HUMAN SHIELD

noun (Politics) (War and Weaponry) A person or group of people placed in the line of fire so as to fend off any kind of attack. Etymology: Formed by compounding: a shield made up of a human or humans. History and Usage: The idea of the human shield has been known for some time, and the phrase itself had appeared in print before the end of the seventies. In the late eighties, there was a concentration of uses in connection with the situation in Lebanon. The greatest concentration of all, though, came in 1990-1 with President Saddam Hussein's holding of Western citizens in Kuwait and Iraq, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990; some of these people were transferred to military and industrial installations in order to dissuade Western forces from attacking. The human shield policy in Iraq was reversed in December 1990 and most of the hostages were allowed to return to their own countries, but the term human shield was by that time very familiar both in the UK and in the US, and continued to be used in news reports in relation to the holding of prisoners-of-war in the Gulf, and in other contexts. For example, when the Red Army arrived in Lithuania in mid January 1991 to seek out draft-dodgers there and take control of strategic buildings in Vilnius, Lithuanians were described as forming a human shield to defend those buildings. There is some variation in usage as regards whether it is the whole group of people who are thought of as forming a single human shield, or whether each individual person is regarded as a human shield (in which case the term can be used in the plural). Thirty-nine right-wing French MPs arrived yesterday from Paris to join the 'human shield' around Gen Aoun, who also received the unexpected 11th-hour support of 6,000 'Lebanese forces', or Phalange militiamen. Financial Times 30 Nov. 1989, section 1, p. 4 Forty-one Britons and a number of other Europeans in Kuwait have been rounded up by the Iraqis, apparently as the first of the thousands of foreigners who were waiting last night to be made a human shield for military and other installations. Daily Telegraph 20 Aug. 1990, p. 1 Americans...reportedly were taken from the Mansour-Melia Hotel in Baghdad on the night of Oct. 29 and are now presumed to be 'human shields' at an undisclosed strategic site in Iraq. Washington Post 1 Nov. 1990, section A, p. 1 See also guestage