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.