June 2016

Laws of warfare. This may sound somewhat strange, like war in itself is accepted, as long as you play by the rules. Yet armed conflicts cannot al-ways be prevented (see also ‘The UN Peacekeeping Missi-ons’ on page 2) and therefore ‘rules’ are needed to prevent further barbarity.

These rules have been written down in the Geneva Conventi-ons, which comprises of four treaties and three additional protocols. Together these form the foundation of international humanitarian law, which re-gulates the conduct of armed conflict.

The Geneva ConventionsIn 1859 Henry Dunant, a Swiss

citizen, witnessed the end of the battle in Solferino, Lom-bardy. He was shocked by the sight of thousands of wounded soldiers with no one to care them. There was a huge lack of facilities, personnel and medi-cal aid. He decided to write a book about his experiences, called ‘the memory of solferi-no’, which inspired the creati-on of the Red Cross in Geneva. He also asked for a govern-ment treaty recognizing the

neutrality of the agency and allowing it to provide aid in a war zone. This led to the first Geneva Convention: ‘for the Amelioration of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces and Field’, which was adopted by twelve nations in August 1864. It stated that in future wars nations would care for all sick and wounded military person-nel, regardless of nationality. They would also recognise the neutrality of medical person-nel, hospitals and ambulances.

A second treaty was adopted on 1906, ‘for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Woun-ded and Sick in Armies at Sea.’ It was continued in the Ge-

neva Convention ‘relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War’, which came into effect on June 19, 1931. In the after-math of World War II, a series of conferences were held in 1949 where the three Geneva Conventions were updated, and the fourth Geneva Conven-tion ‘relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War’ was added. Together they cover armed forces on land and sea, prisoners of war, and civilians.

Protocols In light of the changing nature

of warfare, two protocols were added to the Conventions in 1977. Protocol I extended pro-tection under the Geneva Con-ventions to persons involved in international conflicts, as well as enabling the establishment of fact-finding commissions in case of alleged breaches of the convention. Protocol II extended human rights pro-tections to persons involved in severe civil conflicts, which had not been covered by the 1949 conventions. It prohibits actions like torture, the taking of hostages, acts of terrorism, slavery, rape et cetera.

International Humanitarian Law

President Roosevelt used this term in his new year speech in 1942: United Nations. The world was in uproar. World War II was raging through the world, and the effects were felt everywhere in the world. The United States of America had just faced a huge loss. On December the 7th 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The American fleet was badly dama-ged and many people lost their lives.In 1945, the San Francisco Conference was

held. Originally, fortysix countries were invi-ted to this gathering in the city of the Golden Gate Bridge. The conference itself invited four other nations to participate, and so it came to be that the repre-sentatives of 50 nations met to build an organization that would preserve peace and help built a better world. This ultimately became the United Nations (UN).Peacekeeping, together with

peacemaking, peace enforce-ment, conflict prevention and mediation and peacebuilding belong to the huge range of tasks of the UN with the final goal to protect international peace. These different pillars are usually combined where necessary, which has proven to work more effectively. But what do they enhance?Conflict prevention tries to prevent in-

ter-state or intra-state disputes turning into real conflicts. To ensure ongoing peace and stability in a country (or region), conflict prevention can be used. It promotes social cohesion and tries to help develop and sup-port a system to ensure dialogue between the opposite parties. By this stage informati-on is gathered and analysed so early warnings can be given. This should prevent disputes from evolving into war.However, if this fails, the pillar peacema-

king can be used. This situation usually invol-ves an already developing conflict between hostile parties. Diplomatic action tries to

bring these parties together by negotiating an agreement. However, in many cases this is not enough to prevent a conflict from hap-pening. In such cases, peace enforcement is deemed necessary. Peace enforcement contains many stratagies, but before these measures can be taken, the authorization of the Security Council is needed. Military force can be a part of a peace enforcement operation to prevent futher damage to (in-ternational) peace and security. After that, peacebuilding can start. Peacebuilding means laying the foundation for peace and stability. It should prevent rival parties to relapse into

battle. It is a complex process that can take years. As said before, more than one

pillar is often used to protect the stability in a certain region. The boundaries between these pillars are more en more blur-red. Peace operations rarely involve only one type of pillar. Peacekeeping operations were originally set up by the UN to protect the implementation of a peace agreement or ceasefire. Now this often includes peace-building and peacemaking activi-

ties on top of that. Like warfare, peacekeeping has evolved

over the years. It is based on three princi-ples: impartiality, consent of the parties and non-use of force, except in self-defence and defence of the mandate. At this moment, there are UN peacekeeping operations active on four continents of the world. There have been several stories of success. An example is the peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone from 1995 to 2005. This operation helped the country to break with the civil war that had the nation in its grip. With the help of the operation, a peace agreement could be implemented. In 1988 the Nobel Price was awarded to the UN Peacekeeping Forces.

UN PEACEKEEPING

Critisim on the UN peacekeeping operations In more recent years this concept also faces

considerable amounts of critique. The cri-ticism is of varied nature. The number of peacekeeping operations has grown in the past few decades. The budget to keep these operations going has increased considerably too. Several governments therefore have issued that some of the operations have to be closed down before starting new ones. This year, the UN spends around eight billion dollars on peacekeeping operations. When comparing to the budget in 2015, a sevent-een percent increase can be noted.But the rise in money isn’t everything.

Throughout the years, reports have come out, that even though more money has been available, it does not mean it resol-ves the problems that these operations deal with. In 1948, the main purpose of the first peacekeeping operation in the Middle East was to protect the ceasefire between hos-tile parties. Now the UN troops have to maintain the security in the area, protect civilians, assist disarmament, protect human rights, help resto-re the law, facilitate the political process and help former combats to demo-bilize and reintegrate into society.As mentioned before, the budget has incre-

ased throughout the years. Even so, evidence of vital equipment shortages for militants keeps emerging. Combats face the lack of logistics, intelligence, specific equipment, capabilities and military preparation.Sometimes it seems the peacekeepers are

not in a position to protect the locals. A well know failure is the story of the massacre of eight thousand Muslim men in Srebrenica by Bosnian-Serb forces. The failure of the UN to protect this ethnic group still has far reaching consequences to this day. Another failed story is the story of the genocide in 1994 in Rwanda. Over one million people found their death. An investigation in 1999 concluded that the UN ignored evidence that

the massacre was planned and refused to act when it started. A more recent example took place in Congo. The UN peacekeeping mission was criticised because it was not doing enough to stop the human rights violations in 2009. Further questions have been raised about the

budget for medics who work with these ope-rations. A lack of personnel and funding has been reported more than once. A report written by the International Peace Institute “Healing or harming? United Nations Peacekeeping and Health” declares that there is a problem with providing healthcare to the local population. Because the medical personnel has been over-stretched and underfunded, the medical sup-port given to the locals does not meet with the WHO guidelines.

How to keep the peace? Peace can be very hard to keep. What is fair

to all the parties involved in a situation that faces instability and violence? The UN has had

several actions that were successful and protected many people from harm. Also, we must not forget that measures taken to bring and keep the peace are often in very difficult environments. Unfortuna-tely there are also opera-tions that went horribly wrong. The UN failed to

protect those who needed it. The number of peacekeeping operations has increased over the years, and so has the budget to keep these missions going. However, you can also ask your-self what the harm would be if these operations would not have been there. Maybe even more people would be forced to live in insecurity. Peace is an operation that takes years, with easy lapses back into battle. There is cause for celebration for those operations who succeeded to protect those in need, but there is also still much room for improvement. So if you think about the benefits that a peacekeeping opera-tion could bring, who would not want to help improve that? Maybe you?

HAVE HOSPITALS BECOME TARGETS?On the third of

October 2015 an American Lockheed AC-130U gunship attacked a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Kunduz, Afghanistan. 42 people were killed in the airstrike that lasted for an hour. “This was not just an attack on our hospital, it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions”, said Joanne Liu, interna-tional president of MSF. A U.S. military fact-finding investiga-tion - an independent investigation was ne-ver conducted - came to a different conclusion. This conclusion can be summari-sed with the words of general Campbell: “The proximate cause of this tragedy was the direct result of avoidable hu-man error”.

The next time a hospital attack made the headlines was on the 28th of April when the Al-Quds hospital in Syria was bombed. 14 people were killed, including the last pae-diatrician of Aleppo. For this, either the Russian govern-ment, or officials of the Assad Regime were responsible.

The fact that we hear from these attacks only every six months, does not mean they are merely incidents. This only reflects the fact we have started to get used to it.

Sadly, hospital attacks happen so frequently, that they have to be really bloody in order to make it to the evening news. All over the world, in armed conflicts, ambulances and hospitals are destroyed, health workers are attacked and patients are killed in their beds.

However frequent, it is no normal practice. Under in-ternational humanitarian law and principles, and in particu-lar the Geneva Conventions, health workers must be able to provide medical care to all sick and wounded regardless of political or other affiliation, whether they are a combatant or not. Attacking hospitals, intentionally or accidentally out of recklessness, is a war crime.

So how big is this problem? From 2012 to 2014, the In-ternational Committee of the Red Cross recorded in just 11 countries 2,398 violent inci-dents affecting provision of and access to health care. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has been documenting the incidents in Syria from the start in March of 2011 which resulted in an interac-tive map. At the moment of writing, they have recorded 358 facility attacks, killing 726 health care workers. Eigh-ty per cent of those attacks were performed by the Syrian government. For the last few months, every two weeks, a Syrian hospital or clinic was bombed.

You are not being paranoid when you suspect all those attacks cannot all be acci-

The Médecins Sans Frontières Kunduz Trauma Center after the attack. At the time of the airstrike, the operating theatres were in use – there were patients being attended to by surgeons and anaesthetists. The operating table is barely recogni-zable near the window. Photo: Dan Sermand/MSF

dents. In a press release from March 2016 Amnesty Interna-tional founded this assumpti-on with research of multiple attacks and interviews. “Hos-pitals, water and electricity are always the first to be attacked. Once that happens people no longer have services to survive”, the report reads. This should give Russian and Syrian government forces the way to advance on northern Aleppo. “Syrian and Russian forces have been deliberately attacking health facilities in flagrant violation of interna-tional humanitarian law. But what is truly egregious is that wiping out hospitals appears to have become part of their military strategy,” said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Direc-tor at Amnesty International. In 2015, 75 MSF-hospitals suffered from 106 bombings,

sometimes even with the infamous double tap: when the survivors think the attack is over and start helping other survivors, the target is bom-bed again.

In the Syrian crisis, the Red Cross and Red Crescent have become targets rather than shields. Nowadays, hospitals try to avoid detection and identification and refuse to share their GPS coordinates. That is not an easy task, PHR reports. Firstly, all hospitals established before the conflict broke out, were either run by or registered under the Syrian government. Secondly, hospi-tals have to be easily acces-sible for the wounded, which makes it easy to locate when the wounded of an attack are transported to the hospital.

In the end however, it does not matter whether all these attacks were targeted assaults on a medical facility or if they were indiscriminate attacks on a civilian area. In both cases, the attacks are war crimes.

The Russian and Chinese veto in the UN Security Coun-cil have prevented referring the Syrian situation to Inter-national Criminal Court. The international community has thus far failed to bring the perpetrators of international humanitarian law to justice. Now that injustice prevails and these violations are not condemned as illegitimate forms of pursuing war, who knows how many more health care workers and patients around the world will continue to be attacked.

Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human interven-tion. They might include, for example, armed qua-dcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelli-gence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems

is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nu-clear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against auto-nomous weapons, for exam-ple that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by the-

reby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI we-apon development, a global arms race is virtually inevi-table, and the endpoint of this technological trajecto-ry is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons,

This newsletter is made possible by: Mariëlle Schellens Dirk Hoogenkamp Carlijn Koopman

rightnow@ifsma.nl

they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw mate-rials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time un-til they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their po-pulace, warlords wishing to per-petrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous we-apons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing na-tions, subduing populations and selectively kil-ling a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI we-apons — and do not want others to tarnish their field

by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broad-ly supported international agreements that have suc-cessfully prohibited chemi-cal and biological weapons, just as most physicists sup-

ported the treaties ban-ning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potenti-al to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autono-mous weapons beyond me-aningful human control.

This letter was signed among many, including Stephen Ha-wking, Elon Musk and Frank Wilczek. For the full list of sig-notories, visit futureoflife.org where it was first published.

A fictional killer robot from the 2015 film Terminator Genisys is seen here. It is actuated by artificial intelligence system Skynet that was once build as a defense network but later turned against humanity. Photo: Nathan Rupert