From the Corner: Conflict, Woes and Call for Expanding IHL (Story about Victims in Unregulated and Overlooked Conflicts)

Abstract

The emergence of IHL and the efforts of humanitarian agencies like ICRC to strengthen the same are highly appreciative. For not only it attempts to protect and help victims of armed conflicts but its success for telling the warring groups that innocent people suffer burns of your politics. Nonetheless, this paper argues, the contemporary wars are no more ‘world’. Unlike the world wars on which backdrop the IHL emerged, the existing wars are covered as these are localized under the name ‘ethnic conflicts’. The burns of the victims, however, remain the same as these are unregulated, often overlooked violence which side lined humanitarian norms. The hard fact is that there is hardly any country in the world without ethnic conflict though the patterns of conflict differ. By narrating the story of victims of a specific ethnic conflict in Dima Hasao district in India’s Northeast, the paper claims that  when it comes to such politically motivated conflicts, IHL as it exists today, can do little and thus, victims hardly get any respite from it. In such contexts, neutral humanitarian organizations should be given more freedom on the one hand to expand their boundaries and on the other to meaningfully carry the ideals of IHL forward.