The rules of the game
Noam Chomsky discusses the "rules of world order"? as they apply to Kosovo There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorised by the Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or in self-defence against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.
There is, of course, more to say. Thus there is at least a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under US initiative after World War II. The Charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states.
The issue of "humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension. It is the right of "humanitarian intervention" that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports.
The question is addressed in a news report in the New York Times (March 27), headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo. One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US mission to the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter, "scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the alleged right of intervention. The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the NATO bombing have a pretty good legal bombing "have a pretty good legal 8 International Viewpoint #311 May 1999 argument," but "many people think [an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a matter of custom and practice." That summarises the evidence offered to justify the favoured conclusion stated in the headline.
Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are relevant to the determination of "custom and practice." We may also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court decisions, and so on.
That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to others. Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason beyond subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith" could not be assumed.
A rational person then asks obvious questions: is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the US? And other questions, for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of the only country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to obey international law? What about its historical record?
How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo? There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces. The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
(1) try to escalate the catastrophe the the to
La mo kil
La of the ass litt
Th
Wa neg
(III) do nothing pre
(III) try to mitigate the catastrophe me the
The choices are illustrated by other bot contemporary cases. Let's keep to a few of approximately the same scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the pattern.
ant lan cal
Colombia
In Colombia, according to State on
Department estimates, the annual level of sat political killing by the government and the its paramilitary associates is about at the fai level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from their atrocities is well
Ho over a million.
reI
Colombia has been the leading rat del
Western hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence increased through the '90s, and that assistance is tec now increasing, under a "drug war"
mi far pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton administration cas was particularly enthusiastic in its praise fro for President Gaviria, whose tenure in na office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence," according to human to of rights organisations, even surpassing his predecessors.
the
In this case, the US reaction is (I):
escalate the atrocities.
COI far
Turkey ch
By a very conservative estimate, an
Turkish repression of Kurds falls in the
Ce category of Kosovo. It peaked in the
WO early '90s. Over a million Kurds fled
COI from the countryside between 1990 and
1994, as the Turkish army was an devastating their villiages.
tro
1994 marked two records: it was "the
Gr year of the worst repression in the let
Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, Jonathan
Randal reported from the scene, and the of year when Turkey became "the biggest fo single importer of American military rep hardware and thus the world's largest tra arms purchaser."
When human rights groups exposed
SO
Turkey's use of US jets to bomb villages,
Sp the the Clinton Administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension of arms th deliveries, much as it was doing in qu
Indonesia and elsewhere.
Sta the
Colombia and Turkey explain their
(US-supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their countries from
the threat of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia.
Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the atrocities. Laos
Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history, and arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and Cambodia.
The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest either control or a remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action.
These were only a fraction of the technology deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal Asia.
A conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among children-over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working there since 1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities.
There have been efforts to publicise and deal with the humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from the handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the British press reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians.
The British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer." These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United States.
The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly the Eastern region where US bombardment from early 1969 was most intense.
In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing.
And the reaction of the media and commentators is to keep silent, following the norms under which the war against Laos was designated a "secret war"— meaning well-known, but suppressed, as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969.
The level of self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The relevance of this shocking example should be obvious without further comment.
I will skip other examples of (L) and (LI), which abound, and also much more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological warfare-starvation and denial of medication. "A very hard choice, Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996 when asked for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in 5 years, but "we think the price is worth it." Current estimates remain about 5,000 children killed a month. The price is still "worth it." These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton Administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian Army and paramılıtaries, and to the departure of international observers, which of course had the same effect.
Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened.
The terror for the first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are credible reports of large-scale destruction of villages, assassinations, generation of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps an effort to expel a good part of the Albanian population-all an "entirely predictable" consequence of the threat and then the use of force, as General Clark rightly observes.
Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate the violence, with exactly that expectation.
To find examples illustrating (III) is all too easy, at least if we keep to official rhetoric. The major recent academic study of "humanitarian intervention," by Sean Murphy, reviews the record after the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and then since the UN Charter, which strengthened and articulated these provisions.
In the first phase, he writes, the most prominent examples of "humanitarian
0V020) intervention" were Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia.
All were accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and factual justifications as well. Japan was going to establish an "earthly paradise" as it defended Manchurians from "Chinese bandits," with the support of a leading Chinese nationalist, a far more credible figure than anyone the US was able to conjure up during its attack on South Vietnam. Mussolini was liberating thousands of slaves as he carried forth the Western "civilising mission." Hitler announced Germany's intention to end ethnic tensions and violence, and "safeguard the national individuality of the German and Czech peoples, * in an operation "filled with earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples dwelling in the area," in accordance with their will; after all, the Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare Slovakia a protectorate.
Another useful intellectual exercise is to compare those obscene justifications with those offered for interventions, including "humanitarian interventions," in the post-UN Charter period.
In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defence against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge regime was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas.
The US reaction is instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognised the expelled Khmer Rouge as the official government of Cambodia, because of their "continuity" with the regime that existed before the Vietnamese invasion. The US supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia.
This example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that underlies "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian intervention.
Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law.
The US made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision. Apart from the UK (by now, about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of
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