EXPERTS:
FACE PROSECUTION
The Associated
Press
Orders for
"It’s pretty
simple: Soldiers are not allowed to
shoot noncombatants," said Gary D. Solis, who teaches the law of war at the
"I can’t
understand why I didn’t know about it. I
guess because it was kept quiet," Howard Levie, who was a top Army war crimes
prosecutor in 1950, said of the Nogun-ri
killings.
The Associated
Press reported Wednesday that a dozen veterans of the 1st Cavalry
Division, corroborating the accounts of survivors, said their unit killed a
large number of South Korean refugees at Nogun-ri, a hamlet 100 miles
southeast of the South Korean capital of Seoul.
The survivors say 400 people were killed in the mass shooting and a
preceding
The ex-soldiers
say they shot the civilians because they feared disguised North Korean soldiers
were among the group. Some veterans said
they received sporadic gunfire from among the refugees. Others do not remember hostile fire.
The fear of
enemy infiltrators led
The 25th
Infantry Division commander instructed his troops that civilians in the battle
zone "are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly." In the 1st Cavalry Division, the
operations chief issued this order: "No
refugees to cross the front line. Fire
everyone trying to cross lines. Use
discretion in case of women and children."
Such orders are patently illegal, military law experts say.
"I have never
heard of orders like this, not outside the orders given by Germans that we
heard about during the
During the
1950-53 war, there were no prosecutions of anything more than individual
murders of civilians by
"It’s now
larger and permeates the structure more, and the officers tend to rely on them
to keep out of trouble," said Kelly, a professor of international law at the
Dickinson law school in Carlisle, PA.
It was not
until the Vietnam War that the
The Pentagon
has given no answer to questions about legal action against soldiers involved
in Nogun-ri. Until 1996, U.S. soldiers
who committed war crimes and then left the service could not be
prosecuted. In that year, Congress
passed a War Crimes Act enabling the government to prosecute civilians for war
crimes committed while in the service.
But that law is not retroactive.
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