- While there are many examples of the
United States turning a blind eye to dictators and human
rights repression where it suits its strategic interests,
Israel's crackdown on the Palestinian uprising offers an
instructive current example of a war criminal, violations of
international law, and severe human rights abuses being
tolerated at the same time the indictment of Slobodan
Milosevic is held up as proof of the West's attachment to
human rights and intolerance of war crimes.
And much of what Milosevic is accused of
appears to be pure fiction, the outcome of a concerted and
successful propaganda campaign to justify Nato intervention in
the Balkans.
Israel represents the beneficiary of a
propaganda campaign from the other side. Not of crimes that are
manufactured out of whole cloth, or of legitimate police actions
amplified into gross human rights violations, but of crimes
cleansed, obscured, minimized and denied.
Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is
considered a war criminal by many, not the least for his connections
to the infamous Sabra and Shatilla massacres. The Israeli Defense
Forces have been condemned by Amnesty International for acts that
border on war crimes. Israeli abuses, tolerated by the West, have
been carried out in illegally occupied territory. The Serb crack
down on secessionist KLA guerillas, punished by the West, occurred
in sovereign territory. The Serbs agreed to an international
presence in their own country, rejected by Nato in favor of bombing.
Israel refuses to accept an international presence in territory it
has no right to occupy, and is backed by the US.
But there are no indictments of Sharon, no
official expressions of outrage at Israeli abuses, no denunciation
of Israel's record of ethnic cleansing, no Western pressure on
Israel to quit the occupied territories, no war crimes tribunals,
and no bombing. Just US pressure on Belgrade to turn Milosevic
over to the UN.
As for Nato, it has its own war crimes to
confront, in private anyway, since the chances of the US-led
alliance's transgressions ever being confronted in Western
parliaments, legislatures, cabinet rooms, or in news rooms and
editorial offices, will have to wait, perhaps forever. Human
Rights Watch has expressed concern over violations of
humanitarian law in Nato's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia.
Amnesty International goes further, pointing to possible war
crimes, like Nato's bombing of the Serb Radio-Television
building, a target without military significance.
Whether the UN will investigate incidents
as these, let alone indict Nato for the crimes the alliance
committed in Yugoslavia, is doubtful. The war crimes tribunal
has too many connections to Washington, and London, and Ottawa,
to be impartial. Louise Arbour, the former UN war crimes
prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia, now a Canadian Supreme
Court Justice, was personally selected by Madeliene Albright, US
Secretary of State during the Nato bombing campaign. One of
Nato's leaders during the bombing campaign, Canadian Prime
Minister Jean Chretien, appointed Arbour to Canada's highest
court.
Star Chamber is an apt description of the
UN war crimes tribunal, breathtakingly illustrated by the
audacity of its chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, in resisting
Amnesty International's calls for an investigation into Nato's
war crimes, by threatening to indict Milosevic for the deaths of
the civilians who died in the Nato bombing of the
Radio-Television building.
As for Milosevic, it's not at all clear
what crimes he's committed. Confronted by pathologists' reports,
Nato now acknowledges there weren't 100,000 Albanian Kosovars
brutally murdered, as the alliance originally charged. Nor even
10,000, a number Nato later floated. Some 2,000 corpses have
been uncovered by pathologists, not in mass graves as Nato
warned, none at the bottom of the Trepca mines, most buried
singly or in pairs. How many corpses were KLA guerillas, how
many Albanian Kosovar "traitors" executed by the KLA,
how many Serb, and how many ethnic Albanian civilians, is
unclear. It was widely acknowledged that in the year before
Nato's 1999 bombing campaign there were some 2,000 deaths on
both sides, what you might expect of a civil war, not a
systematic program of ethnic cleansing. The pathologists reports
back that up.
Still, the genocide charges linger, a
hangover of Nato's earlier propaganda. But they don't square
with the indictment. All the incidents Milosevic is indicted
for, but one, occurred after Nato's bombing campaign, and the
one pre-bombing incident, the Racak massacre, cited as the
watershed event that tipped the balance in favor of Nato sending
bombers in droves to strike Serb targets, now appears to have
been faked by the KLA, possibly with US complicity (see Sorting
through the lies of the Racak massacre and other myths of Kosovo,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans1.html.)
How Racak can be called the watershed event when the war crimes
tribunal hasn't adduced any incident before Racak boggles the
mind.
How much substance does the indictment
have? Given Nato's long track record of telling tall tales, and
its apparent control over the UN Tribunal, odds are, not much.
The odds Milosevic will ever receive a fair trial are similarly
infinitesimal. That alone ought to be reason enough to oppose
his being turned over to the Hague.
Meanwhile, Israeli bulldozers rumble
through Palestinian villages, extrajudicial assassinations are
carried out, and the number of dead and injured Palestinians
grows. Last week the death toll topped 500.
Somewhere in Serbia, a woman is drinking a
glass of water, drawn from a river polluted by the tons of
carcinogens released into the water after petrochemical plants
were bombed by Nato planes. A friend, a neighbor, a relative,
perhaps a mother or father or child or husband, may have been
among the hundreds, if not thousands, killed by Nato bombs, or
among the many more permanently injured. In twenty years, she
too may join the victims of Nato's war, a death statistic in a
cancer ward, never attributed to the Nato bombing, but a victim
all the same. Perhaps her child will one day be dismembered by
an unexploded Nato cluster bomb, an indiscriminate, criminal
means of killing, used by an alliance that boasted of its
surgical, pinpoint precision bombing. And its humanitarianism.
- As Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian
homes, and Serbs live with the devastation of their country,
the US, and much of the Western world, cheers the indictment
of Milosevic, blind to the Palestinians who can't go home,
oblivious to the Serb victimized by Nato bombs, unaware of
Nato perversions of international law, and indifferent to
something called justice.
The Toronto Globe and Mail's lead May 7th,
2001 editorial says Milosevic's being served an indictment for
war crimes is a welcome step forward for Yugoslavia. Is it, or
is it an unwelcome step forward for hypocrisy; more smoke to
cover up Nato's own war crimes; another step to justify the
unremitting encroachment of US control over another part of the
world?
