|
Why did Amnesty International Ignore My Warnings about their Ukraine Investigation?
by Tom Mutch[BylineTimes] Russian Government officials are already using the recent Amnesty International criticising the Ukraine Army’s defence of Ukrainian cities to justify their atrocities. Amnesty International staff can’t say they weren’t warned this could happen. I tried to tell them this was the danger just three months ago. In May this year, I was sat around a table with Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis researcher predicting their upcoming report would land like a lead balloon. We were in the kitchen of our hotel in Kramatorsk, the administrative capital of Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk and we could hear the boom of artillery outside our windows every hour.  Rather than expressing shock at the relentless Russian bombardment, the Amnesty staff seemed much more concerned with the fact that a Ukrainian army unit had taken refuge in the basement of a college building. “All government,s (sic) lie to you, your job as a reporter or researcher is to be strictly impartial and report only the facts.” We’d all been to the building: an abandoned language school in the frontline town of Bakhmut which had been turned into a temporary barracks for a Ukrainian unit. This is not a war crime. A military is perfectly entitled to set up in an evacuated educational institution, although of course that building can no longer claim civilian protection and there was a mainly abandoned civilian apartment block over the road, which had not been fully evacuated. But Rovera was insistent that this military presence in a populated area was a “violation of international humanitarian law”’. When I pressed her on how the Ukrainian Army was supposed to defend a populated area, she said that it was irrelevant. By that logic, I continued, Ukraine would have to abandon the major locations such as the city of Kharkiv. “Well, they must avoid as far as possible taking positions in a populated area,” she replied. “International humanitarian law is very clear on this.” I suggested her coming Amnesty International report would be received badly if it failed to differentiate between defensive and offensive operations in urban areas. But it appeared the authors’ minds had been made up: Ukraine was endangering its own civilians by the mere act of attempting to defend its cities. Read the rest at the link Posted by: badanov 2022-08-10 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=640826 |