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ACTION ALERT:
Washington Post a "Useful Tool" for NATO?
Paper's coverage distorts facts about Kosovo war crimes
Jan. 28, 2000
When a group of prominent international legal scholars filed a war crimes
complaint against NATO for its actions in Yugoslavia, the Washington Post's
coverage (1/20/00) was dismissive--demonstrating a poor grasp of
international law and the war in Yugoslavia, and relying on an "expert" with
a blatant and unmentioned conflict of interest.
The scholars, led by Professor Michael Mandel of York University in Toronto,
sent a detailed legal brief to the U.N.-sponsored International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), arguing that NATO leaders
committed serious violations of international law during the 78-day bombing
campaign against Yugoslavia last year.
The Post article, by Paris correspondent Charles Trueheart, curtly dismissed
the legal case against NATO: "Most legal scholars say the professors have a
pretty weak case, noting that accidental civilian deaths caused by NATO
bombs fail to meet the commonly accepted standard for war crimes. Even so,
the legal campaign against the Western alliance has taken on a life of its
own." The piece goes on to claim that "even the Tribunal's most ardent
champions in the human rights community and elsewhere are worried that the
case may have damaged its reputation through an exercise in dangerous
relativism."
Yet only one such "legal scholar" or member of the "human rights community"
is quoted by Trueheart: Professor Paul Williams of American University, who
is identified simply as a "war crimes expert." Nowhere in the article is it
disclosed that Williams, a former State Department lawyer, is currently a
paid lobbyist for the "provisional government of Kosovo" in Washington.
There's no evidence in Trueheart's article that he made a genuine effort to
determine whether, in fact, other jurists or human rights experts support
Mandel's view that NATO violated international law during its Kosovo
campaign. Trueheart could have examined Human Rights Watch's recent
announcement that that it will send detailed reports to the Tribunal arguing
that NATO's target selections were "disproportionate and should be found
violations of international humanitarian law." (London Guardian, 1/7/00)
Trueheart might also have noted that no less a "champion" of the Tribunal
than its former President and presiding judge, Antonio Cassese, has
expressed the view (European Journal of International Law, #1/99) that NATO
violated the United Nations Charter by attacking Yugoslavia without a
mandate from the U.N. Security Council: "The breach of the United Nations
Charter occurring in this instance cannot be termed minor. The action of
NATO countries radically departs from the Charter system for collective
security." (Cassese did add that in his view a moral case could be made for
NATO's intervention.)
In fact, judging by Trueheart's assertions--"accidental civilian deaths
caused by NATO bombs fail to meet the commonly accepted standard for war
crimes"--he appears to be ignorant of either the nature of NATO's attacks on
Yugoslavia or of the Geneva Convention statutes which make up the "commonly
accepted standard for war crimes." This unfamiliarity is disturbing, since
Trueheart regularly covers the ICTY for the Post.
The Geneva Conventions would not hold a bomber pilot criminally liable if a
missile aimed at a military installation--say, an anti-aircraft gun or a
munitions storage facility--drifted off-course and accidentally struck a
village populated by civilians. Such accidents are not war crimes. In their
complaint, Mandel and his colleagues do not cite such accidents as
violations of the Geneva statutes. They point to other strikes that were
deliberate attacks on civilian targets.
Ironically, some of the clearest evidence that some NATO strikes seriously
breached the Geneva Conventions can be found in the Washington Post's own
reporting. For example, a front-page article last year by military reporter
Dana Priest ("Bombing by Committee: France Balked at NATO Targets," 9/20/99)
recounted the decision-making processes behind several NATO targeting
decisions. According to Priest, at one point, British "Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook questioned strikes on power lines affecting a large hospital in
Belgrade. But the group brought him around."
In another episode, shortly before a planned missile strike on the
headquarters of Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party--which was located in a
residential neighborhood of Belgrade--an internal memo assessing the likely
civilian destruction was distributed among NATO leaders:
"Next to a photograph of the party headquarters, the document said:
'Collateral damage: Tier 3 -- High. Casualty Estimate: 50-100
Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250 -- Apts in
expected blast radius.'
"In short, NATO anticipated that the attack could, in the worst case, kill
up to 350 people, including 250 civilians living in nearby apartment
buildings.
"Washington and London approved the target, but the French were reluctant,
noting that the party headquarters also housed Yugoslav television and radio
studios. 'In some societies, the idea of killing journalists--well, we were
very nervous about that,' said a French diplomat."
Ultimately, Paris went along. But in going ahead with the attack, NATO
appears to have directly breached Article 51 of the Geneva Convention
(Protocol I), which prohibits any "attack which may be expected to cause
incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian
objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to
the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."
The Socialist Party building was itself a civilian facility located hundreds
of miles from the site of any military conflict. Asked by a reporter at the
next day's press briefing what military rationale lay behind the party
headquarters strike, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea could not name any specific
military function. Instead, he declared that NATO considered "any aspect of
the power structure" in Yugoslavia to be a legitimate target, adding that
the party headquarters building "contains the propaganda machinery...of the
ruling Socialist Party."
The reluctance expressed by British and French diplomats over these strikes
apparently stemmed from their concern that the raids in question might
represent violations of the Geneva Conventions--or at least that they would
be perceived as such. In fact, NATO leaders repeatedly admitted that their
strategy in attacking civilian targets was to terrorize the population in
the hope that the Serbian public would turn against its government and
pressure Milosevic to capitulate. In a May 24 interview with the Washington
Post, U.S. Air Force Lt.-Gen. Michael Short explained the strategy:
"If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no
gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying
in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, 'Hey, Slobo,
what's this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?' And
at some point, you make the transition from applauding Serb machismo against
the world to thinking what your country is going to look like if this
continues."
Short's rather bowlderized list of examples of civilian destruction in
Serbia does not fully explain the strategy: As the memorandum published by
the Post showed, NATO expected its attack on Socialist Party headquarters to
kill up to 250 neighboring residents as they slept.
In an another instance, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea declared : "If President
Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity,
all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this
campaign." Statements like these have led Human Rights Watch executive
director Kenneth Roth to declare (Letters, London Guardian, 1/12/00) his
group's concern that
"NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not because it was making a
significant contribution to the Yugoslav military effort but because its
destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to
withdraw from Kosovo. Using military force in this fashion against civilians
would violate the 'principle of distinction' -- a fundamental principle of
international humanitarian law -- which requires military force to be used
only against military targets, not against civilians or civilian objects."
But if Trueheart and the Post appear uninterested in examining whether NATO
violated international law during its Kosovo campaign, that does not mean
they are uninterested in the subject of war crimes. In fact, the Post
considers the Tribunal's activities to be major news when they are directed
against NATO's enemies. When the Tribunal handed down its indictment of
Slobodan Milosevic last May, Trueheart's article ran on the front page.
Since then, the Post has used the phrase "indicted war criminal" to describe
Milosevic an average of about once a month. Yet the Post has made no serious
attempt to evaluate whether our own government violated the laws of war in
its air campaign last year.
When the Tribunal was first established, American policymakers hoped that
just such a double standard would prevail in media coverage. As Michael
Scharf, the State Department envoy who dealt with the Tribunal when it was
created, wrote in the Washington Post (10/3/99) :
"America's chief Balkans negotiator at the time, Richard Holbrooke, has
acknowledged that the tribunal was widely perceived within the government as
little more than a public relations device and as a potentially useful
policy tool.... Indictments also would serve to isolate offending leaders
diplomatically, strengthen the hand of their domestic rivals and fortify the
international political will to employ economic sanctions or use force....
Indeed [the Milosevic indictment] became a useful tool in their [U.S. and
Britain's] efforts to demonize the Serbian leader and maintain public
support for NATO's bombing campaign."
It's bad enough that the international war crimes tribunal--much of whose
funding comes directly from the U.S., in violation of the tribunal's own
statutes (New York Press, 1/26/00)--can be described as a "useful tool" of
Washington's foreign policy. The Washington Post should not serve the same
function.
ACTION: Please encourage the Washington Post to fully and fairly cover
allegations of NATO war crimes.
Contact:
Robert McCartney, Foreign Editor
mailto:[log in to unmask]
[This alert is posted on the FAIR website:
http://www.fair.org/reports/post-war-crimes.html]
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