From Netanyahu to Mladic

Protecting Israeli war crimes. Nuggets from a Nut House: From Netanyahu to Mladic By Prof Edward S. Herman

Z Magazine, July-August 2011

The nuggets keep piling up as  the United States continues its course toward the abyss, pulling the rest of the world with it. Imagine, 29 standing ovations for Benjamin Netanyahu’s May 24th speech by the members of the U.S. congress, who once again displayed  their loyalty to a foreign state, their contempt for international law, their racism, and their support of Israeli apartheid and serious ethnic cleansing. Joseph Biden has stated publicly that he is “a Zionist” and that both when a member of the Senate and as Vice President helping Israel was his highest priority (“the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as vice president of the United States.”). It is now routine for U.S. politicians to openly pledge allegiance to Israel , and they readily turn over large resources to Israel at the same time as they are reducing them for U.S. citizens. (This applies fully to President Obama, who bragged to AIPAC that “Because we understand the challenges Israel faces, I and my administration have made the security of Israel a priority.  It’s why we’ve increased cooperation between our militaries to unprecedented levels.  It’s why we’re making our most advanced technologies available to our Israeli allies.  And it’s why, despite tough fiscal times, we’ve increased foreign military financing to record levels. That includes additional support – beyond regular military aid – for the Iron Dome anti-rocket system.”)  The U.S. political leadership is also guilty of  protecting Israeli violations of  international law, war crimes, state terrorism, and disregard of UN resolutions and court decisions, including consistent support for Israel ’s systematic dispossession (ethnic cleansing) operations. How indignant these politicians (and the mainstream media) were over dispossession  and ethnic cleansing in civil war-ridden Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and what a contrast with the standing ovations for ethnic cleansing carried out inside the tail that wags the flea-ridden dog! The words, behavior and actions of the fleas, if done in support of an Arab-dominated state, would be found immoral, in violation of anti-terror laws, and treasonous. The racist double-standard here is breathtaking. Similarly, it is striking to see how the rule of law has been rendered so clearly inoperative in other matters supposedly bearing on “national security.” It is notable how readily and completely a leader like Obama, an expert on constitutional law, and one who had so explicitly committed himself to return us to that promised land, has followed in its abandonment in what Tom Engelhardt aptly calls a “post-legal” state. (“Are We Living in Post-Legal America ?,” TomDispatch.com, May 30, 2011). This is applicable across the board: no prosecutions for authorizing or  carrying out torture; for illegal spying on U.S. citizens; or for illegal war-making. In fact the Obama administration has engineered the renewal of  the U.S. Patriot Act and has made no attempt to eliminate the 2006 Military Commissions Act. It has aggressively pursued war protesters  and extended executive privilege to the right to assassinate U.S. citizens at will. With the Libya war, the administration has carried out a straightforward violation of the War Powers Act requirement that  congress must sanction a war not in self-defense, an action that Obama had specifically promised to avoid. The war against Libya is also one more U.S.-NATO war of aggression in violation of the UN Charter. It is true that the global war lords did get the Security Council to vote them powers to protect civilians under Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973, but both before and after these resolutions were passed the NATO-mafia war lords had announced “regime change” as their goal. And they have been extending their bombing raids throughout Libya , killing civilians on an ever-increasing scale, and certain to do to Libya what the United States has done to Iraq (mass killing, mass refugee generation, and devastation). Mladic and Impunity It is a bit mind-boggling to see Human Rights Watch, Richard Goldstone, Ban Ki-moon, and a stream of pundits and officials claim that the arrest of Ratko Mladic shows that the world has conquered “impunity.”  This was also supposedly proved by the International Criminal Court's (ICC’s) issuance of indictments of, and then arrest warrants for, Gaddafi and one of his sons and brother-in-law.  Kofi Annan had already announced years ago that with the creation of the ICC impunity was at an end, and here we can see its Kafka-esque truth as officers and leaders of tiny states on the U.S. hit-list are brought to book!  The brazenness of these claims is breathtaking. In March 2003 George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq in violation of the UN Charter and were responsible for the million or more Iraqi deaths that followed.  The leader of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, was repeatedly asked to investigate and pursue this crime, but he found that the “threshold of gravity” was not reached in this case for proof of “willful killings.”  This was all just collateral damage, and not deliberate!  (Actually, even in Texas if you shoot and kill somebody while going after a different target, you are guilty of murder.) But the relatively tiny killings by Gaddafi in response to a rapidly growing and at least partly foreign-sponsored armed insurgency were willful and demanded a rush-to-action.  No white person has ever been indicted by the ICC under this new anti-impunity regime—and of the 20 persons who had been indicted through mid-2011, all 20 were African, the three Libyans being the only non-black Africans. And by another amazing coincidence, two of the greatest black African killers, Paul Kagame ( Rwanda ) and Yoweri Museveni ( Uganda ),  who happen to be U.S. clients, have also not been indicted.  In short, the real impunity rule, of long standing, is that leaders of the Western great powers who have not been defeated in war (as Hitler was), and their clients, have impunity. Their targets do not. When Milosevic was first indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1999, he was accused of  responsibility for some 340 victims, only 45 of them having died in the months prior to NATO's bombing war (from March 24 on) in the almost surely mythical “Racak massacre” of January 15, 1999 (see “Mythical Bloodbaths” in Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide [Monthly Review Press, 2010]).  But in considering a petition that NATO leaders be indicted for its killings of civilians in its 1999 bombing war, this was ruled out by Carla Del Ponte on the grounds that (1) these killings were not deliberate, and (2) with only 500 admittedly killed by NATO, this was too few to constitute crimes of war—that is, whereas for Milosevic, the “threshold of gravity” was 340 deaths, for NATO, 500 was too small (see the superb discussion in Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder  [Pluto Press, 2004], Chap. 6).  In short, these cases had nothing to do with justice but reflected the same dichotomy of impunity for the de facto aggressor violating the UN Charter, on the one hand, and sure guilt for the Great Power’s target by that Power’s corrupt agent, the ICTY, on the other hand (see John Laughland’s Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice [Pluto Press, 2007]). When the arrest of Ratko Mladic in the Serbian village of Lazarevo was announced on May 26, this was generally greeted  as a positive  achievement for international justice, given the uniformity, passion and assurance of the media, and even a substantial contingent of supposedly liberal and left analysts, that he was a murderous villain. But this reflects a remarkable propaganda system, that can swallow and honor real mass killers like Clinton, Bush, Blair, Kagame, and Sharon, and yet in the former Yugoslavia pursue Milosevic, Karadzic, and Mladic, but not Croatia's wartime President Franjo Tudjman, nor the Bosnian Muslim's wartime President Alija Izetbegovic, nor the former Kosovo Liberation Army leader become the newly independent Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci. In a civil war context there are always nasty episodes of ruthless killings, and the multi-sidedness of this in the Balkan wars was very briefly revealed in single Washington Postand Toronto Star profiles of the Muslim commander of Srebrencia, Naser Oric, who openly bragged to John Pomfret and Bill Schiller of an episode in which he killed 114 Serbs, showing these reporters videos of beheaded victims.  The Serb analyst Milivoje Ivanisevic listed the names of 3,262 Serbs killed in the Srebrenica vicinity prior to the July 1995 “massacre,” a large majority civilians (2,382). These have been “disappeared” in the discussions of Srebrenica, helping make the July killings inexplicable except for some ethnic cleansing or even genocidal  plan. There is nothing comparable to Oric’s admissions to Pomfret and Schiller in any evidence ever used to implicate Mladic. His initial Srebrenica-related indictment for “genocide” by the ICTY in November 1995 preceded their gathering of any evidence on Srebrenica (not even a single grave was investigated until 1996), and when the ICTY forensic analysts finished their collection and evaluation of grave evidence in 2002, the manner of death in the vast majority of the 1,919 sets of mortal remains exhumed up to that point was unclear, but the majority of the relative small number of remains whose manner of death could be determined (477 sets, or 24.8 percent) were likely combat victims rather than victims of executions. (See the two chapters that Ljubisa Simic contributed to the volume edited by Stefan Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide [Belgrade: Srebrenica Historical Project, 2011], pp. 69-88, and pp. 89-104.) There were evidently hundreds of executions, but Mladic’s role in ordering these executions was surely no clearer than Oric’s role in ordering the deaths of many more Serb civilians in the Srebrenica area prior to July 1995. The main “evidence” of any Mladic role in Srebrenica executions was given in the testimony of Drazen Erdemovic, a mercenary and truly “protected witness” of the ICTY, whose performance (and ICTY protection—against verification) is actually a high point in showing the thoroughgoing politicization of the ICTY and hence of the compromised case against Mladic. (About which, see the devastating account in Germinal Civikov’s Srebrenica: The Star Witness, Trans. John Laughland [ Belgrade : NGO Srebrenica Historical Project, 2010], reviewed by me in Z Magazine, January, 2011.)

An Unindicted War Criminal-Louise Arbour

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

An Unindicted War Criminal. 

Louise Arbour and the International Crimes Tribunal

By Christopher Black & Edward S. Herman

2000 Feb.

Among the many ironies of the NATO war against Yugoslavia was the role of the International Criminal Tribunal and its chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, elevated by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to Canada’s highest court in 1999. It will be argued here that that award was entirely justified on the grounds of political service to the NATO powers, but a monumental travesty if the question of the proper administration of justice enters the equation. In fact, we will show that as Arbour and the Tribunal played a key role in expediting war crimes, an excellent case can be made that in a just world she would be in the dock rather than in judicial robes.

Arbour To NATO’s Rescue

The moment of truth for Arbour and the Tribunal came in the midst of NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, when Arbour appeared, first, in an April 20 press conference with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to receive from him documentation on Serb war crimes. Then on May 27, Arbour announced the indictment of Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his associates for war crimes. The inappropriateness of a supposedly judicial body doing this in the midst of the Kosovo war, and when Germany, Russia, and other powers were trying to find a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, was staggering.

At the April 20 appearance with Cook, Arbour stated that “It is inconceivable...that we would in fact agree to be guided by the political will of those who may want to advance an agenda.” But her appearance with Cook and the followup indictments fitted perfectly the agenda needs of the NATO leadership. There had been growing criticism of NATO’s increasingly intense and civilian infrastructure-oriented bombing of Serbia, and Blair and Cook had been lashing out at critics in the British media for insufficient enthusiasm for the war. Arbour’s and the Tribunal’s intervention declaring the Serb leadership to be guilty of war crimes was a public relations coup that justified the NATO policies and helped permit the bombing to continue and escalate. This was pointed out repeatedly by NATO leaders and propagandists: Madeleine Albright noted that the indictments “make very clear to the world and the publics in our countries that this [NATO policy] is justified because of the crimes committed, and I think also will enable us to keep moving all these processes [i.e., bombing] forward” (CNN, May 27). State Department spokesperson James Rubin stated that “this unprecedented step...justifies in the clearest possible way what we have been doing these past months” (CNN “Morning News,” May 27).

Although the Tribunal had been in place since May 1993, and the most serious atrocities in the Yugoslav wars occurred as the old Federation disintegrated from June 1991 through the Dayton peace talks in late 1995, no indictment was brought against Milosevic for any of those atrocities, and the May 27 indictment refers only to a reported 241 deaths in the early months of 1999. The indictment appears to have been hastily prepared to meet some urgent need. Arbour even mentioned on April 20 that she had “visited NATO” to “dialogue with potential information providers in order to generate unprecedented support that the Tribunal needs if it will perform its mandate in a time frame that will make it relevant to the resolution of conflict...of a magnitude of what is currently unfolding in Kosovo.” But her action impeded a negotiated resolution, although it helped expedite a resolution by intensified bombing.Arbour noted that, “I am mindful of the impact that this indictment may have on the peace process,” and she said that although indicted individuals are “entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are convicted, the evidence upon which this indictment was confirmed raises serious questions about their suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace agreement.” (CNN “Live Event,” Special, May 27). So Arbour not only admitted awareness of the political significance of her indictment, she suggested that her possible interference with any diplomatic efforts was justified because the indicted individuals, though not yet found guilty, are not suitable to negotiate. This hugely unjudicial political judgment, along with the convenient timing of the indictments, points up Arbour’s and the Tribunal’s highly political role.

Background

Arbour’s service to NATO in indicting Milosevic was the logical outcome of the Tribunal’s de facto control and purpose. It was established by the Security Council in the early 1990s to serve the Balkan policy ends of its dominant members, especially the United States. (China and Russia went along as silent and powerless partners, apparently in a trade-off for economic concessions.) And its funding and interlocking functional relationship with the top NATO powers have made it NATO’s instrument.

Although Article 32 of its Charter declares that the Tribunal’s expenses shall be provided in the general budget of the United Nations, this proviso has been regularly violated. In 1994-1995 the U.S. government provided it with $700,000 in cash and $2.3 million in equipment (while failing to meet its delinquent obligation to the UN that might have allowed the UN to fund the Tribunal). On May 12, 1999, Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, president of the Tribunal, stated that “the U.S. government has very generously agreed to provide $500,000 [for an Outreach project] and to help to encourage other states to contribute.” Numerous other U.S.-based governmental and non-governmental agencies have provided the Tribunal with resources.

Article 16 of the Tribunal’s charter states that the Prosecutor shall act independently and shall not seek or receive instruction from any government. This section also has been systematically violated. NATO sources have regularly made claims suggesting their authority over the Tribunal: “We will make a decision on whether Yugoslav actions against ethnic Albanians constitute genocide,” states a USIA Fact Sheet, and Cook asserted at his April 20 press conference with Arbour that “we are going to focus on the war crimes being committed in Kosovo and our determination to bring those responsible to justice,” as if he and Arbour were a team jointly and cooperatively deciding on who should be charged for war crimes, and obviously excluding himself from those potentially chargeable. Earlier, on March 31, two days after Cook had promised Arbour supportive data for criminal charges, she announced the indictment of Arkan.

Tribunal officials have even bragged about “the strong support of concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary Albright,” further referred to as “mother of the Tribunal” (by Gabrielle Kirk McDonald). The post-Arbour chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte at a September 1999 press conference thanked the U.S. FBI for helping the Tribunal, and expressed general thanks for “the important support the U.S. government has provided the Tribunal.” Arbour informed President Clinton of the forthcoming indictment of Milosevic two days before the rest of the world, and in 1996 the prosecutor met with the Secretary-General of NATO and its supreme commander to “establish contacts and begin discussing modalities of cooperation and assistance.” Numerous other meetings have occurred between prosecutor and NATO, which was given the function of Tribunal gendarme. In the collection of data also, the prosecutor has depended heavily on NATO and NATO governments, which again points to the symbiotic relation between the Tribunal and NATO.

Serb-Specific Focus

The NATO powers focused almost exclusively on Serb misbehavior in the course of their participation in the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the Tribunal has followed in NATO’s wake. A great majority of the Tribunal’s indictments have been of Serbs, and those against Croatians and Muslims often seemed to have been timed to counter claims of anti-Serb bias (e.g., the first non-Serb indictment [Ivica Rajic], announced during the peace talks in Geneva and bombing by NATO in September 1995).

Arbour did state (April 20) that, “the real danger is whether we would fall into that [following somebody’s political agenda] inadvertently by being in the hands of information-providers who might have an agenda that we would not be able to discern.” But even an imbecile could discern that NATO had an agenda and that simply accepting the flood of documents offered by Cook and Albright entailed advertently following that agenda. Arbour even acknowledged her voluntary and almost exclusive “dependencies...on the goodwill of states” to provide information that “will guide our analysis of the crime base.” Her April 20 reference to the “morality of the [NATO’s] enterprise” and her remarks on Milosevic’s possible lack of character disqualifying him from negotiations, as well as her rush to help NATO with an indictment, point to quite clearly understood political service.

In a dramatic illustration of Arbour-Tribunal bias, a 150-page Tribunal report entitled “The Indictment of Operation Storm: A Prima Facie Case,” describes war crimes committed by the Croatian armed forces in their expulsion of more than 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995, during which “at least 150 Serbs were summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared.” This report, leaked to the New York Times (to the dismay of Tribunal officials), found that the Croatian murders and other inhumane acts were “widespread and systematic,” and that “sufficient material” was available to make three named Croatian generals accountable under international law. (Raymond Bonner, “War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops ‘Cleansed’ the Serbs,” NYT, March 21, 1999). But the Times article also reports that the United States, which supported the Croat’s ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina, not only defended the Croats in the Tribunal but refused to supply requested satellite photos of Krajina areas attacked by the Croats, as well as failing to provide other requested information. The result was that the Croat generals named in the report on Operation Storm were never indicted, and although the number of Serbs executed and disappeared over a mere four days was at least equal to the 241 victims of the Serbs named in the indictment of Milosevic, no parallel indictment of Croat leader Tudjman was ever brought by the Tribunal. But this was not a failure of data gathering—the United States opposed indictments of its allies, and thus the Tribunal did not produce any.

Tribunal’s Kangaroo Court Processes

Arbour has claimed that the Tribunal was “subject to extremely stringent rules of evidence with respect to the admissibility and the credibility of the product that we will tender in court” so that she was guarded against “unsubstantiated, unverifiable, uncorroborated allegations” (April 20). This is a gross misrepresentation of what John Laughland described in the Times (London) as “a rogue court with rigged rules” (June 17, 1999). The Tribunal violates virtually every standard of due process: it fails to separate prosecution and judge; it does not accord the right to bail or a speedy trial; it has no clear definition of burden of proof required for a conviction; it has no independent appeal body; it violates the principle that a defendant may not be tried twice for the same crime (Article 25 gives the prosecutor the right to appeal against an acquittal); suspects can be held for 90 days without trial; under Rule 92 confessions are presumed to be free and voluntary unless the contrary is established by the prisoner; witnesses can testify anonymously, and as John Laughland notes, “rules against hearsay, deeply entrenched in Common Law, are not observed and the Prosecutor’s office has even suggested not calling witnesses to give evidence but only the tribunal’s own ‘war crimes investigators.’”

As noted, Arbour presumes guilt before trial; the concept of “innocent till convicted” is rejected, and she can declare that people linked with Arkan “will be tainted by their association with an indicted war criminal” (March 31). Arbour clearly does not believe in the basic rules of Western jurisprudence, and Laughland quotes her saying “The law, to me, should be creative and used to make things right.” And within a month of her elevation to the Canadian Supreme Court she was a member of a court majority that grafted onto Canadian law the dangerously unfair Tribunal practice of permitting a more liberal use of hearsay evidence in trials. The consequent corruption of the Canadian justice system, both by her appointment and her impact, mirrors that in the Canadian political system, whose leading members supported the NATO war without question.

NATO’s Crimes

In bombing Yugoslavia from March 24 into June 1999, NATO was guilty of the serious crime of violating the UN Charter requirement that it not use force without UN Security Council sanction. It was also guilty of criminal aggression in attacking a sovereign state that was not going beyond its borders. In its defense, NATO claimed that “humanitarian” concerns demanded these actions and thus justified seemingly serious law violations. Apart from the fact that this reply sanctions law violations on the basis of self-serving judgments that contradict the rule of law, it is also called into question on its own grounds by counter-facts. First, the NATO bombing made “an internal humanitarian problem into a disaster” in the words of Rollie Keith, the returned Canadian OSCE human rights monitor in Kosovo. Second, the evidence is now clear that NATO refused to negotiate a settlement in Kosovo and insisted on a violent solution; that in the words of one State Department official, NATO deliberately “raised the bar” and precluded a compromise resolution because Serbia “needed to be bombed.” These counter-facts suggest that the alleged humanitarian basis of the law violations was a cover for starkly political and geopolitical objectives.

NATO was also guilty of more traditional war crimes, including some that the Tribunal had found indictable when carried out by Serbs. Thus on March 8, 1996, Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted for launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets in Zagreb in May 1995, on the ground that the rocket was “not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the civilians of Zagreb.” The Tribunal report on the Croat Operation Storm in Krajina also provided solid evidence that a 48 hour Croat assault on the city of Knin was “shelling civilian targets,” with fewer than 250 of 3,000 shells striking military targets. But no indictments followed from this evidence or for any other raid.

The same case for civilian targeting could be made for numerous NATO bombing raids, as in the cluster-bombing of Nis on May 7, 1999, in which a market and hospital far from any military target were hit in separate strikes—but no indictment has yet been handed down against NATO.

But NATO was also guilty of the bombing of non-military targets as systematic policy. On March 26, 1999, General Wesley Clark said that “We are going to very systematically and progressively work on his military forces...[to see] how much pain he is willing to suffer.” But this focus on “military forces” wasn’t effective, so NATO quickly turned to “taking down...the economic apparatus supporting” Serb military forces (Clinton’s words), and NATO targets were gradually extended to factories of all kinds, electric power stations, water and sewage processing facilities, all transport, public buildings, and large numbers of schools and hospitals. In effect, it was NATO’s strategy to bring Serbia to its knees by gradually escalating its attacks on the civil society.

But this policy was in clear violation of international law, one of whose fundamental elements is that civilian targets are off limits; international law prohibits the “wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages or devastation not justified by military necessity” (Sixth Principle of Nuremberg, formulated in 1950 by an international law commission at the behest of the UN). “Military necessity” clearly does not allow the destruction of a civil society to make it more difficult for the country to support its armed forces, any more than civilians can be killed directly on the grounds that they pay taxes supporting the war machine or might some day become soldiers. The taking of an entire population hostage is a blatant violation of international law and acts carrying it out are war crimes.

On September 29, 1999, in response to a question on whether the Tribunal would investigate crimes committed in Kosovo after June 10, or those committed by NATO in Yugoslavia, prosecutor Carla del Ponte stated that “The primary focus of the Office of the Prosecutor must be on the investigation and prosecution of the five leaders of the FRY and Serbia who have already been indicted.” Why this “must” be the focus, especially in light of all the evidence already assembled in preparing the favored indictments, was unexplained. In late December, it was finally reported that Del Ponte was reviewing the conduct of NATO, at the urging of Russia and several other “interested parties” (“U.N. Court Examines NATO’s Yugoslavia War,” NYT, December 29, 1999). But the news report indicates that the focus is on the conduct of NATO pilots and their commanders, not the NATO decision-makers who made the ultimate decisions to target the civilian infrastructure. It also suggests the public relations nature of the inquiry, which would “go far in dispelling the belief...that the tribunal is a tool used by Western leaders to escape accountability.” The report also indicates the delicate matter that the tribunal “depends on the military alliance to arrest and hand over suspects.” It also quotes Del Ponte saying that “It’s not my priority, because I have inquiries about genocide, about bodies in mass graves.” We may rest assured that no indictments will result from this inquiry.

An impartial Tribunal would have gone to great pains to balance NATO’s flood of documents by internal research and a welcoming of rival documentation. But although submissions have been made on NATO’s crimes by Yugoslavia and a number of Western legal teams, the Tribunal didn’t get around to these until this belated and surely nominal inquiry that is “not my priority,” as the Tribunal “must” pursue the Serb villains, for reasons that are only too clear.

NATO’s leaders, frustrated in attacking the Serb military machine, quite openly turned to smashing the civil society of Serbia as their means of attaining the quick victory desired before the 50th Anniversary celebration of NATO’s founding. Although this amounted to turning the civilian population of Serbia into hostages and attacking them and their means of sustenance—in gross violation of the laws of war—Arbour and her Tribunal not only failed to object to and prosecute NATO’s leaders for war crimes, by indicting Milosevic on May 27 they gave NATO a moral cover permitting escalated attacks on the hostage population.

Arbour and the Tribunal thus present us with the amazing spectacle of an institution supposedly organized to contain, prevent, and prosecute for war crimes actually knowingly facilitating them. Furthermore, petitions submitted to the Tribunal during Arbour’s tenure had called for prosecution of the leaders of NATO, including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, for the commission of war crimes. If she had been a prosecutor in Canada, Britain or the United States, she would have been subject to disbarment for considering and then accepting a job from a person she had been asked to charge. But Arbour was elevated to the Supreme Court of Canada by Chretien with hardly a mention of this conflict of interest and immorality. In this post-Orwellian New World Order we are told that we live under the rule of law, but as Saint Augustine once said, “There are just laws and there are unjust laws, and an unjust law is no law at all.” 

----------------                                   

Christopher Black is a Toronto defense lawyer and writer and one of the lawyers who made the request to the War Crimes Tribunal to indict NATO leaders for war crimes. Edward Herman is an economist and media analyst; his most recent book is The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader (Peter Lang, 1999).

http://www.zcommunications.org/an-unindicted-war-criminal-by-christopher-black
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Rwanda: UN's Louise Arbour Under Fire Over 1994 murder of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi

Agence Rwandaise d'Information - 2008-04-09

Global Research, April 15, 2008

The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour is responsible for covering up the murder of the President of Rwanda, the President of Burundi and many other persons who were assassinated on April 06 1994, a senior attorney with the UN Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has alleged.

Lead Counsel Christopher Black who is defending General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, former Chief of Staff of Rwandan Gendarmerie says that Louise Arbour - as Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR conspired with some countries to cover up investigations into allegations against the RPF.

According to the Canadian Barrister, Ms. Arbour, 61, is a "criminal, corrupt, (and) a shame to all Canadians". The sooner she is indicted and thrown in prison the better, says Mr. Black - who was reacting to an interview of the former senior UN officer on CBC. Ms. Arbour announced Sunday that she was retiring after years of international service.

In 1997, Ms. Arbour is said to have been informed by her chief of investigations, Australian Michael Hourigan and his team, including FBI agent Jim Lyons and Canadian police officers assigned to their unit that it was the RPF who had shot down the plane and massacred all those people.

"But instead of indicting Paul Kagame and the RPF men who had murdered all those people she ordered Hourigan to come to The Hague where she told him to kill the investigation and to burn his notes", says Mr. Black.

"This makes her an accessory to mass murder and a war criminal."

Barrister Black points fingers at the UN, the US, Canada and Belgium as the culprits in helping the RPF to carry out the alleged assassinations. She did this on the instructions of the US government in violation of her oath to be independent as prosecutor, argues Mr. Black.

The ill-equipped UN force in Rwanda during the Genocide was incidentally also headed by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire

Ms. Arbour was the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR and ICTY between 1996 and 2000. She moved back to the Supreme Court of Canada and in 2004 she became the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

As chief prosecutor, she indicted former Yugoslav and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, among others, for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his part in atrocities committed in Kosovo. The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic was the first of a serving Head of State.

It is during the same period that several senior former officials of the Genocidal government in Rwanda were tracked and brought to book. Their cases have been ongoing at the Tanzania-based court.

Controversy started when it came to what have become the longest and grueling trails involving senior Ex-government soldiers such Major Ntabakuze, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, Brigadier-General Gratien Kabiligi, and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva in case 'Military I'.

Others that are co-accused in trail 'Military II' are General Augustin Bizimungu - former chief of staff of the Rwandan army, General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the former commander of the recognition battalion, Major François-Xavier Nzuwonemeye and Captain Innocent Sagahutu, who commanded a squadron of this elite unit.

The defense in these cases have held that the RPF rebels - with support from some quarters especially the west are responsible for the death of President Habyarimana and thereby culminating into the Genocide. The defense has also stood by demands that as these officers are tried, those they were fighting against should come to the dock as well.

"Once she (Arbour) proved her reliability to the Americans, that is that she was corrupt and willing to cover up those responsible for mass murder, she was then used to lay false war crimes charges against Milosevic in order to prolong the war against Yugoslavia", claims Mr. Black who has worked with the ICTR since 2000.

Last year Ms. Arbour was in Rwanda and held discussions with top government officials and President Paul Kagame. She was also at the forefront praising Rwanda for abolishing the death penalty last year.

In January this year she said she would seek another term at the helm of the UN Rights body but last month decided otherwise.

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IMPORTANT-Rwanda: Kofi Annan - Carla Del Ponte

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

Kofi Annan

Quotes[2010] U.S./U.N. cover-up of Kagame’s genocide in Rwanda and Congo by Juan Carrero  The real news is something else: namely, that in a move that breaks the code of silence that has reigned within the U.N. for too many years, the High Commissioner for Human Rights reveals that the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan before him – the same parties who less than a year ago accused some of us of financing the genocidaires – have actually spent more than a decade covering up the continuous genocide carried out by the RPF from Oct. 1, 1990, until today, which probably constitutes the largest one since the U.N. was founded!
One year after ICTY and ICTR chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte (successor to Louise Arbour) opened what she called the “Special Investigation” of the RPF in 2002, she was terminated as chief prosecutor at the ICTR, despite taking her plea directly to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whom Del Ponte called “inflexible” on the question. In her memoirs, Del Ponte recounts a June 2002 meeting with Kagame at his presidential abode in Kigali, during which Kagame, “fuming,” told her: “If you investigate [the RPF], people will believe there were two genocides….All we did was liberate Rwanda.” This was followed by a May 2003 meeting with Pierre-Richard Prosper, the Bush administration’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes, who, in Del Ponte’s words, “backed the Rwandans,” and “suggested that [she] surrender responsibility for investigating and prosecuting the alleged crimes of the RPF.” By the time Del Ponte was able to meet with Annan in New York in late July 2003, she told Annan, “This will be the end of the Special Investigation,” to which Annan replied: “Yes. I know.”
    “It is clear that it all started when we embarked on these Special Investigations,” Del Ponte told an interviewer after her position with the ICTR ended, “pressure from Rwanda contributed to the non-renewal of my mandate.” 
Doubtless, pressure from other sources with a lot more clout with the Security Council played an even greater role. Former ICTR (and ICTY) spokesperson Florence Hartmann also recounts extensive interference by the United States, Britain, and Kagame’s RPF in every effort by the Office of the Prosecutor to investigate RPF crimes. 
Hassan Jallow, Del Ponte’s successor at the ICTR, has stated on the record that he does not believe the assassination of Habyarimana belongs within the ICTR’s mandate. Under his charge (from September 2003 on), the Office of the Prosecutor systematically dragged its feet when it came to the crimes of the RPF, always pleading a need to carry out “additional inquiries,” without ever bringing a single indictment. Through the end of 2008, 100 percent of the ICTR’s indictments for “serious violations of international humanitarian law” committed during 1994 have been brought against Hutu members of the former government and ethnic Hutus more generally, and none against members of the RPF, despite the ICTR’s Statute, making no distinctions on the basis of ethnicity or political allegiance. Neither the RPF’s violent takeover of Rwanda, its massacre of “10,000 or more Hutu civilians” per month in 1994, nor any of its other numerous postwar slaughters, have ever once been disturbed by criminal charges at the ICTR. [2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
[2008] The Great Rwanda "Genocide Coverup" by Prof. Peter Erlinder   According to sworn affidavits placed in the ICTR record in early 2006, more than 10 years ago, ICTR Lead Investigative Prosecutor, well-respected Australian QC Michael Hourigan, recommended that Kagame, himself, be prosecuted for the assassination of Habyarimana. But, in 1997, then-Chief UN Prosecutor Louise Arbour of Canada ordered him to drop the Kagame investigation; to forget it ever happened; and, to burn his notes ! Hourigan resigned rather than comply and copies of his original notes are now part of the ICTR public record for all to see.
    
The Hourigan affidavit makes clear that the "Rwanda Genocide"-- Cover-up has been going on for at least a decade....but the reasons for the cover-up did not become clear until late 2007, when a senior Clinton Administration diplomat, Brian Atwood, was confronted with UN documents describing a 1994 "cover-up" meeting with the Rwandan Foreign Minister in Kigali and the UN's Kofi Annan. 


According to the UN documents, U.S.-sponsored human rights reports by investigator, Robert Gersony, had documented massive military-style executions of civilians by Kagame's troops, during and after the final 90-days of the four-year Rwanda War.
    The former Rwandan Foreign Minister at the meeting, Jean Marie Ndagiyimana, testified at the ICTR that, rather than participate in the proposed "cover-up," he resigned and went into exile where he remains today. His ICTR testimony confirmed that Clinton's USAID Chief for Africa, Brian Atwood, and the chief of the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operations Kofi Annan, were both in his office in late October 1994 urging him to assist in the "cover-up" the war-crimes committed by Kagame's forces.
    The damning "Gersony Report" included first-hand evidence of tens of thousands of civilians being massacred by Kagame's troops in eastern Rwanda, later confirmed by similar reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The U.N. Document (also in the ICTR record) says that Annan told the Foreign Minister that public knowledge of the Report would be "embarrassing to the UN" and the U.S. Former Clinton-diplomat, Brian Atwood, not only confirmed he was at the meeting, but explained that he had engaged Gersony, and that Gersony's findings of war-crimes being committed by Kagame were "an inconvenient truth" for both the United States and the UN.


[2007] The Gersony Report: It's Findings and more.   In his findings, Mr. Gersony states he believes that the RPA committed genocide against Hutu in Kibungo, Butare, and parts of Kigali and between early April to mid-September 1994, the RPF killed between 25,000-45,000 Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi.....The report was so damaging to the UNHCR, RPF and UNAMIR that UN officials covered it up in October 1994, despite the fact UNHCR officials on the ground (on the order of UNHCR head Ms. Sagato Ogata) stopped encouraging Rwandan Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda because of the killings, as reported in the New York Times at the end of September. Mr. Gersony was instructed never to talk about it publicly.......The report was also potentially damaging to the United States, a strong supporter of the new Rwandan government. As described by Mr. Prunier in his book, then Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth was given orders by the State Department to discredit the report. Mr. Wirth travelled to Kigali and several places in New York, spreading disinformation by attacking Gersony's methodology and claiming it was a "Hutu conspiracy." He also delivered carefully crafted propagandic press statements.
......"By not publishing the Gersony report and other information about RPF´s massacres, a blank cheque was issued to continue the murders," said academic Rwandan expert Dr. Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp to Denmark newspaper "Information" writer Gunnar Willum. Dr. Reyntjens went on to say in the article of 28 June 1999, "Publication of the report would have prevented the RPF to commit the massacre of over 200,000 Hutu refugees in Zaire," says Reyntjens. "The RPF has used the genocide to legitimate massacres on this civilian population.
......In his recent book on the Congo, Mr. Gerard Prunier said Kofi Annan told then VP Kagame, the late Seth Sendashonga (then Interior Minister), PM Faustin Twagiramungu, and President Pasteur Bizimungu the UN would withhold the report to allow the RPF government time to consolidate after providing them with a copy of the report.