Olivier Lallemant - Entry No. 7 (Khalili)

In her text, Dr. Laleh Khalili, specialist researcher in the fields of policing and incarceration, describes how incarceration is going in counterinsurgencies. This specific kind of warfare is very interesting to study, since it is not clearly controlled by international Law. It often leads to serious abuse to human rights and to the dignity of fighters. The author raises several questions that are, as for me, absolutely determining for the study of counterinsurgencies.

First of all, what all counterinsurgencies have in common in the second part of the 20^th century is that they constantly lead to human rights abuses. The main problem for the “government” side, which has to fight rebels whether they are from its own country or not, is the need for information. Actually, in all kind of warfare, one army needs to gather intelligence to plan efficient attacks against its enemy’s forces. But in the case of counterinsurgencies, the enemy is not a country, it is usually a heterogeneous group of people, which it is difficult to know whether the population is involved with or not, and even sometimes without a known head with a name on it. To lead a war efficiently, you have to know who you are fighting. And that is the point where confinement is involved. This specific kind of confinement has as a main target to get information from the “detainee”. In this objective, torture is a “common” way to get this information. The second way human rights are abused in those prisons is the second main characteristic of counterinsurgencies. This kind of warfare is above all based on bombings and terrorist attacks to more or less strategic points of the involved country. Laleh Khalili takes a lot of very good examples of contemporary counterinsurgencies, whose methods are mainly based on decolonization civil wars, which created this way of war making. Thus, as those rebels are involved in a terrorist organization that does not hesitate to kill innocent people as well as military to achieve its goals, the other part does not take care of prisoners as they were common human detainees. That is a very important issue because human rights are the fundamental basis under which we should never but the condition of a human being. But the main question that remains is: Should we prevent the rights of a person who knows where and when dozen of innocent people will be killed? This is a very political, ideological, and difficult question to answer, especially after events like September 11.

At the end of the chapter, the author raises the question of the “Regime of invisibility in wartime”. This “regime” leads to the invisibility everything that is related to confinement in counterinsurgencies. Detainees cannot be heard or seen during wartime, as well as facilities where they are imprisoned. This simply leads to the complete negation of the inmate’s existence. Legally, he is no one. In that case, whether the inmate lives or dies does not matter, since one both cases he remains invisible. The author takes the example of Israel’s “Facility 1391” prison camp, to show that it has been established much earlier than in April 2002, when it took its name. Its location remained an absolute secret for a very long time. Eventually, inmates could not even be found, since nobody knew where they were confined. The second main function of those facilities after intelligence gathering: “bargaining chips” hold center. This was a very important side of their using in Israel. In 2002, the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, voted the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law. Suspending the article 4 of the Geneva Convention, this law meant in practice that they can imprison anyone who is suspected to be an unlawful combatant, who may harm Israel’s State Security; this has been a very efficient way to gather a lot of “bargaining chips”. As a conclusion, the author describes how important Law was in those invisibility confinement techniques; it has been compiled with treaties and control to keep absolute secrecy. Invisibility was the fundamental basis on without which the absolute control on counterinsurgency detainees would not have been possible at all.