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Photo: Reuters
Yazidi refugees
Photo: Reuters

War crimes tribunal sought against ISIS detainees

While the world has been ratcheting up military pressure on ISIS, those focused on legal proceedings against the group for crimes against humanity have been increasingly frustrated; 'The West looks to the United States for leadership in the Middle East, and the focus of this administration has been elsewhere — in every respect.'

War crimes investigators collecting evidence of an elaborate ISIS operation to kidnap thousands of women as sex slaves say they have a case to try ISIS leaders with crimes against humanity but cannot get the global backing to bring current detainees before an international tribunal.

 

 

Two years after the ISIS onslaught in northern Iraq, the investigators, as well as US diplomats, say the Obama administration has done little to pursue prosecution of the crimes that Secretary of State John Kerry has called genocide. Current and former State Department officials say that an attempt in late 2014 to have a legal finding of genocide was blocked by the Defense Department, setting back efforts to prosecute ISIS members suspected of committing war crimes.

 

ISIS mass execution in Palmyra
ISIS mass execution in Palmyra

 

"The West looks to the United States for leadership in the Middle East, and the focus of this administration has been elsewhere — in every respect," Bill Wiley, the head of the independent investigative group, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, told The Associated Press.

 

Officials in Washington say that the Defense Department and ultimately the administration were concerned that court trials would distract from the military campaign. But the diplomats say that justice is essential in a region whose religious minorities have been terrorized. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue.

 

The US has no legal obligation to take on the genocide of the Yazidis, but President Barack Obama has said that "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America."

 

Photo: Reuters (Photo: Reuters)
Photo: Reuters

 

Stephen Rapp, who stepped down as the administration's ambassador at large for war crimes last year, says the administration should have moved early to help secure evidence of ISIS atrocities and push for the creation of special Iraqi courts to try war crimes.

 

"The priority for the US government is to win the war against ISIS and destroy them," Rapp said. "It's been profoundly disappointing, because the idea of accountability has been such a low priority."

 

Rapp is now the chairman of the advisory board of the commission, whose investigators in Iraq work with the Kurdish regional government to formally document ISIS's crimes, including those against the Yazidi minority group. They have built a case implicating the entire ISIS command structure in a plot to kidnap Yazidi women and girls and establish a sex-slave market.

 

Yazidi children fleeing ISIS (Photo: Reuters) (Photo: Reuters)
Yazidi children fleeing ISIS (Photo: Reuters)

 

The plan was executed by an organized bureaucracy at every step along the way, from the temporary sorting facilities — including a prison, schools and a curtained ballroom where the Yazidis were divided by age and willingness to convert to Islam — to the waiting buses that would haul them by the dozens across the border to Raqqa. ISIS's Shariah courts soon stepped in, to settle contract disputes and ensure that its finance hierarchy got its cut of the sex slave proceeds.

 

In 2012, Obama stood at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to announce what he called a comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to war crimes with the establishment of an atrocities prevention board, noting that "as president I've done my utmost to back up those words with deeds."

 

A measure by the House that calls on the US to fund precisely the kind of court envisioned by the investigators is unlikely to advance anytime soon in an election year. With full international backing, the war crimes commission says it would need about $6.6 million and about six months to get the trials going.

 

As head of the group, Wiley's frustration with coalition governments and well-meaning humanitarian NGOs is palpable. The goal is not to advocate, or make promises, but "transforming that evidence into criminal prosecution," he told the AP in a recent interview in his office, as he and his staff laid out the case against the extremists. The hope, they said, is to build an existing court in Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital, into an internationally backed court for Islamic State defendants.

 

"Through a scrupulously fair trial, you illustrate that these guys are not soldiers of Mohammad," Wiley said. "These are the leaders of a criminal syndicate."

 


פרסום ראשון: 09.24.16, 11:34
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