Thursday 14 Oct 1999
The Ottawa Citizen
October 13, 1999
Partisan U.S. weakens UN: Kosovo judge: Washington opposes what it can't control
BY Mike Blanchfield
The chairman of a new independent international commission examining the lessons learned in Kosovo has already launched a stinging critique at two big targets -- the United Nations and the United States.
''What this commission is inevitably going to have to do is take a good hard look at where the UN is at,'' South African Judge Richard Goldstone said yesterday. ''As long as we get the major powers adopting partisan and partial attitudes, it's weakening the UN.''
Judge Goldstone also criticized the U.S. for failing to support the creation of an international criminal court. ''It's an indication of the United States fearing any international activity which they don't control,'' he said.
Judge Goldstone was the first prosecutor appointed by the UN in 1994 to head its international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
He was succeeded by Canadian Judge Louise Arbour, who recently left the post to accept an appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Judge Goldstone announced the creation of the international Kosovo commission and offered candid views during an interview in Ottawa, where he gave an address to law students on the future of international criminal justice.
Despite his criticisms, Judge Goldstone said the international commission has the full support of the United States, Russia and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is to receive the commission's report in September 2000.
The 13-member commission, which includes Canadian author Michael Ignatieff, is in its infancy and has met only once, three weeks ago in Stockholm.
It will gather submissions from experts and government officials.
Kosovo makes for a timely case study, Judge Goldstone said, because it involved for the first time military aggression against a sovereign state for purely humanitarian reasons, and without the backing of a United Nations Security Council resolution.
Judge Goldstone said the commission will look at ways of strengthening the UN's ability to intervene in crises. NATO acted without UN support in launching its bombing campaign to stop Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
The Security Council was hamstrung by the veto held by five permanent members, and most observers expected Russia and possibly China would have used their vetoes to block intervention in Kosovo.
''One's got to see whether one can't have other means of avoiding the Security Council veto stopping any effective action,'' Judge Goldstone said.
He said the international commission will revisit the origins of the Kosovo crisis, the failed diplomatic efforts and what he sees as a key mistake in ignoring Kosovo in the Dayton Accord, the agreement that ended the Bosnian war in 1995.
"It was politically expedient because the Western powers knew if they raised Kosovo, it would not be accepted. Milosevic would not have made any compromise with Kosovo," Judge Goldstone said later in his speech to law
students.
He said he was frustrated by the international community's inability to arrest high-profile war-crimes suspects in the Balkans. Had UN peacekeepers been ordered to take a more aggressive approach towards arrests after the war in Bosnia, the action may have deterred President Milosevic in Kosovo.
Judge Goldstone lauded Judge Arbour's indictment of Mr. Milosevic on war crimes earlier this year, but emphasized that Mr. Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic must be arrested.
''Clearly, that tribunal will never ever be seen to have been really 100-per-cent successful as long as Karadzic and Milosevic don't stand trial,'' Judge Goldstone said.
The strongest deterrent against rogue leaders who abuse their populations will be the formation of a permanent international criminal court.
Judge Goldstone has not shied away from rattling cages in the past. In post- apartheid South Africa, he headed a commission that drew attention to abusive police practices.
