SND SYMPOSIUM part 1

Inhuman Rights

This is the first in a series of articles on The Hague Tribunal based on the papers presented at our symposium on March 24th, 2001. Dr. Fleming is a classical scholar, author, editor of "Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture" and President of The Rockford Institute..

By Thomas Fleming

Here is the lead-sentence we have not yet read in the newspapers: "SERB LEADER DEFIES HAGUE PROSECUTOR, NATO THREATENS RENEWED BOMBING CAMPAIGN." But no, on the contrary, after Carla del Ponte stormed out of Vojislav Kostunica's office, breathing fire and brimstone, Western journalists were quite calmly discussing peaceful options; Maybe, they said, it might in fact be better for Slobodan Milosevic and his cronies to be tried by the Serbs and perhaps it would do more harm than good to inflict this humiliation on the new regime in Belgrade. Can it be that the Hague Tribunal is one of those science fiction monster that refuse to die even when its own mad-scientist creators have decided it is too dangerous to live?

Perhaps. But even if the NATO powers decide that MS del Ponte has gone too far, a giant step toward world government has been taken, a step that threatens both the sovereignty of smaller nations without nuclear arsenals and which in the long run also undermines the prospects for peace. The problem with this Tribunal and with other judicial arms of the New World Order is not that they are on the wrong side or that they are not fair to all parties, because it is, in other words, unfair to Serbs and partial to Muslims.

The really fundamental problem with the tribunal is that it ever existed in the first place. This is clear if only from the mere fact that Ms. Del Ponte continues to claim jurisdiction in Yugoslavia, even after Milosevic has been deposed and a democratic government has been installed. Del Ponte insists (for example in a speech in December of last year) that nothing has changed, citing the following three reasons for her position:

1) The Tribunal's "clear mandate and…primacy over domestic courts. This was and remains the will of the United Nations Security Council, as well as of the international community as a whole."

2) The persistence of key players of the period Milosevic period in the new regime

3) The continuing focus of the new government on "Serbia proper as a victim of Milosevic."

Taking these points in reverse order: the Yugoslav government can only try Milosevic for crimes allegedly committed against Yugoslav laws; this may well include his activities in the Bosnian Civil War, but, why are there no arrest orders for the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim political leadership, against whom there is certainly as much evidence as against Milosevic. Even the pretense to fairness would require that much.

In fact, the new regime has cut ties with the vast majority of Milosevic's top henchmen, and it is not, in any event, up to the international community to dictate the internal politics of a country. The presence of Nazi judges in the government of East Germany, Communists in Poland, and Ku Kluxers in the American Congress has excited little international outrage. Finally, the United Nations is not world government, and if Del Ponte had a leg to stand on, she would not simply invoke the authority of the Security Council. The established venue for adjudicating international disputes is the International Court of Justice, not the U.N. Security Council, which has no business involving itself in what was, after all, a civil war. The pretext was international security, but no one has ever taken the trouble to prove that there was a real danger of international conflict. As Professor Alfred Rubin has written in The National Interest: "If the Security Council, by its own vote, can categorize events in such ways as to avoid limits on its own authority . . . a radical change in the structure of the United Nations will have been achieved."

This War Crimes Tribunal is the first test of one of the great principles of postwar politics--the Nuremberg Doctrine, which makes individuals liable to international prosecution for actions committed during a war. In the old days, military personnel and police officers were expected to do as they were told. In time of war, a soldier who refused to obey an order could and would be shot, sometimes without a hearing. But after the Nuremberg Trials, the phrase, always spoken with a phony German accent--"I vas only following orders"--became both a standing joke and a reproach against anyone who refused to disobey a dishonorable order.

Even under the best of circumstances, it would be hard for a defeated nation to get a fair trial from its enemies. War is terrible, and even the best men do things which would otherwise be regarded as crimes: they destroy houses, kill some people deliberately and others through carelessness. Winston Churchill--who did all of the above in two world wars-thought that the top Nazis should have been killed as soon as they were captured, without setting a dangerous precedent for international revenge.

This is not to say that the Nazi regime did not deliberately commit mass murder against Jews, Poles, Russians, Serbs, even Italians, or that the ringleaders should not have been summarily shot--like Mussolini, who was an innocent choir boy compared to Hitler. Afterwards, a new German government could have settled scores, as best it could, with the other criminals according to German law. Or, if we had to have a trial, if it were limited to clear evidence of international murder--the slaughter of Polish Jews and Catholics, for example--no harm might have come of it.

Instead, the Allies institutionalized the hypocrisy of their propaganda. They not only made the conspiracy to wage aggressive war a crime by itself--as if most 20th-century French, British, and American Presidents and Premiers were not guilty of such a conspiracy--but they also outlawed warfare against civilians, including such acts as murder, ill-treatment, or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population.

The Hague Tribunal is only a faint echo of the Nuremberg Trials: the alleged war crimes of the Serbs, even if they were all proved, are trivial in comparison with anything done not just by Germans but by Americans in recent years. At Nuremberg, at least, an effort was made to fix the blame on the Nazi leadership: men who had preached a doctrine of racial superiority, laughed at Christian morality as weakness, and insisted that their strength and superiority gave them the right to treat other nations as slaves and cattle. There were no such leaders among the Serbs, and the so-called criminals who have been put on trial are so insignificant that, so far from enjoying the glory of a trial, they would not have been allowed even to testify at Nuremberg.

Like the Nuremberg proceedings, The Hague Tribunal is an irregular and illegal court, whose hypocrisy is manifest from its very composition. At last look, the panel of 14 judges included 5 Nato representatives, three from former British Commonwealth nations, one US satellite (Colombia), 3 Muslims, and no Orthodox. The remaining judges include one Chinese, one Malaysian, and one African. Of the countries represented, several have recent and current records of political murder and political repression: China, Zambia, Malaysia, Egypt, Jamaica, Morocco. Setting aside Britain and the US, whose crimes are specifically against the Serbian people, the record of several of these countries, China in particular, dwarfs anything that has been even alleged against the Milosevic government in the Nato press.

The hypocrisy is equally manifest from the manner in which the investigations have been carried out. As Alfred Rubin points out, the United States and its partners in the Security Council have been careful to limit the investigation to crimes committed by the three parties to the civil war. Just as at Nuremberg, where the Germans were not allowed to use any tu quoque arguments in their own defense, the activities of the peacekeepers themselves--including the use of American airpower against civilians--is not to be investigated. At least at Nuremberg, some of the judges did their best to insure a fair trial for the defendants, but this tribunal has been set up on the assumption that Serbs are Nazis, and that their leaders deserve to be hanged. As Srdja Trifkovic has put it, "The model for The Hague Tribunal is not Nuremberg 1946, but Moscow 1938."

Were crimes committed by Serbs during the Bosnian Civil War? Or in Kosovo? Undoubtedly. These things occur in all wars, civil wars in particular, but no impartial examination of the evidence has been able to attribute a criminal intention to Serb military commanders. The most frequently heard charge is that the Serbs launched military attacks on civilian population centers like Sarajevo. There is a word for this: war. Even if the Serbs were responsible for all the faked explosions in Sarajevo, they would be guilty of nothing that the United States does not routinely do. In the Gulf War, before we ever committed ground troops, we subjected Iraqi cities to a murderous barrage of missiles and heavy bombardment. We completely destroyed their infrastructure: plumbing, water supplies, electricity, all gone. Nobody really knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the bombing and the subsequent embargo.

If we are going to talk about military terrorism against a people, then the United States should be accused of war crimes against the Serbs, not only for bombing the Bosnian Serbs into submission, but also for the airstrikes that prepared the way for the Croatian massacres of Serbs in the Krajina--massacres which shocked even the normally anti-Serb press. It was the most brutal episode in a brutal war, and the blood is on our hands.

War against civilians is as old as mankind, although there have been periods of history in which brutality was avoided. The doctrine of total war, however, has been U.S. policy since the American Civil War. Sherman's famous march to the sea, authorized by President Lincoln, was a campaign to break the Southern will to resist by reducing women and children to starvation, and similar plans were carried out in the Shenandoah Valley and along the Missouri-Kansas border.

These were not isolated incidents in a single war. The terror bombings of German cities in World War II had no military value: The death of so many civilians was meant to cause disaffection in the German people, although it had the opposite effect. The nations responsible for the fire-bombing of undefended German cities--Britain and the US--are in no position to point the finger at war criminals. As one British foreign officer put it in 1945, "Bomber Harris must have got more victims on his conscience than any individual German General or Air Marshall."

The United States collaborated with the British in the fire-bombings, but we bear sole responsibility for the use of atomic weapons against civilian population centers. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are an ineradicable black mark on America's character, on the President who made the decision, on the people who reelected Harry Truman in 1948 and who to this day refuse to look at themselves in the mirror.

Murder is not the only crime against civilians. During the Bosnian Civil War, the European and American press dwelt lovingly on rumors of rape camps. Upon closer inspection, most of the horror stories of Serbian rape camps turned out to be either gross exaggerations or even outright fabrications. Were any Muslim or Croatian women raped by Serbs? Probably, undoubtedly. Should they be punished? Of course, either by the governments in Sarajevo and Zagreb or by their own government.

Is rape something unusual in a war? Hardly. The American Army, it is said, raped its way through Germany, and the only soldiers punished were the unlucky few who refused to stop when the war was over. In fact, our record on this is still very bad. The German government has repeatedly complained about the misconduct of American GI's stationed in Germany, and the more recent horror stories from Okinawa and Korea reveal that rape is still regarded as a venial sin by the U.S. military. The most horrifying stories, hardly reported in the West, concern Americn KFOR soldiers in Kosovo, who were keeping teenage girls as sex slaves in a cellar. To go further, it is the US decision to conquer Kosovo for the Albanians that has enabled the so-called Kosovars to expand their second largest business enterprise--a sexual slavery ring that steals and entraps young women and sells them all over the world. Their number one business is heroin trafficking, followed closely by kidnapping, extortion, and murder. Before becoming Hague prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte was hot on the trail of international criminals who might attempt to bribe officials of a foreign government. Why not turn her loose on the governments of Albania and Kosovo?

I have dwelt upon the war crimes of the United States, not because I hate my country or want to blacken its reputation. Many other countries have worse records. But war is usually a dirty business, and few nations have clean hands. One fact alone should make us despise the entire procedure set up at Nuremberg and imitated at the Hague: the fact that Stalin, his hands reeking with the blood of 50 million victims, was one of the prosecutors. None of the Nazi defendants, perhaps not even Hitler, could match Stalin, who even managed to prosecute the Germans for the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest-a crime committed by the Soviets themselves.

I think I have said enough to make it clear that the Nurmberg trials were not fair even in theory or principle. But, some will say, who cares about theory? In punishing the Nazi leaders, we set an example that will deter future aggressors frome repeating their crimes. But did we? The past 55 years, though they have not been years of world war, have indeed witnessed aggression, violence, and crime on a global scale that is hardly less dreadful. French, Chinese, US aggression in Southeast Asia, the warcrimes commmited by all parties in the Middle East, especially Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Turkey. The US's dirty little wars in Central America.

Most relevant of all, though, is the United States' deliberate and unprovoked aggression against Yugoslavia over Kosovo. The US State Department deliberately misrepresented history, falsified evidence, and concocted massacres in order to assist the Kosovo Liberation Army that was, according to recent revelations, armed and trained by the CIA. The crimes committed by the KLA were covered up so long as they were confined to Kosovo, but now that they are spreading their reign of terror into Macedonia, they are being revealed on the Evening News.

So, the Nurmberg Doctrine that justifies the Hague Tribunal turns out to be neither just nor effective. Then what is the point? Underneath all the horror stories of rape camps and mass murder, there is an underlying principle to the State Department line, and it is this: Human beings are individuals whose only group affiliation is to a state that protects their human rights. Differences of religion and nationality are insignificant, and it is morally wrong for members of one group to discriminate against members of another. In Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, this means that a Serb would be wrong not to want a Muslim to move into his neighborhood or to prevent his daughter from marrying a Albanian. When these prejudices become a policy of trying to preserve a Serb village or ensure Serbian political and military control over an area, the acts are not only wrong but criminal.

From this perspective, all the parties in Bosnia are guilty of human rights violations, but the Serbs are guiltier than the rest. Why? Because the Serbs were honest in declaring their intentions, which was to have either a separate Serbian state or else a Bosnian Serb republic within what is left of Yugoslavia. In the eyes of the international community, that desire by itself is a war crime.

Now, I am not going to try to tell you that Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright really care about human rights. In fact, a glance at the Geneva Convention will reveal at once the hypocrisy of the United States and Germany, since the preamble to the latest version adopted in 1977 contains this lofty statement: "Every state has the duty, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, to refrain in its international relations from the threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of any State." What else was the breakup of Yugoslavia but the threat and the use of force against that nation's territorial integrity?

In one sense, this is only good business: if wars are frequent, then whatever the Germans do to the French, they may, in the course of a few years, get a taste of their own medicine. But the kind of international law that has developed in the 20th century is neither pragmatic nor humane. It is a kind of religion--the glowing noxious gas given off from the decay of Western Christianity. Religious people, who see the image of God in their fellow human beings, are sometimes reluctant to indulge in gratuitous brutality. But Western society has been only superficially Christian for the past two centuries, and international human rights are simply the idea of divine law with God left out. Since, for people like Joschka Fischer, Madeleine Albright, and most of her successors in the Bush administration, there is no god but ambition, power, and wealth. They are forced to disguise their crimes and double-dealing with the rhetoric of human rights and international law embodied in an unending series of UN charters and declarations.

Let me talk about just one of these charters: The International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In this convention, genocide is defined as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such," and genocidal acts include: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Now, during the Bosnian Civil War and the Kosovo conflict, we heard a great deal about genocide. As for the first charge--killing members of the group--all the parties are guilty. Serbs killed Muslims who killed Croats who killed Serbs who killed Croats who killed Muslims who killed Serbs. But if we examine the second and third charges--serious bodily and mental harm and the infliction of destructive conditions of life--it is the US and our NATO allies who are most guilty by far.

Apart from the normal incidents of war, the gravest bodily harm was caused by the embargo, which-as we now know-was enforced only against the Serbs, and not against the Muslims and Croats. In fact, the United States violated more than one international agreement by arranging the passage of Iranian arms by way of Croatia to the Muslims. The embargo was enforced so successfully against the Serbs that vital necessities-food, medicines--were not allowed to enter into the country, and from Belgrade to Pale, Serbian children were dying because there were no antibiotics or anesthetics for routine operations. One reporter, who brought this matter to the attention of Red Cross officials in Switzerland, was told that the Serbs were receiving very little Red Cross assistance compared with the bounty being sent to the Muslims, and, they added, if the world ever found out, no one would ever give money to the Red Cross again, an organization that plays politics with human suffering.

Mental suffering is an elastic charge, which lends itself to the thought-crimes legislation that became so prevalent in the Reagan-Bush years. Nonetheless, the American and German press succeeded in demonizing the Serbs, much as British mercenary writers demonized the Germans in World War I. This media campaign was orchestrated in the U.S. State Department, which has knowingly propagated lies and hatred. If there is ever a real War Crimes Tribunal, then these masters of hatred--Warren Christopher, Stephen Halbrook, Madeleine Albright--will face the same charges as Julius Streicher, who was executed for his anti-Jewish propaganda.

In international law, the crime of genocide is now generally taken to include any attempt to deprive a people of its identity: suppression of language and religion and national symbols, for example (which the Scots and the Irish suffered under British rule, the wholesale transfer of a people from its historic homeland (such as Stalin did to the Volga Germans and Chechyns), campaigns to eliminate historical memory and inspire self-hatred in a people. All of this, the US and its NATO allies have done in Kosovo, and they will go on doing it--Albright or no Albright--until the American and British peoples are made to realize what they have done, until the NATO leadership is compelled to confess its guilt in the frank and honest manner of Commander Scott Waddell, who has assumed full responsibility for the sinking of the Japanese trawler. Vladan Batic, the new justice minister, has said he believed Milosevic could be extradited because the international war crimes tribunal is a United Nations institution, not a foreign country. He also noted that the Dayton agreement, signed by Milosevic, guarantees Yugoslavia's cooperation with the tribunal and has very recently declared that Serbia will no longer provide safe haven for criminals. That is all well and good, so long as the United States and Britain are willing to have their own criminal activities investigated at the same time. Let Madeline Albright and George Robertson and Jamie Shea waive immunity and show up voluntarily at the Hague, and it will be time enough to speak of turning Mr. Milosevic over to the Supreme Court of the New World Order.

©1999-2001 Serbian National Defense Council of America