Taking Vengeance Lessons from The Hague
Now I know. Like them, I sat at home for days after the brutal, surreal attack on New York, glued to the same endless TV coverage. Like them, I could do nothing from my new home in the Netherlands, where we've all come because of the Balkans war: me to cover its aftermath at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, them to escape it. You want to go home, but the TV is the closest you get.
At first there are no planes, and then there is fear and then, eventually, there is work for freelance journalists like myself as the world slowly remembers its neglected parts. Still, it's like my grandmother died and I'm not there. More than two weeks on, I'm still unreasonable: jealous of the buildings in Amsterdam, all of which are still standing with their people safe inside. My stomach still can't handle the sight of a plane descending into Schipol Airport.
I watched the news as person after person missing a relative or loved one struggled to get before the camera to show their pictures, tell their stories. I understood their increasingly unreasonable hope, how they clung to the belief that their loved ones were alive, despite watching on television as 110 stories collapsed on them, despite the reality that more than a week after the events, there were no survivors being pulled from the wreckage.
Like the women I've heard in the tribunal's courtroom who lost their husbands and sons in the Srebrenica massacres six years ago--when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were lined up and executed in fields, on farms, in cultural centers and schools--they would go on hoping until they had proof that their loved ones were dead, that they weren't prisoners in a Serbian jail or wandering the streets of New York in a daze.
A ring of revenge
There's a lot of talk about justice these days.
When I hear President Bush speak about "smoking them out of their holes," about "getting them running and bringing them to justice," I'm hoping he means bringing those responsible to trial. But then there's Old West talk of wanting them "dead or alive" or "bringing our enemies to justice or justice to our enemies."
Justice, President Bush-style, is sounding a lot like vengeance.
In my five years listening to horrific stories at the Yugoslav tribunal, I have yet to hear that a violent response has ever led to anything but more violence. And make no mistake about it: People have long-term memories, and before they forget, they pass them on to their kids, especially when it comes to murder and revenge.
So what are the options for bringing the perpetrators to justice?
If American officials have the evidence that it's Osama bin Laden--and if they can get him--the U.S. is the obvious place for a trial. Whether bin Laden would be able to get an impartial jury trial is another question. There is also the Lockerbie option: a trial in a neutral third country by, in this case, American judges. But whether the U.S. would agree to that or whether the Taliban would turn him over seems, for the moment, doubtful.
Despite this age of increasingly international justice, there's no international legal institution to deal with these kinds of crimes. The UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda are ad hoc, able to prosecute only crimes committed on those territories.
While the International Criminal Court, which one day will sit in The Hague, will cover crimes against humanity (and legal opinion seems to be that the attacks on the World Trade Center fall in that category: widespread or systematic, and against civilians), it won't include crimes that were committed before its statute is ratified. Only 37 countries out of the necessary 60 have ratified so far, and the U.S., which shudders at the thought of its citizens or institutions being subjected to international courts, is not among them (neither is Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia).
The consent problem
Which brings up the fundamental problem with international law: It's by consent, so if you're powerful and don't want to play by the rules, you don't have to. When the International Court of Justice in The Hague--the UN's highest judicial body, a place where states sue states--ruled in 1986 that the U.S. had to pay reparations to Nicaragua, the U.S. ignored the judgment.
Two years ago, I listened as Yugoslavia took the U.S. and nine other NATO members to the same court, seeking an immediate halt to the bombing and accusing NATO of genocide. It was a particularly reprehensible argument coming from lawyers of then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's regime. Unfortunately, the U.S. argument was not that much more palatable. America's lawyers argued that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the case because when the U.S. ratified the 1948 Genocide Convention (in 1988), it did so with a reservation: A country could not sue it for genocide unless it consented.
State Department lawyers pointed out that the U.S. was not alone: Albania, Algeria, China and Rwanda had ratified the convention with the same reservation. Needless to say, the U.S. refused to give consent in this case, and the court dismissed it.
Legal, but ugly.
The Bush administration is now busy rallying the world it has largely shunned since coming to office--whether it's scrapping the Kyoto Protocol or plowing ahead with missile defense--to the collective cause. If, as seems to be the case, the world gets on board, maybe it's time for the U.S. to rethink its isolationist approach and be more of the global player it's asking everyone else to be, to be with the rest of the world instead of against it.
Lauren Comiteau is an American freelance writer and radio reporter in The Hague, where she specializes in covering Balkan war crimes trials.
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
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