Blaming the Victim
Ramsey Clark
On June 10, 2000, the International Tribunal on U.S./NATO War Crimes in Yugoslavia held its final hearing in New York City. The evidence of U.S. and NATO aggression and war crimes against Yugoslavia was clear, compelling and massive. All who participated in the long process of gathering, presenting and evaluating it had a strong sense of accomplishment and a belief that if effectively communicated, the information gathered and work done by this tribunal would help deter the U.S. and NATO members from major violence against their chosen enemies. This tribunal was a people’s tribunal, a forum for those who opposed aggression in the Balkans.
Another tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, had indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in May 1999 for war crimes in Kosovo. It was during the U.S. assault and well before the decision of the people’s tribunal in New York that found the U.S and NATO leaders guilty. The ICTY indictment was so political and unsupportable, and Yugoslavia remained so strong that few took it seriously. Above all, the overwhelming evidence that the U.S. and NATO were the aggressors and committed war crimes throughout Yugoslavia was so clear that the risk of any real threat from the indictment seemed remote.
In the early 1960s when African Americans were beaten by the police in Alabama, Mississippi and other states, then charged with assaulting an officer, lawyers in the Department of Justice labeled the offense “resisting assault.” That phrase applies perfectly to the conduct of President Milosevic. As the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia he was sworn to protect and defend the sovereignty of his nation and the lives and property of its people from foreign aggression. Every citizen has the same duty.
The simple truth and the legal defense to the charges against President Milosevic is that he did all that he could to protect his country from military aggression by a superpower—and Western European countries it manipulated—that had the capacity to destroy all of Yugoslavia without ever setting foot on its soil. U.S. planes attacked civilians, civilian housing and facilities and utilities and properties essential to human life every day for seventy-eight days with aerial bombardments against which there was no defense.
The U.S. simultaneously motivated and financed domestic insurrection within Yugoslavia. For seeking to protect his country and its people, and to demonize Yugoslavia for history and make itself seem virtuous, the U.S. caused the indictment of President Milosevic to be obtained before an illegitimate court created at U.S. insistence in violation of the Charter of the United Nations, corrupting international law.
Can peace be found by punishing only the defeated weak after the fact, while the powerful victor engages in widespread military and economic warfare and spends ever more money on ever more dangerous arms? Because the Nuremberg Tribunal and the military trials following the Pacific war were created by victor nations who chose defeated enemy leaders for prosecution and defined their crimes, the criminality of the victors’ conduct in bombing and burning civilian populations by the hundreds of thousands over whole cities, like Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and scores of others and the use of atomic bombs against overwhelmingly civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have never been established in international law.
U.S. bombing in North Korea from 1950 to 1953 was the principal contributing cause of the deaths of three million civilians. Cities in North Vietnam and civilian areas in and outside “free fire zones” in South Vietnam were the direct object of attack by United States aircraft, artillery and ground forces for years, contributing to the wartime death toll of several million Vietnamese. In 1983, the U.S. bombed civilian sites in Grenada, whose total population is 110,000, killing several hundred including sixteen patients in the public mental hospital.
In 1986, the U.S. bombed the sleeping Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in surprise early morning attacks killing hundreds of civilians and damaging four foreign embassies. Yet Libya is demonized and threatened with a criminal tribunal and two of its citizens have been tried and one convicted in an illegal proceeding before a one-time, one-case court on practically no evidence—and what little evidence there was was questionable—for allegedly sabotaging the plane that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland.
In 1989, the U.S. bombed civilians in Panama from the Atlantic to the Pacific, killing two thousand people or more. U.S. forces had occupied Panamanian soil throughout the century. They surrounded and forced the surrender of President Manuel Noriega from Vatican offices where he sought sanctuary. Yet the U.S. had paid Noriega $200,000 a year to serve its interests. It then took the president of Panama to Florida by force, tried and convicted him of crimes against the U.S. and he remains imprisoned in Florida. His wife and family are refused permission to remain in the U.S. to visit him.
In Iraq in 1991 all major cities and utilities and infrastructure supporting civilian life, buildings, water, power, transportation, communication, food production, storage and distribution, health care, schools, churches, mosques, synagogues and and foreign embassies were the direct object of U.S. aerial and missile attacks. Many tens of thousands civilians were killed directly and many more indirectly. The U.S. claims it had 159 casualties, a third from friendly fire, none from combat. Economic sanctions since August 6, 1990, have caused the death of one and a half million people in Iraq, many of them infants and children.
And these are only a handful of the scores of illegal U.S. military interventions, attacks and economic assaults in the last century.
Where power has impunity even though it wreaks violence on the poor, the weak and the defenseless, then corrupts truth and justice, there can be no hope for peace and little hope for humanity.
August 2001
Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general in the Lyndon Johnson administration, international lawyer and human rights advocate, went to Belgrade in March 1999 and again in May 1999 to show his solidarity during the bombing. He has opposed U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, the Balkans, Sudan and many other countries. He has authored or contributed chapters to Crime in America; The Fire this Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf; Metal of Dishonor; NATO in the Balkans, The Children are Dying, and many other books.
The book HIDDEN ADENDA, U.S./NATO TAKEOVER OF YUGOSLAVIA, from which this piece is excerpted, is available for purchase online from www.leftbooks.com.
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