Reply #37: Geneva Conventions breaches - Flashback to Iraq 1991

[mcg]

http://fremantlebiz.livejournal.com/2004/06/05/

Geneva Conventions breaches - Flashback to Iraq 1991
I wrote the following essay during the first US-Iraq War, which became known as Desert Storm.

BURYING WOUNDED SOLDIERS WITHOUT OFFENDING THE GENEVA CONVENTION: A GOD GIVEN ABILITY?

By Paul R. Weaver
24 September 1991

Unofficial estimates of the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in Desert Storm in 1991 have ranged between 100,000 and 300,000, although the United States military has denied these figures, and still chooses to keep their estimations secret. A western television journalist in Baghdad said after the conclusion of Desert Storm that such high figures were not probable because there were few injured soldiers to be seen in the streets of the major Iraqi cities. The rational being that even if the Iraqi forces had experienced such massive losses in the battle, then there would still have been a proportional number of wounded who survived to limp back into civilisation.

On the morning of 13th of September this year the BBC World Service revealed to the world at large what happened to some of those wounded men when it broadcast an admission by a Pentagon spokesman that after the “Desert Storm” battles many wounded Iraqis were buried alive by American bulldozers, as they lay in and about their trenches.

...

A glance through the Geneva Convention document suggests that the Pentagon spokesman had a right to be nervous, because within it there are many provisions which appear to expressly forbid what the American soldiers have done, as can be seen in the following extracts:

Article 3 (2). “The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.”

Article 12. “...wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances... Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated...”

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