[IMMUNE OR SOFT TARGET? THE BOMBING OF OTTOMAN HOSPITALS].

Abstract

World War I was one of the worst wars in terms of human rights violations. The then valid Geneva and La Haye Conventions were ignored by most of the involved states, and serious war crimes were committed. The most serious human rights violations included the following: confiscating, bombing or impeding in their function the hospitals of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as their hospital ships, healthcare workers, vehicles and supplies; mistreating prisoners of war; using prohibited weapons or poison gas; and directly or indirectly killing or violating the right to life of uninvolved civilians. Throughout the entire war, Red Cross and Red Crescent hospitals were bombed in an attempt to prevent the healthcare workers' activities, even though both the Geneva and La Haye Conventions had granted them "immunity" and accepted them as "neutral." The motivation behind these actions was to damage and destroy the enemy's logistic channels and to inflict psychological harm. The enemy wanted to create the worst possible shock and fear by bombing hospitals and clinics considered "soft targets"; by doing so, it attempted to break the other army's morale and break its determination to continue the war. These crimes-which today are openly accepted as war crimes-were greatly assisted by the facts that the conventions lacked any binding statutes concerning breaches and that their enforcement remained very limited. Although at the end of the war a commission was brought to life with the aim to punish was crimes, Germany was held responsible for the war, leading to war crime convictions being limited to this state only. No international court was established to adjudicate and punish war crimes in general. This article examines the correspondence between the Ottoman state and the Red Crescent concerning the Entente Powers' attacks on Ottoman hospitals during World War I and the ensuing human rights violations, in the light of records from the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives and Red Crescent Archive.