The practice of prosecution of international crimes

[MJ]

Analysis: War crime tribunals are here to stay

 

United Press International.

Sunday, 25 February 2001 22:55 (ET)

 

By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst

 

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- Hard cases make bad law. But common crimes make law and punishment essential.

 

This is the argument that looks likely to prove overwhelming for the likely multiplication of international war crimes tribunals approved by the Untied Nations.

 

Two such tribunals are currently sitting in The Hague, capital of The Netherlands and in the Tanzanian city of Arusha. The Hague Tribunal last Thursday convicted three Bosnian Serbs of crimes against humanity and on other charges over mass atrocities committed during the 1992-95 civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

 

The Arusha Tribunal is slowly trying hundreds of Hutu tribesmen accused of playing key roles in one of the most appalling mass crimes of modern times, the 1994 massacre of 800,000 Tutsis -- and some

moderate Hutus -- in only a month in Rwanda.

 

Critics of these tribunals are many, and some of them may hold influential positions in the new Bush administration in the United

States. They note that the precedent of establishing such commissions is virtually certain to be abused and can be used by well

-organized totalitarian or anti-Western blocks as legal and propaganda weapons against democratic societies.

 

They also note that the precedent of setting up international tribunals could cause more chaos than it solves. The precedent

gravely undermines the legal status and power of any nation state, making all nation states potentially subservient to international codes of conduct. That could greatly encourage separatist and terrorist groups seeking to dismember or destabilize democratic societies.

 

The Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals that were set up in 1946 to try accused Nazi and Japanese war criminals have been cited as precedents for the two current tribunals in The Hague and Arusha for the 1998 Rome Treaty that empowered them.

 

But critics of the Arusha and Hague Tribunals note that the Nuremberg and Tokyo ones were set up to deal with unprecedented mass crimes of savagery unparalleled in modern human history and were expressly

designed to try and create a precedent that would deter such conduct as happening again. They argue that the likely proliferation of future tribunals will not in fact deter or serve justice on real

massacres.

 

Instead, the critics say, such tribunals are more likely to become tools to inhibit constitutional democracies like the United States, the Western European nations, Japan and India when they are confronted with lawless and cynical authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton was an enthusiastic

advocate of such tribunals. This was ironic, since he had already shown himself extremely reluctant to intervene in order to prevent

the worst outrages of the Bosnia conflict between 1991 and 1995.

 

Clinton's record was even worse on Rwanda, a remote country without strategic significance where a small and rapid deployment of forces led by U.S. or British peacekeepers could well have prevented one of

the most horrific chapters of modern history.

 

But Clinton refused to intervene, in part through sheer negligence and in part because he did not want to anger France, in whose

Franco-phone sphere of influence Rwanda was.

 

President George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, are far more reluctant and cautious to commit the United States to treaties and precedents that could over-ride and undermine U.S. national sovereignty and freedom of action.

 

Powell is also expected to appoint John Bolton, a former prominent U.S. official and current Number Two man at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, to a senior State Department

position, probably at undersecretary level.

 

Bolton is an outspoken critic of such sweeping supra-national legal precedents. And he can be expected, if appointed, to firmly commit the massive international weight of the United States to oppose the

widespread use-and abuse-of such tribunals.

 

Bush, Powell and - probably -- Bolton may well try and turn back the tidal wave of international sentiment flowing in favor of such tribunals. But they are likely to have no better luck than King Canute in England a millennium ago when he tried to command the waves of the sea to reverse themselves.

 

For the history of the world since 1945 has driven home the frightful lesson that Adolf Hitler and the military tyrants of wartime Japan were not once in a millennium monsters in approving the massacres of and tortures of civilians and prisoners of war that they did.

 

Nor could Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong in China -- both of whom were responsible for scores of millions of murders

apiece -- be seen as rare scourges that could only come every 1,000 years or so. The history of the world in the past 50 years provides all too much disturbing evidence that ethnic massacres and tortures

on enormous scales, involving hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people., seem to come perfectly naturally to human

beings of every race, ethnic make-up and genetic descent around the world, if political conditions permit it.

 

Very often these massacres are entirely forgotten or ignored by the rest of the world, apart from their victims and perpetrators. Hitler openly boasted that he was emboldened to launch his grand design to

exterminate the Jewish people because no one remembered the genocide of the Armenian people by the Young Turk regime ruling the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

 

At least one and a half million Armenians died in horror. And the Turkish military junta who directed it even called what they did their "Final Solution" to the Armenian problem, a term happily appropriated by Hitler 25 years later.

 

Stalin starved 10 million Ukrainians to death before Hitler even took power in Germany. The New York Times chief correspondent in Moscow at the time, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize denying that the deliberately inflicted man-made famine that caused such suffering had even taken place. And at that very time, Stalin was being lauded as an outstanding humanitarian leader by writers H.G. Wells and George

Bernard Shaw and the acclaimed American journalist H.L. Mencken. (Mencken also deeply admired Hitler, but regarded President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a truly evil figure).

 

Perhaps most troubling to those who would see Hitler and Stalin -- and maybe Mao -- as untypical aberrations in human history are the more recent examples of Cambodia and Rwanda.

 

The Khmer Rouge communist guerrillas seized power in Cambodia in 1975 following the conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North Vietnamese. In the next four years, they exterminated up to 3 million of their own people, who only numbered 7 million to start with. The ideological and "moral" justification for this slaughter was the

half-baked sociological theories of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot which he had developed as a Ph.D. student at the Sorbonne University in Paris, one of the oldest and most prestigious centers of learning in

the world, 20 years before.

 

The Hutu killers in Rwanda did not even bother for Pol Pot's fig leaves of sociological theory to justify their massacre of 800,000 Tutsis in a month. Their efficiency and passion in maintaining such

an "impressive;' rate of slaughter even outdid the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, or Special Action Units, that over a year killed a

million and half Jews in the Soviet union during 1941-42.

 

The concept of setting up international tribunals under United Nations auspices to bring to justice those responsible for such

appalling atrocities is filled with flaws and pitfalls. But its critics appear unlikely to prevail for the simplest and most

compelling of reasons.

 

The previous framework of international, law had seen no such tribunals in operation anywhere since Nuremberg and Tokyo. And it had manifestly failed to deter or bring any semblance of justice to the perpetrators of previous genocides over the half-century since the end of World War II. Current UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had become convinced that some kind of international legal framework had to be set up urgently to try and create a deterrent and instrument of

avenging justice to prevent future such crimes.

 

He believed such tribunals were also needed in order to show the world that those who committed such massacres could and would be

brought to justice.

 

The current tribunals operating in Arusha and The Hague are the first, halting examples of this effort in practice. Whatever the new U.S. administration believes or wants, they are unlikely to be the last.

 

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

 

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