War Criminals

U.S. asks Afghan rebels to accept U.N. truceWASHINGTON -- The United States, which for years armed Afghan guerrillas battling the Communist government in Kabul, yesterday urged them to stop fighting and accept a United Nations-brokered peace.Washington seemed alarmed at the rapid collapse of Afghan President Najibullah's forces and the advance of rebels. Yesterday, the rebels took control of the country's largest military base, 35 miles north of the city.War criminals had U.S. 'shield,' TV saysTOKYOTOKYO -- Japan's public television network has unearthed evidence from Russian and U.S. archives on how key members of the Japanese army's secret germ warfare unit escaped prosecution as war criminals after World War II.Documents detailed experiments carried out by the Japanese on prisoners of war, such as deliberately infecting prisoners of war with anthrax and conducting surgical examination of a prisoner's organs while he was still alive, NHK television said.

SECRETARY OF STATE Warren Christopher flies into Bosnia today for one last inspection visit before Sept. 14 elections that are designed to promote a multi-ethnic state but may produce just the opposite. In balloting for a three-party presidency and a national legislature, Serbs, Croats and Muslims are expected to vote their tribal allegiance and thus confirm the de facto partition that has resulted from years of civil war.American-brokered peace accords signed in Dayton last fall and enforced by 60,000 troops, mostly from NATO, have been successful in stopping military action by all three sides.

LONDON -- For more than 50 years, Anthony Sawoniuk lived a quiet existence in Britain, settling in South London and earning a modest living as a railway cleaner and ticket collector. But he was a man harboring dark secrets from the distant past, and they have finally caught up with him.After an emotionally charged trial at the Old Bailey, Sawoniuk, 78, who suffers from diabetes, walks with a heavy limp and is so deaf that the judge in the case had to shout to make himself heard, was convicted of two counts of murder yesterday in connection with the 1942 killings of 18 Jews in Domachevo, a former Polish town that is now part of Belarus.

SINCE THE BOSNIAN civil war started in 1991, the scope and magnitude of the war crimes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina have been staggering. The body of evidence clearly indicates that the vast majority of these crimes have been committed by Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims.Rape, mass murders and torture have been commonplace. In 1995, testimony before the U.S. Helsinki Commission revealed a litany of horror: 200,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians; more than 500,000 people have been held in 800 prisons or detention centers; 151 mass grave sites have been identified; and more than 1,600 cases of rape and forced impregnation of girls and women have been documented.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court gave a skeptical hearing yesterday to the Bush administration's claim that the president has the power to create and control special military tribunals to punish foreigners he deems to be war criminals. Five of the eight justices hearing the case commented that the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions set basic rules of fairness for trying alleged war criminals. And they questioned whether the president was free to ignore those basic rules - as well as the rules of American military law. It suggested a second setback might be looming for the administration's legal strategy in the fight against terrorism.

WASHINGTON - The CIA is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that requires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals, say congressional officials from both parties. Under the law, the CIA has already provided more than 1.2 million pages of documents, the bulk of them from the archives of its World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. Many documents have been declassified, and some made public last year showed a closer relationship between the U.S. government and Nazi war criminals than had previously been understood, including the CIA's recruitment of war criminal suspects or Nazi collaborators.

WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration sought to muster backing for a strike against Iraq in the Security Council, the United Nations moved forward this week toward creating an International Criminal Court - a project that America's allies hope the United States will support over time. In successive rounds of voting, 85 nations began to elect the 18 judges who will serve on the new court, the first permanent venue for prosecuting cases of genocide and other atrocities when national governments fail to act. The court will formally open March 11 in The Hague.

PRESIDENT CLINTON's whirlwind trip to Bosnia was a well-timed show of his authority as commander-in-chief. Many Americans may harbor doubts about his commitment of 20,000 U.S. troops to that war-scarred Balkan nation, but there should ,, be no doubt about his constitutional power to do so. Even a hostile Republican-controlled Congress has been relatively acquiescent.For Mr. Clinton, the friendly welcome he received from G.I.s in Tuzla, headquarters of the American sector, came as an election-year bonanza.

There are four possible justifications for intervention in the Yugoslav crisis. The first is humanitarian: to defend convoys and air missions to feed people in besieged cities, evacuate casualties and civilians, rescue prisoners in concentration camps, etc.The second is to seize and punish war criminals. This, and the preceding, are supposed to be the subject of resolutions to be put before the U.N. Security Council.The third is to defend or restore the international frontiers between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which have been recognized by the European Community and the United States but have been overrun, chiefly by the Serbs, to create a ''Greater Serbia'' uniting all of the ex-Yugoslav regions in which substantial Serbian populations exist.

WASHINGTON -- Political language can infuse its own logic into events. President Clinton says Serbian atrocities in Kosovo constitute "genocide."If so, then what can realistically be said to remain of the premise on which NATO went to war?: The appropriate conclusion of this crisis would leave Serbia diminished and chastened, but retaining sovereignty over Kosovo.Serbia's atrocities are not genocide -- a campaign to exterminate an entire category of people -- but they are patent war crimes intended to terrorize a people into flight.