Japarna Miruzeva, 26, lives in the basement of a bombed-out Armenian house with her four children and considers herself lucky to be there. So do the one hundred or so other Azeri Kurdish refugee families who now occupy the ruins of Shariar, a once-quaint town on the lip of the disputed territory of mountainous (Nagorno) Karabakh—the majority—Armenian area that remains legally part of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan but that seceded in 1992 and is now a self-proclaimed independent state.

Life in Shariar is bleak at best. Well water is brackish and difficult to get; food is in short supply; there are no doctors; and the surrounding fields have been mined twice—once by the Armenians who used to till them, then by the Azerbaijani Army that will have to defend the town if the Armenians come back to reclaim it.

Japarna Miruzeva and the other ethnic Kurdish families in Shariar believe they have nowhere else to go. They still hope to return to the Kelbajar, the neighboring Azerbaijani province from which they were expelled in April 1993, when Armenian and Karabakh forces effectively cleansed the territory of Azeri Turks and Kurds in order to stitch Karabakh to Armenia proper. At present, there is little hope that the day of return will occur any time soon, if ever. Although an uneasy cease-fire was established between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis in May 1994, a negotiated settlement of the war over Karabakh remains elusive due to the intransigence of both sides. Caught in the middle are people like the Miruzeva clan, who are just a few of the almost one million internally displaced people (IDPs) in the squalid tent cities, boxcar towns, and multifamily schoolroom domiciles that dot the Azerbaijani countryside.

In fact, from an international legal perspective, the Kurdish IDPs in Shariar are pawns in a war crime committed by the Azerbaijani authorities, who allowed them to move into the shattered Armenian homes in the contested town. In this instance at least, strict adherence to international law and human reality have parted company.

For a government to allow anyone to move into a zone that has been ethnically cleansed runs counter to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which protects civilians in an international armed conflict. “The Occupying power shall not deport or transfer part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” states Article 49. “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory” are in fact a grave breach, or war crime. Even in an internal conflict, according to Additional Protocol II of 1977, “displacement of the civilian population shall not be ordered for reasons related to the conflict.”

If the security of civilians or “imperative military reasons” such as the movement of a front require it, the population may be temporarily evacuated but they must be returned to their homes when the crisis eases. Protocol II, Article 17, states: “Should such displacements have to be carried out, all possible measures shall be taken in order that the civilian population may be received under satisfactory conditions of shelter, hygiene, safety and nutrition.”

Were one to ask Japarna Miruzeva or any of her fellow IDPs who come from the Azeri provinces in and around the Karabakh conflict zone who the party violating these covenants might be, the response would be very simple: Armenia and the Armenians of the mountainous Karabakh (including current Armenian President Robert Kocharian who, ironically, as a citizen of mountainous Karabakh, is legally a citizen of Azerbaijan) who flushed them from their homes and, as the occupying force, refused to let them return.

Armenia has gone farther than that. In addition to actively settling Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan into the homes of Azeri Turks and Kurds in the areas it occupies, the Armenian diaspora has constructed a multimillion-dollar paved road across the so-called Lachin Corridor, another Azeri Kurdish region that represents the shortest point between Karabakh and Armenia. It was ethnically cleansed of its citizens by Armenian forces in May 1992—and Armenia has been adamant that even if there is a future settlement that might allow the Kelbajar Kurds (including Japarna Miruzeva) to go home, Lachin will never be relinquished.

At the Nuremberg Trials, which preceded the Geneva Conventions, several Nazi government officials were indicted for the crime against humanity of deporting civilians from occupied Germany as slave labor, and transferring German nationals into occupied territory for resettlement. The final judgment against several individual defendants mentioned only deportations, not the resettlement.

The apparent gap in the law today is that in international armed conflict the law does not cover a country transferring its own nationals from refugee or IDP centers in relatively peaceful areas of the country to areas close to front lines. And the problem becomes more acute when the people in question are not being forced to move to such areas but choose to.

As one international aid worker put it, “when a family who have been dwelling in a filthy railway car in either Armenia or Azerbaijan decides that the quickest way to end the awful state of refugeehood is to take one’s fate into one’s own hands and starts repairing the wall of someone else’s house that now finds itself on the ‘friendly’ side of the front lines, who is going to tell them to stop? The legal dilemma is punctured by the human need.”

From a distance, the line of cars and buses that snaked along the rural stretch of northwest Bosnian roadway looked like a traffic jam on that languid August afternoon, as girls in summer white bicycled past fields of cornflower blue. Up close, the terror in the eyes of the people of Sanski Most, the belongings stuffed into satchels and plastic bags, and the police riding shotgun told the real story.

More than fifteen hundred Slavic Muslims were being forced from their homes that day in mid-August 1992 by ethnic Serbs trying to purge northern Bosnia of their neighbor-turned-enemy. The Serbs had even provided city buses to transport those without cars, though the generosity was soon to degrade into a terrifying all-night trek over blood, body parts, and across the front lines. Four months into the war, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had begun to realize that the mass movement of civilians in Bosnia was not the chaotic happenstance of war, but rather a calculated, orchestrated transfer of populations aimed at creating ethnically pure areas.

Europe had not seen this kind of mass expulsion of civilians since World War II. Hitler’s atrocities across the continent had given rise to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which include specific protections for civilians. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention declares that “individual or mass forcible transfers . . . are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

Those in the Sanski Most convoy, by virtue of being moved to another location in the same country, are regarded under international humanitarian law as internally displaced persons (IDPs). If sent across an international border, it would be a deportation and they would be treated as refugees.

Additional Protocol II of 1977, which applies in internal conflicts, provides that forced civilian displacement may be undertaken legally only when civilians’ very safety or “imperative military reasons” require it. In addition, Article 17 says that civilians cannot be forced from their “whole territory” for reasons connected with the conflict. The article does not say unambiguously what is meant by “territory.” The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the Additional Protocols states that the intent here is to minimize civilian displacement that is politically motivated.

The standard is the same for international or internal conflicts: if civilians have to be moved for either of those two reasons—safety or military imperatives—their evacuations are to be under protected, hygienic, and humane conditions, and as short-lived as possible. None of that applied in the case of Sanski Most, which fell under Bosnian Serb control in the earliest days of the war and saw no fighting for three years until autumn 1995.

International law, therefore, was unambiguous. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the mass transfer of Bosnia’s civilians and Article 17 of Additional Protocol II prohibits the expulsions.

Despite IHL, here they were. The daylong journey had descended into the heart of darkness as the convoy turned from the main road onto isolated country paths and made its way through an increasingly hostile gauntlet of Serb soldiers and civilians shouting, “Butcher them, butcher them!” As the sun set, the worst was yet to come. With guns stuck in their faces, the people of Sanski Most were ordered from the buses and their cars, most of which were seized. With what belongings they could carry, they were sent on foot into the darkness through a no-man’s land separating two armies. I went with them.

Old and young, fit and feeble, we trekked along a mountain road that was cratered by mortar impacts, mined on one side, and covered by snipers. In places, the blood was so thick our shoes stuck momentarily to the road, and we stumbled onto chunks of human flesh and other remnants—teddy bears, backpacks, slippers—of those who had gone before. At the front line—a high wall of boulders dynamited from the mountainside—a crippled man was carried over, his wheelchair passed after him. Babies were handed to their mothers. Old men and women, stooped with age, struggled over the rocks to the government-controlled side. The foot journey lasted six hours and covered twelve miles.

By December 1995, just after the Dayton peace accord, at least 1.2 million Bosnians had been internally displaced. Three years later, only a fraction had returned home. “Civilians, not soldiers, were the principal and often intentional victims in the Bosnian conflict. Forced displacement was not just a by-product but an objective of military action and persecution,” Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said at the time.

But three years later, it happened again in the Serbian province of Kosovo, where Serb troops spent much of 1998 crushing an uprising by the 90 percent ethnic Albanian population. As many as 350,000 people had been displaced by September 1998. The majority were women and children.

Not all internal displacements are ethnic cleansing. In Colombia, both sides in the government-rebel conflict have forcibly relocated civilian populations to gain political or economic advantage. Worldwide, there were an estimated 20 to 25 million IDPs in 1998, compared to about 13 million refugees, that is, those forced across international borders.

Legal and humanitarian experts concede existing law is insufficient and weakened by a lack of political will. Interpretations of “imperative military reasons” vary widely, and governments also worry about getting involved in what may be considered the internal affairs of another State. According to Francis Deng, the UN’s top representative on IDPs, “Lack of political will is ultimately the issue. Even if you had fine principles, fine laws, but you don’t have the will to enforce them, then it’s as good as a dead letter.”

When the World War II Allies began preparing the Nuremberg Trials to prosecute Axis war criminals, they faced the problem that the existing laws of armed conflict did not address crimes against one’s own nationals. The Nazis, for example, had arrested and deported millions of civilians to concentration camps where they were held without trial, abused, and executed. To address the war’s atrocities, the Nuremberg Charter for the first time codified crimes against humanity, that is, crimes which may have been committed before or during a war and against one’s own population. It included “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds.”

In their verdicts, the Nuremberg judges repeatedly referred to “acts of imprisonment” as being among the crimes against humanity, and subsequently it has been recognized as such in customary law.

The statutes of the UN International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, established by the UN Security Council, both list imprisonment as a crime against humanity. The charter of the International Criminal Court of 1998, in an article approved by UN member-States without dissent, says that “imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law,” if carried out as a widespread or systematic attack on any civilian population, is a crime against humanity.

The eighteen-car passenger train drew into the small station at Palic, northern Serbia, halted with a screech, then disgorged the eighteen hundred men, women, and children who had been confined to it for four days. They were inhabitants of the village of Kozluk in eastern Bosnia.

Late in June 1992, two Yugoslav Army tanks rolled into the village center and pointed menacingly at the comfortable houses there. Villagers were offered the choice: leave or have their village destroyed from under them. After signing away their property to Serb authorities, many walked across the nearby Drina bridge into neighboring Serbia, where border guards told them they could not return to Bosnia. Others boarded buses to the Serbian town of Samac, where they were transferred to the train. The government of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had provided the trains of the Yugoslav state railways with the intention of deporting the Kozluk residents to Austria, but so few had travel documents that Hungary refused to allow them transit through to Austria.

Individual or mass deportations are war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined at the Nuremberg Tribunals following World War II, and war crimes under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. If there is enormous loss of life, deportation may constitute genocide, namely the intent to kill or injure, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, according to legal scholar Alfred de Zayas of Rutgers University.

Deportation was not explicitly banned prior to World War II. The 1907 Hague Conventions omitted mention, because mass expulsions were “generally rejected as falling below the minimum standard of civilization and, therefore, not requiring express prohibition,” wrote legal scholar Georg Schwarzenberger.

Hitler’s Nazi regime had expelled over 100,000 French from Alsace-Lorraine into Vichy France, and over 1 million Poles from western parts of occupied Poland into the German-run “Government-General of Poland.” Germany also deported as many as 12 million non-Germans to work for the German war economy as compulsory labor.

The Nuremberg Tribunal repeatedly condemned the practice of “Germanizing” occupied or annexed territories, that is, transferring in part of the German population, as well as deporting civilians from one occupied region to another or to Germany. It stated that deportations into Germany for purposes of slave labor was “not only in defiance of well-established rules of international law, but in complete disregard of the elementary dictates of humanity.”

But the victorious Allies in States taken over by the Communists-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and East Germany-adopted Nazi practices and expelled some 15 million ethnic Germans to the West after World War II. An estimated 2 to 3 million died as a result.

The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 explicitly forbids deportations in conditions of war. “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Also forbidden is the common practice of the occupying power deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. The convention allows the “total or partial evacuation” of any area where either “the security of the population or imperative military reasons” require, even outside the occupied territory, “when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement,” but the evacuated civilians must be returned to their homes “as soon as hostilities in the area have ceased.”

Iraq’s deportation of Kuwaitis into Iraq and resettlement of Iraqis in Kuwait was singled out for condemnation by the UN Security Council. Serb “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia from 1992-1995 also qualifies as a crime against humanity and a war crime. Israel’s deportation of Palestinians from occupied territories also violates the Geneva Conventions, in the view of the United States, the UN Security Council and General Assembly, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Israel says the convention has no legal bearing on its conduct in the territories but that it has voluntarily applied the “humanitarian provisions” of its own free will, although without specifying which provisions it has in mind.

The five thousand residents of Kozluk were among the most fortunate of all Bosnian Muslims, for most survived their expulsion. Many families finally made it to Austria where they lived as refugees, and the men returned to fight on the side of the Bosnian government. Their departure was never intended to be a “temporary evacuation.” As of mid-1998, none had returned to their homes in Kozluk.