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In-Depth:
Justice for a Lawless World? Rights and reconciliation in a new era of international law
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 Download this in-depth report
Part I 6.36 MB
Part II 2.40 MB
- Professor Noam Chomsky
- ICC Chief Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo
- Samantha Power, Professor of Practice in Human Rights Policy
- Juan Mendez ,President of the International Center for Transitional Justice
- Justice Geoffrey Robertson Q.C.
- Dr Fanie du Toit, Programme Director for Educating for Reconciliation at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa
- Abdullah An-Na`im, Ph.D, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
- Augustin Nkusi, the Director of the Legal Support Unit, National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions, Rwanda
- Benjamin Gumpert, counsel representing Justin Mugenzi, who is currently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
- Hanny Megally, Director, Middle East and North Africa Program, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
- Paul van Zyl, Country Programme Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
- Johnston Busingye, Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice in Rwanda
- Dennis McNamara (Special Adviser on Internal Displacement to the UN’s Emergency Relief Co-ordinator and Director of the OCHA Inter-agency Internal Displacement Division) on the rule of law
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GLOBAL: Interview with Professor Noam Chomsky
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Professor Noam Chomsky.
Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT |
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Professor Chomsky is one of America's most prominent political dissidents. A renowned professor of linguistics at MIT, he has authored more than 30 political books dissecting such issues as US interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media.
QUESTION: You argue that the Nuremberg trials were essentially unfair inasmuch as the Allies were free to dictate what constituted war crimes and what did not. What was the alternative? As the Allies were never going to put themselves in the dock, isn’t some justice better than no justice?
ANSWER: Yes. We have advanced to the stage where there is something superior to that: the International Criminal Court (ICC). The trouble is, the more powerful states will not submit themselves to that. The United States is so extreme that it even imposes penalties on countries that are willing to participate. It even got to the point where the US delayed the UN Resolution on Darfur because of some mention in it of bringing Sudanese criminals to the International Criminal Court. It is really fanatic.You have heard of the American Serviceman’s Protection Act which is sometimes referred to in Europe as the Netherlands Invasion Act. It grants the President authority to use force to rescue any Americans who are brought to The Hague to the ICC.
Q: Do you see any room for optimism in that the US did not veto the UN Security Council resolution for the ICC to investigate the acts in Darfur, which some have seen as a tacit acceptance that the ICC will have to coexist with American foreign policy?
A: It is good that it happened. But the administration found itself caught in a political dilemma. A large part of their voting base is ultra right Christian fundamentalists for whom Darfur is a huge issue. They had to offer something to them and for that they were willing to stand by while there was a reference made to the ICC.
Q: You are not optimistic for the future of the US’s acceptance of ICC jurisdiction with respect to Americans?
A: There is almost no chance. The Bush administration is way out in the extreme on this. It is worth noting that the US generally does not accept any international authority.
Look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. That is a series of declarations and principles.The idea was that there were to be enabling resolutions passed by the General Assembly that would develop means of implementing the conventions and declarations on the rights of the child, the rights of women, civil and political rights and so on. But they don’t even formally apply to states unless the states ratify and sign them. The US has a very poor record of ratification. The US and Somalia are the only states not to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I think it is true to say that every case where a convention has been ratified, that has been done on the condition that it is non self-executing, i.e. that it does not apply to the United States. I think that is without exception.
There was a recent World Court case that Yugoslavia brought against NATO. They invoked, among other things, the Genocide Convention of 1948. The US did finally ratify that in 1988 but on condition that it not apply to the US. The US therefore excused itself from the World Court trial and the World Court accepted that. So the US is exempt from trial on genocide.
So the US is essentially granting the President of the US the right to commit genocide. And that is true in case after case. In the 1986 World Court case regarding Nicaragua vs US, the US refused to partcipate. The case was heard, and Nicaragua’s case was presented by a very distinguished Harvard University law professor. The World Court threw out a large part of the case because, when the US accepted World Court jurisdiction in 1946, it added a reservation that the US would be exempt from any case involving international treaties such as the United Nations Charter. Consequently, the World Court had to restrict itself to a narrow, bilateral US-Nicaragua treaty and customary international law. That is the case in issue after issue. The US simply refuses to accept any constraint on sovereignty by international institutions.
Take a look at the record of its vetoes at the United Nations. In the early years after the Second World War, the US was essentially running the UN. Since the mid sixties, after decolonisation, when the UN became somewhat more representative of the world, the US has been far in the lead in terms of numbers of vetoes; Britain is second, and no other country is even close. That is all again rejection of any international authority. The current ambassador, John Bolton, has been particularly brazen about it. He has said, virtually in these words, there is no United Nations. If it is useful for US purposes, we will allow it, if not, we will do what we want. Likewise with the International Criminal Court. It cannot have any success without international force behind it. It cannot be successful unless the great powers agree to subordinate themselves to it. International tribunals do have effect, but only against defeated countries.
I don’t reject the Iraqi tribunal and I don’t reject the Nuremberg tribunal either. I am glad it took place. They condemned maybe the worst criminals in history, but it was seriously flawed. The same is true of the Iraqi tribunal. It is the trial of a person who was overthrown by the US/UK invasion, and the trial is very carefully shaped to ensure that the worst criminals are not there, such as Donald Rumsfeld or people from the Thatcher government. Look at what he is being tried for: right now he is being tried for crimes committed in 1982. 1982 is an important year in US/Iraqi relations. That was the year in which Reagan dropped Iraq from the lists of states supporting terrorism so that the United States could start a very substantial flow of aid to Saddam including: military aid; means of developing weapons of mass destruction; biological weapons; and means to develop nuclear missiles and so on. Shortly after Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq to firm up this agreement.
The next set of charges coming up against Saddam are for the Al Anfal massacre and the gassing at Halabja. There was no protest about that from Britain or the US because Saddam Hussein was a good friend of theirs. They were providing him with aid, including military aid. And that went on after the atrocities, after the end of the war with Iran, which was a horror story in itself.
In 1989, Iraqi nuclear engineers were being brought to conferences in the US to be trained on how to develop nuclear weapons. In fact the US stopped sending weapons just before the invasion of Kuwait, but Britain continued sending military aid up until a couple of days after the invasion as they could not stop it in time. There are others as well: Russia, France Germany and so on. But for Britain and the US to stand by while Saddam Hussein is tried for crimes which they were supporting, that is a level of hypocrisy that compares to the Nuremberg trials.
Q: Do you think there is any room for cultural relativism in human rights?
A: In general I am opposed to it. But notice the way the discussion is skewed in the west. In western discourse, when you talk about cultural relativism it is about Asians, communists and others who do not accept some of the provisions of the Universal Decalaration of Human Rights. They are relativists.
But how often have you seen discussion of the fact that one of the leaders of the relativist camp is the US. It flatly rejects two thirds of the Universal Declaration. The Universal Declaration has three parts: civil and political rights, social and economic rights and cultural rights. The US vigorously rejects the last two sections. At a recent UN meeting, the US was alone in voting against a resolution calling for protection of the right to diversity of culture. On socio-economic rights the US totally rejects them. They were described by Reagan’s secretary of state as a letter to Santa Claus that means nothing. Bush’s ambassador to the Human Rights Commission, Morris Abram, described them as preposterous and a dangerous incitement. Paula Dobriansky, now undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, wrote bitterly about what she called myths concerning human rights, namely that social and economic rights are indeed rights. That is a myth that is polluting human rights discourse, according to her.
Q: Are discussions of socio-economic rights hijacked by people who reject first generation human rights saying it is all right for you in the west who are wealthy to talk about human rights, but the right to eat is more important than the right to protest?
A: If that’s hijacking then the US and often its allies like Britain are worse hijackers, because they condemn what you are describing while they hijack it, by rejecting the social and economic rights and the cultural rights. It is symmetrical. And incidentally the US does not observe the political and civil rights either. Does it observe the conventions on cruel and unusual punishment and torture? Does it observe Article 9 that is supposed to grant political asylum? Does Britain accept that? Certainly not. Let’s take Britain as an example. When Jack Straw was British home secretary he was in charge of granting asylum requests. In 2000, he received a request from an Iraqi who had escaped from Saddam’s prisons where he was being tortured and he was requesting political asylum. Jack Straw turned this request down, saying he had faith in Saddam Hussein’s justice system and so if this man returned to Iraq he could be confident that he would receive fair treatment because the justice system was honorable. He was talking about Iraq in 2000.
So let’s look at Article 9 in that context. Can you say Britain abides by it? There are innumerable other cases. The rich and powerful countries more or less accept the political and civil rights when it is in their interests to do so. The US completely and explicitly rejects the social and economic rights not because anybody is hijacking it, but because it simply does not regard those as rights. They pollute human rights discourse in the words of the current undersecretary for human rights.They are preposterous and an incitement. So we drop those and the cultural rights.
There are relativists and we do not have to look very far to find them. It is much easier to talk about other countries’ failures that are grave no doubt. But looking in the mirror is useful too.
Q: With respect to the US and the UN, do you think it is fair that he who pays the piper should call the tune?
A: If you think the world ought to be run like the mafia, yes. If you do not, and if you think that those fine words are actually supposed to mean something then no, of course not.
Q: Is armed intervention for humanitarian reasons acceptable?
A: The only answer that I can think of to that is a statement that is attributed to Gandhi, whether or not he actually said it is not known, but he is supposed to have been asked once what he thought of western civilisation. He replied that he thought it might be a good idea.
Humanitarian intervention might be a good idea. If you look at history, just about every use of force even by the worst monsters is justified on the basis of humanitarian intervention in the most noble language: the rhetoric brings tears to your eyes. But try to find a case where that is actually true.
It is sometimes suggested that the NATO bombing of Kosovo was for humanitarian reasons. That is utterly fallacious. Take a look at the first Milosevic indictment which is for crimes in Kosovo. All but one of the crimes was after the NATO bombing. The NATO bombing was undertaken on the assumption that it would lead to an escalation of atrocities, which it did. It was not a pleasant place before, but by international standards it was not that terrible, unfortunately. The atrocities were fairly evenly split. The British parliamentary inquiry determined that until January most of the atrocities were attributable to the KLA guerrillas coming over the border to kill Serbs, trying to elicit a repsonse. And we know from the OECD reports that nothing much changed in the following months.
On Kosovo, we now have an authoritative statement from the highest level of the Clinton Administration: Strobe Talbot, who was Clinton’s lead negotiator during Kosovo and the head of the joint State Department-Pentagon mission dealing with diplomacy. He recently wrote the introduction to a book by his director of communications, John Norris. In it, Talbot says that for those who want to understand the Clinton administration thinking on Kosovo, this book gives you the answers. Norris says that the motive for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was not humanitarian concerns. It was because Serbia was refusing to enact the socio-economic reforms that the US wanted. Those are the reasons given by the highest level of the Clinton administration. It was not humanitarian in intent. We know what the rate of atrocities was after the bombing. The idea that it was humanitarian intervention is very self-serving propaganda.
In the post war period, there are two cases that at least begin to qualify. The interventions were not taken for that purpose but they did bring to an end huge atrocities. The two examples are the Indian invasion of Pakistan and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia which drove out the Pol Pot regime at the time when the atrocities were peaking.
They are not counted because they were not carried out by the US or Britain. The US was strongly opposed in both cases. In the Vietnamese invasion, the US and Britain turned at once to supporting Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The US imposed very harsh sanctions on Vietnam for terminating the Pol Pot regime. They endorsed the Chinese invasion to teach the Vietnamese a lesson for committing the crime of driving out Pol Pot. Britain and the US insisted that the Khmer Rouge, under the name the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, retained their seat in the UN. Obviously that intervention cannot enter history.
The US was so furious about the Indian invasion that it actually threatened war. It sent an aircarft carrier into Indian waters to warn them, and there were sanctions and so on. The reason was that the Indian invasion was spoiling a photo op that Henry Kissinger was planning. He planned to go through China secretly, through Pakistan, and then have a photo op of him being in China that would have been a step forward in US-China relations. That was spoiled by the Indian invasion of what is now Bangladesh, saving millions of lives.
Those are the two best candidates, but they are obviously not counted. It tells us a lot about ourselves.
[ENDS]
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