Alexander Gillespie: Barbaric crime of unmitigated evil

COMMENT

Let us speak clearly: In an age punctuated by acts designed to cause terror, mayhem and destruction, what has happened in southern Russia is an act of evil, and we should recognise it for what it is.

It is the antithesis of humanity. The act represents a crime, first and foremost, against the children and their families.

It also represents a crime against all civilisation, all humanity and every and any kind of progress we collectively seek to achieve.

We were all once children. We all know what childhood is: the age of promise, of potential, of vulnerability. All children are intrinsically special, and it is for this reason that the world pauses when children get caught up in the conflicts of adults.

We last paused when we watched Mohammed al-Dura executed publicly in 2003 during a firefight between Israeli and Palestinian combatants. The difference now is one of magnitude, and the moral void we must look into in the wake of all of the corpses of the dead children.

The murder of the children was designed to strike terror into all of those who witnessed it. This is part of the strategy of terrorism: it is designed to make a targeted audience give in to the goals that are being demanded.

Similar practices are part and parcel of official military strategies, although the difference between terrorism and official state violence, in this instance, is one of intention.

Historically, it is very rare to directly target children en masse. Indirectly, children in their millions have been sacrificed in the wars of grown-ups. The difference is one of intention.

Carpet bombing, fire bombing and nuclear bombing - in all of these instances, incalculable children have been destroyed in the path of military necessity. The one redeeming feature is that the intention was never to target children directly. The millions of lives of lost generations of children were destroyed as collateral damage.

This is not the same as what happened in the weekend. In School No 1 in Beslan, the children were the target; the adults were the collateral damage.

International law has striven for hundreds of years to place limits on the most horrific acts that belligerents can inflict upon each other. It tries to act independently of the reasons why people and nations try to kill each other, and lay down some basic ground rules. It sounds like an oxymoron, but the ideal is that there are restraints, even in times of warfare.

The current escalation of terrorism is trying to erode these. These restraints are the high-tide mark of our moral limits. In many instances, they do not go high enough, and we need to go much further. But rarely do they go too far.

To act in complete contravention of the rules of humanity, as reflected in laws that date back thousands of years, is an act of barbarism, the direct attempt by some forces not to turn the clock back but to smash it.

If it is possible to build a pyramid of principles of restraint in international law, the first principle would be to safeguard non-combatants. The second would be to recognise certain classes of non-combatants above others, such as medical personnel, religious personnel, and nursing mothers. Children are at the pinnacle of non-combatants, and everything possible must be done to protect their safety.

There have been many violations of international law since World War II: genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape and murder and so on. From Bosnia to Rwanda, the international community has responded, trying to restore civilisation through mechanisms such as international criminal tribunals, which prosecute war crimes.

But one war crime, until now, has stayed hidden: the deliberate killing of children. After World War II, several Nazis were condemned at Nuremberg for this.

There were many ways of killing children, but rarely did the charge involve intention. From the gas chambers to slave labour, they were targeted and killed, but not because they were children. They died for their ethnicity, their nationality or for being in the wrong place.

For example, about 15 per cent of all Polish children were removed to Germany as slaves in World War II. Only 10 per cent of these children survived.

The Nuremberg trials heard of only three instances (all orphanages) when children died because they were children, and these all involved criminal neglect. For example, more than 400 infants died from neglect at the Volkswagenwerke "Children's Home", run for children whose parents had been deported to work in Germany between April 1943 and April 1945.

What happened in Beslan has introduced a new chapter into the unmitigated evil that bad people can perpetuate. It was an act against civilisation, in the tradition of the great crimes against humanity committed by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

This was an act of unmitigated evil. There can be no justification for the deliberate killing of children.

* Alexander Gillespie is a professor of law at Waikato University.