuses on the gruesome truth our society holds: that innocent victims of conflict are mostly left to suffer by those who bring harm to them.
Sarah's working hard to change that.
Check her organization CIVIC (The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict) at
www.civicworldwide.org and check out her Op-Ed which appeared in the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday, March 7:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/07/opinion/edholewin.phpFixing the collateral damage
Sarah Holewinski
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
KABUL: Spend some time in Brussels and Kabul with the soldiers andcivilians of NATO and you'll hear the same thing: If there ever was aplace and a time when winning support of the local population wouldhelp win a war, the place is Afghanistan — and the time is now.
Afghanistan is beginning to thaw, which means a spring offensive againstthe Taliban looms. Perhaps that's why NATO troops, cobbled together from36 countries into the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, have begun publicly promoting their efforts to avoid harming ordinaryAfghans.
ISAF's chief spokesman, Brigadier Richard Nugee, recently admitted: "Thesingle thing that we have done wrong and that we are striving extremelyhard to improve on is killing innocent civilians."
But avoiding civilians in Afghanistan is only half the battle. Civilians will be in harm's way, and bombs and bullets will not leave themunscathed.
With all the talk about winning hearts and minds, NATO countries stillhave not solidly committed themselves to helping the innocent civilians they unintentionally harm.
Accidental casualties can do a lot to help or hurt NATO's mission here —and in a war of public relations, reputation means a lot. NATO needs torecognize, with one voice, that its strategic imperative to defeat theTaliban and its moral imperative to help where it has hurt are far moresimilar than they seem. Yet only a few NATO member states seem tounderstand this enough to do something about it.
Just before Christmas, ISAF created a fund to help innocent peopleharmed by NATO operations. However, the Post-Operations HumanitarianRelief Fund, as it is known, is funded with a pittance — just over€400,000 from only four nations — and not the ones with big wallets.The fund has already disbursed about a third of that amount as aid inthe troubled Kandahar Province, leaving it with even less to work withwhen, inevitably, civilians are harmed during the coming offensive.
It's a worthy effort, and one trail-blazed by the United States, whichhas been bringing aid to innocent civilians in Afghanistan since 2003through a program called "The Leahy Initiative" for the man who createdit, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. That fund will receive $3 millionthis year.
Half a million dollars each from countries with the means — like Japan,which is devoting enormous funding to infrastructure and developmenthere — Britain and Canada, would go a long way.
So why aren't these initiatives catching on at NATO? Member states knowabout them, but most choose not to give.
Some nations don't think they should pay for combat accidents orcasualties their troops did not actually cause, missing the point thatif NATO is going to work it has to work together. Other countries wantto avoid mixing the military mission with humanitarian endeavors.
There's also the worry that giving aid to civilians harmed by themilitary would lay a political minefield back home, seeming to expandthe mission when constituents want their troops back as quickly aspossible.
Those concerns are little consolation to Afghan families who lost anestimated one thousand homes as a result of ISAF's Operation Medusa inSeptember, which NATO said had driven Taliban forces out of astronghold in the southern province of Kandahar.
Nor are they comforting to the loved ones of the dozen nomads killedduring October military strikes in the southern Panjwayi and Pashmuldistricts of Kandahar.
The mission here is NATO's first outside of Europe, and the world iswatching. NATO members who don't donate to ISAF's relief fund or to TheLeahy Initiative are essentially backing out of a mission that wouldhelp them stabilize the country faster by fostering goodwill and beating the Taliban at their own game. This is a war you can't winunless you win the people.
