| Number 162 | June 28, 2002 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I would like to note the passing this week of a giant in the civil rights field. Justin Dart died this past Saturday at age 71. A tireless advocate for people with disabilities for over 50 years, Mr. Dart was an amazing personality who touched the lives of countless people, inside of the community of people with disabilities and out. He will be missed. This week, in a rather lengthy piece, I talk about the scandalous actions of the U.S. in regard to the soon-to-be-created International Criminal Court. It's a case study of how a very powerful nation attempts to affect the structure of power in a world that isn't always happy to follow orders. Starting next week, in a series focusing on the first nine months of the War Against Terrorism (the WAT?!), I will attempt to provide a framework to use in understanding this new phase in the consolidation of the American Empire. (Sneak preview: If you believe that "everything is different" since September 11th, you'll be surprised.) Welcome to the new readers this week. I look forward to your feedback. (And you "old" readers, please keep that feedback coming!) Until next week, Nygaard |
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Here is Secretary of Defense (i.e., War) Donald Rumsfeld, explaining why the United States will not cooperate in any way with the newly-empowered International Criminal Court, which has been created to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide:
He makes that sound like a negative thing! Read the entire amazing statement on the Pentagon website at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2002/b05062002_bt233-02.html. |
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I often lament the fact that today's newspapers have no "Labor" section, but only a "Business" section. The result is that we are relentlessly presented economic news from the point of view of the bosses rather than the workers. Many of us are so used to this that we don't even notice. What difference does it make? Consider wages. To workers, wages are what pays the bills, eh? When they go up, that is good news. To the bosses of the world, however, wages are "costs" which need to be kept low so as not to cut into profits, increase inflation, or threaten the future of the business, and so on, we are told. It's two different worlds. The boss's world comes into your house every day through the television set. But now you can hear from that "other" world—your world—by visiting a wonderful online news source for working people called Workday Minnesota. I mentioned it in passing back in Nygaard Notes #147, but it deserves a whole lot more attention. This collaborative effort of the Labor Education Service and the Minnesota AFL-CIO can be found at http://www.workdayminnesota.org/. Want to read about Enron from the workers' perspective? How about the "epidemic" of workplace injuries in the United States? People in the Twin Cities may be interested to know that Hennepin county plans to lay off of a large number of probation officers in my county, with serious implications for victims of domestic violence and others. These are important stories, unreported or under-reported in the corporate media, but Workday Minnesota has ‘em. Not the least of the reasons to visit this site is the collection of hilarious and poignant cartoons by the labor cartoonists Gary Huck and Mike Konopacki. See "This Week's" offering on tax cuts for the rich, and also check out the collection of previously-published ‘toons. To sum up: Excellent reporting on economic and workplace issues from the perspective of "regular people." (That is, the overwhelming majority of us who make our living by working instead of owning.) Check out Workday Minnesota. |
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About two years ago I briefly mentioned the United States' shameful behavior in regard to the not-yet-ratified-at-that-time International Criminal Court ("Drugs, Money, and Crime," Nygaard Notes #81). In April of this year the final ratifications were lodged, so the International Criminal Court (ICC) will enter into force next week, on July 1st. It's a historic event, and should be celebrated by all who support the rule of law and international cooperation. However, it's doubtful we'll see much celebration in the United States since, although most people and governments in the world do support these things, the government of the United States of America does not. In fact, the U.S. "has launched a comprehensive campaign against the ICC," according to a Human Rights Watch report issued this week. There are good reasons for the U.S. campaign, I might add. "Good," in this case, meaning "sensible from the point of view of the world's most powerful Rogue State." Let's have a look. What is the ICC? The ICC is a permanent court that will investigate and bring to justice individuals who commit the most serious crimes under international law, namely war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Unlike the International Court of Justice (the World Court) in The Hague, in which only nation-states can bring suits against one another, the ICC will try individuals. In order for the Court to enter into force, the 1998 Rome Statute that created it had to be signed and ratified by at least 60 countries. It has now been signed by 139 countries, and ratified by 69 of them. The Court is empowered to act only when legitimate charges have been lodged, and only when a nation's domestic courts are "unable or unwilling" to prosecute alleged war criminals. Basic tenets of justice familiar to United Statesians apply to the Court (not that we always see them applied in this country), such as the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, the right to confront one's accusers, and the right to a speedy trial. The reason we need something like the ICC, as Amnesty International points out, is that the currently existing system of setting up ad hoc or temporary tribunals—from Nuremberg to Rwanda—has big problems. For one thing, any international trials of those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes can now only be established by order of the United Nations Security Council. Five nations, including the United States, have veto power in the Security Council, so right away one would expect that prosecutions would be launched against the nationals of relatively powerless states, and never against people from the powerful states or their allies. And, in fact, that is exactly what we see. Tribunals concerning Rwanda and the Balkans are the two tribunals currently in operation. Serious violations by the U.S. and its allies never have been and likely never will be prosecuted under the current system. A short list of possible subjects for indictment under the Nuremberg Principles and Geneva Convention, which form part of the supposed basis for prosecutions under the current system, might include Bill Clinton for his bombing of Iraq or the Sudan, and Henry Kissinger for his actions in Cambodia in 1970 and Chile over several years. Need I mention Ronald Reagan? Former U.S.-allied heads of state that may have been prosecuted had the ICC been in existence might include dictators Somoza of Nicaragua, the Duvaliers of Haiti, Suharto of Indonesia, and innumerable others. The United States has resisted the very idea of an international court since it came up, and some say the structure of the Court itself was weakened in a futile attempt to appease the U.S. The actions of this country as the Court has come into being are seen by many as more evidence of "a serious assault on the international legal order" by the U.S. The Nature of the U.S. Assault On December 31st, 2000, the U.S. signed the treaty creating the ICC, although we have never ratified it. On May 6th of this year the Bush administration announced their plan to withdraw that signature, as part of their policy of complete "non-cooperation" with the ICC, saying that we would not "become a party to the treaty." Bush administration officials stated, according to the May 7th New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print"), that this was "intended to relieve the United States of obligations under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a 1969 agreement that requires states to refrain from taking steps to undermine treaties they sign, even if they do not ratify them." No nation in the history of the world has ever "unsigned" a treaty in this way. On May 10th the Times reported the following: "With strong administration support, an important House committee has voted authorization for the president to use force to rescue any American held by the new International Criminal Court and to bar arms aid to nations that ratify the Court treaty." In the same report the Times said, "The bill would also codify the Bush administration's announced policy of refusing to cooperate in any way with the Court, and it would bar the extradition of anyone sought by the Court, whose founding treaty has been...ratified by...most democratic nations." The House bill was sponsored by Representative Tom Delay of Texas. Representative David Obey of Wisconsin pointed out that the bill was being rushed through so fast that most committee members didn't even know what was in it, to which Mr. Delay replied that it was so urgent that "we don't have time for Mr. Obey to read the bill." After demonstrating that some committee members did not know that the Court would be located in The Hague, Mr. Obey asked Mr. Delay if he understood that, under the rescue provision, "We would be sending our troops to invade the Netherlands." Mr. Delay said he did not consider that a serious question. On June 19th the Times reported that the Bush administration had announced that the U.S. "would not take part in United Nations peacekeeping missions unless the Security Council granted them immunity from prosecution" by the ICC. The Times reported that this threat "has become a symbol of what many diplomats and officials at the United Nations perceive as a challenge by the Bush administration to the very concept of a universal legal system." The U.S. did more than simply announce that it "would not take part" in peacekeeping. Although not reported in the Times, U.S. diplomats made a further attempt to weaken the ICC by presenting two resolutions that would exempt all peacekeepers from all countries from the jurisdiction of the ICC. (As always, I must caution against readers thinking that this problem lies with the Republicans only. As I reported two years ago, the Clinton administration did their level best to make U.S. citizens "exempt" from the Court's jurisdiction, making the U.S. even then "isolated among the nations of the world." You have to get pretty far outside of the "major" parties in this country to find anyone who will question U.S. power to the point of supporting any sort of democratic internationalism such as the ICC represents.) All of the above information was gleaned from reports in the mainstream, corporate media, yet much of it remains unknown to the average American. Rest assured, however, that it is well-known to many average citizens outside of our borders, and provides a small part of the answer to the question on the minds of so many United Statesians: "Why do ‘they' hate us?" Until the intellectual and media culture in this country changes sufficiently to allow us—no, to force us—to take an honest look in the political mirror, we are destined to continue with a misguided and criminal "War Against Terror" (a WAT?!) that has no hope of succeeding, but that we have "no time" to think about. |
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On a note related to the above story on the ICC (I hope you'll see it's related), the United States this past April used its clout to force out the director of the 145-nation Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Mr. Jose Bustani of Brazil. This marked the first time that the director general of a United Nations agency had been fired in midterm. It's not clear why the U.S. government didn't like Mr. Bustani, who was unanimously re-elected to his post last year. He says the U.S. didn't like "My independence and my refusal to take orders." Certainly his attempts to persuade Iraq to join the OPCW infuriated the Bush people, since that would have made it even harder to justify an already unjustifiable attack on that beleaguered country. The specific reasons for the U.S. displeasure hardly matter. The important thing is that "What the U.S. says, goes!" and here's why: The United States supplies 22 percent of the funding for the OPCW, and the United States threatened to cut off that funding if Mr. Bustani was not fired. One European diplomat was quoted in the NY Times (the April 23rd edition, the source of this story) as saying that "I think a lot of people swallowed this because they thought it was better for Bustani to be removed than have the U.S. pull out and see the organization collapse." Indeed. Other diplomats said the U.S. action "had opened the door further for other international bodies to come under attack." The opening of that door, it is reasonable to surmise after looking at the overall Bush record so far, is precisely the point. |