Nothing could prepare a visitor for the sight of Cuito, a town in Angola’s central highlands that Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) forces besieged for most of 1993 and 1994.

Not a building was left standing on the main street, which became the front line of defense for Angolan government forces. No roof or window remained intact, and many apartment blocks were collapsed into heaps. The pink walls of the grandiose old Portuguese colonial government buildings were scarred by tens of thousands of rifle rounds. Only one wall and the bell tower of the cathedral were left standing. And, of course, the electrical and water systems were destroyed.

Even buildings that enjoyed special protection under international humanitarian law were not spared. The large regional hospital had to be abandoned. But after the staff moved the surgical equipment and medical equipment to a small shop in a government-held part of town, the attacks continued. A UNITA shell eventually found its mark and destroyed the shop. The government, too, showed little respect for protected spaces. Later in the fighting, government war planes bombed the central hospital, perhaps not illegally, as it was a UNITA military position.

A Human Rights Watch study said that by July of 1993, UNITA was raining some one thousand heavy artillery shells on Cuito every day, and the rebel force “had clearly made little attempt to target precisely its shelling.” It concluded that as many as thirty thousand people, mostly civilians, had died during the siege, almost a third of those who perished during the Angolan civil war. The damage to property, while not as tragic, was vast. The siege of Cuito was the occasion for massive violations of the Geneva Conventions and their protocols, among them indiscriminate attack and wanton destruction.

In a strictly geographical sense, the conflict was internal and many of the protections for property therefore would not apply; but as a conflict that from a very early stage had outside participants and support—Cuba, South Africa, and Zaire among them—many experts, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) treated it as an “internationalized” conflict, for which the full body of law governing international armed conflict would apply.

Under the laws of armed conflict, civilian property may not be targeted as such, simply for the sake of destroying it. It must constitute a legitimate military target or military objective. Its destruction must be required by military necessity. A party to a conflict may damage or destroy civilian property only if damage would not be excessive compared to the military advantage to be gained. This prohibition was stated in the 1907 Hague Conventions and is now viewed as part of customary law. Destruction or seizure of property is prohibited unless it is “imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.” The 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions states explicitly that “civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or reprisals, and objects or installations ordinarily of civilian use are presumed to be civilian unless determined to be otherwise.” The 1998 Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court lists “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” as a grave breach.

To determine whether this devastation and seizure constituted a war crime—individually culpable violations of the laws and customs of war—or instead were legal acts, an outsider arriving after the battle would have to know how the government force defended the town, the location or shifting locations of military installations and infrastructure used in their support, and whether any of the protected religious, cultural, or medical buildings were being used for military purposes, or as shields by one side or the other.

In the Angolan case, both sides were often at fault. The bishopric building in Cuito, for example, in which dozens of refugees had taken shelter, was destroyed after having been attacked three times. Normally it should have immunity from attack as a civilian structure, but particularly as a building used for religious, cultural, or medical purposes, protected by rules on cultural property. UNITA captured the building in 1993. Government forces recaptured it the following month, and then, after a fierce battle lasting seven days, UNITA retook it. Both sides had used it as a shield; both sides were partly responsible for its destruction. The level of the damage to the building and the way it came about suggests it was the target for indiscriminate attack—that is, there was no attempt to distinguish this building from any others.

Such devastation was a hallmark of the Angolan civil war. For a while, it was the deadliest conflict on earth, with one thousand people dying daily not only from the fighting itself, but also from starvation and disease. The devastation was so rampant that the ICRC, citing its role under the Geneva Conventions as the custodian and promoter of international humanitarian law, issued a rare public rebuke to both sides in the conflict.

“Military forces,” the ICRC declared in June of 1994, “do not have an unlimited right regarding the choice of methods and means of warfare; a clear distinction must be made in all circumstances between civilians and civilian objects on the one hand and combatants and military objectives on the other.” The prohibitions include: attacks on civilian objects, acts or threats of violence whose main purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population, and “all attacks directed indiscriminately at military and civilian objectives and those which may be expected to cause incidental loss of human life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” Furthermore, the ICRC said pointedly, hospitals, ambulances, and any other object bearing the Red Cross are not to be attacked or used for military purposes, and are to be “respected in all circumstances.”

(See civilian immunity.)