Successful operation or war crime? International hearings hold
Clinton, Albright, Cohen responsible
by Jon Basil Utley
NEW YORK -- The Geneva Convention, The
United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg
Principles, the Helsinki Accords and the
U.S. Constitution have all been violated by
Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and
William Cohen, according to charges filed
by the Commission of Inquiry of the
International Action Coalition.
Nearly 800 persons participated in the
inquiry hearings. Charges are primarily
grouped around those of "starting a war,"
the "deliberate targeting of civilian
infrastructure" and "violating and
destroying the peacemaking role of the
United Nations."
There are 19 charges detailed in articles
and paragraphs from major international
treaties and even the U.S. Army Field
Manual 27-10 (for planning, announcing and
executing attacks intended to assassinate
government leaders and selected civilians,
e.g. "friends of Milosevic," the Yugoslav
president). U.S. commanders and NATO/State
Department spokesmen were so ignorant or
arrogant about international treaties and
laws, according to the charges, that they
even publicly boasted of highly illegal
actions and destruction of non-military
civilian targets. For example, targeting
Yugoslav journalists was a violation of
Article 79 of the U.N. Charter. Bombing
fertilizer plants and a cigarette factory
was a violation of the Geneva Convention
about hitting non-military targets.
"Inflicting, inciting and enhancing
violence between Moslems and Slavs" was one
of the charges. Aggravating conflict
between Slavs and Moslems and injecting
U.S. troops for future actions to control
Caucasus oil exports was the argument of
committee chairman, Ramsey Clark, former
attorney general and a former marine. He
argued that the Orthodox and Muslim worlds
were potential centers of power that could
thwart Washington's "imperialist
objectives." It had been pointed out that
Washington purposefully brought in Turkish
planes (with no military necessity) to bomb
Serbian Slavs in what could have been an
effort to revive centuries old hatreds from
Turkish colonial rule.
Other spokespersons argued all sorts of
other economic motives for the U.S./NATO
attack, trying to rationalize a reason for
it, from promoting sales of American
weapons to taking over Kosovo's giant
Trepca mining complex.
Roland Keith, one of 1,200 former peace
monitors, described his experiences in
Kosovo before all of them were ordered out
so NATO could begin bombing. He said "we
were keeping a lid on the violence." He
described how 20 minutes into his first
mission an accompanying Serbian policeman
was shot by a KLA (Albanian) sniper. He
said the violence came from Serbs reacting
to KLA guerrillas. Keith, a 32-year
Canadian army veteran, is a member of the
Federal Council of the New Democratic Party
in Canada. He argued that if Washington had
just offered to remove the economic
sanctions against Yugoslavia (which were
contributing to the poverty of Kosovo) an
agreement might well have been reached.
A main argument of many speakers was that
the Yugoslav parliament had already agreed
to NATO's key demand for much autonomy and
armed U.N. peacekeepers in Kosovo, before
the bombing. It was Washington's insistence
that Serbia allow NATO troops with
extraterritorial legal rights inside Serbia
proper that was the stumbling block.
Quoting William Randolph Hearst's old
dictum, "You provide the photographs, and
I'll provide the war," speakers decried the
media's feeding frenzy for atrocity stories
after the bombing had started. Speaker and
author Michael Parenti argued that it was
natural for refugees to flee the bombing as
much as from Serbian atrocities in areas of
KLA activity. Equally the Air Force bombing
of a column of returning refugees was a
message, he argued, to the Albanians not to
return until Serbia had surrendered. He
quoted the German Foreign Office Report
that there was no ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo prior to the NATO attack, just
actions against the KLA guerrillas.
Addressing the question of Serb atrocities,
Parenti quoted the New York Times that
there was no proof of a conscious Serb
policy of rape -- neither in Bosnia nor
Kosovo. However, wartime atrocities were
done by both sides. The "mass graves" found
in Kosovo now add up to maybe 200 persons
while the supposed 100,000 dead Albanian
males of NATO/U.S. propaganda was just
another lie, he said. Brian Becker of the
IAC argued that the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
which indicted Milosevic was a "phony,
kangaroo court which only indicted enemies
of Washington" and a court for which the
U.N. Charter makes no provision.
Specific allegations of treaty violations
by the U.S./NATO operation are numerous.
The prime indictment is that of violating
the United Nations Charter by attacking a
sovereign nation that was innocent of any
aggression. NATO also violated Articles 1
and 7 of its own charter that claim it is a
defensive organization, only committed to
force if one or more of its members are
attacked. The NATO Treaty also explicitly
recognized "the primary responsibility of
the U.N. Security Council for the
maintenance of international peace and
security."
Charge No. 6 was "Killing and Injuring a
Defenseless Population Throughout
Yugoslavia." This violated the Hague
Convention, Art. 22 and 23; Geneva
Convention Art. 19; Nuremberg Principle VI
a, b, and c; and the U.S. Constitution, Art
1, Sec 8, cl.II.
David Jacobs of the Canadian Lawyers Group
said that Clinton's argument about
justifying military interventions for
"humanitarian" reasons recalled Mussolini's
arguments justifying his invasion of
Ethiopia to "save them from slavery," or
Hitler's claim of occupying the Sudetenland
"to save Germans from atrocities." It's
just the "same old wolf" of imperialism.
"Starting an Unprovoked War," was the prime
charge against the Germans at Nuremberg
that the U.S. used to hang Germans. It is
part of the Nuremberg Principles subscribed
to by Washington. William Rockler, a former
Nuremberg prosecutor (Chicago Tribune
5/23), was extensively quoted in the
testimonies.
Charges were divided into three categories.
First was against those nations' leaders
that carried out the attack, the U.S., U.K.
and Germany. Second was against those
nations which provided bases for the
attack, Italy and Turkey. Third was against
those NATO governments that voted to
participate.
Ramsey Clark referred to Spanish pilots who
had refused orders to attack civilian
targets. A commission study referred to
testimony in the Spanish newspaper,
ARTICULO 20, of Captain Martin de la Hoz,
"Several times our colonel protested to
NATO chiefs about why they select targets
which are not military targets.... They are
destroying the country, bombing it with
novel weapons, toxic nerve gasses, surface
mines dropped by parachute, bombs
containing uranium, black napalm,
sterilization chemicals, spraying to poison
crops and weapons of which even we still do
not know anything." The United States and
President Clinton were singled out as the
prime motivator for the war and the
"overwhelmingly responsible nation" for its
atrocities and legal violations.
The indictment and package of 15 research
reports is available from the International
Action Center, (212) 633-6646.
[Jon Basil Utley is the Robert A. Taft Fellow in Constitutional and
International Studies at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. He was a former
foreign correspondent for the Journal of Commerce and Knight Ridder
newspapers.]
[ . . .the script prepared for Yugoslavia is being re-enacted in
Afghanistan. Whether Milosevic's trial before the International Court at
the Hague or the capture of bin Laden will provide an adequate conclusion
to this ideological play-making, remains an open question.--Diana
Johnstone, "
Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions," Monthly
Review Press (November 1, 2002)]
Copyright © 1999 Jon Basil Utley - All Rights
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