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October 23, 2003
YES, WE HAVE NO WAR CRIMES
It's no fun to start the day with computer troubles, which I've had all morning. Now that Tech Support has solved my problem, I'm hoping it can rescue a troubled world's war-crime panel called the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. Its problems are much greater than mine, according to a front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal.
"More than a quarter-century ago, in 1977, countries that had signed the Geneva Conventions decided to create the world's first permanent commission to investigate war crimes," Jess Bravin reports. "The commission is still waiting for its first case." Sir Kenneth Keith, a New Zealand appeals court judge who is the current president of the commission, "has been forced to a reluctant conclusion. The governments that voted to establish his group are just 'not very keen' on its actual work."
Read the complete story and weep (subscription required); or if you have a taste for gallows humor, laugh yourself silly. The commission operates on a $110,000 annual budget (give or take $2) and has "no permanent staff, facilities or equipment" to investigate the boundless atrocities of a world seemingly in a state of permanent war.
Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector, tells the Journal: "My heart is full of sympathy for
Ken Keith." As well it should be. The U.N. will not cooperate with the commission, and Blix,
who attended the conference that created it, says he'd forgot it still existed.
Saddest of
all, "a 1998 training exercise for the commissioners, sponsored by the Swedish government at a
military base near Stockholm ... was the closest they have gotten to a war zone." They
investigated "mock atrocities by Swedish separatists. The scenario imagined rebels establishing
the breakaway republic of Greater Dalecarlia, prompting a Swedish reaction."
Apparently "Swedish forces bombed civilians" and the would-be Greater Dalecarlians "tortured farmers and schoolchildren." But that was because it was a mock exercise. I hesitate to think of what the Swedish welfare state's atrocious reaction might have been in reality. My guess is saunas without massages.
Posted by at October 23, 2003 01:30 AM