The school has been damaged. There is no education happening here. There are no teachers, no instructors, no benches, no fans, nothing. The whole building has been ruined. The windows are smashed and blown. The floor is cracked, [and] so are the walls and ceiling. Even the door is broken. Everything is in ruins. (Human Rights Watch 2011:5)
Across the wartorn areas of the Middle East and North Africa, 13 million students—40 percent of the school-age population—were out of school in 2015. In Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, nearly 9,000 schools were closed because they had been damaged or destroyed or seized by belligerents or converted to shelters for the displaced (Gladstone 2015). In Syria the physical and bureaucratic school infrastructure has collapsed, leaving approximately 2 million children out of school. A fifteen-year-old boy noted the irony of seeing his schoolhouse turned into an interrogation center:
Some men came to our village. I tried to escape, but they took me to jail. Except it wasn’t a jail—it was my old school. It’s ironic—they took me there to torture me, in the same place I used to go to school to learn.… They had taken over the school and made it into a torture center. (Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack 2012:8)
A Syrian refugee living in Lebanon recalled,
students don’t go to school, because when they did there were shells—I think they targeted the school because shells fell all across it. Students were leaving to go home in the afternoon when it started and two children died—they were both very young. I am in ninth grade but this war stopped me from graduating and now my future is destroyed. (UNESCO 2013)
These impacts have rippled across the region. Among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey some 700,000 children are not enrolled in school. The High Commissioner for Refugees described “a generation of traumatised, isolated, and suffering Syrian children” (Onishi 2013; UNHCR 2013). Detail and data underscore what is at stake: the safety of students and teachers, school enrollment and retention rates, and successful educational outcomes that open the doors to children’s aspirations. As rights tap into this local knowledge the life-shattering effects of war come into focus. Without the structure and path to the future that schools provide, children are more likely to fall into radicalism and violence. Parents are apt to pull girls and young women in particular out of school, and it can take years to make up for lost education and training.
Or take the case of drone warfare. Many humanitarian lawyers have expressed skepticism about the risk-free nature of drone-based missile attacks and the “moral disconnections” of remote killing (O’Connell 2012; Whetham 2012). But the strategic frame of reference is constant: Were the people killed or wounded militants? Was the intelligence accurate? Will the attacks advance the overall war effort? This line of questions framed the discussion in terms of the capabilities of the drones and the intentions of their far-distant operators rather than the actual effects on people on the ground.
Human rights analysts paint a more visceral picture of the violence. U.S. drone activity is most active in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Drone attacks include both “named” strikes that target identified individuals or groups, and “signature strikes” or “Terrorism Attack Disruption Strikes,” in which the drones hover overhead while their operators look for suspicious “life patterns” that would indicate planning or participation in terrorism. Both kinds of strikes are conducted with deliberation and care, but there is always a danger of imposing a predetermined pattern on ambiguous circumstances (Cockburn 2015:15–16). Misidentifications and mis-strikes are routine. Wedding parties, family gatherings, and work details have all been struck. To some degree these “accidents” are driven by policy, particularly the working assumption that males of military age found in the vicinity of a suspected militant are themselves involved. Because of a tactic known as the “double tap” in which the targeted site is struck multiple times in relatively rapid succession, people are often afraid to help the wounded or collect the dead.
Life in the shadow of drones narrows. Residents are afraid to go to school, to attend weddings or funerals, or to gather for jirga councils. Particular rights are abridged: the right to life, but also the rights to assemble, to work, to be educated, to observe social and cultural traditions, and so on. Authorities rarely investigate attacks, much less acknowledge the harm victims suffer, or provide remedy or redress.
The psychological effects of drone warfare are pronounced. The incessant circling of drones overhead affects everyone under their gaze. (In Gaza, the slang word for drones is “zananas,” an Arabic word for a bee’s buzz.) The largest human rights survey of drone violence in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency to date was conducted in 2012 by researchers from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford University Law School, and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (2012). Witnesses described the “constant and severe fear, anxiety, and stress” of living under drones, especially given the helplessness to ensure their safety (55). A psychiatrist described it as “anticipatory anxiety” (81) over the ever-present possibility of a strike wedded to the impotence to do anything about it. Villagers are at the mercy of the information and technology of the targeteers. One witness said the sound of the drones elicited “a wave of terror.” “Children, grown-up people, women, they are terrified …. They scream in terror” (81).
Everyone is scared all the time. When we’re sitting together to have a meeting, we’re scared there might be a strike. When you can hear the drone circling in the sky, you think it might strike you. We’re always scared. We always have this fear in our head. (81)
Drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are there. (83–84)
When [children] hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they’re always fearful that the drone is going to attack them.… Because of the noise, we’re psychologically disturbed—women, men, and children.… Twenty-four hours, [a] person is in stress and there is pain in his head. (86–87)
Our minds have been diverted from studying. We cannot learn things because we are always in fear of the drones hovering over us, and it really scares the small kids who go to school. (90)
Amnesty International’s interviews with survivors of nine separate drone strikes in North Waziristan also highlighted these psychological impacts. “Children have lost their mental balance, they are afraid all the time,” said a resident of the village of Zowi Sidgi, a transit point a few miles from the Afghan border, where eighteen men were killed and at least twenty-two wounded in a drone strike in July 2012 (Amnesty International 2013:33). On October 24, 2012, in Ghundi Kala, a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Mamana Bibi was picking okra in the family field when she was blown to pieces by two Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. drone aircraft. A second strike followed several minutes later. The aircraft had hovered over the farm for perhaps two hours before unleashing the missiles: not exactly the fog of war. From the perspective of the villagers, the killing was completely arbitrary. “I wasn’t scared of drones before,” said the woman’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Nabeela, “but now when they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?” (Amnesty International 2013:7).
Terrified children, sleep disorders, traumatic stress, lives arbitrarily snatched away, residents paralyzed by fear: whether the drone strikes were legal or not is almost beside the point. A witness to the killings in Zowi Sidgi pleaded, “At least for the sake of human rights they should stop these drone strikes” (Amnesty International 2013:56).
Rights serve as a touchstone for what is right and wrong amid the turmoil. For its People on War Report the ICRC commissioned a survey of 13,000 combatants and civilians across 12 war-torn regions. The norms cited by the respondents centered around notions of human rights, “humanness,” and “staying human.” Certain kinds of conduct were wrong because they violated human rights and human dignity. Overall, 49 percent based their judgment on rights, by far the most