War Crimes: remedial class

The ever balanced, objective and impartial BBC really is pulling out all the stops with its coverage of the Radovan Karadzic trial. As part of a dedicated Karadzic sub-section on the corporation's website entitled ‘Search For Justice’, readers of all ages are even treated to a handy guide to what constitutes war crimes.

"Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: 'Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including... wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.'

This, international lawyers say, is the basic definition of war crimes."

Useful revision, in anyone’s book. Nice one, the Beeb.

But why is it that such studious, publically-funded research is only appropriate when the West’s official enemies are in the dock?

Mystifyingly, when US tanks and missiles bulldoze Iraqi enclaves to dust, when civilians are tortured in nameless desert prisons, or innocents frogmarched without trial to Guantanamo, thumbing through the annals of international justice is apparently not required.

Rather, when “coalition” business is on the agenda, the BBC prefers to talk of “mistakes”.

"As is so often the case in this conflict it's the Iraqi civilian population which suffers the greatest loss of life - either as a result of mistakes by the Americans, or, far more frequently, of course, as a result of the bombs and the bullets of the insurgents." (Nicholas Witchell, BBC News, September 2004)

But of course.

To glance at other versions of the above events, however, as a Media Lens report of 2004 shows us, is to discover an altogether different picture.

'"Our troops continue to die but we can't even identify the enemy, which is why so many innocent Iraqi civilians - including women and children - are being blown away. The civilians are being killed by the thousands." (Bob Herbert, 'A War Without Reason,' The New York Times, October 18, 2004)

Ex-Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey was honourably discharged last year after 12 years as a Marine. Massey was in the main invasion force all the way to Baghdad, before his battalion was moved to Karbala.

In an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman entitled, 'Ex-US Marine: I killed civilians in Iraq', Massey said: "It sickened me so that I had actually brought it up to my lieutenant, and I told him, I said, you know, sir, we're not going to have to worry about the Iraq - you know, we're basically committing genocide over here, mass extermination of thousands of Iraqis..."

Massey reported many shootings of civilians in cars at checkpoints and described how his own unit had machine-gunned peaceful protestors. He also described the effect of bombing: "They had tractor-trailer beds full of bodies. It was so bad - this is because of the bombing that we did - some of them had Iraqi flags on them, representing that they were a soldier, but 80% of them didn't. We would find tractor trailers literally full of stocked bodies."

Massey's conclusion:

"Marines are trained from day one that you go in - when you go in to boot camp you learn what the Geneva Convention is, what the rules of the Geneva Convention are, what the rules of engagement. However, Iraq violated every rule of engagement that I have ever been taught - violated every rule of the Geneva Convention that I have been taught. If you have young marines coming up you to and asking you, staff sergeant, what's going on? You know, we have got a problem."'

For my money, this kind of revision seems a little more pertinent.

Why then, one wonders, did Sgt. Massey’s keenly contextualised critique of a systematic violation of the Geneva Convention never appear on the BBC website? What about his confession of genocide, of mass extermination?

As the sanctimonious Karadzic circus plays out, the lessons laid down by our flagship media machines are clear: there is a time and a place to brandish international legal statutes.

But we need not let the BBC’s diligent research end here. We can carry on the good work ourselves. For starters, if we scan through the Article 147 criteria above, we might find that we are reading a near-exact record of “coalition” behaviour in Iraq since 2003.

If that’s not a useful Compare and Contrast exercise, I don’t know what is.

Try it, kids. Go through the list and tick them off.

All papers to be left on my desk as you leave class.