Editor's Pick

Two reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan

War, suffering and those laws about them . . .

17 July 2009, 17:00 PM
BOOK REVIEWS

AT a time when morality is being tested to the extreme and law is being subjected to rigorous interpretation, this book comes as a useful guide to an understanding of conflict situations and what the international community can do about them. If the world wars are part of the collective human memory now, if the Cold War is somewhere in the distant past, there is hardly any reason to feel complacent about the circumstances we inhabit. Remember that it was only in the 1990s that history, to the extent that war defined a large part of it, was badly mauled in the Balkans in a conflict that lay rooted in the deep antagonisms of the past. Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, et cetera, are all reminders that the human capacity to inflict wounds on civilisation has not yet ended, that indeed conflict in its violent forms is but a truth we have all lived with and will continue to consider part of life. And then of course there are the innumerable hostilities which have left countries in Africa maimed. You could even argue that all the decency and respect for individuals you expect will define these post-modern times have simply not manifested themselves in that unfortunate continent. That is the pity. And the pity is even more in the knowledge that all too often it is the innocent who are compelled to pay the price in a situation not of their making. To what extent they can be provided protection against capricious rulers and the like remains a question. There are other matters of grave import as well. Take, for instance, the damage that may be caused and is indeed caused to the natural environment when armed hostilities break out in some corner of the globe. In International Humanitarian Law, that is precisely one of the concerns which are expressed in all the seriousness you can imagine. What Marco Rossini brings to the reader's attention is, therefore, a theme that, despite being of grave import, has not been given much consideration in all our assessments of conflict. And yet humanitarian law is not just about people; it is at the same time about all those aspects of life that concern people everywhere in the sense that the ramifications of conflict are wide and deep. It is just such ramifications that the authors of this excellent compendium bring together along with a presentation of the laws and rules that are putatively to guide human behaviour in times of open, often bitter hostilities. Begin at the beginning. In every conflict situation there are combatants and non-participants. Or you could call the latter victims of a situation they had no hand in the making of. From that point of view, the burden of guilt is clearly on combatants. How then do you deal with them? In skirmishes, in open battlefield conflict or in street-by-street fighting, they may perish or may be left grievously wounded. But it is a different ballgame altogether when these self-same combatants are taken prisoner. Once that happens, a new situation arises in that you need to define a combatant and, having done that, you need to step away from the earlier fury of battlefield conflict and regard these combatants in terms of international humanitarian law. Annyssa Bellal and Vincent Chetail offer a clear perspective on the broad concept of combatants under international humanitarian law here. Obviously, the biggest need in times of conflict is a guarantee of the protection of civilians and everyone else who has been caught in the crossfire. Michelo Hansungule brings forth a well-reasoned case in defence of the rights of the non-combatant who almost invariably finds himself caught in the bitterness that conflict is all about. The provision of protection to civilians, to the wounded, to prisoners of war is one that is symbolic of the times. Behavioral patterns are such as to impress upon people everywhere the fact that it is only moral to come to the aid of those who have simply been trapped in a war. The law, therefore, is the thing. To what extent you define certain situations and to what degree you can apply the myriad international laws geared toward a protection of people unfortunate enough to be caught in a conflict condition really enables you to know the state of the globe as it will be. There are sometimes humanitarian interventions in a conflict. Why such interventions are necessitated is an issue explained in patent manner by Peter Hilpold, Azizur Rahman Chowdhury and Md. Jahid Hossain Bhuiyan in their discourse on the legal status of humanitarian intervention. The instances cited reinforce their case: India's intervention on the side of the Bengalis in the Bangladesh war of 1971, Tanzania's entry into Uganda in 1979, Vietnam's role in the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1979, Belgian involvement on the Congo in 1960, et cetera. The work in review is, from a purely legal aspect, a detailed exposition of the laws that operate, or should, in defence of the dignity of individuals who have had no role in the making of conflict situations. At the same time, it seeks to delve into the rights that necessarily will be applied in the case of those who create the grounds for conflict and then pursue it to the hilt. You get a rather enlightened idea of such situations through Hitoshi Nasu's ruminations on the status of rebels in non-international armed conflict. And within the broad spectrum of those ruminations come the Geneva Conventions, with all their necessary articles and additional protocols together with the role that the United Nations is expected to play in such circumstances of conflict. This happens to be a work that statesmen and politicians need to keep within reach. It makes perspectives clearer.

… the artist in her landscape of light

ART springs somewhere in the depths of the soul. It is a calling almost religious in nature. Or, as Halide Salam makes it clear, there is about art a strong element of spirituality that gives it its inner meaning and strength. Between 2 Spaces is, therefore, a journey into the sublimity that spirituality can be, a journey that Salam has been engaged in for decades now. And what might be the origins of all this travel through the expanses of artistic time and space the writer has undertaken? The answer to that query comes through Salam's reflections on her past, indeed on the roots she has clutched. The growth of the spirit of inquiry has generally to do with the way clans and families operate. And Halide Salam's sheer good fortune has been in being part of a family where the father has always operated on a higher intellectual plane than anyone else in his surroundings. And from her mother the writer (and remember she has been an artist for ages now) learnt the value of observation. Her devotion to her parents says it all, in effect throws up the metaphor that is her life these days in the distant United States of America. Of her father, there is the warmth to be recalled: "Art is about feelings, my father insisted. 'Paint feelings through the objects but leave the objects far behind.'" If her father was the moon, her mother was to her the sun whose 'presence is constant, permeating and strengthening my actions, the source of my emotional comfort.' Salam goes beyond parents, looks farther back, to the grandmother she calls ammijaan. It is ammijaan she recalls in her reflections on her childhood associations of colour. There was white; and then there were the whites, with their different names. One of those would be explained in terms of fresh butter, or taaza makkhan; another would come as aged butter, or purana makkhan. If that is the background against which Halide Salam has constantly been rediscovering herself, there is a bigger canvas in which she has been subjecting herself to reinvention. And that is her totality of religious belief, in Allah, in the Quran, in the Prophet. The correlation of the physical world to the realm of the metaphysical in her art is, in that sense, achieved through a fundamental underpinning of faith. Note her emphasis on spirituality being a guiding force in the shaping of destiny: 'In the Quran, the Eternal Guide, Al Khidr, guides individuals through their inexplicable journey, provided they ride life's forces with faith in providence and their destiny.' This faith in Creation is a lesson that has come down to her from her father. He spoke of light, of its power, to her --- a cardinal lesson that was to be her driving force in her journey of self-discovery in America. She recalls her father's stress on the Quran, chapter 24, verse 35: 'Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass, the Glass as if it were a brilliant star: lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither from the East nor the West, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it. Light upon Light.' Salam has travelled through towns and cities, through daylight and brilliant night, and has drawn on her experience to create her art. She informs us that in Ohio, in New Mexico, indeed everywhere, she has conversed with nature. In the process, she has gone out in search of knowledge. Muhyuddin Ibn Arabi, Rumi, Imam Gazzali, Henry Corbin, Martin Lings are some of the names she pushes our way. They are the many windows to her mind, or the varied apertures to her soul. There is a spiritedness to Halide Salam's reflections. She crosses time zones and swims through space, to bring to fusion the scientific and the imaginative. The end is Creation. In Halide Salam's intellectual landscape, you are on a journey through the universe.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk.

Google News LinkFor all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.

Click to comment

Related News