#3
Moscow Times
April 4, 2002
Civilized Approach Is Best
By Pavel Felgenhauer

The unthinkable brutality of the armed conflict in the Middle East generates moral outrage and a feeling of hopelessness, since apparently nothing can put a stop to the vicious circle of violence. However, the problem is not specific to the region: In recent years, wars have tended to become increasingly barbaric.

There have been numerous attempts by the international community to uphold civilized rules of military engagement, such as the Hague and Geneva conventions. In response to mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, two international war crimes tribunals were created. But the track record of these tribunals has been checkered.

The Rwanda rebels, after they took power and stopped the genocide, invaded the neighboring Congo and have been fighting a dirty war of their own for years. Serious war crimes are constantly reported from the Congo, but the international community and the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda are looking the other way.

Today the arch war criminal of the Balkans, former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, is at last facing justice. Serbia has been cooperating with the tribunal, but many Serbs claim, not without reason, that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was created to punish only Serbs.

Of course, not only Serbs have been indicted, but international justice as practiced by the ICTY is still clearly lopsided. Not a single Albanian has been indicted, though terrible crimes were also committed against innocent Serb civilians in Kosovo. Today, some of the Albanian mass murderers are part of the new Kosovo parliament and local administration, closely cooperating with official representatives of the international community in the region. NATO peacekeepers in many cases turned a blind eye or even supported the ethnic cleansing by forming convoys to grant the Serbs one-way passage out of Kosovo.

During the NATO air campaign in the Balkans in 1999, more than 600 civilians were killed. In some instances, like the bombing of the Serb state television center in Belgrade, NATO commanders deliberately attacked civilian targets in brazen and intentional violation of international conventions. Well-respected international human rights organizations have repeatedly called on the chief prosecutor of the ICTY, Carla del Ponte, to indict the NATO military for war crimes, but she has refused, although the crimes are obvious and clearly in the tribunal's jurisdiction.

A situation in which some criminals are punished while others are perceived to be immune is in some respects much worse than no justice at all.

In its present war on terrorism in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has committed a string of much worse crimes than in 1999: deliberately and repeatedly attacking International Red Cross compounds, bombing villages into oblivion together with their populations, severely mistreating prisoners of war, taking part in mass killings of prisoners, and so on.

When presented with facts of flagrant war crimes, U.S. officials have simply shrugged them off without much comment. The U.S. military is above the law and, not surprisingly, others are ready to follow their example.

Today, in Chechnya and Palestine, Russian and Israeli soldiers are constantly committing atrocious war crimes -- slaughtering scores of innocent people, applying the harshest collective punishment to entire nations in the name of fighting terrorism. Some time ago a three-star Russian general told me: "Yes, we are committing war crimes in Chechnya, and so what? War in itself is a crime, and the Geneva Convention is never observed by anyone in real armed conflict."

This week was the 20th anniversary of the Falklands' war between Britain and Argentina. An old-fashioned war, it began and ended without leaving a trail of hatred sufficient to fuel fighting indefinitely. This was a war in which the Hague and Geneva conventions were more or less observed by both sides.

When soldiers maraud in Chechnya or shoot civilians and journalists in Palestine, their crimes inevitably bounce back on them and the countries they represent. The Geneva Convention is not the paperwork of misinformed pacifists. The best way to a clean and fast military victory is civilized, even-handed ethical conduct -- a notion that has apparently been forgotten by the military of the "civilized" world.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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