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Canada’s “human security” agenda in Kosovo

Posted by Matthew Brett on May 23rd 2008 at 7:25am | 2

Liberal Interventionists: Continuing the Tradition

Lloyd Axworthy is well remembered as a “radical” if not “revolutionary” champion of human rights during his four and a half years as Foreign Minister. His initiatives in the UN on landmines, the International Criminal Court and war-affected children are a departure from the norm of Canadian rubber-stamping, and his efforts to bolster the UN also appear to be significant. With Axworthy, academics and the press praised the nation’s return to its “glorious Pearsonian past.” The critical assessments of Axworthy’s work rarely step beyond the realm of open praise for his “proudly independent Canadian foreign policy.”[1] Axworthy’s September 2000 resignation “stimulated a kind of premature obituary industry” according to historian and avid Axworthian, Robert Bothwell. “Canadians get time to reflect on their loss and say how much they will miss the Minister,” he wrote. Bothwell also once wrote that Axworthy appealed “to a long tradition of liberal interventionists, some Canadian, like Pearson, but also to figures like the 19^th-century British prime minister William Ewart Glads[t]one and the American president Woodrow Wilson. Gladstone and Wilson stood for an active international conscience, and clung to a standard of international morality. Mr. Axworthy did the same.”[2] The comparisons are telling.

Axworthy wanted to emulate Pearson, but he was highly critical of Pearson’s acceptance of nuclear weapons. He was also an anti-war activist during Vietnam, and here it is difficult to understand why Axworthy would take such pride in emulating someone who “frankly supported all the aims of U.S. policy in Vietnam” including the regular submission of reports from Vietnam to the U.S. and testing of chemical agents in Canada before use in Vietnam, according to an excellent study by Canadian Cold War academic John W. Warnock.[3] Warnock provides a revealing illustration of Pearson’s selective idealism, but let’s move to the second “liberal interventionist” of which Axworthy extends the “active international conscience” tradition: Woodrow Wilson. Wislon lauded the 1898 intervention in Cuba, which prevented its liberation from Spain and turned it into a “virtual colony” of the United States, according to two Harvard historians. But the Cuban intervention, like Kosovo, was “in the interest of civilization, humanity, and liberty.” “We took up arms only in obedience to the dictates of humanity and in fulfillment of high public and moral obligations,” President McKinley chimed, acting “in the name of humanity, in the name of civilization.” Thus we find Axworthy echoing down the halls of history in stating that “it was and is the humanitarian imperative that has galvanized the alliance to act […] NATO’s actions are guided primarily by concern for the human rights and welfare of Kosovo’s people.”[4] Clinton likewise stated that “we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace.” Clinton, one of the most violent Presidents of U.S. history, was likewise described as a “new-Wilsonian.”[5]

Riding the Wave of Mutilation

Axworthy’s rise to humanitarian stardom must not be viewed as entirely independent; rather, his status as a great practitioner of human rights was buoyed by a “new era” in which the “international community” rode a wave of mutilation under the guise of “New Interventionism” or “NATO’s new military humanism.” The Clinton Doctrine of New Humanism was mirrored by Axworthy, and Canadian academia has largely followed suit, praising Axworthy for his humanitarian achievements.

This “humanitarian” phase of intervention was established with the end of the Cold War. The basic premise of “new-Wilsonianism” is that “the United States uses its monopoly on power to intervene in other countries to promote democracy.”[6] “Now freed from the shackles of the Cold War and old-fashioned constrains of world order, the enlightened states can dedicate themselves with full vigor to the mission of upholding human rights and bringing justice and freedom to suffering people everywhere, by force if necessary.”[7] Axworthy likewise pivots his notion of “human security” around the Cold War. “When I arrived [at Foreign Affairs] in 1996, a decided shift was taking place in the perceptions and calculations arising out of the end of the Cold War,” Axworthy writes. “The old paradigm of nation-state supremacy couldn’t deal with evolving interdependence. The alliance system of the Cold War didn’t provide a relevant basis for global cooperation. [Haiti, Cuba and Kosovo] suggested the need for a new approach that would emphasize the human and humanitarian dimension and also promote Canada as an innovative player. The concept of human security emerged as the lens through which to view the international scene.”[8] This notion of human security was emerging throughout the “international community,” and served to widen the right to intervene militarily based on humanitarian grounds.

The first thing to note, if we are to accept the premise of human security, is that intervention on humanitarian grounds is conducted selectively. Prior to Kosovo, Axworthy had “rejected accusations that Canada responded to international violations of human rights selectively and inconsistently, choosing to act only when its political and economic interests would not be compromised.” Axworthy said that “human security was not a solution to all of the world’s problems, but it was making tangible progress.”[9] His response is remarkably similar to Bill Clinton’s, who had also been praised for entering a “noble phase” with a “saintly glow.” Clinton likewise said, “We cannot respond to such tragedies everywhere, but when ethnic conflict turns into ethnic cleansing where we can make a difference, we must try, and that is clearly the case in Kosovo.”[10] Canada must intervene in Kosovo with devastating results, but make no mention of the consequences of Clinton’s increased funding to the Turkish army, which continued to pummel the Kurds largely unabated. It is also telling that the atrocities conducted by Turkey were taking place within a NATO country during the intervention in Kosovo, which says an awful lot about the selectivity of the human security agenda. A look at the chasm between funding of interventions in Angola, Sierra Leone, Columbia and East Timor in relation to funding for Canada’s intervention in Kosovo would surely be telling. This, then, is “Canada’s Global Future” - selective “humanitarian interventions” based on the national interest.

Another telling example a quick look at those Axworthy aligns himself with to achieve his human security agenda. If we are to judge one by the company he keeps, Axworthy states that he could always “count on like-minded individuals from key countries, in particular Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary,” for advancing his “human security agenda.” Canada’s “behind-the-scenes diplomatic discussion” on their “protection agenda” was greatly aided, Axworthy writes, “by the election of the Blair government in Great Britain and the arrival of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who had declared his own version of human security in calling for an ethical foreign policy.”[11]  Cook announced his “ethical foreign policy” would include “a firm commitment not to permit the sale of arms to regimes that might use them for repression or aggression.” But Axworthy refrains from mentioning that Cook’s “own version of human security” would not block the sale of armaments to one of the most oppressive regimes in the world at the time. “His government at once stepped up arms sales to Indonesia, granting fifty-six military exports licenses while [Cook] ‘acknowledged that British equipment was being used against demonstrators’ of Indonesia’s democratic movement. ‘Broad categories cleared for export include small arms, machine guns, bombs, riot control and toxicological agents, surveillance systems, ‘armoured goods’, electronic equipment specially designed for military use, and aircraft’ […] ‘Labour is exporting more guns and other military equipment to Indonesia than the Tories.” Fewer than one per cent of export license applications by arms manufactures were turned down by the Labour government, but Axworthy could certainly “count on like-minded individuals” such as Cook.[12]

Axworthy also found a good friend in Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State and representative at the UN. “We […] found ourselves becoming good friends,” Axworthy writes.[13] The relationship makes sense given Albright’s notion of “NATO’s new military humanism.”  This notion, of course, allows her to state on national television that it was “a very hard choice” to kill half a million Iraqi children in five years. “But the price—we think the price is worth it.”[14] The human security agenda certainly does come at a price, but Axworthy can put faith in his good friends and like-minded individuals who espouse their common goal at any price.

Kosovo and the Human Security Pretext

Two oft repeated assessments of the Axworthy Legacy are his preference for “soft power” over “hard power” and his emphasis on “human security.” The fundamental element of human security is that individual safety takes precedence over state sovereignty. If a state is savagely harming its own people, as was the case under Milosevic, the “international community” has the responsibility to intervene. The problems with such a formulation are glaring, but will be addressed later. My intent here is to focus on Kosovo as a case study of human security, and its devastating consequences. After all, it was Axworthy himself who claimed in retrospect that “Kosovo proved an opportunity to substantially advance the credibility of the concept of human security.” “The ultimate test for a human security policy,” ironically enough, “was a willingness to exercise military force to uphold the principles of protection—an argument we were able to advance day after day in Parliament and the media” with devastating and expected results.[15]

There are two primary histories of the 1999 Kosovo War, one is the truth, and the other is the spin promoted by Axworthy, the U.S. government and the mass media. Canadian academics generally followed the later line of history as well, so some essential revisionist history is required within a Canadian context.

            Looking at Kosovo through a Canadian lens is useful for two reasons, both of which will receive a cursory study. The first is to problematize the notion of “human security.” The second is to regard Kosovo as a case study of a larger and expected issue of Canadian media’s general if not overwhelming adherence to the “Propaganda Model,” as established by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.[16] Both the notion of “human security” and Canadian media’s adherence to the propaganda model will be dealt with by contrasting Lloyd Axworthy’s own brief interpretation of the Kosovo war as relayed in his book, Navigating A New World: Canada’s Global Future with Chomsky’s “revisionist history” in his study, with the apt Axworthian title, The New Military Humanism: Lessons Learned from Kosovo.

            Axworthy begins a chapter titled “Responsibility to Protect” with Slobodan Milosevic’s rise to power “on a tide of strong nationalist appeal. Resentments grew among the Kosovars, but in large part there were peaceful protests led by Ibrahim Rugova, a man steeped in the philosophy of Gandhian non-violent resistance.”[17] What Axworthy does not note is that Rugova, once elected as President in May 1992, ran a his Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) as “a curious mirror image to Milosevic’s SPS [Socialist Party of Serbia],” according to journalist/historian Tim Judah. The LDK “brooks little dissent and those that challenge it are howled down in LDK publications and can even be ostracized in the tight-knit Albanian community”; and “woe betide any Albanian family or shop or businessman who will not pay his dues to Kosova’s tax collectors.” This being Axworthy’s idea of “Gandhian non-violent resistance,” one can imagine how the remainder of his history of Canada’s involvement will be written. “Serbs argue that Kosovo is kept under such a tight regime because the LDK is a separatist party,” Judah reports, a fact that the LDK “proclaims…loud and clear,’ having declared “national independence” with the support of the vast majority of Albanians. Rugova’s policy was “waiting until there are no more Serbs left in Kosovo or their numbers become so insignificant that somehow the province falls to his people like ripe fruit.” Thus in the 1992 Yugoslav elections, Kosovo Albanians abstained; the LDK denounced participants as “traitors” according to Chomsky. Historian Miranda Vickers wrote:

The million Albanian votes would undoubtedly have ousted Milosevic, but as the Kosovar leadership admitted at the time, they did not want him to go. Unless Serbia continued to be labeled as profoundly evil—and they themselves, by virtue of being anti-Serb, as the good guys—they were unlikely to achieve their goals [of a separate state]. It would have been a disaster for them if a peacemonger like [opposition candidate Milan] Panic had resorted human rights, since this would have left them with nothing but a bare political agenda to change borders.[18]

Quoting exclusively from Chomsky now:

In 1992-93, the Serbian president of Yugoslavia, Dobrica Cosic, proposed in ‘discreet contacts with Kosovo Albanian leaders’ that the territory be partitioned, separating itself from Serbia apart from ‘a number of Serbian enclaves.’ But the proposal ‘was rejected by Albanian leaders’ of Rugova’s Rebulic of Kosovo. As noted, the Republic had already declared independence, also setting up a parallel educational and health system that continued to function under Serbian repression while Rugova travelled abroad to lobby for independence.[19]

            This purposeful inaction by “Gandhian” Rugova and the LDK that led to the rise of “a guerrilla cum terrorist organization called the [Kosovo Liberation Army],” rejecting Rugova’s policies and “call[ing] for a war on the Serbs.”[20] It appears that it was not only the more extreme elements that “rejected the moderate approach of Rugova” but also Rugova himself.

            The KLA began to increase attacks on policemen and eventually civilians throughout the mid ’90s. By 1998, the KLA operations gained momentum as they “not only fought Serbian Army and Interior Ministry police but also gunned down civilians, killing Serbian mail carriers and others associated with Belgrade.” The Serbian response was to retaliate by attacking civilians regarded as KLA supporters.[21] Here, Axworthy becomes a very selective historian. He notes that the UN High Commission for Refugees reported more than 200,000 displaced persons. What he neglects to mention is that

after three days of bombing [by NATO forces], UNHCR reported on March 27 that 4000 had fled Kosovo to Albania and Macedonia, the two neighbouring countries. Until April 1 the UNCHR provided no daily figures on refugees, according to the New York Times. By April 5, the Times reported that ‘more than 350,00 have left Kosovo since March 24,’ relying on UNHCR figures, while unknown numbers of Serbs fled north to Serbia to escape the increased violence from the air and on the ground. After the war, it was reported that half the Serb population had ‘moved out when the NATO bombing began.’ There have been varying estimates of the number of refugees within Kosovo before the NATO bombing. Cambridge University Law Professor, Legal Advisor to the Kosova (Kosovo Albanian) Delegation at the 1999 Rambuillet Conference on Kosovo, reports that after the withdrawal of the international monitors (KVM, Kosovo Verification Mission) on March 19, 1999, ‘within a few days the number of displaced had again risen to over 200,000.’

           In other words, the figure provided by Axworthy for total pre-war displacements matched the number of displaced within the first few days after the withdrawal of the KVM monitors (more on the KVM later). This result has since been disputed, but one clear result of the NATO led bombings is the exponential increase in displaced persons and killings, none of which is mentioned by Axworthy.

By the time of the peace accord of June 3, the UNHCR reported 671,500 refugees beyond the boarders of the FRY, in addition to 70,000 in Montenegro and 75,000 who went to other countries. To these we may add [Axworthy’s] numbers displaced within Kosovo, perhaps some 2-300,000 in the year before the bombing, far more afterwards, with varying estimates; and according to the Yugoslav Red Cross, over a million displaced within Serbia after the bombing, along with many who left Serbia.[22]

            Axworthy’s enforcement of “human security” led to a drastic increase in killings and displacements. To return to the Kosovo Verification Mission, Canada was one of the 55 states participating. “One advantage we had was a ready-made roster of skilled experts,” Axworthy writes. Canada deployed a group of “former diplomats, RCMP and military veterans and NGO personnel, all well versed in difficult overseas duty. It was a useful test case of the value of having a rapid-reaction team for civil peace missions.”

At this point, four pages into his summary of the war, Axworthy dives off into the spin cycle in which academics and media have followed. He writes,

Unfortunately, the verification group didn’t have long to prove its mettle. The very shaky agreement, which at best was only tolerated by both sides to the Kosovo dispute, was soon eroded. Cease-fire infractions were frequent, and it was increasingly apparent that Milosevic was simply using the time to build up his police military forces. Matters came to a head in the new year when Serb militia massacred civilians in the town of Racak. The head of the OSCE mission, William Walker, arrived on the scene the day after the killings and denounced the action as a crime against humanity. The Milosevic government retorted by asking him to leave. Another effort in trying to avoid a major confrontation was doomed.[23]

Two glaring misrepresentations present themselves in a single paragraph here, and it becomes little wonder why he was praised as such a statesman. Each deserves its own vital clarification, and each should serve as a telling example of Axworthy’s selective notion of “human security.”

(1)  “Matters came to a head in the new year when Serb militia massacred civilians in the town of Racak.”

Forty-five civilians were killed in the Racak massacre on January 15, 1999. It was regarded as the defining moment which led to the U.S./NATO led war. William Walker, who Axworthy correctly quotes as having called the massacre at Racak a “crime against humanity,” is “an expert in verifying state crimes”:

He served as U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, where he administered the U.S. support that allowed the government to carry out extreme state terror, peaking once again in November 1989 in an outburst of violence that included the murder of six leading Salvadoran dissident intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Their brains were blown out by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl brigade, which had complied a remarkable record of shocking acts. These were much the same hands, with the same guidance, that had murdered Archbishop Romero to open the terrible decade of U.S.-guided atrocities in El Salvador, in large measure a war against the Church, which had violated the norms of good behavior and infuriated the leading enlightened state by adopting ‘the preferential option for the poor.’

Walker was as quick to respond to the murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as he was to the Racak massacre. He supervised the intimidation of the main eyewitness by the U.S. Embassy and its Salvadoran client, who naturally sought to discredit her testimony (withdrawn under pressure). He then ‘told congressional investigators there was no evidence to implicate the military and hypothesized that leftist rebels might have committed the act while dressed in soldiers’ garb’ Americas Watch reported in disgust. Walker’s efforts to deny the atrocities carried out by Washington’s client killers came ‘long after a Salvadoran colonel had told a U.S. major that the Army had committed the murders,’ Americas Watch continued, reviewing his efforts to evade the obvious. He then recommended to Secretary of State James Baker that the U.S. ‘not jeopardize’ its relationship with El Salvador by investigating ‘past deaths, however heinous’—a wise decision, given the decisive U.S. role in the atrocities, including his own.

In January 1999, Walker received great praise for his heroism at Racak, inspired by his recognition that he ‘may not have done enough to stop past atrocities’ (Ted Koppel, Nightline) and by his regret for his ‘silence’ on the assassinations of the Jesuits when he was ‘speechless’ (Washington Post). We await his heroic denunciations of Washington’s crimes.[24]

            As Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria in 1990-92, James Bissett wrote that the Racak massacre was just what Albright needed to commence the NATO led bombardment:

In August 1999 - seven months before the NATO bombing - the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee reported that, ‘planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is largely in place. … The only missing element seems to be an event with suitably vivid media coverage that could make the intervention politically saleable. … That the administration is waiting for a ‘trigger’ is increasingly obvious.’ That trigger was soon to be pulled. It was the highly suspicious ‘Racak’ massacre that, as Madeleine Albright said, was the galvanizing incident that led to the bombing.[25]

The Racak massacre is “suspicious” because of controversial evidence suggesting the massacre was staged. Retired Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie is vocal about the “suspicious” nature of the massacre. He writes:

The current Prime Minister [of Kosovo] Hashim Thaci was the leader of the KLA. He has admitted that the KLA orchestrated the infamous Racak ‘massacre’ dressing their KLA dead in civilian clothes, machine gunning them and dumping them in a ditch and claiming it was a Serbian slaughter of civilians.[26]

(2) “The head of the OSCE mission, William Walker, arrived on the scene the day after the killings and denounced the action as a crime against humanity. The Milosevic government retorted by asking him to leave.”

            The fact that the Serb National Assembly objected to the departure of the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) seems to be of no consequence to Axworthy. “In a March 23 Resolution responding to the NATO Rambuillet ultimatum, the Serb National Assembly declared: ‘We also condemn the withdrawal of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission. There is not a single reason for this but to put the withdrawal into the service of blackmail and threats to our country.’” A search in the Canadian Newsstand Database yields no mention of the March 23 Resolution, which Axworthy would have been well aware of in writing his interpretation of the war.

Morality’s Avenging Angels

            It is interesting to note Axworthy’s final rationale behind sending Canada to war. After much Christian introspection, Axworthy writes that “it simply came down to what I felt in good conscience—that without the ultimate willingness to use military power to enforce the rule of law, there could be abuses that would violate many innocent people.” The fact that the NATO bombing radically breached “the rule of law” that Axworthy so firmly desired to enforce, and the fact that there was a drastic increase in “abuses that [did] violate many innocent people,” goes relatively unnoted by Axworthy. “The object was not overwhelming victory or destruction of an enemy; it was to stop the crimes against people from being committed,” he continues, neglecting the fact that these crimes increased in relation to the bombing, and continue today as a result of U.S./NATO policy.[27]

            Axworthy also says “one of the most important functions foreign ministers collectively had to perform during the eighty-some days of bombing was to set limits on targets in order to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.” He goes on to write that the bombing of a Serb television “was a case where I felt NATO overstepped its mark.” Well a recent revelation came during a brief conversation I had with Scott Taylor, a Canadian journalist and editor of Esprit du Corps, a Canadian military magazine. Taylor informed me that Canada in fact bombed the television station. If Axworthy’s job as foreign minister was to “set limits on targets in order to keep civilian casualties to a minimum,” this is only one poignant example of many in which Axworthy failed at his “most important function,” yet made no mention of the fact that Canada conducted the bombing in his account.

            And as has become very clear now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course the occupied territories of “Palestine,” journalists have become a favoured target. The bombing of the Serbian television station was by no means the first attack on journalists, but it was certainly a brazen attack conducted by Canadian Forces themselves. “What that attack illustrated was the strategic importance of communication as a weapon of war in Kosovo,” Axworthy writes. “Needless to say, the openness of Western media was not reciprocated inside the territory controlled by Milosevic.” This rubs against a report stating that there were “several opposition newspapers as well as radio and TV outlets,” according to the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, and “numerous anti-Milosevic foreign funded NGOs also operated in the country,” mostly closed down after the bombings. Chomsky writes:

The gap between rhetoric and reality in the Serbian media provided the justification for NATO bombing of Serb radio and TV from April 8, finally reducing much of the TV headquarters to rubble with a missile attack on April 23—’on the eve of NATO’s 50^th anniversary celebration,’ the Financial Times observed […] NATO military spokesman Air Commodore David Wilby justified the attacks on the grounds that the Serb media were a ‘legitimate target which filled the airways with hate and with lies over the years,’ though NATO at first offered to allow the media to ‘escape further punishment’ if Milosevic ‘gave six hours of air space to western news broadcasts each day. (129-30)

            “Indeed, NATO’s countervailing communication plan was inferior to that of Milosovic,” Axworthy writes. So Milosevic’s use of the media is “propaganda,” but NATO has a “communication plan” that threatens violence and acts upon its threats if Serbian media does not submit to airing western propaganda. This is no model of “the openness of Western media,” which is actually far narrower than most communist states. Edward S. Herman and Diana Johnstone have provided extensive studies of just how “open” Western media was in its coverage of the war in Kosovo.[28] A detailed study of Canadian media at the time would likely mirror their findings.

            It is also telling that the one academic source he refers to in his account of the war and Milosevic’s “propaganda machine” is Michael Ignatieff, a “new humanitarian intellectual” now quite openly vying for a position as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Ignatieff is known for endorsing of “acceptable degrees of coercive interrogation,” writing in a NYT article that “defeating terror requires violence” and “might also require coercion, secrecy, deception, even violation of rights.”[29] He has also become a favoured target of Edward S. Herman, notably Herman’s article titled “Morality’s Avenging Angels.” Two noteworthy extracts from the article afford insight to this “new humanitarian”:

-       Ignatieff suggests that, in certain circumstances, “the international community has to take sides and do so with crushing force.” For “international community” read the U.S. and its allies, such as the UK and increasingly Canada.

-       He is certain the U.S. intervened in Kosovo because “only the United States can muster the military might necessary to deter potential attackers and rescue victims.” The only problem is that while “principle commits us to intervene…[it] forbids the imperial ruthlessness necessary to make intervention succeed.” If Kosovo can serve as an example, the “imperial ruthlessness” succeeded in all of its bloody glory.[30]

      “Morality’s Avenging Angels” must be read along with Herman’s other essays in order to gain an understanding of the full scope of Ignatieff’s “new humanitarian” aims, and it is also worth briefly noting that Axworthy cites Ignatieff’s book, Virtual War, in which Ignatieff expresses his debt to American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Operation Allied Force commander Wesley Clark and Canadian chief prosecutor at the Hague, Louise Arbour, all of whom were very active in the Western “new humanitarian” imperialist agenda. Like Axworthy, Ignatieff knows how to pick his friends.

      After all of this, Axworthy criticizes the current Canadian government’s role in Afghanistan because “hiding the facts will eventually prove self-defeating—witness the missing weapons in Iraq,” a war Igantieff was a vocal supporter of at the outset. This statement is laughable given the convenience with which Axworthy hides or neglects the facts. One should be particularly concerned when Axworthy writes that “An outstanding group of officials brought intellect and commitment to the task of defining the concept of humanitarian intervention and formulating a far-reaching definition to respond to internal violations of human rights […] We were attempting to refashion the global security paradigm.”(my italics)[31]

      The bombing, Axworthy hoped, “would quickly bring Milosevic to the bargaining table.” After sustained NATO bombing, Axworthy writes: “Once it was obvious that there wouldn’t be an immediate capitulation, efforts turned towards finding a resolution.” The order here is also telling. Efforts “turned towards finding a resolution” only after it was realized that severe bombing did not lead to “immediate capitulation.” Surely the first resort would be to finding a resolution instead of bombing if “human security” is to be in the best interests of human security, but the opposite is true for Axworthy.

The Victors’ Justice

      Axworthy’s timeline continues with brief and reasonable mention of the G-8 foreign ministers bargaining in Cologne throughout the month of May, during which Canada “found itself playing middleman” to an uncompromising U.S. position, and gives passing mention of UN Resolution 1244, going into some detail about the International Criminal Court. This section of Axworthy’s study is also significant, and deserves quoting at length:

At Cologne, we were told that the chief prosecutor for the Hague tribunal, Louise Arbour, was about to lay down indictments of Milosevic and six of his confederates. Some of the ministers expressed dismay, believing that this would derail the delicate negotiations under way. Arbour went ahead nevertheless, and only a few days later Milosevic, who up to that time had been quite intransigent, agreed to the conditions that eventually became the basis for Resolution 1244. I’m convinced that the indictment swayed him […] Naming him a war criminal isolated and shamed him, with consequent loss of political stature and power. The fortunate timing of Louise Arbour’s move strongly buttressed the case for juridical means as an important tool in deterring state violence and gaining compliance to international norms. (my italics)[32]

Fortunately, again, Edward S. Herman and Diana Johnstone provide a compelling analysis of the Hague tribunal. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), Herman writes, “represents an egregious case of the powerful using a nominal cover of law to help attack and dismantle a small country; a case of what Diana Johnstone, referring to the Tribunal’s work from 1993-1998, calls future victors’ justice. ‘”[33] A few brief extracts from Herman prove helpful here:

The man who wrote the Tribunal’s Statute for Albright, Michael Scharf, spoke frankly about its political purpose: The Tribunal was “widely perceived within the government as little more than a public relations device and …useful policy tool…. Indictments…would serve to isolate offending leaders diplomatically…and fortify the international political will to employ economic sanctions or use force” (Washington Post, October 3, 1999).

Funding and Personnel. Although Article 32 of the Tribunal’s charter says that Tribunal expenses should be provided from the general budget of the UN, this proviso has been violated continuously, and the Tribunal has had to depend on U.S. and other governmental funding, the solicitation of George Soros and other interested private donors, and “seconded” personnel from (mainly) the NATO powers. In 1994-1995, the United States provided the Tribunal with $700,000 in cash, $2.3 million in equipment, and many seconded personnel, while failing to meet its legal funding obligations to the UN.

This funding dependency not only makes for external control, it also permits the funders to direct Tribunal operations in ways that suit their immediate political aims. Thus, for example, the Clinton administration found $27 million during the bombing war to enable the Tribunal to collect data on Serb war crimes from Albanian refugees. (Gilbert Guillaume, President of the International Court of Justice [ICJ], speaking on October 26, 2000 before the UN General Assembly, noted that the ICTY gets ten times as much money as the ICJ…

Canadian law professor Michael Mandel describes how in May 1999 he and a group of lawyers from North and South America filed a well documented war crimes complaint against 68 NATO leaders, and traveled to the Hague to make the case to Arbour and her successor Carla Del Ponte; and “like literally thousands around the world, we demanded that Arbour and Del Ponte enforce the law against NATO” (“Politics And Human Rights In The In

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• [...] and devastation to a region that shows only mild signs of recovery today. I wrote briefly on Axworthy’s Kosovo legacy in [...]

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