[Newspoetry] NOAM CHOMSKY ON SERBIA BOMBINGS (fwd)

[Bill Wendling]

> The Current Bombings
       By Noam Chomsky

> There have been many inquiries concerning NATO (meaning primarily US)
> bombing in Kosovo. A great deal has been written about the topic,
> including Znet commentaries. I'd like to make a few general observations,
> keeping to facts that are not seriously contested.
>
> There are two fundamental issues: (1) What are the accepted and applicable
> "rules of world order"? (2) How do these or other considerations apply in
> the case of Kosovo?
>
> (1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"?
>
> There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on
> all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World
> Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless
> explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that
> peaceful means have failed, or in self-defense against "armed attack" (a
> narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.
>
> There is, of course, more to say. Thus there is at least a tension, if not
> an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in
> the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of
> Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under US
> initiative after World War II. The Charter bans force violating state
> sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against
> oppressive states. The issue of "humanitarian intervention" arises from
> this tension. It is the right of "humanitarian intervention" that
> is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by
> editorial opinion and news reports (in the latter case, reflexively, even
> by the very choice of terminology).
>
> The question is addressed in a news report in the NY Times (March 27),
> headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo (March
> 27). One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US
> mission to the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen
> Carpenter, "scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the
> alleged right of intervention. The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist
> on international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the
> NATO bombing "have a pretty good legal argument," but "many people think
> [an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a matter of
> custom and practice." That summarizes the evidence offered to justify the
> favored conclusion stated in the headline.
>
> Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are
> relevant to the determination of "custom and practice." We may also bear
> in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is
> premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and that assumption is
> based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their
> record of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court
> decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to
> others. Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to
> prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were
> dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason beyond
> subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith" could not be
> assumed. A rational person then asks obvious questions: is the Iranian
> record of intervention and terror worse than that of the US? And other
> questions, for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of the only
> country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states
> to obey international law? What about its historical record? Unless such
> questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person will
> dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is to
> determine how much of the literature -- media or other -- survives such
> elementary conditions as these.
>
> (2) How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
>
> There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year,
> overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces. The main victims
> have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the population of this
> Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2000 deaths and hundreds of
> thousands of refugees.
>
> In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
>
>      (I) try to escalate the catastrophe
>
>      (II) do nothing
>
>      (III) try to mitigate the catastrophe
>
> The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let's keep to a
> few of approximately the same scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the
> pattern.
>
> (A) Colombia. In Colombia, according to State Department estimates, the
> annual level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary
> associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily
> from their atrocities is well over a million. Colombia has been the
> leading Western hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence
> increased through the '90s, and that assistance is now increasing, under a
> "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton
> administration was particularly enthusiastic in its praise for President
> Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for "appalling levels of
> violence," according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his
> predecessors. Details are readily available.
>
> In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities.
>
> (B) Turkey. By very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds
>
> in the '90s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early '90s;
> one index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the countryside to
> the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, as the
> Turkish army was devastating the countryside. 1994 marked two records: it
> was "the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey,
> Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became
> "the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the
> world's largest arms purchaser." When human rights groups exposed Turkey's
> use of US jets to bomb villages, the Clinton Administration found ways to
> evade laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing
> in Indonesia and elsewhere.
>
> Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on grounds
> that they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist
> guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia.
>
> Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the atrocities.
>
> (C) Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor
> farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of
> the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and
> arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant
> society had little to do with its wars in the region. The worst period was
> from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under
> popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North
> Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of
> Laos and Cambodia.
>
> The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than
> land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no
> effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with hundreds
> of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate
> of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest
> either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering
> civilians by delayed action. These were only a fraction of the technology
> deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families
> sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated
> from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000,"
> more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter
> Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition.
>
> A conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is
> approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly
> concentrated among children -- over half, according to analyses reported
> by the Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working there since
> 1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities.
>
> There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the humanitarian
> catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove
> the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from the handful
> of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the British press
> reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. The
> British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG
> specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless
> procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer."
> These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United
> States. The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia,
> particularly the Eastern region where US bombardment from early 1969 was
> most intense.
>
> In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing. And the reaction of the
> media and commentators is to keep silent, following the norms under which
> the war against Laos was designated a "secret war" -- meaning well-known,
> but suppressed, as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969. The level
> of self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The
> relevance of this shocking example should be obvious without further
> comment.
>
> I will skip other examples of (I) and (II), which abound, and also much
> more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi
> civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological warfare --
> "a very hard choice," Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996
> when asked for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi
> children in 5 years, but "we think the price is worth it." Current
> estimates remain about 5000 children killed a month, and the price is still
> "worth it." These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we
> read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton
> Administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example
> illustrates.
>
> Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing,
> predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian Army
> and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which
> of course had the same effect. Commanding General Wesley Clark declared
> that it was "entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would
> intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened. The terror for the
> first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are credible
> reports of large-scale destruction of villages, assassinations, generation
> of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps an effort to expel a good part of the
> Albanian population -- all an "entirely predictable" consequence of the
> threat and then the use of force, as General Clark rightly observes.
>
> Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate the
> violence, with exactly that expectation.
>
> To find examples illustrating (III) is all too easy, at least if we keep
> to official rhetoric. The major recent academic study of "humanitarian
> intervention," by Sean Murphy, reviews the record after the Kellogg-Briand
> pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and then since the UN Charter, which
> strengthened and articulated these provisions. In the first phase, he
> writes, the most prominent examples of "humanitarian intervention" were
> Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and
> Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia. All were accompanied by
> highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and factual justifications as
> well. Japan was going to establish an "earthly paradise" as it defended
> Manchurians from "Chinese bandits," with the support of a leading Chinese
> nationalist, a far more credible figure than anyone the US was able to
> conjure up during its attack on South Vietnam. Mussolini was liberating
> thousands of slaves as he carried forth the Western "civilizing mission."
> Hitler announced Germany's intention to end ethnic tensions and violence,
> and "safeguard the national individuality of the German and Czech
> peoples," in an operation "filled with earnest desire to serve the true
> interests of the peoples dwelling in the area," in accordance with their
> will; the Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare Slovakia a
> protectorate.
>
> Another useful intellectual exercise is to compare those obscene
> justifications with those offered for interventions, including
> "humanitarian interventions," in the post-UN Charter period.
>
> In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) is the
> Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's
> atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of
> self-defense against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples
> when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea,
> DK) was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas.
> The US reaction is instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of
> Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were
> harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's slaughters,
> first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of
> extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognized the expelled DK as the
> official government of Cambodia, because of its "continuity" with the Pol
> Pot regime, the State Department explained. Not too subtly, the US
> supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia.
>
> The example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that underlies
> "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian intervention."
>
> Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are
> square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine
> what remains of the fragile structure of international law. The US made
> that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision. Apart
> from the UK (by now, about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine
> was in the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of US
> policy, and were particularly annoyed by Secretary of State Albright's
> "saber-rattling" (Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, Feb.22). Today, the more
> closely one approaches the conflicted region, the greater the opposition
> to Washington's insistence on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy).
> France had called for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize
> deployment of NATO peace keepers. The US flatly refused, insisting on "its
> stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United
> Nations," State Department officials explained. The US refused to permit
> the "neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the final NATO statement,
> unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter and international
> law; only the word "endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYT, Feb. 11).
> Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen expression of contempt for the
> UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood. And of course the
> same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a
> small African country a few months earlier, an event that also does not
> indicate that the "moral compass" is straying from righteousness -- not to
> speak of a record that would be prominently reviewed right now if facts
> were considered relevant to determining "custom and practice."
>
> It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules
> of world order is irrelevant, just as it had lost its meaning by the late
> 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of
> world order has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss. A
> review of the internal documentary record demonstrates that the stance
> traces back to the earliest days, even to the first memorandum of the
> newly-formed National Security Council in 1947. During the Kennedy years,
> the stance began to gain overt expression. The main innovation of the
> Reagan-Clinton years is that defiance of international law and the Charter
> has become entirely open. It has also been backed with interesting
> explanations, which would be on the front pages, and prominent in the
> school and university curriculum, if truth and honesty were considered
> significant values. The highest authorities explained with brutal clarity
> that the World Court, the UN, and other agencies had become irrelevant
> because they no longer follow US orders, as they did in the early postwar
> years.
>
> One might then adopt the official position. That would be an honest stand,
> at least if it were accompanied by refusal to play the cynical game of
> self-righteous posturing and wielding of the despised principles of
> international law as a highly selective weapon against shifting enemies.
>
> While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance of world
> order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy
> analysts. In the current issue of the leading establishment journal,
> Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns that Washington is treading a
> dangerous course. In the eyes of much of the world -- probably most of the
> world, he suggests -- the US is "becoming the rogue superpower,"
> considered "the single greatest external threat to their societies."
> Realist "international relations theory," he argues, predicts
> that coalitions may arise to counterbalance the rogue superpower. On
> pragmatic grounds, then, the stance should be reconsidered. Americans who
> prefer a different image of their society might call for a reconsideration
> on other than pragmatic grounds.
>
> Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It leaves it
> unanswered. The US has chosen a course of action which, as it explicitly
> recognizes, escalates atrocities and violence -- "predictably"; a course
> of action that also strikes yet another blow against the regime of
> international order, which does offer the weak at least some limited
> protection from predatory states. As for the longer term, consequences are
> unpredictable. One plausible observation is that "every bomb that falls on
> Serbia and every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that it will scarcely be
> possible for Serbs and Albanians to live beside each other in some sort of
> peace" (Financial Times, March 27). Some of the longer-term possible
> outcomes are extremely ugly, as has not gone without notice.
>
> A standard argument is that we had to do something: we could not simply
> stand by as atrocities continue. That is never true. One choice, always,
> is to follow the Hippocratic principle: "First, do no harm." If you can
> think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing.
> There are always ways that can be considered. Diplomacy and negotiations
> are never at an end.
>
> The right of "humanitarian intervention" is likely to be more frequently
> invoked in coming years -- maybe with justification, maybe not -- now that
> Cold War pretexts have lost their efficacy. In such an era, it may be
> worthwhile to pay attention to the views of highly respected commentators
> -- not to speak of the World Court, which explicitly ruled on this matter
> in a decision rejected by the United States, its essentials not even
> reported.
>
> In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and international
> law it would be hard to find more respected voices than Hedley Bull or Leon
> Henkin. Bull warned 15 years ago that "Particular states or groups of
> states that set themselves up as the authoritative judges of the world
> common good, in disregard of the views of others, are in fact a menace to
> international order, and thus to effective action in this field." Henkin,
> in a standard work on world order, writes that the "pressures eroding the
> prohibition on the use of force are deplorable, and the arguments to
> legitimize the use of force in those circumstances are unpersuasive and
> dangerous... Violations of human rights are indeed all too common, and if
> it were permissible to remedy them by external use of force, there would
> be no law to forbid the use of force by almost any state against almost
> any other. Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other
> injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to
> aggression and destroying the principle advance in international law, the
> outlawing of war and the prohibition of force."
>
> Recognized principles of international law and world order, solemn treaty
> obligations, decisions by the World Court, considered pronouncements by
> the most respected commentators -- these do not automatically solve
> particular problems. Each issue has to be considered on its merits. For
> those who do not adopt the standards of Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy
> burden of proof to meet in undertaking the threat or use of force in
> violation of the principles of international order. Perhaps the burden can
> be met, but that has to be shown, not merely proclaimed with passionate
> rhetoric. The consequences of such violations have to be assessed
> carefully -- in particular, what we understand to be "predictable." And
> for those who are minimally serious, the reasons for the actions also have
> to be assessed -- again, not simply by adulation of our leaders and their
> "moral compass."
>
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