Peace and Environment News* July-August 1999
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Peace and Environment News * July-August 1999 |
by Robin Collins
NATO Concessions—The ceasefire is based upon diplomatic efforts of the G8, Russia and Finland, rather than on NATO ultimatums.
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The terms of the UN Security Council resolution and ceasefire which ended NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia indicate that all important concessions were made by NATO. This begs the question: If the ceasefire agreement was so similar to what Milosevic was willing to accept and what the Serb Parliament did accept one day before the bombing began, why was there war?
The peace agreement authorizes an international peacekeeping presence to be deployed in Kosovo under United Nations "auspices." Despite claims to the contrary by NATO (and the media), neither the ceasefire requirements ratified by the Serbian parliament on June 3, nor the "technical agreement" of June 9, nor the Security Council Resolution (#1244) of June 10 contain any phrasing giving NATO command and control authority over the peacekeeping force. Yet this was NATO's sine qua non stipulation for the bombing to stop.
Raising the bar
The drift towards a military intervention by the Alliance, we were told, was necessitated by the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic's unwillingness to accept the "final" Rambouillet terms proposed in March of this year. That text, written by the Contact Group of states (including the US and the UK but also Russia), contained provisions allowing NATO unrestricted occupation of the entire Former Republic of Yugoslavia (not just the province of Kosovo), and control and command of the military presence there. A clear affront to Serbian nationalist sentiments in a period of intense ethnic hostilities (to say nothing of Serbia's claims to territorial sovereignty over the province of Kosovo), it has been argued that the Rambouillet Accord was designed to be rejected by Milosevic.
"We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get," according to a senior US State Department official.
Exhausting non-military means
Both China and Russia had supported five UN Security Council resolutions in the last year and a half that dealt with the crisis in Kosovo. Some of those resolutions refer to Chapter VII of the Charter, although none authorized the use of force. Yet Russia and China were denied the opportunity to vote on (and likely veto) any resolution at the UN Council that authorized NATO military intervention and occupation. The veto process might have then led to a subsequent consensus resolution along the lines of what the Security Council ultimately ratified after weeks of NATO bombing, Serbian atrocities and exodus of refugees. For its part, Canada supported the NATO consensus and bombing campaign, did not object to NATO's targeting of civilian sites (unlike France, which chose to veto the bombing of some bridges), and was directly involved in 10 percent of the Alliance's bombing sorties.
U.S. President Clinton sees a promising future for such NATO solidarity, stating recently that "the alliance could intervene elsewhere in Europe or in Africa to fight repression. We can do it now. We can do it tomorrow, if it is necessary, somewhere else..."
Ironically some critics doubt those are the lessons of the Kosovo intervention. They suggest that the UN, not NATO, might well triumph in the long run. Walter Russell Mead, of the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, laments that "one key U.S. goal in this war was to establish the legitimacy of NATO interventions without a U.N. mandate and to build backing among our European allies for more such interventions in the future. We failed. By going back to the Security Council (we did it under heavy pressure from our allies), we tacitly conceded that NATO interventions need U.N. mandates."
The Tribunal
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was mandated to follow through with indictments against perpetrators of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia. A weakness of the Tribunal is that it does not clearly name the UN Charter as its authority. Nonetheless, the institution has won favour with many governments, including the United States, for indicting several Yugoslav government officials including Slobodan Milosevic.
Equally interesting for the peace movement is whether the Tribunal will proceed with indictments against NATO leaders under Article 52 of a 1977 protocol to the 1950 Geneva Convention. That article addresses the principle of proportionality and the failure to protect civilians in wartime, noting that targets can only be entities which "make an effective contribution to military action."
There have been at least three serious requests for indictments against NATO leaders, one of them from a Canadian team of lawyers. Charges to be investigated are related to the bombing campaign and include: the wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages not caused by military necessity; the bombardment of undefended towns; and the willful destruction of religious, charity or educational institutions. William Arkin, a military analyst with Human Rights Watch, has recently claimed that NATO bomb damage to civilian infrastructure was "far more intense than in Iraq [and suggests] a kind of going after targets simply because you needed to put your bombs on something. That defies any real connection with the overall military campaign."
There is some concern that a failure to indict accused NATO leaders will diminish the Tribunal and Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour's reputation for impartiality. On the other hand, a successful precedent at the Tribunal, even if limited, would augur well for a new mechanism to deal with alleged war criminals and gross violations of international humanitarian law.
Given that the Tribunal successfully indicted Milosevic and others even during the progress of the war, it is unclear why those same legal processes could not have been initiated INSTEAD of the bombing campaign. Warrants for arrest could have been issued, and it would be odd (but not impossible) if NATO countries were then to have objected to the arrest of Milosevic. Would a UN-authorized arrest be a more serious violation of sovereign borders than an unauthorized NATO bombing campaign?
And is there the political willingness by governments and civil society to press for an independent system of courts and a UN-authorized police force to seize government leaders accused of war crimes and breaches of international humanitarian law? The Tribunal experiment may yet provide some encouraging answers.
Robin Collins is with the local branch of the United Nations Association in Canada, but these views are his own.
Converted October 30, 1999 - Lg
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