David Rieff

Crimes of war : what the public should know

For everyone who wants to become better informed about the news, this book lays out the benchmarks for monitoring the watchdogs and governments. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, it illustrates what is legal in war and what is not. The text presents reportage of contemporary journalism while the A-Z format and the graphic design make accessible the complicated and often harrowing subject matter. as well as providing visual bookmarks, the photographs document the reality behind the words. The heart of the law, and of the book, are the grave breaches of serious war crimes, delineated in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the First Additional Protocol of 1977. The book gives an example of each breach and journalists who were at the scene report on what they saw. These articles are labelled crime. Leading scholars have contributed shorter articles on techical topics, most labelled the law. There are also essay-length articles on major themes, labelled key terms. To provide an overview of the current scene, ten writers takes a critical look at recent conflicts and examine them in the light of the crimes of war. Complementing these case studies are experts overviews of the applicable law.

Humanitarianism in Crisis

THE HUMANITARIAN WORLD emerged from the 1990S both sad dened and chastened. Again and again nonprofit and UN personnel had been overwhelmed by the magnitude of particular crises-as when 2 million people crossed from Rwanda into Zaire in 1994, or when 8oo,ooo Kosovar Albanians were forcibly deported from the province by Serb forces in the spring of 1999. Even more unnerving was the sense that, often despite the relief groups own best efforts, the moral dilemmas attendant on their actions had only grown more acute over the course of the decade. Even so, humanitarians did not give up. Nongovernmental organizations (NGos) and UN agencies multiplied their efforts to refine their operations in light of the lessons of Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Still, by the beginning of the twenty first century, experienced relief workers had come to accept the new conventional wisdom that there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. From this simple truth, however, diametrically opposing conclusions can be drawn about what humanitarian action should involve. Many persistent advocates of humanitarianism, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, see it as one of a number of pillars supporting a promising new liberal world order. Such an order, they seem to believe, can be constructed to fill the vacuum created by globalizations undermining of the idea of state sovereignty. It will also be built on

From Exiles to Immigrants

Every diaspora judges itself, whether secretly or ostentatiously, to be both unique and uniquely sinned against. In this, the three quarters of a million Cuban-Americans of South Florida are any thing but exceptional. But like the Jews, the Armenians, and the White Russians before them, the Miami Cubans have tended to see themselves, both in their qualities and in their historical grievances, as sui generis. The common currency of exile is memory, above all the memory of wounds. But what may be necessary for group sur vival within the context of an exile group inevitably will appear to many outsiders, who share neither the memories nor the wounds, as touchy, clannish self-absorption. This has been the case with the Cuban exile community in South Florida in its relations with non Cuban Miami, and, more broadly, with U.S. public opinion at large ever since Cuban refugees first started arriving in Miami after the victory of Fidel Castro in 1959. It should be remembered that the first Cuban exiles to arrive after