Closing the gap: symbolic reparations and armed groups

The question of whether non-state armed groups could and should provide reparations to their victims has been largely overlooked. This article explores this gap, with a particular focus on symbolic reparations, such as acknowledgement of the truth and apologies. It argues that, while the question is fraught with legal, conceptual, and practical difficulties, there are some circumstances in which armed groups are capable of providing measures of reparations to their victims. The article identifies the issue of attacks on informers as one potential area for armed groups to provide such measures, and demonstrates that in a few cases armed groups have already engaged in actions that could be seen as analogous to symbolic reparations. The article’s main case study is provided by recent actions by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in relation to its past attacks against suspected informers. While non-state actors have been involved in violence throughout history, the influence of armed groups has been rising exponentially in the last two decades. Armed groups are present in virtually all major areas of violence: for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Chechnya, the fragmented set of * The author would like to thank Avner Gidron, Kieran McEvoy, and Tomaso Falchetta for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. A grant from The Global Consortium on Security Transformation (GCST) assisted in conducting the research. Volume 93 Number 883 September 2011 doi:10.1017/S1816383112000082 783 conflicts with Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and the recent conflict in Libya. Armed groups have also participated in the recent conflicts in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland. Non-international armed conflicts involving non-state armed groups are now the dominant form of conflict in world affairs, with inter-state wars becoming the exception.1 At the beginning of 2008 there were twenty-six active armed conflicts worldwide, all of them involving armed groups.2 Thus, ‘by definition, at least half the belligerents in the most widespread and most victimizing of armed conflicts around the world, i.e. non-international armed conflicts, are non-state armed groups’.3 In addition, many armed groups have operated and committed abuses in situations of political violence that do not cross the threshold for being considered as an armed conflict under international humanitarian law (IHL) (for example, the Maoist armed groups in north-east India, or ETA in Spain). The rise in importance of armed groups has led to several developments. First, the legal norms applying to the conduct of armed groups, in particular IHL, have been gradually articulated and clarified, and indeed have become the subject of a growing body of literature.4 Perhaps the most important step has been the clarification of customary rules of IHL: the majority (though not all) of the 161 rules governing armed conflicts that were authoritatively identified by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) apply in non-international armed conflict and are thus binding on armed groups.5 The general principle of applying at least some of the norms of IHL to armed groups is now beyond dispute; the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), for example, was able to simply assert that: ‘. . . it is well settled 1 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd edition, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006; Richard Schultz and Andrea Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006; UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibilities, United Nations, 2004, p. 17. 2 Joseph J. Hewitt, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2010, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, 2010, p. 27. 3 Marco Sassòli, ‘Taking armed groups seriously: ways to improve their compliance with international humanitarian law’, in International Humanitarian Legal Studies, Vol. 1, 2010, p. 6. 4 Marco Sassòli, Transnational Armed Groups and International Humanitarian Law, Harvard University Program on Humanitarian Law and Policy, Occasional Paper 6, 2006, available at: http://www. hpcrresearch.org/sites/default/files/publications/OccasionalPaper6.pdf (last visited 20 January 2012); Sandesh Sivakumaran, ‘Binding armed opposition groups’, in International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2006, pp. 369–394; Anne-Marie La Rosa and Caroline Wuerzner, ‘Armed groups, sanctions and the implementation of international humanitarian law’, in International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 90, No. 870, 2008, pp. 327–341; Cherif Bassiouni, ‘The new wars and the crisis of compliance with the law of armed conflict by non-state actors’, in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 98, No. 3, 2008, pp. 711–810; Liesbeth Zegveld, The Accountability of Armed Opposition Groups in International Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; Andrew Clapham, ‘Human rights obligations of non-state actors in conflict situation’, in International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 88, No. 863, 2006, pp. 491–523; Noelle Higgins, ‘The regulation of armed non-state actors: promoting the application of the laws of war to conflicts involving national liberation movements’, in Human Rights Brief, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2009, pp. 12–17; M. Sassòli above note 3. 5 See the ICRC database of customary IHL, available at: http://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/home (last visited 8 August 2011). See also International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General, Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1564 of 18 September 2004’, Geneva, 25 January 2005, para. 166, available at: http://www.un.org/news/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf (last visited 20 January 2012). R. Dudai – Closing the gap: symbolic reparations and armed groups