Geneva Conventions hype

CNN:

As the defenders of a besieged Bosnian town prepared to retreat, the prisoners of war held captive in the local jail feared the worst.

"The prisoners were saying, 'If the town falls they will shoot us before they leave,'" recalls Charlotte Lindsey, a Red Cross field worker in the Balkans during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. "We went to the prison authorities and we said, "Look, you cannot let this happen. You are responsible for these prisoners."

Forty-eight hours later, after the town had been captured, Lindsey and her Red Cross colleagues returned to find the prison empty. But the prisoners had all been found alive and liberated by the incoming army.

"We interviewed some of the prisoners and they said the director of the prison and his deputy had stood in front of them to protect them," says Lindsey, now deputy director of communication for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). "They told us: 'They wanted to kill us but they wouldn't let it happen.'"

Even 15 years later, Lindsey is unable to reveal specific details about where the 1994 incident took place or the identities of the protagonists because of the ICRC's strict policy of confidentiality and neutrality.

But for her the story serves to illustrate the lasting impact of the Geneva Conventions -- the set of universally ratified "rules of war" governing the conduct of armed forces and protecting non-combatants -- even in the heat of one of the most brutal and ethnically charged conflicts of recent decades.

"On a daily basis, living in a war zone, you see examples of the conventions being applied. Every time a soldier is captured and moved to a prison, or a wounded soldier is collected by an ambulance, that is an application of the Geneva Conventions," Lindsey told CNN ahead of Wednesday's 60th anniversary of the signing of the conventions.

"People forget that they are rooted in the law because they seem such evident needs and evident rights that people have." See photos of the ICRC's work in the 60-year history of the modern Geneva Conventions »

Shaped in the aftermath of World War II, the 1949 conventions were drafted in an effort to prevent a repeat of the mass destruction of the era of "total war" in which entire nations and civilian populations had become targets for indiscriminate slaughter.

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There are several problems that still exist that the media and the ICRC ignore. One of the more obvious problems is treating the Conventions like a unilateral contract binding on signatories regardless of whether adversaries are signatories or abide by the conventions. This gives an unfair advantage to groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban. Thus a televised beheading of non combatants or even POWs are rarely if ever condemned by the ICRC. Yet these same people insist on POW status for unlawful enemy combatants who violate the Conventions. This undermines the conventions and shows a lack of integrity on the part of the ICRC. Has the group ever criticized the Taliban or al Qaeda for unlawfully camouflaging themselves as civilians, putting all civilians at risk? How often do they criticize the Taliban for using human shields? How ofter do they criticize al Qaeda and the Taliban for deliberately targeting non combatants?

If they want to claim relevance they should at least be critical of these aspects of our enemy's operation on a regular basis. Their failure to do so demonstrates a failure of their mission.