by Christopher Black and Edward S. Herman (6-14-00) www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes] The article by Christopher Black and Edward Herman was written prior to the publication of the following news:
Question from globalresistance.com: Why on earth would anyone think the Tribunal is a tool of NATO? Louise Arbour: Among the many ironies of the NATO war against Yugoslavia was the role of the International Criminal Tribunal and its chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, elevated by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to Canada's highest court in 1999. It will be argued here that as Arbour and her Tribunal played a key role in EXPEDITING war crimes, an excellent case can be made that in a just world she would be in the dock rather than in judicial robes. Arbour To NATO's Rescue In the midst of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, Arbour participated in an April 20 press conference with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to receive from him documentation on Serb war crimes. Then on May 27, Arbour announced the indictment of Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his associates for war crimes. The inappropriateness of a supposedly judicial body doing this when Germany, Russia and other powers were trying to find a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, was staggering. At the April 20 appearance with Cook, Arbour stated that
But her appearance with Cook and the followup indictments fitted perfectly the needs of the NATO leadership. There had been growing criticism of NATO's increasingly civilian infrastructure-oriented bombing of Serbia. Arbour's and the Tribunal's intervention declaring the Serb leadership to be guilty of war crimes was a public relations coup that justified the NATO policies and helped permit the bombing to continue and escalate. This was pointed out repeatedly by NATO leaders and propagandists: for example, Madeleine Albright noted that the indictments
Arbour herself noted that "I am mindful of the impact that this indictment may have on the peace process," and although indicted individuals are "entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are convicted, the evidence upon which this indictment was confirmed raises serious questions about their suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace agreement." (CNN, May 27). So Arbour not only understood the political significance of her indictment, she suggested that interference with diplomatic efforts was justified because the indicted individuals, though not yet found guilty, were not suitable to negotiate. This hugely unjudicial political judgment, along with the convenient timing of the indictments, points up Arbour's and the Tribunal's highly political role. The Tribunal's Politicization Arbour's service to NATO in indicting Milosevic was the logical outcome of the Tribunal's de facto control and purpose. Established by the Security Council in the early 1990s to serve the Balkan policy ends of its dominant members, the Tribunal's funding and interlocking functional relationship with the leading NATO powers have made it NATO's instrument. (1) Although Article 32 of the Tribunal's Charter declares that its expenses shall be provided in the general budget of the United Nations, this proviso has been regularly violated. In 1994-1995 the U.S. government provided it with $700,000 in cash and $2.3 million in equipment, and numerous other U.S.-based governmental and non- governmental agencies have provided the Tribunal with resources. Article 16 of the Tribunal's charter states that the Prosecutor shall act independently and shall not seek or receive instruction from any government. This section also has been systematically violated. NATO sources have regularly made claims suggesting their authority over the Tribunal: "We will make a decision on whether Yugoslav actions against ethnic Albanians constitute genocide," states a USIA Fact Sheet, and Cook asserted at his April 20 press conference with Arbour that "we are going to focus on the war crimes being committed in Kosovo and our determination to bring those responsible to justice, " as if he and Arbour were a team jointly deciding on who should be charged for war crimes. Tribunal officials have even bragged about "the strong support of concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary Albright," further referred to as "mother of the Tribunal" (by Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, president of the Tribunal). In 1996 Arbour met with the Secretary-General of NATO and its supreme commander to "establish contacts and begin discussing modalities of cooperation and assistance." Numerous other meetings have occurred between prosecutor and NATO, which was given the function of Tribunal gendarme. Arbour acknowleged (April 20) that "the real danger is whether we would fall into [following somebody's political agenda] inadvertently by being in the hands of information-providers who might have an agenda that we would not be able to discern." But even an imbecile could discern that NATO had an agenda and that simply accepting the flood of documents offered by Cook and Albright entailed ADVERTENTLY following that agenda. Arbour's April 20 reference to the "morality of the [NATO] enterprise" and her remarks on Milosevic's possible lack of character disqualifying him from negotiations, as well as her rush to help NATO with an indictment, point to quite clearly understood political service. The Arbour-Tribunal bias was dramatically illustrated by the disposition of an internal Tribunal report on Operation Storm, which described war crimes committed by the Croatian armed forces in their expulsion of more than 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995. (6) In only four days "at least 150 Serbs were summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared," totals that exceeded the 241 victims of the Serbs named in the indictment of Milosevic. But as the United States supported the Croat's ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina, and refused to provide requested information, no indictment of any Croat officer named in the report, or head of state Tudjman, was ever brought by the Tribunal. Tribunal's Kangaroo Court Processes According to Arbour, the Tribunal was "subject to extremely stringent rules of evidence with respect to the admissibility and the credibility of the product that we will tender in court," thus precluding "unsubstantiated, unverifiable, uncorroborated allegations" (April 20). This is a gross misrepresentation of what John Laughland described in the Times (London) as "a rogue court with rigged rules" (June 17, 1999). The Tribunal violates virtually every standard of due process: among others, it fails to separate prosecution and judge; witnesses can testify anonymously; confessions are presumed free and voluntary unless the contrary can be established by the prisoner; and "rules against hearsay, deeply entrenched in Common Law, are not observed and the Prosecutor's office has even suggested not calling witnesses to give evidence but only the tribunal's own 'war crimes investigators'" (Laughland). As noted, Arbour presumes guilt before trial; the concept of "innocent till convicted" is rejected, and she can declare that people linked with Arkan "will be tainted by their association with an indicted war criminal" (March 31). Arbour clearly does not believe in the basic rules of Western jurisprudence. And within a month of her elevation to the Canadian Supreme Court she joined a court majority that grafted onto Canadian law the dangerous Tribunal practice of permitting a more liberal use of hearsay evidence in trials. (2) The consequent corruption of the Canadian justice system, both by her appointment and her impact, mirrors that in the Canadian political system, whose leading members supported the NATO war without question. NATO's Crimes In bombing Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 8
1999, NATO
violated the UN Charter requirement that it not use force
without UN Security Council sanction.
(3) It was also guilty of aggression in attacking a
sovereign state that was not going beyond its borders.
In its defense, NATO claimed that
"humanitarian" concerns demanded these actions
and justified seemingly serious law violations.
(4) This reply sanctions law violations on the basis of
self-serving judgments that contradict the rule of law,
but it is also dubious on its own grounds. The NATO
bombing made "an internal humanitarian problem into
a disaster" in the words of Rollie Keith, the
returned Canadian OSCE human rights monitor in Kosovo.
Furthermore, NATO refused to negotiate a settlement in
Kosovo and insisted on a violent solution; in the words
of one State Department official, NATO deliberately
"raised the bar" and precluded a compromise
resolution because Serbia "needed to be
bombed." These counter- facts suggest that the
alleged humanitarian basis of the law violations was a
cover for starkly political and geopolitical objectives. NATO was also guilty of more traditional war crimes, including some that the Tribunal had found indictable when allegeldy carried out by Serbs. Thus on March 8, 1996, the Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted for allegeldy launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets in Zagreb in May 1995, on the ground that the rocket was "not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the civilians of Zagreb." But the same case could be made for numerous NATO bombing raids, as in the cluster-bombing of Nis on May 7, 1999, in which a market and hospital far from any military target were hit in separate strikes--but no indictment has yet been handed down against NATO. But NATO was also guilty of bombing non-military targets as systematic policy. On March 26, 1999, General Wesley Clark said that "We are going to very systematically and progressively work on his military forces...[to see] how much pain he is willing to suffer." But this focus on "military forces" wasn't effective, so NATO quickly turned to "taking down...the economic apparatus supporting" Serb military forces (Clinton's words); targets were gradually extended to factories of all kinds, electric power stations, water and sewage processing facilities, transport, public buildings, and even schools and hospitals. In effect, it was NATO's strategy to bring Serbia to its knees by gradually escalating its attacks on the civil society. But international law makes civilian targets off limits; the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages or devastation not justified by military necessity" is prohibited (Sixth Principle of Nuremberg, formulated in 1950 by a UN-sponsored international law commission). "Military necessity" does not allow the destruction of a civil society to make it more difficult for the country to support its armed forces, any more than civilians can be killed directly because they pay taxes supporting the war machine or might some day become soldiers. Making an entire population a hostage is a blatant violation of international law and its implementing acts are war crimes. In December 1999, it was finally reported that post-Arbour prosecutor Carla Del Ponte was reviewing the conduct of NATO, at the urging of Russia and several other "interested parties" ("U.N. Court Examines NATO's Yugoslavia War," NYT, Dec. 29, 1999). But the news report indicates that the focus is on the conduct of NATO pilots and their commanders, not the NATO decision-makers who decided to target the civilian infrastructure. It also suggests the public relations nature of the inquiry, which would "go far in dispelling the belief...that the tribunal is a tool used by Western leaders to escape accountability." The report also indicates the delicate matter that the tribunal "depends on the military alliance to arrest and hand over suspects." It also quotes Del Ponte saying that "It's not my priority, because I have inquiries about genocide, about bodies in mass graves." We may rest assured that no indictments will result from this inquiry. Beyond Orwell NATO's leaders, frustrated in attacking the Serb military machine, quite openly turned to smashing the civil society of Serbia as their means of attaining the desired quick victory. Arbour and the Tribunal helped NATO by indicting Milosevic, thereby giving NATO the moral cover needed for escalated attacks on the hostage population. Arbour and the Tribunal thus present us with the amazing spectacle of an institution supposedly organized to contain, prevent, and prosecute for war crimes actually knowingly facilitating them. Furthermore, petitions submitted to the Tribunal during Arbour's tenure had called for prosecution of the leaders of NATO, including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, for the commission of war crimes. If she had been a prosecutor in Canada, Britain or the United States, she would have been subject to disbarment for considering and then accepting a job from a person she had been asked to charge. But Arbour was elevated to the Supreme Court of Canada by Chretien with hardly a mention of this conflict of interest and immorality. ** About the authors... Christopher Black (5) is part of the team of Canadian lawyers who have attempted to bring war crimes charges against NATO before the War Crimes Tribunal. At present, Mr. Black is serving as the attorney for one of the defendant at the Rwandan war crimes hearings. He believes that Western meddling is in large measure responsible for the horrendous killing in Rwanda. He plans to write an article for Emperors-Clothes on the subject. Edward S. Herman is the author of many books including 'Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda' (June 1998) and 'Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the Media' (October 1995). Further reading... (1) See Money Talks - US Funds ICTY Public Relations at http://globalresistance.com/news/press.htm (2) Back to the dark ages by Jared Israel at http://globalresistance.com/articles/jared/bac.htm (3) See NATO's War & World Security by Prof. Raju G. C. Thomas at http://www.globalresistance.com/analysis/security.htm (4) See HUMANITARIAN WAR: Making the Crime Fit the Punishment by Diana Johnstone at http://www.globalresistance.com/articles/Johnstone/crime.htm (5) See An Impartial Tribunal? Really? by Christopher Black at http://www.globalresistance.com/analysis/Impartial.htm (6)See Conditions of Serbs in Croatia, by Alice Mahon, MP at http://www.globalresistance.com/articles/mahon/croatia.htm To find out more about "JUDGMENT!" go to http://www.globalresistance.com/Film/astunnin.htm
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