Daily Times

Following the deadly Israeli assault on Gaza, the statement, “Does environmental destruction amount to a war crime?” has often hit the headlines. Though Article 8 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court enunciates “severe damage to the natural environment” as a war crime, any such act of ecocide deserves to transcend beyond the mere definition of war crime; it should be a cardinal sin.

According to Dante, a sin is a misdirection of human will, and it occurs when love – love for domination in case of war – is immoderately directed to the wrong object. To understand how this love for domination immoderately affects the environment, it is paramount to understand the environment and its nexus with war.

Everything that surrounds us is our environment, and we humans not only benefit from it but are also a part of it. In war, the environment itself is affected, be it in the form of human beings, animals, plants, resources, land, or air.

Once a war rages, the aggressor becomes indifferent to its devastating effects. As noted by Thomas Jefferson, “The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.” The US-Afghan war destroyed almost 50 percent of Afghanistan’s forests. Baghdad saw a 705 percent increase in air pollution by the end of the Gulf War. The first year of the Russia-Ukraine war triggered 120 million tonnes of Greenhouse gases. And lastly, the Israeli assault on Gaza destroyed 40 percent of its agricultural land and 95 percent of its drinking water resources, besides causing deaths to 36,000-50,000 poor Palestinians.

According to the Polynational War Memorial, the 20th century – a century revered for the development of international humanitarian laws – saw 200 major wars and conflicts.

One might argue that the lack of laws triggers such uncontrolled destruction. While this could be true to an extent, the laws related to war could be traced back to 200 BC, possibly even to the Code of Hammurabi circa 1750 BC. Moreover, the modern laws related to warfare are preserved in the form of the Geneva Conventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet, compliance with these international humanitarian laws and their subsequent Protocols has never been the cup of tea of the war-mongering states.

According to the Polynational War Memorial, the 20th century – a century revered for the development of international humanitarian laws – saw 200 major wars and conflicts. While these figures might not sound astounding, as per the report of the Center for International Security Studies, Maryland, these wars witnessed the death of more than one-quarter billion people.

Even after burying thousands of dead bodies in the ground and burning countless cadavers to ashes, the consequences of war and its environmental impact persist. After World Wars I and II, huge quantities of conventional munitions and chemical weapons were dumped into the seas, mostly in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. This resulted in the accumulation of enough mustard gas and cyanide in the oceans of the coast of Europe to put an end to all marine life on Earth. But that wasn’t the only sad reality; no proper record keeping on those dumping sites was ever done by the military forces, and therefore, even after the introduction of the Marine Strategy Framework and Water Framework Directives by the European Union, finding these dumping sites is nothing but looking for a needle in the haystack.

Now, let’s touch on the most uncertain and unpredictable element of warfare – the nuclear arsenal. Since the first nuclear bomb was revealed, almost 2000 nuclear tests have been carried out, rendering thousands of miles uninhabitable. Two of these incidents were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the whole world witnessed the capability of a “civilised” man, the man who was ready to deploy nine more nuclear bombs had Japan not surrendered.

With more than a quarter million deaths by the end of 1945, Little Boy and Fat Man continued tearing down the environment in the form of biodiversity loss, radiation exposure, altered DNA, and depletion of the ozone layer. While the legal phoenix did emerge from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the form of many nuclear laws, treaties and policies, such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Treaty of Tlatelolco, Treaty of Pelindaba, The Seabed Arms Control Treaty, The Regulatory Control of Radioactive Waste Management, and Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, it has failed to manage the catastrophic nuclear waste produced by nuclear weapons efficiently.

During the Cold War era, a single Russian nuclear submarine used to produce 200 cubic meters of nuclear waste annually, the majority of which would end up at the bottom of the ocean – a fact revealed by the former Russian naval officer Alexander Nikitin. However, like many other classified documents, this report was also swept under the rug, leaving the northern seas with a ticking bomb.

Likewise, during the US-Iraq war, the US introduced new anti-tank shells based on depleted uranium (DU). These shells released 3000 tonnes of depleted uranium dust into Iran’s atmosphere, affecting millions of lives with Gulf War Syndrome. However, despite its hazardous nature, no law regulating the use of DU was ever entered into, nor was DU brought within the ambit of Article II(1)(b) of the Chemical Weapons Convention, allowing the US to continue using it.

All in all, war is a cardinal sin as no law adequately monitors and controls the environmental aftereffects it causes, nor does any law punish the warmongers, perpetrators, and murderers for causing such apocalyptic loss to nature. However, while Mother Earth might not exact its revenge, the war-loving demigods will reap the consequences of their actions beyond this temporal world.

The writer is an advocate, human rights activist, political scientist and freelance op-ed writer. She tweets @faraz_bina