Interesting little piece
CSM
AMMAN, JORDAN – From Baghdad come angry accusations that US and British planes are deliberately killing civilians by targeting their bombs at marketplaces, homes, and food warehouses.
From the front lines come reports of Iraqis in civilian clothes opening fire after waving white flags, of hospitals used as arms depots, of Iraqi forces shooting from behind human shields, and a suicide bomber in a taxi who killed four American soldiers
American TV audiences have been shocked by pictures of dead soldiers and of captured service men and women giving their names and home towns. That is a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of war, which protect prisoners of war from being exposed to "public curiosity."
Arab viewers have been more outraged by graphic images of children who died in two explosions in Baghdad last week, one of which killed 55 civilians, according to the Iraqi authorities.
US officials have denied responsibility for the first blast, and say they are investigating the second. But even if they were caused by US missiles, they would not constitute a war crime unless they were deliberate attacks on civilians, or the result of "reckless or negligent" targeting, says Louise Doswald-Beck, president of the International Commission of Jurists.
Dismissing Iraqi claims that they were intentional attacks on civilian targets, US Gen. Stanley McChrystal said Saturday that as far as he knew, only seven Tomahawk cruise missiles had missed their targets, and that none of them had exploded.
"The Americans put a tremendous amount of thought into targeting," says Mr. Gutman. "They lawyer every target" to ensure that it is a legitimate military objective.
US military spokesmen have insisted that President Saddam Hussein has used TV as a "command and control" mechanism to direct his forces, which would make broadcast facilities a legitimate target under international law.
Independent observers, however, have voiced suspicions that the real intent of the attacks was to put an end to Iraqi officials' regular and morale-boostingly confident appearances on Iraqi TV.
"The bombing of a television station simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda is unacceptable," Amnesty International's director for international law, Claudio Cordone, said last week. "It is a civilian object, and thus protected."
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told ABC television Sunday, "A people fighting an invasion has the right to fight by all means to defend itself. When you fight an invader with whatever means are available to you, you are not a terrorist, you are a hero."
That is "bad law," comments Professor Roberts. "Even if a war is completely illegal, the laws of war apply equally to both sides."
Especially disturbing are reports from correspondents with frontline units that Iraqi Army troops and irregular fedayeen fighters are using civilians to defend themselves, either forcing them to stay in buildings where fighters have holed up, or pushing them in front of their lines.
Such actions would be a war crime under the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which says that "the presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations."
Waving a white flag and then opening fire on the enemy is also forbidden both by customary law and by the Protocol, which brands such behavior "perfidy."
Apart from anything else, Gutman points out, "it makes it impossible for anyone else to surrender" if advancing troops no longer trust the white flag as a symbol of parley.
The use of civilian clothes, either by regular troops or fedayeen, however, is not illegal, as US spokesmen have suggested, according to experts in international humanitarian law.
The Geneva Conventions treat irregulars and volunteer militia as legitimate combatants, entitled to POW privileges, so long as they are part of an organized chain of command, carry their weapons openly, and wear "a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" to distinguish them from civilians.
"If they are quietly putting grenades under their civilian jackets and throwing them at the last moment," however, "that is perfidy," points out Ms. Doswald-Beck.
The legal and moral picture is muddied by the fact that neither Iraq nor the US has ratified the 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, nor the 1999 Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court (ICC), which will try war crimes. These are the legal instruments governing most of the incidents alleged to have occurred so far during the war.
Washington's "outright hostility to the ICC certainly does undermine its claim to adhere to the most rigorous standards of international law," argues Richard Dicker, a humanitarian law expert with Human Rights Watch.
At the same time, he points out, the US Army has incorporated almost all the provisions of the Protocol into its Land Warfare manual, one of the most detailed documents of its kind.
CSM