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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East
Milosevic and Sharon: when is a war criminal not a war criminal?
By Chris Marsden
2 May 2002
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In the aftermath of the Jenin massacre, some questions beg to be asked. One
obvious query should, by rights, be posed by every major newspaper in the United
States and Europe: Why is Slobodan Milosevic on trial, but not Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon?
To raise this question is not a mark of political sympathy for Milosevic�a nationalist
and pro- capitalist politician who shares responsibility for the political disaster
that
befell the Yugoslav people. Rather it serves as an indictment of the United Nations
war crimes tribunal at The Hague, and of its successor, the International Criminal
Court. The blatant double standard in the treatment of Milosevic and Sharon
demonstrates that these courts are instruments of imperialist foreign policy.
If there are any objective standards of guilt involved in the decision to prosecute
someone for war crimes, then Sharon should be in the dock. That he is not stands as
proof that The Hague tribunal is a political show trial, mounted on behalf of the
United States and the other NATO powers in order to justify their war against Serbia
and their ongoing military occupation of the Balkans.
The Hague�s juridical credentials have already been severely undermined. The
former Yugoslav president has mounted an effective defence, levelling counter-
charges of crimes against peace by the Western powers due to their campaign to
destabilise Yugoslavia. Fresh evidence has also emerged contradicting some of the
central charges against him. The report by the Netherlands Institute for War
Documentation, which implicated Dutch peacekeepers and the United Nations in the
massacre of around 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, found no
evidence that either Milosevic or �the Serbian authorities in Belgrade had a direct
role
in the massacre.�
Even those supportive of The Hague tribunal have been forced to question why
Milosevic alone has been singled out for prosecution. In February the International
Criminal Court effectively sabotaged a possible case against Sharon. Under a 1993
law, Belgium gave itself the right to try war crimes committed by anyone, anywhere in
the world. A group of Palestinians petitioned for Sharon to be tried for war crimes
related to the massacre of 2,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatilla, Beirut, in September 1982. But the International Court ruled that a former or
serving government official �enjoys full immunity from criminal jurisdiction� and
cannot be tried in a foreign court.
In the months since that ruling, Sharon has added the invasion of the West Bank and
the massacre at Jenin to his list of war crimes. Yet he continues to be afforded the
full honours of a head of state by the Bush administration and its European
counterparts, while Milosevic is detained in a prison cell.
It is highly unlikely that Sharon will face a trial like Milosevic, because there is
nothing
impartial about the court proceedings at The Hague. The US and European powers
were exempted from prosecution by the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal, while neither
Israel nor the US even recognise the International Criminal Court�s authority to try
its
citizens, and that court�s statutes are so framed that any of the major powers has the
right to veto a prosecution of its politicians or military personnel.
Yet by any reasonable criteria, not only is the case against Sharon more clear-cut
than the charges levelled against Milosevic, but the specific crimes he is accused of
are of greater magnitude.
Milosevic is charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the
laws and customs of war in relation to the wars in Croatia in 1991, Bosnia in 1992-95
and Kosovo in 1999. The charges relating to Croatia and Bosnia were only added
because the case against Milosevic with regards to Kosovo was deemed to be too
weak to ensure a conviction. The actual deaths in Kosovo for which he is deemed
responsible�cited in the indictment as Albanian victims of Serb gunmen-soldiers,
police or paramilitaries�number 346. Sharon was already found responsible for the
Sabra and Shatilla massacre by an Israeli tribunal, which then proceeded to give him
a formal slap on the wrist that allowed him to continue his political career and even
occupy Israel�s highest office.
The claim that Serbian forces massacred 45 Albanian civilians in the Kosovan village
of Racak in 1999 provided the immediate impulse for NATO to declare war
Milosevic�s regime. But Racak has always been the subject of controversy.
The alleged massacre is said to have taken place �on or about� January 15, 1999.
The vagueness of the charge is due to the absence of any independent witnesses.
Serbia has consistently claimed that the bodies were those of Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) combatants who had died in earlier armed conflicts and were then
gathered together for propaganda purposes. The European Union sent an
investigating team headed by an American official and Washington uncritically
endorsed the KLA�s version of events as proof of a �crime against humanity�
committed on the orders of Milosevic. Less than two months later NATO planes,
headed by the US, began bombing Belgrade.
A widely publicised report issued this year by a team of Finnish pathologists has
given weight to the Serbian version of events at Racak. In an interview broadcast by
Germany�s ARD television, Dr. Helena Ranta said she was �conscious that one could
say that the whole scene in this small valley was arranged... This conclusion was
included in our first investigation report, and also in our later forensic
investigations,
which we made in November 1999 directly in Racak.�
What then of Jenin? Here there is no doubt that Israel committed atrocities. Every
television news channel, every major newspaper has published pictures of Israeli
helicopters raining bombs on civilian housing and of tanks bulldozing buildings.
Reporters spoke of a stench of death emanating from the ruins and of corpses lying
in rows in the streets, because the Israeli Defence Force had been prevented by a
court order from burying them in mass unmarked graves.
Most initial estimates were of hundreds dead, but this could not be verified because
Israel refused to let in official UN investigators, while its armed forces continued to
plough corpses into the ground. The latest reports speak of 54 corpses, including
many who could not possibly have been combatants�such as women, children, old
men, even cripples confined to wheelchairs.
In contrast to Racak, the Western powers have shown an extraordinary reluctance to
charge Israel with any crime whatsoever. The UN has bent over backwards to
accommodate to Israel�s demands that any inquiry be a purely fact-finding mission
that would deliver no verdict and lead to no prosecutions. For its part, Washington
could hardly bring itself to issue a word of criticism. Secretary of State Colin Powell
made no attempt to visit Jenin personally during his diplomatic mission to Israel last
month. This did not stop him from testifying before a Senate subcommittee that he
had seen no evidence of a massacre in Jenin and describing the proposed UN
investigation as a means of dispelling �the coarse speculation that was out there as
to what happened, with terms being tossed around like massacre and mass graves,
none of which so far seems to be the case.�
One must also take note of the Sharon government�s official rationale for the actions
of the Israeli Defence Force at Jenin. Israel rejects charges of having carried out a
massacre by claiming that only 40 or so people died and that most of these were
members of Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and or militant groups. Israel�s estimate of the
number of victims cannot, to put it mildly, be taken uncritically. But it is noteworthy
that its figure of Palestinian fatalities in Jenin is almost identical to the numbers
killed
at Racak�who were said by Serbia to be KLA combatants.
No Western politician and few journalists balk at calling Racak a massacre, whereas
a large number of articles have appeared lending credence to Israel�s defence of its
actions in Jenin and accepting that no massacre took place. Peter Beaumont, writing
in the Observer April 21, cautioned the reader, �It is easy to be distracted by the
presence of the bodies... By their very weight of numbers laid out on the
ground�almost 30 on this afternoon�they suggested themselves as victims of a
massacre.�
Not so, says Beaumont, �a massacre�in the sense it is usually understood�did not
take place in Jenin�s refugee camp. Whatever crimes were committed here�and it
appears there were many�a deliberate and calculated massacre of civilians by the
Israeli army was not among them.�
Beaumont then makes the unfounded claim that �it is increasingly clear from
evidence collected by this paper and other journalists, that the majority of those so
far recovered have been Palestinian fighters from Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the al-
Aqsa Brigades.�
An April 29 BBC report interviewing Amnesty International�s British military expert,
Territorial Army Major David Holley, refers to 54 corpses. These include several
civilians, �with possibly 20 or 30 unaccounted for� and �one or two civilians who were
shot and executed� and �snipers cutting people down in the streets with clear views
of civilians trying to get away from the fighting�.
But Holley still manages to assert that �massacre is a word that is too often used in
these sort of situations and it doesn�t really help,� before declaring his support for
Israel�s efforts to determine the composition of the UN investigative team. The BBC
ran the piece under a headline that placed quotation marks around the word
massacre.
Seven days after Beaumont�s article, Sharon had made crystal clear that he would
not allow even the most toothless UN investigation of Jenin.
A number of additional points can be made:
The indictment against Milosevic admits that the Albanian separatist KLA precipitated
civil war in Kosovo through �a campaign of armed insurgency and violent resistance
to the Serbian authorities� involving �attacks primarily targeting FRY and Serbian
police forces�. Yet Israel�s assertion that its incursion into Palestinian territory
is a
means of combating a terrorist threat is accepted as good coin, while the Serbian
government�s efforts to stem a terrorist threat on its own territory is condemned as a
war crime.
To date, The Hague tribunal has had no success in identifying an occasion in which
Milosevic himself can be shown to have authorised or sanctioned any of the
atrocities cited, which are mostly attributed to irregular Serb nationalist forces that
were not under his command. In Jenin and elsewhere there is no such ambiguity.
The destruction on the West Bank has been carried out by the armed forces under
the direct orders of the military top brass and under Sharon�s authority as head of
government.
Perhaps most telling of all, the case against Milosevic rests in the final analysis on
the assertion that, whether or not his direct responsibility can be proven, his
advocacy of ethnic cleansing created the political environment for atrocities to take
place. But one is forced to ask, how can Sharon�s policy with regards to the West
Bank and Gaza Strip be designated as anything other than ethnic cleansing?
Whether or not civilians were deliberately targeted for killing, the IDF�s systematic
destruction of housing, roads, transport, electricity, water supplies, sewage�every
necessity of life�is aimed at forcing ethnic Arabs to flee their lands and make them
available for further military bases and Jewish settlements to be established. This
fact alone testifies to the double standard employed by the Western powers and the
hypocrisy of all claims by Israel�s apologists to be motivated by humanitarian
considerations.
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World Socialist Web Site
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