June 13, 2000
Kosovo
Was Illegal. So What?
WHAT'S
THE POINT?
What's
the point of parliaments? No, really what's the point? I ask this
because in Britain, mother
of Parliaments, we have managed to plumb the depths of inanity
with our new parliamentary Foreign Affairs select
committee report (needless to say the Committee
is controlled by Labour) on the Kosovo adventure. The verdict was
that the bombing was "illegal, but necessary." Yep, I see
that going down a storm. I know that breaking and entering was illegal,
but it was necessary to steal the jewelry. I know that
stealing jewelry is illegal, but it is necessary to
fund the drug habit. I know that intimidating jurors is illegal,
but it will be necessary to be acquitted.
AMONG
MANY
This
report was not the only one to hit the stands in the last week.
Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the War Crimes Tribunal
said that she saw no
evidence of war crimes from NATO. I suppose
a burning TV station with 16 dead operatives inside doing invidious
deeds such as applying makeup was obviously not a war crime. No
evidence there then. There is absolutely no connection to the fact
that the NATO allies actually
pay Ms. Del Ponte's bills. That would be blatant corruption, and
our side is not corrupt, oh no. The other
report was from Amnesty International,
which said that many of the targets NATO chose were in fact, well,
civilian. In the measured
and reserved tones that one usually finds from Amnesty, they
said that as NATO bombed civilian targets this was not part of a
war, therefore they were illegal. For once the
press got it right when they read between the lines and said
"Amnesty accuses NATO of War Crimes."
THE
ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
Now
as some of the readers of this column will know, I am not really
a fan of international law. That is I don't believe that we should
worry about, say, the UN charter on refugees if we want to limit
the amount of people coming to your country. Although a believer
in free immigration for economic reasons, I believe that who comes
into a country really has to be decided democratically. This is
different. If we carry out an action in the name of the United Nations,
then we should at least have the decency to ask them first. If we
are going to call on NATO countries to fulfill their obligations
then we should at least ensure that it is covered in the contract.
I may want to leave both organizations pronto, but we should at
least go through the motions when we do something in their name.
THE
REAL WAR CRIME
Something
is missing from all of this. What Amnesty and the Tribunal could
not be expected to look at were the domestic circumstances of the
war. This was not the case for Parliament. Surely, the one prerogative
that Parliament has won is the right to decide who we will, or won't
go to war with. I remember in 1982 when Argentina
invaded the Falkland Islands, and hearing the debate on the
radio. It was a Saturday, and the fact that parliaments never sat
on a Saturday except for grave occasions added to the drama. This
was not the case with the Kosovo war. In fact it was unusual for
the government even to refer to it as a war. This was odd as the
Labour Party have the sort of Parliamentary majority that you weigh
rather than count. Added to that the fact that the Conservatives,
although uneasy, showed no signs of opposing it and that the Liberal
Democrats were more blood thirsty than the Labour Party, there was
no chance that the war would not be approved. This makes it even
more puzzling as to why no debate was allowed, but it was not and
war was never declared, just as in the United States.
A
SET OF INCONCLUSIONS
Unlike
the craven acceptance of reality that Ms. Del Ponte showed, or the
carefully documented but fairly dispassionate legalese of Amnesty
International, Parliament chose a third way. In parts the report
reads like it has been written by different people in turns. For
example they say that the infamous Bulgarian spy fiction "Operation
Horseshoe" was made up (although they say that it was perfectly
innocent), and then that the Serbs
were planning the exodus of Albanians. Say what? Then there
is the criticism of NATO not bringing up the military
annex to the Rambouillet accord until the end of the negotiations,
then saying that it had nothing to do with the
breakdown of the negotiations. And then there was the best line
in wet speciousness that the war was illegal but morally justified,
as if breaking the law was not in itself immoral. Overall the committee
seemed many times to almost criticise the moral core of this wretched
war, and then limits itself
CAUSE
FOR CONGRATULATIONS
I
should not keep carping. The very fact that a committee that was
led by such a nonentity as Donald
Anderson actually said anything at all about the legal status
of the war was remarkable in itself. And the report has enough to
recommend itself as a decent collection of testimony and sources,
and a fairly decent summation of a moderately anti-Serb view. The
fact that it admitted that the war was illegal is in itself a gain,
although not as well written or as damning as other reports – such
as the pamphlet by Mark
Littman – it does at least have some official sanction. The
idea that there was no other choice is belied by the corrupt behaviour
of Ms. Del Ponte. However a year on it remains that a war to uphold
international law broke it, a war to strengthen democracy bypassed
it and most of all this war to restore justice has perverted it.
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