Searching for the truth Issues 28 - Documentation Center of Cambodia

100 100 100 100 100 100 50 50 50 50
Black
Yellow
Magenta
Cyan
Number 28, April 2002
42
Searching for the Truth ⎯ PUBLIC DEBATE
The Milosevic Case and War Crimes Accountability
Now that the trial of former Yugoslavia President
Slobodan Milosevic has begun, some have heralded
his prosecution as the dawning of “a new era of
international accountability,” further evidence of “the
globalization of justice.” During the first week of the
trial, Hague prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has insisted
that this is not a political trial. Milosevic countered
with a challenge to the tribunal’s legal legitimacy.
Bubbling beneath the surface of this dispute is a
fundamental clash between the competing claims of
national sovereignty and universal human rights. If we
have entered a new era of war crimes accountability,
then the rules only apply to some. During the 1990s,
the United Nations, backed by a well-funded human
rights industry, pushed for a new international order
based on an expanded set of rules for statecraft. Alas,
the rules have been applied only to some, leaving this
“new era of war crimes accountability” more a claim
than a reality.
The alleged new era began when courts in the
Hague, Spain, Belgium and the United States challenged
the sanctity of national sovereignty by considering
cases against sitting national leaders like Slobodan
Milosevic, Israel’s Ariel Sharon, Chile’s Augusto
Pinochet, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
Cuba’s Fidel Castro and many others. The sad irony is
that as western human rights groups and civilian lawyers
refined and expanded new codes of international
criminal law, their leaders could not summon the
resolve to act forcefully in order to stop mass atrocities
in brutal civil wars in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda,
East Timor, and Sierra Leone. Throughout the 1990s,
the most basic distinction between soldier and civilian
all but disappeared in places like Dili, Kigali,
Sarajevo, and Freetown.
Even with civilians the victims of genocidal violence,
Peter Maguire
there was little interest in intervening militarily. Instead,
the UN promised the victims post-tragedy justice in
the form of war crimes trials. Since 1993, the UN has
spent over one billion dollars to try less than fifty
individuals before tribunals in the Hague and Arusha,
and Tanzania. However, the application of justice has
been selective, uneven, and proves once against that
the rules only apply to some.
Nearly twenty years after the Khmer Rouge killed
two million Cambodians, the UN began negotiating
with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen over a trial
for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. After four
years of negotiations, the United Nations announced
in 2002 that is would not participate in a trial for the
Khmer Rogue leaders because “the Cambodian court
would not guarantee independence, impartiality and
objectivity.” Human rights advocates and many in the
western human rights industry praised the UN’s
decision as an example of the UN standing “its ground
with integrity.”
After the Vietnamese toppled the Khmer Rouge
in 1979, neither the UN nor the Carter administration
supported efforts to try the Khmer Rouge leaders, whose
policies led to the deaths of two million Cambodians.
The U.S. voted repeatedly, throughout the 1980s, for
the genocidal regime to retain Cambodia’s seat in the
UN General Assembly. Although he had been sentenced
to death in absentia in a 1979 show trial, Khmer Rouge
leader Ieng Sary served as Cambodia’s representative
at the United Nations.
Ultimately, the Khmer Rouge was not defeated
by the UN or the long arm of “universal jurisdiction,”
but rather by a brutally Machiavellian series of political
moves taken by Prime Minister Hun Sen. Amnesty
was the price of peace in Cambodia.
Over the objections of western governments and
Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)