The Law of the Battlefield
MURPHY, RICHARD MCGILL
The Law of the Battlefield Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know Edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff Norton. 399 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Editorial director;...
...All the more need for this book...
...The underlying premise of humanitarian law is that there should be a set of standards to distinguish war crimes from legal acts of war, and a set of mechanisms to prosecute war crimes...
...Thus Don Oberdorfer's entry on extrajudicial executions faces the legendary AP photograph of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Vietcong officer during the Tet offensive in 1968...
...But they have been enforced too rarely and selectively...
...For the past three years RTLM's director has been in the custody of the ad hoc International War Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda...
...Rwanda in general and RTLM in particular illustrate the complex, imperfect relationship between international humanitarian law and modern-day tribal warfare...
...Committee to Protect Journalists In April 1994, the Thousand Hills Radio Television (RTLM) station in Rwanda began telling its Hutu listeners to kill ethnic Tutsis, whom it called "cockroaches...
...As Hutu death squads farmed out across the country, RTLM and other stations urged them to keep on killing until the last Tutsi was dead...
...Scholarly explication alternates with case studies...
...After World War II, an international security architecture emerged that attempted to delineate precisely what may and may not be legally done in warfare...
...During those three months no Western government or international body lifted a finger to stop the killing...
...Together, these laws constitute one of the great achievements of human civilization...
...Because each essay links to many others, the book reads much like the World Wide Web...
...By late May, when the Security Council finally determined that there was indeed a genocide going on in Rwanda, it was too late for the UN to intervene...
...In each essay, boldface key words send the reader to related entries...
...International press freedom groups protested the attack...
...For this impressively edited volume, the noted war correspondent Roy Gutman and intellectual gadfly David Rieff enlisted journalists and lawyers to elucidate the basic elements of international humanitarian law...
...For instance, journalists are not considered neutral observers...
...At least nine people were killed, 18 or more were injured...
...The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the two Additional Protocols of 1977 further distinguished legal acts of war from illegal behavior in wartime...
...In June, a Tutsi force made up of exiles fought its way into Rwanda and stopped the massacre...
...Indeed, for all of its graphic impact, literary appeal and intellectual rigor, the design seems web-inspired— and appropriate selections can even be found at www.crimesofwar.org...
...Until modern states are prepared to cede more of their sovereignty to international jurists, there is little reason to expect the laws of war to determine battlefield behavior...
...He is charged with incitement to genocide, which is a crime under Article 3 of the Genocide Convention...
...The Hutus launched a clandestine radio station in Zaire, using the same slogans to incite hatred against Tutsis in Burundi...
...Yet most current warfare is not between disciplined, uniformed soldiers who eachhave a copy of the Geneva Conventions in their hip pocket...
...Meanwhile, Western diplomatsjumped through semantic hoops to avoid referring to the massacre as the genocide it plainly was, because doing so would have bound their governments to stop it under the Genocide Convention of 1948...
...Reporters on the scene documented several instances of United Nations "peacekeeping" troops watching while death squads hacked defenseless men, women and children to pieces in front of their eyes...
...Enforcement remains the weak link: The tribunals formed to prosecute Balkan and Rwandan war criminals are an encouraging but tiny first step, as is the new International Criminal Court...
...The objective is often criminal on its face: to expel, if not exterminate, all members of a given ethnic or religious community...
...The Taliban fighters who executed an Iranian state news service representative in northern Afghanistan last August were probably not aware of this distinction...
...As illustrations, the editors have collected iconic images of 20th century warfare...
...As Gutman and Rieff put it in the Preface: "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...
...Nor were the Revolutionary United Front rebels who murdered eight journalists in Sierra Leone in January...
...Crimes of War, however, was originally conceived as a handy reference for journalists in the field, who usually lack the legal background needed to understand whether particular acts of brutality qualify as war crimes...
...It portrayed their deaths as "collateral damage," which is permitted under the laws of war (unlike "indiscriminate attacks," which are not...
...Intervention was not "part of their mandate," the troops explained...
...By then between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandans, including moderate Hutus, had died...
...You have to work harder," urged the announcers...
...Messy civil conflicts waged between untrained irregulars, many of them illiterate children, are more common...
...Consequently, they should be treated as prisoners of war when captured, not spies (read, shot), as William A. Orme explains in the entry on "Journalists, protection of...
...The answer in all three cases is "war crime...
...The section on genocide, for example, refers you to "Rwanda," "crimes against humanity," "ethnic cleansing,' and "Cambodia...
...The graves are not full...
...It is important to know what the Geneva Conventions say, and actually mean, because the distinction between "war crime" and "legal act of war" is not always intuitively obvious...
...In 1948, the Genocide Convention defined the worst offense in its code as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group...
...But whilejournalists are not legitimate targets, radio and television stations are —along with military-industrial, military research and communications facilities, infrastructure, and energy-related objectives...
...NATO'S response— arguably correct under Geneva—was that the RTS employees were propagandists...
...They were tailored for accredited war correspondents attached to organized fighting forces...
...The Nuremberg Tribunals of 1945 introduced the concept of a crime against humanity that can be tried anywhere in the world, not only in the country where it occurred...
...The book contains several extraordinarily well-written pieces—among them Mark Huband's passionate essay on the Rwandan genocide, Sidney Schanberg's eyewitness account of the Khmer Rouge's lunatic program to extirpate all traces of Cambodian modernity, and Roger Cohen's lucid report on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia...
...Take the statutes related to the treatment of journalists...
...they are equated with "integral, albeit nonuniformed, participants in the greater military enterprise...
...The standards exist, and modern media technology permits rapid mass distribution of information...
...Although the new Tutsi government in Rwanda has also closed down RTLM, its message continues...
...Whether better informed combatants would have acted differently is another question, especially given the lax application of the law...
...Because the laws of war are often honored in the breach, or are distorted to serve the political interests of one side, or simply have not kept up with the times, there tends to be a substantial gap between humanitarian ideals and the realities on today's battlefields...
...This was NATO's rationale for a predawn air attack last April 22 that destroyed the newsroom and studios of the state-run Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade...
...The logic is that they can usually be put to military use and are essential for the functioning of any modern military in time of conflict," according to Gaby Rado's useful chapter on "Legitimate Military Targets...
Vol. 82 • October 1999 • No. 12
