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War
Criminals Are on the Run
By JONATHAN
POWER
August 16, 2000
LONDON - Remember the summer of '98? In the
sweltering, torpid heat of a Roman august, charged with
exhaust fumes, the international community gave its
overwhelming approval to the establishment of an
International Criminal Court that will enable those
accused of "crimes against humanity" to be tried and, if
convicted, sentenced. Only seven nations opposed or
abstained from the motion, including Israel, China, India
and the U.S.A. where the Pentagon had successfully waged
bureaucratic guerrilla war to undermine the initially
sympathetic stance of President Bill Clinton.
Two years on we can now see what an epochal event that
was. In a the stroke of 120 pens it changed the climate
on political thuggery. After numerous half-starts and
false starts ever since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials
that convicted the war criminals of the Second World War,
the world at last had agreed en masse a common set of
understandings and a statute on what constitutes a war
criminal and how, once arrested, due process should
proceed. Of course, the momentum had been gathering speed
for half a dozen years- hence the ad hoc war crimes
tribunals for ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda- but that summer
was the watershed, when the cold rain of judicial sense
took over from personal writ, and the dam burst. In two
years prosecution has followed prosecution, even though
it will be another couple of years before legislatures
have acquiesced in ratification and the Court itself is
up and running. Meanwhile, the world waits for its most
important putative, would-be member, the U.S. to make up
its mind what to do.
Two months after the Rome conference the former
Chilean strongman, Augustino Pinochet, was arrested in
London when, in the early hours of the morning, Scotland
Yard detectives sealed off the clinic where he was
recuperating from a back operation. The next day, Mrs
Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister, attacked
the police publicly for disturbing the rest of a "sick
and frail old man". The arrest, indeed, was a momentous
event in the human rights struggle. The brilliant British
lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson in his book ,"Crimes Against
Humanity" wrote observantly, "The great play of
sovereignty, with all its pomp and panoply, can now been
seen for what it hides: a posturing troupe of human
actors who when off stage are sometimes prone to rape the
chorus." For the first time in a high court anywhere it
was decided that sovereign immunity must not be allowed
to become sovereign impunity. For the Law Lords' ruling
we have to thank most of the nations of the world,
including Chile and Thatcher's Britain, who in the late
1980s and 1990s put their signatures to the UN Convention
Against Torture and thus laid the legal basis in British
jurisprudence.
And now last week the justices of the Chilean Supreme
Court in effect concurred with their London colleagues
and decided to lift Pinochet's immunity from prosecution,
an immunity he had longed assumed was copper-bottomed in
Chile, making the fatal mistake of all tyrants in
believing his popularity and his ability to cow people
would last for ever.
What a year 2000 has been and there are still four and
a half months to go! Earlier in the year a congressional
commission in Brazil filed a petition to indict Alfredo
Stroessner, the most long-lasting dictator of the
twentieth century until he was overthrown in 1989, who
now lives in exile in Brasilia. In Argentina, which
briefly jailed its military junta before pardoning them
in 1990, the former dictator Jorge Videla and eight other
leaders of the "dirty war", in which dissidents were
thrown out of helicopters over the sea, are back under
arrest. Today they are facing charges that they stole
babies (for adoption) from female political prisoners. In
Uruguay a new commission has been formed to investigate
the whereabouts of people who disappeared under the
country's former military government.
In Africa, at the beginning of the year human rights
groups and individuals who say they were tortured during
the rule of Hissene Habre, the former dictator of Chad,
announced they were intending to prosecute him in Senegal
where Mr Habre lives in exile. According to Human Rights
Watch, during Habre's eight year rule, when he was
vigorously supported as a Cold War friend by the U.S. and
France, his secret police killed tens of thousands of
people and tortured as many as two hundred thousand out
of a total population of only six million. (In March,
however, there was a change of government in Senegal and,
at least for now, the charges have been withdrawn.) On
Monday of this week the UN Security Council voted to
establish a special war crimes court to deal with the
accusations of atrocities in Sierra Leone. This suggests,
whatever reservations the U.S., China and Russia have
about a fully-fledged international court, they will at
least agree to deal with the worst cases on an ad hoc
basis. That is an important development.
What happens next? The indications are that Nato is
about to drop its reserve and arrest Radovan Karadzic,
the indicted former head of the Bosnian Serbs and his
military commander, Ratko Mladic. In the last year, eight
indicted war criminals have been arrested and handed over
to the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia in The Hague and in April Nato troops arrested
Momcilo Krajisnik, a right-hand man to Mr Karadzic. If
the arrest does go ahead as expected Western leaders will
find it difficult to parley away the indictment of the
supreme Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, in any political
deal for the ending of hostilities.
The sum of all this activity of the last two years is
to effectively lock up former dictators in their places
of refuge. They dare not venture far from where they
think they are secure. Last year the former Ethiopian
strongman, Mengistu Haile Mariam, suddenly left Zimbabwe
where he had been given shelter for North Korea, one of
the few countries that will not consider a UN demand for
extradition. Also in late August last year, Suharto, the
former Indonesian dictator cancelled the trip he makes
annually to Germany for medical treatment.
Being big and bad is no longer enough to strut your
stuff. The net is finally starting to close on those who
do such evil. "They can run but they can't hide" as the
old American heavy-weight boxer, Joe Louis used to say.
This is momentous sort of progress. It may not totally
change the world, but it is not leaving it as we found it
either. One day, it is possible to believe, we might have
a world of laws not of men.
I can be reached by phone on:
+44 385 351172 or by e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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