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[Previous entry: "The proposed smoking ban in Washington State"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "And so it begins..."] 17 March 2003: "The Death of Rachel Corrie"I ran across an article on the BBC News site this morning, "US peace activist killed in Gaza." I might have paid less attention, had it not been for the sentence: The woman was identified as Rachel Corrie, aged 23, from Olympia, Washington.Well, it's not every day someone from your town gets killed in the Gaza Strip, so I looked in the local paper, The Olympian. Rachel Corrie was a local, who went to Capital High School, and was a senior at Evergreen; she didn't enroll this quarter, instead going to Israel for the International Solidarity Movement to be what she called a "peace witness"—a Western protestor acting as a human shield in an attempt to deter Israeli security forces from conducting operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, Sunday 16-Mar-2003, Ms. Corrie, along with seven other protestors, was near Rafah in the Gaza Strip; in an attempt to stop an IDF armoured bulldozer from demolishing a house, Ms. Corrie placed herself on a pile of rubble the bulldozer was pushing, lost her footing and the bulldozer apparently crushed her under the rubble. From Haaretz: "This is a regrettable accident," said IDF spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal. "We are dealing with a group of protesters who were acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger."There are claims that the bulldozer driver backed up and ran her over a second time; this is seems incredible, given that she lived long enough to be taken to al-Najar hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. ISM was remarkably swift to get photos up showing Ms. Corrie standing in the path of the bulldozer, clad in a fluorescent orange jacket and wielding a megaphone. Having spent a fair amount of time around armoured vehicles, however, I'm not convinced this would have made much difference. IDF bulldozers—in this case a Caterpillar D9—are large, noisy and heavily armoured, and the driver is probably wearing hearing protection against the engine noise; you'd probably need Nigel Tufnel's custom amps to make yourself heard inside the cab from outside. Moreover, the view from the cab is severely restricted. Looking at this picture, it's even money that she is at least partially, if not entirely, obscured from the driver's view. Certainly, he wouldn't be able to see clearly if she fell in front of the dozer blade, managed to get out of the way or what. That's assuming the picture was made directly prior to the incident, as opposed to somewhere earlier in the afternoon. It should be noted that in this photo we see she had her jacket open and a dully-coloured sweater on underneath; not a brilliant idea when you're trying to be seen from in front. (As an aside: you know how, when cars were first introduced, they were required in some towns to be preceded by a guy on foot waving a red flag? When armoured vehicles are moved around places where there are likely to be people walking around, such as in a barracks, that still holds true. Well, not the red flag bit, but one guy walks ahead and does the looking and waving off, so that the driver only has to watch him. But in the Disputed Territories, such a guy would probably be shot by a sniper in short order, which is also why those IDF bulldozers have 6 tons of armour bolted on.) The most plausible scenario, to my mind, is that the driver advanced slowly, expecting Ms. Corrie to chicken out in time; she lost her footing and in doing so was lost to the driver's view. Assuming she'd gotten out of the way, he continued moving forward, with fatal results. It's stretching the definition of the term "accident," but that raises the question to which extent any death that results from playing "Chicken" with a 54-metric ton bulldozer can be termed as "accidental." The point being that I don't think the driver intended to kill her. Carolyn (my wife) commented that it was such a pointless waste of a good future. Rachel Corrie was due to graduate from college this year; if she'd wanted to make a difference in the world, wouldn't it have been more productive for her to have continued her studies and become a human rights lawyer or something, instead of having her life end pointlessly in some muddy field on the Egyptian border? Certainly, the speed with which ISM got the photos up, accused the IDF of murdering Ms. Corrie (whose name, I note, they initially misspelt as "Corey"), and organised a memorial in Olympia is indicative that the organisation's primary concern seems not to have been grief, but to make as much political capital from the incident as possible; it's noteworthy that there are marked inconsistencies between the account as it went up on their website, and an account in this article in the Monday edition of Haaretz. I also note that ISM refers to its volunteers as "internationals," no doubt in an attempt to conjure up associations with the Spanish Civil War. Well, there do seem to be some similarities, in that well-intentioned people are being duped into getting killed by people who don't deserve to benefit from those good intentions. ISM has the text of the Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War up on its site; I believe the suggestion is that foreign nationals in Israel or the Disputed Territories are Protected Persons under the Convention, and that the IDF would make itself guilty of war crimes by harming them. This is a questionable assertion, to put it mildly, even though UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/54/77 affirmed the applicability of the Geneva Convention (IV) to the "Occupied Territories" (which is questionable enough in and of itself). Firstly, Article 4 of the Convention states: Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.Any Western activist is therefore not a Protected Person for the purpose of the Convention. Secondly, even if "internationals" were Protected Persons (which, I hasten to reiterate, they are not), Article 5 states: Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.By serving as human shields for Palestinians, including militants, the "internationals" may be argued to be "engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State" (in this case Israel, since the Palestine Authority is not a recognised state); that case could certainly be made in the Rafah incident, where the houses were being demolished to facilitate the blocking of smuggling from Egypt. On top of that, there is Article 8: Protected persons may in no circumstances renounce in part or in entirety the rights secured to them by the present Convention, and by the special agreements referred to in the foregoing Article, if such there be.Use of human shields is a war crime, because it forces one's opponent to fight with one arm tied behind his back (if the opponent has any shred of decency). Even the use of human shields who volunteer is a war crime. It is therefore also illegal to volunteer to be a human shield. It should be noted that ISM states that it seeks to use non-violent resistance to the Israelis, even while affirming the Palestinians' right to "armed struggle." That's trying to have it both ways; it boils down to standing in the middle of a firefight, while only trying to make only one side (in this case, the IDF) hold their fire. And that, dear reader, is the essence of a human shield. At best, ISM is wilfully ignorant of international law; at worst they're lying scum who dupe well-meaning kids into getting themselves killed by the IDF in order to make political capital from it. Whatever the case, they had no right to waste Rachel Corrie's life. Replies: 2 Comments
A couple things. Check out the two bulldozers on the ISM's website. They are different bulldozers and the pictures were taken different places (check out the minaret and trees). Even though the ISM does not claim that it is the same bulldozer the pictures are placed in that order in a deliberate way to misrepresent the facts. The mistake that they were the same bulldozer was not only posted on this website but picked up by numerous periodicals and newspapers around the world. Including the prestigious Christian Science Monitor. Tom Young said @ 03/25/2003 06:51 AM Z-8 In addition, eye-witness accounts by Corrie's comrades state that she was sitting on a mound of dirt when the bulldozer approached. As the dirt began to move from the shovel, rather than naturally fall backward or to her side, she leaned forward INTO the shovel and was crushed. When bystanders screamed at the operator of the bulldozer, he backed up, without raising the shovel, and it was drawn back across her body. As you've noted, it's impossible to see what's immediately in front of the shovel from the operator's cage, so he would have not been able to know that she had been run over. Measure this against the entries in her journal that have romanticized suicide attacks. "Imagine, please, the courage it takes to carry out these missions." Ernest Wallace said @ 03/26/2003 11:33 AM Z-8 |
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