In the early 1990s, while Western leaders were still congratulating themselves over the end of communism and the fall of the Soviet empire, the security structure that helped bring about those events began to come apart. The American-led North Atlantic Alliance that had for four decades effectively counterbalanced the Russian domination of eastern Europe proved incapable of dealing with a single Yugoslav despot, Slobodan Milosevic. The alliance that had confronted the prospect of nuclear apocalypse could not develop a coherent response to a small conventional conflict in southeastern Europe.

War had returned to the European continent. First in Croatia and then in Bosnia, it was being fought seemingly without respect for the rules of warfare that had been drafted in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. These codes of conduct in war were a lesser-known element in the architecture of international security put into place after 1945. They were an effort to prevent a repetition of the worst of the abuses of World War II: the concentration camps, the mass deportations, the terror bombing. They enabled postwar governments in Europe and North America to at least assure their publics that the lessons had been learned and standards set.

It is no exaggeration to say that these codes were intended to establish even in war, a firebreak between civilization and barbarism. The Nuremberg Tribunals of 1945 set down the principle that there were such things as crimes against humanity, systematic crimes against civilians that can occur inside a country but that might be tried anywhere else. The Genocide Convention of 1948 gave legal meaning and force to the worst crime in the lexicon. The 1949 Geneva Conventions codified and advanced the rules governing wars between States, differentiating legal conduct from illegal and criminal acts in war. Together with the two Additional Protocols of 1977, the Geneva Conventions are the central summation of the agreed rules governing the conduct of war. Scholars and humanitarian organizations, hoping to emphasize the protections under law for noncombatants, call this field international humanitarian law. Militaries prefer to speak of the laws of war, and include in that definition the issues connected with the causes of war.

In well-off Western countries, the canons of international humanitarian law took hold—once the sometimes savage colonial wars had ended. Contrast, say, the American military's conduct in Vietnam, where many of the standards of international humanitarian law were violated, with its attempt to adhere scrupulously to these norms in the Gulf War. Unfortunately, the locus of conflict shifted to the poor world, where governments and insurgent groups routinely have disregarded the legal regime. And in the immediate post–Cold War era, no major Western power felt it had any stake in Third World conflicts unless oil was involved.

Small wonder, then, that less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure of international humanitarian law seemed on the brink of collapse. It took a war in Europe—Croatia in 1991—to stir public interest. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992), the Rwandan genocide (1994), and Chechnya (1995) amplified the alarm bell, though it should have been sounded a good deal earlier.

Bosnia was the trigger. In the heart of "civilized" Europe, Serbian forces had set up concentration camps, deported non-Serbs in cattle cars, destroyed towns and villages, organized the systematic rape of Croat and Muslim women, and targeted civilians in the name of ethnic cleansing. The great Western alliance watched passively, and were it not for the glare of media attention as had occurred more than two decades earlier in Vietnam, and the public outcry in western Europe and North America, the savagery might have had no bounds.

In response to the public outcry, major powers sent in food and medicine and UN forces to monitor the distribution of aid, but more as an excuse to deflect public opinion than a policy response that squarely addressed the cause of a man-made disaster. Belatedly, and well after the worst crimes had occurred, major powers set up the first war crimes tribunals since Nuremberg, first for Bosnia and then in Rwanda. They did so, at least in part, in response to pressure from human rights, relief, religious, and other nongovernmental organizations and from the news media.

This, in itself, was a singular departure. Nongovernmental organizations and committed individuals can rightly claim credit for the conception, drafting, and adoption in 1948 of the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, but the public historically have been bit players in curbing crimes of war. The implementation of international standards had always been up to governments, the militaries, and the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, which for over a century has helped in the drafting, oversight, and implementation of the Geneva Conventions.

No one yet knows whether the rise to prominence of nongovernmental organizations will help shift the responsibility toward a world order based on collaboration between governments, intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations, and private groups. Perhaps, on the other hand, the talk entering an era of international law and ending the old hard edged conception of State sovereignty is overstated. Whatever structures of world politics emerge in the next century, the editors and writers of this book—lawyers, journalists, and scholars—contend that the laws of war belong to everyone. They are among the great achievements of civilization, and in this era of uncertainty and disorder, more relevant than ever.

For the time being, accountability is not the rule, but the exception, in conflict. And realistically, international humanitarian law will not take hold without the support of governments. But as public interest grows in international humanitarian law, and this once esoteric field begins to generate news, a sense of change is in the air. Whether the story concerns the sentencing for genocide of a Rwandan mayor—the first such sentence handed down since Nuremberg—the effort to send war crimes investigators to Kosovo, a Spanish prosecutor's attempt to put the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on trial for crimes against his people, or the U.S.

government decision to award a bounty of up to $5 million for the capture of indicted Bosnian war criminals, the pattern represents a radical shift.

The question now is whether the new paradigm will prove enduring, and whether the rule of law set out in international treaties can truly be made to apply to conflict. There is ample reason for skepticism. What is certain is that it will not happen without public awareness and public engagement. And without a command of the most basic facts about the laws of war, there can be neither.

The need is pressing. Wars today increasingly are fought not between armies where officers are bound by notions of honor but by fighters, many of them children, who are not soldiers in any conventional sense of the word. The goal of these conflicts is often ethnic cleansing—the forcible expulsion of the civilian population of one's enemy—not the victory of one army over another.

The principal victims of this kind of war—slaughter is often the better term for it—are civilians. As horrible as the death toll was in World War I, the millions who died were, by and large, killed on the battlefield—soldiers killed by soldiers, not civilians killed by lawless or random or planned savagery. The rough proportion of military to civilian casualties was ninety to ten. In World War II, the proportions were roughly even. Today, for every ten military casualties there are on the order of ninety civilian deaths. The reality of our era, as demonstrated in Angola, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnya, is that torture is rampant, murdering civilians commonplace, and driving the survivors from their homes often the main goal of a particular military offensive.

This book is published on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary—in August 1999—of the Geneva Conventions, with the aim of encouraging public knowledge of the principles of conduct in war. It consists of three types of articles. The heart of the law, and of this book, are the grave breaches, or serious war crimes, delineated in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the First Additional Protocol of 1977. The editors sought to find a clear example of each breach, irrespective of countries or adversaries, and then asked working reporters who had been at the scene to provide a graphic case study of what they had seen. These articles are labeled, crime. Leading scholars in the United States and abroad contributed shorter articles on technical topics, most labeled the law. There are also essay-length articles by journalists or scholars on major themes, labeled key terms. To provide a broader overview of contemporary conflict, the editors asked reporters and one historian to take a fresh and critical look at recent conflicts and examine them in the light of the crimes of war. These ten case studies offer insights into the dynamics of crimes in nine wars (Rwanda is addressed twice from different perspectives) and can be read as a book within a book. Complementing the case studies are three experts’ overviews of the applicable law: “Categories of War Crimes” by Steven Ratner, “Crimes against Humanity” by Cherif Bassiouni, and “Genocide” by Diane Orentlicher. Every article was vetted by our legal editor, Kenneth Anderson, his colleagues at American University’s Washington College of Law, and by leading military law experts in the United States and Britain.

The A-to-Z format, the use of bold-face type to indicate cross-references, and the graphic design are intended to make the book easy to use, and the photographs to provide visual bookmarks, while documenting the reality behind the words. The texts recount some of the most compelling reportage of contemporary journalism. Sydney Schanberg's case study of Cambodia, Roger Cohen's article on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Gwynne Roberts's account of the gassing of Kurdish civilians in Halabja and the aftermath, Frank Smyth's tale of arrest in Iraq, Ed Vulliamy's account on concentration camps, and Corinne Dufka's account of child soldiers in Liberia are a few of the articles that provide the raison d’être for this book.

Some contributions offer unique insights into military issues for the nonmilitary. For example, Wayne Elliott’s article on POWs tells reporters or anyone visiting or inspecting a POW camp what to look for. Elliott demonstrates how merely asking questions can put the spotlight on the observance or infraction of the rules, reminding commanders that the world is watching them. Hamilton DeSaussure's essay on military objectives will alert readers to the moral debate the military officer should go through before deciding what to attack and what to spare.

Crimes of War was conceived as a handbook for reporters. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, war coverage is too important to be left uncritically to the news media. The general public, too, should know the moral and legal benchmarks contained in the law. One reason for a commonality of interest is that coverage of contemporary conflicts increasingly is available to the public without a filter or a framework or context. A second is that every close observer has a restricted field of vision.

Journalists who cover wars and humanitarian emergencies of the post- Cold War world know far better than their audiences or their critics how much they are operating in uncharted territory. Understanding what is going on in the midst of all the havoc, confusion, and disinformation is anything but simple. And almost nothing in their training prepares reporters to be able make the necessary distinctions between legal, illegal, and criminal acts. Is it a war crime under international law or a horrible, destructive, but legal act of war when one sees a hospital being shelled in Sarajevo, a humanitarian aid convoy blocked at a checkpoint on the Dagestan-Chechen border, or combat in which no prisoners are taken in Sri Lanka? Is it a legitimate sanction on the part of a State when the homes of alleged terrorists are reduced to rubble, as happens regularly in Israel, or is it a war crime? When combatants insert themselves amongst the civilian population, as was the case in Vietnam and more recently in Rwanda, does this violate the international conventions?

The best single indicator of a major war crime often is a massive displacement of civilians. But people may be fleeing for their lives from the scene of crime or the immediate threat of crimes, as in South Sudan at many points during the civil war there; or because their leaders ordered them out, but are intending to return militarily to destroy the other side, as the Serbs fleeing Croatian Slavonia did in 1991. They may be fleeing at the insistence of their political leaders, who intend to depict them as the victims of crime, as in the case of the Tajiks who fled into Afghanistan in 1993; or because they and their leaders have committed massive crimes and fear justice or retribution, as in the case of the Rwandan Hutus who fled into eastern Zaire in 1994 in the wake of the genocide. Determinations as these are hard to make in the best of circumstances, but all the more so under deadline pressure.

Sometimes the laws of war are frustratingly counterintuitive. International humanitarian law, as the contents of this book exemplify, does not address the causes or origins of a particular war, or which side was right and which side was wrong, only the method by which it is fought. So it is entirely possible, for example, for an aggressor to stage a war of conquest in accordance with the Geneva Conventions or for a defender to commit war crimes in a legitimate war of self-defense. But the fact that the law cannot answer every question, or shield us from every moral dilemma that war occasions, does not mean it has no answers or provides no bulwark against barbarism and crime.

In any case, understanding, while always difficult, is never more so than in war when the lure of easy explanations may be hard to resist. The British journalist Lindsey Hilsum maintains that when a journalist reports that the situation on the ground is one of anarchy, or resorts to such reductive clichés as describing a particular conflict as the product of ancient ethnic or tribal hatreds, the chances are that he or she has not fully understood what was going on.

Obviously, journalists have a primary role, but they are not the only people focused on the brutality of contemporary conflict. Groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the German Society for Threatened Peoples increasingly have turned their focus to violations of humanitarian law; but they cannot take on the entire responsibility of uncovering crimes of war. Watch groups have exceptional expertise and devoted staffers, but they also have finite resources and may arrive late at the scene, have limited access, and are sometimes slow to produce their reports. And like many private groups, dependent on external fund raising, each has its separate mandate and agenda.

Relief and aid workers in the field have become the eyes and ears of the world in conflict zones. Usually, they are the first on the scene and the last to leave. But their mandate and their training usually does not encompass trying to stop or even report on war crimes, and they are at risk of expulsion, with all that this entails for the endangered populations they are trying to serve, if they publicly cross that line. Yet knowledge of what is legal, illegal, and criminal in warfare will permit them or any other observers to alert those who do have the mandate and the means to inform the world or to act.

For the general public, Crimes of War should make it possible to become better informed consumers of the news by laying out the benchmarks for monitoring the watchdogs and governments. Just what steps governments should take to counter wholesale violations of the codes of war is not the subject of this book. Sometimes merely turning the spotlight on gross violations of humanitarian law can affect behavior in a small theater of war; other times, as in the Balkans, only military intervention or the threat of it can do any good. Our hope is that if the principles of law are widely understood, and if the news media and other observers present the relevant facts to the public, informed debate will provide the answers.

Joseph Pulitzer put it most succinctly when he wrote, "There is not a crime which does not live in secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later, public opinion will sweep them away." That, at least, is the hope of those who have contributed to this book.