Opinion:
HYPOCRISY OF U.S. POSITION ON RIGHTS IS EXPOSED
In 1978, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it was condemned for outrageous violation of international law. Harsh sanctions were imposed on its people. The US, Britain and most other western powers continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia.
by Fintan O'Toole
Less than five years ago, Bill Clinton delivered a televised address to the American people, preparing them for an imminent US invasion of Haiti. He detailed the gross violations of human rights by the military regime then in power, headed by Gen Raul Cedras: "Cedras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror,executing children, raping women, killing priests."
He talked of a deliberate policy of raping the wives and daughters of dissidents, of "people slain and mutilated, with body parts left as warnings to terrify others; children forced to watch as their mothers' faces are slashed with machetes".
Everything he said was carefully documented by independent human rights groups. The Americans carried out a largely bloodless occupation of Haiti and restored the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Yet the Clinton administration had forced Aristide to accept, as a condition for his restoration, a total amnesty for the slashers and the rapists, the child-killers and mass executioners. Cedras and his armed thugs were allowed to get away with it.
Indeed, in the middle of 1996, Clinton blocked the extradition of the leader of the terror squads, Emmanuel Constant, who had entered the US illegally. The most obvious reason for freeing him was the embarrassing fact that all during the reign of terror, he had been in the pay of the CIA.
This kind of double-think goes to the heart of the dilemma over Kosovo. It is not, as most critics of the NATO bombing maintain,that there is no basis for such actions in international law. The problem rather is that the two pillars of international law, the UN Charter on the one side and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the other, support very different conclusions.
The UN Charter outlaws any violation of the sovereignty of a member-state unless it is explicitly authorised by the Security Council, but the Universal Declaration guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states, including the states of which they themselves are citizens. Yugoslavia's sovereignty does not include the right to murder its Kosovan citizens. The right, arguably indeed the duty, to intervene to protect them is certainly implied by the Universal Declaration.
The crucial task, though, is to give those rights and duties a coherent, transparent form. Instead of doing that, the NATO countries have often done the precise opposite, laying claim to the duty of humanitarian intervention when it suits them and repudiating that duty when it doesn't.
The most spectacular example in recent history was in 1978 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to put a stop to the appalling atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Its intervention undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. Vietnam, however, was not "one of us". It was condemned for outrageous violation of international law. Harsh sanctions were imposed on its people. The US, Britain and most of the other western powers continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia.
Surely, though, in the wake of Bosnia and Rwanda, there is a new determination to protect human rights and to punish those who violate them? Well, yes, there is, but the US is not quite part of it. Two great advances in international human rights law have been made in recent times. One is the treaty outlawing the use of landmines, the other is the treaty to establish an international criminal court (ICC) to prosecute and punish those who commit war crimes. Sadly, one of the few rogue states which obstructed these advances is the US. It has opposed the ban on landmines and it has done everything it can to prevent the establishment of a meaningful and effective ICC.
The US stand on the ICC is, in the light of current events, especially outrageous. The treaty establishing the court was signed with the overwhelming support of the international community in Rome last July. In the negotiations, almost all the participating countries (including Ireland) agreed that the ICC should be able to launch a prosecution when requested to do so by the state on whose territory a war crime is committed, or the state to which the accused person belongs, the state to which the victim belongs or the state that has custody of the accused.
The US insisted, however, that the court's authority should depend solely on the acceptance of its jurisdiction by the state to which the accused belongs. Slobodan Milosevic, in other words, could not be prosecuted for war crimes unless Yugoslavia, of which he is President, decided to cooperate with the court.
The US and all the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (with the honourable exception of the UK) also tried to insist that any one of them could veto the court's investigation of any crime. Russia, for example, could stop the court from looking into atrocities by the Serb paramilitary police in Kosovo.
The Clinton administration went even further, however. It demanded ironclad guarantees that no US citizen could be prosecuted for war crimes without the prior approval of the US government. The US also sought, in the final hours of the negotiations, a special exemption for nonnationals on official duty abroad so that, for example, any war crimes committed, encouraged or tolerated by US agents in Latin America could not be investigated by the court.
Such was its determination to prevent the establishment of an effective ICC that the Pentagon in April 1998 organised a meeting of the military attachs attached to Washington embassies to construct a united front of world armies against the threat that international law might limit their freedom to conduct their wars as they saw fit.
The crucial problem in relation to Kosovo, therefore, is not that NATO is intervening against a vicious regime, it is that the biggest policemen don't accept that the law applies to them.
The US is seeking to establish in Kosovo that the international community has a right to act against war criminals, but it explicitly refuses to accept that the international community has any such right in relation to US citizens. Americans, in its view, exist somewhere above and beyond the jurisdiction of international criminal prosecutors. There is no chance whatsoever that the US will ratify the treaty establishing the ICC.
This hypocrisy does not make it wrong to intervene in Kosovo. The main problem with NATO's intervention, indeed, is that it does not go far enough, that it is using bombs to avoid the much more painful and dangerous responsibility of sending in troops to protect innocent civilians.
The hypocrisy itself is part of what prevents the deployment of ground troops. It stops NATO from articulating a clear and universal set of principles around which public support could be mobilised. It creates confusion and cynicism. It poses a question which NATO cannot answer: why is it worth dying to protect the Albanians from Milosevic but not to protect Guatemalans from the CIA? Why, if the US can claim immunity from international justice for its agents, can't Milosevic claim the same privileges for himself and Arkan?