war crimes- what the publis should know Essay -- essays research paper

Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The term war crime brings to mind a combination of horrific images, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, execution of prisoners, rape, and bombardment of cities. These images correspond in many ways to the legal definitions of the term, but international law draws lines that do not in all ways match our sense of the most awful behavior.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  War crimes are those violations of the laws of war, or international humanitarian law (IHL) that deserve individual criminal responsibility. While limitations on the conduct of armed conflict date back at least to the Chinese warrior Sun Tzu (sixth century B.C.), the ancient Greeks were among the first to regard such prohibitions as law. The notion of â€Å"war crimes† appeared more fully in the Hindu code of Manu (around 200 B.C.), and eventually made its way into Roman and European law. The first true trial for war crimes is generally considered to be that of Peter von Hagenbach, who was tried in 1474 in Austria and sentenced to death for wartime atrocities. (Gutman and Rieff pg. 374) By World War I, States had accepted that certain violations of the laws of war, much of which had been defined in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, were crimes. The 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg defined war crimes as â€Å"violations of the laws or customs of war,† including murder, ill-treatment, or deportation of civilians in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; killing of hostages; raiding of public or private property; meaningless destruction of towns; and devastation not militarily necessary. (Gutman and Rieff pg. 374) The 1949 Geneva Conventions marked the first inclusion in a humanitarian law treaty of a set of war crimes and the grave breaches of the conventions. Each of the four Geneva Conventions (on wounded and sick on land, wounded and sick at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians) contains its own list of grave breaches. The list in its entirety is: willful killing; torture or inhuman treatment (including medical experiments); willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health; extensive destruction and misuse of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully; forcing a prisoner of war or civilian to serve in the forces o... ...e has been defined over and over by various war conventions over time. Sometimes the laws of war are confusing, because of loopholes that can be used to avoid actually committing these crime. International humanitarian law does not address the causes or beginnings of a particular war, or which side was right and which side was wrong, it can only address the way it was fought. So it is possible for an aggressive country to wage war and be in complete accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and for a defender to commit war crimes even in self defense. The fact that these laws cannot answer every question and determine every moral dilemma does not mean it has no answers and no protection against barbarism and pure evil. The types of war crimes that were touched on, as sad and heartbreaking as they might be are unavoidable. Works Cited Gutman, Roy and Rieff, David. Crimes of War: What The Public Should Know. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999 Jones Adams. â€Å"Care study: Genocide in Rwanda, 1994.† http://www.fatherryan.org./holocaust/rwanda. â€Å"Apartheid South Africa.† www.rebirth.co.za/apartheid.htm www.cs.students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html