Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Human Rights and International Law, Part II. posted by Richard Seymour
Last month, the Spectator carried a report suggesting that Slobodan Milosevic may have to be acquitted from most if not all charges levelled against him by the ICTY. I responded that:perhaps part of the problem is the hypocrisy of those organising the trials. It reminds me of the way in which certain obvious war crimes were ruled legal at Nuremberg because the Allies were guilty of them too. How can one try Milosevic for, say, knowingly slaughtering civilians when Nato did the same by bombing a television centre they knew to be manned and by shifting to civilian targets after three weeks? There is a clear lesson here - monsters should be tried by their victims, not by imperial interlopers. Unlike the attempted Pinochet trial, this initiative emerged as the result of a Western desire to validate their aggression in the Balkans, not as the result of a grass-roots campaign to bring a murdering bastard to justice.
Now, a regular contributor to the MediaLens message board, Sue C, has provided an invaluable exhange from the Milosevic trial which illustrates my point:
Milosevic:"...... then the Vance-Owen Plan in May
1993, and surely it follows from this -- or it appears that you are reproaching me for not having resorted to some more drastic measures in favour of the Vance-Owen Plan as if I had abandoned it but in fact you abandoned it. And I don't mean you personally but I mean the international community. The Vance-Owen Plan was abandoned in the first place by the Americans, or rather they didn't even support it. They didn't want to support it. Isn't that true? And they made it known to the Serbs that they didn't consider the plan to be a good one. And then we from Belgrade acted as Don Quixote who advocated the plan which was being undermined by the international community and among that community the largest world power. Isn't that true or not?"
Owen: "There's a great deal of truth in that."
The trouble, once again, is not that Milosevic is innocent; it is that those pretending to hold him to account (the US & European powers) are themselves guilty several times over. The realpolitik behind it was hardly better than that which informed Milosevic's despicable behaviour. For example, a leaked Pentagon document, known as "The Planning Guide" (and reported in the New York Times on March 8th, 1992), said:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…. First, the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
...
It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defence and security as well as the channel for US influence and participation in European security affairs … We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.
Clearly not the armed wing of Amnesty International.