The Geneva Convention Can't be Applied Selectively

EDITORIAL / Le Monde Diplomatique (France) 26mar03

In the presence of a prisoner of war, any journalist worthy of the name should observe a simple code of conduct: under no circumstances should he or she carry out an interview. There are only a few questions that can be asked of those who have fallen into the hands of an enemy they are fighting in their capacity as soldiers: their state of health, name and, possibly, the name of their unit and address of their family. That is all.

This does not mean one cannot film or photograph PoWs. It means, as stipulated by the Geneva Convention, that such prisoners need to be protected from "public curiosity" and, even more importantly, that steps should be taken to prevent any statement made by a man or a woman in that situation from being exploited politically.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was right to protest against the pictures broadcast by the Qatari television station al-Jazeera on March 23. They showed US PoWs, still in a state of shock and, in some cases, wounded, being ordered to explain to a "journalist" what they were doing in Iraq.

This kind of scene - or rather masquerade - is all too familiar. It smacks more of political manipulation for propaganda purposes than journalism. There was a grim precedent to al-Jazeera's parade: the 1990 pictures of the swollen faces of US pilots brought down in Iraq (it later emerged they had been tortured) that were beamed by the regime in an attempt to demoralise the US.

Such practices are revolting and should not be allowed to recur. Rumsfeld was right to say so. But he would be in a better position to stick up for the Geneva Convention if he applied it himself. He does not. He was among the very first leading members of the US administration who refused - and who still refuse - to grant the status of PoWs to the hundreds of people captured during the campaign in Afghanistan who are being held at the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

All the indications are that only a tiny proportion of the prisoners have any links with al-Qaida. And yet, quite unlawfully, they continue to be held in a legal no-man's-land.

As soon as the precedent of Guantanamo was set, some people sounded alarm bells in the US. They argued that the Bush administration's behaviour could eventually jeopardise the situation of American soldiers taken prisoner in any future conflict.

There is a depressing logic to this affair. The 1945 Geneva Convention marked the first stirrings of an international order and multilateral system that the US now claims it needs to reject if it is to fight terrorism effectively. The convention was the forerunner of an international legal set-up that restricted the sovereignty of individual states.

Washington should be fighting to preserve that system instead of helping to undermine it, as it is currently doing.