LEARNING HOW DISCRIMINATION LEADS TO GENOCIDE

by William Drozdiak

(The Herald tribune, 04/07/95)

THE HAGUE - There can be few jobs more anguishing than that of Richard Goldstone. Each day he sifts through grisly accounts of rape, torture and other atrocities, trying to pin down perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans.

Mr. Goldstone, a 55-year-old South African jurist who gained international prominence for his investigations of police brutality and racial violence in his own country, was appointed a year ago by the United Nations as the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and its former republics. It is the first such proceeding since the trials of Nazi leaders in Nuremberg after World War 11.

While investigating reports of mass murder and the expulsions of whole communities of Serbs, Croats and Muslims, Mr. Goldstone and his team also were assigned by the UN Security Council to look into crimes against humanity in Rwanda, where warfare between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups in 1994 left up to half a million people dead.

The experience of hunting down those accused of crimes against humanity on two vastly different continents has left a profound impression, Mr. Goldstone said. Most of all, he has learned that discrimination of any kind, anywhere, contains the seeds of genocide.

"It shows this sort of thing can happen anywhere," Mr. Goldstone said in an interview in the tribunal's tightly guarded compound. "Here you have two separate lands, with distinct cultures and histories, yet similar atrocities committed by neighbour against neighbour.

"This kind of brutal ethnic or religious warfare is just discrimination taken to a violent phase. The victimized group must be dehumanized or demonized. Once this is done, it frees ordinary people from the moral restraints that would normally inhibit them doing such terrible things."

IN BOTH Rwanda and the Balkans, Mr. Goldstone found that fear whipped up by nationalist leaders through the dissemination of lies and scare stories served as the trigger for ethnic atrocities committed or condoned by one group because they were deemed a preemptive strike against the other.

"Rational people will not discriminate unless they can dehumanize their victims or believe that they themselves will be tortured or killed. That's where propaganda comes into play: to persuade people to strike first or

be overrun."

Unlike his peers at Nuremberg, Mr. Goldstone does not have a clear-cut military victory or what he calls "an efficient paper trail" to determine who is responsible for crimes against humanity in the Balkan conflicts.

There also have been persistent reports that France and Britainare less than enthusiastic about Mr. Goldstone's work. European governments are pressing for a peace settlement based on the partition of Bosnia between the rebel Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation.

In London and Paris, some officials have expressed concern that Mr. Goldstone's pursuit of those guilty of war crimes is driving him inexorably up the chain of command to the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs, whose cooperation will be necessary in securing an eventual settlement.

Twenty-two Serbs have been indicted for war crimes, although only one, Dusan Tadic, has been taken into custody and is standing

trial. The indictments have focused largely on the practice known as "ethnic cleansing," carried out by the Serbs in Prijedor and, Omarska, where thousands of Muslim civilians were driven from their homes and placed in concentration camps.

SOME critics have charged that the tribunal has pursued only "little fish" for fear of disrupting efforts for a political settlement. Mr. Goldstone denies the accusation.

"You can only prove who is truly responsible for what happened at those camps by acting on testimony of witnesses and going, after those who are accused of committing the crimes. Only after you indict those people can you move up the chain of command and build a case against those who may have given the orders.

"How can one say that a man like Tadic is a little fish? Here is somebody who carried out multiple murders, rapes and acts of torture against his neighbours. If he had carried out these acts in the United States he would have been called one of the worst criminals of the century."

As the chief prosecutor, Mr. Goldstone and his team of investigators are responsible for building cases that will be decided by an international panel of judges by gathering testimony from the victims.

In April, Mr. Goldstone announced that he was investigating the "criminal responsibility" of Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs; Ratko Mladic, the militia commander, and Mico Stanisic, former secret police chief, for the rape, torture and mass killings of Muslims arising from the operation of detention camps.

Mr. Goldstone said he hoped to decide by the end of the year whether to indict the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs. But he insisted that the decision would be reached on the basis of accumulated evidence, not by the political negotiating climate.

HAT drives Mr. Goldstone and his 120-member staff through the frustrations of tracking down those accused of violating all norms of human conduct, he said, is a sense of duty to the victims and a conviction that the guilty parties must be found and punished to avoid the kind of collective condemnation that only nourishes further ethnic resentment.

For that reason, he feels it is important to investigate reports of Croatian crimes against civilians during the capture last month of formerly Serb-held territory, even though the United Nations has concluded that the Serbs have been responsible for most of the region's recent incidents of rape, torture and ethnic cleansing.

"We need to combat discrimination through justice because it is the only way to break the spiral of violence and deter suchconduct in the future," Mr. Goldstone said. "Just as the Nuremberg trials sought to determine individual guilt so the entire German people would not be held accountable, would need to try and convict those responsible s that, for example, all Serbs are not made t pay for the crimes committed by a few."

Indictments of Bosnian Serbian leader could result in service of international arrest warrants if the leaders travelled abroad, but many observers predict an amnesty as part of any peace settlement.

"We face a lot of frustrating constraints,' Mr. Goldstone said. "But the ongoing war and peace negotiations do not affect our decisions, they only affect the way we do our job And it is a job that has to be done, because war crimes must not be ignored."