the hague 'tribunal': bad justice, worse politics
nada_v...@altavista.net
Srdja Trifkovic
[* An abbreviated version of this article was published in Chronicles:
A Magazine of American Culture in August 1996.]
Not many eyebrows will be raised at the revelation that there is a
prison, in a small foreign country, where you can be indefinitely
incarcerated without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders
of an ad-hoc "court" which sets its own rules as it goes along, and
sometimes issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests had
been performed.
Some may be surprised, however, that this "far-away country" is not
North Korea, Bourkina Fasso or Syria, but the civilized tittle Holland.
The prison is in the North Sea resort of Scheveningen, a wind-swept
melange of belle epoque hotels and 1960s concrete tower blocks. The
court in question is ten miles away, in The Hague, and it goes by the
name of The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons
Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law
Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1 January
1991.
This article seeks to provide evidence that the Yugoslav war crimes
tribunal is a misnomer: it has proven to be neither a "tribunal" --
meaning a forum of impartial justice -- nor is it concerned with "war
crimes" - understood as gross violations of certain norms of war,
regardless of the identity of culprits and victims. After the decline
of higher cynicism in the name Human Progress we now witness the ascent
of higher cynicism in the name of Human Rights. It is the New World
Order's posthumous tribute to Felix Dzherzhinsky.
The myth of the Bosnian Holocaust
The Hague Tribunal (ICTFY) was established by the Security Council of
the United Nations in 1993 on the basis of Chapter VII of the U.N.
Charter (Resolution 827), with the "jurisdiction" for crimes committed
after January 1,1991.[i] The obvious question is why only "the former
Yugoslavia," and why only the past five years? A cynic might say that
one possible reason was that the United States did not want to put its
generals on trial for killing Vietnaimese civilians. As Noam Chomsky
put it, "I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for
impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've
aIl been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war
crimes ". [ii]
But the U.S. Ambassador at the United Nations, Madeleine Albright,
offered the official Administration line when she declared that "there
is no more appropriate a place to discuss the War Crimes Tribunal for
former Yugoslavia".[iii] In other words, the enormity of recent crimes
in the Balkans supposedly sets them apart from all other wretched spots
on our planet, and makes them comparable only to the Ultimate Horror of
Auschwitz, Babi Yar and Belsen.
This claim is not supported by evidence. In the five decades since the
Nuremberg and Tokyo trial's there have been well over one hundred
million human fatalities due to war, genocide, democide, politicide,
and mass murder.[iv] Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killed two million of their
compatriots -- one third of Cambodia's population - in only four years
( 1975-78). This was but an offshoot of Mao's less known, more
grandiose attempt at social engineering after 1949, which physically
destroyed some thirty five million men, women and children. The
Indonesian Army and its affiliates killed half a million people in 1965-
66.
The precise number of victims of India's partition is unknown, but
exceeds one million. This figure was easily exceeded by Pakistan's
brief and savage democide in today's Bangladesh in 1971. Dictatorships
in Afghanistan, Angola, Albania, Romania, Ethiopia, Iraq, North Korea,
Uganda... have contributed their own hecatombs to the total. Even that
old darling of western liberals, Marshal Tito, after being. brought to
Belgrade by the Red Army in October 1944 dispatched hundreds of
thousands of Yugoslav citizens; the victims were not only the
Vollcsdeutsche of Vojvodina who did not survive deportations in 1945-
47, but any real, potential or imagined enemies of the regime.
Democracies admittedly kill few of their own citizens, but they are far
less restrained in killing foreign civilians in declared or undeclared
wars.
Did Harry Truman order the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "in
order to kill, injure, terrorize and demoralize the civilian
population" of Japan? Of course he did, and for the most part, history
has treated him kindly for it. Winston Churchill ordered the
firebombing of Dresden for the same awful reason."
Dresden and Hiroshima have set the scene for indiscriminate bombings of
Vietnamese and Iraqi cities. We know now that the general strategic
bombing policy of the Allies in 1942-45 was to carry out deliberate
terror attacks against urban centers. However, it may be years before
we are told of the estimate for civilian deaths, in Hanoi in 1972, in
Baghdad in 1991, or in the Bosnian-Serb Republic in 1995. One may
safely assume that there will never be any trials of the culprits,
military or political.
Compared to the horrors of Afro-Asian post-colonial killing fields, the
war in the Balkans can be seen for what it is: a medium-sized local
conflict. Before any comparisons of "Bosnia" to the Holocaust are
accepted at face value, it is legitimate to ask how many have actually
died?
For President Clinton, addressing the nation on November 27 1995, the
easy answer was 250,000 -- and that in Bosnia alone! For his defence
secretary, William Perry, two sets of figures seem to be equally valid.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 7,1995,
he said that in 1992 "there were, by our best estimate, about 130, 000
civilian casualties. [...] In I993, that number was reduced to about
12, 000, and last year, 1994, the estimate was about 2500. " But four
months later, on October 18, he told the House of Representatives
International Relations Committee that "the war in Bosnia has been
going on for more than three-and-a-half years, with more than 200, 000
people killed "
There is no empirical basis for any of those figures. Counting bodies
may be poor form ("even one death is one too many"), but it has to be
done if we are not to assist further exploitation of lies and
distortions for political purposes. According to the only serious study
published on the subject so far, by George Kenney, former acting chief
of the Yugoslav desk at the State Department, "Bosnia isn't the
Holocaust or Rwanda; it's Lebanon ".[vi] Kenney is adamant that the
number of fatalities in Bosnia's war is between 25,000 and 60,000 on
all sides.
The "Bosnian Holocaust" story was fabricated by the Muslim side as part
of a wide-ranging and effective PR campaign. In December 1992, the
Izetbegovic authorities first claimed that there were 128,444 dead on
the "Bosnian" side (including Croats and "Serbs loyal to the Bosnian
Government"). According to Kenney, this figure was cooked by adding
together the 17,466 confirmed dead until that time, and the 111,000
that the Muslims had already claimed as missing. He stresses that, at
first, such high numbers were not accepted:
But on June 28, l993 - as near as I can pin it down - the Bosnian
Deputy Minister of Information, Senada Kreso, told journalists that
200, 000 had died. Knowing her from her service as my translator and
guide around Sarajevo, I believe that this was an outburst of naive
zeal. Nevertheless, the major newspapers and wire services quickly
began using these numbers, unsourced and unsupported. [ ... ] An inert
press simply never bothered to learn the origins of the numbers it
reported
For the subsequent four years Bosnian-Muslim propagandists have peddled
the story of the "Bosnian holocaust" without being seriously
challenged. In fact, after an initial bout of heavy fighting, from 1993
to mid-1995 there was a period of relative calm on most fronts in
Bosnia, interrupted by brief outbursts in isolated localities (Trnovo,
Gorazde, Bihac). Stories of mass murder and atrocities have not been
substantiated even after sustained and well publicised digs in the area
of Srebrenica. The Red Cross has been able to confirm no more than
20,000 deaths on all sides. Analysts at the CIA and the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research put fatalities in the
tens, rather than hundreds of thousands a year ago. This is close to
the view of British military intelligence experts: in early 1995 they
estimated fatalities to be 50-60 thousand. Even if the as yet unknown
number of Serbs killed by NATO air power and the combined Croat-Muslim
offensive in September 1995 are included, the war in Bosnia is unlikely
to have resulted in more than '70 thousand deaths. Including
Croatia/Krajina, the Yugoslav wars of 1991-95 have killed up to, but
not more than, one hundred thousand people.
A dispassionate conclusion is clear: Bosnia was a honor, and Yugoslavia
a tragedy, but there was no "holocaust"! There is little to support the
claim that the war there was "qualitatively" different from any other
dispute between ethnic and religious groups over power and territory.
So why the war crimes tribunal? Mrs. Albright's answer is that "the
U.S. Government does not believe that because some war crimes may go
unpunished a1l must." Needless to say, any determination of which ones
should be punished - if left to the U.S. Government -- becomes not a
legal, but a political decision. Susan Woodward of the Brookings
Institution says that the Tribunal was pushed largely by the U.S. for
political reasons: "The accusations became a servant of American policy
toward the conflict itself, which required a conspiracy of silence
about parties which were not considered aggressors ".[vii] The Muslims
and Croats could thus get away with murder, literally and figuratively.
The Serbs were to be pilloried, and the "Tribunal" was needed to give
due legitimacy and pseudo-legality to that decision.
<snip>
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/hague/st-hague.html
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Marc Living
nada_v...@altavista.net made the following submissions:
>The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons
>Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law
>Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1 January
>1991.
Doesn't this imply that it *doesn't* have jurisdiction to look into
"serious violations of international humanitarian law" committed in
the territory of the *present* Yugoslavia?
--
Marc Living (remove "BOUNCEBACK" to reply)
***********************************************
A freeman shall not be amerced for a small fault,
but after the manner of the fault, and for a
great fault after the greatness thereof.
************************************************
nada_v...@altavista.net
ma...@equity.BOUNCEBACK.claranet.co.uk (Marc Living) wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jun 1999 11:47:34 GMT, m'learned friend
> nada_v...@altavista.net made the following submissions:
>
> >Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law
> >Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1 January
> >1991.
>
> "serious violations of international humanitarian law" committed in
> the territory of the *present* Yugoslavia?
>
> --
> Marc Living (remove "BOUNCEBACK" to reply)
Implication ain't the forte of kangaroo courts' persecutors [sic.]
(as betcha *you* know).