Call it assistance, call it regrettable, call it $50,000 for each dead body, but do not call it compensation.
The United States made payments last weekend to Afghan families whose relatives were murdered by an American soldier. My colleagues Matthew Rosenberg and Sangar Rahimi report that the families received $50,000 per victim. The six people who were wounded got $11,000 each.
President Obama and senior military leaders have expressed their regret over the killings, just three weeks after having formally apologized for the burning of Korans at a U.S. air base last month.
An Afghan provincial official described the money as “assistance,” as differentiated from a payment that might be used in Pashtun society to make amends for a slight or a crime. So, no absolution here.
“We are grateful to the United States government for its help with the grieved families,” the official, Hajji Agha Lalai, told Matt and Sangar. “But this cannot be counted as compensation for the deaths.”
Also from their story: “In discussions before the payments were made, American officials were also careful to draw a similar distinction, saying that any eventual payments would be out of compassion for the victims, and that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of killing the villagers, would still face trial.”
My colleague in Kabul, Rod Nordland, also reports that the military’s initial report of 16 deaths has been changed because, according to a senior Afghan police official, one of those killed was a pregnant woman. Her unborn baby, apparently, is being counted as Victim No. 17. Sergeant Bales has been charged with killing 17 people.
Some might see the payments as reparations, compensation or justice; others might call it payback, guilt or blood money. In any event, of course, the issue of payments is a sensitive one, and it’s made all the more thorny in wartime and in combat zones.
Payments by the U.S. government or the military are certainly not unprecedented, and tens of millions of dollars have been paid since 2001 to Afghans and Iraqis for killings, injuries and property damage not specifically related to combat.
A Times article in 2007, for example, reported on the case of two men fishing in the Tigris River, in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit:
“They held up the fish in the air and shouted ‘Fish! Fish!’ to show they meant no harm,” said a U.S. Army report on the February 2006 incident. When an American shore patrol drove up, “the deceased bent over to turn the motor off of the boat, but the C.F. shot him in the head as he bent down,” the report said, using shorthand for coalition forces, in this case for members of the 101st Airborne Division.A month later, the army rejected a relative’s compensation claim for the fisherman’s death, ruling that the shooting was “combat activity” exempt from restitution under the Foreign Claims Act, the law that governs payments to foreign citizens for damage done by American forces operating abroad.The army agreed to pay $3,500 for the dead man’s boat, net and cellphone, which drifted off.
A sampling of other war-related payments, some accepted, some rejected:
* In December, cash payments were offered by the United States to families of 24 Pakistani Army soldiers who were killed in their bunker by an errant American airstrike the previous month. Those payments were refused.
“Nobody is interested in compensation,” the Pakistani Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said in a story in the Dawn newspaper. “It is not in our military culture to take money for a fallen soldier. It is abhorred. We will take care of our own.”
* The families of dozens of Pakistani tribesmen killed in a U.S. drone strike last March rejected Pakistani government offers of about $3,500 for each death. (An American official took issue with Islamabad’s characterization of the strike, saying, “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. They were terrorists.”)
* A U.S. inquiry in 2001 found that American troops had killed civilian refugees at No Gun Ri during the Korean War, but the U.S. government took no legal responsibility for the deaths and declined to apologize. The U.S. offer to build a memorial and establish a scholarship fund was rejected by the victims’ families.
“Of course the U.S. government should pay compensation — it’s the U.S. military’s fault,” a survivor, Cho Kook-won, 78, told The Associated Press. Mr. Cho said four of his family members were among hundreds of Koreans who died while taking shelter in a cave in 1951, suffocated and burned by a U.S. Air Force napalm attack.
* The United States authorized $198 million for the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation Fund to make direct cash payments to some 18,000 Filipino veterans who fought on the Allied side during World War II. Veterans with American citizenship are entitled to $15,000; noncitizens can receive $9,000.
* Canada has paid more than $1 million to Afghans who suffered losses in the war, according to Defense Department figures cited by The Canadian Press. The settlements ranged from less than $100 to as much as $21,420.
“By definition, war requires a certain level of destruction, and combatants are not required to treat every invasion like a massive slip-and-fall case,’’ said Jonathan Turley, the legal scholar, in an online essay, “Wartime Compensation: The New Bomb and Buy Policy.”
“There have been limited circumstances in which the U.S. government has agreed to pay damages even though it wasn’t required to. These primarily have been cases in which individuals were injured in peacetime by military negligence.“Thus, when a Japanese fishing boat was exposed to radiation during the testing of an atomic bomb or an Iranian airliner was mistakenly shot down by a U.S. warship, the U.S. paid compensation.“The closest precedent for any Afghan claimants is Grenada, in which the U.S. government agreed to pay $1.6 million to people harmed in the military invasion.“The compensation was a mistake. It is one thing to allow families to receive general humanitarian aid. It is quite another to ‘compensate’ for our actions.”
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment