Well, let's move to the the main purpose of today, which is the product from the CCL five.
Many of you will know, Professor, I'm a member of this university.
She's a Tetreault fellow at Lincoln College.
And since she last spoke to us here in this format, she's become a fellow of the British Academy, which is a tremendous honour.
We congratulate her on that. And she has a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press called Cosmopolitan.
Great to see you. Thank you very much for inviting me to do this talk.
I for coming to this talk as well. This afternoon, I'm going to talk about the ethics of belligerent occupation.
And it's a subject which is important to me for two reasons.
First of all, hardly anyone in the philosophy of war talks about military occupation.
So it's always nice to latch on to something which is relatively underexplored.
But the topic also has a very deep personal resonance for me for the following reasons.
One, You will know, of course, that between 1940 and 1944, most of my home countries territory, France, was occupied by the German army.
My maternal grandmother, her parents and her sister were living in Normandy, which was occupied by the Germans at the time,
and they had to share literally their house with five German soldiers for the duration of the war.
Now, most of those soldiers only stayed for a few weeks, but two of them stayed for two and a half years.
Now, the soldiers were all very young, and I'm told by my grandmother were very polite, very kind, very shy.
Lived on the second floor of the house and my family had the use of the ground and first floor.
And so occupiers and occupied had no choice every single day but to pass each other in the stairs, in the kitchen or in the courtyard.
My relatives had to decide every single day for four years whether to respond to the soldiers, attempt to engage in conversation,
whether to comfort those very young soldiers when the latter would break down in the yard, having heard dreadful news from home.
They had to decide, and my relatives had to decide whether to sell their soldiers a turkey for Christmas, as were likely requested.
In other words, they had to decide every single day for four years and in their own home whether to treat those five soldiers primarily as enemies,
primarily as human beings, or a little bit of both.
Treat them as enemies and risk their anger for those soldiers.
However young, however shy, however polite, nevertheless were bearing arms and were on the lookout for resistance activity.
Treat them as human beings and risks the anger of your compatriots who could
denounce you as resistance in the early stages of the war or collaborators.
In its closing stages. Now, crucially, these young men to hurt you make similar decisions.
They had to decide how to treat my relatives, particularly the two young girl.
Young women, you know,
really treat them with care and compassion and risk the anger of your superior officers and the place on the next convoy to Stalingrad.
Treat them with harshness and risk losing any goodwill that those people might
have towards you in whose house you live and whose cooperation you need.
Now, occupying forces are no longer billeted in civilian houses.
They live in military bases of their own, which can spool into and involve in two small human towns as the occupation goes on.
Nevertheless, occupied populations are in daily contact with occupying forces in the knowledge that they are,
more often than not are largely powerless in that extraordinarily complex and multi-faceted
relationship to which the status and the role of the soldiers as occupiers is absolutely central.
Now, negotiating these complex relationships, literally living with the enemy, does not always require prompt decisions and solemn gestures.
More often than not, it requires. Acts of moral compromise, which might not seem very significant when taken on their own,
but whose cumulative effect under the shadow of war can and does corrode the civilians self-respect and integrity.
It seems to me that military occupation, particularly when it takes place as the war still goes on,
is one of the harshest diplomatic conditions which individuals might have to face.
And yet, despite the revival of the ethics of war in the last 40 years or so,
indeed despite Israel's decade long occupation of the West Bank, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US led coalition.
There is a dearth of works on this particular phenomenon, though we could speculate about this.
I suspect that one of the reasons why philosophers of war have spent very little time in the last
decades or so talking about military occupation is because most of them come from countries the US,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand whose armies have occupied these countries of not being occupied in living memory,
to say the least, in the case of Britain. We have to go back to 1866 to find an instance of military occupations from the Netherlands.
As it happens, it's quick and easy or relatively easy, it seems to me, to not have to think about occupation when it takes place far away from home.
And when you don't have in your family, you know, someone who is deployed.
It's much harder to ignore it when you can still find traces of its legacy long after the fact.
In our case, in the form of German army invoices, which had been left to gather dust and four bedroom floorboards for 60 years.
And so this is my topic today, more precisely, the dilemmas which I've described, you know, the start of this talk, one feature of occupation,
albeit one of its most poignant,
but I think equally significant and my focus today are the more rights and duties which occupiers are occupied have vis a vis one another,
who, in order to describe a particular situation as a dilemma,
you need to have a sense as to whether or not which the options that you might be tempted to pursue are indeed morally right,
or as the case may be, morally wrong. And in particular,
one must have a sense of the extent to which one would want others by choosing a
particular course of action vis a vis occupiers or choosing another course of action.
Moreover, those who live under a military occupation typically have a very,
very strong set of views about what is the right or the wrong thing to do vis a vis occupying forces,
as witnessed by the extraordinarily harsh treatment, both judicial and extrajudicial,
you know, meted out to those fairly large categories of civilians.
After the end of the Second World War, those civilians who were deemed to have collaborated with the enemy,
or indeed as witnessed by the very harsh judgements typically made on those who,
on the contrary, resist occupying forces and in so doing, expose their compatriots to very severe reprisals.
And I think, therefore, it pays carefully to examine whether those judgements are correct.
So this is what I want to do. This afternoon I want to begin to sketch an account of the more rights and more
duties of belligerent occupants and occupied populations vs of one another.
And my central claim. Oh, by the way, sorry, I should have asked this. Does everyone have a hand out?
You know. Oh, there's some spares at the back.
They can produce performances. I hate to say they are some comedy you can show them.
You are so sorry for the interruption.
I should have checked that. So the claim that I'm going to defend today is that the rights and duties of occupied populations and occupying
forces are very largely dependent on the role status of the war which led to the occupation in the first instance.
And in defending that view, I set myself against international law as it stands and against the set of moral
principles and values which underpins the international law over occupation.
So I shall proceed as follows. First,
I shall set out what the international law of occupation and the set of the principles which underpin it have to say about those rights and duties.
I call that view the Orthodox view, and then will make my case to the effect that the Orthodox view is receiving by.
Tweeting in my talk this afternoon on the case of unjust wars leading to occupation.
In order to make my case fully, I would have first to give you an account of the rights and duties of 55 forces and occupied civilians.
When the war which precedes the occupation, is to it is a just war.
And I do that in the long written version of the paper. I only have 45, 50 minutes.
I don't have the time to do this.
So what I'm going to do instead is to look at the harder for my position, the harder case of unjust wars leading to occupation.
Before long, into my exposition, I need to make two background claims.
The first is that this paper falls against the background theory of justice, which I will set out.
I will not defend it here. I stated in full on the handout briefly.
According to that by the Ministry of Justice,
all individuals have rights to freedoms and resources which they need in order to lead a minimally flourishing or decent life.
In other words, fundamental human rights to basic civil and political liberties, as well as to a sufficient amount of material resources.
Those rights correlate into duties and in particular, but prima facie a duty not to directly harm others for the sake of securing their own survival.
At the same time, I took it for granted that there are limits to the sacrifices which they can be expected to incur for the sake of others.
In particular, I take the view this will become important later on in the talk.
I take the view that individuals cannot be expected to devote themselves or resources
which they currently have if they would have a less than minimally decent life.
As a result, the views that I set out here could be illustrated by example.
Suppose that there is an attacker coming into the room, you know, bursting in and he's trying to kill me on the view that I set out here,
even if the only way for me to save my life is by some sort of, you know, of course,
a mechanism to kill David, who is completely innocent of what this is doing.
I may not do so. I may not harm David deliberately, you know, as a means to protect myself from that attacker.
Contrastingly However, if I only have one remaining loaf of bread in my weapon possession,
I'm not under a duty to give David that loaf of bread if as a result, I will die of starvation.
Even though by giving him the loaf of bread, I would save his life.
And I'll explain later on in the talk why this point is important.
The second background claim that I want to make,
which is listed as being on the handout in the relevant paragraph, is that, in my view, war is unjust.
W it if it fails to meet the requirements of Jewish schools, proportionality, reasonable chance of success and last resort.
In this paper, we focus on cases where the war is just without just cause.
So this is the stage, as it were, for the argument to follow.
Let me now turn to what I call the orthodox view of belligerent occupation,
by which I mean to refute the international law of military occupation and the set of principles and values which underpin it.
And first, I need to make clear that my focus in this paper is belligerent occupation or occupation baleka in the juridical Latin,
you know, scholars, belligerent occupation differs from other kinds of occupation.
In particular, it differs from occupation.
Following the last, you know, debate last year is the state of affairs that obtains when the enemy has collapsed completely, as Germany did in 1955.
Belligerent occupation is a different transformative occupation that can take place where, for example,
a party in a conflict intervenes in a humanitarian conflict and seeks from within
to reform the target state institutional structures by belligerent occupation.
I mean roughly for international law, an occupation which meets the following six conditions which are listed to us on the handout.
First of all, war is ongoing. The belligerent occupier, which I will call occupants and who is taking part in that war?
Occupant effectively exercises powers of government of the occupied territory.
Occupied has not consented to occupiers. Occupy's own government has really been displaced or considerably weakened rather than annihilated,
so that there is a trilateral relationship between Occupy that displaced government and the civilian population of the occupied territory.
And finally, a peace treaty has not yet been concluded between occupant and occupied.
So the war is ongoing in the following three senses in a sense,
that Occupy is still engaged in a conflict largely outside the borders of occupied territory with some of the party.
The war is ongoing also in the sense that, to repeat, a peace treaty has not been completed between occupants and occupied.
Now, this is fairly standard as far as I can tell, having read the relevant legal literature.
It is a fairly standard account of what is belligerent occupation in international law.
There are some comments to make, which is that those conditions, some of these conditions do need qualifying.
So if you look at conditions, see whereby occupant effectively exercises powers of government and of a solidarity by territory.
It is important to note, and I will return to this later on,
that the cooperation of local Indigenous officials is necessary for occupants to carry out its tasks with
respect to the first condition which stipulates that Occupied has not consented to occupants control.
Well, again, the displaced sovereign government sometimes does consent to the occupation as in fact forced it through its own government in 1940.
It would be very odd to say that France was not occupied in the north by Germany,
just in virtue of the fact that its own government had in fact consented to the occupation.
Finally, with respect to this condition,
sometimes there can be a quadrilateral relationship when there is a national liberation movement alongside the displaced regime,
a movement which does claim to have some right to become the proper the jury government of that community once the war is over.
Now, with this commencing place, let me very briefly outline the complex body of laws which pertain to belligerent occupation.
They ought to be found in the so-called Hague Regulations of 1907 and the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
The first point I want to make, bottom of page one, and this is really absolutely crucial for my overall argument,
which is that in law, a military occupation is part of the use in Belgium.
But you knew, of course, that the laws of war in general, the morality of war in particular, you know,
divide between you use to Belgium the set of principles and ought to regulate the resort to
war and use in below the set of rules and principles which ought to regulate conduct in war.
No, given that it is a stipulation of a belligerent occupation that the war is still ongoing.
It makes sense that in the international law,
the set of rules and principles that regulate the conduct of occupants and occupied presumably one another, partakes, as it were, of use in Belgium.
Now I stress this fully for the following reason.
According to the laws of war and the moral principles which underpin it,
the right strategic and liabilities of belligerents in value are the same irrespective of the moral status of their war.
Antebellum. More precisely, soldiers on either side of the conflict at liberty to kill one another,
irrespective of the justness of the cause for which they fight.
So for those of you who are not necessarily very familiar with the literature on that traditional account, the Orthodox account soldier,
a make him soldier, be in self-defence, even if he's a soldier, wrongfully takes part in the unlawful aggression of these country by his army.
And even if that soldier rightfully takes part in his country's legitimate defence of its sovereignty and territory.
Soldiers may also kill civilian members of BE if the latter are taking a very active part in the war.
And the reason why soldiers on the Orthodox view on opposing sides of the war are to be deemed
one another's moral equal has been articulated by a number of philosophers and lawyers,
most notably Michael Ward. Sir, you really speaking individual soldiers cannot be expected to form a judgement as to the justness of the war.
Once the war has started, they are morally on a par with respect vis a vis one another.
Now, insofar as the law of military occupation is proper of use and value, then by implication,
according to the law of military occupation, the rights and duties of occupying forces are the same.
Whether or not the war which leads to the occupation is a just and unjust war.
So on that traditional account,
the occupation of Italy by the Americans and the British from 1943 to 1945 was subject to
exactly the same legal regime is the occupation by Germany of her views during that period.
Even though we might grant for the sake of argument, the invasion of Italy by the Allies in 1943 had a just cause.
Whereas I'm assuming a hope plausibly for the sake of argument for the invasion of her enemies by Germany in 1939, 1940 lacked a just cause.
So the first one to note about international law of occupation is that it confers symmetry or symmetry, as it were,
between occupying force with three respective or different occupying forces,
irrespective of the status of the war, which leads to the occupation in the first instance.
Now, this doesn't tell you anything about the set of rights powers and duties which occupants or occupying forces enjoy.
Briefly, you know, in a nutshell, summarising from the various two legal documents at the beginning of this paper,
those rights and duties are the following. Now, Occupy is not sovereign.
Suddenly over occupied territory and occupation is not explicitly not an election of the occupied country, but the occupied territory.
Now top of page two of your handout was that occupied is not sovereign.
It does enjoy powers of government and particular powers to issue and enforce legal directives in three cases.
If domestic laws violate the laws of war, then occupant has the legal competence to change domestic laws and to issue new
legal directives which will comply with the laws of war over occupied territory.
If law and order require new directives and as a means to bolster its own war effort so occupant is deemed legally
competent to take security measures to pass laws aimed at meeting the acute needs of occupied civilian populations.
By introducing rationing, for example,
it can enact taxation laws for the purpose of defraying the costs of the occupation and meeting the needs of its own forces.
So these broadly are the considerable legal powers which occupying forces are given in international law, but occupying force forces also have duties.
This is important to preserve order and to secure conditions for civic life.
And this does include a duty to, for example, restrict the freedoms of occupied citizens.
For example, freedom of movement.
If occupant deem it to be the case that to grant a freedom of movement to occupied populations will result in breaches of law, peace and order,
so that in the traditional laws of military occupation,
an occupier is deemed legally competent to deem all resistant activity illegal as a unacceptable breach of peace.
Finally, the occupying forces and their officials have rights to appropriate and requisition material resources,
in some cases with no compensation due in other cases against compensation.
Now interestingly, in my view, the requisitions cannot be used to meet the needs of occupant's own citizens back home.
This is important.
This requisitions can be used only to meet the needs of its own forces in place in occupied territory, as well as to fund its ongoing war.
I cite this territory now without wanting to get into too many details.
I don't need to tell you that the crucial issue here, of course,
is that of the extent to which and the grounds upon which in law occupying forces are legally able
to exploit natural resources should be found under the territory of occupied populations under law.
I mean, there is a good deal of controversy, but the consensus amongst the legal scholars.
Right, seems to be that occupant can do that.
What it cannot do is exploit those natural resources.
So resolve the void until there is nothing left,
because that would be tantamount to destroying those natural resources and they are legally prohibited to do so.
So these are the legal rights, duties and powers of occupying forces which are both occupied, you know,
populations that you can't really start thinking about occupation without really taking on board.
The fact that condition, in order for it to be successful in whatever you measure of success is in this particular case,
cannot take place without putting boots on the ground.
She can't, you know, go from an occupied territory without having ground troops.
You cannot do it from the air. You cannot do it from the sea.
In other words, an occupation relies on the cooperation of occupied citizens to a much greater extent than is generally acknowledged.
You can understand why a lot of people find it very difficult to talk frankly about the degree to which,
in any given case, your local Occupy populations have, you know, co-operated with with occupants.
There is a lot of shame. You know, many taboos. We would all like to think that we would all resist if suddenly, you know, we were invaded.
But that's an illusion. Including in the Channel Islands.
That's not something which is often talked about in Britain. But the Channel Islands were occupied, you know, for much of the war.
And reading about the experience of the islanders boosts ordinary citizens, both to the officials who were left,
you know, more or less to find ways on their own without much guidance at all from Westminster.
Ways of dealing with German soldiers who suddenly one day arrived.
But and see, that's a really fascinating thing to read about.
I think we do need to look at the legal rights and duties of occupied populations.
So in brief, we know that that is a feature of a belligerent military occupation, that there still is a displaced regime,
and that displaced regime does remain competent to legislate over the occupied territory, provided that its directives do not conflict with occupants.
Directives provided that it's directives, in other words,
do not place its citizens in the individual situation of being in breach of the laws enacted by occupants.
But if you find citizens crucially in the law, are not under a duty to occupy and to obey its directives.
Remember, an occupation is not an election of sovereignty.
The occupying forces are not sovereign.
And so if you, by citizens, do not owe a duty of allegiance in law to occupied 14 occupying forces, but they may cooperate with this forces.
There is nothing in the laws of occupation which prohibit occupied citizens from cooperating with occupying forces.
At the same time, they may not resist occupiers lawful directives.
For example, if an occupying issued directive in virtue of which it is a crime,
the crime of sabotage to blow up in a military convoy then occupy populations may not breach that directive by,
for example, blowing up a military convoy, particularly if the displaced regime has concluded an armistice with occupants.
Then all stages of that displaced regime is irrelevant.
Now, as you can imagine, there is some unease about this latter point, which has been,
as ever, very interestingly characterised by Michael Walter as follows in his book,
Just an Unjust Wars, he has a well-known description of guerrilla warfare against the occupying forces.
He looks at the case of French resistance, who disguised themselves as peasants and were able,
as a result, to come very close to German soldiers and managed to kill a few of them.
Now, according to so on some standard views of the laws of occupation,
those French partisans could be deemed to have betrayed the disagreement passed between
the French regime and Germany and to have committed a very serious breach of face.
At the same time, once also note to the extent that individuals are not subsumed under the decisions of their
government and to the extent that in fact the German occupation was unlawfully conducted,
Louis partisans could be deemed to have acted legitimacy.
And yet, according to so, this German soldiers themselves who attempted to kill the French partisans of Defence and those
officials who punished the French resistance for murder also had a justification for acting,
since they could not hope to ensure and restore public life under the constant threat of attack.
What is the rights? I quote, Resistance is legitimate and the punishment of resistance is legitimate.
That may seem like a simple standoff and an abdication of ethical judgement.
It is actually a precise reflection of the realities of military defeat.
I disagree with the word, sir. His view rests on a very, in my view, implausible account of the relative marital status of occupant and occupier view,
an account which fails to take into account the more status of the war which the occupant won and is still prosecuting outside occupied territory.
And what I want to do now is to move away from the law and to present an account of the rights, duties of occupant and occupiers.
In those cases where the rule which led to the occupation could be characterised as a unjust war.
And that section three on your hand out.
As I noted earlier, the law of belligerent occupation is part of use in below the provisions of which are deemed to apply to all belligerents,
irrespective of the law status of their development, and in particular irrespective of the status of their cause under view to repeat.
Just as soldiers who carry out a rueful aggression are permitted to kill enemy soldiers who rightfully defend their countries and vice versa,
occupying powers have exactly the same rights, duties and liabilities of a few populations, irrespective of the status of the war.
Now, as many of you will know, the view that use in below is independent from use has come under very sustained,
serious and sustained attack from a number of scholars who have,
including myself, who have sought to revise and order revised sorry, an old pre-modern account of the right to kill in war under pre-modern accounts.
Whether your war is just over,
Bellum has a crucial bearing on whether or not you are permitted to kill enemy soldiers in the battle on their own account.
If you do take part in, for example, a wrongful aggression on another community, and if enemy soldiers, by implication,
take part in the rightful defence of the community against an army, you may not kill them in self-defence,
or as they may kill you in their own defence and in defence of their homeland.
Put differently for soldiers to kill enemy soldiers in a prosecution, in prosecution of an unjust war is morally wrong.
For them to be killed in the course of prosecuting a just war is also morally wrong around doing, which is not entirely dissimilar to murder.
Now I think this is the right way to think about the right and permission to kill
in war for reasons which I'm not going to set out in a great deal of detail here.
I mean, we can talk about that later on in the discussion.
What I want to do is to apply that revisionist account of the right to kill in war to the problem of occupation following an unjust war.
So suppose that thinking at 21 is regime orders as army to invade bees territory without just cause.
And suppose further that he has also wrongfully invaded the territory of another community.
See these regime surrenders.
Its leaders flee in exile. Is armed forces occupying these territory are two at the same time as a is still waging its war against sea.
Now it's my post, his eye on the revisionist count.
Insofar as soldiers say we're fighting an unjust war when they're attacked, be at 81, they lacked the right to kill soldiers.
Be in prosecution of that war. By the same token, they lack the right to stay in be once the fighting following be surrender has ceased at t two.
So let me provide a domestic analogy. Andrew and Charlotte are three characters in this domestic analogy.
So suppose that Andrew invades the the house in which Charlotte and Ben live.
He has no justification for so doing.
Ben decides to flee in order to take the fight outside.
Charlotte stays in the house for a whole range of reasons.
She remains stuck inside. She has to think about the children who that way are housed, fed, and so and so forth.
Andrew decides that he might as well use the House as a base to continue to pursue his criminal activities.
He's very willing to have Charlotte stay there, provided that she makes us have scarce bases,
directives and gives him the resources he needs in order to keep his business going.
He makes it very clear that he will not use that he will use lethal force against her and her children if she decides to resist.
Now, it seems to me absolutely blindingly obvious that Andrew lacks the right to remain in the house.
But neither Charlotte to nor indeed Ben under a duty to him to provide him with any assistance at all, or indeed a duty not to try to kick him out.
In fact, they would do him no wrong by killing him should the opportunity arise, and should this be the only way to get rid of him?
And the same, in my view, applies to all occupants,
except his eye occupant does not have a just cause for invading beast territory from which it follows that it lacks a just cause for remaining there.
Unless, as we shall see later on, circumstances change in such a way that it comes to acquire a justification for staying.
But absent such a change in circumstances, its officials lack the power to issue directives aimed at safeguarding their own and other soldiers safety.
They lack the power to raise taxes, to requisition movable resources and use immovable property as a means to meet either the occupation
related needs or the demands of the unjust war which their regime is still waging against Xi.
More clearly. Still, I believe they may not enforce the wilful directives by killing those who oppose them,
but that's the simple baboon case in favour of the view that if occupying forces are in a
particular territory as occupants following an unjust war against that particular population,
then they simply ought not to stay there.
They ought to withdraw, and they lack the whole array of rights, treaties and powers, which international law calls them.
Now, you might object to this turning over to the top of page three.
You might object to this on the following grounds.
You might say, well, if these regime concludes an armistice with a and allows it to occupy these territory, these regime in effect.
Transfers its own power over government to its officials on behalf of its own citizens.
And we, the citizens should be citizens, but quite an obligation to those officials occupying officials to comply with the directives.
This is the kind of argument which was invoked in the Second World War, for example,
to justify the views that occupied populations whose own government had complete an
armistice with Germany owed it to German officials not to breach the terms of the armistice.
And I have two replies to that objection.
The first one is that consent is given under the duress of impending military defeat at the hands of an unjust aggressor.
Cannot, in my view, bind these officials and citizens to a officials.
I don't think that consent given under those particular conditions is morally transformative in the way that the objection would suggest.
Second, even if consent is morally transformative under these conditions in the way that the objection suggests,
these officials can only transfer to EU officials to occupant's rights which ultimately are vested in these citizens.
They cannot transfer as officials to occupant the right to levy taxes and to requisition resources to promote unjust ends.
In this instance, the pursuit of an ongoing, unjust war against sea.
And this is because these citizens land not right in the first instance.
Is this to say that there is absolutely nothing that occupants is morally entitled to do with respect to its occupation?
No, it doesn't. Occupant is under clearly a moral duty to restore order and protect public life.
Occupant does, in fact, in my view, have the power to protect occupied civilians from one another through,
for example, the enforcement of criminal law to provide for their needs.
However, and this is crucial, it seems to me,
that Occupy civilians do not owe to occupants an obligation to comply with their
obligation to one another as fellow residents of this occupied in the Territory.
Now, this is important because it implies that occupy populations and not just unjust occupation do not know,
do not do any obligation to occupying forces, not to resist that directives.
The point that I want to make here is important. During an occupation common criminals still want,
arresting local indigenous officials might not be in a position to enforce domestic laws over occupied territory.
And it seems to me that there ought to be space for the view that an occupant, which is an unjust occupant of the bar,
of the ethics of war and articulated, is morally entitled to step into the breach.
Issue is left by Indigenous officials inability or unwillingness to do their part when promoting public life, public safety and so on.
But this does not imply that Occupy civilians to repeat,
are under no obligation to occupying forces, not to resist the rule when the opportunity arises.
Now. I said earlier that the account ought to be qualified in the following rare circumstances might change in such a
way as to provide it easier to undressed occupant with the justification for continuing with your occupation.
And I want you to talk about this particular case in a moment, but before I do that,
I want first to address the case where an unjust occupation comes together, as it were, with a just war.
And this is the case that I have in mind. Suppose that is occupation of B is unjust for its war against C is just the example that I have in mind.
Here is the following.
In June 1940, under the terms of a secret protocol, which was added to the 1939 Pact of Non-Aggression signed by Germany and the USSR.
Under the term of the secret protocol, Soviet forces invaded all three Baltic states,
eliminated the officials and installed Soviet personnel in the place.
As you know, on the 22nd of June 1941, Germany breached the Ribbon Act of 1939 and invaded the USSR.
So the USSR found itself occupying at the same time occupying the Baltic States
and at the same time fighting a war of self-defence against German forces.
Now the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states was clearly unjust. In fact, it is deemed illegal in international law.
Once it was a defence against Germany. I'm assuming was just to attenuate.
Had to just cause, you know, why do I raise this particular case?
It is an important feature of the law of occupation that an occupying, irrespective of the justness of its schools,
can requisition resources from occupied populations in order to assist in the prosecution of the war,
which it is continuing to carry outside the borders of the occupied territory.
So the question that I want to ask you now is the following suppose that you have a non just occupant,
which was the status of the USSR in the Baltic state,
which claims to need resources from the Baltic States in order to assist in its war effort against an unjust attacker.
Germany, in this case, may occupants requisition those resources from the occupied populations which it is occupying, except with his eye unjustly.
I don't think so. Before occupant taps into the resources of occupied population, it must deploy its own,
for example, by withdrawing from the occupied territory altogether.
Moreover, in taking from occupied civilians the resources, military and otherwise, which these civilians need in order to resist the occupation,
its compounds, its initial wrongdoing against them, the wrongdoing of unwarranted aggression with the wrongdoing of a strengthened, unjust reputation.
So, you know, I don't think that the USSR would have been justified in requisitioning resources
from Baltic populations on the grounds that it was fighting an unjust war.
So you're just full of self-defence against Germany in the people.
Ask also and I'll pass over this. No, but ask whether occupied civilians nevertheless may be under a duty to assist in that war effort themselves.
And it concludes that they are not on the grounds that there are certain sacrifices that you cannot expect people to incur for the sake of others.
But what I want to do now, and because time is pressing, is to move to the case of an occupation which starts out as unjust,
will assume for the sake of argument, and of which we might want to say that it requires of it time.
A justification and example, which is always used in the very scant literature on military occupation, is the example of the occupation of Iraq,
or rather the war against Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent occupation of that country by the US coalition.
So here is how the argument goes.
Assume for the sake of argument that the Coalition lacked a just cause for invading Iraq in 2003, from which this account which I'm articulating here,
it follows fairly straightforwardly, at least at first sight, that the occupation of that country by those forces was unjust.
If they have no business invading in the first instance, they have no business staying there in the second instance, if you will.
But I think that to draw that conclusion, the occupation of Iraq was always unjust would be too quick.
Because even if the coalition lacked a justification for waging war against Iraq in 2003,
circumstances might have become such as to provide it with a justification for occupying it once Saddam Hussein's regime had collapsed.
And so people at this point in the argument invoked the outbreak of a civil war committing rights violations between different factions in the
aftermath of the invasion that we might think would impose on the coalition would not so much give the coalition the justification for occupying,
but would impose on it a duty, you know, to do so.
And I found that, you know, view quite plausible, you know, really certainly this particular example now quite often, you know,
when I say when I have said in conversations that it is a plausible view, you know, people have made the following objection.
They have said, well, no, you forget the problem of moral hazard,
because if an unjust war is an issue in a justified occupation of the result of the chaos created by the war, then people have objected to me.
An unjust belligerent would have every incentive to prosecute its war in such a way as to create,
you know, the security conditions there by providing itself, you know, with a justification for staying.
Exploiting natural resources, you know. And so and so forth.
Something seems to have gone wrong there. Some people have objected to me.
I'm not convinced that the objection is as decisive as it might seem.
So, first of all, my concern is with delineating the rights and duties of occupant in occupied vis a vis one another,
and the claim that an unjust belligerent would have an incentive to behave in such
a way is not deemed to mount to the claim that it would be permitted in to do so.
And I think it's important when we are faced with objections which invoke the from the war hazards.
I mean, I think it is important not to fall into the trap of making that category mistake.
You know, from saying there is an incentive to behave, therefore that behaviour is permissible.
It's not, you know, they might have an incentive to do so. That would be grievously wrong, maybe in so acting.
So I do see that there can be cases and these are difficult cases where an unjust war, indeed an unjust occupation, can become a just occupation.
This is not to say that those people, individuals, officials, leaders and so on who orchestrated and carry out the now just occupation,
do no duty whatsoever to the civilian populations who in the first phase, if you will, of the occupation were exceptionally so, unjustly occupied.
The fact that just occupation arose as a result of wrongdoing.
Well, it seems to issue in differential burdens, as it were,
which occupying soldiers must now bear when they have to make decisions as to what kind
of property to confer on their own lives vis a vis the lives of occupied civilians.
This is only that we can go back to in the discussion.
Now you will have noticed that I have not said anything at all so far about the difficult issue of collaboration,
and cooperation with unjust occupying forces may occupy populations, collaborate, cooperate, engage with unjust occupants.
Now I use the term engage to refer boost to the mere act of entering into transactions and relationships widely understood
with members of occupying forces in a private capacity and the act of actively cooperating with them in a public capacity.
So examples of private engagement will include selling them goods such as food, tobacco, selling them in shops, having sex with them and soon.
Examples of the latter will include cooperating with them when they act in
such a way as to protect and force just laws in force in occupied territory,
or when they enact the legislation which helped promote conditions for civic life.
I know this is a difficult issue and I will only say this.
First of all, the neo classical account or the revisionist account of the what you clearly knew, which says very clearly,
is that the rights and duties of soldiers and occupiers are fully dependent on the status of the war that leads to the occupation.
That to count does not commit itself to the view.
It seems to me that engagement is with unjust occupiers, is morally impermissible.
And I want you to develop on this particular point by turning first to the
issue of cooperation by Indigenous officials with undressed occupying forces.
It seems to me that the following three considerations should be brought to bear.
Officials will have to weigh up the costs, small costs of active participation in occupations,
wrongful ends such as helping in the commission of genocidal acts,
versus cooperating with occupants to bring about justified, such as, for example, dealing with common murderers.
Again, I mean, to use an example, which I'm familiar with, the example of the French police,
I mean, you know, French police officers during the occupation did two things,
but often the same individuals did two things that assisted the Gestapo in rounding up Jews, French or foreign.
But they also assisted in some efforts by German occupying force.
Occupying forces. In arresting common murderers, you know, common seems to refute the point I made earlier.
Those parts of the criminal law still do need to be in force.
And every single one of those police officers, you know, had to decide what to do.
I mean, they could have said, I'm resigning. I refuse to be complicit in that machine.
But the cost of so acting might well have been, you know, leaving, you know,
occupied in a civilian entirely, you know, at the mercy of occupying forces,
which in enforcing what seemingly was, you know, standards in a criminal law, might have committed acts of atrocity, you know, instead.
Second, officials will have to balance the short term interests of fellow occupied individuals versus the long term interest in occupants.
Doing so in deciding that you are going to stay in post, you know, in order to help your fellow citizens, you must be aware that you will,
in so doing, help occupants there continue to prosecute its unjust occupation and ongoing war outside your borders.
But is one kind of consideration that you have to bring to bear on the decision that you would make whether or not to cooperate.
And finally, you will have to balance between refraining from helping fellow citizens by residing and thereby not facilitating or keep those wrongful
attacks on third parties as against helping your own fellow residents and thereby contributing to those third parties predicament.
That is related to the second point. I don't have any, as you will have gathered, I don't have any firm principles.
This is, you know, when you may resign, this is when you must resign.
All I can do. This is the first step in this in this inquiry is at least identify, you know,
the set of issues or rather the interests which ought to be taken into account,
you know, when making a decision, you know, as a local indigenous official, whether to collaborate, cooperate or not.
What about and I would finish, you know, with this what about engaging with the occupying forces again?
Never forget in this argument that these are unjust occupying forces.
Excuse is only what about engaging with them in a private in a capacity?
No. So, I mean, this this is the point that I want to make, you know, here.
I don't think is it the revisionist accounts of occupation, which I have tried to delineate,
is committed to the view that occupied civilians should not engage in any way whatsoever with
unjust occupying forces unless occupying forces are rigidly kept apart from occupied civilians.
The latter will have no choice but to engage with them,
and I think it would not be apposite to condemn them for doing something which they cannot avoid doing.
Nor would it be apposite to condemn occupied civilians for giving in either to the threat of coercion or to the simple need to earn a living or base.
It's one thing for public and to refuse to serve a rude customer.
It is quite another to turn away a gun wielding soldier.
It's one thing to shut down your business for fear of having to transact with the enemy.
When you have another source of income. It's another thing altogether to do so when you will not be able to feed your family as a result.
Moreover, occupying soldiers are not simply enemies who, in the case at hand,
have no claim to issue directives on us to consume more resources and to make use of our infrastructure.
They are fellow human beings whom it is sometimes appropriate to treat as such and at this particular point,
much in both the Navy obvious and obviously naive.
But I think it does best twisting.
I began this paper by describing some of the choices which occupy civilians have to make when interacting with occupying forces in a private capacity.
I noted that they have to decide whether to say hello every day, sometimes whether to comfort, whether to transact.
No, I do not think it is morally inappropriate at all to treat a bereaved soldier as a human being with compassion.
When his breaking down in your courtyard at ten in the morning of being hurt that his entire family has been destroyed in,
for example, the bombing of Dresden or Hamburg.
Whether you can be forgiven for failing to treat him with compassion if the soldier in question was seen to take Jews to the Gestapo the day before.
But nor is it morally wrong, it seems to me, to send them or to give them, as it happens in this case, a turkey for Christmas.
But nor would you rule him by detonating a mine several hours later, at the exact moment, the military convoy in which you knew him to be is passing.
To be sure, if you knew at ten in the morning that you are going to kill him at seven, you know,
in the evening that you might see that it would be wrong to show him compassion or to give him a turkey.
And should you give in to that very natural impulse.
You might hate yourself for it, but then you might not think and feel that, and it might well be appropriate for you not to be so torn apart.
If you had good reasons to believe that for all his resolve towards you and your family,
he would not hesitate to kill you if you'd ordered to do so by his superiors.
That, I think, is the harsh reality of an unjust occupation, which is harsh precisely because it is made of very soft, grey moral nuances.
Thank you very much.