Accompanying damage

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In the legal system , ancillary damage describes the damage to other rights (for example, obligations of guilt and conduct) of a person affected by a main damage. If the accompanying damage was caused by poor performance , it is also referred to as consequential damage .

As edge damage , collateral damage or collateral damage (of . English collateral damage from lat. Collateralis "laterally adjacent") is in the fire service - and rescue services called that damage was only caused by the rescue operation, but it was essential to achieve the objective, for example, a water damage when extinguishing a fire, a field damage at the entrance to a field, a owed by the circumstances, not protective rescue technique (for example, emergency rescue ) caused infirmity or an emergency amputation .

In colloquial usage, the term collateral damage is also often used in situations that do not result in death or injuries, but in which innocent people are harmed in some way - especially when “collective measures” are necessary to uncover possible offenses and / or prevent them act, e.g. B. Alcohol controls on the road, which also include non-offenders.

Civilian land mine victims

The military technical term accompanying damage or collateral damage describes unintentional or possibly "accepted" damage of all kinds occurring in the spatial environment of a target. The term collateral damage is mostly used in a military context due to inaccurate or oversized use of weapons in non-civilian actions. In contrast to accompanying damage, intended damage is assigned to the military target definition.

Accompanying damage in a more or less critical form occurs in almost every armed conflict, for example

Use as a military term

Legal classification

According to international humanitarian law , it must always be ensured that the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects are spared from accompanying damage. An attack that is accompanied by accompanying damage is contrary to international law if the accompanying damage was foreseeable and:

  1. if it could have been avoided through the application of practically possible precautionary measures in the choice of the means and methods of attack, or
  2. if the associated losses among the civilian population, the wounding of civilians, the damage to civilian objects or several such consequences together are out of proportion to the concrete and immediate military advantage expected.

Accordingly, the conscious acceptance of an accompanying damage can be in accordance with international law if it can only be avoided by renouncing the attack and if the attack can be expected to result in a correspondingly weighty military advantage. The principle of proportionality here may require a weighing of human lives, possibly in larger numbers, against the predicted military advantage.

Even in the case of attacks that are not contrary to international law and through which the civilian population may be affected, an effective warning must precede, if the given circumstances permit.

These principles are laid down in Articles 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions .

An intentional attack with knowledge of the accompanying damage is a war crime according to Art. 8, Paragraph 2, Letter b, No. iv of the Rome Statute if it is contrary to international law according to the criteria mentioned and if it is also "clear" that it is not in any Proportional to the military advantage.

Consequences of accompanying damage

It is the aim of most modern armed forces to rule out accompanying damage as completely as possible, because it could damage one's own reputation, hinder the planned progress of one's own military action or stand in the way of a later policy that is being considered.

Accompanying damage is often covered up by one's own political propaganda or portrayed as minor and unavoidable, while opposing propaganda emphasizes, exaggerates or even invents it.

Serious accompanying damage leads to the formation of an enemy image, which can prolong a conflict, are used for opposing propaganda, and continue to turn the population in the target area against the enemy.

The frequent statement that collateral damage to civilian facilities is intentional is therefore usually not tenable. On the contrary, they can even finally doom a military action to failure, such as B. during the UN intervention in Somalia ; After some accompanying damage, UN soldiers, especially those from the USA, were no longer perceived and attacked as neutral but as opponents.

In wars since the Second World War it has been proven time and again that a terror strategy does not lead to intimidation and abandonment of the enemy, but on the contrary welds the enemy together again and annoys them.

A Vietnamese woman with her 14-year-old son who is mentally and physically severely disabled. In 2002 there were around 100,000 disabled children in Vietnam whose congenital malformations are attributed to their parents being exposed to Agent Orange .
Effects of the atomic bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

criticism

The use of the term can be viewed as problematic if instead of the specific description of serious consequences (deaths and / or injuries, serious damage to civil property) the terms collateral damage or accompanying damage are used as a weakening.

These terms, which come from specialist military vocabulary, are used by political leaders in a targeted manner in order not to have to name the damage in public (e.g. the death of civilians, the destruction of their belongings) as in the case of censorship , in the hope of not having to name the damage in public that these are not perceived as such. A targeted choice of words creates a euphemism in which no one can be accused of having spread misinformation. The euphemism serves to reduce the responsibility and thus the guilt of those responsible for the military operation. During the Kosovo War , the term was mainly due to the NATO - spokesman Jamie Shea circulated - - to his later regret.

Bad word of the year

“Collateral damage” was voted the unword of 1999 in Germany. The jury named two factors as justification: On the one hand, the fact that the media adopted this "only half-translated" word (→ Anglicism ) from NATO reporting on NATO interventions in the former Yugoslavia had an impressive effect due to the difficulty of understanding it, which distract from the true content of the concept ; secondly, the use of this word - especially when translated literally - trivializes "military crimes" as an unimportant minor matter.

Contrasting meaning

The opposite meaning ( antonym ) is accompanying benefit or collateral benefit , a disguising description for a military action, for which ostensibly humanistic arguments are given, but which are intended to indirectly protect the interests of the military deploying power - for example the military intervention of the French armed forces on January 11, 2013 in Mali , which was officially supposed to protect the Malinese people from Islamist leadership in the country. Indirectly, however, specific French interests were also protected: the protection of French uranium mining in neighboring Niger and the uranium deposits in Mali itself, which are still about to be exploited.

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: collateral damage  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Fikentscher, Andreas Heinemann: law of obligations . 10th edition. de Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89949-147-5 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  2. ↑ Heck, Linde, Springer, Südmersen: Technical assistance in truck accidents - technical and medical rescue of trapped people, handling of heavy road vehicles involved in an accident . Ed .: Cimolino. ecomed, Landsberg 2003, ISBN 3-609-68661-8 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  3. ↑ Magedah Shabo: Techniques of Propaganda and Persuasion . Prestwick House, 2008, ISBN 978-1-58049-874-6 , p. 134.
  4. ↑ Language of Politics (I): Jamie Shea and the collateral damage - Germany. In: stern.de. Retrieved April 3, 2016 .
  5. ^ The Unworts from 1991 to 1999. In: www.unwortdesjahres.net. Technical University of Darmstadt, archived from the original on March 25, 2016 ; accessed on March 23, 2016 .
  6. ↑ a b Language critical campaign Unwort des Jahres: Unwort des Jahres since 1991. Horst Dieter Schlosser (speaker of the jury), archived from the original on March 12, 2016 ; Retrieved December 6, 2008 : “Playing down the killing of innocent people as a minor matter; Official NATO term in the Kosovo war "
  7. ↑ a b c Language-critical action Unword of the year: Unword of the year 1999 - collateral damage. Horst Dieter Schlosser (speaker of the jury), accessed on December 6, 2008 (the corresponding, detailed explanation).
  8. ↑ Thomas Schmid: Humanitarian interventions are a chimera. The French invasion of Mali is of course motivated by interest . In: Berliner Zeitung . January 26, 2013, p. 29.