Amitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive. His weblog will be posted every Tuesday.
February 1, 2005
Even mass murder doesn't get in way of White House's fixations
The White House is not letting even mass murder get in the way of its phobia of international institutions.
The Bush Administration is blocking attempts to bring before the International Criminal Court the Sudanese government for the crimes it is committing in the Darfur region of its country. (Approximately 400,000 people have been killed in that region over the past two years, with the Sudanese government responsible for the deaths of the overwhelming majority.) Never mind that a U.N. panel has found that crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed in Darfur--just the sort of offenses the International Criminal Court was set up to deal with. And never mind that Kofi Annan has said that the court is the "logical place" for the criminals to be tried.
The Bush folks have never let logic get in the way. And this time they are honest about their motives. "We don't want to be party to legitimizing the I.C.C.," says Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes. So there.
The Bush Administration is instead suggesting that a new tribunal be set up at Arusha, Tanzania, the site of a previous tribunal to try those involved in the Rwandan genocide. This blithely ignores the additional time, trouble, and expense such a new effort would take. Richard Grenell, the spokesperson for the U.S. mission at the United Nations, insists, contrary to common sense, that the U.S. proposal would cost less than bringing it before an existing institution. His accountant-style calculation also overlooks the fact that, as Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch points out, "the delay involved in setting up a new tribunal would only lead to the loss of more innocent lives in Darfur."
The notion of an international court to try crimes such as genocide actually dates back to the start of the United Nations as an attempt to deal with the horrors of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the Cold War got in the way and the move toward getting the court instituted began only in the 1990s.
Sadly, the United States has been unfriendly toward the court right from the very start. The Clinton Administration actually instructed U.S. embassies to ask military commanders in their host nations to lobby their governments against the creation. In typical half-hearted style, the Clinton Administration signed the treaty during its final days, with no intention of having Congress ratify the move.
Bush’s campaign against the court, however, has gone much further than Clinton's. The Bush Administration announced that it was "unsigning" the treaty, a pointless move from a practical standpoint. The United States also got the Security Council to grant it an exemption on U.N. peacekeeping missions, until the council balked last year in the wake of Abu Ghraib. And with the White House's support, Congress in 2002 passed the American Servicemembers' Protection Act that mandates noncooperation with the court. The law threatens sanction against countries that have refused to sign bilateral agreements with the United States guaranteeing immunity of U.S. servicemembers from prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Under its provisions, the Bush Administration has threatened to cut off certain types of aid from allies such as Jordan and Colombia and a proposed amendment to the law even targets NATO members. More than ninety countries have caved in and signed these agreements. The Sudan move is the most heinous example of the Bush Administration's attack on the International Criminal Court, but it is only the latest.
The White House and other foes of the court claim that if it were allowed to exercise its power, American troops would be brought before it on frivolous charges. But there are enough safeguards to ensure that the chances of this are slim, at best. For instance, the court can try people only when the home country's judicial system is "genuinely unable or unwilling" to do that. Or is the Bush Administration not confident enough that the U.S. legal system will pass that test?
The real reasons for Bush's campaign against the court are far more deep-seated: a visceral hostility toward any notions of internationalism and a brazen notion of going it alone in the world. And if crimes against humanity and mass murder are not punished in the process, then his attitude is, so be it.
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