I could not have said it better myself<g>
Former Nuremburg Prosecutor has Sharp Words about Clinton's Attack on Serbs
"The triumph ...is to
undermine the UN Charter
and destroy a substantial part
of the Nuremberg judgments
directed at Nazi war criminals
By Walter Rockler, Former Nuremberg
Prosecutor
Some 60 years ago when I was relatively young, a well-known German woman film
director produced a film, which I believe was called, "The Triumph of Will." This
was
a film dedicated to the glory, heroism and military power of Nazi Germany. We have
over the past few days been faced with a new triumph, which in many respects has
some of the same characteristics. This triumph is a triumph of credibility.
In my country, my president, my secretary of state assured the Serbs and the rest
of
the world that if they did not comply with our orders to them, we would bomb them
and we would bomb them until they would give up, and this is occurring. The Serbs
did not comply immediately. When we said "jump," they did not jump; therefore, we
have bombed them for almost three months. I think the current statistics are
something like 35,000 airplane sorties and something like 20- 25,000 bombs have
been dropped on Serbia. Now you have to congratulate all the NATO powers
because this was quite a demonstration. Of course the Serbs and the Yugoslavs did
not have great anti-aircraft defences that would reach up to 30,000 feet;
therefore,
with these heroic sorties we ultimately y accomplished what we sought to do,
although it was not quite as comprehensive and complete as represented.
We maintained throughout the splendid diplomatic posture of holding a
non-negotiable position. In other words, whatever we told the Serbs to do we would
not vary from one inch. Bombing itself was represented to be a demonstration of
credibility. Now the American authors of this campaign actually in personal terms
lacked some credibility but that's neither here nor there. The bombing campaign
itself
proved to be credible and, of course, I regard that as a great success.
What have we accomplished? What is this triumph? The triumph, in my judgment, is
to undermine the UN Charter; destroy a substantial part of the Nuremberg
judgments directed at Nazi war criminals; and reduce an imperfect international
law
to something more closely resembling anarchy and the use of untrammeled power.
NATO, which was originally conceived to be a defensive alliance under the umbrella
of the Security Council of the U.N., has been transformed into an instrument for
aggression and that is my primary thesis.
The thing that I find particularly offensive to this campaign is that I am a
citizen of the
United States and it's being done in my name. I object to that. I just don't have
the
characteristics used to describe a "good German." A "good German," for those of
you who do not know what>the expression means, was someone who did whatever
his government told him to do.
Why do I say that this war is essentially, from the standpoint of law, a criminal
enterprise? Because when the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, the primary count
was launching a war of aggression against their neighbors: invading Poland,
invading
Belgium, Holland, invading France, invading Norway, invading Denmark, invading,
amongst other countries, Yugoslavia where their opponents were the Serbs, invading
Greece. I don't want to go through the whole list because it's even longer.
But why were they charged? At that time they were defenders of the defendants who
said well, war has been the experience of the human species since almost its
inception. Well, the Germans had, among other things, signed a treaty in 1928
called,
it was the Pact of Paris - along with about 75 other countries of the world
including
all the major powers. In that instrument, which Canada and the United States
signed
as well, the countries involved, represented that they would renounce war as an
instrument of policy and you can match that up against the bombing campaign as see
whether that pledge was honoured. The Germans as well as the Western powers
have entered into a series of non-aggression treaties from time to time, which are
essentially repudiated by this act.
The tribunal at Nuremberg - which was not a tribunal; it was a four-power court -
held that the ultimate crime in international law, the ultimate war crime, is
launching an
unprovoked attack upon another state, another country. What is "unprovoked?"
"Unprovoked" means when the other country has not attacked you, when it's not a
defensive war - a defensive war under the Charter is permissible - but obviously
Yugoslavia or Serbia has not gone outside its borders to attack anybody, never did
at any point in the last 10 years. So, you read the classic definition of what is
a war
of aggression and this in the opinion of the tribunal, as I said, was the supreme
crime.
In other words, that launching a war carries with it every crime that may be
committed in that war. That's what war is basically. It happens to be a sanction
essentially of criminal activity inherently.
The UN Charter actually does not even give the Security Council the power to
intervene in any state's domestic affairs. There are provisions in the Charter -
Article
2, Sections 4 and 7, which prohibit interference in the domestic jurisdiction of
any
state; which prohibit the threat of military force; which prohibit the use of
military
force. Now on what basis could the U.N. act? It would have to be if you had a
state
of affairs, which truly threatened peace. That COULD arise out of a civil war but
there is no provision in the UN Charter, which says, 'any country may invade any
other country to uphold what it represents to be human rights.' There just is no
such a
provision. There is no treaty, which provides that. The United States was one of
the
authors of the UN>Charter and it insisted on veto-power for the major powers in
the
Security Council. This was a characteristic of the Security Council which we
wanted
- so did the Soviets - for self-protection. In other words we could not be
attacked in
the Security Council over our veto. So this was the procedure set up.
NATO was created, as I said, as a defensive alliance but if you look at the treaty
terms, it purports to be totally under the U.N. It's a defensive alliance subject
to the
control and oversight of the Security Council of the U.N. Obviously in this
attack,
which has always been labeled NATO, and which I regard as primarily American
(and I regret to say that), the Security Council was deliberately bypassed. Now,
you
say, that's because we might have run into a veto on bombing. Yes, we might have,
and that was the conception of the U.N - the U.N. essentially required that there
be
no veto with respect to military action. And we might have had that.
We never explored non-military means. In fact we didn't even utilize at the outset
a
pretext of humanitarian violations in the Kosovo case. That was batted around at
some length with respect to Bosnia, but at the outset of the Kosovo crisis when
the
KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army], labeled by the United States earlier as a terrorist
organization, was murdering Serb policemen and Serb officials in Kosovo - and let
me say that I am not inherently pro-Serb or anti-Albanian but these are the
facts - at
that time the grounds on which the United States urged action to solve this
situation
were not widespread human-rights violations, it was a somewhat preposterous
reading of history to the effect that (and I remember a speech by President
Clinton
along these lines), to the effect that the Balkans were always a source of all the
world
wars and we had to step in to make sure that they weren't troublesome. We would
determine what would happen there.
The humanitarian violations, or alleged humanitarian violations, in effect
followed the
bombing; they were not the basis on which the bombing was undertaken. There was
virtually no expulsion of Albanians; there were no murders, except essentially
murders by the KLA of Serb policemen, 5 or 10 at a time in ambushes, which
furnished the pretext for this military invasion.
So, why the military invasion? I have a lot of trouble explicating the reasons.
For
some reason, which is not clear to me ever since the Yugoslavian civil war began,
we
adopted essentially an anti-Serbian position everywhere. Why there should be this
hostility to the Serbs, I do not know, but this very quickly became something
else.
We were going to determine the conditions under which this country would live
thereafter and this will, the "triumph of will" of Ms. Riefenstahl statement, is
to me
what is really involved.
Now this triumph involves the shredding to me of international law. It involves
substituting anarchy for an imperfect system of international law. It avoided any
diplomatic negotiations of any kind between the NATO aggressors and the Yugoslav
government. All our demands were non-negotiable and that to me is the key element
of the situation. What does "non-negotiable" mean? It means you do as we say or
we'll bomb you. And we'll bomb you endlessly and of course our bombs are not
perfectly accurate so we will kill a certain number of civilians. We know that.
We'll
bomb bridges; we'll bomb factories; we'll bomb sanitariums; we'll bomb hospitals;
we'll bomb roads; we'll bomb waterways; we'll bomb electric plants; we'll bomb
your country out of existence. That is the triumph which has been achieved.
______________________________________ |
