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(TALKZIMBABWE) International law: catching up with Washington

International law: catching up with Washington
Reason Wafawarova ― Opinion
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:06:00 +0000

COMMENTING on international law and institutions in his book Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky said, “In systems of law that are intended to be taken seriously, coerced acquiescence is invalid. In international affairs, however, it is honoured as diplomacy.”

When one looks at the trends of international law from the formation of the United Nations after World War II, the Nuremburg Trials, Geneva Conventions, the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the Rwanda Tribunal, Sierra Leone’s Special Tribunal and even the Iraqi Tribunal that tried Saddam Hussein, there is this selective application of terms of law, as meaning, focus and direction is derived from the centre of global political power and not from the power and legitimacy of the law.

The Nuremburg trials treated crimes as criminal acts exclusively carried out by the Germans and the Japanese and not by the Allied forces. Israel has next to zero regard for Geneva Conventions each time they carry out their ritual attacks on Palestinians or on the Lebanese people and the US is always ready to veto each Security Council resolution that seeks to discipline its rogue outpost.

The Yugoslavia Tribunal was designed to deal with selected atrocities that did not incriminate NATO and all similar atrocities in places where NATO was evidently involved in carrying out war crimes were just ignored.

The Rwanda tribunal also totally ignored the war crimes of the Tutsi rebels, including the gunning down of a plane carrying a democratically elected President.

The Sierra Leone Special Court was established to bring to book Charles Taylor for supplying weapons to Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone in a brutal war that left many dead, raped, maimed and traumatized for life.

This is regardless of the fact there is no Iraq Special Tribunal to try George W. Bush for similar crimes against the civilians of Iraq. There is no Palestinian Special Tribunal set up to prosecute American leaders for supplying weapons to the murderous Israelis so they can fulfil their holy wish of obliterating Palestinians.

The Saddam Hussein trial was described by his defence lawyer as “a sham and a travesty” and he was lucky to live to express himself because many of Hussein’s defence lawyers were slaughtered on the way to his conviction. Saddam is probably the only known convict whose gallows were prepared specifically for him well before a judgment was passed.

International law has to “catch up” with the wishes of the sole super power or else that law is rendered “irrelevant”.

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “the international rule of law is an overarching goal of policy.”

The Academy noted that that neither international law nor the UN Charter was even mentioned in President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy. The academy pointed out that the primacy of law over force that had been a major thread in global politics after World War II had “disappeared from the new strategy” and that the international institutions “that extend the reach of law, and seek to constrain the powerful as well as to grant the weak a voice” had “all but disappeared”.

What the Bush administration left for President Barack Obama is a message that force reigns supreme and the US will exercise that force as it sees fit. Now Obama has to deal with a strategy that has increased “the motivation of US enemies to act in reaction to growing resentment of perceived intimidation,” according to the Academy’s report.

Two of the Academy’s international affairs specialists noted that “extended confrontation, not political accommodation” was “inherently provocative”.

This observation fits perfectly well in the Zimbabwean situation of the inclusive government involving the three major political parties. The African Union, Sadc, South Africa and Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai as well as President Robert Mugabe have all appealed for political accommodation of the inclusive government and an end to the embargo that has brought the country to a near halt.

The Western community seems however to be still engaged in “extended confrontation” with New Zealand trying to convince the International Cricket Council that Zimbabwe is unsafe for its cricket players and the US, UK and Australia sending a chilling message that “no consideration for a review of the sanctions regime has been made yet”.

For Anglo-Americans, this latest stance on Zimbabwe must be viewed by many ordinary Western citizens as a violation of the traditional Adam Smith truism. Adam Smith bitterly condemned the merchants and manufacturers in England who were “by far the principal architects” of policy and were solely motivated by a desire to ensure that their own interests were “most peculiarly attended to,” regardless of how grievous the effect would be on others, namely the poor masses that are often hit the most by the ruthlessness of such policies.

Sanctioning Zimbabwe by way of refusing to play their cricket team has a grievous effect on the careers of the young cricket players denied a chance to showcase their skill on the basis of differences in opinion between politicians from Western countries and those from Zimbabwe.

Equally, a continued reign of the illegal sanctions regime has a grievous effect on the masses of Zimbabwe who are currently afflicted by hunger, disease and a collapsing education system.

The fact that all attempts to have UN approved sanctions on Zimbabwe have failed at the Security Council literally means international law does not recognize the sanctions regime as legal international practice.

The sanctions regime is not even a supported political statement of goodwill, when one considers that Russia, China, the African Union, Sadc and many individual countries have openly condemned the sanctions and also called for a lift on the embargo.

As Francis Fukuyama noted in 1992, “the UN is perfectly serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism and indeed may be the primary mechanism through which that unilateralism will be expressed in future.”

The trend since 1945 has been that whenever the UN fails to serve as “an instrument of American unilateralism” on issues of elite concern, it is summarily dismissed.

Equally when Sadc and AU declare that an election in Zimbabwe or in any African country not favourable to the West is unfree and unfair, the regional bodies are treated as “serviceable instruments” of Western interests. This is when they hit Western media headlines as “fledgling democracies”.

However, when they fail to serve as “serviceable instruments” and begin to request a lift on the West’s sanctions regime on Zimbabwe, they are summarily dismissed as “a club of dictators”.

For the UN, the illustration that the Anglo-American elites have no respect for a non-compliant UN is the veto record. The United States proudly leads in vetoing UN Security Council resolutions and is closely followed by Britain, with France and Russia far behind while China has hardly exercised the veto at all.

It was plausible to condemn Saddam Hussein for his failure to comply with a number of Security Council resolutions but not many people, if any at all, ever mentioned that the United States flatly and arrogantly rejected the same resolutions, especially Resolution 687, which called for ending sanctions on Iraq when compliance was determined by the Security Council, and moving on to eliminate Weapons of Mass Destruction and all delivery systems from the Middle East (Article 14, a coded reference to troublesome Israel).

Of course there was no possibility that the US would ever entertain Article 14, and they got it removed from discussions.

James Barker, Senior Bush’s Secretary of State announced that the US would not respect Resolution 687 and would bar “the relaxation sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

This is the same line of rhetoric that has been repeated on Western commentary in regards to Zimbabwe’s inclusive government – that the settlement falls short of Western expectations because it includes President Robert Mugabe.

This has prompted Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to say that the inclusive government is in place because, “Zimbabweans have a right to choose and they have decided that the inclusive government is the only way out."

When indications were that the UN Security Council was not going to endorse the war on Iraq, Colin Powell is famed for declaring that the UN needed to “catch up” or risked being “irrelevant”, terms that had already been used by John Bolton and another White House official.

South Africa resolutely refused to vote with the United States on a number of issues during its two years at the Security Council and their stance on Zimbabwe has evidently angered the US and its Western allies. Now Uganda is being told in no uncertain terms that South Africa’s behaviour was unacceptable and that the “international community” expects Uganda to improve Africa’s “miserable record”.

When Ronald Reagan urged Mexico to support his awesome resolve to invade Grenada for threatening the existence of the United States in 1982, the Mexican envoy to Washington said the only problem was that if he went home and told the Mexican people that Grenada was about to obliterate the US the people of Mexico would “die laughing”.

The Ugandan government knows very well that the Ugandan people would not die laughing if they voted for sanctions against Zimbabwe, simply because they would not find that action amusing at all. They know that the African Union would not be impressed either, and they know that Sadc would feel undermined, much as they know that Comesa would feel humiliated by such an action.

We hope that President Barack Obama will not be tempted to “be on the wrong side of history,” to borrow his own words, and that he will provide progressive world leadership on the issue of Zimbabwe’s chosen way of ending the socio-economic crisis that has crippled the country.

We also hope that the Western countries that are still “clinching their fists” and running a resolve that seeks to combat Zimbabwe instead of accommodating the country politically may realize that the plea of the Zimbabwean people is to be accommodated and not to be isolated, to build with others and not to destroy.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we shall overcome.
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*Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

Labels: GW BUSH, NEOCOLONIALISM, NEOCONSERVATISM, WAR CRIMES

posted by MrK @ 9:53 PM