UN official cites possible US war crimes

UNITED NATIONS -- The UN's top human rights official said yesterday that US-led forces had committed serious human rights violations in Iraq since the occupation, and incidents at Abu Ghraib prison could be considered war crimes.

While crediting the United States for ending the ''shocking and systematic" human rights abuses that occurred under Saddam Hussein, Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, Bertrand Ramcharan, said that the occupation forces had mistreated many ordinary Iraqis, and called for an ombudsman to monitor their behavior.

In the 45-page report released in Geneva, Ramcharan noted the complexity of Iraq's situation, marked by a murky political transition, acts of terrorism, and civilians getting caught up in troops' efforts to contain insurgents' attacks.

But he said that there had been ''serious violations of human rights" under the Coalition Provisional Authority, with many Iraqis detained ''without anyone knowing how many, for what reasons, and how they were being treated."

The report cited interviews conducted by UN employees and foreign aid groups with Iraqis who spoke of arbitrary arrests, detention and beatings as an ongoing phenomenon since the US-led invasion of March 2003.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former human rights chief who was acting as UN envoy to Iraq last year, reported allegations of torture and ill treatment of prisoners to Iraq's US administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, last summer. Ramcharan became the acting human rights chief when Vieira de Mello died in the bombing of the UN's Baghdad headquarters in August.

Ramcharan, a longtime UN official, commissioned an investigation in April, because he was concerned that Iraq has been unmonitored since Hussein's regime fell in March 2003. He urged that a monitoring system for detention facilities be set up immediately in Iraq.

Referring to incidents of prisoner abuse by US soldiers and contractors at Abu Ghraib, Ramcharan said ''willful killing, torture, or ill treatment" of detainees was a grave breach of international law. Such acts, he added, ''might be designated as war crimes by a competent tribunal." One US soldier has pleaded guilty in connection with the incidents and sentenced to a year in jail. But American personnel are unlikely to be tried in an international tribunal because the United States has not signed on to the International Criminal Court.