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huridocs-gen-l BK RVW: The Worst of (r)



Subject: huridocs-gen-l BK RVW: The Worst of Humankind

>X-From_: owner-huridocs-gen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  Fri Dec 25 18:16:49 1998
>To: marga@xxxxxxxxxxxx, huridocs-gen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
>        James.LAWSON@xxxxxx
>From: DEBRA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Debra Guzman)
>Organization: HURINet/Human Rights Info Network
>Subject: huridocs-gen-l BK RVW: The Worst of Humankind
>Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1998 17:23:00 +0100
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>Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network
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>[This article has been excerpted.]
>
>The Worst of Humankind
>
>WAR CRIMES: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle
>for Justice
>By Aryeh Neier
>
>Times Books, 286 pp., $25.00
>
>Review by Glenn Frankel
>
>In the first weeks following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in
>August 1990, I was among the journalists who searched the
>archives of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights
>for reports on the Iraqi regime's torture and murder of
>dissidents. To my amazement, there was little or nothing in
>the files. Every effort to condemn Baghdad had been stymied
>by a coalition of Third World states that were...beholden to
>Iraqi largess or concerned...their own human rights records
>would not withstand similar scrutiny. The West, eager for a
>bulwark against Iranian expansionism in the gulf, had also
>been passive for many years. As a signal of Iraq's contempt
>for the international process, the man who led the Iraqi
>team at the human rights commission, Saddam Hussein's
>half-brother, was the former head of the internal security
>police and feared by dissidents as an ardent executioner.
>
>When it comes to crimes against humanity and state
>repression, the gap between rhetoric and reality is often
>breathtaking. Since World War II, the international
>community has adapted a basketful of laws and treaties - the
>Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human
>Rights, both in 1948, the 1949 Geneva Conventions with their
>1977 Protocols, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and
>Political Rights and the 1984 Convention Against Torture and
>Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
>All were promulgated with the best of intentions. ...all
>were honored, as Aryeh Neier puts it in his new book, "in
>the breach".
>
>The depradations taking place in the former Yugoslavia have
>put an end to wishful thinking about war crimes. It's one
>thing when they occur in distant corners such as Cambodia,
>Burundi or Halabja (the Kurdish village where Hussein's
>forces dropped poison gas in 1988), another when they take

>place in the supposedly New Europe...in front of the
>television cameras. ...with technology shrinking the global
>media village, it was even impossible for the West to stand
>totally aside in Rwanda, where, over the course of just
>three months in 1994, a government-led campaign exterminated
>the Tutsi minority at a rate that would win Hitler's
>admiration.
>
>As the former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, one
>of the most visible and effective international rights
>groups, Aryeh Neier helped lead the drive to reveal the full
>horror of the crimes against humanity committed in Bosnia
>and establish some kind of judicial mechanism to bring the
>perpetrators to justice. His new book is an extension of
>his...work and a fine primer that defines, illustrates and
>offers legal and moral antidotes to the new wave of war
>crimes plaguing the post-Cold War world.
>
>Neier provides a thumbnail history of war crimes and
>international trials dating back to 15th-century Germany...
>He notes that a key ingredient in shaping public attitudes
>against war crimes was the rise of the war correspondent in
>the 19th century. Armies that once had free reign to commit
>mayhem unmonitored and unobserved were now in public view.
>
>Despite the precedents set by the Nuremberg and Tokyo war
>crimes tribunals, Neier notes...postwar efforts to establish
>a permanent international criminal court were doomed by the
>onset of the Cold War. Too many governments on both sides of
>the Cold War had dirty hands and no wish to air misdeeds
>that jurisprudence would...expose. Neier is an ardent
>critic of U.N. hypocrisy. Still, he makes the case...even if
>the international body hasn't lived up to expectations, it
>is not an utter failure. At the very least, he says, the
>treaties and conventions adopted under U.N. auspices have
>legitimized international efforts to protect human rights
>and laid important groundwork.
>
>An analyst and careful manager of facts, Neier is not a
>journalist or narrative writer. Some of the stories he tells
>about the former Yugoslavia are overly familiar or wooden in
>description. Others can never be told enough. Like the stark
>scene in a Croatian refugee camp when a Muslim woman
>recounting tales of rape tells Neier...she recognized two of
>the Serb soldiers involved as her former high school
>teachers.
>
>It's a crucial point and a chilling difference between
>Bosnia and Nazi Germany. The Nazis, Neier notes,
>bureaucratized mass murder and attempted to place it into
>the hands of a chosen elite, whereas in Bosnia (and Rwanda,
>for that matter) much of the killing was done by people who
>knew their victims as neighbors, fellow employees,
>schoolmates or teachers.
>
>He retells how Washington and Western Europe dithered for
>almost two years while atrocious acts continued in Bosnia.
>He skewers those like Warren Christopher, former U.S.
>Secretary of State, and European Union mediator Lord Owen
>for implying at various times...all sides were to blame in
>Bosnia. "Both should have been aware...statements they made
>at critical moments effectively excused those who committed

>abuses by making it seem...their transgressions were
>inevitable or...their abuses provoked and perhaps even
>justified those by the other side." He also criticizes
>feminists such as Catharine A. MacKinnon for hyping the
>numbers of rape victims and equating rape with genocide. At
>the same time, he acknowledges...feminist outrage helped
>focus world attention on Bosnia.
>
>Neier calls for a permanent war crimes tribunal like the one
>recently approved o0ver U.S. objections. But the real
>solution his book offers is nothing less than eternal moral
>vigilance, with no easy answers and no willingness to
>sarifice human rights to realpolitik, so..all who commit
>atrocities will be aware they will eventually face justice.
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>Glenn Frankel is editor of The Washington Post Magazine and
>author of a forthcoming book on repression in South Africa.
>
>
>