UN Official: US Troops 'Starving' Iraqi Civilians: "Jean Ziegler, a former Swiss sociology professor who is U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said the Geneva Conventions banned military forces from using 'starvation of civilians as a method of warfare'.
But he said that in Falluja, Tal Afar and Samarra, Iraqi and U.S.-led forces had cut off or restricted food and water to encourage residents to flee before assaults on entrenched Sunni insurgents over the past year.
'A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population,' Ziegler told a news briefing.
Two 1977 protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which lay down rules of conduct in armed conflicts, ban using deprivation of food or water as a weapon of war. They also prohibit destruction of food stocks or interruption of food supply lines.
Ziegler said he understood the military rationale of the coalition forces who were 'facing such a horrible enemy -- these insurgents who do not respect any law of war and who use the civilian population of cities like Falluja or Tal Afar as human shields, who keep them as hostages'.
But he said their actions were nevertheless a 'flagrant violation of international humanitarian law'."
- posted by geoff @ #