- Five PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul.
- What about Guantanamo Bay?
-
- Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered
the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against
a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes
its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were
paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld,
the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against
the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner
that is humiliating for them". He is, of course, quite right. Article
13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists
that they "must at all times be protected... against insults and public
curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible
infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq
in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be
prosecuted for war crimes.
-
- This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For
this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of
the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient,
were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
-
- His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641
men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than
15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first
of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them,
just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they
were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground,
hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones.
In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and
deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary
(against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26),
canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise
(38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their
families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).
-
- They were not "released and repatriated without
delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the
US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting
information about al-Qaida. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged
to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion
may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of
any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them, however, the authorities
have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now
known as "torture lite": sleep deprivation and constant exposure
to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to
kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to
slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.
-
- The US government claims that these men are not subject
to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war",
but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with
rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally
invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article
4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members
of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded
as prisoners of war.
-
- Even if there is doubt about how such people should be
classified, article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection
of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined
by a competent tribunal". But when, earlier this month, lawyers representing
16 of them demanded a court hearing, the US court of appeals ruled that
as Guantanamo Bay is not sovereign US territory, the men have no constitutional
rights. Many of these prisoners appear to have been working in Afghanistan
as teachers, engineers or aid workers. If the US government either tried
or released them, its embarrassing lack of evidence would be brought to
light.
-
- You would hesitate to describe these prisoners as lucky,
unless you knew what had happened to some of the other men captured by
the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. On November 21 2001, around
8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Konduz to the
Northern Alliance commander, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them
have never been seen again.
-
- As Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death
records, some hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container
lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on November 26
and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in the
sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan prison, 80
miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of thirst and asphyxiation,
started banging on the sides of the trucks. Dostum's men stopped the convoy
and machine-gunned the containers. When they arrived at Sheberghan, most
of the captives were dead.
-
- The US special forces running the prison watched the
bodies being unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of
them before satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a
Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when
an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever
they wanted. We had no power to stop them." Another soldier alleged:
"They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned
them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they disappeared."
-
- Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers
with the corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili.
In the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead
were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German newspaper
Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one doubted
that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts
on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human Rights visited the
places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they "all... contained
human remains consistent with their designation as possible grave sites".
-
- It should not be necessary to point out that hospitality
of this kind also contravenes the third Geneva convention, which prohibits
"violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation,
cruel treatment and torture", as well as extra-judicial execution.
Donald Rumsfeld's department, assisted by a pliant media, has done all
it can to suppress Jamie Doran's film, while General Dostum has begun to
assassinate his witnesses.
-
- It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government
fought first to prevent the establishment of the international criminal
court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its
jurisdiction. The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras yesterday
should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American
forces fighting for civilisation, but of the "barbaric and inhuman"
Iraqis.
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,921192,00.html
|
