/ 1 March 2003

Doing the Right Thing

There is another world leader out there who is like Saddam Hussein. He has been in material breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions for years. He flagrantly disregards the Geneva Convention. He has ordered the death and destruction of an ethnic group within his nation-state domain

It is time to get serious. He has been in material breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions for years. He flagrantly disregards the Geneva Convention. He has ordered the death and destruction of an ethnic group within his nation-state domain that seeks justice and self-determination. He continues to pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing against them. Given the chance he would probably wish to drive them into the sea. He has weapons of mass destruction.

To many he is a war criminal, nothing more and nothing less. And now there may be the chance to prove it in court. Yes, his time surely is running out. I agree with President George W Bush: it is, therefore, a test of the resolve of the UN. Fail it now and its credibility may be forever diminished — Tony Blair is quite right. The patience of the international community should be at breaking point.

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by Richard Calland

I speak of Ariel Sharon, not Saddam Hussein. I can already feel the rush of e-mailed letters of outrage flying through the ether: how can you compare the elected leader of a liberal democracy, Israel, with an evil despot like Saddam? Well, quite easily in fact. Israel’s breach of UN Security Council Resolution 242 is now 35 years old and there was no surprise when Sharon contemptuously ignored Resolution 1 402 last March during his army’s onslaught on Jenin.

Repeatedly, Sharon has been warned by the Security Council to curb his unlawful, murderous behaviour. In Resolution 1 322, passed on October 7 2000, the council condemned ‘ — acts of violence, especially the excessive use of force against the Palestinians, resulting in injury and loss of human life”. Yet, in the past two weeks more than 30 Palestinians have died at the hands of the Israeli army, including an old woman crushed in a house that was razed to the ground and a medic trying to reach a sick patient, despite the absence of terror inside Israel.

Repeatedly, in the past two years, Sharon’s army has breached the Geneva Convention, by attacking or endangering civilians or medical personnel. There can be even less surprise at the barbarity of the Israeli occupying forces, however, given the identity of their commander-in-chief: the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila.

Two weeks ago the Belgian Court of Appeal upheld the competence of the court to try individuals for serious violations of international humanitarian law, namely war crimes, regardless of where the accused resides. In short, once he ceases to be head of state, Sharon can be tried in his absence for his criminal responsibility as minister of defence at the time of the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees at the two Lebanese camps. In the meantime, some of his army officers at the time can face trial in absentia for the murder of up to 3 500 people at the hands of the puppet Phalangist army.

This, of course, is precisely the sort of work that an International Criminal Court should be doing, were it not for the veto of the United States — hardly surprising given its $8-billion annual subsidy in aid and military hardware to Israel.

It is also the court where, ideally, Saddam should have to account for his own murderous acts against the Kurdish minority in the north of his country. I remember how in the 1980s the Kurds were an esoteric cause célèbre for the most hardened human rights activists. Unfortunately, they lacked the drawcard of the anti-apartheid African National Congress, the anti-CIA-backed-Contra Sandinistas, or even the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

Besides, the US was too busy providing the means for Saddam to wage chemical warfare against them to worry too much about the Kurds’ human rights. Now, suddenly, they are more grist to the moral mill of Bush and Blair’s increasingly desperate attempts to convince public opinion that they are Doing the Right Thing.

It seems patently absurd now, but in 1990 at the fall of the Berlin Wall all the talk was of a New World Order. Nato lacks a single unifying enemy and, as with the European Union, its newer members have different ambitions and interests. Most of them are more blatantly intertwined with the corporate interests of the US than ‘old Europe” is or ever has been. Witness the pathetic fawning of the Bulgarian prime minister at the White House this week. His name — Simeon Saxe-Coburg Goethe — betrays his aristocratic, nay regal, heritage. He acceded to the throne aged six in 1943, but his family was forced into exile by the communists a year later.

In 2001 he returned to Bulgaria with a vague wish to do something useful, and having founded a sort of political party was astonished to be swept to power in a landslide victory in the June 2001 general election. Not at all against the general grain, Bulgarian politics has come to this. Despite the blue blood, his instincts appear to be entirely ‘new money”. He wants Bulgaria to be owed by the Americans not the French.

This, too, is part of the new chemistry of world disorder. Anyone foolish enough to admire French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin for anything more than the dash of his looks and the cut of his oratory at the Security Council two weeks ago should think again. If you want to believe, as I do, in the future of a united Europe as countervailing force to America, there was a distinct pleasure to be drawn from his elegant retort to Donald Rumsfeld’s rant against ‘old Europe”.

But the truth is that the French, who have been only marginally less appeasing in their approach to Sharon, want to resist the force of history for their own reasons. That is their natural position; Jacques Chirac is the archetypal conservative, De Villepin, his former chief of staff and prodigy, its eloquent messenger.

Whether they care for it or not, the balance of power is drifting away from Europe. As London School of Economics Professor Geoffrey Stern argued years ago, the epicentre of world power tends to move. It has lingered over Europe for a very long time. Stern predicted it would move East and China awaits the moment.

In the meantime, the greatest ever military power, the US, is determined to impose its might on the shifting sands of geopolitics. It is a precarious policy, which is why so many people around the world want to stand in its path. What united the peace marchers around the world on February 15 was the diversity of their reasoning. My own is that to tackle the injustice and the menace of the rule of Saddam while turning a blind eye, and worse, sponsoring that perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians is evidently self-defeating as well as plain wrong. Containment would be, in both cases, a far better course.

On the walls of the Security Council room at the UN hangs a tapestry replica of Picasso’s famous artistic complaint against war, Guernica. Ordinarily. But apparently US Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted that it be covered for his February 5 presentation of the case against Saddam.

This is curious to say the least and has prompted a poetic response from the great Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. If I were Xolela Mangcu, I would have saved myself a lot of time and simply donated my column to the poem, but I’m not. Anyway, a copyright warning at the end of the opendemocracy.net Web page, perhaps more than my own vanity or sense of propriety, deterred me from doing so. Instead, I shall steal just a few lines and leave it there:

Why did you not use / Guernica to make your case? / Were you afraid that the mother / would leap from her image and say / no he is the one / they are the ones who will bomb / from afar / they are the ones who will kill / the child

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