Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

"The age of enforcement"

There were two recent articles in the daily press written by prominent 
people, both very different and both touching on human rights abuses in 
Yugoslavia.

One was by Malcolm Fraser in The Australian, the other by Geoffrey 
Robertson in The Sydney Morning Herald. Of the two articles, 
Fraser's was the more startling, Robertson's the more ominous.

Fraser, the former Liberal PM and born-to-rule pastoralist surprised us 
once before with his outspoken opposition to apartheid. His attitude to 
NATO's war on Yugoslavia is equally blunt:

"NATO, of course, was acting in the name of humanitarianism. It was the 
methodology used to justify a breach of NATO's charter. Tony Blair has said 
that he wanted the action in Kosovo to be an example of NATO's actions 
through the next century, an ethical century.

"Does that mean that what has happened there will be repeated in Turkey, 
where a running conflict between the Turkish Government and the Kurds has 
cost 30,000 lives? Does it mean that NATO will seek to establish its 
ethical standards in Sudan or Afghanistan?

"If NATO is to embark on humanitarian wars, we need a clearer understanding 
of their objectives and of their principles than have occurred over 
Kosovo."

Fraser of course is the head of aid agency CARE Australia, and he is 
understandably miffed at the West's selective concern for refugees: NATO 
choosing to go to war allegedly over the 70,000-80,000 Albanian refugees 
from Kosovo while studiously ignoring the 500,000 Serbian refugees driven 
from Krajina in Croatia by unquestioned ethnic cleansing.

"I start to have difficulties", he wrote, "when I find principle 
selectively applied, when the adoption of principle suits some grand design 
or establishes a diversion."

Fraser also expressed the view that NATO "has an obligation to pay for the 
reconstruction of Kosovo .... Certainly the combined NATO nations have the 
wealth to do so; they also have a moral obligation."

Malcolm Fraser is an intelligent man, whatever else we may think of him. He 
can see as well as anyone that NATO's war advanced the grand design of the 
biggest of big business (and remember, Fraser always spoke for Australia's 
national bourgeoisie).

The war plans of the transnational corporations and the governments which 
pay court to them promise only more instability, more crises, more 
refugees, more need for groups like CARE Australia. 

* * *

Who are the real war criminals?

The other article, by Geoffrey Robertson, of Hypotheticals fame, 
was a full page devoted to lauding the concept of enforcing the 
prosecution of war criminals from "recent conflicts".

By this he did not mean prosecuting Tony Blair and Bill Clinton for their 
unprovoked attacks on Yugoslavia and the killing or maiming of thousands of 
its citizens.

Nor did he mean the prosecution of the governments or the arms merchants 
who supplied the wherewithal for the Turkish army to slaughter the Kurds, 
or for a whole host of wars to be waged across Africa and central Asia (to 
the incidental benefit of US foreign policy).

No, far from questioning the morality of the war against Yugoslavia, 
Geoffrey Robertson revels in that war. He believes implicitly every lie 
Britain's spin doctors put out about the supposed evil deeds of the monster 
Milosevic.

He has total faith that NATO went to war for the reasons they gave, for 
humanitarian reasons. He even argues that "humanitarian intervention ... 
may, as over Kosovo, involve killing for human rights".

He sees no conflict between this and his own definition of "crimes against 
humanity" as the "commission of widespread and systematic murder ... or 
persecution of innocent civilians pursuant to a political policy". Which is 
precisely what NATO was doing in Yugoslavia.

He berates the United Nations Charter for protecting countries from foreign 
intervention in their internal affairs, and writes glowingly that "there 
are some hopeful signs that we are indeed entering the third age of the 
human rights revolution — the era of enforcement". 

Robertson demonstrates throughout the article his naive faith in capitalist 
governments. "NATO action in Kosovo ... is likely to be remembered as the 
first war waged not for military or commercial advantage but for ethical 
principle alone."

Not for military or commercial advantage? What planet does this man 
live on? More importantly, how can he be so knowledgeable about the subject 
and so abysmally ignorant at the same time?

NATO's war on Yugoslavia was all about military and commercial 
advantage.

There is a well orchestrated push to impose on the world a legalised system 
for imperialist forces to interfere in any country where it suits 
them, in the name of humanity and with the support of well-meaning 
people like Geoffrey Robertson and his naive faith in "the age of 
enforcement".

He thinks the enforcement agency will be some supra-national judicial body 
somehow untainted by national and class interests.

In fact, it will be the US armed forces, under a cloak of legal 
respectability provided by a compliant international court (for if it is 
not compliant its services will be dispensed with).

Already, the US is trying to disrupt the hard-won peace process in 
Cambodia, demanding an international trial of Pol Pot's supporters.

Robertson of course fully supports such a move, oblivious to the fact that 
the US protected and defended the Pol Pot clique until this year, when the 
consolidation of the Cambodian Government and its deft obliteration of them 
as an opposition force caused the US to shift tactics.

Now it's a defender of human rights in Cambodia and using the question of a 
"war crimes" trial to attack the present Cambodian Government, and 
especially to interfere in the running of the country.

Robertson should talk to Malcolm Fraser about the "selective application of 
principle".