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 |  Subject: U.S., Allies Have Syria War Crime Evidence, Officials Say; AnCaps Have Evidence Against All Of You  Wed Jan 22, 2014 9:54 pm | |
| For nearly two years, dozens of investigators funded by the U.S. and its allies have been infiltrating Syria to collect evidence of suspected war crimes, sometimes risking their lives to back up promises by Western leaders to hold the guilty accountable.
The evidence smuggled out from battlefields and military installations has created a real-time record of war crimes that could help prosecutors begin their work immediately, U.S. officials said.
But such prosecutions may never happen, given the stalemate between President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and splintered rebel factions.
The two sides are meeting this week at an international conference in Switzerland, which the U.S. and its Western allies insist is intended to lead to a transitional government without Mr. Assad.
Some diplomats said it would be worth offering Mr. Assad immunity from potential war-crimes prosecution to persuade him to quit.
“We have to offer him carrots if we want him to give up power,” Stephen Rademaker, a former assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, recently told a House foreign affairs subcommittee.
Even if the conflict were to end, there are deep divisions among international powers over where, or whether, to hold trials.
William Wiley, a former Canadian army officer who heads the U.S.-backed war-crimes investigation, said he is proceeding regardless of current diplomatic maneuvers.
“In the event the peace talks fail, accountability—in particular criminal-justice accountability—will return to the top of the political agenda of the interested Western governments,” he said.
Mr. Assad denied that his forces had committed war crimes, in an interview with Agence France-Presse published on Monday.
“The army doesn’t shell neighborhoods. The army strikes areas where there are terrorists,” he said.
Michael Posner helped launch the effort to document war crimes as assistant secretary of state for human rights during the first Obama administration.
“We made a judgment early on that we needed to support efforts on the ground to gather the facts and support preparations for eventual war-crimes trials,” he said. “It’s much harder to come back after the fact to try to reconstruct what happened.”
With nearly $7 million in funding from the U.S., the U.K. and the European Union, Mr. Wiley’s organization has trained two dozen Syrian exiles as investigators.
So far, his eight squads have spirited more than 300,000 pages of possible evidence from the war zone to Brussels, where they are being digitized and cataloged, Mr. Wiley said.
U.S. officials said approval for the war-crimes project was spurred by the alleged torture and killing of a 13-year-old boy, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, weeks after his arrest at an April 2011 demonstration in Daraa, where the uprising against Mr. Assad’s regime began. The boy’s mutilated corpse was returned to his family—an incident publicized through social media.
The next month, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a warning to war criminals: “Stop killing your fellow citizens or you will face serious consequences.”
The U.S. and its allies would establish “an accountability clearinghouse” to help Syrians “document atrocities, identify perpetrators and safeguard evidence for future investigations and prosecutions,” she vowed.
Those were the early days of the Syrian uprising that morphed into a civil war. In the nearly three years that have passed, more than 100,000 people have been killed.
Mr. Wiley said his project focuses on finding the kind of material needed to investigate a case to criminal-law standard.
“What we are looking for is material linking individuals to acts of abuse,” he said.
U.S. officials said they envision prosecuting a representative sample of high-ranking defendants, carefully selected to represent both the regime and the armed rebels.
That is meant to pave the way for reconciliation rather than placing the blame on one side alone, which risks planting seeds of future conflict.
Those who favor trials are divided on the jurisdiction. The United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, has called for referring Syria to the International Criminal Court. But Syria isn’t an ICC member, so the court can’t act unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council.
Some argue a postwar Syrian government should conduct trials with international help.
Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) has introduced a bipartisan House resolution calling for an ad hoc tribunal modeled on the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which was jointly run by the U.N. and the Sierra Leone government.
Many view that court, which closed down in December after an appeals chamber upheld a 50-year sentence for former President Charles Taylor of Liberia, as relatively successful.
While such a court also would require Security Council approval, Mr. Smith said its limited mandate makes it more palatable.
Officials behind Mr. Wiley’s project, the independent Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability, envision trials for the commanders who directed the machinery of atrocity.
The Obama administration’s point man on the war-crimes project, Ambassador Stephen Rapp, described them as “the people who don’t get their hands dirty, but who are pulling the strings.”
In August 2011, a few months after Mrs. Clinton promised to hold Syrian war criminals accountable, British officials approached Mr. Wiley, who since the early 1990s has worked for several war-crimes courts, including U.N. tribunal for Rwanda, where he served under Mr. Rapp, then its chief prosecutor.
Soon Mr. Wiley was traveling to Turkey and Syria seeking recruits. By January 2012, dozens of Syrians representing a mix of ethnicity, sex and political affiliation had completed a five-day course in evidence collection.
The most notorious war crime in Syria—the August poison-gas attack that prompted Mr. Obama to threaten retaliation—isn’t on Mr. Wiley’s docket.
“We do not have the capacity to take samples from chemical strikes,” he said.
One key case is the February 2012 attack on Homs, when Assad forces bombarded the city for more than two weeks, reportedly killing hundreds of Syrian civilians and a correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, Marie Colvin.
The project’s main problem has been moving documents out of the country, something exacerbated by the rise of Islamist militiamen who now hold areas through which his investigators must travel, Mr. Wiley said.
Two investigators have been shot and wounded. Another was captured and is presumed dead, Mr. Wiley said.
Although the project’s mandate covers all war crimes within Syria, to date it has focused on those attributed to the government. Mr. Wiley acknowledged that is partly to retain good relations with the Western-backed and secular-leaning Free Syrian Army, the rebel group that controls most areas where his investigators are operating.
Inside the Syrian Commission on Justice and Accountability
Led by a former investigator for International Criminal Court
Funded by grants from the U.S., U.K. and European Union
Trains Syrian exiles to infiltrate battlefields and government facilities to gather documents and forensic evidence
Currently about two dozen Syrian exiles are working as investigators
Digitizes and catalogs evidence for potential use by future prosecutors
http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-433504/
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“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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