Afghanistan still exists

(Versión en castellano aquí)

In memory of Lorena Enebral Pérez

«The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways every day.»

David Foster Wallace, This is water

Part one: The law of war

They had gone there to kill each other, over two hundred thousand men in all, equipped with sabres, rifles, wheel lock pistols, bayonets and rusty cannons which released an acrid stench as they spewed their load of lead into the sky. The toll of the battle, after nine hours of fighting, was grim: five thousand dead and twenty-three thousand wounded soldiers bleeding to death on the battlefield. The scene was the Italian town of Solferino, and the year was 1859.

Henry Dunant, on the other hand, had no intention of killing anyone. The only reason this Swiss man with bushy sideburns had gone to Solferino was to seek an audience with Napoleon III who, in addition to heading one of the armies at war, was also something of an “influencer” of the predigital age (Dunant wanted to ask the emperor for assistance in obtaining concessions in North Africa, which was still under the control of the French).

He had no intention of killing anyone, but he came face-to-face with death and rather than look the other way, he rushed to mobilize the citizens of Solferino to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers and to give the dead a dignified burial. On his return home to Geneva, he wrote a booklet, just fifty or so pages long, called A Memory of Solferino, which was to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. In it, he strongly condemned the widespread practice of leaving severely wounded soldiers to die and rot on the battlefield to the delight of soft, cylindrical invertebrates and birds of prey. That booklet caused great consternation among Europe’s monarchies and empires at the time, and they looked from one to another with a mixture of remorse and shame. Soon after its publication in 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was founded, precisely for the purpose of protecting and assisting the victims of armed conflict. A year later, in 1864, the original Geneva Convention was signed. Its main provision was as simple as it was revolutionary: the States parties undertook to collect the wounded from the battlefield and care for them, whatever their nationality. This is how the law of war, also known as international humanitarian law or the law of armed conflict, came into being.