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After
Milosevic, how to prevent another
By JONATHAN
POWER
July 25, 2001
LONDON - The War Crimes Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia
that is preparing its case against former president
Slobodan Milosevic is sitting on a time bomb, concocted
by Milosevic himself. He has made it plain that he is
going to conduct his defence on a political level - not
by hiring a team of smart lawyers to challenge witnesses'
veracity over accounts that he ordered or sanctioned mass
murder, rape and torture, but by mounting a solo
political defence that will seek to turn the tables on
his Western prosecutors.
He will accuse them of bombing his country in defiance
of the Charter of the United Nations. It is they, he will
say, who need to defend themselves against legitimate
charges of breaking international law. They bombed a
sovereign foreign country without the approval of the
Security Council, the supreme organ of the UN.
It is going to be a difficult trial and the
prosecutors will have to hope that the bench of judges,
despite having a strong non-Western component, will rule
such a defence out of order. If they don't the
proceedings could well end up as a trial within a trial,
an outcome that should have been foreseen when the West
chose to bomb Belgrade without a UN mandate.
The great danger with bending the rules of the UN is
that it doesn't always spring back to shape like a rubber
band when next you need it.
But something positive will come out of this
confrontation, if it forces a debate in the West about
the relationship between invasion and bombardment and the
cause of human rights. There is a powerful school of
thought, marked out by such diverse personalities as
Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's ambassador to the UN, the
Canadian writer Michael Ignatieff and the Oxford don,
Timothy Garton Ash, that argues that massive human rights
abuses strengthen the presumption in favour of military
intervention.
But war is war, even if it is launched in a "good"
cause and human rights is too often the loser, however
stringent the control exercised by democratically elected
politicians of their fighting machine. Indeed, if the
preservation of human rights is really the first and
paramount purpose of policy, the whole approach to the
kind of politically impasses that lead to war becomes
very different. Simply put, one avoids the recourse to
war and leaders are compelled to search for alternative
ways of dealing with the situation.
Human rights crises can and should be prevented. They
are never inevitable. As Pierre Sane, the remarkable
Secretary-General of Amnesty International, has expressed
it, "If government decisions to intervene are motivated
by the quest for justice, why do they allow situations to
deteriorate to such unspeakable injustice?"
The NATO governments which bombed Belgrade are the
same governments that were willing to wheel and deal with
Milosevic's government during the break-up of the
original Yugoslavia and were unwilling to address
repeated warnings about the growing human rights crisis
in Kosovo. Six years before the bombing, Amnesty was
arguing in public: "If action is not taken soon to break
the cycle of unchecked abuses and escalating tensions in
Kosovo, the world may find itself again staring
impotently at a new conflagration."
A similar argument can be made for the West's other
great preoccupation during the 1990s - the dictatorial
regime of Saddam Hussein, defeated and driven back after
an attempted invasion of neighbouring Kuwait. (President
George Bush Senior did seek and win the approval of a UN
Security Council vote for this action.) It was Amnesty
which called for international pressure on Iraq in the
mid 1980s, especially after the 1988 chemical weapons
attacks by Saddam Hussein's troops on the town of
Halabja, which killed an estimated 5,000, unarmed Kurdish
civilians.
Amnesty also drew attention at this time to Saddam's
notorious conduct towards his political enemies,
incarcerating and torturing their children. Yet Western
governments were then foursquare behind Iraq as it fought
a First World War type of conflict of attrition with its
neighbour Iran, whom the U.S. could not forgive either
for its fundamentalist stridency or for taking hostage
the diplomats of the U.S. embassy a few years earlier.
The West simply turned a blind eye to Saddam's human
rights violations, while it sold him increasingly
sophisticated weapons of war.
Prevention work may be less newsworthy and more
difficult to justify to the public than intervention in a
time of crisis, argues Mr Sane. "It requires the
sustained investment of significant resources without the
emotive media images of hardship and suffering". It's the
hard day-to-day slog of human rights vigilance - using
diplomatic means to persuade governments to ratify human
rights treaties and implement them at home. It means
ensuring there is no impunity and that every time
someone's rights are violated, the incident is
investigated and those responsible brought to justice.
Not least, it means the speeding up of the establishment
of the International Criminal Court, meant to take over
from the Yugoslavia War Crimes Court and to have
universal jurisdiction, wherever there are crimes against
humanity.
If the West had thought a little more about prevention
in the early days of the Yugoslavian conflict, much of
the subsequent horror could have been avoided. Now with
Milosevic's trial in the offing the West stands of danger
of being hoisted on its own petard. It will be good for
it.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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