Library:To kill a nation/NATO's war crimes

Unfortunately, it is the powerful who write the laws of the world—and the powerful who ignore these laws when expediency dictates. The attacks launched against Yugoslavia in March–June 1999 were in violation of the following international and national laws:

The UN Charter clearly guarantees the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The FRY had attacked no United Nations member; therefore, there were no grounds for war against it. Under the UN Charter, collective action can be taken only with Security Council support, which was not forthcoming given the veto power exercised by China and Russia. So the NATO powers simply bypassed the United Nations.

NATO's own charter says it can take military action only in response to aggression committed against one of its members. Yugoslavia had attacked no NATO member.

Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution requires a declaration of war from the US Congress. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, testifying on behalf of the Clinton administration before the House Committee on International Relations, admitted that Kosovo was part of a sovereign state and bombing a sovereign state was an act of war. When asked whether an act of war requires the approval of Congress, Pickering demurred, "Not every act of war requires it." So the Constitution was conveniently circumvented. As Representative Tom Campbell (R-Cal.) complained, "No emergency prevented the president from making his case before Congress. He simply chose not to do so."

The War Powers Act requires the president to get permission from Congress should he engage in a limited military "action" for more than sixty days. The bombings continued past sixty days and the White House lifted not a finger to bring the matter before Congress. Nor did the liberal hawks in Congress express the slightest concern about the illegalities of Clinton's war.

The War Powers Resolution states that the president's constitutional power as Commander-in-Chief to introduce US armed forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent hostilities are clearly indicated, can be executed "only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." None of these conditions obtained in March 1999.

It was Congressman Abraham Lincoln, commenting on President Polk's war against Mexico (1846-48), who said, "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion. . . and you allow him to make war at pleasure." This would place "our President where kings have always stood." The founders of the Constitution, Lincoln continued, having recognized that war was "the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions," reserved the war-making power for the elected body of representatives, the Congress.

With NATO's attack upon Yugoslavia, we have the first major war declared by a body that has no constituency or geography as would be found in a nation-state. "NATO has no capital, elections, or natural existence. For the first time in history, an institution has declared war on a country." So command and control of the world rests increasingly with corporations and the organizations that support them, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and NATO. With the assault on Yugoslavia, Clinton and NATO declared war upon democratic sovereignty and the right of citizens to have any say about policies that are carried out in their name.

Along with international law, US leaders also discarded traditional diplomacy. Traditional diplomacy is a process of negotiating disputes through give and take, proposal and counterproposal, a way of pressing one's interests only so far, arriving eventually at a solution that may leave one side more dissatisfied than the other but not to the point of forcing either party to war.

NATO VS. CANADIAN SOVEREIGNTY

It was not only Yugoslav sovereignty that was violated by NATO's illegal action. Canadian sovereignty was also abused. Canada became involved in a war without any member of the Canadian parliament or the Canadian people being consulted. The ultimate expression of a nation's sovereignty is the right to declare war. NATO abrogated this right. If it is essential that we give up some of our sovereignty as the price we pay for membership in global institutions such as NATO, then it is mandatory that such institutions follow their own rules, respect the rule of law, and operate within the generally accepted framework of the United Nations Charter. This NATO did not do.

US diplomacy is something else, as evidenced in its dealings with Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, and then Yugoslavia. It consists of laying down a set of demands that are treated as nonnegotiable, though called "accords" or "agreements." The other side's reluctance to surrender to every condition—in the case of Rambouillet, surrender its very sovereignty—is labeled "stonewalling," and is publicly represented as an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. US leaders, we hear, run out of patience as their "offers" are "snubbed" or "spurned." Ultimatums are issued, then aerial destruction is delivered upon the recalcitrant nation so that it might learn to behave the way Washington wants. Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, supposedly the nation's top diplomat, made clear her impatience with normal diplomatic effort. Referring to the period after Rambouillet, just before the NATO air attacks began, she said, "I got increasingly frustrated that we were doing this peacefully.... We had to take action."

Such action violated basic maxims of morality. As the White House saw it, since the stated intention of the aerial attacks was not to kill civilians, then civilian deaths were only regret- table incidentals, not moral liabilities. In other words, only the professed intent of an action counted, not its ineluctable and predictable effects.

Under the laws of civil society, that would not be the case. One can incur criminal liability for pursuing an action that inevitably leads to serious injury of others even if one professes no such intent. Suppose a man drives a car into a crowd of people, killing or injuring some. He then says he had no intention of hurting people but was just in a hurry. Since the deaths were unintended, they were accidental, he argues; therefore he pleads innocent. But according to the law, his action is anything but free of criminal liability. Even if he had no intention of hurting pedestrians, and had a compelling necessity such as getting to work on time, he would still face charges for recklessly driving his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians and inflicting unavoidable injury upon them. The predictably ineluctable nature of the incident makes it some- thing more than an innocent accident.

As applied to the nation-state, such morality is inverted. It is understood that bombing various populated areas will lead to the death of innocent civilians. Now suddenly the inevitable nature of the deaths and injuries becomes the very thing that makes them morally permissible. Since civilian casualties by bombings are unintended and unavoidable, then we are just going to have to learn to accept them as one of those regrettable things about war. So don't blame the people who order the bombing.

But there is a real question as to how unintended the killing of civilians has been. As George Kenney, a former state department official in the Bush Administration, put it: "Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing." (The use of cluster bombs is ipso facto a violation of international law and a war crime.) NATO planners actually spelled out beforehand the estimated number of people who would be killed when they bombed a Belgrade office building that housed political parties and television and radio stations: 50 to 100 government and party employees, and 250 civilians. As William Blum notes, here were decision-makers consciously planning to hit a particular target, knowingly killing a substantial number of civilians, then publicly insisting afterward that it was unintended.

Through most of the aerial campaign, NATO spokespersons repeatedly denied that they had targeted civilians. Civilian casualties were written off as unfortunate accidents or ascribed to the Serbs. Thus when Belgrade charged that NATO jets hit a refugee convoy, killing dozens of civilians, NATO supreme commander General Wesley Clark blamed Yugoslav forces for the attack. He eventually retracted his version, and NATO belatedly took responsibility for the "accident."

Sometimes, the NATO attackers defended their atrocities by claiming that a civilian target was really a military one, as when NATO mouthpiece Jamie Shea unblushingly announced that the bombing of Surdulica hospital was deliberate because the hospital was really a military barracks. This was a blatant fabrication. Journalists who visited Surdulica immediately after the bombing discovered a badly damaged sanitarium, with the pitiful remains of civilian dead.

During the war, a reporter asked Jamie Shea why, if NATO leaders believe international law is so important, were they arguing that the International Court of Justice and the Inter- national Criminal Tribunal had no jurisdiction over what NATO was doing to the people of Yugoslavia? Shea responded that both those bodies were established primarily by the NATO countries. "NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the tribunal; we are among the major financiers." Shea noted that the charges brought against NATO by Yugoslavia were under the genocide convention. "That convention does not apply to NATO countries. As to whom it does apply, I think we know the answer there." Shea's position was clear: if NATO killed the innocent, it was beyond the jurisdiction of international tribunals and courts; if Serbia killed the innocent, it was a war crime.

The spoon-fed press briefings, sophistic arguments, and endless lies could not quite cover up the increasingly wanton nature of NATO's aerial attacks upon hospitals, schools, a train filled with passengers, two buses, a village bridge on market day, churches, rural dwellings, and apartment houses. Human Rights Watch—an organization that rarely strays from the US interventionist global paradigm—issued a report that "found no evidence of war crimes," by NATO, and placed the number of civilians killed by the air attacks at "over five hundred," putting it close to NATO's own estimate of a few hundred. (Belgrade said 500 military and 2,000 civilians were killed, and 6,000 wounded.) Yet even Human Rights Watch ventured that NATO may have caused "excessive" civilian casualties and breached the Geneva Convention by using duster bombs, attacking targets of questionable military legitimacy, and not taking adequate measures to warn civilians of strikes or identify the presence of civilians when attacking.

That NATO attacks upon civilian targets were not usually the result of war "errors" was confirmed by Captain Martin de la Hoz, who participated in bombing missions, flying an F-18. Several times his Spanish colonel lodged protests with NATO chiefs regarding their selection of nonmilitary targets, only to be rudely rebuffed. "Once there was a coded order from the North American military that we should drop antipersonnel bombs over the localities of Pristina and Nis," Captain de la Hoz commented. "The colonel refused it altogether and, a couple of days later, [his] transfer order came. . . All the missions that we flew, all and each one, were planned by US high military authorities. Even more, they were all planned in detail, including attacking planes, targets and type of ammunition that we have to throw."

He concluded: "They are destroying the country, bombing it with novel weapons, toxic nerve gases, surface mines dropped with parachute, bombs containing uranium, black napalm, sterilization chemicals, sprayings to poison the crops, and weapons of which even we still do not know anything. The North Americans are committing there one of the biggest barbarities that can be committed against humanity."

NATO'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ART OF KILLING

After the bombings stopped, various police stations around Belgrade displayed dozens of photos of officers killed while performing rescue operations or other duties during the aerial attacks. Casualties among rescue workers were high. NATO had devised the devilish technique of bombing a site, then waiting fifteen minutes—just time enough for rescue teams to arrive and get working—to hit the target a second time, killing many of the would-be rescuers, and making it extremely dangerous for teams to dig for survivors. This method of delayed follow-up precision missile attack on a civilian target was one of NATO's innovative war crimes.

With words that might cause us to question his humanity, the NATO commander General Wesley Clark boasted that the aim of the air war was to "demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure" of Yugoslavia. No doubt atrocities were committed by all sides including the Serbs, but where is the sense of proportionality? Serbian paramilitary killings in Kosovo (many of which occurred after the aerial war began) are no justification for bombing fifteen cities in round-the-clock raids for over two months, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, poisoning agricultural fields and rivers, maiming and killing thousands, exposing millions to depleted uranium, and obliterating the productive capital of an entire nation. Such a massive aggression amounts to a vastly greater war crime than anything that has been charged against Milosevic.

It may come as a surprise—or an irrelevancy—to some, but unrestricted aerial attacks of the kind NATO rained down upon Yugoslavia are prohibited under international law. Destroying a country's infrastructure, its waterworks, power plants, bridges, factories, hospitals, schools, churches, agriculture, civilian transportation, and communications system—not to mention the attendant loss of life and injury to civilians—is nothing less than a horrendous war crime. Yet, the realities of power being what they are, major war criminals such as Clinton, Blair, and their associates go unchallenged.

In June 1999 President Clinton delivered a thirteen-minute address on national television, into which he managed to pack a record number of deceptions justifying the US-NATO attack on Yugoslavia:

Fiction: Clinton claimed that "the demands of an outraged and united international community have been met."

Fact: The international community, as represented by the 154-member United Nations, was bypassed, and war was waged by the US-dominated NATO. If anything, argues Martin McLaughlin, much of the international community was "out- raged by the savagery of the NATO bombing of a sovereign country."

Fiction: Clinton claimed that he waged war "to enable the Kosovar people, the victims of some of the most vicious atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, to return to their homes with safety and self-government."

Fact: The great majority of Kosovo Albanians did not leave their homes until the bombing started, nor had they been subjected to widespread atrocities, certainly not prior to the NATO bombings.

Fiction: Clinton claimed that the NATO victory brought new hope that the US and the world would always support peoples who are subjected to ethnic or religious oppression.

Fact: The US government actively supports dozens of governments around the world that oppress ethnic and religious minorities including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, and Mexico, as well as several NATO allies, most notoriously Turkey, whose mass killings and expulsions of Kurds far out- strip anything Miosevic has been accused of doing.

Fiction: Clinton praised US pilots for "risking their lives to attack their targets" while avoiding civilian casualties, even though they were "fired upon from populated areas."

Fact: There were no US combat casualties, and US pilots were rarely in danger as they dropped thousands of tons of bombs on virtually defenseless civilian populations.

Fiction: Clinton maintained that "when our diplomatic efforts to avert this horror were rebuffed, and the violence mounted, we and our allies chose to act."

Fact: There was no diplomatic effort at Rambouillet, only an ultimatum that provided a pretext for military attack. The Serbs were told to sign the Rambouillet agreement and accept unrestricted NATO occupation of Yugoslavia—or be bombed.

Fiction: Clinton boasted how nineteen democracies had together faced "the stiffest military challenge in NATO's 50- year history."

Fact: Yugoslavia, a country of ii million people with a small army and a substandard air force, posed no serious military challenge to an alliance that controls half the world's GDP and over half the world's military spending. The "stiffest military challenge" in NATO's history was actually a sadistic, one-sided, gang-battering of a small country by the most powerful military forces in the world.

Clinton also asserted that the NATO action had averted "the wider war this conflict may well have sparked," that there was a perfectly peaceful way that Belgrade could have kept Kosovo but chose not to do so, and that the demonic "Mr. Milosevic was determined to eliminate Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo, dead or alive." Luckily though, because of "our resolve" the new century begins not with helpless indignation but with a new affirmation of "human dignity and human rights." Again, it bears repeating; the Albanian exodus from Kosovo began after the NATO bombings that trampled on human dignity and human rights. And at Rambouillet, it was the US that rejected "a perfectly peaceful" solution to the Kosovo conflict.

In April 1999, as the NATO bombs and missiles rained down upon Yugoslavia, teams of international law professors from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the American Association of Jurists filed war crimes charges against NATO with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In November, two Canadian lawyers, David Jacobs and law professor Michael Mandel delivered three thick volumes of evidence to ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte in The Hague, substantiating their charges that sixty-seven NATO leaders (including Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and Jean Chretien) were guilty of causing the deaths and maiming of thousands of civilians and billions of dollars of property damage. The lawyers told Judge Del Ponte that her court's continued failure to act was a violation of her duties under the law. They noted that, while having rushed to indict Yugoslav President Miosevic during the illegal NATO bombardment, the tribunal still had made no move against the NATO leaders, raising serious questions about its impartiality.

Two months later, Del Ponte made clear that a formal investigation into NATO's war actions was unlikely. Both the White House and the Pentagon opposed any international jurisdiction over US military forces, regardless of what the ICTY's mandate might be. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was set up by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 at the bidding of Madeline Albright and the US government. It depends on NATO countries for its financial support, with the United States as the major provider, and it looks to NATO to track down and arrest the suspects it puts on trial. Although located in The Hague, this tribunal has no connection to the World Court and no precedent in international law or the UN Charter. It hardly qualifies as any kind of independent judiciary body.

The one-sided destruction perpetrated by US-directed NATO forces against Yugoslavia—laughably described as a "war"—was part of the larger US policy of global military interventionism. Over the past half century, the US national security state has been involved in numerous bloody wars, directly or by proxy, in Afghanistan, Angola, Colombia, Cambodia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Western Sahara. Then there are the coups and destabilization campaigns: Chile, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere. In addition, US leaders have supported brutally repressive regimes throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In just the last two decades or so, US military activity has been cause for consternation and outrage. A country reputedly dedicated to peace has been engaged almost continuously in military attacks against other nations, including no fewer than seven major invasions or bombing campaigns (in Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq [1990-91 and 1999], Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo); ongoing military occupations (in Haiti, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo); and proxy wars and interventions in scores of other countries, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths — all testimony to the increasingly unrestrained militarism behind US imperialism.