Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: La tirannia dei diritti umani?

Mando un'altro articolo, stavolta preso dal giornale
inglese (fortemente di destra) "The Spectator".
NB:   Non sono d'accordo al 100%, ma sulla Yugoslavia
la tizia ha centrato in pieno!
----------------
The Spectator, London, 28 August 1999, p11:
THE TYRANNY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
KIRSTEN SELLARS, a journalist writing a critical history of
human rights, says that war-crimes tribunals advance the global
aims of Western leaders
WHEN THE SWISS attorney-general Carla Del Ponte takes up her
post as chief prosecutor of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda
war-crimes tribunals next month, she will assume the role of
high priestess of human rights, the secular religion for the
millennium.  She will be responsible both for putting Milosevic
and the rest behind the bars of Scheveningen prison and for
healing the wounds of a troubled world.  Her job is to see that
good vanquishes evil.
    That's the theory, anyway.  The reality is more
complicated.  When viewed with a dispassionate eye, the
war-crimes trivbunals look less like paragons of justice and
more like the political tools of Clinton and Blair.  These
trials, like the recent bombing campaigns, are motivated first
and foremost by political expediency.  This is not a popular
point of view.  Indeed, it is heresy.  The consensus rules
anything done in the name of human rights is right, and any
criticism is not just wrong but tantamount to support, murder,
torture and rape.
    This coercive consensus gives the most powerful nations
carte blanche to interfere in the affairs of any country they
choose.  In his book, Crimes Against Humanity, the
British-based QC, Geoffrey Robertson, a passionate advocate of
human rights, argues for an end to the age of impunity in which
repression is allowed to flourish within the protective borders
of the nation state.  In place of this he envisages a new "age
of enforcement" in which interventionist global law ensures
that the Pinochets and Pol Pots get their just deserts.
    It is a seductive but invidious scenario which ignores the
fact that a humanitarian crusade offers a lot more to the
crusaders than to those on whose behalf the battle is
supposedly fought.  History teaches us two important lessons.
First, the human-rights ideal was itself born of political
convenience, as a smokescreen behind which the great powers
could pursue their own interests, oblivious to the needs of
those they purported to help.  Second, intervention, whatever
banner it goes under, is a direct challenge to national
self-determination.  That is to say, it undermines a people's
right to govern themselves.  This assault on sovereignty is
constantly reinforced by institutions such as the United
Nations, Nato and the World Bank.
    Attacks on sovereignty, which considered all right for
faraway countries, are not acceptable when they affect the
United States or Britain.  American, the crucible of human
rights and the chief architect of the UN's 1948 Declaration of
Human Rights, refused to accept the Genocide Convention until
1986, on the grounds that it encroached on American
sovereignty.  British governments have been equally cautious.
Although the Atlee government signed the European Convention on
Human Right, it did so only after securing the condition that
UK citizens were banned from taking cases to the human-rights
court in Strasbourg.  This ban was lifted in 1964 and there was
a succession of high profile cases against the UK on such
issues as police powers and press freedom, homosexual rights
and treatement of paramilitary suspects in Northern Ireland.
Westminister has reluctantly accepted the courth's authority,
but there is still, understandably, widespread resentment of
meddling Strasboug Eurocrats.
    The history of human rights as foreign policy is a story of
realpolitik and opportunism.  At the 1919 Paris Peace
Conference, the US President Woodrow Wilson invoked limited
minority rights, while significantly opposing the principle of
racial equality.  In the second weorld war, Frankling Roosevelt
rallied a hitherto isolationist public's support for the "Good
War" in order to extend America's global reach.  Later, the
Carter and Clinton administrations both launched human-rights
missions in order to restore public confidence in the integrity
of government after Watergate and Monicagate.  Tony Blair and
Canada's Lloyd Axworth have followed their vote-catching
example.  Official interest in human-rights has waxed and waned
inversely with the other 20th-century Western idea,
anti-communism, and at the end of the Cold War, "human-rights
abuse" has replaced the "red menace" as the enemy of civilised
values.
    War-crimes tribunals have traditionally been the
cutting-edge of such crusades.  The post-second world war
Nuremberg and Tokyo trials established the blueprint for the
moden ad hoc tribunals on former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  From
the start, politics impinged openly upon the legal process, and
there were accusations of double standards from both
conservatives ("our generals would have done the same") and
from radicals ("Dresden and Hiroshima were war crimes too").
Some lawyers questioned the legal basis of the newly created
"crimes against peace" and "crimes against humanity".  The
Tokyo trial aroused particularly controversy and the Indian
judge, Radhabinod Pal, rejected all guilty verdicts as victors'
justice.  William Douglas of the US Supreme Court later wrote
of the Tokyo trials:  "It took its law from the creator and did
not act as a free and independent tribunal.  It was solely an
instrument of political power."
    The Allied prosecution of German and Japanese leaders was
primarily prompted by political concerns, however high-minded
the judges and vile the crimes of many of those involved.
Justice had to be seen to be done, but within the framework of
broader post-war strategies.  At Toky, some defendants were
scapegoated while a blind eye was turned to others -- notably
Emperor Hirohito -- in order to bolster American occupation
policies in Japan.  At Nuremberg, evidence of Allied atrocities
(e.g.  the Soviet masaccres of poles at Katyn) or agressive war
plans (e.g.  Britain's proposed intervention of Norway) was
ignored.  And once the political and propaganda value of the
trials began to wane, the Allied authorities simply wound up
the proceedings.  Thus, when the lesser tribunals became an
obstacle to the creation of the Federal Republic, the Allies
shortedn the sentences of many Nazi war criminals.  Most were
freed by the mid-Fifties.
    History, as we know, is written by the winners.  The
ensuing justice is conqueror's justice, so only losers ever
stand trial for war crimes.  Perhaps, as one Tokyo trial judge
noted, a lost war is istelf a crime.  When Churchill was told
that 12 top Nazis had been sentenced to the gallows after the
Nuremberg trials in 1946, he mused to General Hastings Ismay,
"It shows that if you enter a war, it is supremely important to
win it -- if we had lost, we should have been in a pretty
pickle."  After Nato's bombardment of Serbia, these words have
a powerful contemporary resonance.
    Just and noble wars are back in fashion and so, as night
follows day, are war-crimes tribunals.  A new International
Criminal Court looks set to follow on the heels of the courts
dealing with former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  Supporters of the
enterprise argue that modern humanitarianism law can rise above
politics and dispense trual impartial justice.  The portents
are not good, though.
    The courts are far from independent.  The Yugoslavia
tribunal, for example, was set up by the UN Security Council in
1993.  Since then it has danced to the tune of the Big Five,
especially the more aggressively interventionist members,
America and Britain.  Occasionally the strings show.  In 1997,
for example, the United States ruffled the court's feathers
when it promised indicted Croats a speed trial if they
surrendered themselves to The Hague.  A tribunal spokesman
complained:  "By making such statements they are making us look
like a politically driven tribunal that you switch on and
switch off every day, according to political circumstance."  In
reality, that is precisely what happens -- the current chief
prosecutor, Louise Arbour, has admitted as such.  She is
heavily reliant on Washington intelligence to put together
prosecution cases and, as she indicates, Security Council
members can either "slow down the flow of information or
accelerate it" in line with their political aims.
    The Kosovo bombardment stripped away lingering illusions of
tribunal impartiality.  The court acted as the judicial arm of
Nato, with Louise ARbout as the Alliance's watchfinder-general.
She was glad publicly to accept a bulging dossier of British
intelligence on Kosovo from Robin Cook.  By contrast, when a
delegation from a Paris-based organisation tried to deliver a
petition calling for Bill Clinton's indictment, they were told
that the prosecutors were "too busy" to receive it.  In the
end, they had to hand it to an UN guard on the gate.
    Ironically, human-rights courts show precious little regard
for the legal rights of the accused.  The Croat general Tihomir
Blaskic has been held in custody for almost three years and
still awaits the outcome of the trial.  In 1997 three Croats
spent two months in prison before being released, because the
prosecution could not mount a case against them.  The Croats
Dario Kordic and Mario Cerkez were jailed for 18 months before
standing trial and, only last year, charges were dropped
against 14 Serbs who had been indicted by Arbour's predecessor,
Richard Goldstone, in 1995.
    Among them was a certain Gruban, who was accused of
viciously raping prisoners at the Omarska camp.  When he was
added to the tribunal wanted list, he continued to live openly
in the Balkans.  This is hardly surprising, given that "Gruban"
is not a human being but a fictional character from Miodrag
Bulatobic's novel "Hero on a Donkey".  The Gruban-as-rapist
hoax apparently began when a local journalist fed the story to
a sensation-hungry American in a Bosnian cafe, who, in turn,
passed the information to The hague, where is "confirmed" by
the conveniently anonymous "Witness F".  It would be funny if
it weren't so tragic.
Ends
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 sovereignty.
Infatti nessuno e' obbligato a far parte delle Nazioni Unite e a
riconoscere il diritto internazionale.
La RFY ad esempio non fa parte delle Nazioni Unite da quando non le
hanno riconosciuto il diritto di ereditare il posto che era della
Ex-Yugoslavia, e da quando non ha presentato richiesta come gli altri
paesi della Ex-Yugoslavia.
Eppure usa i tribunali delle Nazioni Unite quando desidera,
disconoscendoli quando gli stessi tribunali sono contro di loro :)
Ed e' un loro diritto.
Come e' diritto di chiunque altro di far rispettare il diritto
internazionale ovunque sia possibile.
(il resto e' noioso e pieno di panzane e opinioni personali a cui non
vale nemmeno perdere il tempo di rispondere.  Tanto l'idiozia si e' gia'
vista piu' che a sufficenza)
-Stefano

De Cesari, quanto ti paga la NATO ?
Come si fa a farsi assumere nel suo servizio occulto di public
relations?

 relations?
Ti consiglio di fare il/la giornalista :) Come vedi prendono di piu' e
possono dire tutte le stronzate che vogliono che tanto trovano sempre
dei fessi disposti a crederci :)
-Stefano