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Collective punishment
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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.
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Encyclopedia
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).
History
18th century
The Intolerable Acts were seen as a collective punishment of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party.
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.
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.
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 (the village of Ležáky was also destroyed in retribution). 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. In the Dutch village of Putten and the Italian villages of Sant'Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto, as well as in the Soviet village of Kortelisy (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. The British used collective punishment as an official policy to suppress the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952. 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 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, Volga Germans and many others) is an example of officially-orchestrated collective punishment. Pogroms may be considered examples of unofficial collective punishment which resemble rioting. About 14 million East Germans were moved out of what was Germany; only 11 million survived.
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 .
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. More recently the U.S. Army has been accused of practicing collective punishment in Iraq .
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.
The Chinese government has been accused of using collective punishment in its actions against the peoples of Tibet.
The Bahrain Center for Human Rights condemned the actions of Bahrain's military against people traveling to Um'Nessan island as collective punishment.
In the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
Pakistan
On 20 May 2008, the Pakistani Army conducted collective punishment against a village called Spinkai, located in the frontier province of Pakistan. The operation was called 'zalzala' which is Urdu for earthquake. At first, the Pakistan Army swept through with helicopter gunships, artillery and tanks that crunched across a parched riverbed. After four days of heavy fighting, 25 militants and six soldiers died. The rest of the militants retreated up the valley. After the capture of the village the army discovered bomb factories, detonation-ready suicide jackets and schools for teenage suicide bombers.
The Pakistan Army immediately decided to punish the village for harboring the Taliban and allowing the militants to operate in and from the village to conduct further terror attacks in Pakistan. Bulldozers and explosives experts turned Spinkai's bazaar into a mile-long pile of rubble. Petrol stations, shops, and even parts of the hospital were levelled or blown up. The villagers were forbidden from returning to their homes.
Pakistani commanders, who were speaking to the media, insisted they had been merciful in their application of "collective punishment" - a practice invented by the British who demarcated the tribal areas over a century ago.
Kosovo
KEK (Korporata Energjetike e Kosovës - English: Kosovo's Energy Corporation) is a public company, the only one entitled to produce and distribute electricity in Kosovo. KEK collectively punishes communities with lower rate of electricity bills paid. For example: if in a community 45 % of households pay regularly their electricity bills and 55 % do not pay regularly, the entire community (even those who regularly pay) is punished with 3 hours on and 3 hours off supply with electricity.
See also
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