Cheers, Ken Hanly
Jeffrey St. Clair wrote:
> Professors Pursue War-Crimes Case Against NATO
>
> NATO Secretary General George Robertson, left, and United Nations
> war-crimes
> prosecutor Carla Del Ponte face the media Wednesday at NATO headquarters
> in
> Brussels. (Reuters)
>
> By Charles Trueheart
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Thursday, January 20, 2000; Page A15
>
> PARIS, Jan. 19 ? As the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia got
> under
> way in March and talk of war crimes indictments against Yugoslav
> President
> Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian leaders intensified, a loose
> network of
> antiwar law professors in Canada, Norway, Greece, Britain and France
> began
> plotting another strategy.
>
> Communicating by phone and e-mail, the professors began building a case
> for
> war crimes indictments against NATO. By the end of the 78-day air
> offensive,
> they believed they had "overwhelming evidence" to demand the criminal
> prosecution of the leaders of the United States, Britain and other
> alliance
> countries, as well as NATO's senior military commanders.
>
> Most legal scholars say the professors have a pretty weak case, noting
> that
> accidental civilian deaths caused by NATO bombs fail to meet the
> commonly
> accepted standard for war crimes. Even so, the legal campaign against
> the
> Western alliance has taken on a life of its own.
>
> In an effort to demonstrate independence and even-handedness when the
> Kosovo
> war ended last June, prosecutors at the U.N. International Criminal
> Tribunal
> for the Former Yugoslavia began an internal review of the charges
> brought by
> the professors and others. Seven months later, the tribunal's chief
> prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, is poised to decide whether to launch a
> formal
> investigation or to drop the matter entirely, as seems most probable.
>
> The merits of the anti-NATO charges aside, the tribunal's reliance on
> the
> military assets of the Western powers to track down war crimes suspects
> makes it unlikely that any prosecutor would turn against a main source
> of
> intelligence and arrests. But the mere consideration of the charges by
> the
> tribunal already has irritated the United States and other NATO
> governments.
> Even the tribunal's most ardent champions in the human rights community
> and
> elsewhere are worried that the case may have damaged its reputation
> through
> an exercise in dangerous relativism.
>
> Del Ponte ventured into the belly of the beast today with her first
> visit to
> NATO headquarters in Brussels for a meeting with the alliance's
> decision-making North Atlantic Council. According to Graham Blewitt, the
>
> tribunal's deputy prosecutor, almost all of the discussion was about
> NATO
> cooperation in arresting indicted war crimes suspects ? especially one
> from
> an earlier Balkan war, former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan
> Karadzic.
>
> The accusations leveled at NATO leaders were raised by two people at the
>
> table, he said, and Del Ponte responded by repeating the tribunal's
> position
> that it has a statutory responsibility to investigate all alleged war
> crimes
> in the recent Balkan conflicts.
>
> Del Ponte and her staff prepared for more of a confrontation than they
> got.
> "We were concerned about the potential harm this might do to our
> relations
> with NATO," Blewitt said. "But we were told that NATO is not above the
> law
> and that for the tribunal to ignore the charges would have affected the
> integrity of the tribunal. And that is our position, too."
>
> Those charges are sweeping. Michael Mandel, a Canadian law professor who
> has
> led the effort against NATO, describes the bombing campaign as "a
> coward's
> war . . . not even partially legitimized by the Security Council of the
> United Nations."
>
> What the NATO leadership portrayed as the first humanitarian
> intervention by
> great powers ? to curtail the killings and mass deportations of ethnic
> Albanian civilians in Kosovo ? Mandel called "a terrorist war against
> the
> people of Yugoslavia to force President Milosevic to give up." What has
> been
> reported widely as a military targeting process slowed and hampered by
> disagreement among allied leaders ? and one vetted with unprecedented
> caution by lawyers obsessed with avoiding civilian casualties ? Mandel
> described as "all-out, total war."
>
> NATO bombing from high altitudes "placed all the risk on civilians and
> made
> the military immune from risk; this is a violation of the Geneva
> conventions," he said. The post-World War II Geneva conventions laid out
> the
> modern rules of war that are the legal foundations of the tribunal's
> jurisprudence. In a telephone interview from Toronto, where he teaches
> at
> York University's Osgoode Hall Law School, Mandel said "most of the
> world"
> agrees with his position. As for Milosevic's indictment by the tribunal
> in
> May, two weeks before the end of the bombing, Mandel said it was issued
> "with indecent haste" and was "dictated by the P.R. needs of NATO" to
> demonize its chief adversary.
>
> Mandel and his colleagues prepared their complaint and met in June with
> Del
> Ponte's predecessor, Louise Arbour, and her staff in The Hague. Arbour
> ordered a preliminary review of the evidence and the applicable law. She
> was
> replaced in September by Del Ponte, who received the staff report just
> before Christmas. A tribunal source said it contained no recommendations
> and
> did not even merit the term "investigation"; the source said "it was an
> internal memorandum."
>
> Views differ about Del Ponte's attitude toward the NATO dossier at a
> time
> when she has more pressing objectives. Before today's meeting, NATO
> officials indicated they had been assured by Del Ponte that she would
> not
> carry this exercise far and that she suggested she was embarrassed by
> having
> to deal with a tendentious process inherited from her predecessor.
>
> "Nobody seriously thinks Del Ponte will even try to make a case against
> Clark or Solana," a senior NATO said, referring to U.S. Army Gen. Wesley
>
> Clark, NATO's top military officer, and Javier Solana, the Spanish
> diplomat
> who was NATO secretary general during the Kosovo conflict. "It's a
> ridiculous situation, and it's made a lot of people angry, including Del
>
> Ponte."
>
> But one former and one current U.S. official familiar with the U.N.
> tribunal's work said Del Ponte had given the complaint needless exposure
> and
> credibility ? and painted the prosecutor's office more squarely into a
> corner ? by discussing the existence of the internal report in the news
> media and stressing her prerogative to investigate.
>
> Paul Williams, a war crimes expert at American University in Washington,
>
> objected vehemently to the implied parity of offenses by the two sides
> in
> the Kosovo conflict ? that is, accidental casualties caused by NATO and
> widespread killings and mass expulsions carried out by Serbian and
> Yugoslav
> forces.
>
> By publicly launching an internal review of the matter, even one bound
> for
> nowhere, Williams said, the tribunal was tacitly accepting the
> comparison ?
> and revealing itself to be politically driven. "You become credible by
> doing
> independent prosecutions, not by doing pseudo-prosecutions," he said in
> a
> telephone interview from Washington.
>
> On the merits, Williams and other experts said, Mandel and his
> associates
> don't have a persuasive case. "The law is set up to prevent intentional
> targeting of civilians or civilian property, or grossly negligent
> targeting," he said. "But NATO appears to have used extreme diligence in
>
> avoiding civilian casualties."
>
> Williams and others in the international justice community also fear the
>
> NATO war crimes case could make the alliance less cooperative in
> arresting
> war crimes suspects and stiffen U.S. reluctance to sign a 1998 treaty on
>
> establishment of a permanent international criminal court.
>
> Correspondent William Drozdiak in Berlin contributed to this report.
>
> © 2000 The Washington Post Company