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2. Applicable Law

As has been previously stated, the aim of the Serbian/FRY authorities and the forces under their control was to ensure that the Kosovar population did not achieve any form of autonomy or independence from Serbia as a whole. By the summer of 1998, military and police forces were thus being used to halt the activities of the UCK, which had garnered a large amount of support from the civilian population, by seeking to destroy their bases, remove their key personnel, prevent their acquisition of arms and equipment and ensure that the Kosovars as a whole were cowed into submission through fear, intimidation and the destruction of their property. This escalation into terrorisation of the civilian population came after several years of intimidation by the Serbian police forces in Kosovo and the widespread abuse of human rights in the province and constitutes an unlawful method of operation during armed conflict.

The most clear expression of the prohibition on such methods of warfare in the course of an internal armed conflict is contained in article 13(2) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, of 1977. This provision states:

The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

 

Of further relevance is article 14 of the Additional Protocol which reads:

Starvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited. It is therefore prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless for that purpose, objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production of food-stuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.

 

The principle of protection of the civilian population is one of the most fundamental rules of the laws of armed conflict and must be respected in the course of any conflict, whether international or internal in nature. The basic prohibitions expressed in article 13 therefore reflect customary international law and this is indeed recognised in the ICRC Commentary to the article. The obligation of the armed forces involved in a conflict is not only to refrain from launching direct attacks on civilians, but also to avoid, or at least minimise, incidental losses during attacks on legitimate military targets.

While article 13(3) provides that the protections afforded to civilians in the Protocol are lost should such civilians engage in hostilities, it should be noted that the ICRC Commentary states:

"It cannot be denied that in situations of non-international armed conflict in particular, the civilian population sometimes shelters certain combatants, and it may be difficult to ascertain the status of individuals making up the population. However, we must point out that if the mere presence of some individuals not protected under paragraph 3 of this article were to permit an attack against a whole group of civilians, the protection enjoyed by the civilian population would become totally illusory. Thus the fact that the