Atrocities

Sarajevo is a city that worked, where Slavic Muslims and Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholics have lived side by side, mingled, been friends and partners. That's why it is a military target of the Serbo-Yugoslavian invasion of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Integration, tolerance, coexistence are given no place in the new Serbian nationalism as advanced by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and his mentor, Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic.The State Department has confirmed reports that Croatians and Slavic Muslims are being tortured and murdered in detention camps run by Serbian troops.

The philosopher Kahlil Gibran's meditation on children is a touching favorite among parents who have read "The Prophet. " In it, he captures perfectly the helplessness we feel as our children go out into the world, into the future, and necessarily leave us behind. He writes to us, "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. " While we understand that we cannot set the path of the arrow across the infinite or mark its landing, we want to believe that we are "the bow that is stable," that our strength and love will help our children go swift and far. I am sure Nancy Lanza wanted to be that bow for her son, Adam, who killed her and then 20 schoolchildren and six women who cared for them in Newtown, Conn.

ANNIVERSARIES, such as the 50th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, offer an appropriate moment for reflection -- not to rekindle old anger or open aging wounds but to use our knowledge of history to look with increased understanding into the future.Unfortunately, it is especially difficult for the Japanese to take such a look because Japan's educational system refuses to acknowledge the country's behavior in the years leading up to World War II. Absent is a record of the subjugation and slaughter of civilians in China and Korea.

Despite his efforts to stave off his long-overdue date with justice, indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic appeared before a panel of judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Friday. Soon he will stand trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, atrocities he planned and executed throughout the 1992-1995 war, from the siege of Sarajevo to the concentration camps of Prijedor and the genocide at Srebrenica. Mr. Mladic's last request before his transfer was to visit the grave of his daughter, Ana, who committed suicide in 1994 with her father's pistol.

Since Iraq invaded Kuwait last August, there have been reports of atrocities -- from the rape, torture and killing of Kuwaiti citizens, to the allied bombing of Iraqi civilians, to the subsequent vengeful attacks on Iraqi soldiers.As part of the cease-fire, should a war crimes tribunal be established to investigate these reported atrocities? Or, should all acts of barbarism on all sides in this war simply be forgiven and forgotten?To register your opinion, call SUNDIAL at 783-1800 (or 268-7736 in Anne Arundel County)

Recent allegations about alleged atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq come as no surprise to seasoned observers of guerrilla warfare. This ugly, messy conflict, where the line is deliberately blurred between soldiers and civilians, inevitably produces confusion, stress and extreme frustration on the battlefield. The nature of guerrilla war accelerates and amplifies the process of dehumanization of the enemy, and as an inevitable result, otherwise quite humane soldiers on both sides come to view atrocity as acceptable and even useful.

UNITED NATIONS -- Witnesses told of depraved killings, torture and gang-rape of Kuwaitis, and of babies yanked from incubators by Iraqi troops as the Security Council prepared yesterday for tomorrow's authorization of military force to reverse the August invasion.Kuwait, using live and videotaped testimony, depicted a series of atrocities by Iraqi forces that its ambassador, Mohammad A. Abulhasan, said demonstrated "a deviant inclination to sadism mingled with profound malice."Every day in occupied Kuwait "begins and ends with the suffocating fear of death," one witness, Jamal Abdul Rahman, said, telling of the gang-rape of women at police stations and the arrest and torture of children.

WashingtonIn his televised interview with David Frost the other night, President Bush made much of how he had been horrified by reports of the brutality of the Iraqi invaders of Kuwait. His obvious intention was to bolster the case for a military attack on a regime dedicated to savagery.But what the president did instead was to underscore once again the schizophrenic nature of the rationale for the United States' involvement in the Persian Gulf. The White House understandably wants to present the case for action as a moral necessity.

KHARTOUM, Sudan - British Foreign Minister Jack Straw spoke yesterday to fearful victims of violence sheltered at the Abu Shouk camp in the Sudanese region of Darfur and later warned that atrocities were continuing in the western area. Straw's comments came as Amnesty International reported that government bombing raids and attacks by militias continued to afflict villagers in Darfur. The London-based organization accused the Sudanese government of arresting and intimidating displaced people and others who spoke out to foreign observers about the crisis there.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, under mounting pressure for action in the face of atrocities in the Balkans, moved yesterday to initiate international probes of detention camp atrocities and to collect evidence of war crimes.In Geneva, a U.S. envoy pressed for an emergency session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission to investigate reports of Nazi-like killings and torture at detention camps operated by the combatants and aimed especially at the conduct of Serbian forces.The State Department said it was preparing a U.N. resolution urging countries to submit data on war crimes to the Security Council but did not say what the council should do with the evidence.

The Sun recently shed light ("3 youths among 8 dead in Israeli reprisal strikes," March 23) on the tragedy and consequences of war. However, I find it appalling that the previous week an Israeli family with "3 youths" including a 3-month-old infant were stabbed to death in their sleep. The 3-month-old was decapitated. In Gaza, Arabs celebrated by giving candy to their children. Somehow, your newspaper must have missed this atrocity as I didn't see any photos of the funeral attended by 20,000 mourners in Israel including the remaining 12-, 8- and 2-year-old distraught orphans.

MUNICH - John Demjanjuk sat in a wheelchair wrapped in a light blue blanket, his eyes closed and his face pale as his trial opened Monday on charges he helped kill 27,900 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard. Lawyers for the retired Ohio autoworker portrayed him as a victim - of the Nazis and misguided German justice. But three German doctors testified the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was fit to stand trial. Wearing a blue baseball cap, Demjanjuk, 89, was wheeled in to the packed Munich state court and did not answer when presiding judge Ralph Alt asked if he could answer basic questions about himself.

Veterans sometimes say combat survivors give off a glow that protects them like an invisible shield. Jonathan Rhys Meyers radiates that glow until the final reel of The Children of Huang Shi, a terrific, fact-inspired moral adventure. Playing George Hogg, a British war correspondent who travels to China in 1937 to assess the looming Japanese occupation, Rhys Meyers pulls the audience into his clear-eyed gaze and compels us to see history afresh. He may be a racy heartthrob as Henry VIII in Showtime's The Tudors, but in this role he possesses spiritual nobility.

With all the problems facing this country, both in Iraq and at home, why is Congress spending time trying to pass a resolution condemning the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago? Make no mistake about it, that massacre of hundreds of thousands - perhaps a million or more - Armenians was one of the worst atrocities in all of history. As with the later Holocaust against the Jews, it was not considered sufficient to kill innocent victims. They were first put through soul-scarring dehumanization in whatever sadistic ways occurred to those who carried out these atrocities.

The Maryland men's basketball team's 0 percent graduation rate for players entering school from 1997 to 2000 is "an atrocity," a member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics said yesterday. Commission member Hodding Carter III, a public policy professor at the University of North Carolina, said he was concerned not only about Maryland's graduation rate, but also about men's basketball programs around the country whose rates lag behind those of other sports. The overall rate for men's basketball players who graduated within six years was 61 percent, lowest among 18 men's sports, according to NCAA data released this week.

UNITED NATIONS -- A high-ranking Sudanese government official colluded with militias to commit atrocities against civilians in the Darfur region, the International Criminal Court's prosecutor said yesterday. Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo presented results of a 21-month investigation that he said shows "reasonable evidence" that Ahmad Muhammad Harun, then Sudan's minister of state for the interior, and imprisoned militia leader Ali Kushayb "bear criminal responsibility" for mass executions, rapes and the forcible removal of thousands of people from their homes.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon and the CIA are restricting access to people and documents that shed light on past atrocities in El Salvador, the U.S. member of a United Nations investigative team has charged.Thomas Buergenthal, a U.S. law professor and member of the U.N.-appointed Truth Commission on El Salvador, said this week that U.S. stonewalling could undermine efforts to draft an objective account of the 12-year civil war.Under a peace agreement the Salvadoran government and leftist rebels signed at the United Nations in January, Mr. Buergenthal and two prominent Latin American diplomats were assigned the task of probing "serious acts of violence that have occurred since 1980, and whose impact on society urgently demands that the public should know the truth."

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South Africa is faced with a dilemma in the aftermath of last week's findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which accused some of this nation's leading figures of apartheid-era atrocities.The question now: What action to take against those on both sides charged by the commission with gross violations of human rights?They include an ex-president, three political party leaders, a former defense chief, and perhaps this country's best known woman activist, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former wife of President Nelson Mandela.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The gruesome video footage showed a man cradling a dead infant, bodies piled in the back of a truck, women and children weeping and telltale smoke rising from the hills. Prosecutors presented the videos and other documents yesterday at Saddam Hussein's second genocide trial. Hussein and six co-defendants are charged in connection with the Anfal campaign of chemical weapon attacks on villages in the Kurdish north of Iraq during the 1980s. The videotapes showed scenes of carnage captured in Kurdish villages in April 1987 and May 1988, both preceding and during the Anfal campaign designed to root out Kurdish resistance fighters known as peshmerga.

The nightmare still isn't finished for Maher Arar and, through him, for those who care about what is happening to what once were considered bedrock American values - such naive concepts as liberty, trial by jury and innocent until proved guilty. The latest spasm showed up this month, four years after something that never should have happened had long passed the stage where it should have been over. One of the reasons too many of us are willing to look the other way as these democratic frills are scrap-heaped in the so-called war on terrorism is that the people who are most affected have no names or faces.