be working through the UN and universally accepted regional bodies – rather than, as Nelson Mandela charged earlier this year, playing ‘policemen of the world’ with the US, and ‘introducing chaos into international affairs’ by acting unilaterally.
The record shows that the more effective peacekeepers in Sierra Leone have been regional forces, including Nigeria’s. The most useful contribution Britain and other Western states – which still refuse to write off the debts of countries such as Nigeria – could now make to Sierra Leone would be to support an African solution to an African crisis.3
(11/9/00)
Israel: Men of blood and global justice
Governments and their leaders can no longer hide from global justice, we have been repeatedly assured. They cannot shelter behind national jurisdictions and state sovereignty. Those responsible for human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing atrocities and, most of all, war crimes, must and will be pursued regardless of national boundaries in an interdependent world.
That was the theme of Nato’s ‘humanitarian war’ against Yugoslavia – enthusiastically championed by Tony Blair – and of the hunting down of Serbian and Croatian warlords. It was the argument behind the plans for an international war crimes court and the millions of dollars handed out by the US congress for the prosecution of Iraqi leaders and their families.
It was also the message of the citizen-led attempt to prosecute the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the rupture of political relations between Austria and the rest of the European Union in response to the rise to power of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party in Austria. But the partisans of this brave new ‘doctrine of international community’ have been strangely subdued since the election of the extreme right-wing general Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister. It has been business as usual with the man held personally responsible for the largest massacre of civilians in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
The British prime minister had a reportedly cordial chat with Sharon on Wednesday, while Foreign Secretary Robin Cook looked forward to ‘building on common ground’ and ‘moving the peace process forward’ with a politician whose swaggering provocation in Jerusalem last year triggered the current Palestinian uprising – and whose suggestion for dealing with demonstrators was to ‘cut off their testicles’. President Bush meanwhile promised Sharon that US support for Israel was ‘rock solid’.
Of course, governments deal with all sorts of leaders with ugly records. But Sharon is more than that. By any reasonable reckoning, he is a war criminal. This is a man of blood, whose history of terror and violation of the rules of war stretches back to the early 1950s, when his unit slaughtered Palestinian villagers, through his brutal onslaught on the refugees of Gaza in the 70s, to his central role in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon in which up to 20,000 people died.
Around 2,000 of them were butchered in thirty-six hours in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Phalangists effectively under Sharon’s control. Sharon had repeatedly insisted that the camps were full of terrorists. In reality, the victims were overwhelmingly unarmed civilians, the PLO’s fighters having been evacuated with an American-brokered promise of protection for their families.
Israel’s own Kahan Commission found Sharon ‘personally’ but ‘indirectly’ responsible for the massacre, though whether an independent court would be so generous is open to question.
Now Sharon’s return to power will put the good faith of supporters of an international justice system to the test. Their critics maintain that the new supranational doctrine of intervention and extra-territorial legality is a fraud, designed to give a spurious human rights legitimacy to big-power bullying of weaker states that threaten their authority or interests. War crimes or human rights violations committed by the major powers, or by Western allies in particular, they argue, will always be treated according to different standards and go unpunished.
The prospects are certainly not encouraging in the case of Israel, which has long been allowed by its Western sponsors to violate a string of UN Security Council resolutions, while other states in the region are subjected to lethal regimes of sanctions and bombing attacks for their transgressions.
Sharon’s most horrific crimes are more recent than Pinochet’s, and his responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila killings is better documented than, say, that of the indicted former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević for the comparable Srebrenica massacre. It will be objected that Sharon has been chosen in a democratic election and that pursuing him for eighteen-year-old crimes will do nothing to advance the chances of a peace settlement.
Such a settlement will become more likely once the majority of Israelis realise that Sharon’s hardline policies of repression will not deliver the security they crave, while sanctions seem more suitable for a state whose citizens have a say in policy, rather than for dictatorships where they have none.
Of course, no Western government is likely to lift a finger against Sharon, though human rights and pro-Palestinian groups are already gearing up to attempt a Pinochet-style legal action if he ventures abroad. There is little prospect even of some mark of disapproval, such as a Haider-style diplomatic protest or the suspension of arms sales called for by a group of Labour MPs. These might at least send Israeli voters the message that there are limits to external material support.
During the Kosovo war, Blair announced that his foreign intervention policy was based on a ‘subtle blend’ of self-interest and moral purpose. Given the reaction to Sharon’s election, that seems to boil down to moral purpose for dealing with enemies, but self-interest when it comes to friends.4
(9/2/01)
Iraq: Where the victims have no vote
It is a fair rule of thumb that the more important a political issue, the less likely it is to be discussed during a general election. That certainly applies to Britain’s 2001 campaign, where the Blair government’s zeal for bombing, occupying and generally interfering in other people’s countries – described by the former Tory prime minister Edward Heath as an attempt to resurrect a colonial system – has not even registered as a flicker on the election radar.
British soldiers and air crews have been shedding blood in the Gulf, the Balkans and West Africa on a scale unprecedented since the demise of empire. But these interventions merit no debate – perhaps because all the main parties support them, or because such issues are considered best not discussed in front of the electorate. The victims have no vote.
Nowhere has more blood been shed or more lives reduced to misery than in Iraq, where ten years after Saddam Hussein’s army was expelled from Kuwait, its twenty million people are still being punished by the British and American governments for the decisions of a man they did not elect and cannot peacefully remove. RAF and US air attacks on the unilaterally declared no-fly zones in Iraq have continued unabated, while politicians in Britain concentrate on the minutiae of marginal tax rates.
The decade-long sanctions siege of Iraq, effectively sustained by the US and Britain alone, has cut a horrific swathe through a country devastated by two cataclysmic wars and a legacy of chemical and depleted uranium weapons contamination. Unicef estimates that 500,000 Iraqi children have died from the effects of the blockade. They are still dying in their thousands every month, while the living standards of a once-developed country have been reduced to the level of Ethiopia.
Aware that they have lost the battle for international opinion over responsibility for this national calvary, Britain and the US have now come up with a plan for ‘smart sanctions’, which they claim will ease the embargo on civilian imports and decisively shift the blame for Iraqi suffering on to Saddam. That is the spin, at least.
