Otto Dix, Assault Troops Advance under Gas (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor). 1924. Tate Liverpool.As new rockets fly into Syria, it is time to consider
the legal grounds on which the bombing is legitimised. This is important
because it threatens to destabilise the already precarious region and displace,
yet again, thousands of victims that the west is reluctant to accommodate.
The experience of chemical warfare in Britain
has a complex history. British troops were one of the first to fall victim to chlorine
gas attacks during the Battle of Ypres on January 2, 1915. Talented German
chemists, among them the tragic Jewish Nobel Prize Winner Fritz Haber, were
responsible for spearheading the chemicalisation of twentieth and twenty-first
century warfare. British troops were one of the
first to fall victim to chlorine gas attacks during the Battle of Ypres on
January 2, 1915.
The legacy of WWI continues to haunt
present-day reactions to chemical warfare. It was not so much the case that German
gas attacks caused many causalities or to deny that the deaths that did occur were
excruciating; it is rather the case that they dealt a major psychological blow
to army morale, whilst awakening dystopian nightmares among the general British
public.
The experiences of WWI would incentivise
calls for laws against, what the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls,
‘atmospheric terror’. The Geneva Convention brought western countries together
to formulate an international legal architecture on the prohibition of asphyxiating,
poisonous and other gaseous and bacterial methods of warfare. This was not the
first attempt to impose laws on gassing, but instead a continuation of a
centuries-long effort to ban poison and gas from the battlefield. Some of the earliest
proponents of international law, including Grotius, were keen to forbid poison
in times of war.
Signatories
to the Geneva Convention
Among the signatories at the time were
France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. What is striking,
however, is that the United States waited until as late as 1975 to deposit the
instrument of ratification. 50 long years of delay allowed the US to deploy herbicide
and defoliant chemical weapons in Vietnam, Korea, Laos among other places
barely investigated or mentioned in conventional studies on the history of
chemical warfare. The United States waited until as
late as 1975 to deposit the instrument of ratification… The US, however, was
not the only country that ignored or contravened international laws.
The US, however, was not the only country
that ignored or contravened international laws. It took until the mid-1990s for
the Italian government to admit that it had used chemical weapons in its lethal
colonial wars in Ethiopia and Libya. France, the country currently with the
longest pointing finger, actively used methods of asphyxiating in its nineteenth
century colonial campaigns in Algeria and the French Caribbean. When the issue
was recently brought up, by the French historian Claude Ribbe, its leaders refused
to even discuss the possibility of having crossed the proverbial “red line” that
they now actively seek to impose.
Hold no illusion, Britain is not an
exception. Churchill thought of using chemical weapons against Nazi Germany and
earlier was involved in their deployment in the 1917 battle of Gaza and the
1919 aerial attacks on Bolshevik soldiers. He was candid
about his enthusiasm for the humanitarian potential of this new weapon: “Gas is
a more merciful weapon than [the] high explosive shell, and compels an enemy to
accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war.” France,
Britain, Germany, the US, none seemed very concerned when private companies
helped Saddam Hussein to construct the chemical weapons arsenal used in the
Halabja tragedy. France, Britain, Germany, the US,
none seemed very concerned when private companies helped Saddam Hussein to
construct the chemical weapons arsenal used in the Halabja tragedy.
The OPCW, the institution responsible for
upholding the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), is only the latest effort to
regulate and ban chemical warfare. Its role in gas attacks, sometimes
misunderstood, is not to point a blaming finger, but rather to analyse and
identify the kinds of weapon that have been used. The issue of responsibility,
instead, is shared by the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism, an
organisation that was set up in 2015 in response to chemical warfare in Syria.
It was prevented from continuation in late 2017 when the Russian UN delegation
blocked its mandate. The organisation, however, even with a mandate, seems relatively
powerless.
The state of Israel, one of the biggest
offenders of chemical warfare, never ratified the CWC, allowing it to deploy phosphorus
in its 2014 Gaza campaign. It is ludicrous to imagine that the west would bomb
Israel, or Saudi Arabia,
another state known for its use of chemical weapons in Yemen. Only last
year, the US-led coalition used phosphorus in the Battle for
Mosul.
The image of poisonous gas clouds and its terrifying
effect on respiratory failures historically has played a major role in placing chemicals
and poisonous weapons central to laws on warfare. The gassing of people is
considered exceptionally inhumane and officially is presented as a categorical “red
line” dividing good from evil.
This belief now threatens to trigger an
escalation with unpredictable consequences. What is often forgotten, however,
is that many of the governments that historically have deployed chemical
weapons are the same that now try to uphold this truth.
The need to ban chemical
weapons, both nationally and internationally, should not be posed as a
question. However, neither should a ban be used selectively to provoke new wars.