Red Cross Seeking to Revive Respect for the Rules of War

The International Committee of the Red Cross has organized an emergency conference to try to revive respect for rules of humanitarian conduct in wartime.

All 181 signatories to the Geneva Convention have been invited to the International Conference for the Protection of War Victims, which opens today. Representatives from about 160 countries have said they will attend the three-day meeting.

“We are asking participants to make a public commitment to end the massacre of civilians, summary executions, systematic torture of detainees, inhuman conditions of detention, the starvation or forced displacement of populations, indiscriminate use of arms, the plundering of humanitarian aid and the murder of personnel working under the emblems of the Red Cross and Red Crescent,” ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga said in a statement.

But leaders of the warring parties in Bosnia, scene of some of the worst horrors, will be conspicuously absent.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic is scheduled to attend a new session of peace talks in Geneva but has delegated the local charge d’affaires to represent his country at the conference.

Yugoslavia, now made up of Serbia and Montenegro, is boycotting the meeting in protest at being given only observer status. Suspended from U.N. membership, it was not invited as a full participant.

Wanting to avoid political mudslinging, the ICRC and the Swiss government--which is hosting the meeting--have both stressed that there will be no discussion of the situation in individual countries.

“The practice of war has undergone a change for the worse,” Sommaruga said. “Civilian populations are becoming with ever greater frequency the hostages of warlords. We also observe a marked increase in sexual violence. . . . I am struck by a degree of savagery that neither I nor my colleagues in the field have ever witnessed before.”