Evelyn Gordon | @evelyng1234
Under other circumstances, I might enjoy watching “human rights”
activists decry the very international justice system they lobbied
so hard to establish. But not when reactions like this
one, by David Harland of the Center for Humanitarian
Dialogue, show just how much resistance there will be to the
important norms established last month by the appellate court of
an international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. In a verdict
ironically issued just as the world was obsessing
over Palestinian civilians killed in the latest Hamas-Israel war,
the court essentially upheld, in a Balkan context, all the
arguments Israel routinely makes about the legitimacy of its own
military operations. Consequently, the judges acquitted and freed
two Croatian generals whom a trial court had convicted of war
crimes and sentenced to 18 and 24 years, respectively.
The appellate court’s first important move was acknowledging the
obvious fact that in wartime even the most careful army makes
mistakes. The trial court had convicted the Croats of illegally
shelling four towns they were trying to capture. The appeals court
said the lower court’s criterion–“that any shell that landed more
than 200 meters away from a military target must have been fired
indiscriminately–was arbitrary and ‘devoid of any specific
reasoning’,” to quote The Guardian’s apt
summary. In short, it accepted the fact that soldiers are
human beings who make mistakes, and errant shells don’t
necessarily mean the soldiers fired indiscriminately.
Second, it acknowledged the obvious
fact that even the most careful army can’t prevent civilian
casualties. Some 150 civilians died in the generals’ four-day
bombing campaign. But the appeals court said these deaths didn’t
constitute war crimes, because the troops had aimed at
legitimate military targets. In other words, it ruled that
civilian casualties aren’t ipso facto illegal; they may be
unavoidable consequences of legitimate military
activity–especially when military targets are located in crowded
urban areas.
Third, it acknowledged that even when genuine war crimes occur,
they may be the acts of errant individuals rather than deliberate
policy: It concluded that acts of looting and murder following the
bombing campaign occurred not on the generals’ orders, but despite
them.
Finally, it acknowledged the obvious fact that fleeing a war zone
is normal, so a civilian exodus isn’t necessarily proof of a
campaign of ethnic cleansing.
In short, the court recognized a simple truth that “human rights”
activists try hard to obscure: War is always hell, but not every
act of war is a war crime.
Unfortunately, this welcome breath of sanity has been under
assault from the moment it was issued. The first attack came from
the court itself: The dissenting judges in the 3-2 verdict
publicly termed it “grotesque” and said it lacked “any sense of
justice.”
Now, activists like Harland are joining the chorus. Unlike the
court, he can’t accept that civilians might spontaneously–and
sensibly–flee a war zone: “If the acquitted generals were not
responsible for this ethnic cleansing, then somebody was,” he
declared.
Even more disturbing, he appears to think “fairness” requires
convictions for all parties to a conflict even if only one side
committed war crimes: “Convicting only Serbs simply doesn’t make
sense in terms of justice, in terms of reality, or in terms of
politics,” he wrote.
I can’t imagine a worse indictment of the “human rights”
community than that: Justice be damned; convictions must be issued
to both sides for the sake of “politics.” It’s precisely that
monstrous idea against which the appeals court struck such a
welcome blow last month.
But as reactions like Harland’s show, restoring sanity to the
concept of “international human rights law” is going to be a long,
hard haul.
Thanks YM
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