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Amnesty
International is rocking the Nato boat
By JONATHAN
POWER
June 14, 2000
LONDON- Amnesty International's blast last week
against the legitimacy of the Nato bombing of Serbia in a
report that the New York Times said "has infuriated Nato
leaders", perhaps produced an unintended result. It
confirmed to the Pentagon that it was right to oppose
U.S. participation in an International Criminal Court
whose reach on the prosecution of war crimes could
stretch right inside the American military. For a whole
year the joint chiefs of staff campaigned against the
wish of their commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, who
earlier had made it clear he favoured the establishment
of such a court. They won the battle and the U.S.
delegation at the UN conference in Rome two summers ago,
when the Court's statutes were written, was mandated to
seek wrecking clauses that, in effect, would have drawn a
cordon sanitaire around the U.S. military, making future
prosecutions, however outrageous the alleged war crime,
impossible. In the end, unable to get all its way, the
U.S. alongside China voted against the creation of the
court.
The American generals had their antennae switched in
the right direction. The human rights lobby does indeed
have its tail up and this latest report by Amnesty- and a
similar one six months ago by the U.S.-based Human Rights
Watch- has raised the stakes. Amnesty has said that those
responsible for the bombings "must be brought to justice"
and asked the UN criminal tribunal on the former
Yugoslavia, a war crimes court, to investigate its
allegations.
Standing at Nato's doorway, it will not be long before
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and their like
will be on the steps of the Pentagon itself. Amnesty is
questioning the orthodoxys- even the liberal ones- of our
age with a daring that it could not even have
contemplated when it was founded forty years ago to
campaign against the relatively narrow issue of political
prisoners. In challenging Nato's engagement in what, in
the West, was a popular war with Serbia it has staked out
what is being described as an extreme position. Doesn't
Amnesty realize that with the end of the Cold War the
pursuit of human rights is now Nato's cause too? Realists
should board the new human rights enforcement train
steered by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer!
After Bosnia Kosovo. And after Kosovo El Timor. And after
El Timor Sierra Leone. (We won't mention Somalia or
Rwanda to keep the arguement simpler.)
Published today is a long essay by Amnesty
International's Secretary-General, Pierre Sane, as a
preface to its annual report, that is an eloquent and
thoughtful rejoinder to the notion that human rights can
be successfully pursued Nato's way.
It begins with two questions: "Are invasion and
bombardment by foreign forces justifiable in the name of
human rights? And have external military interventions
succeeded in winning respect for human rights?" Sane's
argument in a few lines is this: "Amnesty International
has long refused to take a position on whether or not
armed forces should be deployed in human rights crises.
Instead we argue that human rights crises can, and
should, be prevented. They are never inevitable. If
government decisions to intervene are motivated by the
quest for justice, why do they allow situations to
deteriorate to such unspeakable injustice?"
Sane points to Yugoslavia. The Nato governments, he
says, which bombed Belgrade are the same governments that
were willing to deal with Slobodan Milosevic's government
during the break up of the original Yugoslavia and were
unwilling to address repeated warnings about the growing
human rights crisis in Kosovo. As long ago as 1993
Amnesty was arguing in public: "If action is not taken
soon to break the cycle of unchecked abuses and
escalating tensions in Kosovo, the world may again find
itself staring impotently at a new conflagration." This
begs another question, argues Sane: if the motivation of
governments is "peace", as they often claim, why do they
fuel conflicts by supplying arms or allowing their
nationals to trade in arms? In the case of East Timor two
of the major powers who argued for international
intervention- the U.S. and the U.K.- were also the two
major suppliers of arms to the Indonesian government,
whose security forces were responsible for widespread and
systematic violations of human rights in East Timor.
As for military intervention when it does come, the
history of the last few years suggests it is a double
edged sword. Failure is more likely than success. In
Kosovo, writes Sane, "violence is being committed on a
daily basis against Serbs, Romas and moderate Albanians.
In December, the level of murder, abductions, violent
attacks, intimidation and house burning were reported at
a rate almost as high as June 1999 when Nato peacekeeping
troops were first deployed".
Sane's argument returns to the necessity for
prevention: A year before the genocide in Rwanda a UN
special rapporteur warned of what was to come. Amnesty
repeatedly exposed over years the Indonesian government's
gross violation of human rights. "We fear now that our
pleas for action in other countries are similarly being
downplayed. When some human rights catastrophe explodes,
will we again be expected to see armed intervention as
the only option?....Why should we be forced to choose
between two types of failure when the successful course
of action is known?"
Under Pierre Sane, Amnesty has become an organisation
that dares to bite the hand that partly feeds it. Sane
makes it clear both in this essay and in conversation he
has little time for the hypocrisies and the
double-thinking of the liberal West . "As an
organisation", Sane is said to have told his staff on
taking office, "we have a lot of capital in the bank and
we are going to use it."
Nato and the Pentagon need to watch out. There will
more of this to come. They have two choices. Either to
fight back or to put their house in order. And part of
the latter means signing up for the International
Criminal Court.
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By JONATHAN POWER
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