ICTY's Most Wanted Now in Dock

Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Serbia yesterday. Karadzic was the President of the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb breakaway statelet, during the war in the former Yugoslavia; he stands accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, particularly for his connection to the massacre at Srebrenica. Since his indictment, Karadzic had foiled attempts by NATO and the Serbian government to capture him for thirteen years. His capture is significant not only for international justice, but also for Serbia's prospects of acceding to the European Union.

There is good coverage of his capture in the mainstream media and also at War Crimes Blog. However, one of the best sources is a blog entitled "Finding Karadzic" which has covered the manhunt for the past several years.

With Karadzic in the dock, only Ratko Mladic, the General who oversaw the massacre of approximately 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica, remains at large in Serbia. Will he be next?

Turkey Bombs PKK; BBC Misconstrues International Law

From BBC this morning:

"Turkish officials said the warplanes had targeted the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), in areas near the border.

But officials in northern Iraq said the planes had struck several villages. There were reports that one woman was killed, although this was unconfirmed.”

Here is a classic example of the media using the wrong indicators to gauge whether air attacks are targeting military objectives: the sex of the victims. So the story goes, if there are “women and children” dead, then the attack has hit civilians.


The assumption – quite wrong in the case of the PKK, with its 40% female fighters – is that if you’re a woman, you’re definitely a civilian. On the other hand the bodies are “battle-age males” all is fair game, irrespective of whether those males were involved in the fighting.

The same grisly logic was behind Ratko Mladic’s careful separation of “women and children” from men and boys at Srebrenica, prior to massacring 8,000 unarmed “battle-age” males (some as young as twelve); and the US government’s refusal to allow “battle-age” males to flee Fallujah with their families in 2004. These are, of course, illegal acts, since civilians are protected under the Geneva Conventions irrespective of sex, and that immunity is lost only when one takes up arms during an attack.

Anyway, by acting as if sex and age are some kind of proxy for “civilian status,” the news media is fomenting this faulty assumption that so often results in war crimes. Its reporting would be better to emphasize whether the victims appeared to be close to military objectives, or whether they were armed or otherwise doing something associated with the lawful target of the attack.