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56                          THE ECONOMIST JANUARY 21ST 1995

EUROPE --  Croatia --  Deadly gamble



 IF the familiar conflicts of former Yugoslavia were not
terrible enough, that unhappy part of the world now faces an
unexpected threat which could tip it into the most savage round
of warfare yet. This is a demand by Croatia's government that
United Nations peacekeepers should leave its soil, where they
hold the ring between Serbs and Croats in Krajina, the Serb-held
part of Croatia.

Born of frustration and anger with the UN for failing to bring
justice as well as peace, the Croats' decision smacks of
desperation: "liberty or death". They have made similar threats
before, but this time, for the moment, the Croats seem to mean
what they say the 15,000 UN troops must go, however dire the
consequences.

The UN's blue helmets began arriving in Croatia in 1992 after
Croatia's Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army directed from
Belgrade, had managed to rip a third of Croatia from its
government's control. Up to 300,000 Croats fled from what was to
become the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina; perhaps
the same number of Serbs left government-controlled Croatia. The
UN mandate in Croatia, which allows its soldiers to patrol
Krajina, expires on March 31st, but the Croatian government has
given the UN another three months after that to complete its
withdrawal. Technically, that does not affect the world body's
peacekeeping mandate in Bosnia, though the UN is likely to move
its headquarters for former Yugoslavia from Zagreb, the Croatian
capital, possibly to Brindisi.

One reason for the Croats'ultimatum is fear of what might happen
now that the Contact Group (America, Russia, France, Britain and
Germany) has accepted the Bosnian Serbs' demand to confederate
with Serbia proper. That raises the possibility that the Krajina
Serbs will demand, and get, the same thing. if that were to come
about, it would make Croatia's loss of Krajina permanent. By
threatening a new bout of mayhem, the Croats hope that the UN
will press Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, into
recognizing Croatia's frontiers. There is scant reason to think
that, in the foreseeable future, he will agree to do so.

Under the terms of the 1992 plan which brought UN peacekeepers
to Croatia, refugees were supposed to return home. Few have done
so. Though they have talked about an economic agreement with
Croatia, the Krajina Serb leaders still insist that they will
never submit to Croatian rule. The way to prevent this, the
Croats seem to argue, is to kick the UN out, thus breaking the
stalemate over Krajina that the blue helmets have produced. The
Croats say they will not start fighting again. But with the UN
troops out of the way, a new round of warfare would be hard to
prevent.

Croatia's president, Franjo Tudjman, wants to believe that his
army can beat the Krajina Serbs, that the Bosnian Serbs will not
come to their rescue because they are tied down at home, and
that Serbia would stay out of a rekindled war because it is
keener on having economic sanctions lifted than on striving anew
for a Greater Serbia. These calculations look suspect. The
Yugoslav military commander who helped carve Krajina out for the
region's Serbs was General Ratko Mladic. He is now the Bosnian
Serbs'military commander. He has come to the aid of the Krajina
Serbs before and would be unlikely to ignore them now. At a
stretch, Mr Milosevic might let Krajina make do with autonomy
within a federal Croatia if that were negotiated as part of a
wider peace. But it is barely conceivable that he would stand by
if it happened as a result of military force, or if Krajina's
existence were to be threatened.

According to the International institute for Strategic Studies
in London, the Croats and Bosnian Croats together have 248
tanks, the Bosnian army (their nominal ally) perhaps another 40.
Together, the Serbs of Krajina, the Bosnian Serbs and the now
purely Serb Yugoslav army could go to war with more than 1,200.
The Yugoslav air force has 284 combat jets; Croatia has 20. The
Serbs could even bomb Zagreb or other Croatian cities spared in
1991. Mr Tudjman may calculate that, with the UN gone, the
Krajina Serbs will "see sense". The trouble for Croatia's
gambling president is that the exact opposite is just as likely
to happen and the cards in his hands are deuces.


=============================================


48           THE ECONOMIST JANUARY 28TH 1995


Bosnia -- Blown Rose -- SARAJEVO


IF GENERALS are shot at by their own side, it is normally by
mistake. in the case of General Sir Michael Rose, the potshots
over his one-year stint as commander Of UNPROFOR, the
24,000-strong United Nations force in Bosnia, have been
deliberate. Many of his fellow Britons say he has done a pretty
good job in impossible circumstances. But many Americans, as
well as senior officials in the UN and NATO, have fiercely
criticized his role in former Yugoslavia. And in Sarajevo itself
many Bosnian Muslims accuse him of favoring the Serbs and
compare him to Neville Chamberlain. is the criticism justified?
General Rose began his year in Bosnia as a local hero. in
February 1994, his tough negotiating tactics helped to persuade
Serbs to withdraw heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. Since
then, far fewer shells have fallen on the city. Under his
command, UNPROFOR has helped to restore Sarajevo's water and
electricity supplies and kept a ceasefire between Muslims and
Croats in central Bosnia. It has also continued to assist the
delivery of humanitarian relief. Yet the Bosnian Muslims do not
offer General Rose much gratitude. They claim that he could have
done far more to deter the Serbs during episodes such as the
Serbs' attack on Gorazde in April 1994 and their push into the
Bihac pocket last November. He should, they say, have been more
vigorous in calling for NATO air strikes. in his defense, the
general points out that he did call for air strikes -- but not
many, because he had to worry about the safety of his own men
and UNPROFOR's ability to carry out its humanitarian mission.
After each Of NATO's modest air strikes, the Serbs kidnapped
soldiers, blocked relief convoys or closed Sarajevo airport.
General Rose argues that UNPROFOR cannot do its job unless it is
seen to be scrupulously impartial; that it has neither the
mandate nor the means to enforce peace; and that, if the West is
unwilling to take on the Serbs, it is not reasonable to expect
UNPROFOR to do it. Even so, the doubters persist. Since the
Serbs all-but-overran Gorazde General Rose has sometimes gone to
strange lengths in pursuit of even-handedness. For instance,
when the Serbs have done something bad, he has often accused the
Bosnian government of a similar misdemeanor, sometimes with
scant justification. On January 14th General Rose declared open
the airport road linking Sarajevo to the rest of Bosnia, which
the Serbs had closed. Two hours later, the Serbs shut the road
again. The general's office announced that unreasonable demands
by the Bosnian government had provoked the closure. UN officials
say the Bosnian government was not to blame. On October 8th Serb
machine-gunners attacked a Sarajevo tram, killing one person and
wounding 11 others. Two days later UNPROFOR officials said that,
a few hours after the shooting, Bosnian soldiers had shot at and
missed two Serb women. Senior UN officials accused General
Rose's office of linking an incident of dubious authenticity to
the tram attack. The office now says that it had been mistaken
to link the two incidents, and that the second in fact occurred
a day after the tram attack. The general's breezy style has not
helped him to win the public-relations battle. He described the
Serb attack on Gorazde as "not serious" when it began last
April. As a result, many Sarajevans are reluctant to believe
good news from him even when it is true. He and his team talk of
the Bosnian government's "communist methods and mentality"
(government ministers admit to tapping his telephones). They in
turn were incensed when, after the Serb advance on Gorazde, he
said Bosnian forces had run away; and when, this month, he
accepted as a liaison officer at Tuzla airport a Serb colonel-
who the Muslims say is a war criminal. NATO, too, has become
frustrated with the general. Earlier this month its Naples
headquarters, responsible for flights over Bosnia, found that he
had told the Bosnian Serbs how many NATO aircraft would be
flying over their land (though not the flight paths). That
annoyed NATO, which suspended- pended the provision of that
information to UNPROFOR. For his part, General Rose complains
that "the NATO nomenklatura" has failed to understand his
successes. General Rose's belief in his ability and achievements
is irrepressible. He likes to use the word "heroic" to describe
UNPROFOR'S mission in Bosnia. But, trained in Britain's Special
Air Service, which puts a premium on swift, decisive action, he
has lacked some of the painstaking qualities needed for what has
been, essentially, a political job. His placement, General
Rupert Smith, will need to master these diplomatic skills if he
is to join those described by Pope: "Our Gen'rals now, retired
to their estates, Hang their old trophies o'er the garden gates,
in life's cool evening satiate of applause."


==============================================================

 WORLD PRESS REVIEW FEBRUARY 1995


 In a desperate race to avert a bigger bloodbath, Western policy
on Bosnia is focusing on a contentious strategy of "peace at all
costs." With Sarajevo bracing for a third winter under siege,
the panic in Western capitals over Bosnia has reached fever
pitch. NATO struggles to the top of the hill marked "air
strikes," takes a nervous peek at the other side, and races back
down to say, "Only joking." The United Nations, France, and
Britain shuffle to the edge of the precipice marked
"withdrawal," peer into the abyss, and back off, proclaiming,
"We didn't really mean it." Yet this sorry spectacle of empty
threats and promises and international buck-passing has produced
a realignment of international diplomacy and a revision of the
mediation strategy that may yet clinch a peace deal. The key
shift wrought by the Serbian siege of Bihac has been the US
administration's abandonment of the moral high ground, its
capitulation -- in the interests of NATO unity -- to British and
French demands for a peace at all costs. In the eyes of many,
that means a bad peace. In the view of the Bosnian government,
it is an unjust peace. The peace-at-all-costs position hurts the
weak -- the Bosnians -- and favors the strong -- the Serbs. The
third party, the Croats, will seek to extract maximum advantage
from whatever settlement might emerge. Last summer, the
five-nation contact group the US, Russia, Britain, France, and
Germany] unveiled a settlement plan and said take it or leave
it. The Bosnians, the Croats, and President Slobodan Milosevic
of Serbia took it. The Bosnian Serbs left it. They are now being
offered an infinitely better deal. The intransigence of the
Bosnian-Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, has paid off. He is now
offering to reopen peace talks and claims to be heartened by the
"new interpretations" of the peace plan from Western mediators.
The so-called final peace plan proscribed any merger of
Serbian-held territory to defeat the aim of an expanded
pan-Serbian state across Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Now the
Serbs are being told that the partition map can be redrawn and
that their areas of Bosnia can 'confederate" with Serbia.
Karadzic has been told he need not cede any of the territory he
holds until the constitutional details of the deal are
negotiated, giving him an international license to delay any
pullback. He enjoys international backing for his demand for a
formal Bosnia-wide cessation of hostilities that would freeze
current front lines in his favor. In short, as far as Moscow,
London, Paris, and now Washington are concerned, the Serbs have
won. The priority is to rubber-stamp that victory to reverse
Bosnia's corrosive impact on NATO, prevent it from undermining
the West's relations with Russia, and destroy the case for a
disastrous UN retreat from Bosnia. The cumulative effect is a
coup for Karadzic-all ostensibly because of Bihac, an obscure
corner of northwest Bosnia that the UN pledged to protect. When
push came to shove, the UN admitted that the pledge was
irredeemable and scurried to get its peace keepers out of harm's
way. -Ian Traynor, "The Guardian" (liberal), London,   Dec. 15,
1994.


A War's Grim Lessons


 Bosnia has changed many things, in ways that we do not yet
fully understand. It has caused a rift in the transatlantic
alliance, raising questions about NATO's future. It has exposed
as pious pipe dreams the ambitions of the United Nations to be
an effective peacekeeping agency in the new era beyond the cold
war. It has served as a vehicle for a newly assertive Russian
foreign policy that challenges Western interests. It has left
European Union claims of common foreign and security policies
looking risible. It has left an estimated 200,000 people dead,
tens of thousands more maimed, countless more traumatized, and 2
million homeless and displaced. And it has rewritten Europe's
good-conduct rule book, showing in the case of the Serbs that if
you are determined to establish an ethnically based
blood-and-soil state, willing to prosecute that aim consistently
with a terrible resolve and damn the consequences, you can get
away with it. Meanwhile, there will be more pogroms, more
sieges, another wretched winter in what has largely been a war
against civilians and in which ethnic cleansing has been the
central and paramount aim, not a byproduct of warfare. The war
seems at a turning point. As a result of Jiinmy Carter's foray
and the agreement to resume negotiations, there is again a
prospect of a settlement of sorts emerging. If that fails -- and
recent history suggests it will -- the outlook is for a decade
of "low intensity" guerrilla warfare as the Muslims seek to
reclaim their inheritance. They seem to be convinced that they
can keep losing the battles, as in the fall's at Bihac, but
still win the war. For if at bottom, over the past 32 months,
the Serbs have proved that might is right, that is a lesson not
lost on the Muslims, who, however grudgingly, have done most of
the things the international powers have asked them to do.
Similarly, the Croats have also reluctantly conformed to the
international powers' bidding, refraining from force to regain
Serb-held Croatia and bowing to US pressure to enter a
Muslim-Croat federation. Such virtue has to be its own reward,
for they see the international powers, in their desperation for
a settlement, moving to reward Serbian recalcitrance and
agreeing to renegotiate a peace plan that only a few months ago
was deemed nonnegotiable.  -Ian Traynor, Dec. 22, 1994.


"NATO's Waterloo"


    However the endgame in Bosnia plays out, December's turning
point was crucial. The United States, giving in to its European
allies, agreed in effect that the Serbs had won the war and
would get more concessions to make peace. What forced President
Bill Clinton to change his policy? The latest World Press Review
Opinion Index suggests that global editorial opinion, which both
reflects and influences official policy, had concluded with near
unanimity that the United Nations and NATO peacekeeping efforts
were such a total failure that the future of both international
bodies was in danger. As seen by the world's press, the emperors
have no clothes. The Index sampled editorial opinions about
Bosnia from 50 leading overseas dailies during the first two
weeks of December. The consensus was both massive and harsh.
Forty-six of the 50 agreed in editorials that the UN-NATO
mission in Bosnia had been not just a failure but a debacle.
That's a disapproval rate of 92 percent, and the editors used
such terms as "impotent," "absurd," "irrelevant," "shame," and
"humiliation." Only two of the 50 grudgingly endorsed the peace
keepers' actions as having done at least some good or prevented
greater evil. Two others published no editorials on the subject.
The World Press Review Opinion Index is a systematic gauge of
global views on international affairs, interpreting editorial
comment from daily papers representing a broad range of
ideologies and regions. They are chosen for their national and
international influence. The peace keepers' image had already
been frayed by misadventures in Somalia before the blue helmets
stumbled into Bosnia. But when they mounted only popgun
reprisals against Serbian forces flouting their rules, when they
were treated with open contempt and even taken hostage, and when
UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali him- self was snubbed
by the Serbs and booed by the Muslims he went to protect, the
image of futility became indelible. The liberal Le Monde of
Paris said NATO had been "discredited" and added that "European
defense rests for the moment on myth." London's liberal Guardian
suggested that this might be "NATO's final decade." "Together
with the Bosnian corpses," said the conservative ABC of Madrid,
"the world is burying a mummified UN . . . and a divided NATO."
Editorials from Africa, Asia., the Middle East, and Latin
America were equally damning. The independent Nation of Bangkok
called the Bosnia record a "moral abdication" that sent a clear
message: "Aggression pays." But especially in Europe, some
papers seemed resigned to that, concluding that Serbia has won
the war and the best hope now is to salvage NATO. In Warsaw, the
respected Gazeta Wyborcza said, "Bosnia has turned out to be
NATO's Waterloo." Among NATO members, the paper added, there is
widespread agreement that even if it is too late to rescue
Bosnia, the alliance should be saved. By that reasoning, a
divided Bosnia -- or even total conquest by the Serbs -- may be
the inevitable price for reuniting NATO. The UN was also heavily
criticized, although many papers called for peace-keeping troops
to stay in the region as long as the arms embargo remains in
force. "The United Nations, however maligned, has had modest
success in promoting peace" and assisting war refugees, said
Toronto's Globe and Mail, one of the two papers cautiously
approving the policy (the other: London's Independent). "Without
it, things would probably be much worse." At the other end of
the spectrum was La Stampa of Turin, which said, "The
international community is not giving proof of impotence,
resignation, or passivity. It is giving proof of active
complicity with the Serbian strategy of conquest and genocide."
To all the leaders of the international community, such a solid
global consensus against their policies would be seen as a real
danger signal, undermining both NATO and the UN as significant
players in the post-cold-war era. Naked emperors are figures of
ridicule, not power. In the end, Bill Clinton saw little choice
but to send his predecessor Jimmy Carter to make the key
concession-reopening bar- gaining on who gets which parts of
Bosnia-and paste a smiley face on it.

 Among other memorable opinions gathered by the Index:

 Aftenposten, Oslo: "President Clinton ... made it clear that
from now on the Europeans must take the lead in Europe. ...
Maybe the solution is a NATO not watered down by expansion but a
NATO supplemented by tailored agreements with individual
countries in the East."

Corriere delta Sera, Milan: "Restoring motivation and dynamism
to the transatlantic relationship is the priority challenge
posed to the West in the post-cold-war era by the Bosnian
slaughterhouse. To place before this challenge a plan for NATO
expansion to Eastern Europe, an appropriate but not urgent
matter . . . .means condemning the North Atlantic alliance first
to irrelevance and then to self-destruction."


 Straits Times, Singapore: "The failure of Atlantic unity, the
sharp reminder of Russia's capacity for intransigence, the grim
reality of the aggressor walking away with rewards: These are
the lessons of Bosnia, . . . a case study in how not to go about
keeping the peace."

 Jerusalem Post: "Who would believe that a squabbling bunch of
Balkan militias could make utter fools of all the major powers
on Earth, destroy the reputation of NATO . . . and paralyze the
United Nations? . . . It is going to be a long time before the
United States, Europe, Russia, the UN, or NATO recovers from
this humiliating debacle."   -LARRY MARTZ


Back to Basics For the Alliance (Suddeutsch-Zeitung)


 In recent weeks, lightning has crackled across the skies,
illuminating, in its pitiless glare, the real shape of politics
in Europe -- the situation of the great powers in Bosnia, NATO,
and the United Nations. The insights we have gained from these
glimpses have led to sobering conclusions. Gone is the euphoria
felt when the Berlin Wall fell, when dreams soared and when we
believed that the UN -- "the world community" -- would ensure
order, that right would prevail over might, and that the Western
alliance would survive the end of the cold war. Nothing but
illusions-just look at Bosnia, where the great powers and their
institutions have failed. The future is not in their hands;
instead, the past holds them firmly in its grip. The UN has once
again been exposed as nothing more than what it always has been:
a federation of nations that possesses not a single microgram
more power than those nations permit it. The Serbs held 400 blue
helmets as virtual hostages. And all that Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali could threaten was to completely withdraw
his forces -- and lose all his power. What are we to make of an
army, now almost 40,000 strong, whose function has become an
absurdity? Is it in Bosnia to guarantee peace? It can't do that
even in the official protected zones, such as Sarajevo, where
shelling has once again become routine, or Bihac. Is it there to
create peace by fighting? That it may not do, although, along
with NATO, the UN could at least have prevented a Serbian
victory. All that remains for the UN is a function that could
not be more shameful: Troops that were sent to protect others
protect only themselves, like a police force that runs for cover
when the shooting starts. Meanwhile, NATO has sought over the
past five years to avoid one of the dictates of history:
Alliances die when they win as often as when they lose. The fact
that an alliance is finished when it must hand over its sword is
obvious. But alliances also lose when they triumph, because the
threat that called them into action has been removed. Like a
company whose longtime market collapsed, NATO, after the cold
war ended, tried to find new products to sell to new clients: to
create a peace in Bosnia on one hand, and to expand eastward on
the other. Neither product has found customers. And the attempt
to sell them has put so much stress on the alliance that no one
can say whether it will survive. With a face as grim as Andrei
Gromyko's, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev threw down
his gauntlet to the alliance: nyet to Eastern Europe in NATO,
even though those countries' foreign ministers had timidly
agreed to spend a year negotiating the terms for expanding the
alliance to the east. And to put teeth in his refusal, Kozyrev
also tabled the grandiose NATO-Russia cooperation plan -- a
program that was supposed to make expansion attractive to
Moscow. Would Kozyrev have done this if the alliance had not
been trapped by the war in Bosnia? Moscow has been very much
aware that Bosnia has put NATO into its worst fix since Suez in
1956, when the United States forced England and France to back
away from their intervention. A war of finger pointing has
broken out, in which each power seeks to blame others for the
fact that the Bosnians are losing, for the fact that "Greater
Serbia" is winning, for the fact that the West has been tried
and found wanting. London and Paris complain that the Americans
want to conduct the music but not play in the band. Washington
accuses its two oldest allies of cynicism in the tradition of
Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier in 1938 -- appeasement
of the strong at the cost of the Muslims. Both sides, the
Americans as well as the new British-French alliance, are right.
And the Germans? If they had only remained silent, as Defense
Minister Volker Riihe ironically noted: If Bonn is not making
any military contribution, "we lose the right to make any smart
suggestions about the Bosnian matter." But this diplomatic
competition in stupidity is not the real problem. The heart of
the matter is the return of history, which we believed we had
overcome. Serbian ambitions, which set off World War I in 1914,
have now set Russia marching against the Western powers and
divided the Western allies among themselves. The alliance is
buckling, and the UN is trying to out-trump this unholy alliance
in impotence. As London, Paris, Washington, and Bonn cast stones
at one another, Russia returns to its familiar role and once
again casts its veto against the West's strategic decisions. In
such times, we must keep our eyes on the things that matter. The
alliance must realize, in the wake of the Bosnia tragedy, that
it will have to limit itself to core issues. NATO cannot create
peace beyond its own borders, not even as an auxiliary force to
help out the UN, for even a Radovan Karadzic can make a joke of
this. It retains only its classical task of serving as a
security alliance for the United States and Europe and a bulwark
against the old-new Russia. In the sixth year since the Berlin
Wall fell, that will be work enough. The tragedy of Bosnia, the
triumph of the strong over the weak, is almost complete. The
alliance ought not compound this tragedy by destroying itself.
It will be needed-as Kozyrev has now demonstrated. -Josef Joffe,
"Suddeutsche Zeitung" (centrist),   Munich, Dec. 3,1994.


Judging Bosnia's Carnage


In early November, the international tribunal that was convened
in The Hague, Netherlands, to consider crimes in the former
Yugoslavia opened two cases involving the ethnic cleansing
carried out by Serbs in Bosnia. The tribunal's first indictment
was brought against Dragan Nikolic, the director of the Susica
camp, near Vlasenica, in eastern Bosnia. This officer, as well
as Dusan Tadic, a camp guard currently under detention in
Germany whom the tribunal intends to indict, is unknown to the
general public, which was perhaps expecting indictments against
top leaders such as Radovan Karadzic or General Ratko Mladic.
Nikolic is still at large somewhere in the Serbian sector of
Bosnia. The existence of the Susica camp, a former army depot
where 3,000 Muslims were killed between June and September,
1992, was revealed in the summer of 1994 in a series of articles
in the New York Times. The author of the reports bad spoken with
survivors and with a former guard who had deserted from the
Bosnian-Serb army in 1993. According to this witness, Nikolic, a
tall, thin man in his 30s, would go into the hangar where the
detainees were held and read lists of names. The men selected
were immediately taken outside the building and shot. Nikolic
was famous for plundering his victims' possessions, according to
other eyewitness reports published by the Times. The indictment
of Tadic, which is supported by 19 witnesses, would arise from
ethnic cleansing and its catalog of horrors. But Tadic could not
be indicted immediately. Chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone
simply requested that Germany keep the suspect behind bars until
he is indicted by the tribunal. Germany would have to modify its
laws to permit Tadic's extradition.

The tribunal intends to take up only significant cases, but
various national courts run the risk of taking on more dubious
ones. In October, Austria became the first nation to initiate a
trial for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. That
case was based on a single witness. In Denmark, a Bosnian Muslim
accused of war crimes against Muslims detained by Croatians
appeared before judges for the first time in November.
Psychiatric experts believed he was suffering from mental
disorders. -Helene Despic-Popovic, 'Lib@ration" (1@ftist);


Justice -- Or Peace?


It is freely acknowledged that there can be no justice without
an independent judiciary. So can there be an international
justice system if that supposed system depends on the goodwill
of a few nations? No. And that is why the actions of the
international tribunal in The Hague, set up by the United
Nations Security Council to investigate and prosecute "persons
presumed guilty of serious violations of international
human-rights law in the former Yugoslavia," raise a certain
amount of skepticism. The integrity and determination of
prosecutor Richard Goldstone and the 11 judges of the tribunal
are not in question. The problem lies in their status: Since
they are appointed and funded by the Security Council, the
accomplishment of their mission depends on the goodwill of the
countries on the council, beginning with its five permanent
members, What the council does today, it can undo tomorrow, and
the pursuit of justice may not always be a priority. One cannot
necessarily blame these powerful nations for choosing peace
without justice -- and with amnesty, as was recently seen in
Haiti -- over an impossible justice without peace. At most, we
can It the leaders of these nations for having deceived by
speaking of international justice. They had in mind only a
comfortable justice, a means of pressure designed to dissuade
the criminals from pursuing their activities and to persuade
those politicians responsible for crimes to be reasonable at the
negotiating table. In the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following
World War II, only the defeated were judged. More recently,
though, "international justice" has evidenced a selective
indignation. Although Cambodia's Khmer Rouge were high on the
hit parade of horror, they were treated like respectable
negotiators when the peace accords were discussed. And it wasn't
because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons
against the civilian Kurdish population that he was punished in
the Persian Gulf war. Countries that have signed the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 are obligated to prosecute all violators of
these international rules in their national courts. This
commitment is too little known. In countries that have an
independent justice system, those courts might be as effective
and more consistent than The Hague's tribunal. - Jacques
Amalric, "Liberation" (leftist), Paris, Nov. 8.1994