To the New York Times Editor:
Trying Radovan Karadzic for war crimes is fine and important ("War Crimes Arrest Bolsters Other Courts," July 23), but media discussion of it has carefully avoided the elephant on the sofa: the war crimes of the Bush Administration. As much as Karadzic, they fully warrant prosecution for the calculated deaths — murders — of an estimated million Iraqis, the internal and external exile of another five million, and the utter destruction of that country. Add to that the ordering of torture and denial of habeas corpus against not just combatants but countless innocent bystanders. What they have done cannot be excused as a reasonable, if flawed, political policy. They persistently lied about their motives and information and charged ahead with their murderous scheme for purposes of stealing that country's oil, setting up a permanent military base and creating a free trade zone for friendly corporations. Their repudiation of our commitment to the International Criminal Court was specifically motivated by their knowledge of their own guilt. The new President and Congress should reinstate our place in that essential court and set in motion the trials of Bush and Cheney and their criminal cohorts.
Bud Hazelkorn
July 23, 2008
War Crimes Arrest Bolsters Other Courts
By DAVID ROHDE and MARC LACEY
The arrest of Radovan Karadzic on Monday gave badly needed credibility to international war crimes tribunals that have struggled for years to bring fugitives to justice, according to former prosecutors, legal experts and human rights groups.
Mr. Karadzic will be the third high-profile figure to be brought before a United Nations-backed tribunal on war crimes charges in the last six years, following in the footsteps of President Charles Taylor of Liberia and the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
But Mr. Karadzic, who remained free for nearly 13 years, made a mockery of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which in 1983 became the first such body established by the United Nations.
Although repeatedly seen in public when American and NATO forces entered Bosnia in 1996, he was not arrested, in part out of fear that seizing him could cause a violent backlash against NATO forces. Instead, the United States and the European Union tried to use economic and diplomatic pressure on Serbia to force his arrest. Until Monday, the policy appeared to be a failure.
“For international justice, this is a very good thing,” Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program, said of the arrest, especially since Mr. Karadzic’s evasion of the court for so long had come to “personify impunity.”
Other war crimes tribunals established by the United Nations have also come under fire. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has been criticized as being hugely expensive, exceedingly slow and largely detached from the country itself. And the establishment of the International Criminal Court — a permanent tribunal intended to prosecute war crimes globally — was delayed for years by tortuous negotiations and fierce opposition from the Bush administration.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, called Mr. Karadzic’s arrest a “great achievement” and predicted it would aid his efforts to prosecute war crimes in Darfur, including his widely-debated genocide case against the country’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan.
Other legal experts agreed that Mr. Karadzic’s arrest had the potential to significantly bolster the clout of the tribunals.
“When Karadzic was indicted back in 1995, nobody really expected he’d ever actually get arrested,” said Gary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and the author of “Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals.”
“It’s not clear how exactly Bashir could wind up in The Hague,” he added, “but the Karadzic example has got to make Bashir think hard.”
Officials from the war crimes tribunals have argued that the United States and its allies have lacked the political will to make arrests or use diplomatic and economic measures to bring fugitives to justice. Economic sanctions, indictments and travel restrictions can all place small but steady pressure on individuals accused of war crimes and on their patrons.
Critics of the tribunals’ track records argue that Mr. Karadzic’s arrest does not make up for more than a decade of inaction. The widely feared wartime leader was arrested while masquerading as a bearded practitioner of alternative medicine in Serbia. A man accused of overseeing the execution of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and the brutal siege of Sarajevo was giving lectures on new age medicine in local community centers.
The amount of time it took to pressure Serbia to arrest Mr. Karadzic shows how easy it is for states to defy and divide the international community. Similarly, Sudan has also flatly refused to turn over war crimes suspects.
For years, many of survivors of the 1995 massacres in Srebrenica — for which Mr. Karadzic was indicted on genocide charges — mocked the Yugoslavia tribunal as a toothless and expensive show put on by the international community.
“Three thousand persons in Bosnia still unaccounted for," said Hasan Nuhanovic, whose father, mother and brother were killed in Srebrenica. "The mortal remains of my mother and brother still not found.”
Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist who served as the Yugoslavia tribunal’s first chief prosecutor and indicted Mr. Karadzic in 1995, said it was critical that Serbian officials also arrest Mr. Karadzic’s co-defendant, Gen. Ratko Mladic, who remains free and is believed to be hiding in Serbia as well. “I just hope that Mladic is not that far behind,” he said.
Similarly, the international tribunal for Rwanda, created in 1995 in neighboring Tanzania, has secured the arrest of more than 70 people accused of high-level involvement in the mass killings of more than 800,000 Rwandans in 1994. Yet 13 accused kingpins have not been caught.
The bulk of the defendants have been politicians, but there has been an array of others: journalists who helped fuel the slaughter; businessmen who helped finance it; members of the clergy who participated in it and even a musician, Simon Bikindi, who is accused of singing songs and giving speeches that promoted hatred and violence against Tutsis.
But the tribunal’s work has been slowed to a snail’s pace by bureaucratic failings, the need for multiple translations and the shear complexity of the cases. In the tribunal’s four courtrooms, six trials involving 19 people are taking place, the court reported in its latest submission to the United Nations, and two more are scheduled to commence. Four more cases are preparing for trial.
The United Nations Security Council has urged the tribunal to end its trials this year and wind up all its work by 2010. But in May, the tribunal indicated in a report that those deadlines would likely slip.
The effort, however, remains profoundly important for Africa, tribunal officials say. Ending the tribunal’s work too early and not rounding up every last fugitive, they say, would destabilize a part of Africa where ethnic strife remains 14 years after the machetes and guns were laid down and Rwanda’s lush soil was stained with blood.
Despite the burdened pace, the tribunal has some notable accomplishments. It secured the first genocide conviction against a head of government: former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, who was found to have led the homegrown campaign to exterminate ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The tribunal also helped establish the legal precedent that rape, which was widespread during the Rwandan massacre, can be a form of genocide to destroy a group.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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Labels: Bush, Cheney, International Criminal Court, Karadzic, war crimes
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