War Crimes: Goose and Gander

 

Truthout - Mar 13, 2006

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031306J.shtml

War Crimes: Goose and Gander
    By Marjorie Cohn
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Monday 13 March 2006

    Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his jail cell at The Hague Saturday. Since 2001, he had been on trial for genocide in Bosnia, and war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Although many have already adjudged him guilty, we will never hear the official verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

    We will also never see a trial in the ICTY for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright or Wesley Clark for the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Nor will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld be prosecuted by an international tribunal for their war crimes in Iraq.

    NATO's invasion of Yugoslavia was a war of aggression that violated the United Nations Charter. It was not undertaken in self-defense nor did it carry the approval of the Security Council. Between 1500 and 2000 civilians were killed and many thousands injured. When I visited Belgrade a year after the NATO bombing, I saw schools, hospitals, bridges, libraries and homes reduced to rubble. The ICTY statute prohibits the targeting of civilians. And even though it also forbids the use of poisonous weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering, NATO used depleted uranium and cluster bombs, whose devastating character is widely known. NATO also targeted a petrochemical complex, releasing carcinogens into the air that reached 10,600 times the acceptable safety level.

    The American Association of Jurists and a group of Canadian lawyers and law professors filed a war crimes complaint against NATO leaders in the ICTY. Yet that tribunal conducted only a perfunctory investigation of the serious charges. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticized the ICTY for failing to thoroughly investigate.

    By denouncing the International Criminal Court, Team Bush has ensured that US leaders will never be held to account for war crimes. Although virtually every Western democracy has ratified the statute under which the Court operates, the United States has thumbed its nose at this monumental international justice system.

    Bush has reason to fear prosecution. He has used cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorous and napalm. And the torture of prisoners in US custody also constitutes a war crime. His war on Iraq is a war of aggression.

    After the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing ... to initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal, labeled the crime of aggression "the greatest menace of our times."

    For the first time, at Nuremberg, individuals were held criminally accountable for war crimes and waging a war of aggression. Japanese leaders were also tried for atrocities committed during World War II, in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

    Yet US leaders who were responsible for some of the most heinous war crimes ever committed - the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and 66 other Japanese cities - were never brought to justice.

    Only the vanquished Germans and Japanese were put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, dissenting at the Tokyo Tribunal, called this "victor's justice."

    Indeed, Robert McNamara, who participated in the bombing of Japan during World War II, admitted in the film Fog of War that he and General Curtis LeMay would have been tried for war crimes if the US had lost the war. He said, "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He ... and I'd say I ... were behaving as war criminals."

    It is no accident that the Iraqi Special Tribunal where Saddam Hussein is currently on trial only has jurisdiction over Iraqi citizens for acts committed prior to May 1, 2003, the day the US-UK occupation of Iraq began. The United States opposed sending Hussein to an international tribunal, and manipulated the Iraqi tribunal to prevent any US leaders from being tried for their war crimes in Iraq.

    What's good for the goose is good for the gander. But the leaders of the world's most powerful country continue to enjoy "victor's justice."

---

    Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly column for t r u t h o u t.

The Convenient Death of Slobodan Milosevic

 The Convenient Death of Slobodan Milosevic


To: Mary Mostert <Mary@bannerofliberty.com>
Subject: The Convenient Death of Slobodan Milosevic


The Convenient Death of Slobodan Milosevic


By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)

March 13, 2006

Slobodan Milosevic, the last communist head of state for the former Yugoslavia, after four years of a trial conducted by the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia), died in his cell at the Hague, unattended and after much debate with his captors over his health problems. His trial for his alleged crimes has been going on for four years and was supposed to be coming to an end in a matter of weeks.

His death is being viewed as rather convenient by those who might have been embarrassed had he won the case. A Dutch news agency, citing an unidentified "adviser" to the Tribunal, reported that traces of a drug used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis, which would block medications prescribed for Milosevic's heart disease and high blood pressure, were found in his blood.
His attorney, Zdenko Tomanovic told reporters that his Milosevic feared he was being poisoned and requested that an autopsy take place in Moscow. The Tribunal refused that request as it did a recent request to allow Milosevic treatment in Russia for health problems.

During the past 10 years I've done a lot of research on the issues involving the break up of Yugoslavia. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was caused by a civil war that reminded me a great deal of America's own Civil War of 1861-1865. The outbreak of America's civil war was not caused by any one person, but arose largely because of a fundamental disagreement between the North and the South over what the U.S. Constitution says and over the slavery issue.

The South believed the Constitution limited federal sovereignty, and that the States retained their sovereign rights. The North believed Constitution made the federal government the keeper of the nation's sovereignty.

The second fundamental disagreement arose as the Northern States, all of which allowed slavery at the time of the Declaration of Independence, gradually eliminated slavery either because of moral concerns or simply because, in the economy of the North, it was impractical and expensive to maintain.

In American history, the President of the country who believed that the preservation of the Union was more important than states rights was Abraham Lincoln Although the Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history and left anger and resentments that have haunted America every since, today Lincoln is considered one of America's greatest presidents because he managed to preserve the Union.

On the other hand, Slobodan Milosevic's efforts to preserve the unity of Yugoslavia after the death of communist dictator Tito did not succeed - although it might have if US and British Air Forces had not bombed the Serbs for 79 days 1999.

Abraham Lincoln did not, all by himself, create the situation which led the Southern States to secede from the Union and Slobodan Milosevic did not, all by himself, create the situation which led first Slovenia and Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991 or Bosnia and Herzegovina to secede from Yugoslavia on October 15, 1991. As a matter of factTito preserved Yugoslav unity by harshly putting down a Croatian separatist movement in
1972 without any outside assistance.

In 1990 in the first multi-party election to be held in Serbia after World War II Slobodon Milosevic was elected President of Serbia. On July 23, 1997 he was elected President of all of Yugoslavia. He lost the election of October 5, 2000, after NATO had bombed the country for 79 days and on April 1, 2001 he was arrested on a charge of corruption and was imprisoned without specific charges.

On June 28, 2001 without any trial on charges in the arrest warrant, the newly elected Serbian leadership handed the previously elected president over to the ICTY to be imprisoned at the Hague.

This would be somewhat comparable to European powers arresting President Abraham Lincoln and hauling him off to Europe for trial. And, had it not been for the diplomacy of Lincoln's Secretary of State, William H. Seward, that might have happened over the Trent affair. The Confederacy had appointed two former US Senators as ambassadors to France and Britain during the Civil War. They went to Havana, caught the British mail steamer Trent for Europe. A Union frigate San Jacinto commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes halted and boarded the Trent, removed the two new Confederate ambassadors and took them to Boston, where they were tossed in prison.

This was considered an act of war by Britain, which promptly demanded reparation and an apology. Seward recommended just that to keep the British from declaring war on the United States. Had that happened, the Union probably could not have won the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln would probably not be honored as a great American president.

>From time to time over the past 4 years I've read some of the ICTY
>trial
transcripts which
<http://www.bannerofliberty.com/BosniaKosovo/OSKosovo-MasterTOC.html>  are posted on my website along with other information on issues involving the former Yugoslavia. Frankly, it was becoming obvious to me that the prosecutors in the case had very poor arguments that were being regularly refuted by Milosevic and his defense lawyers. Although CNN reported and President Clinton believed that Milosevic had killed "over 100,000 Albanians," scores of forensic experts never found the bodies that the Albanians claimed were buried in "mass graves" in Kosovo.

With Milosevic now dead, the ICTY is "unable" to pronounce a verdict.
Technically, there can BE no "guilty" verdict. Under American law, he would have to be considered innocent, since no court of his peers ever declared him guilty. Milosevic is the third Serb to die while imprisoned at the Hague. If he had been a terrorist and the Hague was an American prison, the world media would be up in arms demanding an investigation.

Of course, that won't happen. Anyway, the Serbian Unity Congress (SUC) says the death of Slobodan Milosevic, "together with the passing of two other leaders responsible for the Yugoslav carnage, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, will lead to the final closing of an unfortunate chapter in Serbian, Yugoslav and world history."
All three men were signers of the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995 that was supposed to solve the Balkan problem..

SUC also observed Kosovo Albanian leaders of the most recent Balkan bloodbath are still at large. Former Prime Minister Ramush Hardinaj resigned when indicted for war crimes, and Agim Cheku, who was recently nominated to be Kosovo's prime minister, awaits his indictment for war crimes.

As long as key leaders of the Balkan bloodbath expect to be rewarded for their crimes by being given possession and made leaders of Kosovo, I rather doubt the chapter is closed on this story.