This article from the Jerusalem Post touches briefly upon the ICC in the context of reviewing Roy Gutman and David Rieff's new book on war crimes: the Post has the following to say on the ICC:

Although there are ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, there are no standing enforcement mechanisms for violations of the Geneva agreements. A treaty to form an international criminal court, approved last year in Rome by 120 nations, would, if ratified, create a permanent tribunal to prosecute genocide and other war crimes.

But ratification appears unlikely. The Rome treaty was opposed by Israel, the US, Libya, Algeria, Qatar and China. Israel objected to the Arab states' insertion of an article under which settlements would constitute "war crimes," while the US insisted that only sovereign states or the UN Security Council had the authority to refer cases for prosecution.

See below for the full article.

The Jerusalem Post

Friday, August 27, 1999,

Legal, illegal, and criminal warfare

BY Marilyn Henry

CRIMES OF WAR: What the Public Should Know by Roy Gutman and David Rieff, editors. New York, London, W.W. Norton. 399 pp. $ 19.95.

War crimes are matters of law. And some acts can be abhorrent, but not necessarily illegal.

Reporters out in the field, filing stories from Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya and Kosovo, were ill-equipped to characterize the atrocities they saw. This was a critical problem because their dispatches were central in prompting public outrage and setting the tone of the political debate about how to confront human rights abuses and to pursue war criminals. For instance, it was reports of the offenses in Bosnia that impelled the UN Security Council to establish the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

"The term - war crimes - evokes a litany of horrific images: concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, execution of prisoners, rape and bombardment of cities," according to Steven R. Ratner, a professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin, and the co-author of Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy. "These images correspond in many ways to the legal definitions of the term, but international law draws lines that do not in all ways match our sense of the most awful behavior, " says Ratner.

Some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in Kosovo and hundreds of thousands were displaced in 11 weeks this year. This happened during a war. But what was happening? Which casualties were civilians or combatants? Did the massive movement of civilians - of refugees - mean that people were being expelled, or were they fleeing from a war zone?

"Understanding what is going on in the midst of all the havoc, confusion and disinformation is anything but simple," write Roy Gutman and David Rieff in the preface to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know. "And

almost nothing in their training prepares reporters to be able to make the necessary distinctions between legal, illegal and criminal acts.

"Is it a war crime under international law or a horrible, destructive, but legal act of war when one sees a hospital being shelled in Sarajevo, a humanitarian aid convoy blocked at a checkpoint on the Dagestan-Chechen border, or combat in which no prisoners are taken in Sri Lanka?" ask Rieff and Gutman.

In time for the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions this summer, Gutman (a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Newsday) and Rieff achieved an unusual collaboration of reporters and scholars and produced Crimes of War.

The book, intended as a handbook for reporters, relief workers and the public, includes 140 articles by dozens of journalists, legal scholars and military-law experts. Among them are Micha Bar-Am, Joel Greenberg, Amira Hass, Daoud Kuttab, Gideon Levy and Benny Morris. It is an extraordinary reference work that guides readers through the terms, content and background of major war crimes and international humanitarian law, and of many of their violations. There are also striking accounts on recent

conflicts written by outstanding journalists. These include Sydney Schanberg's reporting on Cambodia (which is widely known because of the film The Killing Fields); Roger Cohen writing on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and Ed Vulliamy on concentration camps.

The book is organized in an alphabetical format that is both logical and irritating because items are not arranged according to the context. So, for example, "imprisonment of the civilian population" is followed by "incitement to genocide."

While it is simple, for instance, to find a section defining "ethnic cleansing" or "guerrillas," it is impossible to easily locate every specific use of those terms in the text. Nor is there a guide to, say, every reference to Israel.

The book, a paperback encyclopedia, is illustrated with more than 100 chilling news photos.

Human rights comprise a contentious topic, and there are items that will irritate readers who oppose any suggestion that Israel could have committed rights abuses or war crimes. There was consternation in some segments of the Jewish community after a recent event at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The museum, grappling with its irreconcilable roles of being both a federal and a "Jewish" institution, was accused of "Israel- bashing" when it hosted a forum to introduce the book.

For example, Morris, a historian at Ben-Gurion University and a former Jerusalem Post reporter, writes that there was "a variety of ethnic cleansing of Arab areas by Jews" in 1948 and that Shi'ite Hizbullah suspects were tortured in South Lebanon.

However, there is also a cogent and balanced review of Israel's resistance to the applicability of the Geneva agreements in the territories.

GUTMAN and Rieff's book is intended to educate the public about war crimes and international humanitarian law. Knowing the laws highlights the feebleness of enforcement.

The concept of war crimes dates back to the ancient Greeks. These crimes are violations of the laws of war for which people can be held individually accountable.

The 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg defined war crimes as "violations of the laws or customs of war," including murder, ill- treatment or deportation of civilians in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; killing hostages; plundering public or private property; and wanton destruction of municipalities. Violations of international humanitarian law were considered war crimes

under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Prosecution of war criminals has been very weak, and appears unlikely to change. For instance, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, recently charged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic with war crimes, although it is hard to imagine that NATO is making a serious effort to apprehend him.

Although there are ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, there are no standing enforcement mechanisms for violations of the Geneva agreements. A treaty to form an international criminal court, approved last year in Rome by 120 nations, would, if ratified, create a permanent tribunal to prosecute genocide and other war crimes.

But ratification appears unlikely. The Rome treaty was opposed by Israel, the US, Libya, Algeria, Qatar and China. Israel objected to the Arab states' insertion of an article under which settlements would constitute "war crimes," while the US insisted that only sovereign states or the UN Security Council had the authority to refer cases for prosecution.

Israel has mixed sentiments about the Geneva agreements and seems to have reason to fear their abuse. Last spring, the UN General Assembly voted to call, on July 15, an unprecedented Geneva Convention conference. The target was Israel, for settlement activity, and it was understood that this was a political ploy to coerce the Netanyahu government to advance the peace process. That conference was held; Israel called the event a farce.

Operating without a procedure, an agenda or a real goal, it opened and adjourned in less than an hour. In the process, it undercut international humanitarian law, because it showed that the hallowed Geneva agreements could be manipulated for political purposes.

Politics aside, the book's editors note that "the laws of war are frustratingly counterintuitive." International humanitarian law "does not address the causes or origins of a particular war, or which side was right and which side was wrong, only the method by which it is fought," Gutman and Rieff write.

"So it is entirely possible, for example, for an aggressor to stage a war of conquest in accordance with the Geneva Convention or for a defender to commit war crimes in a legitimate war of self-defense."

The wars at the end of the 20th century are increasingly not battles between soldiers with codes of honor, but between fighters, many of whom are children.

And the primary victims are civilians. In World War I, the proportion of military to civilian casualties was 90 to 10, Gutman and Rieff write. Today, that is reversed: for every 10 military casualties there are some 90 civilian deaths.

Knowledge of war crimes and vigilance is required to contend with what Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa calls the "paradox." "Humanitarian law and international rights law have never been more developed," writes Goldstone, the first chief prosecutor of the Yugoslavia tribunal. "Yet never before have so many innocent civilians been the victims of war crimes, and never before have human rights been violated more frequently."