War Crimes

The United Nations appointed a widely respected South African judge who is a trustee of Hebrew University to lead a high-level mission to investigate allegations of war crimes by Israel in the Gaza Strip. Israel did not say whether it would cooperate. Richard Goldstone, the former U.N. chief prosecutor for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was named to head the investigation, ordered by the Human Rights Council in January. According to the mandate, the investigation should focus on Palestinian casualties in the three-week assault Israel launched against Hamas late last year.

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

Former World War II prisoners of war and other activists stepped up their pressure against Japanese corporations in the United States, announcing Tuesday a nationwide class-action lawsuit alleging that the companies brutalized POWs and forced them to perform slave labor in Asia during the war. The lawsuit, part of an escalating U.S. offensive to win reparations for Japanese war crimes, targets five corporate giants: Mitsubishi International Corp., Mitsui & Co. (USA) Inc.

A friend of mine got a lifetime achievement award recently, and it got me to thinking about the Holocaust again, something that's never been completely out of my mind for the last 22 years. Randolph L. Braham and I are an odd couple to be friends because our families were on different sides of the Holocaust. His emails to me over the last 20 years have always been signed Randy, but I call him Professor Braham out of respect. Braham is distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, director of the Rosenthal Center for Holocaust Studies there, and the author of more than 60 books on the Holocaust.

A friend of mine got a lifetime achievement award recently, and it got me to thinking about the Holocaust again, something that's never been completely out of my mind for the last 22 years. Randolph L. Braham and I are an odd couple to be friends because our families were on different sides of the Holocaust. His emails to me over the last 20 years have always been signed Randy, but I call him Professor Braham out of respect. Braham is distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, director of the Rosenthal Center for Holocaust Studies there, and the author of more than 60 books on the Holocaust.

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

In a challenge to one of Africa's most defiant strongmen, the International Criminal Court on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's president on charges of war crimes in Darfur, a quest for justice that immediately complicated relief efforts for hundreds of thousands of people and raised the specter of more violence.

A United Nations inquiry concluded Tuesday that Israeli and Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes during their conflict in the Gaza Strip, and it called on both sides to prosecute wrongdoers or face possible intervention by an international court. The probe led by former South African Judge Richard Goldstone detailed what investigators called Israeli actions "amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity," during a 22-day winter offensive against Hamas-led rocket squads in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians, many of them civilians, were killed.

The alleged ringleader of what authorities say was a rogue U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan goaded his comrades into killing innocent Afghan civilians and threatened to kill a fellow soldier if he told anyone about drug use in the platoon, an Army investigator testified Tuesday. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, facing three counts of murder in one of the most serious war crimes cases of the war in Afghanistan, produced a collection of severed fingers from Afghan corpses and, along with co-defendant Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, used them to intimidate Pfc. Justin Stoner, who already had been stomped and beaten by half a dozen members of his unit, Army investigator Anderson Wagner said his interviews revealed.

The scene at the untidy conclusion of Cambodia's first war crimes trial was telling: a French defense lawyer with his face buried in his hands. The tribunal promised a more inclusive approach than its counterparts at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Instead, the trial closed in disarray late last month after an eleventh-hour disagreement between the Cambodian and foreign defense counsels, offering a stark reminder of the difficulties in carrying out international standards of justice in a country with a reputation for corruption and a deeply compromised legal system.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The litany of abuses was chilling: mass murder, rape, sexual slavery. Forcing children to fight. Chopping off victims' limbs. Former Liberian President Charles Taylor's conviction Thursday by an international tribunal in the Netherlands on charges of abetting such war crimes in the West African country of Sierra Leone sent a powerful message to other warlords that they will eventually face justice, human rights activists and prosecutors say. But it also highlights what can be a wrenching tension between pursuing justice or peace first in some of the world's most violent, chaotic corners.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague on Wednesday found former Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga guilty of using children as soldiers, the first verdict in the panel's 10-year history. He could face life imprisonment. After a three-year trial, the court convicted Lubanga of recruiting boys and girls younger than 15 as soldiers during a civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002 and 2003. Although his militia was accused of massacres, rapes, torture and ethnic killings by human rights activists and witnesses, the court charged him only with the recruitment and use of children to fight.

Memo to the new leaders of Libya: If you're trying to establish a democratic, internationally recognized state founded on the rule of law, it's a very bad idea to seek governance advice from the modern successor to Idi Amin. In one of the more incongruous diplomatic visits in recent memory, Libyan officials over the weekend rolled out the red carpet for none other than Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir — the dictator next door wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for slaughtering his own people, very like the military dictator just overthrown in Libya who was also wanted by the ICC on similar charges.

  The old women, this time with hundreds of demonstrators shouting their support outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, on Wednesday marked the 1,000th successive weekly protest against Tokyo for a 7-decade-old war crime. The women's demands remained unchanged: Punish surviving members of the Imperial Japanese Army responsible for taking an estimated 200,000 young Korean women as sex slaves during World War II and pay governmental reparations. Those who fell victim to the Japanese military as young women, who during the war were called "comfort women," are still seeking closure.

To organize his research on the Watts riots, journalist Robert E. Conot sketched out the hour-by-hour progress of events in 1965 on a 25-foot-long stretch of paper, then dressed the diagram in the exhaustive detail for which he became known. The timeline helped him write "Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness," a 1967 study of the smoldering unrest behind the riots. Based on his eyewitness account and extensive interviews, the book was called "brilliant" by Times reviewers. In 1969, one of them wrote: "With honesty and soul," he revealed the "real, ordinary" people of the "ghetto.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo has more than a billion clients. He is the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, whose authority to prosecute those who commit crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide is acknowledged by more than 110 nations. (But not the United States -- the U.S. signed the treaty, and then "unsigned" it.) Before he joined the ICC, he was famous for prosecuting politicians and generals for mass murder in his native Argentina. With his nine-year ICC term nearly finished, the first of the international cases he's filed -- against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga -- still awaits a verdict.

Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general accused of overseeing the worst massacre in Europe since the end of World War II, has been arrested, Serbian authorities said Thursday. Mladic is Europe's most wanted war crimes suspect for his alleged role in the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica, an atrocity that came to symbolize the brutality of the Balkans conflict. The war crimes tribunal in The Hague wants to try Mladic on charges of genocide.

War: the system whereby victors rewrite history and losers are labeled war criminals. LOUIS ST. MARTIN, Pomona

Guatemalan voters pick a president Sunday at a moment when deepening drug crime threatens the nation's feeble justice system and doubts hang over both candidates. Rampant violence by encroaching Mexican drug traffickers provides an ominous backdrop to the sharp-elbowed runoff between the front-runner, retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, and congressman Manuel Baldizon, who came in a distant second in the initial round of voting in September. Both men vow aggressive action. The rightist Perez Molina promises to use army troops to attack traffickers and says he will cut the murder rate in half, while the populist Baldizon has called for greater use of the death penalty.

The images were gruesome. In one grainy video clip, a figure in a blood-soaked shirt who looks like Moammar Kadafi is manhandled behind a truck by frenzied fighters shouting, "God is great!" The man stumbles and appears to struggle against his captors. In another clip, a shirtless body lies on the ground. Fighters roll it over to show what appears to be Kadafi's bloodied face to cheering fighters. Photos: Moammar Kadafi | 1942 - 2011 The amateur videos that flashed across television screens and were uploaded to YouTube on Thursday suggest that Kadafi was alive when he was captured after fighters loyal to Libya's provisional government overwhelmed the former strongman's hometown of Surt.