On the early morning of March 16, 1968, American soldiers from three platoons of Charlie Company (1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division), entered a group of hamlets located in the Son Tinh district of South Vietnam, located near the Demilitarized Zone and known as "Pinkville" because of the high level of Vietcong infiltration. The soldiers, many still teenagers who had been in the country for three months, were on a "search and destroy" mission. The Tet Offensive had occurred only weeks earlier and in the same area and had made them jittery; so had mounting losses from booby traps and a seemingly invisible enemy. Three hours after the GIs entered the hamlets, more than five hundred unarmed villagers lay dead, killed in cold blood. The atrocity took its name from one of the hamlets, known by the Americans as My Lai 4. Military authorities attempted to suppress the news of My Lai, until some who had been there, in particular a helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson and a door gunner named Lawrence Colburn, spoke up about what they had seen. The official line was that the villagers had been killed by artillery and gunship fire rather than by small arms. That line soon began to fray. Lieutenant William Calley, one of the platoon leaders, admitted to shooting the villagers but insisted that he had acted upon orders. An expose of the massacre and cover-up by journalist Seymour Hersh, followed by graphic photographs, incited international outrage, and Congressional and U.S. Army inquiries began. Calley and nearly thirty other officers were charged with war crimes, though Calley alone was convicted and would serve three and a half years under house arrest before being paroled in 1974. My Lai polarized American sentiment. Many saw Calley as a scapegoat, the victim of a doomed strategy in an unwinnable war. Others saw a war criminal. President Nixon was poised to offer a presidential pardon. The atrocity intensified opposition to the war, devastating any pretense of American moral superiority. Its effect on military morale and policy was profound and enduring. The Army implemented reforms and began enforcing adherence to the Hague and Geneva conventions. Before launching an offensive during Desert Storm in 1991, one general warned his brigade commanders, "No My Lais in this division-do you hear me?" Compelling, comprehensive, and haunting, based on both exhaustive archival research and extensive interviews, Howard Jones's My Lai will stand as the definitive book on one of the most devastating events in American military history.

Originally published in 1999, this A-to-Z guidebook of wartime atrocities has received worldwide acclaim and has been translated into eleven languages. Now substantially updated, with sixteen new entries, this concise guide to the broken rules of war remains unique and essential. More than 140 distinguished experts from the media, military, law, and human rights groups examine recent conflicts in light of international humanitarian law, including: Afghanistan (Patricia Gossman), the Congo (Gerard Prunier), terrorism (Anthony Dworkin), Guantanamo (Mark Huband), Darfur (John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen), occupation (George Packer), independent contractors (Peter Singer), war and insurgency (John Burns), and detention and interrogation (Dana Priest). Christiane Amanpour writes on Bosnian paramilitaries, Jeremy Bowen on Chechnya, and Gwynne Roberts on Saddam Hussein. Through case studies, definitions of key terms, and explanations of what is legal and what is not illuminated by 150 stunning duotone photographs Crimes of War reveals what every citizen should know about war and the law."

Listen to a short interview with James Dawes Host: Chris Gondek ] Producer: Heron & Crane

After the worst thing in the world happens, then what? What is left to the survivors, the witnesses, those who tried to help? What can we do to prevent more atrocities from happening in the future, and to stop the ones that are happening right now? "That the World May Know" tells the powerful and moving story of the successes and failures of the modern human rights movement. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldworkers around the world, the book gives a painfully clear picture of the human cost of confronting inhumanity in our day.

There is no dearth of such stories to tell, and James Dawes begins with those that emerged from the Rwandan genocide. Who, he asks, has the right to speak for the survivors and the dead, and how far does that right go? How are these stories used, and what does this tell us about our collective moral future? His inquiry takes us to a range of crises met by a broad array of human rights and humanitarian organizations. Here we see from inside the terrible stresses of human rights work, along with its curious seductions, and the myriad paradoxes and quandaries it presents.

With pathos, compassion, and a rare literary grace, this book interweaves personal stories, intellectual and political questions, art and aesthetics, and actual "news" to give us a compelling picture of humanity at its conflicted best, face-to-face with humanity at its worst.

From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a host of further ethnic cleansings in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crisis of Genocide seeks to integrate these genocidal events into a single, coherent history. Over two volumes, Mark Levene demonstrates how the relationship between geography, nation, and power came to play a key role in the emergence of genocide in a collapsed or collapsing European imperial zone - the Rimlands - and how the continuing geopolitical contest for control of these Eastern European or near-European regions destabilised relationships between diverse and multifaceted ethnic communities who traditionally had lived side by side. An emergent pattern of toxicity can also be seen in the struggles for regional dominance as pursued by post-imperial states, nation-states, and would-be states. Volume I: Devastation covers the period from 1912 to 1938. It is divided into two parts, the first associated with the prelude to, actuality of, and aftermath of the Great War and imperial collapse, the second the period of provisional 'New Europe' reformulation as well as post-imperial Stalinist, Nazi - and Kemalist - consolidation up to 1938. Levene also explores the crystallisation of truly toxic anti-Jewish hostilities, the implication being that the immediate origins of the Jewish genocides in the Second World War are to be found in the First.

Syria has been at the center of world news since 2011, following the beginnings of a popular uprising in the country and its subsequent violent and murderous repression by the Assad regime. Eight years on, Joseph Daher analyzes the resilience of the regime and the failings of the uprising, while also taking a closer look at the counter revolutionary processes that have been undermining the uprising from without and within. Joseph Daher is the author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever.

Issues of the war that have provoked public controversy and legal debate over the last two years--the Cambodian invasion of May-June 1970, the disclosure in November 1969 of the My Lai massacre, and the question of war crimes--are the focus of Volume 3. As in the previous volumes, the Civil War Panel of the American Society of International Law has endeavored to select the most significant legal writing on the subject and to provide, to the extent possible, a balanced presentation of opposing points of view. Parts I and II deal directly with the Cambodian, My Lai, and war crimes debates. Related questions are treated in the rest of the volume: constitutional debate on the war; the distribution of functions among coordinate branches of the government; the legal status of the insurgent regime in the struggle for control of South Vietnam; prospects for settlement without a clear-cut victory; and Vietnam's role in general world order. The articles reflect the views of some forty contributors: among them, Jean Lacouture, Henry Kissinger, John Norton Moore, Quincy Wright, William H. Rhenquist, and Richard A. Falk. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

As a child growing up in Cambodia, Ronnie Yimsut played among the ruins of the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by a close-knit community. As the Khmer Rouge gained power and began its genocidal reign of terror, his life became a nightmare. Teenaged Ronnie was left orphaned, literally buried under the bodies of his family and friends. In this stunning memoir, Yimsut describes how, in the wake of death and destruction, he decides to live. Escaping the turmoil of Cambodia, he makes a perilous journey through the jungle into Thailand, only to be sent to a notorious Thai prison. Fortunately, he is able to reach a refugee camp and ultimately migrate to the United States, another frightening journey to the unknown. Yet he prevailed, attending the University of Oregon and becoming an influential leader in the community of Cambodian immigrants. Facing the Khmer Rouge shows Ronnie Yimsut's personal quest to rehabilitate himself, make a new life in America, and then return to Cambodia to help rebuild the land of his birth.

Slavenka Drakulic attended the Serbian war crimes trial in the Hague. Her book is an accessible, involving and moving account of how ordinary people commit terrible crimes in wartime. Drawing readers into this difficult subject, Drakulic explores everything from the monstrous Slobodan Milosevich and his evil "Lady Macbeth" of a wife, to humble Serb soldiers who claim they were "just obeying orders". She enters the minds of the killers, but also reveals stories of bravery and survival, both from those who helped Bosnians escape from the Serbs and from those who risked their lives to help them.

Defined by deliberation about the difference between right and wrong, encouragement not to be indifferent toward that difference, resistance against what is wrong, and action in support of what is right, ethics is civilization's keystone. The Failures of Ethics concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite us human beings to inflict incalculable harm. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Although these catastrophes do not pronounce the death of ethics, they show that ethics is vulnerable, subject to misuse and perversion, and that no simple reaffirmation of ethics, as if nothing disastrous had happened, will do. Moral and religious authority has been fragmented and weakened by the accumulated ruins of history and the depersonalized advances of civilization that have taken us from a bloody twentieth century into an immensely problematic twenty-first. What nevertheless remain essential are spirited commitment and political will that embody the courage not to let go of the ethical but to persist for it in spite of humankind's self-inflicted destructiveness. Salvaging the fragmented condition of ethics, this book shows how respect and honor for those who save lives and resist atrocity, deepened attention to the dead and to death itself, and appeals for human rights and renewed spiritual sensitivity confirm that ethics contains and remains an irreplaceable safeguard against its own failures.

The rise of international criminal trials has been accompanied by a call for domestic responses to extraordinary violence. Yet there is remarkably limited research on the interactions among local, national, and international transitional justice institutions. Rwanda offers an early example of multi-level courts operating in concert, through the concurrent practice of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the national Rwandan courts, and the gacaca community courts. Courts in Conflict makes a crucial and timely contribution to the examination of these pluralist responses to atrocity at a juncture when holistic approaches are rapidly becoming the policy norm. Although Rwanda's post-genocide criminal courts are compatible in law, an interpretive cultural analysis shows how and why they have often conflicted in practice. The author's research is derived from 182 interviews with judges, lawyers, and a group of witnesses and suspects within all three of the post-genocide courts. This rich empirical material shows that the judges and lawyers inside each of the courts offer notably different interpretations of Rwanda's transitional justice processes, illuminating divergent legal cultures that help explain the constraints on the courts' effective cooperation and evidence gathering. The potential for similar competition between domestic and international justice processes is apparent in the current practice of the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, this competition can be mitigated through increased communication among the different sites of justice, fostering legal cultures of complementarity that can more effectively respond to the needs of affected populations.

This book examines how international law prohibits state and individual complicity. Complicity is a derivative form of responsibility that links an accomplice to the wrongdoing of a principal actor. Whenever a legal system prohibits complicity, it must address certain questions as to the content and structure of the rules. To understand how international law answers these questions, this book proposes an analytical framework in which complicity rules may be assessed and defends a normative claim as to how they should be structured. Anchored by this framework and normative claim, this book shows that international criminal law regulates individual complicity in a comprehensive way, using the doctrines of instigation and aiding and abetting to inculpate complicit participants in international crimes. By contrast, international law's regulation of state complicity was historically marked by an absence of complicity rules. This is changing. In respect of state complicity in the wrongdoing of another state, international law now imposes both specific and general complicity obligations, the latter prohibiting states from aiding or assisting another state in the commission of any internationally wrongful act. In respect of the ways that states participate in harms caused by non-state actors, the traditional normative structure of international law, which imposed obligations only on states, foreclosed the possibility of prohibiting the state's participation as a form of complicity. As that traditional normative structure has evolved, so the possibility of holding states responsible for complicity in the wrongdoing of non-state actors has emerged. More and more, both the wrongs that international actors commit, and the wrongs they help or encourage others to commit, matter.

The Nuremberg trials after World War II constituted a landmark in the development of international criminal justice: presided over by jurists from the victorious powers, it set new standards for defining international war crimes. Set in motion shortly after the creation of the United Nations, the courts seemed to point toward a future in which the international community could more effectively prosecute crimes against humanity and advance the cause of justice and the rule of law throughout the world. However, the onset of the Cold War stymied all efforts to create an effective international criminal court. Neither the US nor the USSR was willing to face the possibility of being judged in a forum controlled by ideological adversaries. Despite the lack of progress, the dream of the court lived on through the 1980s, and when the Cold War ended, a new opportunity arose. After the UN's creation of temporary courts during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, a powerful grassroots movement championing a permanent international criminal court emerged. Facing stiff resistance from the US and other powerful states, the movement triumphed against great odds. The court was established in 2002, and it now has the support of over 100 states (but not the US). The US opposes it outright and the Russians and Chinese are skeptical of it for a simple reason: as the most powerful states, they have no intention of surrendering jurisdictional authority over their own citizens to lesser powers. As a consequence, the court has faced numerous setbacks, and many have questioned whether it has any real power at all. It has ended up focusing its energies on pursuing war criminals in weak states, typically in Africa. It is now caught on the horns of a dilemma: to pursue justice, it does what it can where it can, but it cannot actually prosecute figures in powerful states. Russia will never surrender troops who may have acted badly in Georgia, and America is not about to hand over soldiers who killed civilians in Afghanistan. Yet the court has had some minor successes, and we should remember that it is still in its very early days. As the years pass, its jurisdictional authority may expand, and the norms that it advances may achieve the status of common sense. Time will tell. In Rough Justice, David Bosco tells the story of the movement to establish the court and its tumultuous first decade. He also considers its prospects for the future, especially the very real challenges that it faces. This is an authoritative account of an international institution that is prototypical of the post-Cold War era.

In 1993 Ewen Southby-Tailyour joined the British Foreign Office for duties with the European Community Monitoring Mission. He was also tasked, informally, by MI6 to report on a few characters. Monitoring the cease-fire violations along the Confrontation Line between Croatia and the Republic of Serbian Krajina plus the humanitarian and economic issues for the regeneration of Dalmatia were professionally satisfying; as were a covert beach reconnaissance, interviewing war criminals and pacing the length of a 'secret' airfield that was eventually used by US Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft to support Croatia's ethnic cleansing of all Serbs from Krajina. Closing in on hard evidence that Germany and the US were breaking UN Arms Embargo 713 the author was caught in the diplomatic cross-fire between the Greeks, who supported Serbia and the French who supported Croatia. To prevent the French knowing of any illicit arms embargo he was order by the Greeks to falsify his reports. He resigned from the mission. This is a thought-provoking, disturbing tale of deceit and duplicity between European countries (and, notably, the US) all supposedly supporting a common cause-peace in the Balkans-but, in effect, helping to ethnically cleanse 200,000 Serbs from their 500 year-old homeland.

The legal position in international law of heads of states and other senior state representatives is at the heart of the conflict thrown up by recent changes in the international legal order. The establishment of the International Criminal Court and the ad hoc criminal tribunals reflects a growing belief that heads of states and other senior state representatives should be held accountable for serious violations of international law. It is now questioned whether foreign states and their officials still have immunity from proceedings concerning grave human rights abuses in national courts.
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of this key issue, covering both civil and criminal proceedings before domestic courts and the position before international courts and tribunals. The positions of both serving and former heads of states are examined and, where appropriate, so is that of their family members. The wide variety of constitutional forms and titles enjoyed by heads of states and senior state representatives is considered and their internationally relevant powers and functions outlined. The implications of recognition or lack of it are assessed, together with the practical and legal consequences of loss of office and/or exile in a foreign state. In examining the position of heads of state and other senior representatives in foreign states, attention is given to the question of immunities before the local courts, and to other privileges, protections, and courtesies to which they may be entitled.
The book draws a distinction between the personal immunity (ratione personae) enjoyed by heads of states which derive from their status or office, and the official act immunity (ratione materiae) enjoyed by all state officials. It closely examines the relationship between state immunity as it has developed under the restrictive doctrine and the immunities to which individuals are entitled. Careful consideration is given to separate regimes of international immunities such as special missions.This systematic analysis of the legal position of heads of states takes into account the history of the subject, relevant state practice (judicial and legislative), the impact of relevant international treaties, and international judicial or arbitral decisions on the matter.

The question is as searing as it is fundamental to the continuing debate over Japanese culpability in World War II and the period leading up to it: "How could Japanese soldiers have committed such acts of violence against Allied prisoners of war and Chinese civilians?" During the First World War, the Japanese fought on the side of the Allies and treated German POWs with respect and civility. In the years that followed, under Emperor Hirohito, conformity was the norm and the Japanese psyche became one of selfless devotion to country and emperor; soon Japanese soldiers were to engage in mass murder, rape, and even cannibalization of their enemies. Horror in the East examines how this drastic change came about. On the basis of never-before-published interviews with both the victimizers and the victimized, and drawing on never-before-revealed or long-ignored archival records, Rees discloses the full horror of the war in the Pacific, probing the supposed Japanese belief in their own racial superiority, analyzing a military that believed suicide to be more honorable than surrender, and providing what the Guardian calls "a powerful, harrowing account of appalling inhumanity...impeccably researched."

Genocide has scarred human societies since Antiquity. In the modern era, genocide has been a global phenomenon: from massacres in colonial America, Africa, and Australia to the Holocaust of European Jewry and mass death in Maoist China. In recent years, the discipline of 'genocide studies' has developed to offer analysis and comprehension. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. Chapters examine secessionist and political genocides in modern Asia. Others treat the violent dynamics of European colonialism in Africa, the complex ethnic geography of the Great Lakes region, and the structural instability of the continent's northern horn. South and North America receive detailed coverage, as do the Ottoman Empire, Nazi-occupied Europe, and post-communist Eastern Europe. Sustained attention is paid to themes like gender, memory, the state, culture, ethnic cleansing, military intervention, the United Nations, and prosecutions. The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Uniquely combining empirical reconstruction and conceptual analysis, this Handbook presents and analyses regions of genocide and the entire field of 'genocide studies' in one substantial volume.

Genocide has tragically claimed the lives of over 262 million victims in the last century. Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, Darfurians, Kosovons, Rwandans, the list seems endless. Clinical psychologist Steven K. Baum sets out to examine the psychological patterns to these atrocities. Building on trait theory as well as social psychology he reanalyzes key conformity studies (including the famous experiments of Ash, Millgram and Zimbardo) to bring forth a new understanding of identity and emotional development during genocide. Baum presents a model that demonstrates how people's actions during genocide actually mirror their behaviour in everyday life: there are those who destruct (perpetrators), those who help (rescuers) and those who remain uninvolved, positioning themselves between the two extremes (bystanders). Combining eyewitness accounts with Baum's own analysis, this book reveals the common mental and emotional traits among perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers and how a war between personal and social identity accounts for these divisions.

That American forces should torture prisoners in their “war” on terror is disturbing, but more shocking still is that the highest officials of the Bush-Cheney administration planned, authorized, encouraged, and concealed these war crimes. When the Supreme Court ruled that the officials were bound by the Geneva Conventions, a Republican Congress responded by granting amnesty to all responsible, from lowly interrogators to the president, while conservative judges erected a wall of secrecy to protect them even from civil liability. Meanwhile, timid Democrats have shown little stomach for repealing the amnesty law and bringing those responsible to justice. Many Americans, including those who endorsed torture to find “ticking bombs” that never were, are now embarrassed by credible reports of CIA kidnappings for purposes of torture, secret prisons into which prisoners have disappeared without a trace, and rigged tribunals to convict al Qaeda’s criminals on evidence obtained by torture. But the problem is not just embarrassment; it is the widespread acceptance of unaccountable, secret government that now threatens to destroy the very foundations of constitutional government. The moral standing of the United States will not be restored, Christopher Pyle argues, until a concerted effort is made to bring our secret government under the rule of law.

As international criminal courts and tribunals have proliferated and international criminal law is increasingly seen as a key tool for bringing the world's worst perpetrators to account, the controversies surrounding the international trials of war criminals have grown. War crimes tribunals have to deal with accusations of victor's justice, bad prosecutorial policy and case management, and of jeopardizing fragile peace in post-conflict situations. In this exceptional book, one of the leading writers in the field of international criminal law explores these controversial issues in a manner that is accessible both to lawyers and to general readers. Professor William Schabas begins by considering the discipline of international criminal law, outlining the differing approaches to the description of international crimes and examining the frequent claims relating to the retroactive application of these crimes. The book then discusses the relationship between genocide and crimes against humanity, studying the fascination with what Schabas calls the 'genocide mystique'. International criminal tribunals have often been stigmatized as an exercise in victor's justice. This book traces how this critique developed and the difficulty it poses to the identification of situations for prosecution by the International Criminal Court. The claim that amnesty for international crimes is prohibited by international law is challenged, with a more nuanced approach to the relationship between justice and peace being proposed. Throughout the book there is a strong historical perspective, with constant reference to the early experiments in international justice at Nuremberg and Tokyo. The work also analyses the growing pains of the International Criminal Court as it enters its second decade.