Scene from the racial justice protests in Washington, DC following the death of a Black man named George Floyd during a violent police encounter in Minnesota, USA. Credit: Amnesty International, Alli Jarrar

By Brian Castner
BUFFALO, New York, Jun 23 2020 (IPS)

Police forces across the United States have committed widespread and egregious human rights violations in response to largely peaceful assemblies protesting systemic racism and police violence, including the killing of Black people.

Amnesty International has documented 125 separate incidents of police violence against protesters in 40 states and the District of Columbia between 26 May and 5 June 2020.

These acts of excessive force were committed by members of state and local police departments, as well as by National Guard troops and security force personnel from several federal agencies.

Among the abuses documented are beatings, the misuse of tear gas and pepper spray, and the inappropriate and, at times, indiscriminate firing of less-lethal projectiles, such as sponge rounds and rubber bullets.

To evaluate these incidents, Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab gathered nearly 500 videos of protests from social media platforms. This digital content was then verified, geolocated, and analyzed by investigators with expertise in weapons, police tactics, and international and US law governing the use of force.

In some cases, researchers were also able to interview victims or confirm police conduct using local police department statements.

These human rights violations by US police against peaceful protesters – which were neither proportionate nor necessary to achieve a legitimate law enforcement objective – are particularly egregious as they have occurred at demonstrations denouncing just such police behavior.

Most of these protests have been peaceful, but in some a minority of protesters have committed unlawful acts, including acts of violence. In such cases, security forces have routinely used disproportionate and indiscriminate force against entire demonstrations – without distinguishing, as legally required, between peaceful protesters and individuals committing unlawful acts.

Credit: Amnesty International, Alli Jarrar

Besides the severity of the abuses, what is most striking about the incidents Amnesty International documented is their broad geographic scope, indicating the national scale of the problem of police violence.

On 30 May, a joint patrol of Minneapolis police and Minnesota National Guard personnel unlawfully shot 37/40mm impact projectiles at people peacefully standing on the front porches of their homes. The security forces yelled “light them up” before firing.

The attack appears to have been done in retaliation for the people being outside after curfew and videotaping the forces with their smartphones.

On 1 June, Pennsylvania State Police and City of Philadelphia police confronted a group of protesters on a highway that runs through the city center. Even after the protesters left the road bed, police continued to use pepper spray and tear gas to drive the crowd up a steep embankment and against a high fence.

Lizzie Horne, a rabbinical student who was in that group, described the experience:

“Out of the blue, they started breezing pepper spray into the crowd. There was one officer on the median who was spraying as well. Then they started with tear gas. Someone who was right in the front – who had a tear gas canister hit his head – started running back … We were against a big fence that people had to jump over up a steep hill. The fence was maybe 6 feet tall.

People started putting their hands up – but the cops wouldn’t let up … We were drooling and coughing uncontrollably … The police started coming up the hill and continued to harass people who were still on the hill – they were hitting and tackling people. They were dragging people down the hill and forcing them down on their knees, lining them up kneeling on the median on the highway with their hands in zip ties – and pulling down their masks and spraying and gassing them again.”

In Washington, DC, also on 1 June, security personnel from a variety of federal agencies, including National Park Police and the Bureau of Prisons, plus DC National Guardsmen, committed a range of human rights violations against protesters in Lafayette Park.

These included misusing a variety of riot control agents, and tossing “stinger ball” grenades, which contain pepper spray and explode in a concussive flash-bang effect, throwing rubber pellets indiscriminately in all directions.

The violations were not limited to the largest cities, however. Local police inappropriately used tear gas against peaceful protesters in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Conway, Arkansas, among others.

In Iowa City, Iowa, police fired tear gas and threw flash bang grenades at protesters kneeling and chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In Huntington Beach, California, police fired pepper balls at protesters lying prone in the street on their stomachs.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, police used tear gas to trap protesters between two tall buildings, and then shot pepper balls at them from above. During a protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, police held down a homeless man and shot him in the back with a 37/40mm impact projectile.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a local journalist lost his eye when police shot him in the face with a tear gas grenade.

Less-lethal weapons—such as tear gas and pepper spray grenades, and impact projectiles such as sponge rounds, baton rounds, and rubber bullets—should never be shot at close range or aimed at the head, as serious injury or death is possible.

There is no legitimate use for projectiles that cause a blinding flash of light in public order policing operations, such as the policing of a protest.

Such weapons are designed to disorientate their targets, which is antithetical to the purpose of weapons such as tear gas, which are only to be used to disperse crowds where violence is so widespread that no other less harmful means will disperse them.

For this reason, weapons that combine a gas and a flash, such as ‘stinger balls,’ can never be legitimately used in the policing of assemblies.

The US government is obligated under the US Constitution and international human rights law to guarantee the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Law enforcement agencies—at the federal, state, and municipal levels—have a responsibility to respect, protect, and facilitate peaceful assemblies.

As such, law enforcement authorities are only permitted to use force at public assemblies when it is absolutely necessary and in a proportionate manner to achieve a legitimate law enforcement objective.

Any restrictions of public assemblies, including the use of force against demonstrators, can never be discriminatory toward any race, ethnicity, political ideology, or other social group.

The enforcement of a curfew is not, in and of itself, reasonable grounds to use force, nor do curfews supersede the human right to peaceful assembly or First Amendment freedom-of-expression protections.

Law enforcement authorities’ main objective in policing demonstrations should always be to effectively facilitate peaceful assemblies.

If it does become necessary for law enforcement to disperse a protest—for example, as a result of individual protesters perpetrating acts of serious violence—law enforcement officials can use force only if non-violent means are unlikely to be effective.

In the use of force, law enforcement officials must seek to minimize harm and injury, and ensure it is proportionate to the level of resistance by the demonstrators. Even then, authorities must strictly distinguish between peaceful demonstrators or bystanders, and any individual who is actively engaged in violence.

The violent acts of an individual never justifies the use of force against peaceful protesters generally, and force is only justified for the minimum duration necessary.

In order to prevent impunity and the repetition of abuses, authorities in the US must investigate, prosecute, and punish the unlawful use of force by police or others, and provide full reparations to the victims of such violence.

To date, there is little indication that these obligations have been taken seriously across the US.

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Images taken when Amnesty's South Sudan researcher and Crisis Response team's arms and military operations investigator visited 12 military training sites in South Sudan in early 2020 to document violations of the UN arms embargo. They also witnessed evidence of child soldiers being used and diversion of arms.
 
This image shows a Mi-24 attack helicopter, one of four that South Sudan purchased from Ukraine in 2015. When the arms embargo was instituted in July 2018, these helicopters were in disrepair and unserviceable, unable to fly. However, during the embargo the helicopters underwent maintenance and repairs, using components imported in violation of the embargo. This one is pictured at Juba International Airport (JIA) in early 2020. Credit: Amnesty International

By Brian Castner
JUBA, South Sudan, May 21 2020 (IPS)

Earlier this year, just before the coronavirus virtually shut down international travel, I sat under a mesquite tree and listened to a rambling speech by a South Sudanese general at a military base outside of the capital, Juba.

I was in that war-weary country to investigate violations of the arms embargo, which is up for renewal by the United Nations Security Council this month. The embargo is about two years old, and though it hasn’t solved every problem, violence and human rights abuses have significantly decreased in the country since the main torrent of guns and ammunition was choked off.

That day, I had come to see the commander of the dusty improvised camp at Gorom brief a party of diplomats and international ceasefire monitors on his progress training South Sudan’s newly established VIP Protection Force.

But instead, the general rattled off a litany of complaints – not enough supplies, not even bedding to sleep on. He said this while seated in front of a wall of unopened cardboard boxes, ten feet tall and forty feet long, all stuffed with sleeping mats donated by Japan.

There was a certain “which do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” quality to the presentation.

I wasn’t there for logistical gripes, though. I was there to find out if their weapons were newly shipped in, and thus broke the embargo, and so when the general said he had four shipping containers full of small arms that he had collected from his soldiers as part of the disarmament process, I was interested.

I made it to twelve military and training camps in South Sudan, and this was the only one with a nominally established armory. This was my best chance yet.

But when one of the general’s officers opened the four containers for me, they weren’t filled with guns. Instead they were stacked to the ceiling with bags of rice and durra, a kind of grain. These units weren’t disarming. They were hedging their bets against a return to war.

The general was unapologetic. “These are the forces that will impose the peace in Juba,” he said. “These soldiers are the backbone of this peace.”

He said out loud what many fear: that even after so much bloodshed in South Sudan’s civil war, when given the chance at a negotiated settlement, the generals will still search for peace at the end of a rifle.

Images taken when Amnesty’s South Sudan researcher and Crisis Response team’s arms and military operations investigator visited 12 military training sites in South Sudan in early 2020 to document violations of the UN arms embargo. They also witnessed evidence of child soldiers being used and diversion of arms.
 
Amnesty’s investigators observed that several South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) soldiers were armed with Mpi-KMS-72 rifles manufactured in the former East Germany. Credi: Amnesty International

On March 23rd, in the face of a mounting global health crisis, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire. Suffice it to say it was not heeded.

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, South Sudan is not the only place where a pandemic disease is poised to run rampant through a state of endemic conflict. Officially, South Sudan has only a few dozen cases. So too places like Syria, though as we have come to know, this is mostly a function of testing.

Meanwhile, in Yemen the number of cases is skyrocketing, and in Somalia, gravediggers in the capital can’t keep up with the surge in demand and the number of cases in Shabab-controlled territory is unknown.

Adding the coronavirus to these ongoing conflicts will only increase human suffering, and yet, at a time when the world could join together to confront COVID-19, so many wars continue to take their toll on civilians.

The Syrian government and Russian air force have in recent months continued to bomb schools and hospitals around Idlib. In the civil war in Libya, outside powers from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates have pumped in enough mercenaries and materiel that civilian casualties, from artillery and airstrikes, have actually increased since the start of 2020.

Across the Sahel, from Mali to northern Nigeria and Cameroon, and elsewhere in Africa, as far south as Mozambique, armed groups who have pledged allegiance to the group calling itself Islamic State are burning villages and beheading civilians.

And in western Myanmar, where the government’s crimes against humanity forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, the military and Rakhine rebels continue to fight; in April, a World Health Organization worker driving coronavirus samples was killed in the crossfire.

And violence continues in South Sudan as well, as a fringe rebel group continues their fight against the government and longstanding inter-communal rivalries breed abductions and gunfights. Meanwhile, victims and survivors of mass atrocities during the conflict continue to be denied justice.

Fueling this instability and impunity are continued violations of the UN arms embargo. During our investigation, we found recently manufactured Chinese ammunition in the hands of the feared National Security Service.

We found the government’s fleet of heavily armed Mi-24 attack helicopters, broken before the embargo was established, newly fixed and flying, ready to be used again to attack civilians as they had during the civil war. We found Kalashnikovs from Eastern Europe, some even made in the old East Germany, newly imported and in the hands of government forces and opposition alike.

The civil war in South Sudan was decidedly low-tech, and featured horrific atrocities, including hundreds of people gathered up and gunned down in mass executions, often along ethnic lines.

But while the arms embargo has proven no panacea, since its adoption in July of 2018 there has not been a single documented large-scale massacre of civilians, certainly not of the scale seen in the early days of the conflict.

Some fighting and human rights violations continue, but nothing compared to what we saw before the embargo in 2014, back when tens of millions of rounds of ammunition where being shipped in at a time.

The fight against COVID-19 has been described as a war. I don’t think that framing is accurate or helpful at all; I bet most of us who have experienced the chaotic messy violence of human beings killing each other would agree.

Wars destroy, but the response to a pandemic requires the opposite; an act of building, creating a resilient society where we take care of each other. And we have a common inhuman foe outside ourselves to mobilize against: a grotesque ball of goo covered in spikes.

Unfortunately, at the UN, the old divisions threaten this unifying opportunity. The rift between China and the United States has stalled a resolution on a 90-day humanitarian ceasefire that would allow for COVID medical aid to reach civilians.

And the question of arms embargoes gets wrapped up in discussions of dropping sanctions generally. Though they are considered by the same council, the arms embargo should not be seen as punitive in nature.

It is not a targeted sanction, it is a necessary tool for curbing human rights violations by all parties, and could not possibly be misconstrued as impeding a country’s ability to treat COVID-19.

We face an uphill battle to get the South Sudan arms embargo, but there is still space for hope. The UN Security Council can move with purpose and good will and see the obvious truth: guns don’t vanquish a disease.

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, South Sudan was a place that had more attack helicopters than ventilators. It makes no sense to lift an arms embargo on a fragile country with a legacy of impunity for war crimes and a looming public health challenge.

The UN Security Council should vote to renew the embargo and give the South Sudanese the space and chance to build a peace founded on justice and respect for human rights.

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