For those who have wondered in recent years if those buzz words, international law and international justice, will ever come to mean anything in the real word, here’s a bulletin: they already have.
With the astonishing news last Thursday that former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, the driving force behind a decade of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, was suddenly arrested and flown out of the country, to answer charges of crimes against humanity, the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague made good on its pledge that no one was beyond the reach of international law and international justice. It is clear that with Milosevic, a former head of state who had presided over the greatest carnage in Europe since World War II, now languishing in a jail cell in the Hague, the UN tribunal is doing just that.
To be sure, though the former Yugoslavian president is being indicted only for those crimes against humanity committed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, his trial will almost certainly become an examination of his role in fomenting those policies of ethnic cleansing that savaged Bosnia and Croatia over a decade previous to that.
Since the UN tribunal was established in 1993, about 20 of Milosevic’s underlings have been sentenced and another 38 taken into custody. But apart from Milosevic himself, a lot of other big guns are still at large, like the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic and at least 37 others indicted by the court.
Milosevic is specifically charged with the deportation in 1999 of 740,000 ethnic Albanian Muslims from their country (almost exactly the same number of Palestinian Arabs expelled from theirs in 1948) and of the murder of 340 people (one-fourth the number massacred at Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982). The indictment alleges that he and others from the top Serb leadership planned, ordered and carried out these deportations and killings.
That’s all well and good. The arrest of Milosevic is truly a defining moment for the UN tribunal which, it seems certain, will ultimately secure a conviction. No dream team, a la O.J. Simpson trial, will save this man.
And this is where we, along with our supporters at the United Nations, come in. We must lobby for the creation of a similar war crimes tribunal that will indict, arrest and try Zionist leaders who are clearly implicated in crimes doubly heinous as those ones that Yugoslav suspects are today being held for in the Netherlands. The crimes these Zionists have committed, in Palestine and across international borders, are well-known: mass deportations by force of arms, calculated massacres of unarmed civilians, and the expropriation and settlement of occupied land, accompanied by the expulsion of their native inhabitants.
These crimes do not only represent a violation of the UN Charter, of international law and of the Geneva Conventions, but they constitute offenses that should form the basis of a legal prosecution for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against customary or international law.
War crimes do not have to be confined to the callous and calculated murder of civilians. (And over the years Israel has chalked up an impressive record in this regard.) War crimes equally cover leaders who pursue and perfect the “art of profitable war”, that is, leaders who make war a national industry, relying on the exploitation of conquered territory as a major source of income. Certainly the seizure by Israel of the fertile Golan Heights, for example, and the transfer there of its settlers (a clear violation, at minimum, of the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bar an occupying power from transferring elements of its population to conquered territory) has so far yielded tens of billions of dollars to the occupiers, as has the seizure and exploitation of land in the West Bank and Gaza on those 146 illegal settlements colonized by 200,000 Israeli squatters.
In 1976, we were able to get the international community, at the General Assembly, to pass a resolution, by an overwhelming majority, that defined Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” There is no reason why today we should not begin a campaign to urge the formal establishment of a UN war crimes tribunal similar to the one in The Hague in order to bring Israeli war criminals like Ariel Sharon to justice. Surely, the war crimes that Slobodan Milosevic stands accused of having committed pale before the war crimes committed by Ariel Sharon in Sabra-Shatila in 1982, among other places, such as Qibya in 1963 and Khan Younis in 1971.
Last Saturday, the UN asked Cambodia’s leaders to commit themselves to a projected war crimes tribunal to prosecute several of the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge on charges of genocide during their rule between 1975 and 1979. Though the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen expressed reluctance to sign a memorandum of understanding with the UN on the issue, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is pushing to convene that body.
So then why not Israel war criminals too?
It is interesting to see how, by handing over Milosevic to the authorities in The Hague, Serbs have in more ways than one opted to come to terms with their history. The new Serbian government, under Zoran Djindjic, for example, recently began to publicize, quite openly, the discovery in Serbia of mass graves of Kosovars murdered by Milosevic’s security forces.
The Israelis too must realize that their day of reckoning — when their past catches up with them, when the crimes against Arabs masterminded by their leaders in their name are answered for — will come. Make no mistake about, I say to them, that day will come, if not in this decade then in the next, and if not in our lifetime, then in our children’s.
Today Milosevic sits where he belongs — in a 17-by-10-foot cell awaiting trial. We should begin a campaign, then, to convince the international community that this also is where Zionist war criminals equally belong.
