THE “terrifying” history of the use of civilians as human shields is revealed in a new book by an Edinburgh academic.
Nicola Perugini, who teaches international relations at Edinburgh University, said the “chilling” truth over the misuse of civilians during conflict stayed with him throughout work on Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire.
The book, published by University of California Press, was co-authored by Professor Neve Gordon of Queen Mary University London after the pair began examining the incidents of the brutal 2014 Gaza war, a seven-week conflict in which almost 1500 Palestinian civilians and six in Israel were killed.
The UN said Israel Defence Forces “may not have done everything feasible to avoid or limit” harm to ordinary people and statements from some armed Palestinian groups indicated they’d intended to target civilians.
The work led Perugini and Gordon also focuses on the use of humans shields from the US civil war to conflicts in Vietnam, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Iraq and more, plus protests such as that over water at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016 and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The trend is one of the increasing weaponisation of ordinary people, the book argues, telling us who is considered valuable. “It’s chilling, it’s terrifying in a way,” Perugini said. “That is the feeling we kept with us from the beginning until the end of the book. We realised there was this figure, this ghost haunting so many conflicts and so many populations. This is a criminal history.
“Under international humanitarian law, you cannot intentionally kill civilians, but these civilians are made killable. That started telling us something extremely important about the history of political violence and how certain kinds of lives can become expendable.”
Perugini acknowledges some groups do hide behind non-combatants but says the human shield concept is a “perfect tool” to enable armies to push on where they could not otherwise: “The situation is complex, but there’s no such thing as a natural human shield – a civilian needs to be construed as such and that is useful to armies.
“With the 2014 Gaza war we were hearing more and more Israeli accusations against Palestinian resistance groups about using civilians as human shields. These accusations legitimise and justify the killing of innocent civilians. We see them used often against Islamic militants, non-Western armed groups. In Mosul and in Syria tens of thousands of civilians were framed as human shields. What were the implications of that framing?
“This has to do with a certain kind of liberal sensitivity and understanding. The history of the human shield goes in parallel with the emergence of ‘humane violence’, which is considered to be necessary and perpetrated to humane standards.
“Liberal armies like to portray themselves as the good keepers of the rules of warfare but this is linked to colonial ways of seeing war, about colonial armies against ‘savages’. During colonial times, there did not need to be a distinction between who could or could not be killed for these armies. With the end of empire in the 1960s and 70s, former colonies become part of the families of nations and a distinction needs to be applied – there has to be some justification. That’s when the idea of the human shield becomes crucial.”
US veterans stood before Indigenous protestors at Standing Rock because they were thought less likely to be blasted with pepper spray. During Black Lives Matter protests, lone woman Iesha Evans stood against advancing riot police over the killings of black men in an image that went viral.
“This is the crucial point of the book,” said Perugini. “Only certain bodies can shield. Human shields reveal hierarchies of humanity.”
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