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One year after the Kunduz hospital airstrike, we’re still bombing the hell out of humanitarianism

An MSF worker surveys the destruction of the hospital in Kunduz, October 2015. Najim Rahim/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.In
the year since an American gunship
bombed and rocketed the Médecins
Sans Frontières trauma hospital
in
Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, killing 42 staff, patients and visitors, front-line
medical workers have been subjected to an unprecedented level of violence. It has
culminated in this month’s orgy of death and destruction in Aleppo and represents
the biggest threat to humanitarianism and its ideals since World War II.

The
eight still-functioning hospitals in eastern Aleppo have been hit repeatedly in
recent weeks. Three of them – the Al Bayan, the M2 and the M10 hospitals – have
each been struck on at least three occasions. There were eight attacks on
ambulances in the course of a month.

It is
surely time to turn the clock back to the founding principle of modern
humanitarianism.  Because the wounded had
to be cared for, the First Geneva Convention of 1864 laid down that ambulances,
hospitals and their staff were to be formally recognised as neutral and “protected
and respected by the belligerents.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), modern
guardians of the Geneva Conventions, has established that in the past three
years in 11 countries, there have been an astonishing 2400 attacks involving
patients, health personnel and medical transport.  Much of the responsibility for these outrages
lies with the strongest states in the world, from the Russians in Syria to the
western powers over Yemen.

MSF has had three hospitals it supports in Yemen bombed by
the Saudi-led coalition in the past year. One of them has been hit twice. Two
ambulances and a mobile clinic have also been attacked. As well as using
British and American bombs, there are UK and US military advisers on hand to
guide these coalition air forces.

After the worst of these attacks in August – on the Abs
hospital in northern Yemen which killed 19 – MSF was forced to pull out of the
country. They complain of the “utter disregard for civilian life by all warring
parties.”

The Kunduz attack in the early hours of 3 October 2015 was
the worst bombing in MSF’s history. It has led to 12 months of public dispute
with the US government over the facts and implications of the raid. MSF wanted
it independently investigated as a war crime. The US offered its “deepest
condolences”, issued a heavily censored report and declared the incident a
tragic error borne of incompetence on the ground and in the air. But it was not
a war crime, because it was not intentional.

But it was not a war crime, because it was not
intentional.

Important discrepancies persist. MSF says that the bombing
lasted from 2:08am to 3:15am: a total of 67 minutes. In the US account, the
attack was called off after 30 minutes. The US report confines responsibility for
the raid – and all the mistakes – to American personnel. Other accounts cite
the role of Afghan forces in urging the Americans on and their distrust of MSF
for treating Taliban wounded. Afghan officials have claimed that the hospital
was under Taliban occupation.

The Americans say they mistook the hospital for another
building, but their purpose was certainly to help their Afghan allies or, as
they put it, “to soften the target for partner forces.”   In response to a query about human figures seen
on the ground, now known to be hospital staff, the circling gunship was told that
the compound was “currently under the control of TB [Taliban] so those 9 PAX
[personnel] are hostile.”

There was one way to resolve these differences, and MSF
shrewdly adopted it. They approached the organisation established under the
Geneva Conventions to investigate potential breaches of International
Humanitarian Law. The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission
(IHFFC) has been in existence for 25 years, and has yet to record a single
solid achievement. It is at the service of governments, and governments have
shown consistent unwillingness to be investigated.

Nothing changed over Kunduz. Neither the US nor the Afghan
government was going to submit itself to independent inquiry over a potential
war crime. But in publicly acknowledging the MSF approach, the IHFFC did wonders
for the agency’s noisy campaign to gain respect for the rules of war. MSF has since
brought two more potential war crimes to the commission’s attention. One was the
bombing of a hospital they supported in Yemen, the other a hospital raid in
northern Syria.

The IHFFC is at the service of governments, and
governments have shown consistent unwillingness to be investigated.

Lacklustre international responses to humanitarian outrages
are not confined to little-known organisations in Geneva. In May, the United
Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning attacks on health
facilities and demanding an end to impunity for those responsible. In the field
in Syria and in Yemen, MSF noted a reduction in the regularity and intensity of
attacks, but it proved temporary.

The UN failed in another initiative. In its preparation for
the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in May – boycotted by MSF
as “a fig leaf of good intentions” – officials allowed front-line humanitarian
emergencies to become entangled with longer term development objectives
stretching to 2030 and beyond. As for measures to end conflict and respect
international law, the UN now admits the summit gained “few new and concrete
commitments that would lead to change on the ground.”

International institutions are as good or as bad as the
governments that subscribe to them. The big powers often invoke the good name
of humanitarianism, but do precious little to promote its principles. After years
of planning, a major international conference staged by the Red Cross in Geneva
last December made no progress at all in establishing a formal mechanism to
ensure compliance with humanitarian law.

The wretched truth is that if the Geneva Conventions did not
exist today, no one would invent them. If they were presented to governments today,
surprisingly few would sign them.

In a world indifferent to upholding humanitarian principles,
there is only one bright spot. It is the work and commitment of the two aid
agencies in direct line of descent from their original Swiss foundation: the
International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. 

A year on from the air raid, MSF wants to go back to work in
Kunduz where the surgical needs are overwhelming. But it dares not risk more
staff lives until the Americans can assure them that the same thing would not
happen again.

Peter Gill is the author of Today We Drop Bombs, Tomorrow We Build Bridges: How
Foreign Aid Became a Casualty of War (2016) published by Zed Books.