Interview with Sarah Holewinski, Executive Director of the NGO CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict)
By Karen Duncan and Elham Shabahat
PGI: It’s really interesting, the idea that CIVIC is not just a thought, but a part of your lifestyle. Can you start by telling those of us who are, who had to educate ourselves or those who do not know what CIVIC stands for – the acronym, and what your mission is basically?
SH: Sure. CIVIC has a really interesting history. It stands for Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict. The history started in 2003 when a young woman named Marla Ruzicka, a young Californian she got involved in some groups that were going over to Afghanistan and saw the devastation of these civilians who were being harmed by US combat forces. Now the combat forces were not intentionally trying to harm them, it was very different from some places in the world but where civilians are intentionally harmed, raped, genocide, mass atrocities, that sort of thing.
This was civilians being caught in the crossfire of conflict. She saw that the US troops didn’t want to harm them. Yet they were harming them, but nothing happened afterwards. So she went to the hospitals, she went to the refugee camps and she saw that these civilians were not getting help. And when the statue fell in Baghdad she went to Iraq from Afghanistan. She created this organization to say publicly in the world, and to do work on getting warring parties to help where they’ve harmed. And that’s a really important thing when you look at international laws, which I know a lot of the students here are doing work on. International laws say that you have to protect civilians, you have to avoid them. But once you harm them within the boundaries of law, you don’t have to do anything to help them. So that’s what we do.
Thank you. With the death of Maria in 2003, could you expound on whether or not this changed the focus of CIVIC and the operations, the way in which you operate – being on the ground, if that changed?
That’s a great question and I think it’s something that every organization or group that comes together to do work like this has to consider. And when Marla died it was a question of whether or not we were going to be in the field anymore and we decided at that point that we couldn’t be. We couldn’t send more people over to Iraq and have this happen again. When I took over the organization in early 2006, we were a staff if two. We barely had a budget, and we were trying to figure out, oh my God what are we gonna do with this organization that the visionary is no longer here? And we can’t go and replicate her work so what can we do? And what we decided to do was focus on policy. And instead of, you know Marla was such a caring and compassionate individual and she wanted to help everyone. So she would go and see a five year old with an amputated limb, and want to get that child help. And we decided well, we can’t do that. We’re not equipped to do that, we don’t have the budget. So we’re gonna focus on getting the warring parties themselves to help that child, and change policies. So that’s what we did.
As the years went on we realized that, you know, the US can’t be the singular focus of this. It has to be a worldwide campaign. It has to be that all warring parties in all places, every time a civilian is harmed must go and help somehow. Compensation, humanitarian aid, whatever it is. And now we actually do have people in Afghanistan, we have people in Pakistan, and we just, we are very, very careful about where they go and what they do and who they talk to.
So, as I understand it your organization is addressing a gap in international law, and by making amends. I wanted to talk to you about this concept of making amends and what that exactly means, and who bears the responsibility of making amends – is it the home state? Is it both the warring parties?
Sure. That’s it. It’s a very complicated question but I will take it one at a time. Making amends is a term that we coined to delineate between the reparations that people can receive if they are intentionally harmed, if their rights are violated under international law. And they have some sort of legal redress. Now the mechanisms aren’t that great. You know you can think of a couple different examples through history – the Kuwaitis got reparations from the Iraqis, the Germans had to pay the countries that they invaded, they had to pay them reparations for the damages they caused. So there are examples of that happening.
What doesn’t happen is when you have the “collateral damage”, and I use quotes to say that because it’s a term that was coined by the US military in Vietnam. It means sort of the incidental harm that comes to civilians in the course of warfare. It’s kind of, it’s expected, it’s understood. And it sounds callous to say that but that’s the way that warring parties think about it. So for that group of people, there is no redress for them. They are injured, they are killed, their houses are blown up, they’re displaced,
their hospitals are blown up. There is no legal right for them to say “Hey you have to compensate me.” And so we decided, well, that is a gap in international laws. I mean International laws, both bodies – international humanitarian law and human rights law, they were both founded on human dignity. Right? So if they’re founded on human dignity how can this one group of war victims so horribly devastated be left out of being dignified after harm. And so we call it making amends and we’re trying to fill the gap in international law. And there are a couple different ways you could go about doing that.
With cluster munitions they went for a convention, with landmines they went for a treaty. This has been done before, you know? Gaps have been filled before. We are going to do it through state practice. We’re gonna get state after state after state to do it until the international community steps back and says “wow, we’ve got a behavior here.” In the conduct of war that’s new and it’s customary as they call it, and now everyone has to do it.
That’s a tall order, that’s a very tall order but I’m glad that someone, an organization like yours has taken the baton in terms of moving international response. International response to the level of acknowledgement at least – that’s great, if states will acknowledge exactly what their responsibilities are. For the moment you are working with states who possibly or ostensibly believe in international humanitarian law. But what about the states that intentionally harm civilians?
Well there are a lot of challenges to something like making amends, and we focus on, as you said, the states that do try to abide by international humanitarian law. They try to protect civilians, they try to avoid them and in that way, we are focusing on a very small subset of civilian harm. Because, as you know, around the world civilians are harmed in awful, egregious ways. And for those civilians, reparations exist; a method of reparations exists in international law. The problem is, it’s not, they’re not good – they are not working. So when civilians in Sri Lanka – there’s this whole grey area between collateral damage and civilians who have experienced war crimes. If you look at Sri Lanka, if you look at Nepal, if you look at even some places in Congo it’s very hard to differentiate. Well, wait a minute were they caught in the crossfire? Or were they intentionally harmed? Were their villages intentionally burned down? Were they – you know all of these questions. And so what we hope is that because we’re not gonna get this done in the next ten years and it’s not gonna be perfect. So what we hope is that the people working on reparations on war crimes and us working on making amends for collateral damage will somehow meet in the middle and make sure that we can cover everyone. That everyone harmed in war will have some kind of redress.
Wow. So you’re working in – from your website – it seems like you’re working with Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Nepal, Somalia, which is a lot. Could you briefly tell us about your campaigns in one of these countries, and what CIVICs’ role has been? Do you remain apolitical in these conflicts? Does CIVIC have a long-term investment? Or are you a transitional body?
Because we don’t do direct service we don’t help the civilians themselves. We try to get the governments or the warring parties (whichever you want to call it), of the conflict to do it. So I think the best example is the United States, in – let’s take Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the US military compensates civilians, it’s not a perfect system, a lot of civilians are left out, and it’s this very arbitrary number. They picked USD 2500 to give for civilian deaths, injuries – that’s kind of the cap on what they’ll give. But, they’re one of the first nations to do this, and a lot of their NATO partners who make up the international forces in Afghanistan followed suit. And so now about half of them, out of the many dozens or so countries that are operating on the ground will compensate civilians after their troops cause them harm. So that’s a really interesting thing.
And then the second thing that the US does and this is really important because it doesn’t have to be military, and in some places it should not be the military that are making amends. In Afghanistan, the US Congress also approved about $10 million per year for humanitarian aid program. Now this is not compensation, this is really where the money is used for Afghans themselves under an international organization. To go out into the provinces to say “Alright, Community Elder, who has been harmed in this town? What do they need?” They go and talk to that family. And if it’s for example, a widow, whose husband has been killed, and she can no longer provide for her family, she’s got nowhere to go, hopefully she will have already received US compensation money so that she can pay for the funeral and food and these things that are very important immediately following harm. And then this humanitarian aid program comes in and works with her to figure out what are her skills? what can she do? Maybe we’ll give her a grocery store with supplies and business training and we’ll stay with her for two years. So this is an example of how making amends can be done on the ground.
It is extremely difficult in some places to figure out what that’s going to look like, and how involved the warring parties should be. We stay apolitical. We try to stay neutral, we try to stay, we don’t take sides and we don’t even say this war should or should not have happened – because that would draw us into a lot of arguments that would take our attention away from war victims. We say once war has started, once civilians are being harmed, that’s when we come in and we try to do the best we can to them. There’s also the issue, and it’s another challenge – which I’m sure you’re about to ask – of non-state actors. We don’t necessarily ask the Taliban to pay compensation or make amends in Afghanistan. So that’s a real challenge. You know, how do we say that all warring parties should do this if we’re not going to ask the Taliban or Al Qaeda to make amends to civilians.
Picking up on that, in such extreme circumstances where they are definitely hostile, in terms of working with organizations like yours, families who are – whose husbands, or uncles or brothers, in some cases women, who are involved directly in the conflict who have sustained some damage, some hurt – does CIVIC work with families like that? How, or do you have any mode of operations in terms of how you deal with that kind of recommendation from say a village Elder?
In terms of civilians who are indirectly harmed by the conflict?
Yes. But whose families are definitely known to be say a Taliban?
I see, I see. That’s something we hear a lot from, for example the US military when we’re talking with people who don’t believe in this. There are some of course who say “Look, we don’t want to give $2000 to somebody who is supporting the Taliban, they’re just gonna turn around and buy an RPG.” Maybe. I mean, maybe that’s true. We think that you should err on the side of helping as many innocent civilians as you can. And because you can’t do formal investigations in a way that is going to give you a hundred percent positive proof, make sure that you’re doing the best that you can. And if you get a couple of Taliban in there, so be it. It’s not that much money. I mean the Taliban are getting so much money, from all of these other ways through corrupt channels with the government, and through international aid and through the poppies. You know, the compensation that’s being given out is really needed, and if the population feels like they deserve it there’s no reason to withhold that because you think you’re going to get, you know, a couple Taliban in there.
So talking about the US military, we notice that CIVIC this year will probably train officers. HHTell us more about that. Are you worried about being associated with the US military?
No. And here’s why – because in order to create change, you have to create it from within. And you have to inculcate that civilian cost of war from within the military itself. We can, you know name and shame them all we want to. We can put out a press release every week, and say you know “They’re not doing what they should, blah blah, blah.” But if we go and we actually sit down and we talk to them and we make the case, and we actually run through scenarios with them – we’ve done this at Fort Leavenworth where we’ve trained officers, staff officers who are going to be the commanders on the ground. We believe that if we can get to them, we can change their minds, and then they are going to go and train many hundreds more troops. And they’re going to go into Afghanistan and into Iraq and make this a priority. And so when we go through their scenarios, for example we’ll have a week-long scenario where they have to invade a fake country etc. And we get access to them as they’re making these decisions, and you know, we’re able to talk to them and say “well there’s a civilian population over here, what are you going to do about that? Are you gonna go round them, are you gonna go through them you know? What are your decision- making criteria for that? And then, if you actually harm them, do you already have a system in place so that you know that you can help them immediately? And I think that’s really important, it’s the first time they will have heard that kind of reasoning when they’re going into a battle situation.
That’s interesting. Is this perhaps a part of, I know that the US military had started relatively recently, this idea of being friendly on the ground so to speak. You know, being accessible, being within the bounds of operational procedures, being able to connect with the local populations where they work. Is this a part of sustaining that and taking that to another level?
This is absolutely a part of that, and it’s really a strategic imperative that we talk about. We talk about making amends both for moral reasons, because it’s the right thing to do – it’s humanity, it’s compassion, it’s our identity as Americans. You know just taking the US as an example. But there’s also a strategic component, and if you upset the local population, they are going to turn on you, and they’re going to turn to the Taliban. And they’re going to plant IEDs and they’re going to be upset , and they’re not gonna give you the support that they need. So General McCrystal earlier in 2009, in the Summer of 2009 created a new tactical directive. And it comes out of a lot of thinking in the US military, it’s been shifting for a while. But it goes back to a lot of tenets of Vietnam where you say we have to win over the local population. It’s that clichéd hearts and minds. But what he did was say “Look, we’re not gonna, the airstrikes are really upsetting people.” You know they never know when they’re gonna be hit. You could be going to a wedding, which they were. You know if you remember that case and they were hit – and they don’t know why. And we’re killing a lot of civilians and this is something that has to change and so we’re going to restrict air power. And you know we’re not going to shoot someone until we see that they have a weapon in their hands, because they might just be a farmer planting in their field – they’re not planting an IED. So he was very smart about this and said “we have to protect the local population, that’s why we’re there.”
And now we’re hoping to go a step further, and we hope that the international forces in Afghanistan will realize – look some of us are compensating, some of us aren’t. A lot of civilians are left with nothing, that’s also really angering the population. And if you really do something about it, create a uniform system of compensation, it will be the first time that a group of countries had created a uniform system of compensation. And if you look at old Afghan laws, I mean we dug them up from a hundred years ago, and they are very well versed in compensation. If you harm your neighbor, here’s how much the herd will cost, here’s how much a wife will cost – you know it’s a very cold calculation, but it’s there – here’s how much a pinkie will cost. And so I think we should abide by that and have this kind of uniform system of compensation based on local traditions.
How is compensation provided? I mean are you giving, could you talk about that?
It’s different, it’s different all over. I mean I’ll use Afghanistan again because there’re only a couple other examples in the world, Somalia being one of them where some compensation has been given – but nothing systematic. In Iraq, the US and the British gave compensation; but in Afghanistan you have all of these different countries that have combat troops on the ground, some of them compensate, some of them don’t. And what that means is in certain provinces, you’ll have for example a US commander who believes in compensation, and has the funds to compensate. And so after they go into a place – actually we can take Marjat – which just happened. This was the big offensive in the south and Helmand province where the US was going in with Australia and a couple others to rid this community of Marjat of the Taliban.
Well, they said even before they went in, we are going to compensate you for any deaths, injuries or property damage. And they’ve done that. So what that means is perhaps a family’s house, a rocket hit it and they didn’t mean for that to happen; or the Taliban were supposed to be there but they weren’t, it was mostly civilians. Well then the US commander, or one of his judge advocates, whoever happens to be there on the ground, will go and talk with the village Elder or with the family itself depending on what’s appropriate and discuss what are your losses and what that amount should be. And then they’ll make an offer, and they’ll give them cash. Sometimes if cash is not appropriate, for example in Marjat, where the Taliban might come and just take it right away or it will put the family in danger, that’s something else you have to think about. Maybe it could be rice, maybe it could be clothes, maybe it could be building materials that the family could use to rebuild their homes. There are a lot of different ways of compensating for losses.
The fact that it’s actually happening is encouraging, because you know that the acknowledgement is there and that as you say, customary international law catches on so to speak. It takes the first step and then we have more people carrying on. We have looked at your website obviously, and we are impressed by the emotional connection that the stories of the civilians, and how you have had different successes – the people who have been harmed by conflict. The one in Gaza in particular, and we looked at the importance of your mission statement, in how you established; what the steps were that you took. In our non-profit management classes of course this is definitely something that is encouraged and looked at. Can you tell us some more about difficulties that you faced as a non-profit organization of course, and how you overcame them – and as an individual. What advice do you have for students interested in field work? How do you handle fear? How do you actually get to the point of contributing to what we now have in existence.
Well I would say the first thing is take that non-profit management class. I never had that and gosh I wish I could come back and take it now. Non-profit management is really a very tricky thing. I kind of fell into it and didn’t realize what I was getting into. I’ve learned on the job. I didn’t necessarily have any non-profit management experience when I took over this organization – luckily we were small. Or maybe unluckily depending on how you look at it. So we were able to start out and raise our budget and raise our staff and kind of grow with the organization as it grew. But there are all of these decisions you know you have to make about leadership.
Where do you want the organization to go and do you want to replicate and duplicate others’ work? Well, we didn’t – so how to find that niche? And if you are replicating and duplicating others’ work, do you continue to do it because people are listening to you? Or do you say, you know what this is really a waste of funds and we have to find our own unique voice. So that’s what we’ve been trying to do year after year. We sit down every January with our staff and with our Board of Directors and we say where can we go with this? Where are we going to make the most difference for war victims? And I think when you get into this business – and it is a business – sometimes you can get drawn away from what you really intended to do; why you really got into it. Because you’re dealing with excel spread sheets, you’re dealing with hiring procedures and what the employee handbook looks like, and fundraising. You know fundraising is a big part of my job as the head of this organization.
Sometimes it can really sap you of the passion for the issue, and so one thing that helps is getting out to the field. And one thing that helps is going to Afghanistan or going to Iraq, or going to Nepal or Sri Lanka or any of these places where you can actually meet war victims and talk with them. Talk with them about what it would be like if there was this international norm – that warring parties helped them after they were harmed. How would that change their lives? And then you go back and you feel like ok, I’ve got this renewed energy.
Also very important, that said, to not go back and feel like you’re an expert on an Afghan family and their suffering. Because you’ve heard a very tiny piece of it and even people who spend years in war zones or years in a particular culture, if you don’t come from that, then I think you have to be careful about saying well, the Afghan I talked to said this – and making it a very generalized thing. It takes a lot of work to figure out for example, what Afghans or Nepalese need, and want and deserve, and will actually accept. And what will not create fissures in their society. It’s a very complicated process and I think it just takes a dedication to always, always focusing on what is best for the war victims, and then working out from there.
And just to the end part of my question about as workers, who actually go into the field sometimes to get in touch with what’s actually happening in terms of the execution of the policies – how do you deal with fear and emotional consequences of going in the field?
There is fear and there are emotional consequences both. I don’t spend that much time in war zones anymore, but I was just in Kabul a couple of weeks ago. I was there for a week which is not that long, and even just a week, and my heart goes out to my colleagues who are there. Living there, working there and also to the Afghans who have to go through this day after day and don’t have the luxury of getting on a plane and coming back to Washington DC to live – with my safety and my family, and my Whole Foods down the street. You know its … so there’s that that impacts you. You come back kind of feeling bad, and guilty, and then you have to get over that. And say well, if those Afghans could trade places with me they would, so I am going to enjoy this as much as I can and work as hard as I can for them. And that’s the kind of thing that you have to face. That’s the dichotomy you have to set up in your mind.
When you are over there and it’s just exhausting because – I’ve been to Afghanistan every year since I started this job, and this past time was … I felt the most fear of any time that I’ve been there. It’s gotten really bad, it’s gotten really dangerous. Tons of risks, you can’t walk anywhere, you have to take a car from place to place. You never know what the person next to you is thinking or about to do. There are concrete blast walls as high as you can see, which I don’t remember from last time I was there. Barbed wire everywhere, you know, it feels like a very intense place where you’re a little claustrophobic. The place I was waiting for a car one day was blown up last week. And so it’s this very indiscriminate violence that happens and you can’t really prepare for it.
What about language difficulties? Is that an issue for people?
It depends on what your goal is. If I’m going to Kabul which I did just to talk with the international military, then no. And everyone knows English and it’s totally fine. Drivers know English and that’s fine and colleagues do as well. If you’re going out into the field usually you would hire a translator; or you would hire a ‘fixer’ which is a journalistic term for somebody who kind of produces the situation – makes sure that you’re gonna be safe, make sure you have a car, a translator, knows the local language, probably knows your issue, is able to find you the war victims you need, that kind of thing. Relying on the local population for your work is really important.
Even just an elementary understanding of international law, we all realize how outdated those laws can be. You talked about how your organization is filling a gap in international humanitarian law. What advice do you have for other organizations who are dealing with the same issue – for example international refugee law hasn’t adapted to address climate refugees. So an organization that’s dealing with that kind of issue, what kind of advice do you have for them?
Well I would say that even though our making amends campaign is not yet, is not gonna be successful for another probably twenty years, it’s all possible. I mean when you look at international laws, you look at the Geneva Conventions and the additional Protocols and the Human Rights law, it seems so long ago and it seems so outdated, it seems we will not abide the kind of suffering that that allows because there are so many gaps. But look at how many things have happened since then. The Landmine Treaty and the Cluster Conventions and you can’t use rape as a weapon of war and the Responsibility to Protect, and the nuclear proliferation issues that are coming up now and Obama wants to get to zero.
You know, international law is a living, breathing thing just like all laws. And it can change and it has changed and there are new norms that are coming about in our lifetime that are really exciting. And so I think that for the students here are NYU, look at international law as a living, breathing piece of your own life, and your own moment in history. During our lifetimes we will be able to bring all of these issues in – refugees and climate and environmental damage, and war victims and what they need, and IDPs and all of the rest of it. If we work hard enough and we have enough passion for it and we realize that things can change, they will. We’ve seen it happen in the past.
Thank you so much. As we end, I would like to contradict one last thing you said, that making amends will take another twenty years, because you’ve begun the process. So we appreciate you and the passion you bring to this particular issue – who knows – one of these days we may just join you.
Sarah Holewinski is the Executive Director of CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), an organization working with warring parties to help civilians they have harmed in combat. She began her career as a member of The White House AIDS policy team throughout President Clinton’s second term, later joined West Wing Writers-a firm of former White House speechwriters, and has consulted for Human Rights Watch and the William J. Clinton Foundation. Sarah has worked in India, Rwanda, and has traveled to conflict and post-conflict zones around the world including Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Kosovo. Sarah received her degree in political theory from Georgetown and Masters in security policy from Columbia University. Sarah is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Karen is a second-year student in the MSGA program at NYU, with a declared concentration in International Relations. A Jamaican migrant, she graduated from NYU with a bachelor’s degree in International Relations. She is involved in international youth outreach programs and is committed to facilitating connections between local and international groups for cultural exchange purposes.