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101 Why International Law Matters in God’s World dav i d s c h e f f e r One of Isaiah’s prophecies against Judah intones, “Mankind will be brought low, everyone will be humbled” (Isa. 2:9). That prophecy bore truth in our lifetimes, on our watch. If you have difficulty imagining the reality of the Devil, or if you do not believe in the Devil, or of evil forces that undeniably exist, then take a walk with me. • Imagine walking through a still-burning camp in the eastern Congo, near Goma, in August 2000, where scores of internally displaced persons have been burned alive in their tents or gunned down trying to escape— not an uncommon event in the worst humanitarian crisis on the face of the earth. • Imagine standing in a small hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in February 1999. Scattered before you are scores of mutilated children. One young girl, no more than ten, is burned only on the front side of her body, from her face to her toes, because rebels had thrown her into the fire of her burning home. Another teenage girl lies still, her eyes having been incinerated with acid following her gang rape by rebels. • Imagine witnessing thousands of Kosovo-Albanians flee across the Macedonian border in early April 1999 with tales of sheer horror at the hands of Serb paramilitary and police units sweeping across Kosovo, and in the rain-drenched night visiting families whose babies had died from exposure only moments before. • Imagine visiting a near-abandoned town deep in the interior of southern Sudan in June 1999 and learning of the years of torture, death, and destruction visited upon its Christian population by the Sudanese army and paramilitary and listening to the few remaining children describe V4366.indb 101 V4366.indb 101 8/22/07 3:21:18 PM 8/22/07 3:21:18 PM 102 david scheffer how they saw their neighbors being shot by soldiers and stuffed down the town’s major water well, where their bodies continued to decay. • Imagine investigating a still-smoldering massacre site in northwest Rwanda in 1997, a crime scene larger than any ever encountered by the FBI prior to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Those Tutsis lucky enough to survive are huddled in a nearby hospital with horrific wounds from grenade blasts, gunfire, hatchets, and machetes . A young girl’s brain has just been stuffed back into her head by the sole doctor on the site, who is entering his fifty-sixth hour of surgery and care of the wounded. • Imagine touring the missing-persons identification morgue in Tuzla, Bosnia, right after the delivery of almost three hundred well-preserved Muslim bodies in Yugoslav army body bags dug up from a mass grave found near the border with Serbia, and learning that a mother just hours earlier had identified her husband and all four sons among the carcasses, each one screaming at her with waxy skin stretched by the collapse of the victim’s jaw. But you do not have to imagine any of this. It all happened before my eyes. In America, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought home the kind of horror experienced by millions in foreign lands in this age of atrocities. So we need no longer plead with Americans to imagine such assaults on humankind. Genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are very grim reapers of death and sorrow in the lives of so many innocent human beings, and none of us holds any exclusive rights to the spectacle. What happened in the Congo, in Kosovo, in the Sudan, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, and in so many other atrocity zones, and which continues today across the globe, has a lot to do with law and with religion. There are millions of citizens of the world who every day need the protection of what I call “atrocity law” and who, as believers in God, still trust in Him to keep them alive despite the ravages of evil forces that none of us would ever want to confront. In these essays we are examining the most fundamental proposition about how we respond to atrocities: whether justice or mercy, punishment or forgiveness, military might or religious pacifism can coexist in a violent world or whether we should chose one over the other in the conduct of human affairs. I...

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