I’m writing a story. I’ve done as much Googling as possible, but I can’t find an answer to this particular question/scenario/thingy. My hope is to faithfully convey the experience of a veteran coping with PTSD after a single traumatic event. I’ve never been in the military, and the couple vets I know are not reliable sources of information. One doesn’t enjoy discussing his service. The other was Coast Guard/strictly reservist, and my question pertains to active deployment in another branch entirely.
I’m content with minor suspensions of disbelief, and I know I could just make shit up wholesale (I’m not writing nonfiction/a biography, nor is this a main focus of the plot–merely backstory in a novel). All the same, I’d like to have my factual ducks in a row, as factually and duckily as possible. I’m also just burning with curiosity to know how such an ethical dilemma would be handled in the Real World.
All hems, haws, and disclaimers aside: what are the obligations/consequences for military personnel regarding intervention or lack thereof when on shore leave, off-duty and unarmed, in a foreign country that is governed by Sharia law? Specifically, my character was in the Navy. During a loud festival, he and a few shipmates (including his commanding officer) witness a woman attempting to steal some food. The vendor catches her in the act and cuts off her hand on the spot. There’s time to intervene, but nobody does. In my head, it’s similar to the scene in Aladdin. Jasmine would have gotten her hand cut off if nobody intervened on her behalf. The incident is reported up the chain of command after the fact, and none of the men gets in trouble.
Does this jive at all with reality, or is it a Disney-esque fantasy? Any tweaks you would recommend? Any outside resources that would address this topic? Many thanks in advance.
First, I don’t think that this is a Cafe Society question. You’re asking it because you’re writing a story, but the question itself isn’t about a story. You’re looking for real world information. Seems more like GQ or maybe IMHO. But, I’m not a mod.
Second, U.S. military personnel do not have any sort of law enforcement authority or obligations except in specific circumstances. Sailors on shore leave certainly don’t. Whether the sailors were in San Francisco or Agrabah, they wouldn’t have any obligation under the UCMJ to intervene, and no more legal authority to do so than any other random U.S. tourist. They would have an obligation to report it to the proper authorities, but that’s it.
Third, I know you’re specifically asking about the U.S. military personnel, but the whole situation isn’t a Disney-esque fantasy - it’s an Islamophobic one. Unless the Sailors are literally taking shore leave in Agrabah, that’s not how Sharia law works. Individuals do not have the authority to take the law into their own hands and mete out punishments. It would be like having a shop owner in San Francisco grabbing a thief, and then locking the thief up in a closet in his shop for 5-10 years, and none of the natives think twice about it.
As brutal as a literal application of Sharia can be, it is still a law code that requires the accused be arrested by proper authorities, given a trial, and only subjected to punishment after due process. I doubt there’s a law code anywhere, anywhen, in the real world that allows for an aggrieved party to mutilate someone on the spot in retaliation for a crime - the entire point of law codes is exactly to prevent that sort of individual retaliation and make punishment for crimes a communal responsibility.
Finally, back to the U.S. Sailors, if there is a country somewhere in the world where it’s legally permissible for shop owners to cut off the hands of anyone they accuse of being a thief, it would be unrealistic for the Sailors to be allowed to take shore leave there, just for their own safety.
While this is for a story, you’re asking for how it works in the real world. And specifically, you’re asking about the military’s official written policy on the matter, which should be a question of fact. So let’s move this from CS to GQ.
Thanks for the responses, and the thread move. I know very little about the reality of Sharia Law, aside from pop culture depictions.
gdave-your response was very helpful. It’s good to know that off-duty military don’t have the obligations entailed by law enforcement. Based on your words, I believe I can reframe what happened as a localized act of unjustifiable violence (which may end up being colored by retrospective Islamophobia–while less than admirable, it makes sense in terms of characterization for this particular character). Whether or not it’s sanctioned by the governing body in question, a one-off fucked-up incident drowned out by noise and general revelry in a country where you don’t speak the language can (theoretically) happen anywhere.
They could come across a village exercising their own brand of justice on a young girl who was raped and must now be punished. See Woman is sentenced to die 'for being raped' in Pakistan | Daily Mail Online example. In the link, the stoning didn’t occur, but there are examples where villages have carried out such executions, outside of official channels.
Do your soldiers have to be Navy? Have to be on leave? Because even if soldiers were on patrol and came across such a situation, they wouldn’t be allowed to intervene. Deadly force can only be used against combatants or in self-defense, or defense of protected persons or places/buildings. It cannot be used to protect the girl. They could try to ask the people to not stone her, but they’d have no authority to use any kind of force to prevent it. They might call higher HQ to ask for permission to get involved. They’d be told to ignore it and move on.
That might be able to fit the needs of your story.
It depends. And I would be careful about (perhaps apocryphal) stories about US service members witnessing or not witnessing things in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Anyway, the answer would likely vary based on time/place/location. I recall, as part of the Joint Professional Military Education - Phase One curriculum a few years back, there was a case study in the US intervention in Haiti in the 90s, in which US forces initially received poor/unclear guidance on how to respond, or even if they could respond, to Haitian on Haitian violence (whether by the government acting against protesters or routine criminal acts) leading to something like what you may be envisioning with US forces witnessing human rights violations and feeling that they were not allowed to act under the ROE in effect. As it happens (and here I’m thinking back to the case study) new ROE had already been approved that would have allowed US military forces to intervene, but the changes (written by lawyers and statesmen, because international and humanitarian law really is complicated) had not yet been distilled down to bite-sized chunks of information and disseminated to the troops on the ground. The press later covered the change in ROE as being in response to a recent notable incident, but in fact the changes had already been in the works and just made it into action a little too late.
Here’s a contemporary article covering one of the incidents I have in mind, one of the incidents that I believe provoked the case study and the discussion of ROE:
Now with that said, having provided you with a somewhat factual or at least fact-based response, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest, as an actual veteran with PTSD, that perhaps you should reconsider becoming yet another voice claiming to faithfully represent PTSD as experienced by veterans, but without actually having PTSD or being a veteran yourself. I would put it in the same category of misrepresentation, however well-meaning, as doing minimal research (cursory internet) and then writing from the POV of a marginalized group of people, and then going on to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about them in the process.
I said perhaps. There’s the truth, there’s what gets reported, and then there’s what makes it into stories written by the people like the OP. I am most concerned about the latter as maybe not always being super-good representations of the truth.
So, as it happens, I was a US Navy sailor and I actually have been various places in the Middle East, to include 18 months living out in town in Bahrain.
The first question the OP needs to consider to get anything like a factual response is, what country do you envision this happening in? And are you sure that’s the way the law actually works there? Because if you can’t get past that, then it seems you don’t really have a story. FWIW, in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman—at least the parts of those countries that they actually let us go ashore in, generally not deviating outside the major cities and tourist areas—I just don’t see this happening. I once had the opportunity to participate in a naval exercise with Saudi Arabia in which briefs were held ashore on one of their naval bases, but there was no liberty authorized.
I guess what I’m getting at is… I question the plausibility of your scenario as envisioned, and it seems like it relies on stereotypes about Muslims (again, it would help if you could specify which country you envision this taking place in) as much as I fear it might perpetuate stereotypes about veterans with PTSD.
I am not a veteran, but I do have complex PTSD if that helps. It’s possible for people without the condition to depict it well, in my humble and very-well-read opinion. If everyone only wrote what they knew, the world would be full of fairly boring and poorly-executed autobiographies.