The murder of Hardeep Singh NijjarA Sikh separatist activist who was shot dead in Canada in June has sparked explosive clashes between them Canada It is India. It also illuminated an incendiary facet of the new global disorder: murders. The killing of dissidents and terrorists as well as political or military figures is as old as politics itself, but the frequency of such killings may be increasing.
A Ukraine targets attackers and collaborators; The Russia tried to assassinate the Ukrainian president. On September 25th the Ukraine claims to have killed the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleetbut apparently The next day he appeared in a video.
In addition to the war in Europe, a new group of rising powers emerged, including India and Saudi Arabia, radiates strength abroad. They resent what they see as the Western view of double standards when it comes to murders committed by states. New technologies are making it easier than ever for governments to precisely attack their enemies, even from long distances.
Posters make accusations against India and call for an end to extrajudicial killings in protest after the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Photo: Narinder Nanu/AFP
But while it may become easier to murder and murders may become more common, the world has not yet decided how to respond. Just look at the West’s response to recent state killings. Russia’s murder of a former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenkoin 2006 sparked outrage and led to sanctions.
After the terrible murder in Istanbul in 2018 Jamal Khashoggian exiled Saudi journalist who lived there US, Joe Biden declared that Saudi Arabia should be treated as a pariah. But last year he did greeted Muhammad bin Salman with a punchthe Saudi crown prince and de facto leader of his country, and is trying to convince him to make peace with Israel.
Meanwhile, India denies involvement in Nijjar’s death and could avoid serious consequences related to the case. The world’s most populous country is important to the West as both an economic partner and a geopolitical counterweight China. These inconsistencies reflect an ageold moral and legal labyrinth regarding statesponsored killings.
While the Bible praises the Israelite Ehud for killing Eglon, the oppressive and “fat” Moabite king, it also calls for obedience to authority: “For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil.” The politically motivated murder of a prominent person without due process smacks of villainy. Dante placed the murderers of Julius Caesar, along with Judas, in the deepest circle of hell, whose bodies were eaten by Satan.
But states kill prominent enemies abroad for different reasons and with different methods. A 2006 article by Warner Schilling and Jonathan Schilling lists 14 possible goals, from revenge to weakening an enemy to destroying a rival state.
Because of problems in identifying cases and perpetrators, it is difficult to obtain reliable data on patterns of murders and their causes. According to an article by Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken published in the American Economic Journal in 2009, approximately 298 assassination attempts on heads of state were recorded between 1875 and 2004. They note that since 1950, a head of state has been assassinated in about twoquarters of years.
Hatice Cengiz (onscreen), fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, speaks at an event honoring Khashoggi, who died at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP
For Rory Cormac from the University of Nottingham, in United Kingdom, the shooting in Canada is evidence of the weakening of international norms against murder: “With every highprofile murder, the taboo weakens a little,” he says. Cormac cites two reasons: authoritarian regimes “lose their shame” when they challenge liberal norms; and democracies that resorted to targeted killings “emboldened other states.” Other factors, such as ease of movement and drones that enable longrange surveillance and attacks, have likely made the problem worse. Over the years, the US has killed thousands of suspected jihadists as well as many civilians using drones.
“Assassinations have never changed the history of the world,” remarked British politician Benjamin Disraeli after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But many homicides can have dramatic consequences. The projectile fired by a Serbian nationalist that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 detonated 1. War.
And murders risk retribution: Mike Pompeo It is John Boltonformer US Secretary of State and former US national security advisor, were allegedly the target of an assassination attempt against her will. Britain’s MI5 says Iran has “ambitions to kidnap or even kill British or UKbased individuals considered enemies of the regime.”
When it comes to methods, Russia prefers poison. His agents murdered Litvinenko with radioactive polonium. They almost killed another former spy in Britain, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia with Novichok, a nerve agent, in 2018. A North Korea also likes poison killed Kim Jongnam, halfbrother of leader Kim JongunIn 2017, he rubbed VX, another neurotoxin, into his face at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
The US prefers bombs and gunfire. His special forces stormed a fortified house Pakistan It is In 2011, he assassinated alQaeda leader Osama bin Laden. An American drone killed his successor Ayman alZawahiri in Kabul in 2022. Another drone was eliminated Qassem Suleimanithe commander of the Quds Force, Iran’s foreign operations unit, at Baghdad airport in 2020.
All this despite the fact that in 1961 President John Kennedy (later murdered himself) said to an adviser who disapproved of the practice, “We can’t get involved in something like this or we’ll all be targets.” But the US was certainly involved in something like this in the early years of the Cold War.
Kim Jongnam (left), halfbrother of North Korean dictator Kim Jongun (right): North Koreans also like to use poison and rubbed Nam’s face with VX, a nerve agent, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in 2017 Photo: Shizuo Kambayashi and Wong Maye / AP
Revelations about Washington’s secret attempts to assassinate leaders such as Cuban Fidel Castro (unsuccessful) and Dominican Rafael Trujillo (successful) triggered retaliation. In 1976, thenU.S. President Gerald Ford issued an executive order declaring that no member of the U.S. government “shall participate in or conspire to commit murder.”
Murders abroad are still commonplace. Today, says Luca Trenta of Swansea University in Wales, autocracies use covert action to achieve plausible or often implausible deniability. But democracies like the US try to cloak “targeted killings” with a veil of plausible legality, especially when they kill suspected terrorists.
The UN Charter requires all members to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.” At the same time, however, it recognizes “the inherent right to individual or collective selfdefense in the event of an armed attack.”
International human rights lawyers take a restrictive view. In peacetime, assassinations and targeted killings are illegal. In time of war, these operations may be permitted if they are consistent with the laws of war. Ukraine is targeting senior Russian commanders in the same way the Allies shot down a plane carrying Japanese Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku over the Solomon Islands in 1943.
Satellite image shows attack on Russian base in Sevastopol; Ukraine said the offensive killed a commander in the Black Sea who was later seen on video. Photo: Planet Labs /AP
What about international terrorism, which seems to be somewhere between war and ordinary police work? Mary Ellen O’Connell from the University of Notre Dame in the US argues that there is “no gray area”. Under international law, she says, countries must combat terrorism through law enforcement measures, including international cooperation and extradition; Fatal acts constitute “extrajudicial killings.”
But the USA in particular is striving for greater freedom of action. One possibility was to qualify sovereignty. Military measures are permissible, the Americans argue, if a state “does not have the intention or is unable” to prevent acts of terrorism. On certain occasions they have also designated areas abroad as “areas of active hostilities” where forces can operate more freely.
Another way was to expand the right to selfdefense. One step is to explain that this includes responding to attacks by nonstate actors as well as states. The second is to assert a right to “anticipatory selfdefense,” which allows a country to use force to deter an “imminent” threat of attack. The most widely accepted definition is that the threat should be “immediate and overwhelming, allowing no other choice of means or time for consideration.” But this too was stretched.
Former President in 2001 George W Bush went further and began adopting ideas of anticipation and prevention to justify the use of force even before threats were “fully developed.” The government of Barack Obama it also redefined the meaning of “imminent.” His attorney general, Eric Holder, said the term must take into account not only the proximity of the threat but also the “window of opportunity to act.” Much of this thinking is borrowed Israelwhose Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that in the case of terrorists, “pauses between hostilities are nothing other than preparations for the next hostilities.”
The example of the USA has led to similar easing in Great Britain, Australia and France, says Trenta. But for Professor O’Connell, these narratives and attitudes illustrate a West that grants itself rights that it does not grant to others, “an order based on rules that violate international law.”
Activists burn the Indian flag and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poster in protest after the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Photo: Cole Burston/AFP
India, like progovernment newspapers, could well argue that the Nijjar murder fits Western ideas about counterterrorism. Sikh separatism caused bloodshed in the past, culminating in the 1984 assassination of… Prime Minister Indira Gandhiand in the bombing that brought down an Air India airliner en route from Montreal to London.
Although Sikh violence has subsided, it could flare up again. India claims Nijjar was a terrorist and offered a reward for his capture; His supporters claim the activist was a pacifist. From India’s perspective, the West’s refusal to help contain Sikh separatists poses a threat. However, the Indian government prefers to claim that it had nothing to do with Nijjar’s death. When it comes to policing, cooperation is becoming increasingly difficult as India erodes democratic freedoms.
Developing a long arm for covert operations is not easy; it requires resources and knowledge to track targets, organize assassinations and avoid arrests. Indian spies may think they are emulating American and Israeli agents as necessarily brutal defenders of democracy.
Some even speak of an “Israelization” of the Indian intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). But if RAW is seen as an organization that has moved from mitigating obvious security threats to assassinating political rivals, RAW will become the shadowy, public face of government repression domestically, just like Russian or Saudi spies. Murders can alert the world to the brutality of the regimes that order them. / TRANSLATION BY GUILHERME RUSSO