Two items today. Compare and contrast:
1. A Letter in today's Globe and Mail:
Re Ethnic Albanians Blamed For Expelling Serbs, Roma -- Aug. 4:
Since the occupation of Kosovo and Metohija by NATO troops in mid-June, there have been daily reports of murder, rape, looting, house-burning, destruction of religious monuments and "ethnic cleansing" on a wide scale.
Our Prime Minister and his Foreign Affairs Minister plunged Canada into an illegal and undeclared war to prevent such abuses. Bravo! A new humanitarianism triumphs over state sovereignty and long-established international law.
Reading the above-mentioned article, I find that the humanitarian goals not only ring hollow, but also are downright fraudulent.
After six weeks of murder, ethnic cleansing, rapes and general mayhem perpetrated by Albanian gangs on the non-Albanian population (under the watchful eye of NATO "peacekeepers"), not a peep has been heard out of Jean Chrétien or Lloyd Axworthy.
Obviously, I am unable to fathom the nuances of this new humanitarianism. Pray tell, how many non-Albanians need to be ethnically cleansed, raped or slaughtered before our leaders decide that an encore "humanitarian intervention" is required, and who will lead the bombing campaign? <end>
2. Canadian Law Professor Lambasts ICTY
TORONTO, July 26 - A Canadian law professor who has been in the forefront of the effort to indict the NATO leaders of war crimes (see S99-73, Day 49, Update 1, Item 4, May 11), wrote a letter on July 26 to Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in which he accused her of dragging her feet on this action.
Here's an excerpt from Prof. Michael Mandel's letter, which he wrote for himself and for Alejandro Teitelbaum, American Association of Jurists, and Glen Rangwala, Movement for the Advancement of International Criminal Law, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.:
When we met in the Hague last month, we were at pains to point out how critical a moment this is for the "anti-impunity" movement that you have been championing throughout your tenure. Charging the war's victors, and not only its losers, would be a watershed in international criminal law. It would inspire the world with a concrete demonstration that no one is above the law, not even the leaders of the world's most powerful countries. On the other hand, a failure to act notwithstanding the clear requirements of the law and the evidence would deal a mortal blow to the credibility of international law. It would show it to be nothing more than an instrument of the powerful countries -- a modern version of "might is right."
Unfortunately, as you know, many doubts have already been raised about the impartiality of your Tribunal. In the early days of the conflict, after a formal and, in our view, justified complaint against NATO leaders had been laid before it by members of the Faculty of Law of Belgrade University, you appeared at a press conference with one of the accused, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who made a great show of handing you a dossier of Serbian war crimes.
In early May, you appeared at another press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, by that time herself the subject of two formal complaints of war crimes over the targeting of civilians in Yugoslavia. Albright publicly announced at that time that the US was the major provider of funds for the Tribunal and that it had pledged even more money to it.
Within two weeks, indictments had been issued against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other Serb leaders, in what, with the greatest respect, might reasonably have seemed to an impartial observer to be a very indecent haste -- one dictated not by the needs of justice (which surely could have waited), but by NATO pressure in the face of flagging popular support for its war effort. And, of course, this flagging popular support was due precisely to the mounting civilian casualties that NATO leaders defined as "collateral damage" and the law defines as war crimes.
And now, after the bombing has stopped, with 185 member states in the United Nations, your Tribunal appears to have trusted only investigators from a few of the 19 NATO countries, led by the FBI and Scotland Yard, for the sensitive job of investigating war crimes in Kosovo. We cannot help thinking that this is a terrible mistake.
NATO investigators, whose governments are themselves the subject of well-grounded complaints of war crimes committed in Kosovo and Serbia, have every incentive to falsify and cover up the evidence in order to protect their governments and to justify the war. The caché of illegal cluster bombs that resulted in the deaths of British and KLA soldiers is just one suspicious example.
Not only is there a real danger of permanently tainting the evidence (we ask you to imagine the effect on an ordinary criminal investigation of sending a suspect to gather the evidence), there is also a grave risk to the Tribunal's reputation for impartiality and, by extension, to the cause of international criminal law.
As you know, last summer in Rome the US government opposed the establishment of an International Criminal Court with universal jurisdiction to punish crimes against humanity. Perhaps the US feels it has nothing to lose if the whole idea is discredited by the experience in Yugoslavia. But there is a lot at stake for those of us who insist that any "New World Order" be a democratic and law-governed one.
We trust that you share our concerns for impartial justice and the future of international criminal law. We therefore urge you to make every effort to bring the NATO leaders to justice. In our respectful submission, the Tribunal is already possessed of more than enough evidence to meet the established standards for prosecution. However, as we promised you in June, we will continue to accumulate and submit evidence in order to satisfy you that there is really no alternative for law or justice but to prefer indictments against these NATO leaders.
Yours very sincerely,
Michael Mandel, Professor,
York University,
Toronto, Canada ---
TiM Ed.: Last month, the government of Canada announced that Louise Arbour had been named to the country's Supreme Court. A "kick upstairs;" a reward for a "job well done" in making a mockery of justice on behalf of the NWO crowd? (see "Milosevic Indicted! Clinton, Blair... Next?", S99-91, Day 65, Item 1, May 27). Or a move to get Madam Kangaroo out of the way, so that her successor could claim ignorance and feign profound surprise when challenged by the likes of Prof. Mandel, his associates, or millions of others around the world seeking real, not "victor's justice?" -
Thought for the Day:
"Your society is so distorted that a sane person would appear like a madman."
(Charles Manson)
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