'Humanitarian aid' or 'War Crime': how to decipher Obfuscatory Language

A post on how the obfuscatory language of war and 'international relations' conceals truth but reveals who has the power. And a few tips on how to decipher that language.

I have long been interested in the notion of decoding (also deciphering or decryption). My grandfather broke Nazi codes in Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Remarkably, some of his innovations in decryption are still secret, I’ve been told by GCHQ. I think the in-the-know opacity of diplomatic terminology is one of the reasons I was attracted to diplomacy. Do you know what a ‘démarche’ is or what it means to ‘PNG’ someone¹? I do, so that must make me special.

In my world of politics and international affairs (itself a term that is a bit problematic, btw), decryption is essential to understand what’s really going on. Unfortunately, the obfuscatory language used by politicians, commentators and diplomats is rarely deciphered and often left for the layman to work out for themselves. I considered calling this blog, ‘The World Decrypted’ but I thought that might be over-claiming and I have other reasons for calling it ‘Gentle Anarchy’ (which I shall come to in due course). But today’s post is an attempt to share my techniques for decoding obfuscatory language.

I was driven to write this post because of what I heard on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme this morning as I was driving my children to school. It was an interview conducted by presenter Amol Rajan with the World Food Programme director Cindy McCain (widow of John McCain). They were talking about famine in northern Gaza. Rajan quizzed her about what might be done about it. Not once during their discussion did either of them use the word ‘Israel’. Instead they talked about ‘aid routes being blocked’ or entries over the border with Egypt ‘being closed’. Everything was passive voice. They used the term ‘humanitarian routes’, reducing the debate to the discourse of ‘humanitarian aid’ which carries a whole set of implications and submerged signals. ‘Humanitarian aid’ is what gets delivered after earthquakes or droughts and such like. ‘How do we get aid in?’ asked Rajan.

It’s clear, and has been for some time, that Israel is the reason aid is ‘not getting in’ to Gaza. To be more explicit - and to correctly locate subject, object and verb - Israel is blocking aid (a word itself more clearly known as food, water and medical supplies) from getting to the Palestinian population in Gaza, by closing entry points, subjecting aid shipments to unjustified delays etc, and indeed bombing humanitarian vehicles and killing aid workers, to the extent that there is now widespread malnutrition and hunger, particularly but not only in the north of Gaza. Aryeh Neier, a giant in the human rights movement, and founder of Human Rights Watch, says this deliberate blockade is evidence of genocide. It is also a clear cut-and-dried case of war crimes. Look at article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It’s not complicated.

None of this was mentioned by Rajan and McCain. It was as if the famine had happened by itself, and had not been deliberately caused by someone i.e. Israel. Instead the words they used depicted the issue as somehow neutral and depoliticised (and decriminalised). Their use of the passive voice was one giveaway. Hence my first rule of decryption:

Watch out for the passive voice. The absence of the subject and object means that Who is doing What to Whom is being concealed, and it is being concealed for a reason.

In passing, I will add that ‘who/whom’ is one of my favourite tools for breaking things down to their essence. Who is doing What to Whom? It was also one of Stalin’s favourite aphorisms, apparently. Perhaps not surprising for one of the most effective wielders of unrestrained, brutal power that the world has ever seen.

What other tricks to watch out for? We’re all familiar with the euphemism of ‘collateral damage’ for civilian casualties (a word which is itself a euphemism for killing and mutilation). Wikileaks brilliantly inverted this to title the leaked video of an American helicopter gunship killing unarmed civilians - journalists - in Baghdad ‘collateral murder’. But there are many such euphemisms from the contemporary ‘limited military operation’ misnomer for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to the happily outdated ‘Global War on Terror’ (abbreviated as GWOT inside government, and pronounced - absurdly - ‘g-what’). I’ve often wondered how do you wage war on ‘terror’? GWOT was used as a catch-all obscurantist euphemism - and excuse - for all kinds of illegal and counter-productive activities, from torture to invasion.

A further and related rule is to look out for how things are framed and named. Rajan and McCain framed the deliberate starvation the Gazan population as a ‘humanitarian’ issue. That framing leads to consequences, chief among them ignoring the perpetrator and the occurrence of war crimes. Framing it as deliberate starvation or collective punishment of course leads to very different conclusions.

Other examples are similarly subtle and pernicious. When I was a diplomat during the 1990’s, the British government framed the break-up of Yugoslavia a ‘civil war’. In reality, it was a war of aggression and expansion by Serbia against Bosnia and Croatia, directly instigated by Slobodan Milošević. It was moreover a deliberate attempt to eradicate the Bosniak population - genocide. But by framing Milošević’s assault as a ‘civil war’ the British government, which I then represented, was more comfortable defending its policy of not doing anything to stop Milošević, because to do so would be ‘interfering’ in a civil conflict.

There’s a subtle implication in this framing that all the ‘parties’ in the ‘civil war’ are at fault, justifying an arms embargo on all of them, aggressor and victim alike (and thus advantaging the aggressor). Notably, Britain, France and others used the same ‘civil war’ excuse to impose an arms embargo on the Spanish Republican (ie democratic) forces fighting General Franco’s fascist aggressors seeking to overthrow democracy. This helped Franco because Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, ignoring the embargo, were generous in their supply of weapons to the fascist forces - including the aircraft used to bomb civilians in Guernica. The Republicans by contrast received very few arms supplies. The UK, US, France and others refused to help them. They lost.

Israel/Palestine is an issue serially misunderstood because of false framing. It is often portrayed as some kind of equal conflict between two groups who want the same land. This encourages the elevation of ‘mediation’ and ‘mutual understanding’ as the solution, or some slicing of the cake where each gets a ‘fair’ share. This has spawned what one friend calls the ‘mediation industrial complex’ of hundreds of NGOs who want to build peace and understanding between the Arabs and Jews and in practically every conflict elsewhere in the world (which often also suffer from the ‘equality of both sides’ mis-framing).

The truth is that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land - who/whom again. This isn’t controversial (or shouldn’t be): it has been repeatedly affirmed at the UN Security Council (ie by international law). Even the US didn’t veto these obligatory decisions for Israel to leave the occupied territories (though there’s a debate over the ‘the’ here, which I will explain one day). The basic fact that one side is occupying the other’s land is often not mentioned (indeed it’s a long time since I’ve heard a British minister utter it, let alone the long-standing requirements of international law). Obviously, this is much to the advantage of the occupier. Calling it ‘occupation’ by contrast makes it pretty obvious what needs to done to solve the ‘issue’: end the occupation.

So watch out for the framing. When I was a diplomat, sub-consciously or consciously I was careful about how to frame matters, precisely with the objective of getting what ‘we’, the British, wanted.

Obscure terminology is another ruse. If a term is being used that you don’t understand, you can be confident that you, and everyone else, are being deceived, a deceit that is entirely deliberate. The practice of diplomacy is rife with obscurantist terminology, one ulterior purpose of which is to preserve that practice for the elites by making it unintelligible to everyone else (a topic I covered in my book, Independent Diplomat). There is no other need for this kind of language. Diplomats are perfectly capable of speaking plain English. They just choose not to.

An obscurantist term you hear a lot for instance these days is ‘international humanitarian law’ or, even worse, ‘IHL’. This term means in fact the laws of war: the international agreements, most notably but not only the Geneva Conventions, whereby states committed to conduct war in particular ways and not others: not targeting hospitals for instance. It’s a safe bet that 99% of people could not tell you what international humanitarian law is, let alone ‘IHL’. This renders international law as the realm of the specialist lawyer, not the everyman, even when in many cases ‘IHL’ is very clear, for instance on the obligation to provide sufficient ‘humanitarian assistance’ (there, I’m doing it again) to the civilian population.

How is this deliberate obscurity of international law exploited? Before the Iraq War of 2003, there was a debate about the legality of the American-British ‘allied’ invasion. (I note in passing that the use of ‘allied’ is itself dodgy, a clearly deliberate evocation of the positive connotations of The Allies of World War Two). The legality of starting wars is not that complicated. The use of military force is illegal except in two clear circumstances: self-defence, or when it is explicitly authorised by the UN Security Council (as was, for instance, the 1990 ‘Gulf War’ when military action was authorised to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait). The 2003 invasion was neither in self-defence nor was it authorised by the UN Security Council (just like, and not coincidentally, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine). It was therefore illegal. Not complicated.

But to this day you will hear defenders of the war claim that the legality is not clear, or that the invasion was in fact legal (and if you have ten minutes, I can explain their - ludicrous - legal argument). By comparison, it’s striking that the Foreign Office lawyer who resigned in protest at the illegality of the war² used much plainer words to explain her legal interpretation of the war: without UN authorisation, the invasion was quite simply a ‘war of aggression’. Not much obfuscation there.

The illegal 2003 Iraq invasion was also the occasion for the deployment of all other kinds of deliberately confusing and unintelligible terminology, most notoriously the term used to justify the whole farrago, ‘WMD’ - Weapons of Mass Destruction (most people still don’t know what this means in the Iraq context. In fact it means chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and certain kinds of ballistic missiles - the latter are not generally included in the definition of WMD. I know this because I worked on Iraq’s ‘WMD’ for many years). And here’s perhaps the golden rule - whenever you hear such terminology, someone is being tricked, probably you.

Of course, at the most basic level, words are about power relations. Who gets to name and frame things has the power. The names and frames that dominate a debate show who’s winning it. Using different - and correct - names and frames is a way of contesting that power. Language matters.

Perhaps you have rules or examples you’d like to share, or indeed terminologies or framings you don’t understand and we can try to decrypt them together. Please put any in the comments and we can add to the list (and I will probably add examples as they occur to me too). In any case, the main point is clear: always decrypt to get to the reality. Very rarely are bald words used to describe bald truths - especially in war.

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1. A démarche is the direct and formal delivery of a message from your government to another. It can also be a verb: a diplomat ‘démarches’ another government. To ‘PNG’ someone is to declare them ‘Persona Non Grata’ (which is also thereby an adjectival noun) ie. chuck them out of the country.

2. Elizabeth Wilmshurst