IN ITS FIRST EDITION, published in 1999, this book was an importantly useful compendium, alphabetically and with coolly angry dispassion detailing almost everything one wishes one did not need to know about the atrocities and crimes committed in the course of human conflict.

In this second edition, Crimes of War 2.0: What the Public Should Know, it is an even more important and useful handbook, updated and revised for an even gloomier and more dispiriting world. In the introduction to the first edition, Roy Gutman and David Rieff decried Nato's feeble response to the crises in Croatia and Bosnia, and its inability to deal with one minor dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, despite having just faced down the mighty Soviet empire in 40 years of Cold War. But they could also strike an optimistic note, by stating a hope that regimes of humanitarian law were slowly and incrementally offering opportunities for improvement.

For even though war had returned to the European continent in the tragic Balkans conflicts, that year of 1999 was the fiftieth anniversary of the four Geneva conventions which, in response to the horrors and calamities of the Second World War, aimed at creating what the editors aptly described as a “fire-break between civilisation and barbarism”.

The editors' cautious optimism, even though they could cite Somalia, Rwanda, Angola and Chechnya in addition to the Balkans as places where humanitarian endeavours against barbarities had recently been or were still needed, no longer seems possible.

In the introduction to this second edition the editors, joined to great advantage by Anthony Dworkin (executive director of the Crimes of War Project), remark that the world's problems in 1999 were smaller beer than today. Terrorism and the Bush presidency, and all that both have caused, responded to or are directly and indirectly associated with, have made the world a different place.

“Five years into the ‘Global War on Terror',” the editors write, “the hope placed on international justice may seem terribly naive. Our own error was not in putting excessive faith in international institutions, but in assuming that the commitment to international humanitarian law on the part of well-off Western countries was permanent.”

These are mortifying and angering words indeed, as one contemplates the misdirection of will and resources that has, at least in part, characterised the efforts of large powers in the past several years.

Indeed, the world has seriously regressed on the humanitarian law front; George W. Bush's very first action was to withdraw the Clinton signature to an undertaking that the US would adhere to the newly instituted International Criminal Court; and as Bush policy thus began, so it has continued.

Many of nearly 200 alphabetically listed entries, ranging from “Act of War” to “Wilfulness” and consisting of short essays accompanied by sometimes agonising photographs, reflect the darker mood of the stressed, conflict-infected world of today. Among the enduring topics are extrajudicial executions, concentration camps, illegal targeting of civilians, chemical weapons, persecution on religious or political grounds and dozens more. Among the entries on continuing problems are those on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, landmines, and nuclear weapons. Among the new or expanded entries are those on Darfur, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Strife and humanitarian problems have grown in the world since the first edition, yet there is also a chilling and dismaying continuity. In the entry on “Hostages” there is a photograph of a captured UN peacekeeper in Bosnia in 1995, guarded by a Serb fighter wearing a hood and brandishing an automatic weapon. To look at it you cannot tell whether it is Iraq today or the Balkans 12 years ago.

This fact increases the sense of urgency behind the book: it seeks to inform everyone, in the plainest terms, of what is happening and what is at stake; it provides background, and with admirable concision sets out the basics of humanitarian law, the concepts of just and unjust war and the definition of crimes against humanity

in an effort to alert the public to the realities (as opposed to the media-sanitised and often tendentious versions) of what is happening in these conflicts, what it means, and what should be done about it.

The entries are not merely encyclopaedia-like. The one on “Torture” begins: “Ferhat is a broken man ... this man in his thirties cannot sleep at night because he is afraid of the dark. He loses his temper when his four young children play loudly, because their screams remind him of the nightly cries he heard from his cell ...” There is harsh human reality here, brought home repeatedly in accounts of sexual violence as a weapon of war, wanton destruction, slavery, imprisonment, massacre and starvation.

Part of the intention of the editors is to ensure that when people hear the too-familiar litany of strife on the news, they will use this book as a resource to understand further and more deeply what the news really means. Knowledge of this kind is a spur to action, if it is only to support an NGO or to write a letter to an MP. The alternative is to shut one's eyes to the load of suffering borne by our fellow human beings, and to its sources and causes. This book, rightly and powerfully, will not let us do that, and may help us to do something about it.

Crimes of War 2.0: What the Public Should Know edited by Roy Gutman, David Reiff and Anthony Dworkin
Norton, £13.99; 432pp

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