WAR CRIMES: When the criminal blames the victim
By Sara Flounders
and Richard BeckerJune 10, 1999--It is hard to imagine a greater level of arrogance and deception than the 19 NATO war makers charging little Yugoslavia with war crimes. The Pentagon is leveling the charge to cover its own naked aggression.
All across Yugoslavia, water systems, power and heating plants, hospitals, universities, schools, apartment complexes, senior citizens' homes, bridges, factories, trains, buses, radio and TV stations, the telephone system, oil refineries, embassies, marketplaces and more have been deliberately destroyed by U.S./NATO planes in a ruthless 10-week bombing campaign.
More than 13,000 tons of bombs have crashed down on a country the size of Kentucky. Civilian casualties are now being counted by the thousands in a war that unquestionably violates all international law.
Yet as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia reached new levels of destruction against the civilian population, the International War Crimes Tribunal on May 28 announced the indictment of President Slobodan Milosevic and four other Yugoslav leaders for "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."
Not the attackers. Not Bill Clinton. Not Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac, Lamberto Dini or the other NATO warmakers. Instead, the tribunal indicted the leaders of the country being attacked.
What the media call the International War Crimes Tribunal is known more officially as the International Tribunal for Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia Since 1991. It was set up in 1993 by the U.S.-dominated United Nations Security Council, and is today an instrument of the same NATO countries that are raining death and destruction on Yugoslavia.
The indictments received prominent coverage in all the major corporate media, diverting attention from NATO's preparations for a massive ground operation.
However, under the headline "Clinton to order 90,000 troops to Kosovo," the May 26 London Times had reported that "there is a growing feeling in Washington and London that the alliance must prepare itself for a much bigger operation involving 150,000 to 160,000 troops."
This is the real story behind the "war crimes" indictments against Yugoslavia's leaders.
Tribunal lead prosecutor Louise Arbour of Canada and her staff obviously rushed to produce the "indictments" of Yugoslavia's leaders as part of the U.S./NATO military campaign. Before this, the tribunal had been widely perceived as a slow-moving body. Arbour warmly thanked the NATO countries for supplying the court with "intelligence information."
The tribunal charges, which have been predictably hailed by U.S. and other NATO leaders, describe several alleged massacres in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. They do not directly link the Yugoslav officials to these events.
On May 29, the New York Times published "key sections" of the "indictment." What is most remarkable about this document is that in its many thousands of words only one paragraph mentions in passing the "NATO air strikes," and nothing at all is said about the civil conflict raging in Kosovo, or the "Kosovo Liberation Army" forces that NATO is using.
Arbour and the tribunal conveniently seem not to notice that a war is going on at all. If they did, they might also have to consider bringing war crimes charges against their NATO sponsors. That, clearly, is out of the question for the tribunal.
NATO war crimes enumerated
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote on April 5, 1999, that "the U.S. and NATO attacks on Yugoslavia are acts of war which violate the UN Charter and the most basic international and humanitarian law." Clark described NATO as "virtually all the colonial powers, past and present, which have systematically repressed and exploited poor and underdeveloped countries."
James Bissett, Canada's ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1990 to 1992, said April 19 that the NATO attack was "clearly in violation of international law, in violation of the UN Charter."
Walter Rockler, a prosecutor at the 1945-1946 Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal at the end of World War II, wrote an opinion piece for the May 23 Chicago Tribune. He denounced NATO's murderously destructive bombing campaign. The accusation that Milosevic is guilty of war crimes, said Rockler, "is a mere pretext for our arrogant assertion of dominance and power in defiance of international law."
Rockler quoted the actual wording of the Nuremberg judgment against the Nazis. It exposes the most serious U.S. crime: "To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
He points out that the U.S. government is in violation of the UN Charter, which explicitly prohibits intervention in the domestic jurisdiction of a country. The bombing also violates many General Assembly resolutions. NATO's own charter and the U.S. Constitution are also flagrantly violated.
Douglass Cassel, director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University's School of Law, wrote on April 22: "At Nuremberg, leading Nazis were sentenced to death for crimes against peace, defined to mean waging a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties. Because NATO's war violates the UN Charter--an international treaty--it is a crime against peace."
Bombing civilians is war crime
Unrestricted air bombing is barred under international law. So is bombing the infrastructure of a country-the waterworks, electricity plants, bridges, factories and so on. Bombing chemical plants and using radioactive weapons also violate international conventions.
Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to "attack civilian targets or to destroy or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population." The U.S./NATO bombers repeat these war crimes every day in Yugoslavia. The attacks on civilian as well as military targets are most concentrated in Kosovo, but they cover the entire country.
In the midst of the highly publicized crime of NATO missiles and bombs destroying the whole fabric of life in Yugoslavia, how is it possible for a court to charge the victims of this international crime with war crimes?
In the imperialist-dominated world--as in U.S. courtrooms--the rich and powerful judge the poor, not the other way around.
Just what is the tribunal? How did it come into existence and what is its purpose?
The International War Crimes Tribunal is not in any way part of the International Court of Justice, or World Court, which has been based at The Hague in the Netherlands for 50 years. This War Crimes Tribunal, a legal fabrication, was located at The Hague in order to masquerade as a prestigious body. The confusion is intentional. There is no provision for such a tribunal anywhere in the UN Charter.
The War Crimes Tribunal is a political court controlled by the U.S. government and NATO. U.S. appointees act as investiga tors, prosecutors, judges, jury and jailers.
He who pays the piper...
The government of Yugoslavia immediately denounced the charges as politically motivated and rejected the tribunal's authority to pass judgment on its internal affairs. No such "court" exists to judge other countries--a fact that in itself points to the tribunal's real agenda.
Yugoslavia has denounced the court as "a private court" set up by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, NATO Supreme Commander in Europe Gen. Wesley Clark and State Department spokesperson James Rubin.
This very apt description was confirmed by the official NATO spokesperson Jamie Shay when he bragged: "We are the biggest supporters of the War Crimes Tribunal. NATO finances the International War Crimes Tribunal."
The massive coverage given to this charge of war crimes must be contrasted to the minimal mention of a case Yugoslavia filed in the International Court of Justice at The Hague on April 29, charging 10 NATO countries with bombing Yugo slavia and violating its sovereignty.
The lawsuit lists the many international conventions NATO has violated by targeting civilians, the civilian infrastructure and the environment. The International Court of Justice is scheduled to rule on Yugoslavia's charges on June 2.
Were it to actually rule against the United States and NATO, would that stop the Pentagon's war drive?
In May 1984 the World Court ordered the Pentagon to stop mining Nicaragua's harbors. But the U.S. government refused to abide by the decision and rejected the court's competence.
Last year, the U.S. government sabotaged an international effort in Rome to establish an independent International War Crimes Tribunal. Washington was quite open in explaining that it would block any effort to establish a court or any type of international mechanism where it could be charged with war crimes.
Washington decided to brand Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic a war criminal long before the actual events for which he is charged even occurred in Kosovo. Last July 18 in a unanimous vote, the U.S. Senate resolved to bring Milosevic before the War Crimes Tribunal. It also voted to provide the money necessary to secure the indictment.
The crime of resistance
A possible indictment for war crimes has been hanging over the heads of political leaders in Yugoslavia as a way to try to force them to comply with NATO's demands. Over a year ago, in an April 1998 referendum on Kosovo, the population of Serbia--including Kosovo--voted almost 95 percent against allowing Western intervention in the province of Kosovo. So no matter who was president of Yugoslavia, they could not comply with the popular mandate and at the same time give in to NATO and allow a foreign army of occupation, which is what the U.S. demanded at Rambouillet.
Legality and class rule
Who writes the laws and decides how and against whom they are enforced?
The law is not an abstraction that comes from somewhere above human social relations. In feudal society the laws protected the rights of the landlords and nobility to exploit the peasants' labor. Any challenge to the nobility's rights was a crime punishable by death. In slave society the rights that existed were only for the slave owner.
In the United States, the country with the biggest proportion of its population in prison in the world, the courts are weapons of the rich and powerful to enforce laws that protect their property against the working class--especially the poorest, who are disproportionately from the nationally oppressed.
In the international arena the vast wealth of the very countries that today are making the charge of war crimes has been accumulated through piracy, the slave trade, colonial occupation and past imperialist wars of plunder.
The U.S.-led NATO war against Yugoslavia is the latest in a long record of imperialist crimes around the world--Vietnam, the Congo, Algeria, China, Guatemala, Iraq, Indonesia, Palestine, Korea, World War I and World War II, and many more. The casualties of imperialism's wars, conquests and blockades run into the hundreds of millions. And the toll continues to mount today.
The U.S., British, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese empires covered most of the world until after World War II, when a rising tide of national liberation struggles brought the era of direct colonialism largely to an end.
Attack on sovereignty
The War Crimes Tribunal is a political weapon against the sovereignty of every oppressed country. In Bosnia, which was ripped away from Yugoslavia, the U.S. government and the other major imperialist powers tried to establish the precedent that through the International War Crimes Tribunal they can decide who runs for office, can remove elected officials, arrest them and take them to another country for trial and prosecution.
However, because this court is controlled by the Security Council, the United States with its veto power is immune from prosecution.
Yet it is important to not politically abdicate this arena of struggle. In the same way that workers and the oppressed mobilize to free a political prisoner facing execution, it is important to defend an oppressed country that is standing condemned in the docket.
It is President Bill Clinton, Gen. Wesley Clark and all the other leaders of NATO who should be indicted for war crimes, for crimes against humanity and for violating the genocide convention. Even if the imperialist countries control all the levers of power and enforcement, a political indictment can be made by the organizations that represent people in struggle all over the world.
An indictment for war crimes can expose the imperialists' blatant disregard for the very laws that they themselves have written.
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