Sharon and Arafat should both be on trial
If the new International Criminal Court is to mean anything,
we must be ready to judge the acts even of those
whose causes seem just, says author ERNA PARIS
By ERNA PARIS
The Globe and Mail [One of the leading Canadian Newspapers]
Wednesday, April 17, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A19
The 20th century was the most brutal the world has known, as ordinary people became the deliberate targets of wars, both international and civil: An estimated 86 million non-combatants died. But the century also saw a remarkable attempt to enhance world order by demanding accountability for serious human-rights abuses -- something to keep in mind during this latest eruption of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When the top Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg under new legislation called "crimes against humanity" -- the most serious breaches of rights ever codified -- a new idea entered international law: that of personal responsibility for committing, or commanding, antihuman acts.
In his opening address to the tribunal, the American jurist Robert H. Jackson set the scene in words that still resonate: "The real complaining party at [the] bar is Civilization," he said. "Civilization asks whether the law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with [such] crimes. It does not expect that you [the tribunal] can make war impossible. It does expect that your action will put the forms of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions, and most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace."
At Nuremberg, the Allied Powers directly addressed the Nazi abuse of state power and, in doing so, shifted the balance between brutality and "civilization." Another tilt in the same direction occurred just last February when Slobodan Milosevic entered the prisoner's box at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Nuremberg's legal successor.
Still another took place last week when the long-awaited International Criminal Court was born in a ceremony at the United Nations in New York. The ICC, which is expected to go into operation next year, is a landmark achievement that Canada supported from the start; its permanent status will eliminate the need for ad hoc tribunals such those for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The new court will have jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity only when countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute their own citizens. This is as it should be. Accountability starts at home.
The ICC will not be retroactive (the opening date for indictments is July 1, 2002), which means that, at this writing, neither Ariel Sharon nor Yasser Arafat is likely to be prosecuted.
This is a pity -- because each of them has contravened not just the international humanitarian law founded at Nuremberg and later, but, even more shocking to millions, the ground rules of what Judge Jackson quaintly called "Civilization."
Few reasonable people reject the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians: Secure borders for one and a national state for the other. But the failure of diplomacy and the political process, for whatever disputed reasons, cannot justify the gross abuse of human rights or exempt those responsible. Put simply, an acceptable end does not justify unacceptable means.
Late last week, as Israel mopped up its military operations in the Jenin refugee camp, as ambulances and doctors were refused permission to tend the wounded, as families were denied permission to bury their dead, as the international and the Israeli media were denied access to unmediated information, as the International Red Cross was thwarted in its attempts to deliver humanitarian aid, as seemingly out-of-control Israeli soldiers looted homes, and as accusations brought against the army for illegally attempting to dispose of the bodies of the dead in the Jenin camp were being heard in an Israeli court, the Bush administration, in stunning, unconscious irony, again referred to Ariel Sharon as "a man of peace."
Mr. Sharon, however, has never hidden either his military doctrine or contempt for international law. After he headed his country's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (following which he was removed from office by an Israeli tribunal that found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of Palestinians), he granted a revealing interview to the respected Israeli writer, Amos Oz, which was published in the journal Davar.
"Even if you prove to me that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don't care," he said. ". . . Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us. . . . And I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal . . ."
Mr. Sharon's aging nemesis, Yasser Arafat, is more circumspect, but his record is no better. Autocratic, two-faced and double-talking, Mr. Arafat has fought a lifelong dirty war opposite Mr. Sharon and his predecessors, utilizing every means possible, including terror attacks against Jewish targets in Western Europe as early as the 1960s.
After a brief interlude marked by failed peace initiatives, he has returned to (possibly direct) sponsorship of terror. By promising posthumous glory and material help to their destitute families, Mr. Arafat has encouraged desperate young Palestinians to die for his cause by murdering innocent civilians within Israel.
It is sometimes said that there is "too much history" in the Middle East. Perhaps it is closer to the truth to say that there is too much selective history: The arguments, half-truths and myths in both camps are now so entrenched that few can hear over the local din. The Arab world promotes that disreputable fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in a 30-part "factual" television series, ensuring that hatred of Israelis will be enduringly transformed into a hatred of Jews everywhere.
Currently, 46 per cent of Israelis favour deporting Palestinians from the occupied territories into Jordan -- although population deportation is a known war crime. Arab-language papers extol the murderous "martyrs," while in the lens of presumably balanced reporting, New York Times columnist William Safire confers regularly with Ariel Sharon. And Thomas Friedman, the paper's international affairs columnist, spuriously conflates disparate acts of Arab terror and urges Israel to deliver a decisive "military blow" (although it is commonly agreed that suicide-bent Palestinians will not be stopped by such means). Closer to home, Canadian media baron Izzy Asper unapologetically controls the content and slant of what gets published in his domain about the Middle East.
Perception is all; I know this personally. In 1987, I spent a day in the Balata refugee camp talking to young Fatah "freedom fighters" as research for my book The Garden and the Gun. No one knew I was there; in those days, just before the outbreak of the first intifada,no permission was needed.
Suddenly, the IDF appeared on the camp road, guns pointing. My "friends" threw themselves to the floor behind a table and pulled me down with them. We held our breath in common fear.
Late that afternoon I returned to my apartment in Jerusalem. That evening, I heard the strangled sounds of someone going berserk in the street just outside; the language sounded like Arabic. I double-locked and cowered behind my door. Perception depends on where one sits -- even during the course of a single day.
The facts of history will continue to be selected and shaped by those with an agenda; but without accountability for abuses and the redress of international law, we are held hostage to the psychology of ruthless leaders.
To maintain international order, we must address human-rights violations even when the cause of those who commit them is just. In South Africa, Bishop Desmond Tutu threatened to resign from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he founded unless the ruling ANC party acknowledged their own violations during the struggle against apartheid. As Telford Taylor put it in his book The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, "The laws of war are not a one-way street."
Erna Paris's most recent book, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, won three prizes in Canada and was a Best Book of the Year in Canada, the United States and Britain.
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