HRW accuses NATO of high civilian death toll in Libya

PanARMENIAN.Net - NATO air strikes killed 72 civilians in Libya last year, Human Rights Watch said on Monday, May 14, accusing the western alliance of failing to acknowledge the scope of collateral damage it caused during the campaign that helped oust Muammar Gaddafi.

According to Reuters, in a report based on investigations at bombing sites during and after the conflict, the New York-based HRW said NATO strikes killed 20 women and 24 children. It called on the alliance to compensate civilian victims and investigate attacks that may have been unlawful.

"Attacks are allowed only on military targets, and serious questions remain in some incidents about what exactly NATO forces were striking," Fred Abrahams, special adviser at HRW, said in a statement.

The report claims to be the most extensive investigation to date of civilian casualties from NATO's air campaign and presents a higher death toll estimate than a March paper by Amnesty International which documented 55 civilian deaths, including 16 children and 14 women.

NATO considers its Libya operation highly successful, illustrating the allies' ability to work well together in a limited campaign. NATO carried out some 26,000 sorties including some 9,600 strike missions and destroyed about 5,900 targets before operations ended on October 31.

The alliance said the campaign had been conducted with "unprecedented care and precision and to a standard exceeding that required by international humanitarian law".

"NATO did everything possible to minimize risks to civilians, but in a complex military campaign, that risk can never be zero," said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu in a statement. "We deeply regret any instance of civilian casualties for which NATO may have been responsible."

HRW acknowledged that NATO had taken care to minimize civilian casualties and added that countries such as Russia that had made claims of large-scale civilian deaths did so "to score political points".

But Abrahams, principal author of the report, said the care NATO took during the campaign was "undermined by its refusal to examine the dozens of civilian deaths."