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Change Obsolete Rules of Warfare, Says Bush Envoy

Legal foundation for the Red Cross has helped maintain humanity and dignity in combat for 140 years

Friday, February 22, 2002
(17:50 GMT)
By Andrew Buncombe
Independent Digital (UK)

Conventions III and IV offer wide-ranging protection for civilians and enemy forces taken prisoner. These can include "members of militia or volunteer corps", they say. They add: "Persons taking no part in the hostilities shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.

WASHINGTON -- ID
The rules of war, which America's war crimes envoy yesterday declared obsolete, have evolved over a century and a half in which the nature of warfare has moved from pitched battles to the horrors of international terrorism.

The first guidelines were drawn up in 1864 and revised over the years. The conventions remain the most important international instruments for defending human dignity in war. They provide the legal foundation for the work of the Red Cross and have been signed by almost 200 countries.

These are the rules that President George Bush's envoy, Pierre-Richard Prosper, now suggests are out of date, as the US administration tries to deal with the aftermath of the international outrage which followed its refusal to allow Taliban and al-Qa'ida detainees the convention's protection at Guantanamo Bay.

In the summer of 1859, Henri Dunant, a sometime diarist and sometime merchant, was travelling in northern Italy when he arrived in the small village of Castiglione delta Pieve. Dunant could not have arrived at a more inauspicious time.

That day, 24 June, a battle was raging around Castiglione in what would be a decisive episode in the struggle for Italian unification. The French, allied to the Sardinians and with Emperor Napoleon III at their head, faced the Austrian troops, 300,000 men in all, engaged in a bitter and unrelenting battle.

By the end of the day, when the Austrians abandoned their positions, more than 6,000 men would be dead and 40,000 wounded in what was known as the Battle of Solferino.
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