Amnesty International in the dark
Responses and reactions to AI's report on Ukraine: outrage and disbelief from official sources and civil community
Amnesty International in the dark
Amnesty International dropped their report “Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians” on Thursday, triggering criticism from the four corners of the civil liberties world inter alia. As reported yesterday, the director of AI’s Ukraine office, Oksana Pokalchuk, resigned in protest and provided her motivation in a FB post. She had tried to dissuade AI from publishing the report as it appeared.
This is another loss that the war brought me.... Everything crashed against the wall of bureaucracy and a deaf language barrier," the post said. "If you don't live in a country occupied by invaders that are tearing it to pieces, you probably don't understand what it's like to condemn an army of defenders.
And added that the report:
cannot fail to contain information about the other side of the war, about the one who started this war.... The organization created material that sounded like support for Russian narratives. Seeking to protect civilians, this research instead became a tool of Russian propaganda.
Marc Garlasco, member of the PAX Protection of Civilians team and a United Nations war crimes investigator specialized in civilian harm mitigation, has also provided a legal analysis of AI’s position stating, “They got the law wrong.”
Cristian Tinazzi, a journalist focused on war, crisis areas, and migration, has provided his eye-witness testimony about his experience in Ukraine, and why AI’s report was written out of context.
My comment: I simply don’t understand why AI has decided to focus and blame the victims of Russian aggression and war crimes. I invite you to read the report in full and the comments and responses in the tweets I’ve included below.
This is simply an introductory post, as the topic of human rights and war crimes reporting and reports merits much more.
Eyewitness report by Cristiano Tinazzi & comments on AI’s report
Translated by: Monique Camarra
In June I was in #Mykolaiv, in the south of the country. Every day the Russians bombed the neighborhood where I was with artillery, missiles and cluster bombs (one that exploded 300 metres from me).
Then I moved 5 km away from the Russians and lived for ten days in a place on the river #Dnipro . Same situation. The Russians continued bombing the village. Ukrainian artillery was not in the town. It was distant.
In those days Amnesty contacted me on FB to ask me for information on the situation. I gave them my Ukrainian phone number. Nothing. I contacted the person again, he read [the message] and he didn't even answer me. Then that report comes out. Totally out of context from the ongoing conflict.
I read it in good faith, and I said to myself, well sure, I also slept in a former school where there was a battalion. But there were no armored vehicles or artillery pieces. [It was] [a] place to sleep, get away from the front, and feed hundreds of soldiers.
One day we evacuate. The commander had received an intelligence report on a potential Russian bombing of the facility, and he evacuated the building for fear that civilians in the surrounding area, as well as his own soldiers, might be involved. Then I wondered about this, and I would see it several times with my own eyes:
In a disputed village on the front line, in the gray zone, as often happens, where a large part of the population has gone away, where the fuck are the soldiers supposed to sleep? In a barracks that does not exist, and that 100% would be immediately bombed? On the ground in the fields? How do they feed him?
It is obvious that if you move from village to village or city to city, you use suitable facilities, whether they are private homes or public buildings, but contrary to what Amnesty says in that report…
I have not seen any firing and I have not seen any use of artillery on populated areas even where the inhabitants did not want to leave, and I would have forcefully kicked their asses and carried them away if because of them, men could die to bring them food and aid, but despite this nothing, the Ukrainian volunteers risked their lives to bring aid, and did not bomb the area.
In the villages and in the countryside there is not much: schools and cultural centers, shops. And sometimes the 'municipality' building. That’s it. There isn't shit else besides companies and houses.
And often the Russians know everything: who is where and how. I could tell dozens and dozens of these first-hand stories in almost four months on the frontline, and thousands of kilometers traveled throughout the country. Then I read the Amnesty report again, in good faith, and wondered where are they living.
Those people who have drawn up absurd statements from 4 eye-witnesses, a conflict involving 40 million people, why the cities have become fortifications, and house-to-house fighting theaters.
The cities have also become fortresses because the citizens, the military and civil volunteers, the soldiers of their country, who are defending them, have transformed them as such, because they are the resistance, not aggressors, because there is a military invasion, and there is often no clear separation between civilians and military.
Aid for fighters and civilians is collected in the volunteer centers. So? Am I a target? No, I am not, and this in no way justifies that entire towns and villages can be bombed indiscriminately as the Russians do.
And this below is the result of the Amnesty report, a report without context that did not consult with the Ukrainian section of the NGO, and created divergences in the Italian one, and which in the past has shown unethical and strongly ideologized behavior.
Amnesty’s Ukraine team response
Official reaction to Agnes Callamard’s comments & Amnesty’s report
Olga Lautman weighing in…
Amnesty is silent on Russian-created migrant flows
David Patrikarakos from occupied Kherson
Read the article in full here.
