GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – China has recognized Libya’s new government, the NTC, handing a final international political blow to the Qaddafi regime. The news comes this week as the National Transitional Council in Libya announced that the new government’s main source of law will be moderate Islam.
Earlier this week, 13 September Amnesty International issued a report on crimes against humanity by the Qaddafi regime but it also noted that the NTC may have committed war crimes.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Goran Hadzic, 52, the last of the 14 Serb leaders accused of war crimes during the Croatian war who was still at large has been arrested. He was taken in at 08:35 Tuesday morning 20 July in a forest near the village of village Krusedol in the Fruska Gora region about 100 km northwest of Belgrade, said Vladimir Vukcevic Wednesday, confirming local media reports Tuesday. Vukcevic is the Serbian prosecutor for war crimes.
Hadzic was carrying a pistol at the time of his arrest but did not resist, according to Vukcevic. He had been in hiding since 2004. The news was announced by Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, who said that Hadzic was not arrested in an Orthodox monastery as local media had reported earlier.
The European Union promptly congratulated Serbia, which has been accused until recently of lagging in its efforts to find the accused former leaders. The news is likely to speed up Serbia’s entry into the European Union.
Hadzic’s name is linked to the murder of 250 Croatians and other non-Serbs who had taken refuge in the Vukovar Hospital in November 1991 before they were rounded up and shot. He is accused of attempting the forced transfer out of the region of some 27,000 people.
A study commissioned by former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer reveals the extent to which German diplomats participated in war crimes during the second world war. “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” (The Ministry and the Past) was published 28 October. It is an 880-page investigation of the foreign ministry’s close involvement in the Holocaust and the whitewash after the war.
Fischer paid homage to Marga Henseler, a 90-year-old retired foreign ministry translator, who read an obituary in the ministry’s in-house newspaper about a former diplomat, where no mention was made that he was once wanted for war crimes. Henseler wrote to Fischer to tell him the truth. Fischer commissioned the study by a panel of four historians in 2005.
The UN peacekeeping operations in eastern Congo, the UN’s largest, are judged to be a failure, and in many cases are exacerbating the situation. The war in North and South Kivu regions have caused the displacement of a million civilians, thousands of killings and hundreds of rapes, says a new report seen by BBC and Reuters. The report was released 25 November by a Group of Experts mandated by the UN to examine violations of the arms embargo in the region.
The main Hutu-backed rebel group FDLR controls extensive tin and gold-mining areas which helps to finance its rebellion. Former Tutsi rebels integrated into the Congolese army, which is supported by the UN peacekeeping force, operate as a parallel milita. They are led by Nosco Ntaganda, wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
Links to other sites: BBC, Reuters, UN site establishing arms embargo
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva will reopen a debate Thursday 15 October on the conduct of both sides in last winter’s brief war in Gaza, Palestine, between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza strip’s political authority. A report by former South African judge Richard Goldstone suggests both armed groups may have committed war crimes. It recommends that they conduct their own impartial investigations within six months or have the case referred to the International Criminal Court. A call by Libya for the UN in New York to take up the report by strongly rebuffed by Israel which said late Wednesday 14 October that as long as the report is “on the table” there can be no peace negotiations with Palestine.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), the nominal representative of the Palestinians, initially asked for the debate on the report to be deferred, but it came under sharp criticism from Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza strip since elections in 2007 forced out Fatah and the PA.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – World headlines about endless casualties and aid organizations being kept out of Sri Lanka’s conflict area have died away, last week’s news, but the battle to find out what really happened and how many died may be only beginning, media reports 29 May show. Le Temps and Le Monde jointly carry an article by reporter Philippe Bolopion in Colombo that accuses the Sri Lankan government of hiding the real number of deaths and the UN of collusion out of fear that its ability to work in the country would be compromised. In the UK, The Times front-page story Friday 29 May says that 20,000 civilians – three times the official number – were killed.
The Times story is based on photos taken on the beaches in the conflict area, UN documents as well as “witness accounts and expert testimony.” The numbers are in fact the same as those published a day earlier by Le Monde, which also cites UN sources. The photos were taken for The Times. Le Monde refers to satellite images taken by Unosat of the conflict area, which reportedly show shelling damage, possibly after the date when the Sri Lankan government said it had stopped.
In Geneva Wednesday 28 the Human Rights Council, an independent inter-UN organization, rejected a Swiss-European draft resolution to investigate possible war crimes in Sri Lanka and instead adopted a Sri Lankan counter-resolution. Human Rights Watch condemned the UNHRC move, saying it had “passed a deeply flawed resolution on Sri Lanka that ignores calls for an international investigation into alleged abuses during recent fighting and other pressing human rights concerns.”
