The senseless American effort to undermine and marginalize the International Criminal Court must come to an end. The U.S. case against the court is bogus on its face. The real problem is the Bush administration's wholesale rejection of multilateralism and its desire to curry favor with the extreme right of its political base.
The ICC now is a reality. It opened shop Monday in the Hague and will be up and running within a year. So far, 74 nations have ratified the treaty, including almost every democracy in the world except the United States. Soon, the member states will begin electing judges; a two-thirds vote is required, a powerful guard against getting jurists with political agendas. Meanwhile, a skeleton staff will keep track of complaints. Only war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, committed after July 1, come under the court's jurisdiction. As Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Cambodia amply demonstrate, the court fills a gaping hole in the evolving system of international justice and rule of law.
The United States has always allowed the Pentagon to drive American policy toward the court, and the Pentagon is paranoid that U.S. service people could be hauled before the court on some trumped-up charge. President Bill Clinton fought hard to tailor the Treaty of Rome creating the court to American concerns; ultimately he did sign the treaty.
But the Pentagon's worries dovetail nicely with President Bush's antipathy toward multilateralism. So earlier this year he took the unprecedented step of voiding Clinton's signature.
Even that was not enough, however. Now the United States is threatening to prevent an extension of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia, which mainly involves a police training program. The much larger NATO force in Bosnia is not formally a U.N. operation. The threat was prompted by the Security Council's refusal to provide a blanket exemption to the ICC's jurisdiction for all members of any U.N. peacekeeping force. The United States had sought the exemption, it said, for fear that American forces might face "politically motivated" prosecution by the court. If a compromise isn't found by Wednesday, the peacekeeping program might be forced to end.
The American fear is so much nonsense. All U.S. allies say so, and so does the treaty. It spells out the court's jurisdiction to take only the most serious crimes, and only then if the suspect's home country won't investigate.
So, for example, had the ICC existed when U.S. soldiers killed 504 civilians at My Lai, Vietnam, the case would not have made the ICC grade: Although clearly a war crime, the number of deaths was not large enough, nor part of a pattern; the killings were not carried out as U.S. policy, and the United States itself investigated the crime and prosecuted those responsible.
But say the court had existed when Iraq's Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In that situation, the court would have had ample power to act, not only because of war crimes committed in Kuwait, but also because Saddam had previously used chemicals to wipe out an entire village of Kurds in northern Iraq. The court most definitely would have sworn out an international arrest warrant for Saddam. How much more legitimate and easier that would have made subsequent U.N. dealings with Iraq.
Eventually, active U.S. participation in the court is inevitable. Sooner or later, American officials will want the court to act against a future Saddam or Slobodan Milosevic. Over time, Americans also will come to see that the permanent court acts just as responsibly as the temporary one now hearing the case against Milosevic.
In the meantime, though, U.S. efforts to actively undermine the court give a cover to the world's Saddams and the rogue states they lead. It also weakens the court's legitimacy and encourages noncooperation with it.
As the Milosevic case demonstrates, bringing this kind of criminal to justice is expensive, time-consuming and just plain difficult. The aid of the world's most powerful nation, its premier democracy, is essential, and should be fulsome
[I thought Jesse Ventura had this handled]
{This is a editorial out of St. Paul Minn.}
startribune.com |
