Peace Researcher 29 – June
2004
The US occupation of Iraq is being fatally undermined by the relentless evidence of systematic torture in its prisons, a regime paralleled in the other secretive detention camps where it is holding those swept up in its “War On Terror” dragnet (such as at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba). Like the torturers and murderers of all previous terrorist regimes (such as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge) these criminals just love to record their handiwork – which proves their undoing. Reflecting the sexualised nature of US culture, they have added one unique ingredient to their sadistic practices – staging them as if making their own pornographic home movies. The Bush Administration has fixed the blame at the lowest possible level in the military command (“a few bad apples”) and some of these patsies are starting to squeal that they were simply following orders from the highest levels. Where have we heard that before?
So what will happen to these lowly privates who get to take the rap for the criminality of the US occupation? Leaving aside the “private contractors” (see article elsewhere in this issue) who are not answerable to military law and thus go scotfree, the GIs will face a US court martial. One thing that you can be sure of – they won’t face trial in any international court. There is just such a court, established expressly to prosecute and punish those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is the permanent International Criminal Court, which has been in existence since July 2002. Every step along the way was marked by strong American protests and President Clinton only reluctantly signed the treaty (in December 2000, after the Democrats had lost the election but during the period of transition from Clinton to Bush).
At the earliest possible opportunity, President Bush revoked the United States’ signature to the treaty and set about a systematic campaign to sabotage the Court. The US campaign has been monomaniacal in its purpose, which has been expressly spelled out as being to protect not so much the GIs and grunts at the bottom of the heap but the generals and politicians at the top of it. One recent event seems to have searingly burned itself into the brain of the US ruling class and filled it with fear – the arrest and lengthy (but very comfortable) detention of the former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, who was held in Britain on a Spanish warrant for crimes against humanity. As we know, he was let go, for reasons of political expediency. But that, and the widespread call for historical US war criminals such as Henry Kissinger to be brought to justice, has put the fear of God into the warmongers who run every US Administration, be it Democrat or Republican. Hence the ferocious campaign to eradicate any possibility of Americans ever facing international justice (the hypocrisy of this is, of course, quite breathtaking. The US led a campaign to force what is left of Yugoslavia to turn over its former leader Slobodan Milosevic and numerous others from his regime to face international justice at the ad hoc tribunal at The Hague).
The US played hardball from the outset in 2002, vetoing continuation of the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia and withdrawing its military observers from East Timor. The UN Security Council gave in to this US pressure and passed a Resolution, which granted a one-year ban on the Court investigating or prosecuting any current or former US officials involved in any UN operation. In June 2003, the US won a further one-year extension of this Resolution.
At the same time, the US announced that it would seek an impunity exemption for its personnel from every country that signed the treaty establishing the Court (meaning that those countries agree never to turn over American officials or employees to the Court). And it backed that up by threatening to cut off military aid to those that didn’t agree to the American exemption. In July 2003, the US followed through by cutting military aid to 35 countries (including 14 Latin American and Caribbean countries). These included major American military clients such as Colombia.
The US has not been so successful in bullying countries to sign the exemption for Americans, managing to get only some of the weakest and most vulnerable nations on Earth (including several US clients) to sign up. One of the most despicable examples is East Timor which, more than most, knows all about crimes against humanity. It had only been independent for three months, in 2002, before it agreed to sign the exemption. That required Parliamentary ratification. But, in October 2003, the Council of Ministers quietly decided at a closed meeting to pass it without needing ratification. The US had extended its deadline for cutting off military aid to November 2003 – as that deadline approached, three US warships were heading towards East Timor for a courtesy call and US Special Forces were training East Timor’s military. No official announcement or press release was made and nothing appeared about it in the East Timorese media.
The unilateralism that has marked the Bush Administration was first invoked against this Court, as soon as Bush took office. The US campaign of sabotage has been waged against the rest of the world, including countries that have served as US allies in the war on Iraq. It is obvious that the US will go to any lengths to avoid international justice for its actions. And as the daily revelations from within the American hellholes in Iraq show, international justice is exactly what is needed to clean up this rogue State of torturers and murderers.
Those daily revelations from the Iraqi hellholes provide the compelling motivation for the Americans and their British accomplices to make sure that every single one of their troops in Iraq are immune from any legal action in the courts of the newly “sovereign” Iraq that was due to emerge on June 30, 2004. Those occupying forces are only subject to the domestic laws of their own countries, making a mockery of the “sovereignty” of colonised Iraq. As one British MP asked: “How is anyone in Iraq expected to bring a case in the British courts? It is taking the idea of diplomatic immunity and applying it to 130,000 troops. There is a danger that you are actually going from immunity to being able to act with impunity” (Observer, 23/5/04, “Iraqis lose right to sue troops over war crimes”, Kamal Ahmed). Exactly. And that’s just the way the US wants it.
|
|
|
|