Post Finally Covers Law Profs' War Crimes Complaint

Ken Hanly khanly at mb.sympatico.ca
Thu Jan 20 15:01:51 PST 2000


This leaves out so much it is simply ludicrous. No mention of DU weapons, of cluster bombs that cannot properly target from the heights bombing took place or of the 8 to 30 percent dud rate and subsequent explosions--the first KFOR casualty being one victim. Nothing about deliberately targetting non-combatants-correspondents- in the bombing of a TV outlet in Belgrade. Nothing about hitting a civilian train and then turning around to finish the job of destroying a bridge. Nothing about bombing structures of no or limited direct military use in blowing up the Danube bridges and blocking commerce from other countries. No mention of deliberate intent to cause civilian hardship by attacking infrastructure. No mention of deliberate atttack on facilities that if destroyed would cause serious environmental damage. Even the best mainstream journalism is often irresponsible as far as stating even the most elementary facts while quoting any nincompoop with rank in the military and any rank academic expert.

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



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