Collective punishment

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For the concept whereby people are held responsible for other people's actions, see Collective responsibility (doctrine).
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Collective punishment is the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behaviour of one or more other individuals or groups. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions. In times of war and armed conflict, collective punishment has resulted in atrocities, and is a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions. Historically, occupying powers have used collective punishment to retaliate against and deter attacks on their forces by resistance movements (e.g. by destroying whole villages where attacks have taken place).

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[edit] History

[edit] 18th century

The Intolerable Acts were seen as a collective punishment of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party.

[edit] 19th century

The principle of collective punishment was laid out by U.S General William Tecumseh Sherman in his Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864, which laid out the rules for his "March to the sea" in the American Civil War:

V. To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc..., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested, no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.[1]

[edit] 20th century

The British in the Boer War and the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I justified such actions as being in accord with the laws of war then in force.[2]

During WWII, in 1942, the Germans destroyed the village of Lidice Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) killing 340 inhabitants as collective punishment or reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by commandos nearby the village. In the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane 642 of its inhabitants — men, women, and children — were slaughtered by the German Waffen-SS in 1944.[3] In the Dutch village of Putten[4] and the Italian villages of Sant'Anna di Stazzema[5] and Marzabotto,[6] as well as in the Soviet village of Kortelisy[7] (in what is now Ukraine), large scale reprisal killings were carried out by the Germans.

The British used collective punishment against villages which concealed Communist rebels in Malaya in 1951.[8] The British used collective punishment as an official policy to suppress the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952.[9] In 1956, Britain officially used collective punishment in Cyprus in the form of evicting families from their homes and closing shops anywhere British soldiers and police had been murdered, to obtain information about the identity (ies) of the attackers[10] Today, it is considered by most nations contradictory to the modern concept of due process, where each individual receives separate treatment based on his or her role in the crime in question. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention specifically forbids collective punishment.

Joseph Stalin's mass deportations of several nations of the USSR to remote regions (including the Chechens, Crimean Tatars) is an example of officially-orchestrated collective punishment. Pogroms may be considered examples of unofficial collective punishment which resemble rioting. 14 million east Germans were moved out of what was Germany; only 11 million survived. The fleeing refuges in Dresden were sujectected to collective punishment in the largest non-nuclear holocaust ever created, by the allied airforce.

There have been claims that certain CIA and U.S. military programs such as the Phoenix Program were a form of collective punishment of Vietnamese civilians to terrorize them into submission. There have also been claims that special US Army units such as Tiger Force were involved in civilians massacres also designed to collectively punish Vietnamese civilians who supported the Viet Cong [1] [2].

In March 2005, Judge Restaino of the Niagara Falls City Court, Niagara County used collective punishment of 46 people in an attempt to find out who owned a cell phone which rang in his courtroom. The judge said "Everyone is going to jail; every single person is going to jail in this courtroom unless I get that instrument now. If anybody believes I’m kidding, ask some of the folks that have been here for a while. You are all going." Then committing them into custody, and ignoring the pleas of numerous defendants who protested that his conduct was unfair and pleaded that he reconsider. The judge was subsequently removed. [3]

[edit] In the Israeli/Palestinian conflict

See also: Israeli-Palestinian_conflict#Collective_punishment

[edit] Recent

The term is also used to describe confiscation of assets connected with drug use and trafficking or otherwise connected with organized crime in the United States[citation needed]. More recently the U.S. Army has been accused of practicing collective punishment in Iraq [4].

A form of collective punishment may also occur in schools, such as when a teacher imposes some form of discipline upon a whole class as a result of the actions of an individual student or small group of students.[citation needed]

The Chinese government has been accused of using collective punishment in its actions against the peoples of Tibet. [5] [6]

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights condemned the actions of Bahrain's military against people traveling to Um'Nessan island as collective punishment. [7]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sherman, William T., Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman, 2nd ed., D. Appleton & Co., 1913 (1889), Chapter XXI. Reprinted by the Library of America, 1990, ISBN 0-940450-65-8.
  2. ^ "The laws of war as to conquered territory" by William Miller Collier, New York Times, November 29, 1914, p SM6
  3. ^ Oradour-sur-Glane - Britannica Online Encyclopedia
  4. ^ *Official Website
  5. ^ The New York Times > International > Europe > Tiny Town Lost in Tides of History
  6. ^ Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in the Axis Countries
  7. ^ World War II in Ukraine: Kortelisy (Ukraine), Lidice (Czechoslovakia) & Oradour-sur-Glane (France): Razed Villages.
  8. ^ "British to step up Malaya campaign; 1951 plans include 'collective punishment' for aiding Reds, rewards and more troops" New York Times, Dec. 17, 1950, p 12
  9. ^ "Labor's censure over Kenya fails" New York Times, Dec 17, 1952, p16
  10. ^ Britain punishes Cypriote balking in informer role" New York Times,Mar. 17, 1956, p1

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