Inside Geneva's 100th episode: the war in Syria, killer robots and justice in Myanmar

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This is Inside Geneva.
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I'm your host, imogenfolks, and this is a Swiss Info production In today's programme, In recent history.
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I don't think there is something comparable to the disaster in Syria.
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What you see, it's apocalyptic.
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If we were to think of aid as a form of reparation, as a form of social justice for historical and continuing harm.
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Do you hold the commander responsible who activated the weapon system?
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There's what we call an accountability gap when it comes to killer robots.
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I still know that the Myanmar butchers who are responsible for what happened may never individually be brought to justice, but I certainly live in hope that one day they will.
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Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva.
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I'm Imogenfolks, and today's programme marks a very special moment it's Inside Geneva's 100th edition.
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I can't quite believe we reached that milestone, but, looking back over all our episodes, we certainly have covered a lot of ground, from refugee questions to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the war in Ukraine or dilemmas facing aid agencies in Afghanistan All the things that get discussed here in Geneva, in fact, we have cast our sometimes critical eyes on.
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So today we thought we'd go back into the archive and give you a sample of some of what we think are our highlights, and hope that inspires you, too, to take another listen to some of our earlier episodes.
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First way back in the spring of 2021, the war in Syria was 10 years old, a conflict that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of people to be displaced.
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It's one of the most repressive states in the Middle East, yet even Syria hasn't managed to completely suppress the calls for freedom that are sweeping the region.
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But when the first protests started in Syria, jan Egland, formerly the UN's Humanitarian Relief Chief and later the head of the UN's Humanitarian Task Force for Syria, was optimistic.
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These were modernists, democratic youth who wanted to change the Arab world and, I must confess, I was optimistic.
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I saw this in the long line of transition from dictatorships, from authoritarian regimes, to more democratic, more human rights-oriented societies.
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And then came the backlash, and I even visited, in February 2013, a lepo, which was already then a divided city, and it was very clear that this was becoming a very polarized, very bitter civil war.
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But you touched on it there when it started you at first thought this could be almost positive.
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This was positive.
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I mean what happened in Tunis, egypt and then later with Syria and with Yemen and elsewhere was positive.
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These were students I could identify with.
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These were intellectuals.
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These were people who were campaigning for human rights.
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They went to the streets and they were met with bullets.
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They were met with repression and little by little they radicalized and extremist joined and there was armed uprisings and it basically became a civil war.
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Syria's largest city, Aleppo, is split between government and opposition forces.
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There's panic on the streets of Aleppo.
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Places like the Al-Firdaus neighborhood are few areas where rescuers can still reach.
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A civil war in which, it seemed, no international law was worth respecting.
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Civilians attacked, besieged and starved.
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Fabrizio Carboni of the International Committee of the Red Cross remembers being shocked by the destruction.
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I visited the old city of Aleppo, the souk of Aleppo, which is not just an historical center for Syria, this is the common history of humanity.
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The old souk, which has hundreds, not thousands, of years of history, was totally destroyed and I was there with my Syrian colleagues from Aleppo and almost all of them were crying.
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We were walking into this destroyed souk and they were all crying and at one stage we reached the spice market, which was totally destroyed, but there was still the smell of spices.
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You know, there was nothing left.
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There was only burned stones, collapsed buildings all around, but the smell of those spices which were stored for thousands of years in those places were still there.
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It's something which characterizes, I think, the conflict in Syria.
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There was no limit to reach your objective.
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You ready to destroy even your own history, who you are.
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How do you actually Keep calm?
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not lose your temper, even when you're talking to people who you know are Allowing children to starve to death inside a besieged town.
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You, you keep your eyes on the ball.
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I would say to keep your eyes on the final Objective, which is to have access at all costs.
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You might have an action.
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It's not about you.
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You know you have to swallow things I would never accept in my private life, but I would accept it in my professional life, as you might, an actor, because I need to get there.
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And it's not about my pride, is not about my how I see myself.
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If I have to listen to somebody Telling me things which are, no, just lies, okay, I accept it if I can move the lines and if I can get something to the people.
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They are the people, no country wants the families of ISIS.
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Al-hol camp is a dark and desperate place beyond the spins of the lost children of the caliphate thousands locked up and abandoned and Visiting the Al-Hol camp, where thousands, among them many women and children, were held after fleeing ISIS territory.
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Fabrizio also took away memories from Syria that made him question whether the world's leading Democracies were truly committed to international law and to human rights.
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There was a mother who was laying.
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She, she was very weak, she was dying, and you had around her six of several children looking at her.
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And, as a father, to see those children, helpless, seeing probably their mother dying in front of them, it's something I will Carry all all my life because it represents an aspect of war and conflict which we often don't see.
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It's not the bombing of Mosul, it's not the, the big explosion, it's not the the movement of troops, it's not loud, it's very quiet, it's no movement, people staying still.
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If you don't pay attention, you don't even realize what's happening.
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And and this is for me another memory of Syria which will stay with me, because this Scene of children seeing their mother dying slowly, I'm sure it was repeated hundreds, if not thousands of time in the country some of the developed countries who taught the loudest about human rights really seemed to to wash their hands of their citizens and the children in those camps.
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Oh, it's, it's it's for us, as you may tell an actor, it's.
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It's devastating because we defend values which are the minimum.
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Just, you know, you can't kill people out of combat, people out of combat when it should be protected and and we have special emphasis on children, on women, I mean nothing, a spectacular, nothing above the bare minimum.
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And For us to promote those value and to defend those values, we need those values to be shared.
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And when you have states who, for decades, not just promoted those values but lectured other states About those values, when those very same state lecturing the rest of the world are themselves affected by violence, are they themselves affected by conflict?
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And suddenly they say, yes, you know what we said, that Below 18 years old children in conflict are victims, but in our case, actually, no, no, because we are in an exceptional situation.
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That's devastating for our credibility, for the credibility of the rules and and the values we defend, which, we should never forget, were developed mainly after, after the Second World War.
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And what about the UN's role?
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The Syria conflict may be quieter, but it's not really over.
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Did the UN do anything meaningful?
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I asked Jan Egland.
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It was unsuccessful in the sense of being able to protect civilians from horrors.
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That's a horrific failure for all of us, but the main blame on those who carried the guns and who did the crimes and those who supported them In terms of how many people got their daily bread, their health services, their disease control.
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Much of this humanitarian work have been able to save millions.
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So let's also remember, against all the odds, tens of thousands of humanitarian workers, most of them Syrians, working for other Syrians, led and coordinated by humanitarians in Geneva and elsewhere, and I think they should be proud of that, even though there was a war lasting for 10 years and the diplomats and the politicians failed us.
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And you can hear that podcast episode in its entirety on all your favourite podcast platforms.
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Just look for Inside Geneva.
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And another episode in fact the one you listeners have downloaded the most was a roundtable discussion on whether we need to decolonise aid, our humanitarian organisations often led and staffed by Europeans and North Americans influenced by the history of colonialism.
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To start us off, lata Narayanaswamy, associate Professor of Global Development at the University of Leeds, attempted to define the question.
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One of the things that's a challenge is to make the question of coloniality.
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How has our shared history of empire, european empire in particular so we're thinking about the last 500 odd years how has that affected us now?
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So, when we talk about decolonising, certainly for me the key thing is about embracing a more diversified way of understanding our world, and that includes it necessitates an engagement with our shared colonial past In order for us to move forward.
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As you said, all of these challenges that we face, we have to contend with that past in order for us to work out what we do about our shared future.
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And Tamam Aludat, now at Geneva's Graduate Institute, but who spent 20 years working for medical charity.
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Médecins Sans Frontier, added his thoughts.
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I come from 20 years of practicing medicine in crises and I come from having enthusiastically embraced the global system of humanitarianism, of global health, of my younger self-thought of it, as this is the way for us to achieve an equitable future.
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20 years later, what I've hit repeatedly is that the system not only is failing at improving people's lives in a way that leads towards a sustained collective equality at some point in the future, it insists in reproducing the conditions of that inequality.
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Think about COVID now, for example.
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The earlier rhetoric of COVID was that this is an equalizer and then, immediately after it collapsed into protectionism, into self-preservation in the most base way, like our national border and our electoral future as Western politicians is more important than anything else, while continuing to pay lip service to providing for the rest of the world.
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Rich countries are giving away more in aid than at any other time on record.
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The European Union has agreed to try to channel more aid to Africa.
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I'll give you a very practical example.
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I've been sent once as an expatriate to a project that has been standing for 10 years and told you know what we have a gap in.
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Like the manager of that massive hospital, go, give us a plan for next year.
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We need an annual plan.
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So I went there, I gathered the senior staff it is in a sub-Saharan African country we sat together and we discussed what should be done next year and then showed them the plan and sent it off to Geneva.
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And I asked one of my colleagues could you ask them if they liked the process?
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And the answer astonished me.
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Shouldn't have surprised me.
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They've never known that we had annual plans.
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They've never been asked about one.
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So the headquarter trusted me to come out and, within 72 hours, produce a document that will decide the expenditure of several million dollars, but never asked anyone of the people who have been day in, day out in that hospital.
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For later.
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The thought process which sees aid as a voluntary gift from the privilege to the needy is flawed.
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If we were to think of aid as a form of reparation, as a form of social justice for historical and continuing harm, then all of a sudden we can actually shift that lens.
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And it is political, because the problem with something like aid is it can be withdrawn, there is a responsibility.
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It's not charity, it's actually.
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We need a reparative social justice that then thinks about the ways in which our resources now are being shared, and it's highly unequal.
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So if we were to reimagine aid and actually interrogate that language, then it would give us a new way to think about how we share our resources and, again, that notion of the collective.
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If there's anything that's shown us that we're all in this together, it's COVID.
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But the word reparation makes many former colonial powers uneasy, and our analyst, Daniel Warner, wanted more practical, immediate answers.
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I'm supposed to play the role here of the guilty middle-aged white northern male.
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So here we go, here we go.
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What's the problem?
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Monday morning at eight o'clock, what are we supposed to do, and how many?
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Seems to me, there are two different vocabularies here.
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On the one hand, you want me to pay reparations and on the other hand there's a notion of enlightened self-interest.
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If everyone has the COVID vaccine, it's better for me, but there's no notion of reparations.
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I wasn't born in the 19th century.
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My background is not in empire.
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Is that the best way to get me to change my behavior?
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And what do you want me to do Monday morning at eight o'clock that I'm not doing now?
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That, to me, is the most important thing.
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So what does Danny have to do?
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You'll have to listen to the full episode to find out, and if you're interested in how humanitarians are scrutinizing their strategies and employment practices, inside Geneva has a whole episode on challenging institutional racism within aid agencies.
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Now, though, let's hear some highlights from an episode on the tricky and lengthy discussions around arms control here in Geneva, in this case over lethal autonomous weapons, sometimes called killer robots.
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The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Guardian of the Geneva Conventions, is taking a keen interest in these new weapons, and the ICRC's Neil Davison shared his concerns.
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Well, the main risks come from the way they function, so autonomous weapons.
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After they've been turned on, they select and apply force without human intervention.
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Critically, the user doesn't actually choose what they're fired at, when they fire or exactly where they fire.
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And that brings a number of risks.
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Firstly, difficulty in anticipating or controlling their effects.
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So there are inherent risks to civilians in that Also risks of conflict escalation.
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From a legal perspective, humans must apply the rules of international humanitarian law, the law of war, in carrying out attacks and they must make those context specific judgments to apply those rules.
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And the third aspect is really the ethical concerns.
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It's about the risk of leaving life and death decisions to a machine process.
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An algorithm shouldn't decide who lives or dies.
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Music BANG.
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Did you see that they used to say guns don't kill people, people do, well, people don't.
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They get emotional Disobey orders.
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Aim high.
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Let's watch the weapons make the decisions.
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Not surprisingly, a number of arms control and rights groups came to Geneva to lobby during the discussions To support their point of view.
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They had an eye-opener of a video.
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A $25 million order now buys this Enough to kill half a city.
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In which tiny weaponized drones swarm around the world taking out apparent undesirables.
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The nation is still recovering from yesterday's incident, which officials are describing as some kind of automated attack.
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From student protesters to politicians.
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They flew in from everywhere but attacked just one side of the aisle.
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Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch and Frank Sliper of the Disarmament Organization PACS joined me in the inside Geneva studio to tell me more.
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This is an incredibly serious subject.
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We're trying to prevent the loss of meaningful human control in warfare and we see many investments that are happening today into autonomous weapon systems.
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But that's just the beginning of what could be a very dark path.
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Frank, what we saw okay, the listeners can't see it, but the concept of swarms of things that look like small birds but vicious, flying around shooting people Is this a possibility?
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Oh, yes, very much.
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The video and you have to watch it starts a bit as a tech talk where someone demonstrates a drone that can attack a person, and I mean the further the video goes, the more science fiction it maybe gets.
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But it also shows how something looking very realistically isn't that far away from what we're knowing as warfare currently today.
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That's why the campaign to stop killer robots is calling for a prohibition on fully autonomous weapons, but we're very much focused on what the Red Cross has called the critical functions of weapon systems, which is the selection and identification of a target and then the use of force against it, lethal or otherwise.
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Those are the two critical functions that we want to see remain under meaningful human control going forward.
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But if, at the end of the day, it's just ground robots, air robots, robots killing each other, isn't that better?
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Or is that a stupid question?
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Well, is it?
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I mean, I work for Human Rights Watch and I support our research, and there's no such thing as a clean battlefield.
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There are always going to be civilians in the area.
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And you look at warfare today most of it is fought in towns and in cities and imagine sending in an autonomous machine that is weaponized and programming it to go out and attack and to kill in such a cluttered environment.
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As the technologists like to say, self-driving cars at the moment are operating in quite strict parameters and you have so much unpredictability in warfare it moves.
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It can move fast as well.
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There are so many unknowns, so trying to program into a machine the laws of war or ethics is a really major task right now and it's not possible, and it may not be possible for decades to come.
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But in the meantime, ai and the emerging tech is already being incorporated into weapon systems.
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Frank and Mary are pushing for a ban on killer robots.
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Other groups want restrictions on their use which guarantee meaningful human control.
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For Paul Legate, law professor at Geneva's Graduate Institute, this could be tricky.
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I don't think that we will ever reach a total ban.
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A treaty regulating the use of lethal autonomous weapons is high probable, perhaps with the principle of meaningful human control.
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But what does it mean to exercise meaningful human control?
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I mean it doesn't mean much because anytime you sell this technology, you sell it with people being able to rely on it.
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So if you use your Google map telling you which way to go, then you rely on Google map.
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You don't stop every minute asking where I'm going.
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I mean, of course, this is technology that is developed to be reliable and to be used.
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If it is adopted, the treaty will be adopted along these lines, but then it will be the task of lawyers to see what it means In practice.
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And secondly, what if a weapon is used and developed without the meaningful human control?
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What are the consequences of?
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it.
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Yeah, I mean, who do you prosecute?
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You can't prosecute a robot for war crimes.
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Indeed you can't.
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And, to tell you the truth, I'm studying now the criminal responsibility of individuals, the human operators of those weapons, and still you have problems, even if the person exercises meaningful human control.
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Or you might have problems and obstacles ascribing criminal responsibility because the person could say well, I did not exercise meaningful human control because I trusted what the machine was doing.
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I didn't mean to not exercise the meaningful human control, I trusted the technology.
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I mean, how do you ascribe responsibility if you trust what the machine is telling you to do?
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With such complexities.
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Maybe it's not surprising that those negotiations are still dragging on.
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But as we are also realising, with artificial intelligence and, yes, we have it inside Geneva episode about that too the technology is now racing ahead and our ability to legislate is lagging behind.
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Frank Sliper is worried.
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I'm very much afraid that if we don't have a treaty within 10 years, we will be too late.
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That within 10 years, looking at how developments technologically have gone and examples that we see technology is progressing at a much faster pace than diplomacy is doing, and if they don't have a treaty within 10 years' time, I fear the worst.
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Now for our last set of highlights.
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Geneva is home to human human rights, and the Human Rights Council meets here several times a year, in theory to promote rights and call out violations wherever and whenever they occur.
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To support that work, the UN appoints independent investigators and they draw on testimony, sometimes of the utmost brutality, from survivors of violations.
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In spring 2022, we talked to them, starting with Chris Sidoti, who led the UN's fact-finding mission, or FFM, on Myanmar.
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I asked him about the personal toll of doing this kind of work.
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No, you can't switch off and, yes, things do stay with you, absolutely.
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There was an enormous level of violence against women, in particular, women and girls, in the Rohingya operations of 2016-2017.
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The accounts that perhaps affect me most are those of children, and we talk to a lot of kids.
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Now I'm a grandfather, I sit there and listen and I think of my own kids when they were young and my grandkids now.
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How can you not?
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And those experiences that they tell us, that we're privileged to hear, stay with you.
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They don't get forgotten.
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And Andrew Clapham, member of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, shared his experiences.
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The first trip that I made out of the capital, when I met a group of displaced women with their children, really in a very precarious situation, and showed us what food they had to survive on.
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And just around the corner from there I could see a UN emplacement which had been totally destroyed and bombed during the fairly recent conflict, and I realized how dire the situation was and how precarious people's lives were, both in terms of survival day to day, but also the ever-present threat of violence, which it really did strike me listening to their stories of the gangs that had come and taken people, and when you hear the accounts firsthand, yes, that does leave a mark on you definitely.
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Is it hard to listen, to switch off after you've heard that kind of account?
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I mean, people talk about switching off and separating it out, but of course you don't really separate it out, because once you've heard a story like that and as you can tell now, it comes back to you If you speak to anybody who's done this work the idea that you can compartmentalize although that's of course what they tell you to do is easier said than done.
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Andrew and Chris do their work, though, to support people like Kino Maher, a human rights activist from Myanmar who, although she can no longer live in her own country, has never given up hope of a better future, with help from the UN.
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These mechanisms are so useful because the human rights violations in Myanmar are really widespread and for so long.
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So we need the council special attention to Myanmar as a country-wide situation.
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So it's been very helpful.
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But what I've been finding quite challenging with the UN system is on the human rights side, it's been helpful, but the other part of the UN, starting from the Security Council, they have been silent for so long.
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They've been silent about the human rights abuses under the previous military regime.
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They've been silent about the early warning signs of the genocide against the Rohingya in 2017.
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So the FFM the FFM was so great and the Special Roboter so great.
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They came up with concrete recommendations for actions and yet we don't see.
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Especially now, in the last year of the extreme violence.
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You still don't see the recommendations and there is no concrete action to stop this military in Myanmar.
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And that is the perennial problem.
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The UN Human Rights Council can expose violations, but it cannot prosecute them or order sanctions against the perpetrators.
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Andrew and Chris recognise the limitations of their work, but have no intention of giving up.
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I know how limited the action of the UN is, I mean on paper and in law.
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You know you can't do that much, but from the other end of the spectrum, the idea that somebody has listened to your story and you have taken your case to the United Nations, so to speak, is incredibly important.
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Because if you've gone through something like that and you feel nobody has listened and it's nowhere in the system and nowhere is it logged, that in itself is a source of trauma.
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So they just want somebody to listen and to tell them that you know, this has been noted down and that steps will be taken.
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Is that enough, though, do you think, for the kind of atrocities that you have documented?
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No, it's definitely not enough, but obviously I would like to see more prosecutions and more people sent to prison and more ministers removed from posts.
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But one also has to be careful in not suggesting to people that they're all going to get their day in court and they're all going to get compensation and as soon as I get back to Geneva, all of this is going to be resolved, because that would be similarly silly and misleading.
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So you have to get through the day thinking that this work is leading somewhere and not expecting that you're just going to save the world overnight.
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I know how weak the international system is, I know how ineffective so many bodies like the Security Council are.
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I am afraid and those of us who do international human rights work don't labour under any illusions but people place their hope in the UN and in the international system, and we have an obligation to be very frank about what can be accomplished and what not.
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And one of the things we can accomplish is to write the historical record so that at least what has happened is recorded and reported and remembered.
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That's the very least to which people are entitled.
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And we say that.
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We say that we can guarantee that the record will be written, that the evidence that they give to us will contribute to presenting the entire picture of what occurred and preserving it historically.
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And we hope that, in addition, there will be possibilities of international justice and that their story may contribute to the development of a picture that causes the international community.
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Can I be blunt?
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The bloody will get off its arse and do something, because it never happens.
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And if you haven't listened to that episode of Inside Geneva in full, please do so.
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It contains moving testimony from other human rights investigators and from survivors of violations.
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I hope you liked this troll through our archives.
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Do take a look at other earlier episodes and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
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A quick word about the next edition of Inside Geneva.
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We continue with our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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We have an exclusive interview with Zaid Radal Hussein.
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The overwhelming emotional response.
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One feels the revulsion, one experiences the senselessness of it all.
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There's nothing that can justify killing or destruction like that, nothing at all.
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The outspoken, some might say controversial, UN Human Rights Commissioner who succeeded Navi Pile.
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The UN is not there to become friendly with the member states.
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For me, it mattered little whether they hated me or they disliked me or so forth.
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I think the point was were they wary of me enough to take me seriously?
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That's out on October 3rd.
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Don't miss it.
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A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss info production.
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I'm Imogen Folks.
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Thanks for listening.