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All in all, the tribunal looks less like a neutral court of international law than a creature of global power politics. Fears that such a body will dispense a justice tainted with double standards are unlikely to have been assuaged by plans to establish a permanent International Criminal Court which, as then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook assured Newsnight viewers last year, ³is not a court set up to bring to book Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom or Presidents of the United States²... (see below)
How true!...
JJ
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From: Branka Josilo-Perry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Marbles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The Times editorial
Date: Mon, Jul 2, 2001, 4:54 pm
MONDAY JULY 02 2001
Milosevic might be a monster - but this is no way to bring him to justice
MICK HUME
Whatever untruths he might tell in the dock, Slobodan Milosevic surely had a point when he described his forthcoming trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal as a ³political circus². The debate over war crimes often reveals motives that have rather more to do with politics than justice.
The former Yugoslav President may be guilty of many crimes. The court at The Hague will be asking what happened in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia, and to what extent Milosevic can be held responsible. There are, however, some broader questions about the current drive for war crimes trials that we might all do well to ponder in the months before the hearings begin.
What exactly do we understand by a war crime? This question has always been politically loaded. Military conflict is not cricket, and combatants rarely behave like gentlemen. In the brutalising circumstances of war, all kinds of normal people become capable of doing terrible things, and one man¹s act of war is another¹s atrocity. On what basis do we single out some as war crimes? Why now? In the half century after the trials of leading Nazis at Nuremberg, many atrocities were committed around the world, a good many of them by governments allied to the West in the Cold War. Yet there was never any serious consideration given to setting up an international tribunal. So why is there now such enthusiasm for war crimes trials in relation to the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia? And even there, it is at least worth asking why Milosevic has been singled out. He has blood on his hands, but it is hard to see how that makes him much different from Croatia¹s late President Tudjman, or the other Stalinist-turned-nationalist politicians engaged in a local power struggle in the Balkans.
Is it possible for a Western soldier or statesman to commit a war crime? History suggests that we tend to think not. Proposals that Britons and Americans should be tried over acts of war in the Falklands, the Gulf or Serbia have been quickly dismissed. And what of the response on those occasions when it is acknowledged that Western commanders were responsible for a massacre? In April 1919, at Amritsar, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire unprovoked on a crowd of unarmed Indian protesters, leaving almost 400 dead. The Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab supported it as ³the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect². Dyer was relieved of his command, but returned to England a hero to many, who presented him with a purse of thousands of pounds and a sword inscribed ³Saviour of the Punjab².
In March 1968, US infantrymen under the command of Lieutenant William Calley massacred the civilian population of the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai in four hours. When Calley eventually faced a court martial, he said: ³I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy . . . I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified the same.² Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment. After just three days in prison, President Richard Nixon ordered that he be moved to his apartment under house arrest. Three years later he was free on parole.
Back in the present, another question remains as to whether the war crimes tribunal should sit in judgment on a former head of a sovereign state. It is arguable that the existence of this tribunal is an infringement of international law. It was set up by the permanent members of the UN Security Council ‹ the US, UK, France, Russia and China ‹ in contravention of the UN¹s own principle of non-intervention in the affairs of member states. There are no juries at The Hague, and measures have been permitted during trials ‹ such as the use of hearsay evidence and anonymous witnesses ‹ that even new Labour Home Secretaries have so far fought shy of proposing for UK courts.
All in all, the tribunal looks less like a neutral court of international law than a creature of global power politics. Fears that such a body will dispense a justice tainted with double standards are unlikely to have been assuaged by plans to establish a permanent International Criminal Court which, as then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook assured Newsnight viewers last year, ³is not a court set up to bring to book Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom or Presidents of the United States².
None of us need lose much sleep over the fate of Milosevic. But perhaps it is time that the process of war crimes trials itself was subjected to some more testing cross-examination.
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