One Rule for them
AFive
PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul.
What about Guantanamo Bays
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
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 hotographs 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 as 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 hem 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.
|