Southcom’s Engagement Program Promotes Human Rights

By Donna Miles

American Forces Press Service

MIAMI  – An active theater engagement program at U.S. Southern Command is making notable progress in promoting respect for human rights within regional militaries, the command’s human rights coordinator reported.

“Throughout our entire area of responsibility, many nations in this region have had a history of human rights abuse in the past 20 or 30 years,” Leana Bresnahan acknowledged in an interview with American Forces Press Service.

Bresnahan credited Southcom’s human rights policy, the first for a U.S. combatant command when it was issued in 1990, and its standup five years later of the first COCOM human rights office, with helping reverse that course.

“This emphasis on human rights is something that is unique for a combatant command,” said Army Maj. Gen. Gerald W. Ketchum, director of Southcom’s theater engagement directorate. “But the reality is that it is integral to everything we do.”

Southcom’s human rights office represents an institutional statement of U.S. values and the command’s commitment to maintaining a robust human rights program in the region, Bresnahan said.

“Human rights are part of our national values, our history, our traditions,” she said. “The bottom line is -- it is what we do as a nation.”

That principle underpins U.S. engagements with countries around the world, and is written into foreign security assistance laws. The so-called Leahy Law, for example, prohibits U.S. military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights with impunity.

“We are prohibited from providing security assistance or any other DOD-funded training to a unit of a foreign national military if there are credible allegations of gross human rights abuse unless there has been effective action to investigate and prosecute those human rights abuses,” Bresnahan said.

That congressional mandate provides the carrot that has helped Southcom inculcate respect for human rights within the region, she noted.

Bresnahan said she’s been encouraged, as the region has put decades of military dictatorship and conflict behind it and embraced democracy, at how open regional partners have been to the human rights message.

The American Convention on Human Rights, for example, established the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to protect and promote human rights, as well as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to enforce these rights.

“The transformation has been amazingly positive, and the militaries serving in these countries today are receptive to the human rights message,” Bresnahan said. “They know that human rights are an issue, and there is a great deal of awareness. They are aware of their responsibilities and open to assistance.”

As part of its charter, Southcom’s human rights office works with regional militaries to help them develop doctrine that encompasses human rights principles and training programs that introduce them to their forces. The staff also works with them to help strengthen their internal control systems and increase cooperation with civilian authorities.

These efforts are particularly important and relevant, Bresnahan said, in the few countries where the governments call on their militaries to help local police forces provide internal security.

Ketchum emphasized that the United States strives to be a facilitator, supporting partners in their efforts and promoting shared values. “We are not dictating what people should be doing,” he said. “We provide forums and minimal resourcing that allows everyone to come together on this issue. We emphasize the importance of it and try to help where we can as they develop their own path for training, for integrating that into institutions, into how they develop their doctrine.”

“And we have had some real success stories in providing support,” he said.

The training focuses at every level, through classroom courses and field training exercise scenarios to senior-level military colleges and seminars.

The Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga., integrates human rights into every course it provides to Latin American mid-level officers and noncommissioned officers every year, Bresnahan said.

Meanwhile, the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington is introducing more human rights into its strategic-level curricula for senior-level officers and civilians. In addition, the Defense Institute of International Legal Studies incorporates respect for human rights into training it provides at the schoolhouse in Newport, R.I., and around the region through its mobile education teams.

But equally important, Bresnahan said, is the troop-level training conducted predominantly by partner-nation military members themselves.

Often the U.S. military members’ biggest contribution, she said, is the example they set. “The respect that partner nation militaries have for the U.S. military is tremendous,” she said. “These guys in uniform are the best messengers you can get. It is very powerful.”

Every member of Southcom’s staff as well as service members traveling or operating in its area of responsibility are required take an online human rights course and carry a pocket-sized card describing the command’s human rights policies. The reverse side covers the so-called “five Rs” of human rights: recognize, refrain, react, record and report.

“They need to recognize what a human rights violation is, refrain from committing a violation, react if they see one being committed by someone else, and if they can’t prevent it, immediately record it and report it up their chain of command,” Bresnahan said.

While acknowledging that some military members initially questioned why they were getting involved in human rights training, she said, “increasingly, our own military personnel are realizing the influence they can have on this issue.”

U.S. State Department and other governmental as well as nongovernmental organizations share that assessment. “They recognize that our military people have a level of influence on other militaries that they might not have,” Bresnahan said.

With recognized successes, Ketchum acknowledged that the mission isn’t yet complete.

In some cases, Southcom can’t support a partner nation because of its human rights record. “Some of our countries are challenged and we really want to help, but human rights remains an issue that is going to have to be discussed and overcome,” he said.

Navy Vice Adm. Joseph D. Kernan, Southcom’s deputy commander, said that’s a challenge the command struggles with as it engages in the region. “Human rights are important, and countries that ask us at the leadership level to come in and work with them know we are going to advocate human rights,” he said.

“And we often advocate strongly for providing support to a country that may have had a long past human rights issue,” Kernan continued. "We remain very sensitive to human rights abuses, but our perspective in some cases is that we would like to work with willing partners and promote human rights through side-by-side engagement.”

“This, as well, affords us the opportunity to build a more expansive partnership across a number of other common interest areas,” he added.

Bresnahan emphasized the increasingly complex security challenges the region’s military forces are being tasked to meet, and warned that promoting respect for human rights is a long-term effort. “One should never assume the war has been won,” she said. “Like freedom itself, respect for human rights requires constant vigilance.”

New Task Force Supports Countertrafficking in Europe

By Donna Miles

American Forces Press Service

STUTTGART, Germany, May 8, 2012 – A new task force at U.S. European Command is helping other U.S. government agencies and their international counterparts confront trafficking in illicit goods and services that officials call a major national security threat to the United States.

Eucom stood up the Joint Interagency Counter Trafficking Center here in September to focus on trafficking in drugs, weapons, humans and other illicit commodities, as well as their financing, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Scraba, the center’s director, told American Forces Press Service.

Its role is to marshal military resources to support a whole-of-government approach to a skyrocketing problem that extends far beyond European borders.

“Europe has become the illicit trafficking intersection of the world,” Scraba said, a transit zone for illicit shipments originating not only in Europe, but also in the Middle East, Asia, and increasingly, South and Central America.

Scraba noted a variety of factors: Europe’s central location, a lucrative cocaine market that pays four to five times the U.S. street value, and increasing challenges traffickers face getting drugs across the southern U.S. border.

“So there is an incredible incentive for drug organizations to expand and open up new franchises in Europe,” Scraba said.

Compounding the challenge, he explained, is the fact that traffickers who once operated independently have aligned their efforts. They see the value of working together as they use the same organized networks to traffic their materials.

The result, Scraba said, is far more sophisticated criminal networks able to operate across national borders. Among the greatest concerns, he said, has been the convergence of drug and terror networks.

All of this contributes to corruption of legitimate governments as well as global financial and trade networks, Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, the Eucom commander, said during an interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service. “It undermines fragile democracies. It has a real human cost.”

Scraba described the step-by-step process that occurs. “Trafficking feeds corruption. And if you have corruption, that leads to instability within the governing process of a country,” he said. “If you then have instability and corruption in the day-to-day governing of a country, then that spreads to regional instability. And regional instability … has the second- and third-order effects of impacting multiple regions, requiring a response by the international community.”

Particularly troubling, Stavridis recently told Congress, is the trafficking networks’ links to terrorism and insurgencies and their ability to undermine stability, security and sovereignty. The same networks that move narcotics, weapons and people also transport terrorist operatives, he said, and this trafficking, regardless of the commodity, bankrolls organized crime, terrorists and insurgents.

For example, drug trafficking through Europe has had a significant impact on security in Afghanistan. The Taliban made more than $150 million in 2009 alone through the sale of opium, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimated in its 2011 World Drug Report. That same year, the U.N. estimated that 75 to 80 metric tons of Afghan heroin reached Central and Western Europe, and another 90 metric tons transited through Central Asia to Russia.

Concerned about this growing threat, Stavridis took the lessons of U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force South in Florida that he previously commanded to create Eucom’s smaller-scale operation from existing resources.

With fewer than 40 staff members, including representatives of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and other U.S. government agencies focused on trafficking, it serves as a “fusion organization” matrixed to other Defense Department and U.S. government agencies. This, Scraba said, leverages military capabilities to help them operate more effectively.

“We are the cog in the wheel” that reaches out to and helps connect the other spokes, he said. That runs from providing translators to monitor known trafficking networks and technology to help federal law enforcement officials to more efficiently inspect shipping containers to teaching police dogs to sniff out drugs or explosives.

Eucom shares intelligence and lessons the military has learned supporting U.S. interagency partners’ counternarcotics efforts in the United States, Scraba said. The command recently ran a conference for 14 partner nations, providing law enforcement communications training and sharing lessons learned in running an operations center.

“This gets at the center of gravity for why we exist: to support our U.S. agency efforts,” Scraba said.

“The bottom line,” he explained, “is that trafficking is a network of networks. And in order for us – the United States and international community – to have the best chance of disrupting and dismantling illicit trafficking, we, too, have to be a network of networks.

“That is the U.S. military, supporting the U.S. interagency and then collaborating with international organizations that share the same concern and have the same objectives with regards of disrupting and dismantling illicit trafficking,” he added.

Just eight months after it stood up, the new Eucom task force is getting a warm reception from interagency and international partners alike, who recognize the contribution it can make to their countertrafficking efforts.

All recognize the extent of the problem, Scraba said, and the need to work together to confront it.

“There is no question that it is a problem, and there is no question that this is a team sport and that it requires the international community working together to combat this,” he said.

That’s essential to disrupting trafficking and making Europe inhospitable to traffickers, he said. Americans should care that it succeeds, he added, because it’s a matter of “invest now, save later.”

“It is clear and documented that trafficking distorts economies. It erodes sovereignties. It corrupts democracies. It accelerates extremism. It weakens allies and feeds terrorism,” he said.

“All that adds up to a threat to the U.S. homeland,” he continued. “And that, from a national security perspective, is the ‘So what?’ as far as why trafficking is such a significant issue here in Europe.”

Holocaust Survivor Shares Harrowing Story

By Margaret Kenyon-Ely, Naval Supply Systems Command Public Affairs

PHILADELPHIA (NNS) -- This year's theme of "Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue" hit home for military and civilian personnel who attended the annual Holocaust Days of Remembrance program on the Naval Support Activity (NSA) Philadelphia April 19 after hearing about a survivor's first-hand experience.

"Why do we tell the story? We want to make sure we remember and curtail future happenings of what happened in the Holocaust," said keynote speaker Shelly M. Zeiger, whose life experiences and journey shaped him into a successful entrepreneur and well-connected businessman.

At the age of eight in 1940s Poland, Zeiger and his mother, father and brother sought refuge with a family friend, and lived in a small space beneath a cellar for 15 months before being liberated by the Soviets in 1944.

"The world had changed and became a nightmare in 1941. The Germans burned our only Synagogue and Torah, and made all the Jewish people watch," said Zeiger.

"It was absolutely nightmarish to see how cruel people could be. I saw many atrocities perpetrated on human beings," he added as he described life in the Nazi-created ghetto and the slaughter of Jewish men after they were forced to clean the equipment and tanks of German soldiers when they first arrived in his small town.

"By making a personal commitment to participate in the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, each and every one of us is making a promise to never forget what happened in places like Auschwitz-one of the largest concentration camps housing the victims of the Holocaust-and a promise to never let something so vicious to ever repeat itself in history," said DLA Troop Support Commander Rear Adm. David F. Baucom in his opening remarks.

Baucom also recalled how his visit to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. forever changed his life.

"I grew a lot that day back in 1994. I learned to respect humans of every persuasion... It was an absolute turning point in my life. I will never take life for granted. I will never forget the Holocaust - how horrible humans can treat each other," he added.

NAVSUP Weapon Systems Support Operations Director Capt. Duke Heinz, presented a Commander's Coin to Zeiger after Baucom recognized the guest speaker with a token of appreciation from DLA Troop Support.

A field activity of the Naval Supply Systems Command, NAVSUP Weapon Systems Support (NAVSUP WSS) is the U.S. Navy's supply chain manager providing worldwide support to the aviation, surface ship, and submarine communities. NAVSUP WSS provides Navy, Marine Corps, joint and allied forces with products and services that deliver combat capability through logistics. There are more than 2,000 civilian and military personnel employed at its two Pennsylvania sites. The NAVSUP WSS Philadelphia site supports aircraft, while its Mechanicsburg site supports ships and submarines.

Statement by the Army on Photographs Published by Rolling Stone

“The photos published by Rolling Stone are disturbing and in striking contrast to the standards and values of the United States Army.  Like those published by Der Spiegel, the Army apologizes for the distress these latest photos cause.  Accountability remains the Army’s paramount concern in these alleged crimes.  Accordingly, we are in the midst of courts-martial, and we continue to investigate leads.  We must allow the judicial process to continue to unfold and be mindful that the government has distinct obligations to the victims and to the accused, which include compliance with the court's protective order to ensure a fair trial.  That said, the Army will relentlessly pursue the truth, no matter where it leads, both in and out of court, no matter how unpleasant it may be, no matter how long it takes.  As an Army, we are troubled that any soldier would lose his ‘moral compass’ as one soldier said during his trial.  We will continue to do whatever we need to as an institution to understand how it happened, why it happened and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.”