UN WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL - SHOW TRIALS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Johnny Byrne

10/20/95

Justice & War

People everywhere share an innate belief in justice. It predates the relatively modern notion of `war crimes' - an oxymoronic concept since war by its very nature is at best a form of state sanctioned indiscriminate mass murder. In earlier times, while the abiding human belief in justice and injustice coursed just as strongly as they do today during times of conflict, what constituted a war crime depended utterly on who came out on top.

Even in warfare defined as cultural, conflict circumscribed by custom, ritual and practice, the victors were obliged act within mutually agreed terms of engagement - failure to do so could have serious consequences. In warfare generally defined as political, a Clauswitzian theory later developed into the concept of total war, these limitating factors were swept away. As a theory of warfare this reached its apotheosis during the time of MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction. However, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the apostles of total war are now back in the driving seat - and with a a vengeance. Even those conflicts which are essentially cultural, Rwanda, for instance, are fought on total war principles.

But in the main, great power conflict is wholly political in the Clauswitzian sense. Here war is imposed from the top down, unlike in the case of the Serbs, and any other people genuinely fighting for survival, from the bottom up. Since political war is rooted in concerns of little interest to the public at large, their interest has to be engaged before the horrors of total war in unleashed on a perceived enemy. In the context of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs are starring as demonic victimisers, while the favoured Muslims and Croats exude the auras of sanctified victims. Even the Pope has joined the act by lending his infallible authority to the concept of the `just' war - Vatican-speak which expresses an urgent Polish need to zap the Great Schismatic Serb.

Justice For Some

As mentioned above, justice is intrinsic to human existence. Even those who commit the vilest war crimes are ardent believers in justice when called to account. But to be meaningful in practice, justice must be seen to be impartial, even-handed and rigourously applied to whoever commits war crimes. Similarly, the international body which dispenses justice should have no connection whatsoever with the events, individuals or nations charged with war crimes. Since neither of these conditions are met by the UN War Crimes Tribunal, any hope of `real' justice from that quarter is a non-starter.

Looking back, the WW2 War Crime Trials exercised only slight and one-sided justice. Thousands of nazi and Japanese war criminals were never brought to trial. Most escaped their well-deserved punishment - in Croatia today, some are receiving a heroes welcome on their return to the scene of their ghastly crimes against the Serbs. The US government, for instance, pardoned the Japanese doctors who experimented on human guinea pigs, many of them US servicemen. Likewise those responsible for the indiscriminate destruction of civilian populations escaped punishment. Indeed, some like `Bomber' Harris' have had statues erected in their memory.

This is a a far cry from the notion of impartial justice, which should apply to crimes committed by all - winners and losers. Nazi leaders stood trial and were rightly hanged for their crimes. But who stood trial for the needless fire-bombing of Dresden, or the unspeakable nuclear holocaust inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The truth is that justice in the sense that in war we uniformly punish the act, simply doesn't exist. We selectively punish war crimes. Sometimes crimes committed by people on a winning side are punished, but only if doesn't conflict with the interests of those calling the shots. More often, on the winning side, war crimes go unpunished simply because governments and military leaders would end up prosecuting themselves.

Nor can victims of war crimes committed in peacetime hope for justice. Has the Israeli conduct of its long, expansionist war against Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians been any less `criminal' in kind than the crimes Mr Goldstone is investigating in ex-YU? UN resolutions are openly flouted by the Israelis. One UN resolution after another has simply vanished into a black hole of UN inertia. Yet in Iraq, similar UN resolutions are rigourously applied.

Question: what mysterious moral and legal principle determines why a UN resolution can be ignored with impunity by Israel, or applied with all the economic and military force of the west against Iraq? A profound belief in the sublime nature of democracy in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? An even more profound belief in the power of the Jewish Lobby in the US to determine electoral results? The price of gas at US petrol pumps?

Whatever the answer, it had nothing whatever to do with impartial, all embracing justice. If it did, governments and commanders of the Gulf War task force would be facing charges for the aerial slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men women and children in Baghdad and other heavily populated cities. Likewise the often inhuman means the Task Force military employed to destroy thousands of conscript Iraqi soldiers who'd lost the will to fight. I have in mind here the mass burying alive of non-combatant conscript border troops by giant army earth movers, the use of ghastly fuel bomb devices and the deliberate destruction of the Iraqi people's basic means of survival.

If he has a spare moment, Mr Goldstone might also usefully investigate the flagrant breach of international law displayed by Turkey - and the war crimes it regularly commits against the Kurds. Which raises another oddity about the impartiality of international justice. The UN and US declared Kurdish Iraq a `safe area'. Billions of air dollars are spent keeping the Iraqis from harming the Kurds there. Yet the same mega-death air-war machine repeatedly allows the Turks to invade, destroy the homes and kill and injure the very people - hapless non-combatants - it is supposedly there to protect. And with the public support of the US government, the main player in the vast military effort deployed to protect the Kurds. The same Kurdish people now being slaughtered by the Turks with public US government support.

Taking Serbia and rump Yugoslavia as an example, will the U.N. to impose sanctions on Turkey? It hasn't so far. Yet the U.N. imposed sanctions on Yugoslavia, a member state, with the speed of greased lightening for the `offense' of trying to prevent the unilateral and therefore unconstitutional break-up of the country. And not just any member state, but a founder member state. But on Turkey, whose repeated invasions of a neighbouring state is beyond doubt, the silence of the U.N is deafening. The same silent tune played when Turkey invaded Cyprus, virtually annexed half of the island and ethnically cleansed and raped everything Greek on two legs, if not four, in the process.

Clearly, the Turks lead a charmed existence in terms of international legality. To be consistent, the U.N. should straightaway have slapped sanctions and war crime trials on Turkey - and called in Nato air-strikes if they failed to observe international legality. Such righteous actions were accomplished with marvelous facility when the wicked Yugoslavs were judged to have crossed the line in the sand. But everyone knows it won't happen. Zapping the Turks would cause problems for Nato and US foreign policy objectives in the Balkans.

Yet, it's justice that's supposed to reign supreme, isn't it? - not politics. At least, that's what the victims of war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia have been led to believe. Only those who encouraged them to believe it are pursuing a nakedly selective form of justice. At the end of the day justice of this sort adds up to no kind of justice at all. The truth is that where the laws governing international conflict are concerned, justice and the rest of the eternal human verities have been bent to serve nothing more enlightened than national self-interest.

The Cult Of The Victim

The nature of modern warfare has had a role to play in this. `Civilised' nations train and equip powerful armies to fight wars whose destructive potential is simply immeasurable. To unleash such military force is no simple matter, we're not led by Hitlers, after all. Above all we must avoid the same kind of public odium evoked by Boris' barbarians and their techno-trashing of Chechyna. Western nations righteously censured and punished what they did, despite the fact that those condemning the Russians had themselves recently done it bigger and better to the unfortunate Iraqi people.

The public which funds these destructive military follies, and who elect those control them, are by and large sensitive souls. To accept wars for the brutish affairs they truly are - the naked exercise of force to gain political and economic advantage - would deliver a major blow to the self-esteem of a sensitive electorate. Before the self-proclaimed good guys can go to war these days, its sheer human beastliness has to be pre-sold to the electorate of the state which intends to wage it. Failure to get it right can topple governments. Success can rescue them from near certain defeat.

This was certainly the case with The Falklands War. The military success of the campaign was all that saved Maggie Thatcher from well-deserved annihilation in the elections which shortly followed it. The Falkland and Gulf wars could not have been fought without massive public acceptance. They united both the traditional war-mongers and the traditional anti war-mongers.

We see the same phenomenon today in relation to the civil war in former Yugoslavia. Those on the liberal left previously revolted by war, are the most vehement in calling for military intervention on the side of the Muslims and Croats. Yet these same people still profess to be morally outraged by the brutishness of war. And they are probably sincere - at least those without their snouts in the petro dollar trough..

So what's changed? What made people recently opposed to war in general, to zealous advocates of war in particular today?

This is the age. not of Aquarius, but of the New Left. The ideological struggle to free the masses from economic exploitation collapsed with the coming down of the Berlin wall. The proletarian New Jerusalem was demolished and from the ashes arose a shining new left edifice of pure political correctness. It offered a blinding vision of a world no longer divided by the exploiters and the exploited, but one inhabited by victims and victimisers - a much more broadly based ideology, since it aimed at the conscience and not the taxable pocket of the fellow traveller.

In this right-on ideological paradise, women, children, blacks, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, men, birds bugs and bats - all are deemed to be either actual victims, on simply on hold for future victimisation.

While asserting the desirability of engineering a politically correct perfect place, every legislative step taken to that end has precisely the opposite effect. The effect has been to salami slice society into ghettoised special interest groups. A fragmented social ethos where everyone is presumed to have an inalienable human right to just about everything that moves, including the inalienable human right to deny someone else's human rights. And at the top of this endlessly sectioned social anthill him, the beatified victim reigns supreme.

Today, this ethos extends way beyond the social boundaries defined by class, education and money. During the cold war to be anti-war was perceived by the establishment to be anti-capitalist. To the old left, the enemy were the fat cat economic exploiters, especially those who profitted from war and arms manufacture. But in new left theology the enemy is now social, not economic. Today its's far more ideologically correct for homosexual clergy to be ordained than that arms industries continue to sell death dealing war material. A man arming savages to commit genocide in Africa is infinitely less despicable than a man who, in a moment of mindless lust, fondles the breast of a strange woman on a crowded London Tube.

The victim and victimiser is a game which even dyed in the wool capitalists can play. Nor do new left ideologues restrict their search for victims to their home patch. It extends to the great abroad, which is rearranged to conform with the prevailing ideological divide. Safe sex in Uttur Pakistan, sexual harassment of Nilotic camels, lack of provision for nappy changing in the Gobi desert, or the plight of quadriplegic homosexuals in the Empty Quarter - everywhere they look they see victims. People forever obsessed with `addressing issues', with most of them morally incapable of addressing anything short of an envelope.

`All We Need Is War'

It's all too easy for the unreconstructed to laugh away absurdities of the kind I describe above. But it's happened in the US, UK and in many other European counties. It's also becoming institutionalised in domestic and EU legislation, and the UN itself has started issuing edicts which take a similar view of the a world made up of victims and victimisers.

Serbs and Yugoslavs have every reason to take note of it, for it underpins the near universal hostility to their cause, certainly in the UK and, at a guess, also in the US. Many of the same people who would throw themselves under an earth mover to protects the habitat of the Great Crested Newt, would take vindictive pleasure in seeing the homeland of great victimising Serbs smashed by US air power.

The New Left cult of the victim is a comprehensive take on the world. It actively seeks out victims and, once having identified them, is relentless in pursuit and punishment of the presumed victimiser. Thus victim collectors like Michael Foot - the near senile ex-leader of the UK Labour Party - and fellow travellers like Vanessa Redgrave, heap public abuse on the Serbs and endlessly plead for them to be bombed back into the stone age. Similarly with almost the entire liberals arts establishment, the soft left media opinion formers... everyone wants to have a go at the brutal serb victimisers.

And shouting in unison with them, are people like the brutal, whiskey sodden Thatcher and a right wing army of Thatcherite entrepreneurs who dine out on back-handers from the Saudis and the Gulf States. This combination is all the all the more remarkable when you consider that people like Foot and Redgrave epitomise the traditional anti-war movement in the UK prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. To these people, victims are as potent a symbol of human evil today as Trident was yesterday.

And they and countless others like them, have identified the victims of the civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia - Muslims and Croats. No matter that Croats and Muslims are the genocidal fascists which yesterday people like Foot and Redgrave marched to protest about. Today they are perceived as victims and the perceived enormity of their victimhood cancels out any relationship between past and present, between cause and effect. Outraged, affronted, new Left liberal angst seeks outlet against the evil Serb victimiser in war, the very form of destructive human activity which most have spent the best part of their lives opposing.

`Oh, What A Lovely War'

Today wars can't be sold as wars. They are grim and beastly and no civilised liberal people wired into the electronic media would accept such destructive frightfullness. However war in pursuit of justice for a grotesquely abused victim is not viewed as war - it's a crusade. And crusades are fun, something in which everyone can participate. The old papal Polak understands this, which is why he's sanctioned the `just' war, the only justification for unleashing colossal military force in this New World Order politically correct age. It's not a new concept, merely an old concept disinterred and dressed up for modern consumption.

A just war demands not just winners and losers, but righteous winners and demonic losers. Saddam was a sucker for treatment in this respect. As we learned from the Gulf War, to justify the near total destruction of Iraq, we first had to demonise Saddam - not difficult. Anything done to the hapless civilians of Iraq, including the deliberate destruction of their most basic means of survival, was okay. So long as we kept the image of the `Butcher of Baghdad' and his crimes - real and imagined - firmly to the forefront of our minds, any horror our military leaders cared to inflict on the Iraqi people was morally acceptable.

The parallels between the media perceptions of Saddam and his demonised Doppelgangers in Belgrade and Pale are obvious for all to see. But things get trickier with the Serbs. For a start they're not Muslim `rag-heads', but white European christians with a valiant record of resisting fascism. Hardly surprising then that it has taken a mind-bending degree of role-reversal to Saddamise the Serbs. The true of importance of this process will only become clear if the US visits unrestricted air war in the Serbs - extreme demonisation is a necessary prerequisite if the extreme military might of the US is unleashed against them. And now, as I revise this article, the signs are that the US fully intends to deploy their aerial might against the Serbian people.

It's worth remembering how we felt during the air war against Saddam. I remember normally sane, decent and sensitive people actually cheer when the defeated and undefended Iraqi columns retreating from Kuwait city were incinerated and re-incinerated by US air power. Troops needlessly slaughtered who would have surrendered given half a chance. This was just one of many expressions of an entrenched belief that to an Iraqi, a Vietnamese, or any other non-European, human life is of little or no consequence.

The liberal press went along with the exercise. Respected liberal newspapers like the Guardian hardly wrung a limp hand at the merciless destruction of the Iraqi civilian infrastructure. Saddam was an ace victimiser and deserved all he got - even if the Iraqi nation was destroyed to make the point.

The same Guardian today is one of the most rabid media Serb haters. Its reporters follow the greasy slick made by Maggie O'Kane, the paper's victim finder in-chief. Her outrageous anti-Serb reporting is on a par with that of her fellow Guardian reporter, Ian Traynor, whose anti-Serb venom is so crude that one can only wonder in whose bottomless pocket his hand has taken root. Just last week a vile Serb bashing article by O'Kane was captioned with the notorious grinning Belsen like human cadaver - the man who was later discovered to be a Serb and not a Muslim victim of a Serb death camp as originally claimed.

The degree to which ordinary people who followed the Gulf War in the media were divested of their qualities of judgement, mercy, compassion and humanity was truly frightening. Every last guiding principle was corrupted. Truth, justice, right, wrong - all were bent to the single purpose of persuading them to accept the horrible consequences of the unleashed might of a military superpower. The successful global manipulation of public opinion and perceptions about the nature and purpose of this war was the real victory for the western powers.

States which view war as the solution to political problems, especially the major democracies, have learned how to make their electorate feel good about inflicting mega death on perceived enemies . And since it worked then, it will work again. Political and military necessity is largely in step with a public locked into a belief that nothing is too good for a victim, and nothing too awful for a victimiser.

It's a slumbering beast, capable of being aroused at short notice. We saw it in the instant demonisation of Ghadaffi, and when the North Koreans suddenly started growing devil horns over the issue of nuclear reactors. And today, inspired by the US, the focus is now switching to Iran.

The most blatant example is seen in the US official and public attitude to the civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Listening to the anti-Serb rhetoric of the US media and Congress, one can only marvel at their apparently sincere belief in justice for victims - real and imagined - of Serbian war crimes. Unkinder souls who understand the lingo of petro patronage simply view much of the rhetoric as payment in kind.

But here too New Left liberal angst is seriously into victimhood. Thus rumours of Serb atrocities are seized on and denounced as fact, and verified Croat and Muslim atrocities are either justified or simply considered irrelevant. In the perverted moral and ethical universe of the just war doctrine, never forget that human evil has a relative, not absolute value.

Righteous members of the US Congress also demonstrate a mind-boggling degree of moral amnesia . They appear not to see - or chose not to acknowledge - the glaring contradictions in their moral censure of the Serbs. Yet compared to their own country's earlier conduct in Vietnam, the Serbs are clawless pussy cats. The destruction of Vietnam by air, land and sea by the US armed forces cost 2 Vietnamese million dead.

It's legacy was a poisoned, ruined Vietnam and the loss and disillusionment for a generation of American youth. Throughout this war, ideology aside, the Vietnamese were resisting an external aggressor which had not even declared war. As an act, this was surely a breach of international law. In deeds, it totals up to a staggering collective crime against humanity.

Yet the moral arbiters of the US congress seem unable to confront the reality of what was done to Vietnam. It's the same form of national denial in type, if not in kind, we witness in the Croat attitude to their own WW2 past. It's as though the sheer enormity of the wanton destruction the US inflicted on an Asian peasant people and their country is simply too awful to contemplate. Years on, all we can now remember is what the US did - and vividly - not why they did it.

Certainly there were no sanctions applied to the US during their undeclared war against Vietnam. Nor for the illegal and equally devastating air wars in Cambodia and Laos. No zealous, justice loving UN advocates ever turned up there to take witness statements from the victims of US war crimes.

These include, remember, the deliberate destruction of Vietnam's environment by carcinogenic pesticides like Agent Orange, which is still producing a human toll of misery including spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, deformed births and a variety of cancers and other horrible afflictions too numerous to mention. A toll which also includes Vietnam Vets who today still suffer the poisonous after affects of contamination.

Nor does the passage of time since the Vietnam War relieve the illegality of these crimes - nazis are still being tried for criminal acts committed during WW2. But war crime trials aside, can the leaders of a nation responsible for acts like those committed in Vietnam and elsewhere,believably presume to lecture the Serbs, or indeed any other state, on the justice or morality of their conduct in times of conflict? Here, the answer is a resounding yes. The morally witless among them would consider it an insult to equate what the US did in Vietnam to what the Serbs do in former Yugoslavia. The morally bankrupt will say anything if the price is right.

The Americans are by no means unique in this respect. In this century, it was the Brits who gassed Iraqis from the air in the 20's. The Italians who exterminated - or tried to - anything black that moved in Ethiopia. The French who did the same with anything yellow skinned in Indo-China. As for Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the less said the better. Nor are recently emerged states and other nations like China and post Soviet Russia, both members of the Security Council, immune from acts of inhumanity against their own or citizens of other states.

Yet most, if not all, of these nations, but especially the US, elect to sit in judgement on the Serbs. And not just alleged Serbian war criminals, but on the entire Serbian nation. The lives, hopes, fears and aspirations of the Serbian people is, like the powerless Iraqi people during Desert Storm, deemed hostage to fortune should the nightmare of all out techno-war ever happen.

The UN - Hanging Judge Of The New World Order

The UN is now deeply embroiled in the pernicious examples of international double standards mentioned above. And to its ultimate cost, for its role in the dismemberment and consequent civil wars of ex-Yugoslavia will surely consign it to the same historical bin into which the League Of Nations was junked. Nowhere in the UN charter, for instance, does it grant itself the power to bestow legality on nations unilaterally formed from within the internal borders of a member state - in the case of ex-YU, a founder member, no less.

Yet the UN cravenly allowed itself to be pressured into doing just that. And in the full knowledge it would provoke a savage Balkan conflict - war being, of course, the very scourge the U.N. was created to avert or abolish. And with predictable war now terrible reality, we witness the legal farce of the UN setting itself up in judgement over those accused of waging a war which the UN itself largely initiated.

The depressing truth is that the UN, through the self-serving actions of the Security Council, now lacks the moral authority to accuse and condemn anyone of anything. Selective justice of the kind it doles out has nothing to offer the victims of the civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia. It's fatally flawed because at heart it is a face-saving contrivance conjured up by political maggots wriggling on a hook shaped by double-standards, incompetence and craven duplicity. It's a `do what we say, not what we do" justice. The kind which prompts an aggressive UN and US response to breaches of the international law by Iraq and Serbia, and total inertia, if not active connivance when Israel and Turkey commit precisely the same offences. In its current form, the U.N. has been reduced to the level of a bent global cop whose services are on offer to the highest corrupt bidder.

Since the end of the cold war, the US and the European nations have effectively perverted the international ideals which the U.N. was created to uphold. By their actions we know that justice for individuals and nations is whatever they deem it to be. And since it means whatever these powerful nations want it to mean, in essence UN justice means nothing at all.

To be meaningful, justice requires a commonly shared belief in, and adherence to, the universal principles upon which it is founded. If not, its application during and after conflict can't begin to heal the human agonies of war. In fact, it intensifies them. As we know, selective justice invariably trails the political poisons of cant, hypocrisy, division and hatred in its wake - a sure-fire prescription for future conflict..

In this context, the UN War Crimes Tribunal is a betrayal of the very people it pretends to serves, for it is cynically promising what it is wholly unable to deliver. Worse, its very existence - at least in it's present form - is also denying any hope of real justice for victims of war crimes throughout ex-Yugoslavia.

The day a War Crimes Tribunal start putting member states of the Security Council on trial for past and present war crimes, is the day I might start believing in the U.N. again. But I'm not holding my breath.

Johnny Byrne