Opinion The selective monster hunt By Douglas Lummis	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
偏りのある「怪物狩り」 戦争犯罪の疑いで起訴されていたユーゴスラビアのミロシェビッチ前大統領がオランダ・ハーグにある国連旧ユーゴ戦犯法廷に引き渡された。だが、この決定の裏には…。

June 24, SF: Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports that yesterday the Yugoslav Cabinet agreed to extradite former President Slobodan Milosevic to The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. This tribunal has indicted Milosevic for war crimes allegedly committed against Albanians in Kosovo.

The Yugoslav president who replaced Milosevic, Vojislav Kostunica, had been opposed to the extradition. He, like most Serbians (and like me), believes that the tribunal is not a neutral body, but is biased against Serbia. He had wanted to try Milosevic in a Serbian court, under Serbian law.

Why the change? The extradition decree was passed just a week before a conference of the Western nations was to be held to plan post-war economic aid for Yugoslavia. The U.S. had made it clear that if Yugoslavia did not extradite Milosevic, the U.S. would not attend that conference. Without U.S. attendance the conference would presumably fail, and war-shattered Yugoslavia would stand to lose as much as $1 billion in aid. Under this pressure the Yugoslav government gave in.

Most human rights activists are elated by the many indictments of human rights violators in recent years. It seems that national boundaries are no longer much of an obstacle to such indictments.

To my knowledge, the first in this new wave of transborder criminal indictments was when Panama's General Noriega was "arrested" in Panama (by U.S. troops who had invaded that country) for violation of U.S. criminal law (while in Panama) and brought to the U.S. for trial. More recently, Chile's former dictator Pinochet was indicted by a Spanish court for crimes committed in Chile.

And now we have the various International Criminal Tribunals being established under the United Nations. The prestigious New York Times Book Review recently carried a headline boasting that finally the "monsters" of world politics are being brought to trial. It seems that the Western powers, which once dominated the world through colonialism and imperialism, are now becoming the policemen of the world in the name of human rights.

I have no reason to doubt that the people being indicted are (mostly) monsters. But they are not the only monsters. Have you noticed that all these people being arrested and vilified as monsters are from small, non-Western countries? The monsters from large, powerful countries, and those who work effectively in the interest of the Western powers, seem to have immunity.

Moreover, it seems to be assumed as an axiom that within the governments of the Western powers themselves it is unthinkable that there could be any war criminals or human rights violators who ought to be indicted. So far it's been a pretty selective monster hunt.

As for me, as a U.S. citizen, I am still waiting for some tribunal somewhere to indict Robert McNamara for carrying out a monstrous war against Vietnam while he was Secretary of Defense, Ronald Reagan for the war crimes committed during the U.S. government's campaign to overthrow the government of Nicaragua and Bill Clinton for bombing Iraq to divert attention from his sex scandal.

When that happens I will begin to believe that these tribunals are genuine tribunals, and not po gitical tools of the Western powers.

Shukan ST: July 13, 2001

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