Editorial: Soldiers must be accountable

IT MAY seem to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that protecting his country's soldiers from the potential for foreign prosecution over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip is an important move in terms of giving his troops the ability to carry out their tasks with confidence.

But while it's a move that fits well with his country's siege mentality, ultimately such a strategy could only serve to isolate Israel even further. Of course, it has a powerful ally in the United States, but the new administration there would have to be looking askance at a decision that could effectively remove much of the need for Israeli soldiers to be accountable for their actions.

Mr Olmert announced on Sunday that a special legal team was being formed to defend Israeli soldiers against potential war crimes charges related to the three-week offensive in Gaza which has just ended, with the deaths of nearly 1300 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, compared with 13 Israeli deaths.

In effect, it's an attempt to ring-fence his troops from prosecution. No doubt, Israel would argue that the reason it is needed is to protect its soldiers from false accusations and it's hard to dispute the suggestion that Hamas has a powerful propaganda machine working in Gaza.

But that discounts the all too real possibility that there have been actions carried out during the offensive that crossed the line and which need to be brought to light. It's an almost inevitable scenario in armed conflict that a small minority of those involved will take things too far and there needs to be the ability for a neutral agency to deal with such incidents; in this instance particularly because Israel is clearly not going to take action against its own troops via a court-martial process.

When accusations of criminal conduct during a conflict are levelled, the truth, or otherwise, of such accusations needs to be established through the appropriate legal process and certainly no country would object to Israel mounting a robust defence of any of its soldiers accused of war crimes.

But trying to prevent the possibility of prosecution takes things too far, reducing the need for accountability and, effectively, opening the way for soldiers to engage in unlawful conduct if they believe there's no way they will be charged.

To put the move in some sort of historical context, one wonders how Israel would have reacted had Nazi Germany been able to shield from prosecution those high-ranking officers in charge of death camps like Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Of course, this isn't entirely comparing apples with apples, but the need to be able to hold accountable those who may flout international law during a conflict is important. They're likely to be a tiny minority, but that's beside the point.