The U.N. And the Bartender

By Douglas Lummis

Did you know the United Nations has its own jail? It is located at The Hague and has 24 cells now holding three prisoners. On May 6, one of these prisoners went on trial for war crimes.

This is the first time the United Nations organization, by itself, has put an individual person on trial. True, there were the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials half a century ago. But at that time Germany and Japan were under the rule of Allied military governments. This is the first time the U.N. itself has assumed the power to arrest and punish without such military occupation.

On trial is one Dusan Tadic, a Bosnian Serb bartender. He is accused of torture, and of killing 16 people during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. These are terrible crimes, but in the context of that war, Tadic is small fry. The big criminals are the politicians and generals who started the war and ordered mass killing. Compared to them, as one Western diplomat put it, "Tadic is nothing."

The Tribunal has indicted 57 people, including Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. But the U.N. has no power to make arrests. It must wait until the suspects are arrested by the government of a member state, or turn themselves in voluntarily.

The Tribunal's indictments include the crime of deliberately bombarding civilians, for example at Sarajevo. It is good that the U.N. has reaffirmed that this is a war crime and that the people who either order it or carry it out should be arrested and given prison sentences.

But can we really expect the U.N. to enforce this law fairly? Remember that for a law to be fair, it must be enforced equally on all, weak and strong alike.

To enforce this law fairly, the U.N. would have to start arresting the heads-of-state and military leaders of many of the U.N.'s own member nations. Is this likelly to happen?

Take a recent example. On April 13 the Israeli military, with U.S. support, began bombarding southern Lebanon. The purpose was to try to stop the Hezbollah guerrillas from firing rockets at northern Israel. The method was to threaten all people living in southern Lebanon with death. To achieve this, the Israeli government made southern Lebanon into a "free fire zone." It told the Lebanese people that if they did not leave the area, they could be killed by the Israeli bombardment. In effect, the government claimed for itself the right to kill "anybody" remaining in southern Lebanon.

As a result, some half a million people were made refugees. Hundreds of civilians were killed, including — famously — more than one hundred in the U.N. refugee camp at Qana. This is terrorism on a massive scale.

Has the U.N. set up a new tribunal and sought the indictment of the persons responsible? No. Its lawyers are busy prosecuting a Serbian bartender.

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