>From AntiWar.Com
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NATO's Home Free
by George Szamuely
New York Press
6/20/00
Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for
the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), announced the other day that she would not be
opening an investigation into NATO. "I am very satisfied," she explained, "that
there was no deliberate targeting of civilians or unlawful military targets by
NATO." This was hardly shocking news. Back in December she had already
reassured an anxious Clinton administration that "NATO is not under
investigation." The tribunal is what it has always been: an obedient creature
of the United States. In clear violation of Article 32 of its statute it gets
funding from the U.S. government. Prosecuting NATO would thus have brought
about its swift demise.
Yet NATO's violations of international law were so blatant and outrageous that
fat Carla had to make at least a show of "investigating." Her report
exonerating Clinton, Blair, Schroder and the rest of last year's band of heroes
is so laughably implausible that only the dim bulbs of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page could find comfort in it. Take cluster bombs, resorted to with
some frequency by NATO. "There is no specific treaty provision which prohibits
or restricts the use of cluster bombs," del Ponte's report announces
cheerfully. Well, yes. But the tribunal has not always taken this view, at
least not when it came to the Serbs. In 1995, the tribunal indicted Milan
Martic, president of the now-defunct Serb Republic of Krajina, charging him
with "violating the laws and customs of war" for ordering a missile attack on
Zagreb. What made it a war crime was that the missiles were fitted with cluster
bomb warheads. According to the indictment, a missile can be "fitted with
different warheads to accomplish distinct tasks: either to destroy military
targets or to kill people. When the [missile] is fitted with a �cluster
bomb'...it is an anti-personnel weapon designed only to kill people." Martic
was a war criminal because he launched an "unlawful attack against the civilian
population and individual citizens." So how is he different from NATO? Ah,
Martic's missile "landed in an area with no military objectives nearby... [It]
was not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the civilians of
Zagreb. There is no indication cluster bombs were used in such a fashion by
NATO." Really?
Here is how U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Short explained NATO strategy last
May to The Washington Post: "If you wake up in the morning and you have no
power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is
down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin
to ask, �Hey, Slobo, what's this all about? How much more of this do we have to
withstand?''' Sounds like terrorizing civilians to me. NATO's strategy was
directed at civilians and at nothing else. Hospitals, buses, retirement homes,
schools, markets, town centers, apartment buildings, refugee convoys all went
up in smoke. Yugoslavia's military, however, remained intact.
Yet del Ponte, her voice resonant with insincerity, insists that NATO only went
after legitimate military targets. Take the bombing of the Grdelica railroad
bridge, which led to the destruction of a passenger train and the death of at
least 12 people. Nothing wrong with that, she cries. The bridge was being used
as a resupply route by Serb forces in Kosovo. The pilot simply did not see the
passenger train coming. "Realizing the bridge was still intact, the controller
picked a second aim point on the bridge at the opposite end from where the
train had come and launched the second bomb." So the pilot knew that he had hit
a passenger train, yet he came back to dump a second bomb on the dead and
injured. Carla del Ponte has no problems with that. Nor is she concerned that
the attack was carried out in broad daylight when "collateral damage"�NATO's
beloved phrase�was likely to be at its highest. Del Ponte is evidently unaware
of Articles 51(4) and (5) of the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva
Convention I. These prohibit indiscriminate attacks. Such attacks would include
"(a)�bombardment by any methods...which treats as a single military objective a
number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives [and] (b) an
attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life." As for
that brave pilot, who completed his mission, he was clearly in violation of
Article 57 (2b) of Protocol I: "An attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it
becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one or is...expected to
cause incidental loss of civilian life."
Del Ponte also exonerates NATO from any blame for the destruction of the
headquarters of Serbian state television and radio (RTS), which killed 16
civilians. "The bombing of the TV studio," her report explains proudly, "was
part of a planned attack aimed at disrupting and degrading the C3 (Command,
Control and Communications) network." Yet another legitimate military target.
Trouble is, Carla, that is not what NATO claimed at the time. It is not even
what it is claiming today. According to the recent Amnesty International
report, NATO believed RTS a legitimate target because of its use as "an
instrument of propaganda and repression." NATO demanded that Milosevic provide
"equal time for uncensored [sic] Western news broadcasts for two periods of
three hours a day," to make Serb radio and television "an acceptable instrument
of public information." He refused, and 16 people died. Just the other day, at
the Brookings Institution, the demented Wesley Clark was defending the bombing.
Serbia's state media, he raved, was "a crucial instrument of Milosevic's
control over the Serb population and it exported fear, hatred and instability
into neighboring regions... So it was a legitimate target of war." Wesley
Clark, Carla del Ponte, Madeleine Albright�some day surely they will just be a
dim memory.
End<{{
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