Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East

By Kamala Visweswaran

In the twenty-first century, political conflict and militarization have come to constitute a global social condition rather than a political exception. Military occupation increasingly informs the politics of both democracies and dictatorships, capitalist and formerly socialist regimes, raising questions about its relationship to sovereignty and the nation-state form. Israel and India are two of the world's most powerful postwar democracies yet have long-standing military occupations. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey have passed through periods of military dictatorship, but democracy has yielded little for their ethnic minorities who have been incorporated into the electoral process. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (like India, Pakistan, and Turkey) have felt the imprint of socialism; declarations of peace after long periods of conflict in these countries have not improved the conditions of their minority or indigenous peoples but rather have resulted in "violent peace" and remilitarization. Indeed, the existence of standing troops and ongoing state violence against peoples struggling for self-determination in these regions suggests the expanding and everyday nature of military occupation. Such everydayness raises larger issues about the dominant place of the military in society and the social values surrounding militarism.

Everyday Occupations examines militarization from the standpoints of both occupier and occupied. With attention to gender, poetics, satire, and popular culture, contributors who have lived and worked in occupied areas in the Middle East and South Asia explore what kinds of society are foreclosed or made possible by militarism. The outcome is a powerful contribution to the ethnography of political violence.

Contributors: Nosheen Ali, Kabita Chakma, Richard Falk, Sandya Hewamanne, Mohamad Junaid, Rhoda Kanaaneh, Hisyar Ozsoy, Cheran Rudhramoorthy, Serap Ruken Sengul, Kamala Visweswaran.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812207835

Book preview

Everyday Occupations

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

EVERYDAY OCCUPATIONS

Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East

Edited by

Kamala Visweswaran

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Everyday occupations : experiencing militarism in South

Asia and the Middle East / edited by Kamala Visweswaran.

— 1st ed.

  p. cm.— (Pennsylvania studies in human rights)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4487-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Military occupation—Social aspects—South Asia. 2. Military occupation—Social aspects—Middle East. 3. Militarism—Social aspects—South Asia. 4. Militarism—Social aspects—Middle East. 5. Ethnic conflict—South Asia. 6. Ethnic conflict—Middle East.

I. Visweswaran, Kamala. II. Series: Pennsylvania studies in human rights.

UA832.7.E94 2013

355.4'90954—dc23

2012032310

CONTENTS

Healing the Forest

Cheran Rudhramoorthy

Introduction: Geographies of Everyday Occupation

Kamala Visweswaran

Chapter 1. Qirix: An Inverted Rhapsody on Kurdish National Struggle, Gender, and Everyday Life in Diyarbakir

Serap Ruken Sengul

Chapter 2. The War Zone in My Heart: The Occupation of Southern Sri Lanka

Sandya Hewamanne

Chapter 3. Grounding Militarism: Structures of Feeling and Force in Gilgit-Baltistan

Nosheen Ali

Chapter 4. Stateless Citizens and Menacing Men: Notes on the Occupation of Palestinians Inside Israel

Rhoda Kanaaneh

Chapter 5. Indigenous Women and Culture in the Colonized Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

Kabita Chakma and Glen Hill

Chapter 6. Death and Life Under Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in Kashmir

Mohamad Junaid

Chapter 7. The Missing Grave of Sheikh Said: Kurdish Formations of Memory, Place, and Sovereignty in Turkey

Hisyar Oszoy

Afterword: Refining the Optic of Occupation

Richard Falk

Some Day

Kabita Chakma

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

HEALING THE FOREST

Cheran Rudhramoorthy

To heal a still

smoldering land,

we went;

no bird in sight.

An empty sky

above the sparrow-flying

earth.

An ash-covered landless earth

to the edge of that wide expanse;

here, no one knows

how to gather bones.

Yet,

Our libation of milk

the relentless

welling of tears

now mocked with glee

with dance and song

by an estranged foe;

what then is the

way ahead?

To cool the burning heart

there is nothing today.

No witness

for the drop of blood

still not dry.

To claim closure

to dissolve ashes in the sea

to scatter in the air

to close one’s eyes,

there is no air

there is no sea

there is no way

to heal the forest.

The year 2012 year marked the release of my eighth collection of poems, Kaadaatru (Healing the Forest) (Nagercoil: Kalachuvadu Publications). The poems were written mostly during the last stages of the war that ended in May 2009 with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The English translation Healing the Forest does not capture the depth, imagery, and ritual undertones of the Tamil title. Kaadaatru is a death ritual performed on the third day after cremation and involves gathering the ashes and bones of the dead. Performing kaadaatru is the beginning of closure. However, the poem sketches the haunting inability to perform kaadaatru and therefore the impossibility of achieving closure.

Introduction: Geographies of Everyday Occupation

Kamala Visweswaran

In 2008, an Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, threw his shoes at President George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad; he was quickly detained (and badly beaten by security detail) but became something of an overnight hero in Iraq and across the Middle East. In Sadr City, Iraqis hung their shoes and sandals on long poles they waved in the air as a protest against the U.S. occupation, while in Najaf people threw their shoes at passing military convoys. One of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s daughters awarded al-Zaidi a medal of courage, while Syrians recognized him as a hero.¹ Soon after, an Internet video game irreverently called Sock and Awe² (www.sockandawe.com) went viral, allowing players to reenact the thirty-second scene by throwing virtual shoes at Bush sheepishly ducking behind a podium (high score 99 by several Chinese gamers).

Some two years later, during a summer dubbed the Kashmiri Intifada by the international press, head constable Abdul Ahad Jan, from his backbencher’s seat at an Indian Independence Day function, lobbed his shoe at Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah, landing it harmlessly in front of him. Jan was also beaten and taken immediately into custody; he too became an overnight sensation: thousands of villagers converged on his home town near Bandipora (at the Line of Control separating India and Pakistan), shouting Meri jaan, teri jaan, Ahad Jan, Ahad Jan!³ Indian mainstream media with much puzzlement noted a number of Facebook pages devoted to the unlikely hero, even as his sanity was questioned, and allegations that he was involved in local extortion were quickly countered by pointing to a service medal he had received in 1992—the year before the Kashmiri police revolted against the occupation of Indian troops. What is instructive about these incidents is the sense of something happening that eludes easy coding by regimes of power: a sense of the popular as the site of enactment of an inversion, a surge of affect cresting as a kind of jouissance, marking a joyful triumph of the insult such that the narrowly ducked shoe would be appropriated by Bush as a sign of democracy, while Abdullah would pardon constable Jan’s shoe-toss in a display of Ramadan-inspired forgiveness.

Other figures, apart from this shoe-throwing hero, also emerged from the Kashmiri intifada amid the masses of stone-pelting youth (or sangbazan) that summer. These are the unemployed youth stuck at home during curfews, the bekaari (good-for-nothing, slackers) of a social network calling itself the Bekaar Jamaath (Idle Group). These useless people originated as a Facebook group with 12,000 members, highlighting complaints about exams, jokes about engineering students, mock letters to the dean (and mock-up photos of members of university administration), film heroes, and the usual images college students take to be cool or just plain silly. The most explicit reference to the situation in Kashmir is a wall photo that asserts, Unlimited creativity needs undivided spaces and its fevered, late-night imagining of itself as an epidemic—as almost a symptom of the fighting on the streets:

Bekaar jamaath is a new epidemic . . .

Symptoms include insomnia, restlessness, anxiety, headaches, constant presence on Facebook, always online in gtalk, doing silly things to remain busy & so on . . .

In a region where cell phone usage is monitored, text messaging frequently banned, and internet service often limited, the site had reportedly crashed amid reports of Indian intelligence infiltrating social network sites, was briefly up again, then defunct by September 2011.⁴ Cartoonist Malik Sajad’s graphic novel Facebooked tellingly describes the plight of young Kashmiris harassed and detained by police for their Facebook posts, though Facebook posting itself is not a crime.⁵

A breakaway Facebook group, the Kargil Bekaar Jamaat, located in cyberspace but also at the Line of Control where India and Pakistan last fought a war in 1999, is still putting the edge on idle critique, however. It adopted as one of its slogans, No seedhi baat, only bakwaas, a play on the popular expression, Seedhi baat, no bakwaas (Straight talk, no nonsense), and the Aaj Tak Indian cable TV news show Seedhi Baat (Straight Talk). For the Kargil BJ, No seedhi baat, only bakwaas is ironically posed as a form of Bekaar advertising (where bakwaas can also refer to something fake) and is superimposed across a cartoon image of a man getting his brains blown out, a referent to the fake encounter killings practiced routinely throughout Kashmir. It is dark humor that uses inversion to point to news spin and negotiated forms of straight talk as so much false advertising that fails to mask the bald exercise of political power. One wall photo on the site is of an Indian military sign that says in English and Hindi, Caution You Are Under Enemy Observation, mirroring another inversion for its Kashmiri addressees. Still another photo on the site juxtaposes a military supply plane touching down on a runway as a luxury Jet Airways plane, dubbed BJ Airline, is poised for take-off. The narrative and visual structures of the Bekaar Jamaaths are playful or silly, but in the end they cannot escape the politics of occupation. They enact an aversion to politics, an inversion of them, and perhaps against the Bekaar Jamaats’ will, a reversion to them.

* * *

The papers in this volume take seriously the intertwining of popular and expressive culture with the political in exploring the logics of occupation. They examine militarization as it is wielded as a political and economic tool, and as it is experienced as a material form of violence and symbolic domination. Roughly half the group write on militarization as it affects soldiers or on the imbrication of military logics in forms of popular culture from the standpoints of the occupier; while the other half approach militarization from the standpoint of the occupied, their forms of resistance and challenges to the practices of militarization. Rhoda Kanaaneh and Sandya Hewamanne see the logic of occupation as crucial for how the Israeli and Sri Lankan states reinvent and reterritorialize themselves through racialized and gendered fantasies or rationales. Mohamad Junaid, on the other hand, defines the logic of occupation as neither reason nor rationale since, as he points out, occupation rarely names itself as such (hence the semantic difference between Indian-administered Kashmir and what Kashmiris refer to as Indian-occupied Kashmir). For Junaid, occupation can be better understood as general features or practices like the physical organization of space, uses of violence, procedures of security, emergency laws and ordinances, tactical decisions and moves among higher and lower level figures in power, psychological operations and propaganda, which, while specific to Kashmir, also resonate with other places under occupation.

Occupation might also be seen as an example of what Carol Gluck and Anna Tsing have called a word in motion,⁶ one that gains in force by moving across space and time, in and out of majority and minority nationalist vocabularies, and as a set of military practices with consequences for dominant and subjugated peoples. It is historically part of imperial conquest, settler colonialism, and more recently, as we have seen with the Occupy Wall Street protests, a form of urban resistance. Junaid describes how in Kashmir, the occupation is referred to as the halat or situation while Ruken Sengul relates how in Turkish Kurdistan the surec or process came to define Kurdish nationalist revolutionary struggle against Turkish military domination. Like other powering rubrics on Partition,⁷ Empire,⁸ or Walls,⁹ it is the work of this volume to see how recentering an analytic object or set of events—occupation—may productively revise historical, political, social, and economic frames of analysis.

Histories, Sovereignties

Preoccupation, in the sense Sandya Hewamanne uses it in her chapter in this volume, is a form of saturation of culture with the symbols and processes of militarization that extend Sri Lanka’s military occupation of Northeastern Sri Lanka to the southern, Sinhala-majority portion of the country. But (pre)occupation also refers to prior histories of sovereignty or belonging that cannot be encapsulated by either the Westphalian or the postwar/postcolonial state form. The Tamil peoples are split between India and Sri Lanka, yet Tamil presence in Sri Lanka dates to perhaps the second century, and a Tamil state was in place during the ninth or tenth centuries, contributing to the sense of the Jaffna Peninsula and Northeastern Sri Lanka as a historic, if mixed Eelam or homeland. Tibet was occupied in 1949, but claims a state form as far back as the seventh century. Kashmir claims a regional identity and historical tradition tied to seventh-century Sanskrit and later Kashmiri and Persian literatures, though Kashmir is divided by India, Pakistan, and China. Kurdish nationalist thought locates a sense of territoriality and vatan (homeland) that extends at least to the eleventh century, if not to the seventh or second, preempting twentieth-century claims by Russian, Turkish, Syrian, Irani, and Iraqi regimes.¹⁰ Historic Palestine is a term of considerable contention, with Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Arabic linguistic sources that predate by millennia the modern era, but the Zionist presumption that the Christian, Muslim, Bedouin, Mizrahi, or Sephardic Palestinian peoples are simply the residuum of Israeli state-formation is both pernicious and highly revealing of the processes of exclusion, violence, and domination that have come to characterize modern Israel. As for Bangladesh’s indigenous groups, James Scott reminds us that by the close of the eighteenth century, most of the world’s minority peoples, inhabiting remote regions but the greater part of the world’s land mass, were stateless, particularly those highland groups stretching from South to East Asia.¹¹ Such groups as the Chakmas (and other indigenous or Jumma peoples of South and Southeast Asia) also claim forms of precolonial sovereignty that predate British colonial, Burmese, Indian, Pakistani, and now Bangladeshi nation-states, as Kabita Chakma explains in her contribution for the volume.

While it is the work of nationalism to push forms of identity or territoriality deep into the past, it is not the task of this volume to resolve the relationship of premodern forms of identity to modern-state formation (where already a large critical literature exists). Hisyar Ozsoy’s and Kabita Chakma’s chapters, however, do mark the heft of such long-mobilized identities for alternate conceptions of sovereignty, raising the larger question of what forms of sovereignty are legitimate or are indeed even intelligible outside the nation-state form.

Michel Foucault in his lecture of March 10, 1976, provides an ingenious reading of how nation and state became soldered together in eighteenth-century France, linking this process to the displacement of war in historical discourse, and to the idea of an internal war that defends society against threats born of and in its own body. As he puts it, this idea of social war makes . . . a great retreat from the historical to the biological.¹² Foucault would, of course, call this form of nation-state war on itself a form of biopolitics, and it is a major challenge to the literature on global civil wars, which takes as given the very object it seeks to explain.¹³ Indeed it is Foucault’s rethinking of the terms of sovereignty itself, which helps to establish the tradition critical of the state’s management of life (biopower) that has enabled Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe to write of the spaces of bare life signaled by the forms of occupation attended to in this volume.

These spaces of ongoing violence or of bare life nonetheless still represent the essential domain of sovereignty in Henri Lefebvre’s terms; they attempt to wrest sovereignty away from the issue of external recognition to one of internal recognition.¹⁴ It is for this reason that Kashmiri calls for azadi (freedom) or Sri Lankan Tamil demands for viduthalai (liberation) are nearly unintelligible in the framework of the Westphalian nation-state. Richard Falk, special rapporteur for Palestine, in his Afterword for this volume, is critical of the ways international law recognizes only territorially based sovereignty. Indeed, to lose territorial control as a result of what he calls the Westphalian knife is to lose all claim to sovereignty; it is thus unsurprising that so many unresolved conflicts of this century and the last are centered on land.

While historian Eric Weitz has located the roots of a population-based politics of partition in the late nineteenth century,¹⁵ we can clearly see a partitioning blade carving up lands after the First World War. As Hannah Arendt observes in her classic essay, The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,¹⁶ the massive displacements and deportations that marked the close of the First World War (and the breakup of empires) marked the large-scale emergence of modern statelessness, as some nations were arbitrarily assigned states, and others were excluded from the state form. After World War I, the Kurds, a group of some twenty million people, were slated to form a state under the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 (as were the Armenians); instead they were effectively partitioned by creation of the nation-states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Soviet Union. In the postwar period, the birth of the modern nation-states of India and Israel was the result of back-to-back partition mandates in August and November 1947.¹⁷ Occupation is thus part and parcel of postcolonial state formation even as the standing international law on occupation was reformulated through the postwar administration of Japan and Germany by the Allies.¹⁸

Yet, the occupations of Kashmir and Palestine by newly minted states on the eve of British withdrawal from these areas are foundational to the postwar world order in a way that classifying India and Israel as democracies does not make evident. Or rather it asks us to pose a different question: to what extent is occupation foundational to the world’s largest democracy and the only democracy in the Middle East? (We should also not neglect to ask this question of the world’s oldest modern democracy, with its decade-long occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan only now winding down).¹⁹ Elections can been seen as a kind of theater of the absurd where, as Mohamed Junaid notes, Muslim majority Kashmiri citizens of India (or for that matter, minority Palestinian citizens of Israel) are performatively disenfranchised from the larger publics that confer second-class citizenship on them (to say nothing of the widespread fraud and vote-rigging of the last Afghan elections). Similarly (although we cannot cover this region in the volume), to place the 1949 occupation of Tibet genealogically in line with the occupations of Kashmir and Palestine is again to question the received distinctions between democratic and communist forms of governance. New questions emerge: How exactly has occupation shaped the postwar state form, and how might it force a re-reckoning with the body of postcolonial theory and the so-called era of decolonization?²⁰

A genealogical, as distinct from a strictly comparative, grid allows us to understand not just similarities and differences but asymmetries and forms of transitivity²¹ through which sites of occupation index and refer to each other (the throwing of stones or shoes, practices of martyrdom or collaboration; arm sales between occupier states; state applications of special emergency powers and forms of legality), showing both the power of mediatization and its skewed operation. If we consider the postwar legal regime that established the international laws that regulate and administer occupation, Kashmir is the first site of contemporary military occupation, yet its history remains comparatively less known than that of Palestine or Iraq, even though the number of Indian troops posted in Kashmir approaches 700,000—more than twice the U.S. forces in Iraq at the height of the military occupation there. Kashmir may receive less international attention than Palestine, but much of Northeastern India, where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has been in force since 1958, receives even less media coverage and international scrutiny than Kashmir, where the AFSPA has been in place since 1990.

In the process of genealogical relocation we thus also learn of hidden or masked occupations. Turkey’s ongoing occupation of Northern Cyprus (since 1974) and its displacement of 170,000 Greek Cypriots²² has been the subject of several UN resolutions, but its occupation of Kurdish and Armenian lands is hidden in the process of state formation in the region. And we find occupations within occupations: while the Southern Sinai Bedouin experience of military occupation was occluded in the back and forth transfer of the Sinai between Israel and Egypt in 1949–1982,²³ as Rhoda Kanaaneh argues in this volume, the fact of Israeli citizenship for Palestinians within the 1967 territorial boundaries of Israel masks the contiguities of their experience of occupation with Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. And there is by now Israel’s forgotten occupation of southern Lebanon from 1985 to 2000.²⁴ The U.S. and UK occupations of Grenada and the Falklands are the forgotten occupations of the 1980s.

A genealogical grid also yields new insights as to how inter-regional political economies of militarization are produced through the world system. Over the last decade, the portion of Israel’s GDP for military-related expenditures has averaged 7.7 percent a year, but rose to 15.3 percent during the peak of the first intifada.²⁵ By 2008, however, India was Israel’s largest arms customer, although earlier Turkey and more recently Sri Lanka were recipients of Israeli military technology. Indeed, the Mossad and other Israeli advisors trained the Sri Lankan armed forces, helped establish its notorious paramilitary Special Task Force (STF), and recommended the establishment of Sinhalese settlements in Tamil dominated areas.²⁶ As of 2009, the military-related portion of Sri Lanka’s GDP was 3.5 percent (as opposed to Bangladesh’s 1 percent, India’s 2.8 percent, and Pakistan’s 2.8 percent of GDP), but between 1988 and 2001, Sri Lankan military spending tripled.²⁷ By 2008 Sri Lanka had spent 1.8 billion dollars on defense, almost 20 percent of the national budget.²⁸ Pakistan’s economy is heavily dependent on U.S. military aid, but it was nonetheless in a position to sell Sri Lanka’s military some of the cluster bombs it dropped on Tamil civilians in the last stages of the war in 2009.²⁹ And as Nosheen Ali notes in her chapter, the militarization of Pakistan is not separate from the U.S. military-complex and the production of its own national security regime.

Despite a tanking economy and the cost of wars in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, which cost the United States as much as $4.4 trillion over the last decade³⁰ (and by the U.S. government’s own estimates,³¹ almost $13 billion a month over the last year alone for just Afghanistan and Iraq), the U.S. continues to rank as the world’s largest military power, with military spending at 4.8 percent of its GDP.³² As the world’s second largest arms exporter, it has also played the major role in developing Israel’s military arsenal. Indeed, the U.S. both instigated and authorized Israel’s sale of arms to India in 2002, while keeping the U.S-Pakistan military corridor clear.³³ As of the U.S-India nuclear deal of 2008, the U.S. now sells arms to both India and Pakistan.³⁴ And with post-9/11 national security regime triangulation between these countries, the security laws of India, Israel, and the U.S. also look remarkably similar, a product of both the political economy of militarization and the UN system.³⁵ In turn, Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) is similar to India’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), although Sri Lanka had been under Emergency Rule in 1983–2001 (with a hiatus in 1989), and again from 2005 until the present. After the Sri Lankan army’s military victory over the LTTE in 2009, however, it seems the Indian military may be viewing it as a model for dealing with its own insurgencies.³⁶

Complicities

In addition to the military forms of transitivity that both consolidate and splinter traditional forms of regionalism, the areas covered in this volume also share the experience of being monitored and administered by the UN international system. Between 1948 and 2009, the UN Security Council passed 225 resolutions on Palestine; between 1948 and 1971, it passed 27 resolutions on Kashmir, while the UN General Assembly passed three resolutions on Tibet.³⁷ India and China, perhaps thinking of their own occupied territories, were instrumental in blocking a Security Council resolution that would have authorized a war crimes investigation into Sri Lanka’s killing of 40,000 Tamil civilians in its May 2009 offensive against the LTTE, even though Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, had authenticated by 2010 a video showing Tamil prisoners being executed by the Sri Lankan army. As of May 2011, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) were present in every district in Jaffna; unsurprisingly they also have a strong presence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Iraqi Kurdistan, and Palestine (UNICEF went to Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir after the earthquake of 2005). Palestine also has an entire relief agency allocated to it—the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), separate from the mandate of the UNHCR, which deals with all other refugees.³⁸ UNRWA was conceived in 1949, and has been operational (since 1950) for more than 60 years; it administers 58 camps and runs 690 schools in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza with an enrollment of half a million children. Its 137 primary health centers serve two million Palestinian refugees (two-thirds of those registered of a total eligible refugee population of 4.8 million).³⁹ Given the number of UN agencies present in occupied zones, we might more productively understand the UN system as one that has evolved in some measure to administer if not enable occupation; indeed, a UN occupation of Haiti is ongoing since 2004.⁴⁰ We must thus ask what the work of occupation is for the international system; how occupation was not so paradoxically enabled by its very birth.

The UN system’s safe haven policies proffer other troubling episodes in the international management of conflict. In Bosnia in 1993–1995 the safe haven policy led to civilian massacres, and cast doubt on the UN’s ability to respond to ongoing conflict.⁴¹ The lessons, if any, of these controversial safe area policies for occupied regions, are unclear at best.⁴² Unlike Bosnia or Rwanda, when the UN compound in Dili was threatened by Indonesia-backed militias in September 999 after the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence, the remaining UN employees refused to abandon the 1,5000 East Timorese sheltering there.⁴³ In response, the UN evacuated the entire compound, and while up to 250,000 Timorese may have been displaced by Indonesian-backed militias over a two-week period, pressure was brought to bear on the international community until a multinational force could be assembled to stem the violence.

More recently, in the Tamil stronghold of Killonochi, signs of state-sponsored massacre were already imminent in September of 2008 when the government of Sri Lanka informed the UN that they could not guarantee the safety of its personnel there, and the UN agreed to evacuate all its employees. As the Sri Lankan army closed in on the Vanni region, 400,000 Tamil refugees fled into a succession of ever-smaller government-designated No Fire Zones (NFZ) or Civilian Safety Zones (CSZ), which conveniently overlapped with the western and southern flanks of LTTE defense lines. This gave the Sri Lankan army an excuse to repeatedly shell the area, claiming it could not distinguish civilians from LTTE. In a massive international PR blitz, the Sri Lankan government claimed it was engaged in humanitarian rescue and pursuing a policy of zero civilian casualties, even as the army continually shelled food distribution lines and cut off supplies of food, water, and medicine, creating tens of thousands of casualties. In April, some 80,000–100,000 people were herded into closed barbed-wire camps. By the beginning of May, makeshift hospitals in the NFZ (whose location was known precisely from unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] surveillance) had been hit sixty-five times by army shells, while some 130,000 people remaining in the NFZ were pressed onto a mile-long sand spit, where they were bombarded from all sides. Much of it was captured on satellite imagery available to the UN,⁴⁴ but the international community took no action.

Akin to the bombardment of Gaza by Israel in January earlier that year, international commentators likened the May 2009 military assault on civilians in Sri Lanka’s NFZ to shooting fish in a barrel. Radhika Coomaraswami, well regarded for her decade-long work as former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and current Special Rapporteur on Children and Armed Conflict, produced a report critical of the plight of Gaza’s children in February 2009. However, as a Tamil international civil servant, she was unable to say anything publicly about thousands of Tamil children killed in the onslaught of the Sri Lankan army in 2009, let alone the large numbers of Tamil women subject to rape and sexual violence.

After the U.S. interventions in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, special rapporteurs were appointed to assess the flow of Kurdish and other Iraqi refugees to Turkey, and of Turkish Kurds to Northern Iraq.⁴⁵ In 2009, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) produced a report on disputed areas of Northern Iraq, and in 2010, the representative of the secretary general on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons asked the Kurdish regional government of Iraq to deal with internal displacement. That same year, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, Anand Grover, noted that Syrian Kurds were denied the rights to health and numerous other rights since they were rendered stateless in 1962,⁴⁶ while the UNCHR expressed concern about the number of Kurds executed in Iran in 2010.

What we see is less a failure of the UN system to solve the problem of occupation, than its complicity in maintaining it. The UN has developed the capacity to report on and witness occupation, not to change it—exacerbated no doubt by the United States withholding more than $1 billion in dues⁴⁷ until 2008. UN resolutions are blocked by powerful countries or simply rendered unenforceable without NATO or UN peacekeeping troops. And peacekeeping troops sometimes trail their own human rights violations in their wake. The proliferation of a variety of honorary, nonsalaried special rapporteurs may be another sign of this failure: rapporteurs can exercise influence and make recommendations, but their recommendations are not binding. The rapporteur system, however, does claim UN resources and has immense fact-finding value. Indeed, much of the existing social science on occupation has (arguably) emerged through the UN system of documentation, and the rapporteurs are key nodes in this information system. The extent to which the rapporteur system potentially moves beyond neutrality into the zone of critical engagement for occupied peoples is not yet clear. Richard Falk reflects on some of these questions in the Afterword.

Violent Peace

Most of the places covered in this volume—Palestine, Kashmir, CHT, Northeastern Sri Lanka—are places where formal or informal cease-fires and peace accords have been brokered, sometimes monitored or administered by the UN (or other international actors), resulting not in peace but in the paradox of violent peace.⁴⁸ The failure of the 1993 U.S.-brokered Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine is the most renowned. And while Kashmir is no longer considered an unresolved dispute by the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), it remains in place at the Line of Control between India and Pakistan to monitor the cease-fire agreement of 1971. Bangladesh declined to have a UN-brokered peace accord in the CHT in 1997, but agreed, at the instigation of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) for a special rapporteur, Lars Anders-Baer, to investigate and report (in 2011) on why the Bangladesh government had not enforced it. The Sri Lankan government pulled out of a 2002 Norway-brokered cease-fire with the LTTE in 2008. In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) attempted several unilateral ceasefires, the longest lasting from 1999 to 2004, with the latest withdrawn by the PKK in February 2011.

Despite their illegality according to the international law of occupation (see Falk, this volume), state-sanctioned or official policies of transmigration or population transfer in Palestine and Bangladesh—or more specifically of settler-violence by Jewish Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, and settler violence by Muslim Bangladeshis against Jumma indigenous peoples in the CHT—are major reasons for failed agreements and cease-fires. In the CHT, model villages for settlers were set up next to the 500 military camps in the region,⁴⁹ while in Palestine, expanding Israeli settlements were often built on higher ground to double as surveillance points for the Israeli army.⁵⁰ Palestinians have lost their claim to roughly 78 percent of historic Palestine and have acquiesced to the formation of a state on the remaining 22 percent of the land in this region. Existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank would reduce even this amount by 10 percent, though, as Rhoda Kanaaneh notes in her chapter, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, has proposed to the UN a population transfer that would transfer Israeli settlements on the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in exchange for Palestinian citizens of Israel being sent to live in areas administered by the PA. On the other hand, Bengali transmigration into the CHT, as Chakma shows, resulted in land-grabbing and an increase of the nonindigenous population from 9 percent in 1951 to almost 50 percent by 1991. With 70,000 Jummas who had sheltered in the Indian state of Tripura as a result of the conflict, and as many as 300,000 more internally displaced, more than 20 percent of the half million Jummas still in the CHT have lost all claim to their lands.⁵¹

Over the same period in Sri Lanka, a government-sponsored transmigration program resulted in an influx of Singhalese into mixed or Tamil-majority districts.⁵² After the Colombo riots of 1983, this process intensified, leading to an escalation of conflict as convict settlers in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Manal Aaru (now Weli Oya) were not only armed but given a stipend of rs. 50 to 100 per day to keep guns in their homes.⁵³ Areas marked for development or the protection of putative Buddhist heritage sites resulted in violent expulsions of Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, and permanent displacement as they lost the right to their own lands. In this way, the seemingly innocuous planting of a Bo tree in a Northeastern Sri Lankan village signaled construction of a Buddhist temple and impending Tamil expulsion, just as surely as setting aside lands for Hindu pilgrims was seen as aggressively decreasing the amount of Muslim public space in Kashmir.

In Indian-occupied Kashmir there has been a steady Hindu influx into the Jammu region. In 1961, the Muslim population of Kashmir was 68 percent in 1961, 66 percent in 1971, and 64 percent in 1981; over the same period the Hindu population increased from 28 to 32 percent.⁵⁴ Thus, the government’s 2008 attempt to transfer 40 hectares of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board for development of permanent camping areas for Hindu pilgrims at the shrine was seen by Kashmiris as a bald attempt at land-grabbing that resulted in mass protests, and a partial revocation of the transfer. On the other hand, in Pakistan’s Northern Areas of Jammu and Kashmir (now called Gilgit-Baltistan), the elimination in the 1950s of a state subjects rule, which had restricted nonlocals from claiming local citizenship and property rights, was seen by ethnic Shias and Balwari nationalists as paving the way for Sunni colonization of a