Fwd: Nato, master of the world

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed May 12 10:47:27 PDT 1999


LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - May 1999

WAR IN THE BALKANS

Nato, master of the world

______________________________________________________________

Meeting in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the North

Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the member states on 26 April

ratified the New Strategic Concept proposed by the United States.

This permits Nato to go beyond its defensive role and intervene

militarily, without a mandate from the United Nations, against a

sovereign state. The token reference to the UN may satisfy France

but does not seriously modify US power. The war in the Balkans,

conducted without the authorisation of the Security Council, in the

name of humanitarian intervention, and the new strategic concept

mark a turning point in the global order. For the first time since

1945 the victors of the second world war (less Russia) have ignored

the sole source of international legality, the UN - without

replacing it. This allows China, India or Russia, for example, to

conduct similar interventions in their own spheres of influence;

and increases the risks of injustice and conflict throughout the

world.

by NOAM CHOMSKY *

______________________________________________________________

There are many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North

Atlantic Treaty Organisation - meaning primarily the United States.

They come down to two fundamental issues: what are the accepted and

applicable "rules of world order" and how do these or other

considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?

There is a regime of international law and international order,

binding on all states, based on the United Nations Charter and

subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat

or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorised by the Security

Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or

else in self-defence against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until

the Security Council takes action.

There is, of course, more to say. There is at least a tension, if not

an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down

in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, a second pillar of the world order

established under US initiative after the second world war. The

charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the

rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of

"humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension. It is this right

that is claimed by the US/Nato in Kosovo, and is generally supported

by editorial opinion and news reports (in the latter case,

reflexively, even through the very choice of terminology).

The question is addressed in a news report in the New York Times (1),

headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo. One

example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US mission to

the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter,

"scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the alleged

right of intervention. The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on

international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the

Nato bombing "have a pretty good legal argument" but "many people

think [an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a

matter of custom and practice". That summarises the evidence offered

to justify the favoured conclusion stated in the headline.

Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts

are relevant to the determination of "custom and practice". We may

also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if

it exists, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and

that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in

particular their record of adherence to the principles of

international law, World Court decisions, and so on.

Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to

prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were

dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason

beyond subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith"

could not be assumed. A rational person then asks obvious questions:

is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of

the US? And how should we assess the "good faith" of the only country

to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to

obey international law? What about its historical record? Unless such

questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person

will dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is

to determine how much of the literature - media or other - survives

such elementary conditions as these.

How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?

There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year,

overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces. The main

victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the population

of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2,000 deaths and

hundreds of thousands of refugees. In such cases, outsiders have three

choices: solution 1, try to escalate the catastrophe; solution 2, do

nothing; solution 3, try to mitigate the catastrophe. The choices can

be illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let us keep to a few of

approximately the same scale and ask where Kosovo fits into the

pattern.

To start with Colombia, according to State Department estimates the

annual level of political killing by the government and its

paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee

flight (primarily from their atrocities) is well over a million.

Colombia has been the leading Western recipient of US arms and

training as violence has grown through the 1990s, and that assistance

is now increasing under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all

serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly

enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in

office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence" according to

human rights organisations, even surpassing his predecessors. Details

are readily available. In this case, the US reaction was solution 1:

escalate the atrocities.

Then there is Turkey. By very conservative estimates, Turkish

repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls into the category of Kosovo. It

peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of over a million

Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital

Diyarbakir from 1990-94, as the Turkish army was devastating the

countryside. The second year marked two records: it was "the year of

the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, as US

journalist Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and also the year

when Turkey became "the biggest single importer of American military

hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser". When human

rights groups exposed Turkey's use of US jets to bomb villages, the

Clinton administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension

of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Again Washington opted for solution 1.

Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on the

grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of

terrorist guerrillas - as does the government of Slobodan Milosevic.

The third example is Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly

children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern

Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history

it appears, and arguably the most cruel. Washington's furious assault

on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the

region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled

to undertake negotiations - under popular and business pressure -

ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Henry Kissinger and

Richard Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos

and Cambodia.

The deaths are from "bombies", tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse

than land-mines. They are designed specifically to kill and maim, and

have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Jars plain was saturated

with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a

failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer,

Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control

or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These

were only a fraction of the technology deployed, including advanced

missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter. Current

annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from hundreds to "an

annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them

deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Asia

edition of the Wall Street Journal. The crisis this year seems

approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly

concentrated among children .

There have been efforts to publicise and deal with the humanitarian

catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to

remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from

the handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the

British press says, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian

civilians. The UK press also reports, with some anger, the allegation

of MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render

harmless procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a

lot safer". These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in

the US. The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in

Cambodia, particularly the eastern region where US bombardment from

early 1969 was most intense.

In this case, the US opted for solution 2: do nothing. And the

reaction of the media and commentators was to keep silent, following

the norms under which the war against Laos was designated a "secret

war" - meaning well-known but suppressed, as was also the case in

Cambodia from March 1969. The level of self-censorship was

extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The relevance of this

shocking example needs no further comment.

There are many other examples of solutions 1 and 2, and also much more

serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi

civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological

warfare. "A very hard choice" said US Secretary of State Madeleine

Albright on national television in 1996 when asked for her reaction to

the killing of half a million Iraqi children in five years, but "we

think the price is worth it". Current estimates are about 5,000

children killed a month and the price is still "worth it." These and

other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric

about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton administration is at last

functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.

Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of Nato bombing

predictably led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian

army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international

observers, which of course had the same effect. Nato Commander General

Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely predictable" that Serb

terror and violence would intensify after the Nato bombing, exactly as

happened. Kosovo is therefore another illustration of solution 1: try

to escalate the violence, with exactly that expectation.

Perhaps the most compelling example of solution 3 (trying to limit

violence) is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978,

terminating Pol Pot's atrocities which were then at their peak.

Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defence against armed attack - one

of the few post-UN Charter examples when the plea is plausible. The

Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out

murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas.

The US reaction was instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians"

of Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were

harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's

slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US

imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognised the

expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia because of its

"continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained.

Not too subtly, the US supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing

attacks in Cambodia. The example tells us more about the "custom and

practice" that underlies "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian

intervention".

Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are

square, there is no serious doubt that the Nato bombings further

undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law.

The US made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the Nato

decision. Apart from the UK (by now about as much of an independent

actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev years), Nato countries

were sceptical of US policy and were particularly annoyed by

Albright's "sabre-rattling" (2).

Today, the more closely one approaches the conflicted region, the

greater the opposition to Washington's insistence on force, even

within Nato (Greece and Italy). France had called for a UN Security

Council resolution to authorise deployment of Nato peacekeepers. The

US flatly refused, insisting on "its stand that Nato should be able to

act independently of the United Nations", State Department officials

explained. The US refused to permit the word "authorise" to appear in

the final Nato statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN

Charter and international law. Only the word "endorse" was permitted.

Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen expression of contempt for

the UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood (3). And of

course the same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical

production of Sudan a few months earlier (4). It could be argued,

rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules of world order

is irrelevant, just as it had lost its meaning by the late 1930s. The

contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order

has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss.

This stance is not new: it began to gain overt expression during the

Kennedy years. The main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton years is that

this defiance has become entirely open. The highest authorities

explained with brutal clarity that the World Court, the UN and other

agencies had become irrelevant because they no longer followed US

orders, as they did in the early post-war years.

Under Clinton the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to

be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts. In the current issue of

the leading establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington

warns that Washington is treading a dangerous course. In the eyes of

much of the world - probably most of the world, he suggests - the US

is "becoming the rogue superpower", considered "the single greatest

external threat to their societies". A realistic "international

relations theory," he argues, predicts that coalitions may arise to

counterbalance the rogue superpower (5).

Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It leaves

it unanswered. The US has chosen a course of action which, as it

explicitly recognises, escalates atrocities and violence: a course of

action that also strikes yet another blow against the regime of

international order, which does offer the weak at least some limited

protection from predatory states. A standard argument is that we had

to do something: we could not simply stand by as atrocities continued.

That is never true. One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic

principle: "First, do no harm." If you can think of no way to adhere

to that elementary principle, then do nothing. There are always ways

that can be considered. Diplomacy and negotiations are never at an

end.

Recognised principles of international law and world order, solemn

treaty obligations, decisions by the World Court, considered

pronouncements by the most respected commentators - these do not

automatically solve particular problems. Each issue has to be

considered on its merits. For those who do not adopt the standards of

Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof to meet in

undertaking the threat or use of force in violation of the principles

of international order. Perhaps the burden can be met, but that has to

be shown, not merely proclaimed with passionate rhetoric. The

consequences of such violations have to be assessed carefully. And for

those who are minimally serious, the reasons for the actions also have

to be assessed - and not simply by adulation of our leaders and their

"moral compass".

* Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This text

was specially written for Le Monde diplomatique. Noam Chomski's

writings can be found on his website: http://www.zmag.org

Original text in English

(1) New York Times, 27 March 1999.

(2) Kevin Cullen, The Boston Globe, 22 February 1999.

(3) See Alain Gresh, "War without end against Iraq", Le Monde

diplomatique in English, January 1999.

(4) See Alain Gresh, "Holy war", Le Monde diplomatique in English,

September 1998.

(5) Samuel Huntington, " The Lonely Superpower ", Foreign Affairs, New

York, March-April 1999.

_________________________________________________________________

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1999 Le Monde diplomatique

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