IMHO, this is a must read...and the last two paragraphs are tragically funny.
THE TYRANNY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Foreign Affairs Editorial Opinion (Published) Keywords:
YUGOSLAVIA, WAR CRIMES
Source: The Spectator (UK)
Published: 8/28/99 Author: Kirsten Sellars
Posted on 08/28/1999 18:39:50 PDT by antiwar republican
THE SPECTATOR
28 August 1999
THE TYRANNY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Kirsten Sellars says that war-crimes tribunals advance the global aims
of Western leaders
WHEN the Swiss attorney-general Carla Del Ponte takes up her post as
chief prosecutor of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda war crimes tribunals
next month, she will assume the role of high priestess of human
rights, the secular religion for the millennium. She will be
responsible both for putting Milosevic and the rest behind the bars of
Scheveningen prison and for healing the wounds of a troubled world.
Her job is to see that good vanquishes evil.
That's the theory, anyway. The reality is more complicated.
When viewed with a dispassionate eye, the war-crimes tribunals look
less like paragons of justice and more like the political tools of
Clinton and Blair. These trials, like the recent bombing campaign, are
motivated first and foremost by political expediency. This is not a
popular point of view. Indeed, it is heresy. The consensus rules that
anything done in the name of human rights is right, and any criticism
is not just wrong but tantamount to supporting murder, torture and
rape.
This coercive consensus gives the most powerful nations carte blanche
to interfere in the affairs of any country they choose. In his book
Crimes Against Humanity, the British-based QC, Geoffrey Robertson, a
passionate advocate of human rights, argues for an end to the age of
impunity in which repression is allowed to flourish within the
protective borders of the nation state. In place of this he envisages
a new 'age of enforcement' in which interventionist global law ensures
that the Pinochets and Pol Pots get their just desserts.
It is a seductive but invidious scenario which ignores the fact that a
humanitarian crusade offers a lot more to the crusaders than to those
on whose behalf the battle is supposedly fought. History teaches us
two important lessons. First, the human-rights ideal was itself born
of political convenience, as a smokescreen behind which the great
powers could pursue their own interests, oblivious to the needs of
those they purported to help. Second, intervention, whatever banner it
goes under, is a direct challenge to national self-determination. That
is to say, it undermines a people's right to govern themselves. This
assault on sovereignty is constantly reinforced by institutions such
as the United Nations, Nato and the World Bank.
Attacks on sovereignty, while considered all right for faraway
countries, are not acceptable when they affect the United States or
Britain. America, the crucible of human rights and chief architect of
the UN's 1948 Declaration on Human Rights, refused to accept the
Genocide Convention until 1986, on the grounds that it encroached on
American sovereignty.
British governments have been equally cautious. Although the Atlee
government signed the European Convention on Human Rights, it did so
only after securing the condition that UK citizens were banned from
taking cases to the human-rights courts in Strasbourg. This ban was
lifted in 1964 and there was a succession of high profile cases
against the UK on such issues as police powers and press freedom,
homosexual rights and the treatment of paramilitary suspects in
Northern Ireland. Westminster has reluctantly accepted the court's
authority, but there is still, understandably, widespread resentment
of meddling Strasbourg Eurocrats.
The history of human rights as foreign policy is a story of
realpolitik and opportunism. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the
US President Woodrow Wilson invoked limited minority rights, while
significantly opposing the principle of racial equality. In the second
world war, Franklin Roosevelt rallied a hitherto isolationist public's
support for the 'Good War' in order to extend America's global reach.
Later, the Carter and Clinton administrations both launched
human-rights missions in order to restore public confidence in the
integrity of government after Watergate and Monicagate. Tony Blair and
Canada's Lloyd Axworthy have followed their vote-catching example.
Official interest in human rights has waxed and waned inversely with
the other 20th-century Western idea,' anticommunism, and at the end of
the Cold War 'human-rights abuse' has replaced the 'red menace' as the
enemy of civilised values.
War-crimes tribunals have traditionally been the cutting edge of such
crusades. The post-second world war Nuremberg and Tokyo trials
established the blueprint for the modern ad hoc tribunals on former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda. From the start, politics impinged openly upon
the legal process, and there were accusations of double standards from
both conservatives ('our generals would have done the same') and from
radicals ('Dresden and Hiroshima were war crimes too'). Some lawyers
questioned the legal basis of the newly created 'crimes against peace'
and 'crimes against humanity'. The Tokyo trial aroused particular
controversy, and the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, rejected all guilty
verdicts as victors' justice. William Douglas of the US Supreme Court
later wrote of the Tokyo trials: 'It took its law from the creator and
did not act as a free and independent tribunal. It was solely an
instrument of political power.'
The Allied prosecution of German and Japanese leaders was primarily
prompted by political concerns, however high-minded the judges and
vile the crimes of many of those involved. Justice had to be seen to
be done, but within the framework of broader post-war strategies. At
Tokyo, some defendants were scapegoatedwhile a blind eye was turned to
others-notably Emperor Hirohito-in order to bolster American
occupation policies in Japan.
At Nuremberg, evidence of Allied atrocities (e.g. the Soviet massacre
of Poles at Katyn) or aggressive war plans (e.g. Britain's proposed
invasion of Norway) was ignored. And once the political and propaganda
value of the trials began to wane, the Allied authorities simply wound
up the proceedings. Thus, when the lesser tribunals became an obstacle
to the creation of the Federal Republic, the Allies shortened the
sentences of many Nazi war criminals. Most were freed by the
mid-Fifties. History, as we know, is written by the winners. The
ensuing justice is conquerors' justice, so only losers ever stand
trial for war crimes.
Perhaps, as one Tokyo trial judge noted, a lost war is itself a crime.
When Churchill was told that 12 top Nazis had been sentenced to the
gallows after the Nuremberg trials in 1946, he mused to General
Hastings Ismay, 'It shows that if you enter a war, it is supremely
important to win it-if we had lost, we would have been in a pretty
pickle.' After Nato's bombardment of Serbia, these words have a
powerful contemporary resonance.
Just and noble wars are back in fashion and so, as night follows day,
are war-crimes tribunals. A new International Criminal Court looks set
to follow on the heels of the courts dealing with former Yugoslavia
and Rwanda. Supporters of the enterprise argue that modern
humanitarian law can rise above politics and dispense truly impartial
justice. The portents are not good, though.
The courts are far from independent. The Yugoslavia tribunal, for
example, was set up by the UN Security Council in 1993. Since then it
has danced to the tune of the Big Five, especially the more
aggressively interventionist members, America and Britain.
Occasionally the strings show. In 1997, for example, the United States
ruffled the court's feathers when it promised indicted Croats a speedy
trial if they surrendered themselves to The Hague.
A tribunal spokesman complained: 'By making such statements they are
making us look like a politically driven tribunal that you can switch
on and switch off every day, according to political circumstance.'
In reality, that is precisely what happens-the current chief
prosecutor, Louise Arbour, has admitted as much. She is heavily
reliant on Western intelligence to put together prosecution cases and,
as she indicates, Security Council members can either 'slow down the
flow of information or accelerate it' in line with their political
aims.
The Kosovo bombardment stripped away lingering illusions of tribunal
impartiality. The court acted as the judicial arm of Nato, with Louise
Arbour as the Alliance's witchfinder-general. She was glad publicly to
accept a bulging dossier of British intelligence on Kosovo from Robin
Cook.
By contrast, when a delegation from a Paris-based organization tried
to deliver a petition calling for Bill Clinton's indictment as a war
criminal, they were told that the prosecutors were 'too busy' to
receive it. In the end, they had to hand it in to a UN guard on the
gate. Ironically, human-rights courts show precious little regard for
the legal rights of the accused. The Croat general Tihomir Blaskic has
been held in custody for almost three years and still awaits the
outcome of his trial.
In 1997 three Croats spent two months in prison before being released,
because the prosecution could not mount a case against them. The
Croats Dario Kordic and Mario Cerkez were jailed for 18 months before
standing trial and, only last year, charges were dropped against 14
Serbs who had been indicted by Arbour's predecessor, Richard
Goldstone, in 1995.
Among them was a certain Gruban, who was accused of viciously raping
prisoners at the Omarska camp. When he was added to the tribunal's
wanted list, he continued to live openly in the Balkans. This is
hardly surprising, given that 'Gruban' is not a human being but a
fictional character from Miodrag Bulatovic's novel, Hero on a Donkey.
The Gruban-as-rapist hoax apparently began when a local journalist fed
the story to a sensation-hungry American reporter in a Bosnian cafe,
who, in turn, passed the information to The Hague, where it was
'confirmed' by the conveniently anonymous 'Witness F'. It would be
funny if it weren't so tragic.
The author is a joumalist. She is writing a critical history of human
rights.
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