How Amnesty Became the Villain Last Week
By giving what amounts to strategic advice, they are way out of their depth
Greetings from Saigon! I am still re-visiting my old Southeast Asian stomping grounds. Off to Phnom Penh tomorrow.
By now, you have probably heard of the Amnesty International debacle. To recap, Amnesty published a report accusing Ukraine of violating international humanitarian law by placing troops and equipment in residential areas. Shortly afterward, one of the same researchers, Donetalla Rovera, appeared in a now-deleted CBS report raising concerns that Western arm shipments to Ukraine were liable to diversion to nefarious groups. Let’s take these on one at a time.
The Amnesty report prompted an outcry from Ukrainians and their overseas supporters, and for good reason. While many of the basic facts of the story are true – any journalist who has worked near the frontline has seen plenty of soldiers and weapons lying around in cities and towns – it misses the nature of urban combat. There were times during my three months in Ukraine where I feared that my accommodations would become potential targets due to the close presence of military. If a significant mass of soldiers congregate in one place to spend the night or rest and recuperate during the day, there is a chance that it will attract the interest of Russian artillerymen. But did I fault the soldiers for spending time in a city under attack? Absolutely not.
Simply put, defending a city from enemy invaders necessitates putting military assets in places where civilians are ordinarily present. For an ethically-minded commander, this requires striking a balance between establishing effective combat positions while also, when practical, not encouraging enemy fire into populated areas. Is it possible that the Ukrainians could find room for improvement? I assume yes. Is a human rights researcher from Amnesty qualified to give what essentially amounts to military strategic advice on the matter? Very unlikely.
The journalist Tom Mutch, who I met just briefly over lunch in Kharkiv, published a damning story about Rovera’s research. The two were staying at the same hotel in Kramatorsk around the same time I was in the Donbas in May, and exchanged some words. I quoted a brief passage of the article below.
But Rovera was insistent that this military presence in a populated area was a “violation of international humanitarian law”’. When I pressed her on how the Ukrainian Army was supposed to defend a populated area, she said that it was irrelevant.
By that logic, I continued, Ukraine would have to abandon the major locations such as the city of Kharkiv. “Well, they must avoid as far as possible taking positions in a populated area,” she replied. “International humanitarian law is very clear on this.”
If Rovera’s interpretation of the law is correct, then it is essentially illegal to defend a city under attack. Even with robust evacuation mechanisms (and there are many in the Donbas), the civilian population does not magically disappear when a battle begins. While there is certainly an ethics discussion to be had among those with relevant expertise to find ways to minimize the likelihood that actions within your control might increase the likelihood of civilian casualties at the hands of the enemy, winning a war is by definition making the best out of a bad situation.
In any case, Russian government social media accounts were eager to jump on the controversy.
They are partially trolling, of course, given Russia’s historical animosity with Amnesty. Still, Amnesty would be well advised consider to how they got themselves into this position. It does not help that the Amnesty Secretary General’s initial response was to post this, even as her Ukrainian office head in Kyiv was signing her resignation letter in protest.
As for the CBS video, the now-deleted piece mainly told the story of an NGO delivering non-lethal aid to the frontline. The organization, Blue/Yellow, issued a statement in response to the final product praising CBS for accurately depicting the challenges of delivering supplies to the combat zones. It criticizes the report, however, for its “parallel storyline” concerning accountability issues regarding Western arms transfers to Ukraine. Crucially, the remark about only “30 percent” of aid reaching the frontline, which was only included in the trailer and intro, referred to the group’s own logistical problems in delivering non-lethal aid. The quote was also uttered on a reporting trip that took place just two months into the war, with much having changed in the interim. You can read their full statement below.
As far as Donatella Rovera’s comments are concerned, which are relatively brief and occur toward the end of the video, her comments overall were less grating than in her separate Amnesty report. But we still run into the same expertise issue; what tracking, precisely, in her experience as a human rights researcher, does she recommend implementing? Is it even possible to introduce such a system that Amnesty could independently audit without jeopardizing operational security? We are also still dealing with hypotheticals; neither Rovera nor CBS provides evidence, even just circumstantial, that any significant amount of diversion is actually happening.
There is no guarantee, of course, that an NLAW or something will not eventually turn up in a shady container ship at the Rotterdam port. War zones are magnets for arms dealers, both buying and selling, and the general concern is valid, just as one might have reasonably surmised that the titanic amounts of U.S. weapons and material sent to the Soviet Union during Lend Lease might not permanently serve the interests of the Western allies. Such balancing and prioritizing, of course, is the nature of public policy.
That said, the nature of much of the NATO equipment being transferred to Ukraine makes it unlikely that they would stay unseen on the black market for long. While Soviet-era shells or bullets could easily disappear without anyone noticing, the sudden appearance of NLAWs or Javelins, let alone an entire HIMAR system, on the black market would trigger alarm bells. Advanced weaponry is also finicky; just ask the American National Guardsman who became an ad-hoc Javelin tech support hotline.
That is all for tonight. Hopefully, this will be the first of a significant handful of impromptu updates. I will finally share some personal news: in less than two weeks, I will be joining my girlfriend in Belgrade. Let us see what opportunities that brings.