War Crimes Prosecution Watch

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)

Official Website of the Extraordinary Chambers
Official Website of the Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force
Official Website of the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT)

UN envoys slam Cambodia over genocide judge's transfer
Associated Press via The International Herald Tribune
August 23, 2007

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Two U.N. envoys accused the Cambodian government on Thursday of interfering with the judiciary by transferring a top judge from the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal, which they said was a violation of the Constitution.

Yash Ghai, the U.N. secretary general's special representative for human rights in Cambodia, and Leandro Despouy, special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, made their criticism in a joint statement.
They said the government's move to appoint You Bun Leng, one of two investigating judges at the U.N.-backed genocide tribunal, to head the Appeals Court is casting doubt on judicial independence in Cambodia.

Their criticism came amid mounting concern that You Bun Leng's transfer could also further delay efforts to convene the genocide trial. You Bun Leng has said he will not take up his new post right away to allow for a smooth transition.

The government has said that the new appointment is part of its agenda to reform the judiciary, and is separate from the tribunal.

The U.N. envoys agreed that reform is crucial for Cambodia.

"But it should not be undertaken at the expense of the essential protections ... that enable judges to administer, and be seen to administer, justice efficiently, impartially and fairly, free of political interference," they said.
They charged that the appointment violated the Cambodian Constitution, which states that all judicial appointments, transfers, promotions, suspensions or disciplinary actions are decided by the Supreme Council of Magistracy, the body that oversees conduct of judges.

But the council never met to decide on the appointment, which was approved instead by a royal decree. King Norodom Sihamoni signed the royal decree at the request of Prime Minister Hun Sen, the envoys said.
According to the U.N. officials, that meant that You Bun Leng's appointment "was done at the request of the executive branch of government in contravention of the separation of executive and judicial powers specified in the Constitution."

Chief government spokesman Khieu Kanharith could not be reached for comment.

The envoys' statement followed a recent appeal from the U.N. to the government to reconsider the judge's transfer, saying it could disrupt efforts to convene the long-awaited genocide trials.

After numerous delays, You Bun Leng and Marcel Lemonde, a U.N.-appointed judge, only recently began investigations of former Khmer Rouge leaders accused of crimes against humanity, genocide and other atrocities that resulted in the deaths of some 1.7 million people in the late 1970s.

The judges have so far indicted one of five suspects. Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, headed the former Khmer Rouge S-21 prison. The other four have not been publicly named and remain free in Cambodia.

Cambodian government heeds call to keep judge at genocide tribunal
Associated Press via The International Herald Tribune
August 24, 2007

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: A key Cambodian judge investigating cases against former leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime will not leave his current job in the U.N-backed tribunal, the government said Friday.

The announcement was apparently intended to allay fears that the government's recent appointment of You Bun Leng, one of the tribunal's two co-investigating judges, as head of the country's Appeals Court would disrupt efforts to convene long-awaited trials.

The United Nations had appealed to the government on Wednesday not to transfer You Bun Leng away from the trial.

On Friday, the government said You Bun Len's new job was only an additional title and that he would not leave the tribunal.

You Bun Leng's "role and duty as a judge at the Khmer Rouge tribunal should remain as before and ... nothing should obstruct the process of the trial at all," a statement quoted Prime Minister Hun Sen as saying.

After numerous delays, You Bun Leng and his U.N.-appointed counterpart, Marcel Lemonde, recently began investigations of former Khmer Rouge leaders accused of crimes against humanity that caused the deaths of some 1.7 million people in the late 1970s.

The judges have so far indicted one of five suspects, Duch_ or Kaing Guek Eav_ who was the head of the Khmer Rouge's S-21 prison and torture center. The other four have not been publicly named and still remain free in Cambodia.

Describing the government's announcement as "excellent news," Theary Seng, executive director of the nonprofit Cambodian group Center for Social Development, said it "eases concerns about a delay" in the trials if You Bun Leng were to be transferred to the new job.

But Youk Chhang, director of Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent group researching the Khmer Rouge crimes, said the affair reflected negatively on the supposed independence of the judiciary and shows the government still wields influence on it.

"You Bun Leng should have decided on his own (about the appointment) and set a good example as a judge instead of waiting to be told what to do," Youk Chhang said.

On Thursday, Yash Ghai, a U.N. human rights expert, and Leandro Despouy, a U.N. specialist on the judiciary, said the executive branch of government had usurped the duty of the judiciary in making the appointment, violating the constitution.

However, chief government spokesman Khieu Kanharith dismissed the criticism and accused the U.N. envoys of making a mockery of King Norodom Sihamoni, who approved the appointment.

Cambodians need to know atrocities aren't forgotten
San Jose Mercury
By Nic Dunlop
August 23, 2007

Last month, nearly 30 years after the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, the first indictment was issued by a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Cambodia. From 1975 to 1979, more than 1.7 million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. Now, after years of prolonged negotiations and conniving by the international community, the tribunal finally looks set to begin its work.

The man awaiting trial is Kang Kek Ieu - alias Comrade Duch, and referred to as Kaing Geuk Eav in tribunal filings - Pol Pot's chief executioner and butcher. As the commandant of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, he is allegedly responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children. Duch has been charged with crimes against humanity.

Growing up in Ireland and England, I was shocked by revelations about what happened under the Khmer Rouge. As an adult, I based myself in Bangkok, working as a photographer. After making frequent trips to Cambodia, it occurred to me that if the world was serious about preventing such crimes in the future, it was crucial to understand the perpetrators. And I felt that if there was one man who could provide us with answers on the Khmer Rouge, it was Duch. He was the missing link between the killings and the leaders.

For about a year, I took to carrying a photo of him. I showed it to Cambodians I met to see if anyone recognized him. None did. Then, in 1999, while on assignment in the west of the country, I came face to face with him.
Duch had become a born-again Christian. After several meetings, he began to talk candidly about his role during the reign of terror. It was the first time that a senior cadre had ever confirmed mass murder as policy. "I have done very bad things before in my life," he said. "The killings must be understood. The truth should be known." He began to name names and establish a chain of command for the killings. As a result of my finding him, and his extraordinary confession, he was arrested. Today, he remains the only Khmer Rouge in custody.

Why has so little been done to bring to trial the perpetrators of the Cambodian holocaust? After the regime was overthrown in 1979, the quest for justice was sidelined during the Cold War because of the competing interests of the United States, China and the Soviet Union. Cambodia had become a pawn.

After the Khmer Rouge was ousted, and despite its barbarous record, Pol Pot's men continued to be recognized as Cambodia's legal representatives at the United Nations, and the United States supported a guerrilla coalition they dominated. When the Cold War ended, the Khmer Rouge continued its fight to regain power. In the mid-90s, as part of a strategy to defeat the guerrillas, the Cambodian government granted amnesty to Khmer Rouge members if they defected to the government side. Justice was exchanged for peace. Eventually the movement imploded.

Some former Khmer Rouge members now hold positions within the army and government. Many are old, frail men in their 70s. Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's right-hand man, and Khieu Samphan, the regime's former head of state, live freely in Cambodia - although they are likely among those whom the tribunal will seek to indict.

Because he was Pol Pot's chief executioner, Duch's trial will be one of the most important. If he speaks as he did in 1999, Duch can explain the decision-making for the regime's atrocities and the chain of command and responsibility.

But after so many years, and with so few infirm and elderly cadres likely to be indicted, some people have questioned the purpose of a tribunal and a trial.

And yet Cambodia remains a society plagued by violence. A trial could help establish an understanding of the importance of due process of law to replace the current cycle of impunity and revenge. It is also important for people to see that leaders are not immune from prosecution.

To counter the violence, the details of the process must be made accessible to a wide audience. With the tribunal, a completely alien and complex system of justice is being introduced to a largely uneducated population. What will people think when only a few old men whom some may never have heard of go on trial in Phnom Penh, but the man who killed their relatives, living in the same village, literally gets away with murder? As the head of Duch's defense team told me, "There will be many people who will be disappointed." The biggest challenge for this tribunal is to demonstrate not only justice being done but, more crucially, justice understood. The key is not whether to find a group of old men guilty, but to explain how they are guilty. The tribunal also would be public acknowledgment of the suffering of those who survived and a means for the United Nations to show that when nearly 2 million people are killed, it matters.

Khmer Rouge survivor ready to testify
AFP
August 26, 2007

CHIANG MAI, Thailand (AFP) — French ethnologist Francois Bizot survived three months in a Khmer Rouge camp led by a man who is widely believed to be one of the regime's most notorious torturers.

Thirty-six years later, Bizot says he is ready to testify at Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal, which on July 31 detained his one-time captor Duch on charges of crimes against humanity.

"It's possible that I will testify," Bizot told AFP in an interview in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where he settled after fleeing Cambodia.

Up to two million people, about one quarter of Cambodia's population, died under the ultra-Maoist regime that plunged the country into a reign of terror between 1975 and 1979, emptying the cities into the countryside where people were forced into labour and opponents were eliminated.

Bizot was accused of spying, and was held for three months in 1971 in a Khmer Rouge camp headed by Kaing Geuk Eav, better known by his alias Duch.

"I owe him my life, I'm sure of it," said Bizot, who believes that Duch engineered his release, which he described in his book "The Gate."
Nonetheless, the 67-year-old author said he's ready to take the stand at the tribunal.

"Whether I'm called by the defence or the prosecution, I will say the same thing: you cannot minimise the torturers' actions and the terrible suffering endured by the victims and their families."

It would not be the first time that Bizot comes face-to-face with Duch. They last met in February 2003, when Bizot saw Duch while he was being held in a Phnom Penh prison.

Bizot said he was "fascinated by the juxtaposition of the man and the monster" that he has come to see in Duch. He said he fears that Cambodia's tribunal, like past war crimes trials, could end up demonising the accused and losing the human aspect to their cases.

"The torturers dehumanise their victims in order to torture and crush them. We need to stop this way of thinking," said Bizot.

"If the accused is judged as a torturer who has a right to have his humanity rehabilitated, that becomes less an accident of history. That is someone who begins to have a dimension that scares us, because we begin to understand the human drama that plays out inside of him.

"If there is a hope, it's in this humanisation of the torturer."

A few years after detaining, interrogating and finally sparing Bizot, Duch went on to head the infamous Tuol Sleng torture centre. Some 16,000 people passed through its hellish chambers, where some of the Khmer Rouge's worst atrocities were carried out.

Duch's lawyer has told the tribunal that he was merely following orders.

Bizot believes that Duch had devoted his life to the Khmer Rouge's cause.

"If the Khmer Rouge had won, he would hold an important rank today," he said.

"There are forces that can make a man cowardly, destructive, heartless. When the rule of law disappears, these forces that exist even in normal times suddenly can make us killers, makes us aspire to positions that turn us into monsters, into people we never thought we'd become," he said.

When the Khmer Rouge trial opens, Bizot said "the crimes should in no way be minimised, but the totality of the man should be shown."

"Understanding does not mean forgiveness," he said.

Duch, 65, is so far the only former Khmer Rouge cadre charged by the tribunal since it opened last year.
Four other leaders could be charged soon, but new delays threaten to hold up the proceedings.
Bizot said the delays are just "a question of big bucks" being sorted out between the Cambodians and the international community.

Lawyers in Cambodia seek release of detained former Khmer Rouge prison chief
The Star (Malaysia)
August 29, 2007

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP): Defense lawyers have mounted their first legal challenge against a ruling by the Cambodia genocide tribunal, arguing against the detention of a former Khmer Rouge prison chief, officials said Wednesday.

The lawyers launched a formal appeal with the tribunal's co-investigating judges against an order to keep Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, behind bars ahead of his trial, said tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath.
The tribunal's pretrial chamber will open a hearing soon on the request, which was filed last week, Reach Sambath said, but he declined to elaborate.

Duch, the former the head of the Khmer Rouge's S-21 prison and torture center, is the only suspect detained so far by the tribunal. He has been charged with crimes against humanity committed when the Khmer Rouge held power from 1975-79.

The communist group's radical policies caused the deaths of some 1.7 million people from starvation, diseases, overwork and execution.

Prosecutors have recommended four other suspects for trials, but they have not been named publicly and they remain free in Cambodia.

Duch is being represented by Kar Savuth, a Cambodian attorney, and Francois Roux, a human rights activist from France.

Kar Savuth confirmed that his team has appealed against Duch's detention but declined to discuss details, citing confidentiality rules of the tribunal.

The appeal is the first legal test for the U.N.-backed tribunal to demonstrate its fairness, said Sok Sam Oeun, director of the Cambodian Defenders Project, a nonprofit legal group providing legal aid to the poor.

He said that Duch's previous detention by the government without trial for more than eight years could be the legal basis used by the defense lawyers for their appeal.

"The fact known to us is that Duch had been held for several years already prior to his transfer to the tribunal. We will see if the tribunal comes up with appropriate reasoning in passing a decision'' on the appeal, Sok Sam Oeun said.

In their detention order late last month, the co-investigating judges denied the defense lawyers' request for Duch to be released.

They said they have no jurisdiction to determine the legality of Duch's previous detention. They also argued that his present detention by the tribunal will ensure his appearance at trial and protect him from any violent revenge for the crimes he is accused of.

Sok Sam Oeun predicted that, in light of the judges' argument, chances for the pretrial chamber to rule in favor of the defense lawyers are slim.

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Democratic Republic of the Congo (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Congo Bows to Rwanda Pressure On Interahamwe
AllAfrica.com - The Monitor (Kampala)
Robert Mukombozi
August 28, 2007

THE Congolese Government yesterday bowed to pressure from Rwanda and announced it would resume its hitherto suspended military offensive against Rwandan rebels in the eastern part of the country.

Congolese Army Chief Deodone Kayembe said they would resume military action against all negative forces on DRC soil in September, after dealing with the current humanitarian crisis in the east. Congo announced recently it was suspending operations against rebels to give way to negotiations and avoid further ethnic tension in the Kivu Region where much of the force has been mounted.

"We have lost many innocent people and others are still wandering around. These people suffering are innocent and therefore it would make no sense to continue military action while thousands of civilians are dying and becoming homeless," Lt. Gen. Kayembe told the media at a two-day tripartite plus meeting of the Great Lakes military chiefs in Kigali, Rwanda.

The army chiefs endorsed the establishment of a Joint Planning Cell to assist in the evaluation and coordination of military intelligence information in collaboration with the DRC-based Tripartite Fusion Cell (TFC).

Lt. Gen. Kayembe said the situation in eastern Congo was becoming more complex due to the existence of mixed brigades in both north and Southern Kivu region. In an effort to restore peace and stability in the region, the military companies, mixed with armed Forces of DRC and integrated soldiers from the camp of the renegade Congolese army commander, Gen. Laurent Nkunda, were faceda with difference in interests.

But the army chief assured sister countries that they are forging a quick solution to the problem. Although the negative forces are not an organised grouping that can be dealt with at once, Lt. Gen. Kayembe said the DRC has committed its resources and defence forces to deal with them in a more sophisticated military campaign. Other tripartite plus member states that include Uganda and Burundi welcomed DRC's new commitment.

However, Rwanda was more concerned with the pace at which Kinshasa is pursuing the rebels.

"We are not happy with the rate at which DRC is flushing out rebels fighting us from their side," said Rwanda Defence Forces Spokesperson Jill Rutaremara. Rwandan Foreign Affairs Minister Charles Murigande, insisted on Monday that more pressure is needed to flush out FDLR and ex-FAR/Interahamwe insurgents because they undermine peace and security both in Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region.

Present at the Kigali meeting were Ugandan Chief of Defence Forces Aronda Nyakairima, Rwandan CGS James Kabareebe, Burundian CGS Godfrey Niyombare and Monuc Liason Officer in Kigali Joe Felli.

U.N. finds half-buried corpses at Congo army camp
Reuters
Joe Bavier
August 22, 2007

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - U.N. peacekeepers in eastern Congo have found the bodies of at least six people believed to have been executed by soldiers, deepening suspicions of an ethnic terror campaign by rogue army groups.

The half-buried bodies were found by patrolling U.N. soldiers over the weekend at two abandoned military installations in troubled North Kivu province occupied until recently by Tutsi-dominated army brigades fighting Hutu rebels.

"They found them on the sites of Congolese army positions abandoned the week before," said Sylvie Van Den Wildenberg, spokesperson in North Kivu for Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission, known as MONUC. "The state of decomposition showed that they had been there possibly a week."

The two camps, near the villages of Katweguru and Kiseguru 95 km (60 miles) north of the provincial capital Goma, had been occupied by soldiers from Bravo Brigade.

This is one of five mixed brigades created in an effort to bring peace to North Kivu by integrating into the army fighters loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda, who led a 2004 uprising to defend the rights of his Tutsi minority group.

The move has instead sparked fresh ethnic fighting and fuelled fears of renewed conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, which is recovering from a 1998-2003 war that killed an estimated 4 million people.

So far this year, more than 165,000 people have fled fighting in North Kivu between the Tutsi-dominated brigades and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a predominately Hutu Rwandan rebel group based in eastern Congo.

There are no plans to exhume the six bodies, but Van Den Wildenberg said it was possible more victims were buried in the graves. At the Katweguru base, investigators also discovered a shallow pit believed to have been used to hold prisoners.

"The visit to the site ... reinforces fears MONUC already had that (Congolese soldiers) based there illegally and arbitrarily arrested people, including civilians, and executed some of them," Van Den Wildenberg said.

CAMPAIGN OF TERROR
Army chief Lieutenant-General Mbandakulu Kayembe told journalists in Goma on Tuesday an investigation was under way.

MONUC and human rights campaigners accuse certain mixed brigades of waging a campaign of terror against civilians from the Hutu ethnic group suspected of allegiance to the FDLR, particularly in the district of Rutshuru.

At least 15 civilians were massacred in the village of Buramba in March by suspected Bravo Brigade soldiers. Last month, the bodies of five people were found bound and shot to death on a banana plantation near a Bravo Brigade base.

Speaking with Reuters on Monday at his mountain stronghold in the district of Masisi, Nkunda said any civilian deaths were the unavoidable result of military operations against the FDLR.

"Why principally in Rutshuru? You must see the place of the FDLR in Rutshuru, their involvement and participation in the population," he said.

Earlier this month, General Gabriel Amisi, Congo's ground forces commander, announced military operations against the FDLR had been suspended until the mixed brigades could be replaced by regular army brigades to stem rising ethnic tension.
The decision angered officials in neighbouring Rwanda, which has long accused Congo of harbouring and even backing the FDLR.

The rebel movement is composed in part of ex-Rwandan soldiers and Hutu Interahamwe militia who fled to Congo after orchestrating Rwanda's 1994 genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

Violence in eastern DRC
The Southern African
August 27, 2007

KINSHASA - Increasing violent unrest in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo may spark a huge increase in the numbers of people fleeing the fighting, the United Nations has warned.

More than 160,000 people have already been displaced this year in the region's North Kivu province and aid agencies believe a further 280,000 people may flee in the next six months.

The instability, which involves dissident Congolese troops and Rwandan rebels, has seen villages attacked by armed groups which loot, rape and kill. Humanitarian workers in North Kivu say fresh waves of internally displaced people are arriving at camps on a daily basis.

Patrick Lavand-Homme, the head of the UN's humanitarian office in northern Kivu, said: "What we fear in the coming months is that if more military operations are taking place, we might increase the number of displacement.

Troops loyal to the dissident Congolese General Laurent Nkunda are known to operate in North Kivu. An ethnic Tutsi, Gen Nkunda claims he is defending his people from Rwandan Hutu rebels, suspected to have participated in Rwanda´s 1994 genocide, who have been in eastern DRC ever since.

Gen Nkunda is reportedly being supported by neighbouring Rwanda which recently complained that the DRC army has been letting Hutu rebels make forays into its territory. Earlier this year, negotiations between the Kinshasa government and General Nkunda led to some of his men being integrated into the national army. But instead of diffusing Nkunda's influence, it appears to have given him control of these "mixed brigades". It is thought that troops loyal to Gen Nkunda are responsible for much of the insecurity – with BBC.

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Darfur, Sudan (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Darfur, Sudan

UN Blames Sudanese Government For Rapes in Darfur
Voice of America
By Lisa Schlein
August 21, 2007

The United Nations is accusing armed groups backed by the Sudanese government of systematic rapes and other forms of sexual abuse in South Darfur. In its report, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says these acts may constitute war crimes. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from Geneva.

This is a follow-up to a report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Office in April. It contains additional information gathered from victims, witnesses and subsequent field missions.

The new report describes in graphic detail the manner in which women were abducted and systematically raped after their village of Deribat came under attack at the end of last year.

U.N. human rights monitors say about 50 women and many children were abducted. They say the victims were held for about a month.
A U.N. human rights spokesman, Yvon Edoumou, says most of the women were kept as sex slaves and were subjected to multiple rapes and other forms of abuse at the hands of forces loyal to the government.

"The report stresses that the government holds the responsibility for the actions of its armed forces and all these affiliated armed groups, notably the Popular Defense Forces and the Sudan Liberation Army, Abu Gasim faction," he said. "The report also deplores the fact that no investigation has been carried out by the authorities, although some of the acts committed may constitute war crimes."

According to witnesses, in late December, armed men, some in vehicles, some on horses and camels, attacked Deribat and eight other villages. A total of 36 civilians were killed in the attacks. The witnesses report some of the attackers spoke Arabic, although others were described as being of African appearance.

The report says women and children who were victims of multiple rapes are suffering grave health risks from physical injuries and psychological trauma.

Edoumou says the U.N. High Commissioner's Office is calling on the government of Sudan to protect women and children from violence.

"Among the recommendations from the report, the government is urged to cease all attacks against civilians, especially women and children: to establish an independent body to investigate the cases of abduction, rape and sexual slavery committed in the region and to hold those suspected of being responsible on trial under international standards of fairness," he added.

The report names three people who, it says, may share criminal responsibility for possibly leading or authorizing the attacks on Deribat and the abduction and abuse of the women: Ali Mohammed Hussein, a former sergeant in the Sudanese Armed Forces; Hamid Mohammed Hamdan, an Arab militia commander; and Yousif Ali Yousif, a leading member of the government-backed Popular Defense Forces. He allegedly coordinates all the attacks launched in the Deribat area.

Sudan: Drawn in Darfur – Pictures Don’t Lie
Business Daily (Nairobi)
Rebekah Heil and Katy Glassborow
August 22, 2007

Anna Schmitt was in eastern Chad interviewing Sudanese refugees from the Darfur region when the women at a displacement camp gave her some advice.

“If you want information, you should ask the children.” So she did just that. During her research for the non-government organisation Waging Peace, Schmitt sat in a classroom with the camp’s children, many of whom had been forced from their homes three or four years ago.

Through interpreters who spoke Arabic and the languages of Darfur, she asked the children about their hopes and dreams. Many answered that they wanted to be doctors or teachers or join the civil service.

One 16-year-old boy said, “I don’t want to become a rebel. I want to be educated and continue school, so I can help my people.” When he was 14, his father had been killed in front of him in Darfur.

Schmitt asked the children to write down their memories when one of them asked, ‘Would we be allowed to draw instead?’ The children, between the ages of five and 18, drew pictures showing their villages full of tanks and armed men on horseback, houses ablaze and helicopters circling the skies.

As Waging Peace gathered in the drawings, the translators got the children to tell them what was in their pictures, and wrote these explanations down on the back of each one.

In the pictures, the helicopters bear the markings of military aircraft, and men in camouflage are labelled by the children as Janjaweed militia. Villagers are shown under attack, women are led off in chains, and civilians are shot at and try to defend themselves with spears and arrows.

These visual accounts contradict Khartoum’s insistence that most of the casualties involve combatants from Darfur’s rebel movements. Waging Peace director Louise Roland-Gosselin says the pictures suggest that the Sudanese government is directly involved in the violence, working alongside the Janjaweed.

“Civilians are being targeted, not rebels. Women and children are being shot at, not rebels. It’s not a civil war, and not rebels against government troops,” she said.

Roland-Gosselin pointed out that the military are shown as having a lighter skin colour than those being attacked, and explained that the children are identifying themselves as black Africans and the attackers as Arabs.

Khartoum has long denied claims that it is supporting the militia. But this claim was recently contested by the International Criminal Court, ICC, which was tasked by the United Nations Security Council to look into events in Darfur.

Prosecutors began investigations in 2005, and announced this February that they believe Ahmad Harun, currently Sudan’s minister for humanitarian affairs, and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb, are responsible for coordinated violence against innocent civilians in Darfur.

ICC Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said the men are suspected of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes during attacks on the villages of Kodoom, Bindisi, Mukjar and Arwala in western Darfur between 2003 and 2004.

These include rape, murder, torture, destruction of property and forcible transfer.

In April, ICC judges issued arrest warrants against the two men. Waging Peace plans to submit the 500 drawings to the ICC as evidence of attacks carried out by Sudanese government forces.

“We think that these pictures are evidence of genocide and show what has been happening for the past four years, and that they constitute evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said Roland-Gosselin.

She believes the fact that the drawings were produced by children make them even more valuable as evidence. “Children basically speak the truth, and the truth coming out of them is much more credible than what’s coming from the Sudanese government,” she said.

IWPR approached ICC prosecutors to ask whether such pictures might be admissible as evidence in a criminal investigation and subsequent trial, but they refused to comment.

Chief Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo has consistently encouraged NGOs working in relevant countries to share evidence with his team of investigators. In September 2006, he called on NGOs to help raise awareness about the court across Africa, support witnesses and victims, and collect evidence from the field.

“I want to increase your participation so that you help me to get gender-based evidence, as we cannot present a case without evidence,” he told NGOs at a conference. “To enlarge victim participation, we encourage your help.”

If the Darfur children’s pictures were to be brought as evidence, the possibility that the organisation that gathered the evidence exerted some influence on them would have to be dealt with.

In general, the onus is on NGOs to prove that the verbal and other testimony they gather – in this case the drawings – were not affected by interviewers with an agenda.

Lawyer Jean Flamme told IWPR he was concerned about the power NGOs could exercise over victims, and questioned their legitimacy in the legal process.

Flamme formerly represented Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a former militia leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo indicted for war crimes and now awaiting trial at the ICC.

Flamme said that the prosecutor’s file against Lubanga contains many reports from NGOs, a fact which he finds “questionable”, since the court is required to be completely independent – from NGOs, the countries which support and fund it, and even from the UN Security Council.

“This is a big problem,” he stressed.

The human rights group FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights) has recently collected its own drawings from children in refugee camps in Chad. These too seem to portray Janjaweed attacks.

Karine Bonneau, director of international justice at FIDH, told IWPR that should ICC prosecutors decide to use such drawings in court, NGOs will have to describe the precise circumstances under which they were created. If an international criminal tribunal accepts evidence from NGOs and human rights groups – including drawings – it is obliged to verify its authenticity and corroborate it with other evidence and testimony.

If children are called to give evidence in court, they could be subjected to vigorous cross-examination by defence lawyers trying to disprove their testimony and attack their credibility.

Margriet Blaauw from the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims adds a word of caution, stressing that “getting justice is hard”, and giving evidence could cause victims to be traumatised a second time. She says witnesses need to be offered support before, during and after giving evidence.

It would have to be made clear to the children why they are doing the drawings, and they would need to have proper support from the ICC or from the NGO which spoke to them.

“Their wounds cannot be reopened, and then left. It is up to the court to provide sufficient protection to the children’s rights,” said Blaauw.

Bonneau said that criminal evidence needs to relate to a specific person, so pictures showing men in uniform or military helicopters could be used as general evidence at the initial investigation stage.

“It is not evidence against a particular accused, so the children would not have to appear or give their testimony before the court” said Bonneau, adding that “taken together with other documents, it could confirm the fact that the population is attacked by Janjaweed”.

Each drawing collected by Waging Peace has the name of the artist written on the back, together with their home village, and their age now and at the time of the attack. The children were certain that they what were drawing happened in 2003 and 2004.

According to Roland-Gosselin, “We’re hoping to have exhibitions all over the place exhibiting these drawings and eventually having these permanently placed in a memorial or a museum.” One picture, drawn by a boy who was 15 when his village was attacked and is now 18, left a short message on the back, written from his new home in a refugee camp.

“Look at these pictures carefully and you will see what happened in Darfur. Thank you and see you later.”

Sudan accused of arms violations
Al Jazeera
August 24, 2007

Amnesty International has accused Sudan of sending weapons to Darfur, in violation of a United Nations arms embargo and a peace deal in the region.

In report released on Friday, the London-based human rights group referred to photographs it said were obtained from credible witnesses supporting the claim of arms embargo violations.

The human rights groups urged the UN to give its planned peacekeeping force in the region the authority to confiscate weapons from armed groups.

The photographs were taken in July and purportedly show military shipments at the Sudanese army airport in El Geneina, capital of the West Darfur state.

One photograph shows Sudanese soldiers moving containers from an Antonov cargo plane on to military trucks, while two others show Russian-supplied Mi-7 and Mi-24 attack helicopters at the airport, Amnesty said.

A Sudanese official responded by saying there was a pattern of fake photos and that they were designed to deflect attention from other international issues like Iraq and Gaza.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Khalid al-Mubarak, from the Sudanese embassy in London, rejected Amnesty's claims.
He told Al Jazeera that the timing of the claims was "suspicious", coming "at a time in which the 'Save Darfur' coalition, which is leading the campaign against the Sudanese government, is weakening".

Indiscriminate attacks

Brian Wood, Amnesty International's arms control research manager, told Al Jazeera that the weapons transfers were damaging stability in Sudan.

"The issue here is arms are going in, arms are being used for indiscriminate attacks. Arms are being proliferated, small arms and light weapons to militias, and also the armed groups, who are splintering.

"Civilians are getting attacked, raped, looted, displaced and the terror, the horror of Darfur is continuing. Fighting has erupted again in the last days."

But al-Mubarak said: "Sudan is not the party which will benefit from the continuation of the crisis in Darfur. Sudan's stake is in stopping the crisis."

"Sudan has agreed to peace in the Abuja agreement last year," he said. "This is the proof of Sudan's good intentions."

Embargo

In 2005, the UN Security Council imposed a wide arms embargo on all parties in the conflict in Darfur, including the Sudanese government.

It was a follow-up on a previous 2004 embargo that included the janjawid militia.

Amnesty has already accused Sudan of violating the embargo in a report in May and said the Sudanese government was launching air raids on civilians in Darfur.

On July 31, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of 20,000 peacekeepers and 6,000 civilian police in a joint UN-African Union operation for Darfur, which the Sudanese government had long resisted.

The peacekeeping mission is authorised to use force to protect and ensure freedom of movement for its own personnel and aid workers, and to prevent armed attacks and protect civilians in Darfur.

"But the mandate for that peacekeeping force does not include the disarming and the demobilising of the militia and the armed groups," Wood said.

"That has to be addressed urgently if the human rights of the people of Darfur are going to be respected."

Sudan not cooperating on arrests of war crimes suspects, says prosecutor
UN News Service
August 28, 2007

The Sudanese Government has not moved to arrest two suspects wanted to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan’s war-wracked Darfur region, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said today, calling on Khartoum to cooperate immediately with the court.

In an interview with the UN News Centre, Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that it is “totally unacceptable” that one of the two suspects, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, is currently Sudan’s Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs.
“He was coordinating actions to remove people from their own villages and push them into IDP [internally displaced person] camps, and now he… basically controls them,” Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said. “Harun is still in charge, effectively, of the same people. He is like the fox being in charge of the chickens.”

Unless the Government takes steps to arrest Mr. Harun and the other suspect, Janjaweed militia leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (also known as Ali Kushayb), Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said he would inform the Security Council in his next progress report.

He said there had been no progress from Khartoum since it was informed of the arrests and its responsibilities.
“They have to remember, Sudan, that this issue is a part of their duties now that we have these global legal standards” enshrined in the ICC, said the Prosecutor. “The responsibility to execute the warrant is for the Government of Sudan,” and not for him or the ICC or the Security Council.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said his staff were trying to monitor the movements of the two suspects to determine their whereabouts, particularly now that an Interpol red notice – which allows the warrant to be circulated around the world with the request that the wanted person is arrested with a view to extradition – has been issued for Mr. Harun.

Mr. Harun and Mr. Kushayb are accused of targeting civilians in attacks on four villages in West Darfur between August 2003 and March 2004, according to their warrants, which outlines multiple counts of personal responsibility for murder, rape and pillaging for each man.

The ICC Prosecutor has been investigating war crimes committed in Darfur amid increasing international efforts to stop the bloodshed in the impoverished region and provide justice to victims of the violence and human rights violations.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least two million others forced to leave their homes in Darfur since 2003 because of fighting between rebel groups, Government forces and allied Janjaweed militias.
Mr. Moreno-Ocampo, who is in New York this week, held talks today on Darfur and other issues, including the progress of cases in northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR), with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

He also spoke on the same issues, and the need for greater cooperation between the UN and the ICC, with Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Affairs Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide Francis Deng and the Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Margareta Wahlström.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo is also taking part this week in a conference for current and past prosecutors of international criminal tribunals being held in Chautauqua, New York.

Member States And UN to Enhance Police Peacekeeping Training for Darfur
UN News Service
August 31, 2007

Top United Nations and Member States' police and human security officials today pledged to enhance training for UN Police (UNPOL) officers preparing to serve as peacekeepers in Sudan's Darfur region in what will be the largest single UN Police contingent ever with more than 6,400 officers.

This outcome came at the end of two days of meetings by the International Policing Advisory Council (IPAC) in the Australian capital Canberra. It followed a call yesterday by new UN Police Adviser Andrew Hughes for the global policing community to cooperate ever more closely with the world body.

The new hybrid UN-African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in Darfur, to be known as UNAMID, will be made up of over 30,000 personnel, including more than 19,500 military. Among its final outcomes, IPAC also recognized military and police relations as critical to the success of international policing in peacekeeping operations.

As well as facing the challenges of policing in Darfur, IPAC further recommended that the UN and Member States need to work together to enhance pre-deployment training for police officers serving in other global peacekeeping missions. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations' (DPKO) Police Division also pledged to develop more manuals and handbooks for police on the ground.

In addition, IPAC agreed on the need for the Police Division to look into ways of cooperating more closely with regional organizations such as the AU, European Union, the Pacific Island Chiefs of Police and ASEANAPOL, which groups the Chiefs of Police from the Association of South-East Asian Nations region.

The 24 academics, senior level police and UN representatives who met also identified a number of new challenges facing the world body, in particular the need for enhanced efforts to fight corruption in post-conflict environments.
The meeting was run in cooperation with the Australian Federal Police and, along with Mr. Hughes, was also chaired by his predecessor as UNPOL chief, Mark Kroeker. Key participants included high-level academics and police chiefs from Australia, El Salvador, Indonesia, Nigeria, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Interpol.

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Uganda (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Uganda

Uganda considers crimes court for Lord's Army fighters
ABC News
By Andrew Geoghegan
August 21, 2007

Uganda has proposed setting up a war crimes court to try members of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who are accused of murdering thousands of civilians.

The Ugandan Government and the LRA are in the middle of peace talks aimed at ending a 20-year conflict which has displaced more than 2 million people and killed tens of thousands.

Thousands have been victims of the LRA, which is notorious for its brutal attacks, such as burning people to death and hacking off limbs.

The Government is considering setting up a legal system based on traditional values which would try LRA rebels for war crimes.

Victims would be asked how they would like to see the perpetrators punished. The Government is also likely to punish many of its own soldiers who are accused of crimes against humanity.

Taylor Judge Says International Justice Must Apply in Uganda
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
by Samuel Okiror Egadu
August 23, 2007

Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde insists that Lord Resistance Army leaders must go before an international tribunal rather than informal local courts.

A senior Ugandan judge working for the Sierra Leone tribunal has delivered a strong call for international justice principles to be upheld in her own country.

Julia Sebutinde, who is sitting in the case of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor, accused of war crimes at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, talked to IWPR about the prospect that leaders of the Ugandan rebel Lord Resistance Army, LRA, will one day be put on trial.

In an exclusive interview on August 20, Judge Sebutinde insisted that the serious nature of the allegations against LRA leader Joseph Kony, his deputy Vincent Otti, and commanders Okot Odiambo and Domenic Ongwen means they should be tried by a formal international court rather than simply going through informal tribal ceremonies designed to achieve reconciliation.

The four LRA leaders are indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court, ICC, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity which include, abductions, sexual enslavement, mutilation, the killing of innocent civilians, rape and forcibly using children as guerrilla fighters.

“War crimes and crimes against humanity [charges] which LRA top commanders are facing cannot be tried using the local traditional justice system like the Acholi Mato Oput,” said Sebutinde. “The perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in northern Uganda, in all fairness, must appear before an impartial and independent tribunal to answer the charges.

Only a tribunal of this kind, she said, would “adequately address” the kind of crimes that Kony and his commanders are charged with.

Sebutinde speaks on Ugandan and international justice matters with some authority, both as a judge at the Sierra Leone tribunal and from her past experience chairing judicial commissions of enquiry in Uganda, one into the police and the other into the government’s revenue authority.

Her remarks come as the Ugandan authorities appear to be shifting ground on the ICC indictments. Although it was the Kampala government which in 2003 asked the ICC to investigate the situation in northern Uganda, it has subsequently indicated that it might ask the tribunal to drop the charges if the LRA concludes a peace deal in the ongoing negotiating process conducted in neighbouring Sudan.

On June 29, government and LRA delegations at the peace talks signed a crucial draft protocol that would allow rebels to be tried under traditional tribal justice systems, such as the “Mato Oput” ritual mentioned by Sebutinde.

Mato Oput is a process used in traditional Acholi society by which offenders are reintegrated into the community after confessing their guilt and begging forgiveness. While it might provide some closure to people involved in the long-running conflict, this method – and analogous rites practiced by other ethnic groups in northern Uganda – does not impose formal sanctions. For that reason, its detractors say, it is ill-suited as a mechanism for addressing crimes of the magnitude seen in this bloody guerrilla war.

The government delegation to the peace talks, led by Ruhakana Rugunda, who is also Ugandan interior minister, are currently visiting the north of the country to consult with victims of the conflict and others on how to implement the protocol agreement, titled “accountability and reconciliation”.

The LRA has taken the position that there can be no lasting peace unless the ICC indictments are dropped. Otti, the rebel’s second-in-command and a frequent spokesman, recently told IWPR that even if a final peace deal is agreed in Juba, where the talks are taking place, LRA combatants will remain in the bush unless the ICC indictments are scrapped.

Speaking by satellite phone from the rebels' main base in the Garamba National Park, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Otti said, “The ICC remains a big stumbling block to peace in Uganda. If ICC indictments are not lifted, we shall not come out. It’s simple. No.”

In a previous interview with IWPR, Otti said he would surrender to the ICC only if the court charged the Ugandan army on similar counts of war crimes.

"If the UPDF [Ugandan People's Defence Force] are included on the list of indicted commanders, I will definitely go to The Hague. Short of that, I will never go,” he said.

In that interview, Otti described as "very one-sided" the ICC's decision to indict only members of the LRA. “It’s not only the LRA who committed atrocities in northern Uganda," he said. "It’s both the LRA and the UPDF. Why did ICC indict us alone?” asked Otti.

Sebutinde counters such arguments, saying the decision to indict the LRA was based entirely on investigations carried out by ICC prosecutors.

“Let him [Otti] come and defend himself. They [the rebels] must come and defend their innocence,” she said. “The decision to indict LRA commanders is entirely of the prosecutor, depending and based on his investigations. The indictee can’t tell the prosecutor who to be indicted or tell the prosecutor what to do.”

Sebutinde takes the view that people in northern Uganda will not truly have peace until justice is properly served.

“You can’t have peace without justice. The victims who were maimed, mutilated and raped must have justice. Nobody has asked them for their views. The perpetrators must have their day in court,” she said.

The LRA rebellion has driven more than 1.7 million people into internal refugee camps in northern Uganda. Some 100,000 people have died and as many as 38,000 children have been abducted and forced to join the insurgents.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has consistently said that the arrest warrants will not be lifted unless either the Ugandan government or the LRA brings a legal challenge to ICC judges, or to the United Nations Security Council.

Although the Special Court for Sierra Leone sits in that country’s capital Freetown, Judge Sebutinde and her colleagues in the Taylor trial are in The Hague, where they use the premises of the ICC. The trial is being held here because of fears that if it took place in the region, Taylor’s residual support-base could generate instability in Sierra Leone, over the border in Liberia and even beyond.

Taylor is charged with 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, including mass murder, mutilation, rape, sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers.

On August 20, Judge Sebutinde ruled that the start date for Taylor’s trial should be adjourne until January 7 next year, to allow a new defence team time to prepare its case. The trial had been scheduled to begin in June, but was delayed when Taylor fired his then legal team, saying they had not had the time or resources to mount a proper defence.

Samuel Okiror Egadu is an IWPR contributor in Uganda currently reporting on international justice issues in The Hague.

Another Side of Child-Soldiering: Grils
Associated Press via Forbes
by Katy Pownall
August 25, 2007

At 12, Lucy Aol was clutching an assault rifle and preparing to ambush government soldiers. At 13, a rebel commander a decade older made her his wife. At 16, she was a mother.

At 21, fresh-faced and beaming in a clean T-shirt and neatly braided hair, Aol is studying environmental health at college in Uganda's capital, and planning to use her knowledge to improve the health of her war-battered nation.

Aol has made a remarkable journey from child soldier to young woman with a future, but millions of children across Africa continue to be victims of war - orphaned, forced from their homes, denied education and, like Aol, forced to fight in the conflicts waged by their elders.

But slowly, the world's campaign against the horror of child soldiery, and its pursuit of the perpetrators as war criminals, has begun to yield results.

Girls are an estimated 30 percent of the young fighters. They face challenges boys don't, such as rape and the stigma it inflicts, making it harder for girls to return to their communities.

Aol was 12 when she was abducted by a feared Ugandan rebel group, forced to walk hundreds of miles to a base in neighboring southern Sudan and taught to use a gun.

"We were used like slaves," Aol said, staring at the wall of the cramped student dormitory at Kampala's Mulago Medical College. "We used to work in the fields or collect firewood from 7 in the morning until 5 in the evening and we were given no food. If you made a mistake or refused, they would beat us ... the three girls who were taken from my village with me were beaten to death."

"We were always moving with our guns but when you are so young they are very heavy and difficult to carry," she said.

Aol was snatched by the Lord's Resistance Army, rebels based in northern Uganda who are estimated to have abducted 25,000 children during their 20-year anti-government insurgency. Peace talks are under way, but pleas to free the children meet with denials they are being coerced into soldiery.

According to Human Rights Watch, child soldiers play various roles, including spies, porters, mine sweepers, concubines as well as active combatants, often serving on front lines and sustaining some of Africa's bloodiest and longest running conflicts.

The number of child soldiers - defined in international law as children under 18 - cannot be estimated, humanitarian groups say. And though most are forcibly recruited, many join out of desperation. For those separated from their families or orphaned, enlistment may be the only way to get shelter, food and companionship.

Children are easily manipulated and can be groomed from an early age to obey instructions unquestioningly. Child protection workers cite numerous tactics used by ruthless commanders to coerce their young captives into obedience. In Sierra Leone, child soldiers were given a cocktail of gunpowder and cocaine before battle. In Liberia, they were forced to do things that would isolate them permanently from the community such as murdering family members.

Returnees from the Lord's Resistance Army, a cult-like group with only the vaguest of political platforms, tell of oil being smeared on young fighters to make them believe they are bulletproof.

"I went only once to the field to fight," Aol said. "We laid an ambush for the government soldiers and waited. But after three days they hadn't come so we were sent back and a second group came to take our place. The soldiers came and there was fighting. They killed 16 LRA. All were children and some were my friends."

Aol said most of the LRA fighters at her base were aged 10 to 15.

"You get trained in guns for one or two weeks, then you are sent to a battle but most don't know how to fight so they are killed," she said.

"I felt sad because young people like me die not for something they believe in but because they are forced to fight. The rebels tell you, 'Don't surrender - don't run," or they will kill you."

At 13 Aol was made the third wife of an LRA commander. She says she suffered "sexual abuse" and was regularly beaten by her older co-wives. She considered suicide.

Three years into her ordeal, Aol decided to escape. She managed to persuade her rebel "husband" that a better life awaited them back home. One morning, fearing for their lives, they fled Sudan.

It took them three weeks to reach Uganda. Once there, they were ambushed by government soldiers. Aol was captured and her husband, the commander, was shot dead. She was taken to a center for former combatants where she received some counseling and learned that she was pregnant. She gave birth to her daughter, Winifred Bianca, four months later.

Returning to normal life was tough. She had no money to continue her schooling, and although her family welcomed her home, her neighbors - whose daughter had been killed by the rebels - were less accepting.

"They asked why am I alive and their daughter is not. They said that I've killed people and that I might kill my parents," she said.

The young mothers find their babies ostracized as "Kony's children," referring to Joseph Kony, the self-proclaimed prophet who leads the Lord's Resistance Army.

"People say we have ghosts attached to us because we have killed ... they point at us and talk badly about us," Aol said.

Returning girl soldiers have it tougher, according to Susan McKay, a professor of Women's and International Studies at Wyoming University who has studied the subject.

"Girls who return to communities are perceived to have more thoroughly violated social norms than boys," she said. "They find it hard to marry and their children are often stigmatized." Poverty drives many to prostitution, she said, and even back into the ranks of the rebel armies they escaped.

Peace agreements in recent years, including those of Sudan, Ivory Coast and Burundi, have included a framework for returning children to society. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N.'s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, hopes to see standard paragraphs on child protection in all agreements ending wars where children fought.

Though she emphasizes that much work remains to be done, Coomaraswamy believes the world has made significant steps. Over 100 countries have ratified a U.N. treaty banning the conscription of children, and a working group that reports directly to the U.N. Security Council on situations involving child soldiers has had successes.

Among them was the decision by rebels in Ivory Coast to enter into dialogue with U.N. teams and accept a plan to release children.

The law has also had results. On June 20, the U.N.-backed court trying crimes committed in Sierra Leone's civil war convicted three former junta leaders of using child soldiers - the first verdict of its kind, according to Corinne Dufka of Human Rights Watch. They were sentenced to prison terms of 45 to 50 years each.

The International Criminal Court treats the recruitment of children under 15 into armed forces as a war crime. The first case before the Hague-based court, beginning later this year, is that of a former militia leader from Congo, Thomas Lubanga, and it focuses on his use of child soldiers.

The Lubanga case is already acting as a deterrent in Africa, Coomaraswamy said. Many analysts believe the decision by the Lord's Resistance Army to enter into peace negotiations last year was forced by the indictment of its top five leaders, including Kony, on counts including forcible enlistment of and use of child soldiers. The LRA is not believed to have abducted any children since the peace talks produced a cease-fire in August.

Meanwhile, Lucy Aol is now a bright and talkative 21-year old. With help from her mother, a small inheritance from her father - who died last year - and her own hard work and determination, she saved enough money to enroll at Mulago Medical College, based at Uganda's most prestigious hospital.

Her daughter, now 5, is cared for by her mother while she studies.

"There is no money to send Winifred to school while I am studying so she has to wait. I have one more year, then I can get a job and she will go to school," Aol said, beaming. "I want my daughter to have all the opportunities I never had. Her education is very important to me. I think she might be a lawyer."

Aol shakes her head and smiles when asked if she ever imagined a happy ending while she was with the rebels.

"Now, when I look at myself, I see a completely different person to who was there in the bush," she said. "My daughter and I have a future in spite of all that has happened."

Funding problems stall Juba negotiations
Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)
by Samuel Okiror Egadu
August 28, 2007

Peace talks between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army, LRA, have been postponed with the rebel group requesting cash from donors to carry out consultations on accountability and reconciliation proposals.

Negotiations between the Ugandan authorities and the LRA were adjourned in June to allow both parties to consult with stakeholders and victims of northern Uganda's 21-year civil war on how to deal with "accountability and reconciliation" - the third item on the peace-talks agenda.

LRA and Uganda government representatives reached and signed an agreement setting out principles for handling accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed on both sides of the conflict in northern Uganda, but some details are not yet finalised.

The LRA says that planned consultations have not been held because of a lack of funds and is requesting cash from donors. While the Ugandan government - which says it needs two million US dollars for its consultations - insists the group's cash demands are unreasonable and accuses it group of stalling tactics.

The consultations were to consider creating a commission to investigate alleged war crimes committed by both sides and explore the possibility of using traditional justice systems - which could be proposed in future as an alternative to prosecutions at the International Criminal Court, ICC, in The Hague.

Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, his deputy Vincent Otti, and top commanders Domenic Ogwen and Okot Odiambo are wanted by the ICC on 33 separate counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include murder, rape, enlisting of children, and sexual enslavement.

A fifth LRA commander Raska Lukwiya - who also had a warrant issued against him - was killed in August 2005 in a battle with government forces.

The outstanding arrest warrants have been cited as a stumbling block to the peace talks, which began in the capital of autonomous South Sudan in July 2006, and were set to resume in mid-September after the two sides had completed consultations.

But acting LRA spokesman David Matsanga Nyekorach said, "Continuing the talks without consultations will be meaningless, so we will not engage in any further talks."

Head of the LRA delegation Martin Ojul said the rebel group has requested two million dollars from donors to pay for consultations.

The LRA says it needs the money to airlift 500 delegates from northern Uganda to the main rebel hideout in the Garamba National Park, in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC. It also wants to fund its experts to travel to Argentina, South Africa and Sierra Leone to research issues of conflict, justice and reconciliation.

"It would enable us to assess the failures and successes of these systems and how to improve on them," said Ojul.

"Without these consultations, it would be pointless to resume the talks as the materials for the next round of talks are supposed to be derived from these consultations. So any delay can only be reasonably blamed on those who are making it impossible for the consultations to be held," he said.

But acting government delegation leader Dr Stephen Kagoda said the LRA's cash demands are unreasonable, unrealistic and aimed at delaying the peace talks.

The talks - which are mediated by south Sudan vice-president Dr Riek Machar and overseen by United Nations special envoy to northern Uganda and former president of Mozambique Joachim Chissano - have regularly stalled since they began in July last year.

This January, LRA delegates walked out of the talks after a row over their daily expense allowances, and returned only after these were increased.

"The LRA is looking for two million dollars to ferry people, including musicians, to Garamba for consultation," said Kagoda. "Let the LRA delegation come down to the ground in northern Uganda where the actual war victims are who were maimed, raped [and whose friends and relatives were] killed."

Kagoda, who is a senior civil servant in Uganda's ministry of internal affairs, attacked the group's consultation plans.

"Taking 500 people for consultation - for what? The victims are in northern Uganda. It will not be cost-effective as the real war victims will not reach the LRA leaders," he said.

"To travel abroad to do what…? To consult whom in the Diaspora…?" he asked. "The victims are here. The victims are not in South Africa, Argentina or in the Diaspora."

But Ojul denied Kagoda's claims that the LRA delegation has been soliciting money from donors as a precondition for resuming the peace talks.

"At no time did we make receiving two million dollars a precondition for resuming the peace talks," he said in a statement emailed to IWPR.

"It's not true that we have been soliciting for funds everywhere, including Canada.

"It is unforgivable for a senior civil servant to deliberately make irresponsible, reckless and malicious political statements, calculated at maligning and undermining the integrity of the LRA and the delegates in particular, with the potential of diverting focus from the process."

Ojul said the government had constantly used such tactics "to make it appear as if the LRA are the bad guys and they the good ones".

He said the LRA had so far raised 600,000 dollars of the two million it says it requires.

Ojul insisted that peace talks would not collapse, because, he said, the LRA remains committed to ending a civil war that has claimed some 100,000 lives.

"We want to reaffirm to the stakeholders, the donor community, in particular, that in all that we do in this process, we are motivated by the will to make these peace talks succeed."

Meanwhile, deputy leader of the government delegation in Juba Henry Okello Oryem said the Uganda authorities need one million dollars to carry out consultations.

Government delegation spokesman Captain Ba-Hoku Barigye said there was no money in the budget for consultations.

"We have not been able to hold consultations due to budget constraints," he told IWPR by phone from Juba.

Uganda war victims want LRA tried locally - government
Reuters
by Francis Kwera
August 30, 2007

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Most of the victims of Uganda's 20-year war want local courts to try the Lord's Resistance Army rebels for alleged war crimes, rather than see them indicted by an international tribunal, the government said on Wednesday.

Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, chief government negotiator at talks with the rebels, said he had carried out "extensive consultations" with Ugandans in the war-ravaged north, but gave no figures.

"Very many of them felt that Uganda by using traditional and formal justice systems, will provide a sufficient alternative to handle issues of accountability and reconciliation," he said.

Two decades of war in northern Uganda killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 1.7 million before peace talks in south Sudan began in July 2006, leading to a truce the following August that has been largely respected.

But the LRA has said it will never sign a final peace deal unless the International Criminal Court drops indictments against four top commanders for crimes such as killing civilians, slicing body parts off victims and kidnapping children.

The rebels have said they might accept local courts as an alternative to the Hague-based tribunal but are angered at what they say is the government's unwillingness to put its own soldiers accused of atrocities on trial.

In June, the Human Rights Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, surveyed 2,875 people in the north, 58 percent of whom wanted the LRA to be tried but with 76 percent saying they feared the ICC indictments would jeopardise peace.

Elders from the LRA's Acholi tribe want the rebels to undergo traditional reconciliation rituals to deal with crimes. But human rights groups argue such rituals would fail to dish out punishments fitting the alleged crimes, such as long jail terms.

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International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

Official Website of the ICTY

UN war-crimes prosecutor new Swiss envoy
Reuters via The Globe and Mail.com
August 24, 2007

ZURICH — United Nations chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte will serve as Switzerland's ambassador to Argentina after her term at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague expires at the end of this year. Ms. Del Ponte, a fiery lawyer from the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland, is best known for bringing Slobodan Milosevic to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001.

"After having been a prosecutor for 26 years, she is looking forward to the new challenge of performing her duties as Swiss ambassador," her spokeswoman, Olga Kavran, said on Friday.

Ms. Del Ponte, 60, said in a recent newspaper interview she had turned down an offer to return to her previous position as Switzerland's top prosecutor, a job she held between 1994 and 1999.

The United Nations Security Council appointed Del Ponte as Louise Arbour's successor in 1999. She had been due to leave The Hague at the end of September but was asked by the UN to remain in her position until the end of the year.

As Switzerland's federal prosecutor, she cracked open account secrecy and froze assets of Italian politicians under investigation in corruption probes.

In her previous position as head of the Swiss justice department, she indicted former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband for money laundering.
She escaped an attempt on her life in 1989.

Gotovina Unaware He Was Trialed In France
Javno
August 25, 2007

Gotovina`s attorneys believe that documents on his criminal past do not prove Gotovina fled from the French authorities.

-Disputable rulings against Croatian general Ante Gotovina reached were reached in absence, which means that Gotovina had no option of defending himself. Therefore we request that the documents on Gotovina`s verdict from France are omitted from the files and all until the Hague Prosecution finds a witness from the French authorities that would be prepared to be cross examined- head of Gotovina`s attorney team Luka Misetic told the Jutarnji list daily.

Documents on Gotovina`s criminal past

Namely, Gotovina`s attorneys believe that documents on his criminal past do not prove what the prosecutor claims; that Gotovina fled from the French authorities. According to their interpretation, nobody from the French authorities notified Gotovina they were searching for him, just as they did not use state instruments to arrest anyone who was under a court verdict”.
-Just the opposite, the French authorities kept high contacts with Gotovina on a military level from 1992 until 2001 and issued out French passports for him.

-France did not treat Gotovina as a criminal, but as a high officer of the Croatian army and its citizen, Misetic said. Attorneys are requesting that the Prosecution takes a statement from a witness included in the French authorities who will sign a statement under oath that these documents are authentic.

Sentenced three times in France

In documents attached to the explanation of opposing to the release of Ante Gotovina, submitted by Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte, it was documented that Gotovina was sentenced three times in France from 1986 until 1995: for armed robbery, extortion and kidnapping. He was sentenced t a total of nine and half years in prison. Sources from the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) authorities at that time claim that little was known about Gotovina`s criminal file in Croatia.

-First Croatian president Franjo Tudjman was told that Gotovina was in the French Foreign Legion and had military training. A part of his criminal past was mentioned, in the sense that he “did some nonsense” in France. To this, Tudjman said that the though he had to wage a war with nuns did not occur to him- once of the collocutors told Jutarnji list yesterday. It is questionable how nimble the French search for Gotovina was, seeing how our collocutors repeated yesterday that “there were no inquiries of such content from France via diplomatic channels”.

ICTY takes justice from theory to practice
ISN
By Daniel Barron
August 27, 2007

The tribunal has been criticized for many things, yet it has laid much of the groundwork for the permanent International Criminal Court. From IWPR.

As the new International Criminal Court begins its work in earnest, with an expanding list of investigations and the first trial about to get under way, another Hague-based court – the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – is moving towards its completion date in 2010.

Over the 14 years since it was set up the Yugoslav tribunal, or the ICTY, has tried senior politicians and soldiers accused of the worst wartime atrocities seen on European soil in half a century. Operating under the United Nations mandate, the court has brought together judges and lawyers from around the world to examine evidence from a series of conflicts, where the root causes and responsibility remain deeply disputed, politicized issues in the Balkan states.

In such a controversial environment, it is hardly surprising that the court's work and even its legitimacy have been questioned. For instance, some critics have accused the tribunal of dispensing victor's justice – with Serbs as the losers – although the tribunal has also prosecuted Croat, Bosnian Muslim and more recently Kosovo Albanian military commanders.

Other, more considered criticism, has focused on the actual mechanics of running an international justice system. The case against the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, for example, came under fire for involving an impracticable number of charges, some of which might have been nearly impossible to prove, in a process that could have taken years to complete.

As the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials at the end of the World War II, the ICTY laid much of the groundwork for subsequent processes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and now the International Criminal Court (ICC) the world's first universal war crimes court. As such, its lessons will carry a great deal of weight.

IWPR asked leading members of the international justice community for their views on the legacy that the ICTY will leave when it closes its doors. Interviews with past and present members of the tribunal's Office of the Prosecutor, defense lawyers and independent human rights organizations revealed a striking breadth of opinions on its successes, and failures too.

While some pointed to the tribunal's achievements and its contribution to international criminal law, others say the court was flawed from its inception and argue that an arbitrary deadline imposed by the United Nations has undermined the fairness of trials.

Did the court achieve what it set out to do?

The ICTY was established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 to try individuals for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991.

The tribunal has tried crimes committed during the various conflicts that emerged from the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation in 1991 through to the conflict in Kosovo of 1999.

Its objective was to prosecute those suspected of bearing the greatest responsible for atrocities committed during the Balkans wars in the early nineties. In doing so, it would bring justice to victims, deter further crimes and help foster peace and reconciliation in the region.

When the court was established, practical issues such as rules of evidence and the choice between the adversarial and inquisitorial systems had to be addressed.

John Ackerman, a defense lawyer at the tribunal and former president of its Association of Defence Counsel, said that the ICTY was designed to be a "very Anglo-American kind of court," and that Judge Antonio Cassese, the tribunal's first president, had been heavily involved in that decision.

The system worked well in the beginning, he said, not necessarily because it was the best system, but because it was uniform and had a substantive body of precedents.

However, Ackerman said, "Then you had continental judges showing up with the idea of combining the best of both systems, which was just another ridiculous idea. If combining the best of both systems produced a better system of justice, that would have happened 150 years ago."

Justice Richard Goldstone, formerly a member of South Africa's Constitutional Court and a chief prosecutor at the ICTY, asserted that differences between the adversarial and inquisitorial systems tended be exaggerated.
"Both systems have as their goal ascertaining the truth. Whether you do it one way or the other ultimately doesn't matter," he said.

Anton Nikiforov, political adviser to Carla Del Ponte, insists that the court's hybrid procedure had "proved to be effective."

He said the tribunal has achieved amazing results, citing the 161 people originally indicted, although he conceded that the number of people the tribunal actually processed is closer to 135 due to indictees dying and lower-level indictments being withdrawn.

Nevertheless, Nikiforov says, the results of 14 years of work at the ICTY have been amazing for a body that originally had only one trial chamber.

"It is a remarkable achievement by any standard," he said.

Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Project at the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, agrees, adding that with a few notable exceptions, the tribunal had been able to get custody of "an overwhelming number" of the individuals indicted.

But Jonathan O'Donohue, of London-based Amnesty International, said the ICTY has tried fewer than 100 of the thousands of persons suspected of crimes under international law in the former Yugoslavia.

Accusations of political bias

Michael Karnavas, who has served as a defense lawyer in a number of ICTY trials, most recently representing former Bosnian Croat leader Jadranko Prlic, and also current president of the Association of Defence Counsel, said a lack of uniformity in indicting suspects from the region had raised concerns about whether certain ethnic groups are being singled out.

"Croats and Serbs want to know why [former president of Bosnia-Herzegovina Alia] Izetbegovic and [former president of Croatia Franjo] Tudjman weren't indicted right away. Look how quickly they indicted Milosevic," Karnavas said.

"The perception on the ground is that some groups are being prosecuted, some are being persecuted."
Over the years, the ICTY has persistently refuted claims of bias and pointed out that members of all ethnic groups have been indicted and tried. It currently has ongoing cases against a former Bosnian Army commander in chief, who is a Bosniak; several former Bosnian Croat political and military leaders; Albanian former paramilitary leaders from Kosovo and senior police officials from Macedonia. A trial of three Croatian Army generals is also due to start soon.

Failure to enforce indictments

Goldstone said that while he had never read of or heard any "serious criticism" of the fairness of the trials, he was aware of some difficulties at the ICTY.

Neither the ICTY nor the ICC has a police force of its own and both rely on national authorities in the countries in question to find and hand over suspects.

"The biggest problem that faced both ad hoc tribunals [Rwanda and ICTY], and is already a problem for the ICC, is enforcement," Goldstone said. "There won't be, in any of our lifetimes, an international police force," capable of enforcing international arrest warrants, he predicted.

The lack of cooperation from the authorities in Serbia has been largely blamed for the failure to capture the Bosnian Serbs' army commander Ratko Mladic and wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic, both accused of orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

The ICC has already run into difficulties in delivering suspects to the court once arrest warrants have been issued.
Omer Fisher, a researcher with the Balkans team at Amnesty International, expressed concern about the fate of senior indictees who remain at large, including Mladic and Karadzic.

"We don't think it would ever be appropriate for people like Mladic and Karadzic to be tried anywhere other than the ICTY," he said.

ICTY's success in this regard has been limited by external factors – the failure of Balkan states to hunt down and detain suspects believed to be on their territory and deliver them to The Hague. This applies above all to Mladic, who is believed to spend most or all of his time in Serbia, and Karadzic, who is thought to hide out in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro.

International pressure on post-Milosevic Belgrade, in particular, has failed to produce either man, although some other high-ranking suspects have been detained. As a result, ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has indicated that the Serbian authorities have become significantly more cooperative of late.

While the court was able to enforce the indictment of the late Milosevic –widely regarded as bearing the greatest responsibility for the Balkan conflicts - he died in custody, four years into a trial with no end in sight.
Goldstone said the Milosevic trial had "undoubtedly tarnished the legacy of the ICTY."

He said that in his my view, "the judges were too lenient with Milosevic, and at the same time he was allowed to demean the judges".

Inconsistency and procedural flaws

Another criticism leveled at the tribunal is that there has been a lack of uniformity of procedures, both over the years of its existence, and in the practices of the different trial chambers.

O'Donohue has said at the ICTY there had been "considerable inconsistency, o ften unresolved by the Appeals Chamber, concerning definitions of crimes such as rape and murder".

However, Dicker says it is understandable that there should have been some modifications to the rules along the way.

"I think that the evolution of the court's rules of procedure and evidence is a work in progress, some of it controversial but nonetheless understandable given that this was really the first tribunal created in 50 years to try these kinds of crimes," he said.

Karnavas attributes a lack of uniformity and consistency at the court to several factors. For instance, the judges come from a diversity of legal systems, and in some cases simply do not buy into the ICTY's hybrid legal system, which Karnavas termed a party-driven system where judges serve as "referees" between prosecution and defense.

He suggested that the ICC should have a "bench book" or manual of courtroom procedure, and a training program for new judges. He also thought the ICC should make sure potential judges have substantial experience on the bench.

The prosecution has also been accused of over-indicting and over-trying suspects. Indictments often contain a long historical context, with defendants charged with several forms of liability in the hope of securing a conviction.

Karnavas argued that the ICTY had attempted to "set out historical truth", leading to long indictments which were difficult either to prove or disprove.

"Those of us who practice law in courts… know that a court is not capable of finding historical truth. That's not the place of a tribunal. A lot of time, money, and effort were wasted trying to figure out what this historical truth is," he said.

He also alleges that defence lawyers have been excluded from crucial decision-making processes such as scheduling. Although he conceded that improvements have been made since earlier days, he insisted that, "Right now the defense is not seen as part of the tribunal."

Consequences of the completion strategy

In recent years, the tribunal has also come under fire for the "completion strategy" according to which the UN Security Council requires the court to complete all first-instance trials by 2009 and all appeals by 2010.

The pressure on the court to finish on time has resulted in judges having to be creative in the courtroom in order to cut down the amount of time trials take.

Fisher is concerned that the exit strategy will prevent certain indictees from facing justice.

"The main message for us is certainly that the ICTY has played a crucial role in trying senior people, but we've been consistently concerned about the exit strategy and seeing the work unfinished," he said.

He described the 2010 deadline as "arbitrary," and said it was unlikely that the ICTY would complete all of its cases and appeals by that time.

Karnavas said it was just as the tribunal "hit its stride" in the last three or four years that the Security Council began to pressure the courts to finish by 2010.

"The system has changed so radically over the years, and the rights are being eroded slowly to the point where it's almost an aspiration that you could get fair trial, rather than a reality," he said.

"None of the judges would want to be tried in this fashion. No one in the courtroom would want that."

"We're not going to complete the task within time. It's impossible. It cannot be done," Karnavas warned, suggesting that it was impossible to follow the UN Security Council's requirements and at the same time serve the interests of justice.

"This completion strategy is going to undo many of the good things that have been done," he said.

Ackerman was even more critical of the completion strategy, and said that what has happened at the ICTY happens in many courts.
"The funding source takes over and replaces justice with expediency."

The upshot of what Ackerman described as a "misguided effort to speed up proceedings" has been that "the rules have changed, to the detriment of the accused."

O'Donohue is also concerned about the consequences of the completion strategy.

He also said that while the ICTY had inspired national courts in some countries in the former Yugoslavia to conduct investigations and prosecutions of people suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the completion strategy "means that there will no longer be a stick to take cases away when national proceedings fall short."

He cited numerous problems with national courts, including a failure to define all the crimes in the ICTY statute as crimes under national law, and a lack of adequate victim and witness protection and support.

Fisher also expressed reservations about the ability of national jurisdictions to deal with serious crimes under international law, and said that there had been an acceleration of requests to move cases from the ICTY to be tried in national courts since the exit strategy was implemented.

Dicker noted one positive development to come out of the completion strategy - the introduction of witness testimony in written form – was a "potentially valuable" innovation in terms of saving time, but stressed there was a need for a right of the defense to cross-examine.

The ICTY's legal legacy

Most of the experts interviewed seemed to agree that the ICTY has made positive contributions to the field of international criminal law.

Dicker points out that the ICTY was the first internationally created war crimes tribunal since the end of the World War II, when the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals were set up by the victorious Allied powers to try German and Japanese war criminals.

"There hadn't been anything comparable since the 1940s. There was nothing by way of practice or precedent," he said.

He said that the court's "outstanding positive feature" is that "it has shown over the 14 years of its existence, the viability of an internationally created judicial institution mandated to investigate and prosecute the mass slaughter of civilians, the use of rape as a weapon of war, ethnic cleansing".

Perhaps more importantly, Dicker said, the ICTY "brought to life provisions of international law that had been dormant or simply relegated to the pages of the Geneva Convention."

The result has been what Dicker termed "an absolutely essential jurisprudence", which he says will serve as a reference point for "all subsequent ad hoc and permanent international courts, and national jurisdictions."
Others cited similar positive accomplishments.

"The first success, in my view, is the fact that the ICTY and ICTR [International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda] have demonstrated that international criminal courts can hold fair trials," said Goldstone.

He also pointed out that, until the inception of the ICTY and ICTR, humanitarian law had stagnated. "It was law that wasn't used," Goldstone said. "It is to the huge credit of the ICTY that, notwithstanding that, they continued to use and refine it."

Chief among those refinements, according to Goldstone, are what he called "the unhappy distinction" in international law between protecting civilians in international armed conflict versus in domestic armed conflict, which he said had been "obliterated."

Goldstone singled out the ICTY's achievements in the arena of gender-related crime, saying, "The ICC has taken it further than the ICTY, but the way was opened by the ICTY and [Rwandan] ICTR."
According to Goldstone, the two tribunals confirmed rape as a component of genocide, established an international definition of rape, and established case law regarding rape that is now used in domestic jurisdictions.

Goldstone also cited the creation of the ICC as one of the most important legacies the ICTY will leave. "But for the sort of successes I've been talking about, there would be no ICC," he said.

John Washburn, the American convener for the independent Coalition for the International Criminal Court, said that as a result of work by the ICTY and ICTR, crimes such as mass rape are dealt with extensively in the ICC's founding statue.

Karnavas admitted that the court has had some success in contributing to international law. "Right now, it's very clear that the culture of impunity is not going to be tolerated in the international community," he said.

He described the tribunal's record of jurisprudence as "spotty - some of it is rather good, some of it is way out there," and predicted that the ICC would use ICTY case law sparingly.

While Ackerman conceded that the court had broken new ground by putting into practice what had previously been a purely theoretical discussion about international criminal justice, he argues nevertheless that this will not translate into future practice.

"The meat that was put on the bones here in terms of international jurisprudence is really quite important," he said. "Unfortunately, I think it will largely be forgotten."

Lessons learned

Yet most of the people interviewed for this report agreed that lawmakers at the ICC can learn many lessons from the experience of their counterparts at the ICTY.

Dicker echoes Karnavas's call for judges at the trial level in international courts to have previous courtroom experience - either as judges, defence lawyers, or prosecutors.

He added that the ICTY had provided "lessons to be learned as to how respect for the rights of accused needs to be calibrated with the overall interests of justice."

Washburn agreed that there are a number of lessons that the ICC can learn – and it has already made some changes, for example providing separate pre-trial chambers to deal with initial motions and appeals in order to avert the kind of complaints heard at the ICTY about trials taking too long to get started.

The ICC has also learned about the physical requirements of conducting a proper trial, he said. These include buildings designed to prevent defense and prosecutions lawyers from running into each other during the trial, with separate lifts, and adequate conference and computer facilities for defense teams near the courtrooms.
"It makes for a much fairer trial," Washburn explained.

Washburn said that due to staff carry-over from the ICTY and ICTR to the ICC, the new court was experiencing some of the same problems, including inadequate consultation with defense lawyers on important matters.
The problems have already led to the creation of the International Criminal Bar Association, with support from bar associations in the US, UK and France.

Ultimately, as Dicker pointed out, it may be long time before the ICTY's legacy becomes fully apparent.

"The Nuremburg trials did not have an immediate effect in post-war Germany. It was decades later that a new generation was able to access the Nuremburg judgments and make them meaningful," he said. "Time will tell."

Barred From Montenegro,Bishop Starts Hunger Strike
Javno
August 28, 2007

A Serbian Orthodox bishop pitched a tent at the border on Tuesday and said he was going on hunger strike in protest.

A Serbian Orthodox bishop who has been barred from Montenegro on suspicion of aiding war crimes fugitives pitched a tent at the border on Tuesday and said he was going on hunger strike in protest.

The United Nations tribunal in The Hague has put Bishop Filaret on a list of people suspected of helping four ethnic Serb suspects from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s evade justice.

Montenegro, keen to get the Hague's support for its progress towards European Union membership, turned the bishop away twice this summer when he was trying to visit parts of his diocese that are on Montenegrin soil.
When Filaret tried to enter the country again on Tuesday morning, he was stopped by some 20 policemen. He returned at noon, pitched a tent on no-man's land, complete with a power generator, and put up a banner saying "Hunger Strike Day 1".

"I will stay here until my requests are fulfilled, or until my life ends," Filaret said, sitting on a wicker armchair at the Rance crossing, a few metres from the Montenegrin border sign.

The portly, white-bearded Filaret is one of several Serb Orthodox bishops known for their nationalist sympathies. He wanted to deliver the obituary at the funeral of Serb autocrat Slobodan Milosevic in March 2006.

He denied all contact with the Hague's top fugitives, former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic, both indicted for genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnia war.

"I don't know where Karadzic and Mladic are," Filaret said. "I last saw Radovan Karadzic in 1994, in Pale."
The controversy has deepened the chill between Montenegro and Serbia since the coastal Adriatic republic voted to leave its 90-year union with its larger sister state in May last year.

The political unease also has a religious aspect.

Montenegro's predominantly Orthodox population mostly follow the Serbian Orthodox Church, but since the two nations split, this dominance is challenged by the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which is not recognised by other Orthodox communities.

Belgrade authorities stepped in earlier this month to support the bishop, saying his religious rights were violated.
Filaret said apart from his hunger strike, he was also lodging a complaint with Montenegro's President Filip Vujanovic.

But Vujanovic said Montenegro was just following recommendations by The Hague and the Council of Europe.
"It is a question of relationships and cooperation with the international community," Vujanovic told local media. "We must cooperate in all areas, including justice."

Serb Group Plans ´Safe Houses´ For Fugitive Mladic
Javno
August 28, 2007

A Serbian nationalist movement says it is trying to establish a nationwide network of "safe houses" for top war crimes fugitive Mladic.

A Serbian nationalist movement says it is trying to establish a nationwide network of "safe houses" for top war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic, the Belgrade daily Pravda reported on Tuesday.

Posters and stickers with the words "Safe House for Ratko Mladic" appeared on Monday morning in the capital and seven other towns in central and southern Serbia.

"We plan to print thousands of such signs for citizens to put up on doors and windows, so the general would know which house was a safe hiding place in case, God forbid, someone tries to arrest him," said Misa Vacic, spokesman for the 1389 group.

Mladic, commander of Serb forces in the 1992-95 Bosnia war, has been indicted for genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague. He is accused of organising the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims and the 43-month siege of Sarajevo.

Serbia's failure to arrest and extradite Mladic to the U.N. war crimes court is a major obstacle to the country's bid for European Union membership.

Vacic said his group, named after the date of the Battle of Kosovo in which the Serbs were defeated by the Ottoman Turks, wanted to show the world that Mladic had the support of Serbs.

"One of our teams was stopped by a police patrol, but instead of filing a report against them, they asked for a poster to put up on the police station wall," he said.

Ethnic Albanians, police exchage fire in Macedonia
BIRN via B92
August 31, 2007

SKOPJE -- A former ethnic Albanian guerrilla leader said Friday his men had a short exchange of gunfire with police.

The officers then allegedly retreated from Tanuševci, which BIRN describes in its report from Skopje as "secession-minded" village near Macedonia's border with Kosovo.

Xhezair Shakiri, who was known as "Commander Hoxha" during the 2001 armed conflict in Macedonia, told local media Friday that police retreated from the mountain village on the border with Kosovo he claims to control.

The 2001 fighting between the Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanian guerillas started when the guerillas took over Tanuševci and proclaimed it as “liberated territory."

The conflict ended later that year with a peace accord that gave greater rights to ethnic minorities in the country.

Police officials refused to comment on Shakiri’s claims, instead saying in a prepared statement: “The police are regularly practicing their everyday activities on the whole territory of the country.”

“We have information that around ten shots from automatic weapons have been heard from the area of Tanuševci, but we do not know who fired them,” police spokesman Ivo Kotevski told Balkan Insight.

Local A1 TV cited people claiming they witnessed a third version of events. These people said Shakiri and his armed group fired shots from grenade launchers and personal weapons into the air, and that police did not return fire.

Shakiri last week challenged the central government when he said that villagers in Tanuševci want to unite with Kosovo.

He said in an interview that the Macedonian police are not welcome in the village. Shakiri also accused Macedonian authorities of disinterest in his village’s problems and of leaving the community “in the hands of destiny.”

“That is why we ask for the unification with Kosovo. Furthermore, our geographic position and family bonds tie us to that country,” Shakiri said.

Shakiri is a former deputy to the Macedonian parliament who is charged with kidnapping the former mayor of the municipality of Studeni?ani during the 2001 armed conflict.

He refuses to face the charges and claims that he is being framed by the police.

The largest ethnic Albanian opposition party formed by the former guerrilla fighters, Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, held an emergency meeting that lasted late into Thursday night to discuss mounting friction with the police.

DUI Vice President Teuta Arifi said after the meeting that Macedonian authorities are harassing the former guerrilla fighters.

For example, DUI members contend that party president Ali Ahmeti’s bodyguard was questioned and searched for illegal weapons recently.

[back to contents]

The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber

Official Website

Commencement of trial in the case of Zijad Kurtovic
Court of BiH
August 24, 2007

Commencement of the trial in the case of Zijad Kurtovic has been scheduled for Monday, 27 August 2007, starting at 2.00pm in courtroom 8. The Accused is charged with War crimes against civilians, War crimes against prisoners of war, and Violation of laws and practices of warfare.

According to the indictment, in the second half of 1993, in Donja Drežnica, Mostar Municipality, as commander of the Military police platoon within the Independent Drežnica Battalion of the 4th Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina Corps, Zijad Kurtovi? acted contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The indictment, inter alia, alleges that on several occasions during October 1993, the Accused physically and mentally tortured detained Croatian civilians and prisoners of war in the Roman Catholic Church of All Saints in Donja Drežnica.

Nenad Tanaskovic found guilty of Crimes against humanity and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment
Court of BiH
August 24, 2007

The Trial Panel in the case of Nenad Tanaskovi? handed down its verdict today, finding the Accused guilty of Crimes against humanity committed in the Višegrad Municipality in 1992, and sentencing him to 12 years imprisonment.

Finding that charges against the Accused were proved under six of seven counts of the indictment, the Trial Panel stated, inter alia, the following: In the period April to end of June 1992, as a reserve policeman in the Višegrad Police Station (Centre for public safety Trebinje), the Accused took part in a widespread or systematic attack of the Army of Srpska Republika BiH, police and paramilitary formations against the Muslim civilian population of the Višegrad municipality.

The Court found as proved, inter alia, the following:

In mid May 1992, together with other persons, the Accused deprived of liberty a female person and, threatening to rape her, conveyed her together with another male civilian, whom he also deprived of liberty, to the Višegrad police station. Following this, the man was detained in the police station together with other detainees while the female person was questioned by Drago Samardži? and then raped by two soldiers.

On 23 May 1992, together with other persons, the Accused unlawfully deprived of liberty two civilians whom they took to the Municipal centre in the Donja Lijeska village for questioning. The Accused Tanaskovi? directly participated in the beating of these persons, following which, together with Novo Rajak, he took them to the police station in Višegrad where they were held captive for four days.

On about 31 May 1992, together with a group of soliders, the Accused attacked undefended villages inhabited by Muslims and arrested the male inhabitants from these villages, threatening to kill everyone who tried to escape. Following this, Tanaskovi? and the soldiers looted a shop and set houses on fire, with Tanaskovi? personally setting on fire two houses. During the night, in the primary school in Orahovci, two men were called out of a room in which male captives were held, to be taken to another room where they were severely beaten by Nenad Tanaskovi?, Miloš Panteli? and another five to six soldiers.

On 14 June 1992 the Accused was in one of the buses, which were used to transport Muslim civilians, who had been forced to leave their homes, from Višegrad to territories controlled by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. After arrival at Iševi? Brdo, an order was given for men under the age of 65 to remain in the vehicles while women, children and men over the age of 65 were to disembark.

The Accused was acquitted, inter alia, of the charge that on 16 June 1992, on the Old Bridge in Višegrad, while soldiers were taking captives off a truck, killing them and throwing them into the Drina river, he forced two civilians to clean the blood and remove corpses from the bridge, and subsequently beat and forced one of these persons to lick blood off the floor in the garden of the Višegrad Hotel.

The time the Accused has been held in custody since 11 July 2006 will count towards the pronounced imprisonment sentence.

Mejakic et al: The night 120 detainees were killed
BIRN Justice Report
August 27, 2007

Prosecution witness tells the court how detainees were tortured in Keraterm. Protected prosecution witness K014 has told the court about a mass execution of detainees in July 1992, and of the involvement of one indictee in the maltreatment of forcibly detained Bosniaks and Croats. "I remember that, at the end of July 1992, a truck with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it was brought to the camp," claims K014, who was brought to Keraterm on 31 May 1992. "A machine gun shooting position was set up in front of the room in which detainees from Brdo were kept. The same night we heard shooting. The morning after I and other detainees collected the bodies from the room and took them to the 'runway'. I think that between 110 and 120 detainees were killed that night and 30 were wounded. All bodies were loaded onto the truck which drove them in an unknown direction," he added.

The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina charges Zeljko Mejakic, Momcilo Gruban, Dusan Fustar and Dusko Knezevic with the rape, murder,beating up and forcible detention of Bosniaks and Croats from the Prijedor area in Omarska and Keraterm detention camps in the course of 1992. "Killing, beating and all other things that I could never even imagine happened in Keraterm," says K014 adding that "Dusan Knezevic, also known as Duca" was in charge of the daily beating of detainees. The witness says that he saw Knezevic for the first time in the detention camp "when he arrived in a gray BMW, wearing a camouflage uniform". The witness added: "As far as I can remember, he was a thick man, weighing between 95 and 100 kg, and had curly hair. I think he was between 33 and 37 years of age and, I was told he was a butcher. "Knezevic, Zoran Zigic and a person named Predrag Banovic used to beat Emsud Bahunjic every day. Later on, he passed away," says K014. The indictment further alleges that Knezevic "regularly visited Keraterm detention camp, without being interrupted by anybody, and committed murders and beating of prisoners" in the period from 24 May to 30 August 1992. In February 2005 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced Zoran Zigic, also known as Ziga, to 25 years imprisonment for crimes committed in these detention camps. Dusko Knezevic's defence attorneys have not had any questions for the witness.

Witness K014 has further said that he also used to see Dusan Fustar, one of "the guard shift commanders", in the detention camp. "I cannot remember if Fustar beat anybody, but other guards told us that he was a guard shift commander," witness K014 said during cross-examination. The indictment alleges that Fustar was one of the three guard shift commanders in Keraterm detention camp in the period from 24 May to 30 August 1992. The trial is due to continue on 28 August 2007.

Mihaljevic: Murders in Tulice
BIRN Justice Report
August 30, 2007

A protected witness says that murders in Tulice village were committed by indictee Zdravko Mihaljevic.

A prosecution witness at the trial of Zdravko Mihaljevic, charged with war crimes committed in the vicinity of Kiseljak, has spoken about the murder and maltreatment of Bosniaks in the village of Tulice in June 1993. Mihaljevic is alleged to have committed, in his capacity as member of the 2nd Battalion of 'Ban Josip Jelacic' Brigade with the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) from Kiseljak and also as a commander of 'Maturice' Special Purpose Squad, crimes against civilians in the village of Tulice, Kiseljak, in the period from April to end June 1993. Witness A talked about the events in the village that took place on 12 June 1993. He said that on that day the village was shelled from the position held by HVO, while the population sought shelter in the basements of their houses. While witness A, together with other residents, was trying to extinguish fire in one of the houses a neighbor ran towards them and said that "black shirts" were coming. "We were surrounded. They were lined up in a row and, when they approached us, they started shooting," the witness says. He tried to flee but he was stopped by Vlatko Trogrlic, known as Zuna, who told him to report to Pijuk (the inductee’s nickname). The witness says he did not recognize Mihaljevic at the time, but he was pointed out to him by other people. According to this witness, Mihaljevic and one more person killed Salko Bajraktarevic. Some 35 men from the village were then taken to the local cemetery. This is where Refik Huseinovic, Mufid Tulic, Safet Kadric, Ahmed Bajraktarevic, Zijad Huseinovic and Aziz Huseinovic were murdered, according to witness A. Witness A claims that Mihaljevic, and a few more soldiers, shot them. According to this witness, Mihaljevic also killed Kasim Huseinovic, after weapons had been discovered in his house. The indictee also maltreated witness A when he said he did not have any weapons. Later on, a group of about 30 men was driven in a small truck in the direction of Lepenica. Mihaljevic followed the truck driving in a white "golf". After being told to "get off" the vehicle, Ibrahim Jusic was taken away. Later on, the witness found out that Jusic had been taken to Svinjarevo detention camp and killed. The others were taken to Kiseljak barracks.

In the course of the mentioned events, the person claimed by witness A to be Mihaljevic was wearing a black cap with eye, nose and mouth holes. He took off the cap when they arrived in Lepenica. That is when the witness discovered that person was Mihaljevic. The witness has also described the clothes the person, whom he identified as Mihaljevic on that day, was wearing. He has also given a detailed description of a tattoo on his upper arm that looked like a snake curled around a sword. The witness described the indictee's voice as "strident". During cross-examination, witness A said he has neither seen the inductee’s photo nor has he ever identified him before. He knew Mihaljevic "by sight" from 1992 and he never saw him again after the aforementioned events. The witness added that he would not be able to recognize the indictee now. Mihaljevic asked the witness a few questions concerning the military situation in the village of Tulice during 1992. The witness was unable to give precise answers. As the witness was testifying under additional protection measures the hearing was followed from a separate room, by listening to an audio recording. The public was excluded from the hearing on several occasions. The trial is due to continue on September 5.

Custody ordered for Dordislav Aškraba; Restrictive measures ordered for Nedo Zeljaja
Court of BiH
August 31, 2007

Today, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) rendered a decision ordering one-month custody to ?or?islav Aškraba, who is suspected of Crimes against humanity.

In its motion seeking custody orders, the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH alleges that there is grounded suspicion that in the period between April and September 1992, the Suspect was a police officer in the Kalinovik Police Department and performed the duties of warden at the Barutni magacin detention camp. The Prosecutor further states that the camp was used to detain Muslim civilians, who were subjected to starvation, physical mistreatment and killings. The Prosecutor also states that on several occasions, the Suspect took detainees out of the camp and handed them over to members of the Army of Republika Srpska or paramilitary formations, following which they disappeared.

Following a public hearing the Court found that, on the basis of the evidence submitted, there is grounded suspicion that the Suspect committed the offence referred to above. Further, the Court concluded that the basis for an order of custody was established based on a substantial risk that, if released, the Suspect would interfere with the criminal proceedings by influencing witnesses and co-perpetrators.

Also today, the Court issued a decision refusing as unfounded the Prosecutor’s motion for an order of custody for Ne?o Zeljaja, who is suspected of Crimes against humanity. However, due to special circumstances of the case, the Court imposed restrictive measures on the Suspect, requiring him to report daily to the Kalinovik Police Station.

Ratko Bundal Arrested
BIRN Justice Report
August 31, 2007

One more Bosnian Serb, who is believed to have participated in crimes committed in Kalinovik in the course of 1992, has been arrested.

Acting on a warrant issued by the Prosecution of BiH, the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) has arrested Ratko Bundalo, who is believed to have committed war crime against humanity in Kalinovik area. The arrest took place in Banja Luka on Friday, 31 August. Earlier this week SIPA arrested two more persons believed to have committed crimes in Kalinovik - Nedjo Zeljaja and Djordjislav Askraba. Kemal Pervan, president of the "Istina – Kalinovik 1992" Association, told Justice Report that war crime suspect Bundal was a "commander of 'Sanica Brigade' in Kalinovik". "In the course of 1992 he provided logistical support during the capture of the local population and he was a member of the Emergency Headquarters," Pervan alleges. Later today, Bundal will be referred to the Prosecution of BiH. The Court should then render a decision concerning custody order.

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International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)

Official Website of the ICTR

Transfer Policy of the ICTR Prosecutor Takes Another Hit
AllAfrica.com - Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
August 24, 2007

After the decision of a Dutch court that ruled that it did not have the jurisdiction to try suspects of the Rwandan genocide and the release in France of two accused, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is facing a true puzzle if it wants to finish its mandate by the end of 2008.

The Security Council, which created it in 1994, has asked it to finish its first instance trials within 16 month as 12 trials are ongoing and nine accused await to be tried. For that purpose, the ICTR has already stated its intention to transfer its last defendants towards other courts, including in Rwanda. But after this resignation by the Netherlands, and the rupture of diplomatic relations between France and Kigali, the list of volunteers to replace of the ICTR is not so long.

First to be transferred on the basis of rule 11 bis of the rules of procedure and evidence, Michel Bagaragaza is once again in the custody of the ICTR which is awaiting his arrival at the detention center in Arusha. On 30 August 2006, he had already seen his transfer to Norway refused because the legislation of that country did not recognize the genocide as a crime.

He was finally sent to The Hague, for his safety while awaiting his trial, because he had agreed to testify in other ICTR cases. Today, if the international tribunal does not assume his case or if it does not find other countries which will agree to try him, he should be transferred to the Rwandan authorities who have been requesting his extradition.

Generally, international law recognizes in countries a universal repressive jurisdiction. "Universal crime universal repression" explains Olivier Corten, head of the center of international law of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

This universal jurisdiction is sometimes allowed (for example, the convention on the prevention and the punishment of the crime of genocide of 1948), sometimes binding (in particular, the Geneva Conventions of 1949). However, it is unanimously allowed only when the suspect is found on the territory of the country which wants to prosecute.

As the world unceasingly relives these same horrors and massacres, certain countries like Belgium, Switzerland and Spain decided in the nineties to equipped themselves or to recognize themselves with absolute universal jurisdiction which enables them to try any person, whatever their nationality, that of the victim and the place of the crime.

These countries had posed, at the same time, a legal and moral requirement to do whatever possible to prosecute the authors of these crimes which we had sworn, following the Nuremberg trials, would never happen again. A legal requirement due to the international commitments undertaken and a moral requirement like an ethical duty to fight against the impunity of the most serious crimes.

All have exercised it, but today, Spain is the only country that still posses this power. The other countries succumbed to the various political pressures (lack of means in the face of the number of complaints filed, interests of the countries on the international stage, commercial activities abroad, effects of appeals in regard to asylum requests, etc.) and exert nothing more than a delegated power.

In the majority of other countries, such as Canada, Australia, the United States (which all the three have already exerted their delegated universal jurisdiction), the presence of accused on the territory is required to be able to try them, this leads to obvious problems within the framework of the transfer procedure of rule 11 bis of the rules of procedure and evidence of the ICTR because they were arrested elsewhere.

But finally, even when this condition was met, the prosecutions were suddenly no longer possible, for lack of internal legal grounds, as in the Bagaragaza case in the Netherlands.

The only option remaining for these countries that refuse to try persons accused of genocide would be to extradite them to Rwanda, which is henceforth possible due to its new law that abolishes the death penalty.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has already carried out several transfers on the basis of rule 11 bis (14 until now). But all were towards countries of the former Yugoslavia, while the ICTR authorizes the transfer to any country which would possess jurisdiction.

The goal of the ICTY is, at the same time, to decentralize criminal justice in order to free the buildup of cases by only keeping high officials but also, and especially, to associate these countries, victims of their own war, with the judgment of their nationals.

Prosecutor Intends to Try a Former Farmer Before a National Court
AllAfrica.com - Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
August 31, 2007

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) will request next week to try before a national court the former farmer Yussuf Munyakazi accused of genocide, it was learned Friday from Arusha.

A senior trial attorney, Richard Karegyesa ( Uganda), stated during a "status conference" that a motion to this aim was about to be filed.

Karegyesa did not specify towards which country the prosecutor would wish to transfer the defendant. A source close to the case, however, indicated to the Hirondelle news agency that it would be Rwanda.

Munyakazi, 72, was a prosperous farmer and businessman in Cyangugu (southwestern Rwanda). He would have led a militia which took part in several attacks against Tutsis in 1994.

Arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2004, he has pled not guilty.

Norwegian Judge Erik Mose, who presided the status conference, however estimated that, as it was difficult to know if the motion of the prosecutor would be granted, it was advisable to determine the trial calendar in prospect of it being held before the ICTR.

The defence recommended that the trial open in February 2008 and the prosecutor in April. Judge Mose invited the parties to a new status conference next December "to measure the temperature".

Yussuf Munyakazi is defended by a Tanzanian lawyer, Juan Mwaikusa.

Mwaikusa has already defended before the courts of his country, Rwandan Major Bernard Ntuyahaga, who later became a prisoner in Belgium where he was tried in connection with the genocide committed in Rwanda in 1994. In July 2007, Ntuyahaga was sentenced to twenty years in prison by the crown court of Brussels. He has appealed the decision.

Kagame Encourages Other Countries to Abolish the Death Penalty
AllAfrica.com - Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
August 31, 2007

The Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, encouraged other countries to follow the example of his country, as he received Thursday in Rome, Italy, an award for the abolition of the death penalty.

"We encourage more countries in Africa and in the world to be put an end to this practice", declared the Rwandan Head of State, in receiving this award handed out by the Italian organization, Hands off Cain.

Kagame received the "award of abolitionist of the year 2007" from Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Rwanda abolished last month the death penalty for all crimes including the 1994 genocide which resulted, according to Kigali, in nearly a million killed, primarily Tutsis.

"The death penalty is contrary to our vision of stability, peace, prosperity and democratic governance", estimated the Rwandan president, in a speech consulted Friday by the Hirondelle agency on the site of the organization Hands off Cain.

He, however, recognized that it had not been "easy to obtain a national consensus" on the abolition of this sentence, notably because of the wounds of the 1994 genocide that still remain.

Mr. Kagame also called on countries harbouring genocide suspects not to hesitate further in extradite them towards Rwanda now that the death penalty has been abolished.

"There are countries which had in the past refused to hand over (to Rwandan courts) Rwandans accused of crimes of genocide for the reason that they would likely be put to death", he recalled.

"If these countries change their position now and return, for judgment in Rwanda, the said individuals, we would welcome this decision because it would undoubtedly develop the administration of justice in our country", he added.

The suppression of the death penalty raised one of the principal obstacles to the transfer before Rwandan courts of accused of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) headquartered in Arusha, in northern Tanzania.

Rwanda is the first country of the African Great Lakes Region to have abolished the death penalty.

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Iraqi High Tribunal

Official Website of the Iraqi High Tribunal
Grotian Moment: The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog

15 Hussein Aides on Trial in Baghdad
New York Times
by James Glanz
August 21, 2007

BAGHDAD, Aug. 21 — The man known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing villages in northern Iraq stood up and identified himself as “the fighter, Ali Hassan al-Majid” today, during the first day of the trial for his role in suppressing the 1991 uprising in the south of the country.

Despite his feisty description of himself, the man often chosen by Saddam Hussein to carry out the darkest deeds of his regime — Mr. Majid has already been given eight death sentences for the crimes in Kurdistan — is now a shuffling old man.

He and some of his 14 co-defendants adamantly protested their innocence as their trial began, and at one point several lapsed into a diatribe that prompted the Iraqi judge to cut them off. They are charged with four counts of crimes against humanity: willful murder, persecution, torture and what amounts to unjust imprisonment.

Before sitting down in the front row of the dock among his co-defendants, Mr. Majid, a wooden cane in his right hand, walked meekly to his seat and spent much of the time bent over his notes. He wore a white headscarf, known here as a ghutra, and a disdasha. He stood up once to address the judge, gesturing right and left but producing no Mr. Hussein-like fireworks.

Mr. Majid is accused of being among the leaders of the brutal suppression of the uprising, which occurred as Iraqi armed forces engaged in a chaotic retreat from Kuwait. Mr. Hussein made a disastrous decision to invade the country, and his forces were routed by a coalition led by the United States.

Trials relating to the suppression have been divided into parts, and this one covers only accused crimes in the southern provinces of Basra and Amara. A United States official at the trial said that the division had been done to reduce the number of witnesses who needed to be transported from the south for any one trial.

When Mr. Majid stood, he first complained that documents on court proceedings were not reaching him in a timely fashion. He also ridiculed what he called “plastic trash bags” that detainees were given to keep their clothes in — and said that he was also required to keep court papers in the bags instead of in boxes. “The bag will tear later on” if the papers are all dumped in it, Mr. Majid said.

The court also heard a witness, Khuraibu Jabbar Rissan, provide a detailed description of the chaos and brutality of the suppression of Shiites in the south, recounting how the Iraqi Army devastated his village. When young men of the village, in the marshes near Basra, heard that the city had fallen, they marched on the police station and Baath Party headquarters, Mr. Rissan said.

The men were angered because there was no food or electricity in the village, he said.

The buildings were abandoned and the men burned them down, he said. Mr. Rissan, who was in the Army, heard that the military would march on his village and fled to an abandoned school in another town with his family. Soon thereafter they fled into the marshes to escape the assault on the entire area by Iraqi military forces.

When he finally returned to the village, he said, it had been largely destroyed and looted by members of the Iraqi Army, Mr. Hussein’s Republican Guard, and the local Baath Party. His clothing shop was destroyed, tank rounds had been fired into his house and everything was missing except for two old sofas and a worn carpet.

“And a few pillows — because I’m under oath,” Mr. Rissan said. “And a few clothes thrown about.”

The gallery at the trial was sparse, reflecting a drop in interest in the high tribunal after Mr. Hussein was found guilty and hanged.

But Iraqis, especially those in the south, were aware of the proceedings.

“I am happy because mothers of victims will take comfort in this trial,” said Muhamed Abdul Mahdi, in Basra.

But others were skeptical of the trial.

“I don’t care,” said Mumen Hamdi, also in Basra. “For me nothing is different, because yesterday there were mass graves and the same today.” The trial is taking place at the Iraqi High Tribunal, which was created to try crimes committed during Mr. Hussein’s government. The organization, run by the American Embassy, has overseen the trials, called the Regime Crimes Liaison Unit, and has for the first time left many of the logistical and administrative duties — such as moving witnesses — to the Iraqi government, said Armand Cucciniello, an Embassy spokesman.

“We’re going through a capacity-building phase where we’re trying to turn over the operation to the Iraqis,” Mr. Cucciniello said, using the term, capacity building, that the United States calls upon here when it tries to teach Iraqis how to carry out some task, in this case jurisprudence.

Mr. Majid is the most recognizable defendant left in the trials. But his earlier convictions are under appeal, and he could be hanged at any time for those crimes.

The appeal process in Iraq generally takes no more than 30 days, and once a defendant in a capital case loses an appeal, the sentence is carried out almost immediately.

High-profile trial divides Iraq
BBC News
by Mike Wooldridge
August 21, 2007

The sight of key figures in the Saddam Hussein regime in the dock at a new Iraqi High Tribunal trial has provoked a fresh debate among Iraqis about this means of delivering justice.

Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid - widely known as Chemical Ali because of the gassing of villages in northern Iraq - is the most prominent defendant in the third trial to be conducted by the tribunal.

He and 14 others are charged with crimes against humanity in connection with the suppression of the Shia uprising that took place in the south of Iraq in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War.

"The fighter Ali Hassan al-Majid" was how he identified himself at the start of what is expected to be another lengthy trial.

'Just punishment'

He and two other defendants might not live to see the end of the proceedings because they have already been sentenced to death in an earlier trial.

If the sentences are upheld on appeal, under Iraqi law the expectation is that they would be carried out within 30 days.

"The people being prosecuted deserve to be executed thousands of times for crimes they committed against the Iraqi people," said a 39-year-old teacher the BBC spoke to in Baghdad.

"They will have the chance to face a fair trial and they are able to defend themselves, so they will see how the new Iraq looks like."

A restaurant owner, 34, said: "This is the court we have been waiting for. Those criminals were behind the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi people in the south and they made the Iraqis suffer for a long time so they have to get a punishment they deserve."

'Illegitimate court'

But there is equally strong criticism to be heard.

A 43-year-old shop owner called the court "a play".

He said it was being directed by the Americans and also the Iranians because Iraq won the war against Iran in the 1980s and a now a new pro-Iranian government in Baghdad was looking for revenge on behalf of Tehran.

He also alleged that the people who were discovered in mass graves were Iranian Revolutionary Guard elements who had come into Iraq to destroy its infrastructure and been killed by the Iraqi army.

A 30-year-old butcher said he regarded the court as "illegitimate because it was established under the occupation".

A student, aged 20, felt it was not the right time for trials of this kind to be taking place because "things are very bad in the country and the people are suffering a lot".

'Significant bearing'

Yet this argument - heard quite commonly during the previous two trials as well - was not persuasive enough for one 30-year-teacher we spoke to.

"I admit that the current conditions are very hard where the security and economic situation is very bad," he said. "But it is Saddam loyalists and their ally al-Qaeda who are behind it."

On day one, the defence team challenged the legitimacy of the trial, as they did in the earlier trials. The judge said he would consider their grievance but proceedings continued.

Some 90 witnesses are expected to testify. They will give their account of the events 16 years ago.

But in Iraq the events of history often have a significant bearing on the attitudes of its different and often fractious communities today.

Once again, the words spoken in one of the most closely guarded courtrooms in the world are being argued over on the streets of Iraq's towns and cities.

2 ex-aides to Saddam ejected from trial
Associated Press via Yahoo! News
by Sameer N. Yacoub
August 22, 2007

BAGHDAD - The chief judge dismissed two former aides to Saddam Hussein from the courtroom for unruly behavior Wednesday on the second day of a trial over the brutal suppression of a 1991 rebellion by Shiite Muslims.

The order came as a 76-year-old former Shiite lawmaker testified that he was falsely imprisoned for months following the uprising, describing how fellow inmates were carried back to jail in blankets after hours of torture rendered them unable to walk.

"I was later released because of the presidential pardon, but my life was already destroyed. I was dismissed from the parliament. My cotton was destroyed by the army shelling and my house was damaged," Kamil Kanoun Abu al-Heil recalled.

Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, who gained the nickname "Chemical Ali" after poison gas attacks on Kurdish towns in the 1980s, and 14 others went on trial Tuesday for crimes against humanity in the case, which stems from the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, in which a U.S.-led coalition drove Saddam's army from Kuwait.

Iraqi Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north — repressed under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime — sought to take advantage of the defeat, launching separate uprisings and briefly seizing control of 14 of the country's 18 provinces.

U.S. troops created a safe haven for Kurds in three northern provinces, preventing Saddam from attacking. But Iraqi troops crushed the other uprising in the predominantly Shiite south, killing tens of thousands.

Al-Heil denied that he was part of the uprising, pointing out that he was a member of Saddam's rubber-stamp parliament. "I was part of the regime. No way I could have participated in the uprising," he said.

In the middle of Wednesday's session, chief judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa ordered former Republican Guards commander Maj. Gen. Iyad Fathi al-Rawi — who led the 1988 offensives at the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war — to leave the courtroom "for not sticking to the rules of the court."

The judge then ordered the defendants who sat in three rows in a wooden pen not to talk to each other or sit cross-legged.

Half an hour later, he dismissed former defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai for the same reason.

Al-Tai asked what he had done before leaving and the judge replied, "you know what you have done."

It was the third trial of former regime officials. The first led to the hanging of Saddam and three others after their conviction for the 1982 killings of 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail. The second trial involved the killing of more than 100,000 people during a 1980s military crackdown on Kurds.

Al-Tai, al-Majid and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, an ex-deputy director of military operations — were sentenced to death in the so-called Anfal case. They are standing trial in the Shiite uprising case pending their appeals.

The defendants who spoke Tuesday maintained their innocence and questioned the U.S.-backed court's credibility.

Sabir al-Douri, former director of military intelligence, told the judge he was in Baghdad during the 1991 uprising and did not visit the south in that period.

Sabawi Ibrahim, a Saddam half brother who headed an intelligence agency in 1991, challenged the trial, saying the court "was established by the occupiers who ignored the international law and invaded Iraq without the permission of the United Nations."

He also defended the crackdown on the Shiite uprising, saying it was orchestrated by Iran, with which Saddam's regime had fought a devastating war.

" Iran failed to achieve its goal in the 1980-88 war, but it seized the chance in 1991 to kill Iraqis and loot Iraq," Ibrahim said. " Iran used its elements and agents to destroy Iraq."

Court told Saddam's cousin shot dead Shi'ite rebels
Reuters
by Ahmed Rasheed
August 23, 2007

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's cousin, widely known as "Chemical Ali", shot dead nearly 20 men suspected of taking part in a Shi'ite uprising after the 1991 Gulf War, a court trying him for crimes against humanity heard on Thursday.

Ali Hassan al-Majeed, once one of the most feared men in Iraq, is on trial with 14 other defendants, most of them former military commanders, for their role in crushing the uprising in which the prosecution says up to 100,000 people were killed.

They face charges of crimes against humanity, which carry the death penalty. Majeed was sentenced to death earlier this year for masterminding a genocidal military campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988 that killed tens of thousands.

The Shi'ite rebellion in southern Iraq, and a simultaneous one in Kurdish areas, erupted spontaneously in early March 1991 after a U.S.-led international coalition routed Saddam's army in Kuwait the previous month.

When then U.S. President George Bush held back from invading Iraq, fearing that it would break up his carefully constructed coalition, Saddam swiftly counter-attacked against the rebels with tanks and helicopters.

Gasim Mohammed, then a soldier in the Iraqi navy's logistics department in the southern city of Basra, told the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad he had seen Majeed execute several men after he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the rebellion.

"The army arrested me. There were a bunch of us. They took us to the Industrial Institute building in Basra. I saw Ali Hassan al-Majeed with two women beside him.

"They made us stand in line and the two women started to ... point out the involved ones. Every man they selected was immediately shot dead by Majeed. I remember him shooting two or three men with his own pistol."

A second witness, Ali Hadi Jaber, a student at the time but now a policeman, said he was arrested with dozens of others and taken to a military detention facility in Basra.

"They lined us up and Ali Hassan al-Majeed began indiscriminately selecting some men and shooting them with a collapsible AK-47 right through their hearts.

"He shot dead 15 men. I saw that with my own eyes. He killed them all. They were from my town and I knew them."

Majeed is appealing the death sentence he received in the earlier trial. If it is rejected he could be executed before the latest trial is completed.

Majeed, dubbed Chemical Ali for his use of poison gas against ethnic Kurds, was seen as Saddam's main enforcer, a man with a reputation for brutality who was used by the president to crush dissent.

Saddam himself was hanged in December 2006 after being found guilty in the killings of scores of Shi'ite men in the town of Dujail after an attempt on his life there in 1982.

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Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) &
Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Offical Website of the Special Court for Sierra Leone
The Sierra Leone Court Monitoring Programme
Official Website of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia

War crimes trial of former Liberian leader postponed by UN-backed court
UN News Service
August 21, 2007

The war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor has been postponed until early next year after judges at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) agreed today to give defence lawyers more time to study the evidence.

Mr. Taylor’s counsel applied for a delay until 7 January so they could evaluate some 40,000 pages of evidence recently disclosed by prosecutors, SCSL spokesperson Solomon Moriba told the UN News Service from The Hague, where the trial is being held.

Justices Julia Sebutinde (presiding), Teresa Doherty and Richard Lussick approved the application during a status conference, one in a series that will be held over the next few months to assess the progress of the prosecution and the defence in presenting their cases.

Mr. Taylor is facing 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, including mass murder, mutilations, rape, sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers, for his role in the decade-long civil war that engulfed Sierra Leone, which borders Liberia.

A year ago the Security Council authorized the staging of Mr. Taylor’s trial at The Hague, citing reasons of security and expediency. Although the trial will be held at the premises of the International Criminal Court (ICC), it will remain under the exclusive jurisdiction of the SCSL.

The Special Court, established in January 2002 by an agreement between the Sierra Leonean Government and the UN, is mandated to try “those who bear greatest responsibility” for war crimes and crimes against community committed in the country after 30 November 1996.

Last month it reached an agreement with the United Kingdom that will mean Mr. Taylor will be imprisoned in the UK if he is convicted.

Liberian Ex-Leader's War Crimes Trial Is Stalled
New York Times
by Marlise Simons
August 27, 2007

PARIS, Aug. 25 — When Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was arrested 17 months ago on war crimes charges and ordered to face international judges, it was heralded as a milestone for justice in Africa.

His trial, the first war crimes trial for an African president, was to start in April.

But having barely begun, the case has already lost its momentum. Last Monday, hearings were postponed for the fourth time this year, and the court is now set to reconvene in January.

The latest disruption was the result of Mr. Taylor’s dismissal of his court-appointed lawyer, Karim Khan. His new lawyer, Courtenay Griffiths, told the court that his team needed at least four months to study the 40,000 pages of evidence already before the court. And he said that Mr. Taylor’s personal archives, about 50,000 pages, had only just surfaced and needed to be examined.

The delays have caused much fingerpointing about who at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone is most to blame.

The responsibility is variously pinned on the judges for trying to schedule the complex case with undue haste, on the court administration for being inept and short of funds, or on Mr. Taylor — who has denied all criminal charges — for stalling.

One problem that has dogged the trial is that it was moved from the relatively inexpensive Sierra Leone to the much costlier city of The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Several countries, including the United States, which was deeply involved in creating the tribunal, feared that a trial in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, for such an influential politician could cause unrest in West Africa.

Court officials say that the move has created more bureaucracy while driving up salaries and travel bills for staff and witnesses.

“The court had to find new offices, move people, hire more staff, find safe quarters for witnesses, all on a very tight budget,” said Stephen Rapp, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor.

Turf wars arose with the host, the new International Criminal Court. An official with the Sierra Leone tribunal, who did not want to be identified because he needs to work with both courts, said the international court initially tried to charge “an enormous sum” for the use of one of its rarely occupied courtrooms and insisted on renting out a whole floor of its cellblock instead of just Mr. Taylor’s two cells. In the end, prices came down.

But the new location has also put the Sierra Leone court under a stronger spotlight in a town with three other international courts, packed with lawyers, students and observers from the fast-growing field of international law, some of whom have been critical.

As it happens, the Sierra Leone court was planned to benefit from lessons learned from the war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia, which were seen as slow, expensive and far from the wars’ victims.

When it opened in 2002, American officials involved in its creation presented the new institution as a better model, one that would be cheaper, faster and leaner and would try only a few top leaders. One innovation was using both national and international judges.

But in practice, the court, now dealing with just 10 defendants, has had difficulty in carrying out its mandate. Operating on two continents — in Europe for Mr. Taylor and Africa for the other cases — has clearly complicated its mission, but critics say that from the start the court has been slow and inept.

Its original three-year mandate is expected to turn into eight years. The original budgeted cost of $54 million, based on voluntary contributions, has tripled and is growing. “Because of numerous mistakes and cost-cutting, it has become comparatively more expensive and slower than the other tribunals,” said Antonio Cassese, an international lawyer who wrote an efficiency report ordered by the United Nations that was published this year.

During recent hearings, several lawyers following the Taylor trial from the public gallery were critical of the prickly style of the leading judge and of her rush to open the trial this summer when the prosecutors and defense had agreed that September would be realistic. They said they believed that the bench had been under some political pressure to move the case along.

With their uncertain, voluntary financing, court officials have had to divide their attention, devoting time to drumming up contributions. “We now think this will be a $4 million trial,” said Herman von Hebel, the new court administrator who, after a recent hearing, rushed off with Mr. Rapp, the chief prosecutor, on a fund-raising trip to world capitals. “We have funds in hand to last us through October,” said Mr. Rapp, adding that new pledges “will take us to into 2008.”

Mr. Taylor has protested the disarray but also exploited it. Although he is believed to have amassed a large fortune, he has claimed to be indigent and demanded legal aid, repeatedly requesting more time and more money to hire the additional top lawyers he wanted to defend him. He faces 11 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, for instigating or tolerating many of the enormous atrocities committed by rebels he backed during the Sierra Leone civil war of the 1990s.

Mr. Khan, his former lawyer, said his client became more and more angry as court documents were sent to the defense late or incomplete and motions and requests sent to the court were ignored. “We were fighting a phantom,” Mr. Kahn said. “We often got no replies.”

On the opening day of the trial, Mr. Taylor stayed in his cell. “He told me the only thing which will embarrass this court is public attention,” Mr. Khan recalled in a recent interview. As part of that strategy, Mr. Taylor fired him as the lawyer, knowing this would stall the trial, Mr. Khan said.

Mr. Khan, who walked out of court after announcing that he had been fired, said during the interview that he regretted having to leave “one of the biggest cases in the world.”

But Mr. Taylor’s tactics worked. The judges ordered that “sufficient” funds be provided to defend the accused, and the court has now almost doubled Mr. Taylor’s defense budget, to $70,000 per month. It also provides close to $30,000 monthly for other services, like office rent and investigators. Last Monday, Mr. Taylor took his seat in court behind his new team of three lawyers, and the judges granted them preparation time until January.

Meanwhile, on orders of the United Nations Security Council, investigators continue to search for Mr. Taylor’s assets, which, if found, will be tapped for reimbursing the court.

According to the chief prosecutor, governments in half a dozen countries are enrolled in the inquiry, and $15 million in assets of Mr. Taylor’s business associates have been frozen in Britain, the United States, France, Egypt and Lebanon. But legal proof is still needed that those businesses were fronts for Mr. Taylor.

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United States

Recommendation: Drop Marine Murder Case
Associated Press via The Guardian
by Elliot Spagat
August 24, 2007

SAN DIEGO (AP) - A Marine accused of murdering Iraqi civilians, including children, in the town of Haditha should have all charges dropped against him because of weak evidence, an investigating officer recommended on Thursday.

Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, 26, is charged with unpremeditated murder of two girls and negligent homicide on suspicion that he unlawfully killed two men, a woman and a boy. He is also accused of assaulting another boy and a girl.

The investigating officer, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, said the evidence was too weak for a court-martial. Tatum, of Edmond, Okla., shot and killed civilians, but ``he did so because of his training and the circumstances he was placed in, not to exact revenge and commit murder,'' Ware wrote.

``I believe ... Tatum's real life experience and training on how to clear a room took over and his body instinctively began firing while his head tried to grasp at what and why he was firing,'' Ware wrote. ``By the time he could recognize that he was shooting at children, his body had already acted.''

Ware's recommendation is nonbinding. Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the commanding general overseeing the case, has final say about whether Tatum will be court-martialed.

If Mattis accepts the recommendation to dismiss charges - as he has with three of eight Marines who were initially accused - that would leave one Marine charged with murder. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the squad leader, is charged with the unpremeditated murder of 18 men, women and children. He is scheduled to appear in court Aug. 30 for a preliminary hearing.

An attorney for Tatum, Jack Zimmerman, said he was pleased with the recommendation and would not comment further until he knew that the general had seen the 29-page report.

Ware said the deaths were tragic and that photographs of the victims were ``heart wrenching,'' but that Wuterich fired first inside one room where seven Iraqis were killed, with Tatum following his lead.

Tatum was ``entitled to act on his honest and reasonable belief'' that Wuterich was firing at legitimate targets, Ware wrote.

A message left for Wuterich's attorney, Neal Puckett, wasn't immediately returned.

The victims died when a Marine squad launched a house-to-house assault Nov. 19, 2005, following a roadside bomb blast that killed a Marine driver.

Tatum was among four Marines charged with murder, while four others were charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the deaths.

Of the four accused of murder, prosecutors dropped charges against Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz and gave him immunity to testify.

Mattis has dismissed charges against another rifleman, Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, after an investigating officer also recommended against sending him to a court-martial.

Squad leader Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich still faces murder charges. He is charged with the unpremeditated murder of 18 men, women and children and is scheduled to appear in court Aug. 30 for a preliminary hearing.

Officer acquitted of mistreatment in Abu Ghraib
The Boston Globe
by Josh White
August 29, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The only military officer to face trial for the abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was acquitted yesterday of all charges of mistreatment of detainees. But after a weeklong trial, a military jury in Fort Meade, Md., found Army Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan guilty of disobeying an order not to discuss a 2004 investigation into the allegations.

The jury of nine colonels and a one-star general deliberated for nearly seven hours over two days before concluding that Jordan should not be held responsible for failing to train and supervise interrogators and military police at the facility in 2003.

Jurors also determined that Jordan bears no responsibility for alleged abuses that occurred on Nov. 24, 2003, when a group of Iraqi police officers were strip-searched and dogs were used to search for contraband. The jurors apparently agreed with defense arguments that Jordan was not in charge of the effort or the military police soldiers at the prison.

Jordan's acquittal on three charges related to abuse exonerates him of any connection to the infamous photographs of naked detainees that emerged from the prison in early 2004. Defense attorneys argued that Jordan was not in charge of interrogations and had no connection to controversial interrogation policies that allowed the use of dogs and other harsh methods. Rather, they said, he served more as a "mayor" in charge of improving conditions for service members at the austere military base.

Jordan's exoneration on charges of mistreatment means that no officer will serve prison time in connection with the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, leaving the harshest punishment for low-ranking soldiers who committed the abuse. Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, a military intelligence officer who ran Abu Ghraib, accepted an administrative punishment and a fine for inappropriately authorizing the use of dogs in interrogations, and then-Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who commanded military police, received an administrative punishment and was demoted.

Jordan's case also wraps up the numerous inquiries and investigations that began after photographs taken by military police at the prison became public. Detainees were hooded, put in painful stress positions, made to wear female underwear on their heads, and placed in simulated sexual positions while naked. Iconic images included a naked detainee with a leash around his neck and detainees cowering from unmuzzled dogs in the prison's hallways.

In an interview with The Washington Post last month, Jordan said he had no connection to the abuses and that, had he known they were occurring, he would have put a stop to them. Jordan, 51, an Army civil affairs reserve officer, has been forced to remain on active duty at Fort Belvoir for more than three years as he awaited court martial on the charges. He has accused the Army of making him a scapegoat in order to put an officer on trial.

Military prosecutors argued in a dozen previous cases that the abuse photographs were evidence of a few "rogue" military police soldiers who were acting on their own on the night shift in the prison's Tier 1A, where detainees deemed valuable to military intelligence interrogators were held. Those soldiers, shown in the photographs, were held responsible for the abuse and received sentences up to the 10-year prison term of Corporal Charles A. Graner Jr.

In Jordan's case, however, prosecutors tried to turn the argument on its head, telling jurors that Jordan, a military intelligence officer, created "an atmosphere" that led to the abuse and failed to properly train soldiers in appropriate use of new interrogation techniques. But prosecution witnesses, including the most senior officer who worked at the prison, said that Jordan held no such responsibilities.

The jury found Jordan guilty of one count of "willfully disobeying" a senior commissioned officer, determining that Jordan purposely made contact with other soldiers after Major General George Fay ordered him not to discuss his investigation in 2004. Jordan was found to have contacted a number of soldiers, asking them questions via e-mail, before passing their contact information to Fay and his investigative team.

That charge carries the heaviest penalty that Jordan faced: A possible total of five years in prison and dismissal from the Army. Jurors will next hear evidence in the sentencing phase of the trial.

Justice Department Lawyers Refuse Detainee Cases
U.S. News and World Report
by Emma Schwartz
August 30, 2007

Some lawyers in the civil appeals division object to the government’s policies on Guantanamo Bay

The government's legal arguments justifying the detention of hundreds of people at the Guantánamo Bay naval base have been repudiated three times by the U.S. Supreme Court. But it's not just outsiders who take issue with the U.S. Justice Department strategy: Up to one fourth of the department's own civil appellate staff has recently opted out of handling the government's cases against detainee appeals, two sources familiar with the matter tell U.S. News.

These conscientious objectors—their exact number is not known—have decided not to take part in the government's litigation against the detainees because of disagreements with the legal approach, these sources say. They would not elaborate on the specific reasons for the objections, but critics have long objected to the government's failure to formally charge detainees and have pushed for closing Guantánamo because of allegations of torture and inhumane conditions. Defense lawyers also contend that the government has stymied their cases by withholding documents and curbing client access.

The quiet rebellion has emerged in recent months among the approximately 56 attorneys in the appellate section of the Justice Department's civil division following a court ruling in February that placed the defense of the approximately 130 remaining Guantánamo cases under the responsibility of the appellate lawyers. More than 300 men captured shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 are still being held at Guantánamo over alleged ties to terrorists, although all but a handful have never been formally charged with crimes.

Though the objectors have created some tension among the appellate staff, it's unclear that their opposition has hampered the government's efforts—especially because the court ruling will be reviewed by the Supreme Court this term. But the staff attorneys' objections highlight how dissension has grown even within the department's own ranks.

Justice Department spokesperson Charles Miller declined comment.

The Justice Department has no formal policy allowing attorneys to opt out of certain cases, unlike some law firms that make clear they won't penalize associates who, for instance, choose not to defend tobacco companies. But, informally, attorneys have rejected certain types of cases.

Most famously, in 1982, then Deputy Solicitor General Lawrence Wallace signed off on a brief in Bob Jones University v. United States but in a footnote noted his opposition to the department's position. The argument went against an Internal Revenue Service policy that denied tax-exempt status to institutions that discriminated by race.

The government's treatment of the Guantánamo detainees has a troubled legal history. The Justice Department initially denied the detainees any legal rights, arguing that the federal courts had no jurisdiction over foreigners captured overseas and held on the base in Cuba. But in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the obligation to hear petitions challenging the detainees' detention because Guantánamo Bay is controlled by the U.S. military.

In an effort to block a flood of litigation, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act in December 2005, barring cases challenging detainees' detention—habeas corpus petitions—from the federal courts. But in 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the law did not apply to cases that had already been filed. That left a slew of petitions in the federal courts. The ruling also threw out the White House's newly created military commission system because it did not comply with the Geneva Conventions.

Congress tried to stanch the litigation once again in October 2006 with the Military Commissions Act, which banned all habeas petitions by Guantánamo detainees. But it allowed them to file more narrow challenges of their status as enemy combatants—only in the more conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The detainees tried to challenge the law, but in February a divided three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit ruled against them, effectively moving all detainee litigation into the D.C. Circuit and into the hands of the civil appellate lawyers.

Although the Supreme Court is planning to address the ruling this year, the Justice Department has recently been on the defense in the D.C. Circuit. A different unanimous three-judge panel held in July that the government must turn over more information for the court's review of the detainees' new challenges, a ruling that the Justice Department has continued to contest.

Witness Describes Iraq Killing
The Washington Post
by Karl Vick
September 1, 2007

Marine Says Leader Shot Haditha Civilians

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., Aug. 31 -- A Marine testifying under immunity Friday said he saw Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich shoot five unarmed Iraqi men moments after a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha in November 2005, a week after Wuterich said that if such an attack occurred, "we should kill everybody in that vicinity."

The damaging new testimony by Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz was diluted by withering defense attacks on his credibility. At one point in a contentious four-hour review of his earlier, often contradictory accounts, the quest for truth grew so convoluted, the witness implored to be disbelieved: "I did lie about that, sir," Dela Cruz said.

A Fate Worse Than Guantanamo
The Washington Post
by Jennifer Daskal
September 2, 2007

TUNIS In mid-June, a group of U.S. soldiers entered the cells of Abdullah al-Hajji and Lofti Lagha at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , where they had been held without charge for five years. The Americans cuffed the detainees' hands, shackled their ankles, muffed their ears and blindfolded them before loading them onto a military plane for the flight home.

For most of the 360 detainees still at the U.S. military prison, that would have been a joyous journey. But Hajji and Lagha are from Tunisia , a country that State Department reports say uses sleep deprivation, electric shocks, waterboarding, cigarette burns, beatings and prolonged suspension by the wrists to extract confessions and stifle opposition.

Eight weeks later, the two men are being held in a Tunisian prison, telling visitors that things are so bad they would rather be back at Guantanamo Bay.

For five days in July, I crisscrossed this steamy capital, trying to learn the fate of these men. I met with local activists, lawyers, government officials and families of Guantanamo detainees. Plainclothes cops followed me around, giving themselves away with their deep stares and white SUVs. While I was unable to meet with Hajji or Lagha, I talked to others who had.

The problem goes beyond these two men. Since 9/11, the United States has been using Guantanamo Bay as a dumping ground for suspected jihadists. As pressure mounts to shut it down -- even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said he would like to see it closed -- efforts to winnow down its population are now in high gear. In July, the Bush administration said that 80 detainees were slated for release or transfer; that number has now jumped to 150.

For most of these detainees, this is good news. But about 50 men have told their lawyers that they fear torture and other abuse so acutely that they do not want to be returned home. These detainees -- citizens of Algeria , China , Libya , Tunisia and Uzbekistan , all countries the United States has accused of mistreating prisoners -- present yet another obstacle to closing Guantanamo Bay.

In some cases, Washington has recognized these fears as legitimate. Eight of the detainees (five Chinese Uighurs, an Algerian, an Egyptian and a Russian) were sent to Albania rather than to their countries of origin. This isn't an ideal solution -- the men are now living apart from their families in a refugee camp in an impoverished country where they don't speak the language and can't find jobs -- but it is better than continued detention at Guantanamo Bay and a forcible return to a country that tortures. The United States is still trying to find a third-party country to accept the remaining 17 Uighurs held at the prison, some of whom have been accused of waging an on-again, off-again separatist struggle against China's central government.

But in other cases, the Bush administration has claimed that it can negotiate away the risk of torture by getting promises of humane treatment from the receiving country. The Tunisian government gave such assurances before Hajji and Lagha were transferred. And State Department officials are reportedly in the final stage of negotiating such deals with Algeria. But what protection can "diplomatic assurances" provide from countries that have done little to clean up their acts after years of U.S. protests?

The cases of Hajji and Lagha provide scant comfort. Hajji, a 51-year-old father of eight, says he left Tunisia with his family in 1990 because of religious persecution, traveled to Saudi Arabia , then settled in Pakistan in 1991. Lagha, a 38-year-old from a remote village in southern Tunisia, left in 1998, traveling first to Italy and settling in Pakistan in 2001. Both were arrested by Pakistani authorities and handed over to the Americans in 2002. Neither was ever charged with a crime, and on June 18, 2007, after five years in U.S. custody, they were passed off to Tunisian authorities -- the first of 12 Tunisians at Guantanamo Bay to be sent home.

Hajji told his local lawyer that the Tunisian government's first act of welcome was to replace their blindfolds, which are used in transporting detainees, with hoods. The account I gathered about what happened to Hajji during his first days back home tracks closely with widely known practices of the Tunisian police. He endured two long days of interrogations at the Ministry of Interior, where Hajji says he was slapped, threatened with the rape of his wife and daughters, and shaken awake every time he started to sleep. In the end, the threats to Hajji's family were more than he could take: He told his lawyer that he signed the paper that officials thrust at him, even though his eyes had deteriorated so badly and his glasses were so old that he had no idea what it said.

Hajji's next stop was a Tunisian military court. This court had tried him in absentia and sentenced him to 10 years in 1995 on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organization operating abroad. The case against him relied primarily on a statement from one of Hajji's 19 co-defendants, who claimed that Hajji had been associated with the Tunisian Islamic Front in Pakistan -- a statement that Hajji's lawyer says was probably given after torture and abuse. Hajji says that neither the Tunisians nor the Americans ever told him about this conviction before sending him home; had he known about it, he adds, he never would have wanted to return. (Hajji's U.S. lawyer, who also learned of the conviction only recently, went to Guantanamo Bay to try to warn his client about it, but Hajji was whisked away to Tunisia before the lawyer could do so.)

For the next six weeks, Hajji was held in solitary confinement in a windowless, unventilated cell that he called his "tomb." He was allowed just 15 minutes of recreation per day, in another windowless room. Hajji told visitors that he never knew what time it was -- not even when to pray. He had, I'm told, no contact with any other prisoners.

In fact, the Tunisian government had disavowed such solitary confinement in 2005 as cruel and outmoded. "It's illegal!" exclaimed Hajji's overworked defense lawyer, producing a tattered copy of the Tunisian Criminal Code and pointing excitedly to the provision that permits solitary confinement only for punitive purposes and not for more than 10 days.

Both his lawyer and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been able to visit Hajji. His family members, who are allowed one 15-minute visit per week, must report the content of their conversations to police as soon as they leave the prison.

Less is known about Lagha, who had no legal representation during his more than five years at Guantanamo Bay. He returned on the same flight as Hajji. Since June 21, I'm told, he has been facing charges of participating in a terrorist organization abroad, but he was not given access to a lawyer until Aug. 9. He told his new attorney that he had been moved out of solitary confinement only two days before the lawyer's visit.

Two of Lagha's brothers made the long trip from the family home in southern Tunisia to the capital to see him while I was there. They had thought that their brother was dead, they told me, and hadn't even known he was being held at Guantanamo Bay until they learned of his release on al-Arabiya TV.

I asked Robert F. Godec, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, what the Bush administration is doing to track the two men's cases. He said that he had "specific and credible" assurances from the Tunisian government that they would not be abused, adding that "we follow up on these assurances." But he would not say whether the treatment of Hajji and Lagha had lived up to Tunisia's pledges; nor would he say whether any U.S. official had met with the two since their return home. This is disturbing: All we have are promises from a notoriously abusive regime, yet U.S. officials will not even say whether they are following up on those assurances by talking to the detainees themselves.

My organization, Human Rights Watch , has long urged the Bush administration to close Guantanamo Bay. As we continue to hope for an end to this chapter, we must remember that the United States is expressly prohibited under international law -- in the form of the 1984 Convention Against Torture -- from forcibly sending anyone back to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing they would be tortured.

Haphazardly shipping detainees such as Hajji and Lagha to countries with widely known records of torture is hardly the way to go about closing Guantanamo Bay. The administration could shut down the camp responsibly by alerting the detainees and their lawyers about pending home-country returns and giving them an opportunity to challenge such transfers, including the reliability of any diplomatic assurances of humane treatment, before a federal court. Most Guantanamo detainees won't want to do anything to slow their return home, but such a process would add an invaluable protection for those who can demonstrate a credible fear of torture or abuse back home.

Guantanamo Bay needs to be emptied, but it must be done justly and humanely. Otherwise, Washington could end up condemning the detainees to a fate worse than Guantanamo. This would only further fray the tattered global reputation that the United States so desperately needs to repair.

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UN Reports

UN Assessing Needs of Civilians in Ethiopia's Ogaden Region
Voice of America
by Alisha Ryu
August 31, 2007

A United Nations fact-finding mission is in Ethiopia's restive Ogaden region to assess the food, water and health needs of civilians caught amid a military campaign against local separatist rebels. Human rights groups accuse the government of committing serious human rights violations against the civilians. VOA Correspondent Alisha Ryu recently spoke to several eyewitnesses from the Ogaden region whose accounts of abuse conflict with Ethiopian government assurances that civilians are not being targeted in its crackdown on the rebels.

The eyewitnesses from the Ogaden region say they are ordinary people with no ties to the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), the ethnic Somali separatist group the government in Addis Ababa has been fighting since the mid-1980s.

The eyewitnesses are living in exile now, after barely escaping what they say is a brutal government crackdown. They say Ethiopian troops are punishing entire villages and towns in an effort to wipe out the ONLF insurgency once and for all.

The Ogadenis agreed to speak on the condition that VOA does not reveal their full names. They say they fear government agents from Addis Ababa may find them and kill them, or members of their family still in the Ogaden, for revealing what they have seen and experienced.

College student Ahmed, 27, recalls the day, nearly three months ago, when several dozen Ethiopian troops arrived near his village, 250 kilometers northwest of the town of Dhagahbur.

Ahmed acknowledges that ONLF fighters, believed to number several thousand, sometimes hide in villages, after conducting hit-and-run attacks on the Ethiopian military.

Ahmed says that day in June, he saw soldiers setting fire to everything until his village and other villages nearby were reduced to ashes. He says the soldiers then gave everyone an ultimatum: leave the area within five days. Anyone who stayed would be killed.

Ahmed obeyed the order and fled into the bush, but he says many others refused to leave.

Ahmed says the soldiers punished the defiant villagers, killing the men, beating and raping the women, and slaughtering their livestock. He says he later helped collect the bodies for burial.

In another interview, Nur, 23, says he worries constantly about his mother and several other family members he has not seen since mid-June.

He says that was when Ethiopian soldiers accused them of being ONLF supporters and took them away to a military barrack to be interrogated.

Around the same time, Nur says he too, was arrested on similar charges and interrogated with about a half a dozen other men.

Nur says during the interrogation, they watched as Ethiopian soldiers killed four of the men by strangling them with sharp metal wires. Nur says the soldiers used so much force the wires cut open their throats. The soldiers warned Nur that the same fate awaited anyone who supported and aided the ONLF.

VOA has not been able to independently verify these accounts. But human rights groups say similar reports of murder, rape, torture, and other serious violations against civilians in the Ogaden have risen sharply since Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi launched the military campaign nearly three months ago.

In April, suspected ONLF rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil field in the Ogaden and killed 74 people, including dozens of Ethiopian guards.

That incident is widely believed to have triggered the crackdown against the ONLF, which has also included food and trade blockades in the remote southern region.

Human rights groups say the blockades are causing hunger and widespread civilian suffering. The Ethiopian government defends the blockades as a way to stop weapons from reaching the rebels.

Addis Ababa calls the ONLF a terror group and says it is being armed and funded by Ethiopia's archrival in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea.

The director of the London-based Center for Development Research and Advocacy, Farah Abdulsamed Farah, says his group has investigated human rights abuse allegations in the Ogaden many times before.

But he says what is happening there now is far beyond mere allegations. He accuses Prime Minister Meles' ethnically Tigrayan-dominated regime of attempting to wipe out the entire Somali population in the Ogaden.

"This campaign has been conducted in a wrong way to punish the people," he said. "There is no assistance or logistics Ogaden [people] can provide to the ONLF. The reason behind targeting the civilians is race, 'You are an Ogaden, the ONLF is Ogaden. I have to kill you.' It has the same scale of crisis, which we consider genocide."

The senior advisor to Prime Minister Meles, Bereket Simon, says nothing can be farther from the truth.

"This is a far-fetched story circulated by the human rights organizations," he said. "There is no genocide. There is no attack on civilians, any crime whatsoever. We have singled out the terrorists and we are not attacking civilians. The civilians are on our side, so simply this is an outrageous accusation."

The weeklong U.N. fact-finding mission that began on Thursday is primarily focused on assessing the food, water and health needs of civilians in the Ogaden.

But the mission is also under enormous pressure to begin investigating war crimes and genocide allegations against the Ethiopian government and its military.

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NGO Reports

Darfur: Urgent Measures Needed to Address Sexual Violence
Human Rights Watch
August 22, 2007

Hybrid Force Should Enhance Civilian Protection Capabilities

(New York, August 22, 2007) – International peacekeepers in Darfur should provide civilian protection and use rapid-response capabilities to protect women from widespread rape and other sexual violence, Human Rights Watch said today.

A report from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on August 21 described how government forces and affiliated armed groups in December 2006 captured and systematically raped dozens of women during a large attack in South Darfur. The report is just the latest evidence of widespread sexual violence in Darfur, which has also been documented by Human Rights Watch and others.

“The mounting evidence of widespread rape in Darfur underscores why the newly approved AU-UN mission will need to be prepared to protect civilians,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Peacekeepers in Darfur need the capacity to respond rapidly to threats against civilians.”

Women in Darfur are also at risk of sexual violence outside the context of large attacks. Women risk being raped if they leave their camp for internally displaced people to search for firewood. In some areas, the current African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) has provided “firewood patrols” to accompany groups of women once or twice a week as they gather firewood. But these patrols have often been ineffective due to poor organization, lack of resources, and lack of communication with the people who benefit from the patrols.

If such patrols were better organized and carried out, they could make a major contribution to the protection of civilians, as could the appointment and wide dispersal of more human rights monitors on the ground.

Human Rights Watch welcomed the recent agreement on a proposed AU-UN hybrid force for Darfur. However, that force will not be on the ground until next year.

“Civilians under attack today can’t wait for the hybrid force,” said Takirambudde. “Better patrols to protect women and more human rights monitors are needed now.”

In 2005, the UN Security Council referred the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC). When serious sexual violence forms part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, it can constitute a crime against humanity. In the case of Darfur, such crimes could be prosecuted under the jurisdiction of the ICC.

Thailand: Separatists Target Civilians for Attack
Human Rights Watch
August 28, 2007

More Than 2,000 Killed in Attacks by Separatist Groups in the South

(New York, August 28, 2007) – In their efforts to establish an independent state in Thailand’s southern border provinces, separatist groups are killing and mutilating civilians and attacking schools, community clinics, and Buddhist temples, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 104-page report, “No One is Safe: Insurgent Attacks on Civilians in Thailand’s Southern Border Provinces,” details human rights abuses and violence committed against civilians by separatist militants in the predominantly ethnic Malay Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and Songkhla from January 2004 to July 2007. The report is based on interviews with eyewitnesses, families of the victims, academics, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders and government officials.

Moreover, the report includes firsthand accounts from members and militants of separatist groups in which they discuss their motivations and attempted justifications for the attacks.

“After decades of low-intensity insurgency, Thailand’s southern region is becoming the scene of a brutal armed conflict,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Separatist militants are intentionally targeting both Buddhist and Muslim civilians in shootings, bombings and machete attacks.”

Village-based militants called Pejuang Kemerdekaan Patani (Patani Freedom Fighters) in the loose network of BRN-Coordinate (National Revolution Front-Coordinate) have now emerged as the backbone of the new generation of separatist militants. Increasingly, they claim that the southern border provinces are not the land of Buddhist Thais, but a religious “conflict zone” which must be divided between ethnic Malay Muslims and “infidels.” The separatists seek to forcibly liberate Patani Darulsalam (Islamic Land of Patani), from what they call a Buddhist Thai occupation.

Human Rights Watch found that separatist militants carried out more than 3,000 attacks on civilians from January 2004 to July 2007. At the same time, there were some 500 attacks targeting various military units and their personnel, and a similar number of attacks targeting police units and their personnel.

Of the 2,463 people killed in attacks during the past three-and-a-half half years, 2,196 (or 89 percent) were civilians. Buddhist Thais and ethnic Malay Muslims were killed in bomb attacks, shootings, assassinations, ambushes, and machete hackings. At least 29 victims have been beheaded and mutilated. There have been hundreds of militant attacks on teachers, schools, public health workers, hospital staff, and community health centers. For the first time in the region’s history of separatist insurgencies, Buddhist monks and novices are now among those killed and injured by separatist militants.

“Violence against civilians is being used by separatist militants to scare Buddhist Thais away from these provinces, keep ethnic Malay Muslims under control, and discredit the Thai authorities,” said Adams. “But it is illegal and morally indefensible to deliberately target civilians in any circumstances.”

Nit Jombadin, a Buddhist Thai, remembered that she was taking her 2-year-old daughter Napaswan to a food stall when a bomb went off in a busy market in Songkhla’s Saba Yoi district on May 28 – killing four people, and injuring 26 others:

“I was holding my daughter in my arms, talking to her and playing with her. As I was asking her what kind of jelly she wanted to buy, a bomb exploded behind us. I saw shrapnel ripped through her body. My daughter was killed instantly. I saw another little girl in school uniform lying not far from my daughter. She was dead too ... My daughter’s body was left lying on the road for many hours. I was crying my eyes out. I felt my heart stopped beating. How could they do this? ... The place was packed with children and parents after school ....”

Separatist militants are carrying out summary executions of civilians based on ethnicity. On March 14, a passenger van that ran between Yala and Songkhla was ambushed in Yala’s Yaha district. Supawan Sae Lu, who survived the attack that killed her 18-year-old daughter, and eight other passengers, recalled:

“The driver saw that the road was blocked. He tried to reverse the van back. But then there were armed men, armed with assault rifles and dressed in green, came out from the roadside. They announced that all Buddhists would be killed, and started shooting at us one by one. My daughter was trying to lean to me when she was shot in the head.”

Human Rights Watch also documented separatists’ attacks on ethnic Malay Muslims who collaborate with the Thai authorities, or oppose the operations of separatist militants. Those ethnic Malay Muslims are accused as munafig (hypocrites) or traitors, who have committed haram (forbidden sins) by betraying the radical blend of Malay nationalism and Islamist ideology. The victims are often religious leaders or parents who obstructed the recruitment or training of new members by separatist militants in their villages, or were known to be critical of the insurgency.

Usman Jaema, an ethnic Malay Muslim, told Human Rights Watch that his 15-year-old son was hacked with machetes and axes in January 2004 by separatist militants who wanted to send a message to him, as a village chief in Narathiwat’s Muang district, not to oppose their operation:

“There are around 10 Muslim youths in this village who join the militants. They have been trained to become guerilla fighters. They do not like me ... I never support these senseless killings. It is wrong to hurt innocent people, no matter who they are ... After the attack, my villagers look down on me. They said I could not protect my own son, then how could I be able to protect them? Some of them even said that it might be practical to give support to the militants to ensure their safety.

A fundamental principle of the laws of war is the distinction between civilians and military objectives. The militants’ claim that the civilians attacked were part of a larger group (Buddhist Thais) with members involved in the hostilities offers no defense or justification for such a serious violation of those laws. Other militant claims, such as radical interpretations of Islamic law, equally lack any bearing under the laws of war. International humanitarian law explicitly prohibits many of the tactics used by the militants, including: reprisal attacks against civilians and captured combatants, summary execution of civilians or captured combatants, mutilation or other mistreatment of the dead, and attacks directed at civilian facilities such as homes, schools, temples, and public community clinics.

“Fear is rampant in southern Thailand, and violence has disrupted the lives of ordinary people in almost every way,” said Adams.

In response to militant attacks, the Thai government has imposed special security legislation – including the Executive Decree on Government Administration in Emergency Situations and martial law – and increased the number of regular and paramilitary troops to nearly 30,000 in the southern border provinces. In this context, the Thai security forces and police have carried out extrajudicial killings, “disappearances,” and arbitrary arrests of those known or suspected to be involved with separatist groups. Human Rights Watch documented many of these abuses in a March 2007 report. (To access the report, see “‘It Was Like Suddenly My Son No Longer Existed’: Enforced Disappearances in Thailand’s Southern Border Provinces,”.)

The interim government of General Surayud Chulanont, installed after the military coup in September 2006, has signaled a new approach to the region’s crisis. On November 2, Prime Minister Surayud offered a public apology to residents of the region, admitting that they held serious and legitimate grievances against the government. At the same time, he announced the re-establishment of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC) to help investigate complaints from the Muslim population concerning corrupt, abusive or inept government officials. But it remains unclear how the interim government will take concrete action to end state-sanctioned abuses and the culture of impunity in the south.

Human Rights Watch called on separatist groups and the Thai government to institute concrete measures to protect civilians and immediately cease all attacks that do not discriminate between combatants and civilians. In addition, separatist groups and the Thai authorities should permit independent, impartial and effective investigations into allegations of human rights abuses, and ensure that those found responsible be held accountable.

“Violations of human rights and ongoing impunity have increased the level of hostility and widened the communal gap between Buddhist Thais and ethnic Malay Muslims, making it impossible to achieve peaceful and lasting resolution to this brutal conflict,” said Adams.

Lebanon/Israel: Hezbollah Rockets Targeted Civilians in 2006 War
Human Rights Watch
August 29, 2007

(Beirut, August 29, 2007) – During the 2006 war, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately and at times deliberately at civilian areas in northern Israel, killing at least 39 civilians, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch said that Hezbollah’s justifications for its attacks on Israeli towns – as a response to indiscriminate Israeli fire into southern Lebanon and to draw Israel into a ground war – had no legal basis under the laws of war.

The 128-page report, “Civilians under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War,” presents more than 20 case studies based on extensive field research in northern Israel into rocket attacks that killed or injured civilians in Jewish, Arab and mixed villages, towns and cities. It also draws evidence of Hezbollah’s intent behind these rocket attacks from more than 100 Hezbollah communiques and declarations.

“Hezbollah’s explanations for why it fired rockets at Israel’s civilian population utterly fail to justify these unlawful attacks,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division.

In their statements, Hezbollah leaders repeatedly threatened to attack Israeli towns and settlements in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Lebanese towns – a rationale that under international humanitarian law does not justify deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians. Hezbollah also claimed responsibility for specific attacks on Israeli towns and settlements, even as they voiced support for the principle of sparing civilians. Statements by leaders in the military chain of command indicating intent to fire indiscriminately toward civilian areas are evidence of war crimes.

Hezbollah rockets, some carrying anti-personnel steel spheres, repeatedly hit populated areas in northern Israel. Human Rights Watch found that numerous rockets were fired in which there was no apparent legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of the attack, indicating that civilians were deliberately attacked. For example, hundreds of rockets struck inside Karmiel, Nahariya, and Kiryat Shmona, cities containing no significant military assets. In other cases, a military objective was located in the vicinity, but even assuming that Hezbollah had intended to hit the military target instead of civilians, the inaccurate rockets it used were incapable of distinguishing between the two, making the attack indiscriminate.

Hezbollah rockets killed at least 39 Israeli civilians during the conflict and inflicted moderate or serious injuries on 101 more. They struck three hospitals, an elementary school in Kiryat Yam, and a post office in Haifa. Hezbollah’s rocket campaign crippled economic activity and daily life in much of northern Israel, forcing several hundred thousand civilians either to flee south or to hide in shelters and “safe rooms.”

Hezbollah stated that it targeted and hit Israeli military objectives more than is known, and blamed Israeli censorship for covering up the extent of such attacks. However, Hezbollah attacks on legitimate military objectives, whatever their extent, do not justify the attacks that were indiscriminate or deliberately targeted civilians.

Hezbollah forces fired long-range, unguided rockets, referred to as “Katyushas,” that were highly inaccurate and could not distinguish between civilians and military objectives. Fired toward cities and towns, such attacks showed, at minimum, a reckless disregard for civilians, and frequently hit civilians and civilian objects deliberately or indiscriminately.

Many rockets that hit the most densely populated coastal areas – the city of Haifa and the string of its suburbs to the north and east known as HaKrayot – were 220 millimeter rockets packed with thousands of 6 millimeter steel spheres that when released in an explosion are devastating anti-personnel weapons. Incapable of inflicting serious damage to hard military structures or materiel, they penetrate human flesh and organs within a wide radius of the warhead blast. Hezbollah also fired into civilian areas cluster munition rockets loaded with submunitions that are designed to disperse, on impact, 3 millimeter steel spheres over a wide area. The Israel Police says that it examined 118 rocket strikes with cluster munitions.

In other reports, Human Rights Watch has addressed other aspects of the conflict, including violations by Israel in its conduct of hostilities. A major Human Rights Watch study, titled “Why They Died: Civilian Deaths in Lebanon during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War,” will be released in September. Human Rights Watch at all times measures each party’s compliance with its obligations under the laws of war, rather than compare the behavior of one side with the conduct of other parties to the conflict. Under those laws, violations by one party to a conflict do not excuse or mitigate violations committed by the other.

In “Civilians under Assault,” Human Rights Watch urges Hezbollah, as a matter of practice and doctrine, to cease all attacks that deliberately target civilians, as well as those that cannot discriminate between civilians and combatants, and to renounce publicly the argument that attacks on Israeli civilians are permissible as reprisals for Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians. The report calls on the government of Lebanon to interdict the delivery of rockets to Hezbollah so long as it uses them, or subscribes to a doctrine that would permit use of them, to fire deliberately or indiscriminately into civilian areas.

The report also urges the governments of Syria and Iran not to permit the transfer to Hezbollah of materiel, including rockets that Hezbollah has used in violation of international humanitarian law.

Human Rights Watch said that in some instances Israel located its own fixed and mobile military assets in or near civilian areas of northern Israel, raising questions of whether it complied fully with the norm requiring it to avoid, to the extent feasible, locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas and to adequately protect all citizens residing near military assets. While this practice did not diminish Hezbollah’s responsibility to discriminate at all times between noncombatants and legitimate military targets, Human Rights Watch urges the government of Israel to take all feasible steps to locate military objectives away from densely populated areas and to ensure adequate measures to protect all civilians, on an equal basis, who may be at increased risk of enemy fire due to their proximity to Israeli military assets.

Finally, noting that both the Lebanese and Israeli governments have failed so far to investigate violations of international humanitarian law committed in the course of the 2006 war, Human Rights Watch recommends that the United Nations secretary-general establish an international commission of inquiry to investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law, including possible war crimes, in Lebanon and Israel and to formulate recommendations with a view to holding accountable those who violated the law.

“Hezbollah, like Israel, must respect the laws of war,” said Whitson. “Unless those responsible on both sides are held accountable for their actions, instead of being allowed to hide behind the violations of their adversary, we fear that civilians inevitably will continue to pay a costly price.”

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