The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

Copyright 1999

[...] There is no international army, nor do leading powers want one, and the sole superpower can't be the world's policeman. Legitimate U.S. concerns about sovereignty will dog the operations of an International Criminal Court.[...]

Friday September 17, 1999

POST AND COURIER EDITION

'Crimes of War' demand justice

Trudy Rubin

Events in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor have intensified the debate over the proper international response to war crimes committed inside sovereign states.

Although NATO troops patrol Bosnia and Kosovo, and U.N. forces will soon arrive in East Timor, the issue remains extremely contentious. Western publics may recoil at TV scenes of fleeing civilians but don't want to die to save them. Pundits argue over who should intervene, or what can be legally called an international war crime.

So nothing could be more timely than the appearance of an extraordinary book called "Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know."

This glossy paperback compendium of compelling horrors was co-edited by Newsday's Roy Guttman, who won a Pulitzer prize for uncovering Serbian-run concentration camps in wartime Bosnia, and David Rieff, the prominent chronicler of Bosnia and other humanitarian crises. Their original aim was to provide a handbook for war reporters, laying out key laws on war crimes, then illustrating them with essays and photos from leading journalists who had covered recent conflicts.

But in the end, they expanded their goals to reach a broader audience, producing a beautiful volume about an ugly subject, with stunning graphics and cross-references linking every reported crime to the international law it violates. Example: New York Times correspondent Roger Cohen's eyewitness account of Bosnian Serbs' deportation of Muslims is linked to the relevant Geneva convention article on forcible deportation of civilians.

From A to W, the volume looks at issues ranging from Cambodian genocide to U.S. area bombing (North Vietnam, Iraq); from systematic rape in Rwanda to wanton destruction (by Russia in Chechnya). Essays set out the basics of laws on genocide and war crimes and, importantly, when international law applies to internal armed conflict. The authors include useful Web sites with the relevant legal texts.

You will learn things you didn't know or maybe never wished to know. Example: Legitimate military objectives can include TV stations, railroad lines and bridges, and even, sometimes, water supplies. (This can be applied to the U.S. bombing in Belgrade.)

But the larger purpose of this book goes beyond simple information. It is meant to address the paradox laid out in the foreword by South African judge Richard Goldstone, who was the first prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

"As this century comes to an end humanitarian law and international human rights law have never been more developed," he writes, "yet never before have so many innocent civilians been the victims of war crimes, and never before have human rights been violated more frequently."

The 1949 Geneva Conventions and the additional Protocol I in 1977 were primarily intended to address international conflicts. They didn't foresee the time - after the fall of the Berlin Wall - when superpowers no longer restrained their clients, and internal wars proliferated as old ethnic, religious and regional grievances exploded.

The authors clearly hope their book will advance the debate on humanitarian intervention, which, as Rieff notes, is "at once an immensely powerful and a terribly imprecise idea."

Their volume illustrates the need to clarify this idea and shows that there exists a tenuous legal basis for international intervention inside a country when war crimes are taking place. But recent history demonstrates that most states are, rightly, cautious about throwing the principle of sovereignty to the wind.

The reasons are many: Such intervention can be for bad reasons as well as good. For example, France intervened in Rwanda to help its historic allies, the genocidal Hutus, not the Tutsis.

There is no international army, nor do leading powers want one, and the sole superpower can't be the world's policeman. Legitimate U.S. concerns about sovereignty will dog the operations of an International Criminal Court.

And yet the issue of humanitarian intervention remains on our minds. Reporters will record the horrors of internal wars, which will continue to disturb us, even if the solutions aren't obvious.

Roy Guttman is optimistic: "This is evolving right in front of us. The trend is there that these things are not allowable."

He notes one sign of progress: In East Timor, the international community isn't waiting three years to act as it did in Bosnia.

Rubin is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.