Bringing The Wicked To The Dock
Economist
War crimes
Mar 9th 2006 FREETOWN
But does an international search for justice hurt or help the pursuit of peace?
HITHERTO, the world's worst tyrants have usually managed to avoid being brought to court for their crimes. Some, of course, were killed. Hitler took his own life. But Stalin and Mao died in their beds. Pol Pot, responsible for the slaughter of 2m Cambodians in the 1970s, lived on in Cambodia until his death in 1998. Idi Amin, Uganda's brutal dictator, saw out his days in comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia; Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam continues to live in Zimbabwe. The list goes on. But with the spread of international justice over the past decade, the noose is tightening. It is now accepted that there can be no immunity for the worst violations of human rights, not even for heads of state.
Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, was indicted for war crimes in 1999 and is likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment when his trial ends later this year. After ten years on the run, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief held responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, is expected to be arrested any day. In Chile, Augusto Pinochet is finally facing a real possibility of trial 17 years after the end of his dictatorship. Hissène Habré, a ruthless ex-president of Chad, exiled in Senegal for the past 16 years, could soon be extradited to Brussels to face trial for crimes against humanity under Belgium's “universal jurisdiction” law. Polish prosecutors are preparing to bring charges against Wojciech Jaruzelski, their last communist leader. And Saddam Hussein, Iraq's former dictator, faces near-certain execution at the end of his trial before a special tribunal in Baghdad.
Debate has long raged about the best way to deal with gross violations of human rights. Is it more important to punish the perpetrators or to bring an end to the atrocities? Can one, in other words, secure both justice and peace, or are the two naturally antagonistic?
In the 1980s the concept of “truth and reconciliation” began to be the rage, and justice was relegated to the back burner. Truth-telling, perhaps encouraged by amnesties, appeared a good way of revealing the previously suppressed stories of the victims and (much less often) the perpetrators of the covert state-sponsored violence (death squads, “disappearances” and such like) in Latin America. Indeed, the first truth and reconciliation commission was set up not in South Africa, as many still believe, but in Chile, in 1990. Others followed in quick succession in El Salvador, Chad, Haiti, South Africa (1995), Ecuador, Nigeria, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Uruguay, Timor-Leste, Ghana, Panama, Congo, Liberia and Morocco, the first in the Arab world. Algeria, Afghanistan and Burundi are now considering following suit.
But for many, the idea that genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture and other such horrors should go unpunished became increasingly troubling. Under the principle of national sovereignty, nation states were supposed to have responsibility for enforcing their own criminal justice. But all too often they had shown themselves unwilling or incapable of prosecuting the worst culprits, either because those responsible were still in power, or because they had taken refuge in other countries and were now out of reach. Hence the turn to international justice.
In 1993, the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague became the first international war-crimes tribunal to be set up since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the second world war. It was followed a year later by the UN tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania. Like their post-war forebears, the two courts operate exclusively under international law and are staffed by foreign judges. Since then, five other war-crimes tribunals, all with more or less international input, have been—or are being—set up to deal with atrocities in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Iraq and Afghanistan. Lebanon has now asked the UN for help in setting up a “tribunal of international character” to try the assassins of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who was killed a year ago.
More:http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5601334
War crimes
Mar 9th 2006 FREETOWN
But does an international search for justice hurt or help the pursuit of peace?
HITHERTO, the world's worst tyrants have usually managed to avoid being brought to court for their crimes. Some, of course, were killed. Hitler took his own life. But Stalin and Mao died in their beds. Pol Pot, responsible for the slaughter of 2m Cambodians in the 1970s, lived on in Cambodia until his death in 1998. Idi Amin, Uganda's brutal dictator, saw out his days in comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia; Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam continues to live in Zimbabwe. The list goes on. But with the spread of international justice over the past decade, the noose is tightening. It is now accepted that there can be no immunity for the worst violations of human rights, not even for heads of state.
Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, was indicted for war crimes in 1999 and is likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment when his trial ends later this year. After ten years on the run, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief held responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, is expected to be arrested any day. In Chile, Augusto Pinochet is finally facing a real possibility of trial 17 years after the end of his dictatorship. Hissène Habré, a ruthless ex-president of Chad, exiled in Senegal for the past 16 years, could soon be extradited to Brussels to face trial for crimes against humanity under Belgium's “universal jurisdiction” law. Polish prosecutors are preparing to bring charges against Wojciech Jaruzelski, their last communist leader. And Saddam Hussein, Iraq's former dictator, faces near-certain execution at the end of his trial before a special tribunal in Baghdad.
Debate has long raged about the best way to deal with gross violations of human rights. Is it more important to punish the perpetrators or to bring an end to the atrocities? Can one, in other words, secure both justice and peace, or are the two naturally antagonistic?
In the 1980s the concept of “truth and reconciliation” began to be the rage, and justice was relegated to the back burner. Truth-telling, perhaps encouraged by amnesties, appeared a good way of revealing the previously suppressed stories of the victims and (much less often) the perpetrators of the covert state-sponsored violence (death squads, “disappearances” and such like) in Latin America. Indeed, the first truth and reconciliation commission was set up not in South Africa, as many still believe, but in Chile, in 1990. Others followed in quick succession in El Salvador, Chad, Haiti, South Africa (1995), Ecuador, Nigeria, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Uruguay, Timor-Leste, Ghana, Panama, Congo, Liberia and Morocco, the first in the Arab world. Algeria, Afghanistan and Burundi are now considering following suit.
But for many, the idea that genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture and other such horrors should go unpunished became increasingly troubling. Under the principle of national sovereignty, nation states were supposed to have responsibility for enforcing their own criminal justice. But all too often they had shown themselves unwilling or incapable of prosecuting the worst culprits, either because those responsible were still in power, or because they had taken refuge in other countries and were now out of reach. Hence the turn to international justice.
In 1993, the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague became the first international war-crimes tribunal to be set up since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the second world war. It was followed a year later by the UN tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania. Like their post-war forebears, the two courts operate exclusively under international law and are staffed by foreign judges. Since then, five other war-crimes tribunals, all with more or less international input, have been—or are being—set up to deal with atrocities in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Iraq and Afghanistan. Lebanon has now asked the UN for help in setting up a “tribunal of international character” to try the assassins of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who was killed a year ago.
More:http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5601334
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