Foreword by Noam Chomsky
Introduction
CONSTRUCTIVE
GENOCIDES
1.
The Iraq
Sanctions-Regime Killings
2.
The Iraq
Invasion-Occupation
NEFARIOUS
GENOCIDES
1.
The Darfur Wars and
Killings
2.
Bosnia and
Herzegovina
3.
Kosovo
4.
Rwanda and the
Democratic Republic of Congo
SOME
BENIGN BLOODBATHS
1.
Israel: Sabra and
Shatila
2.
Israel: The Gaza
Invasion of December 2008–January 2009
3.
Croatia’s Operation
Storm
4.
Dasht-e-Leili
(Afghanistan)
5.
Turkey’s Kurds vs.
Iraq’s Kurds
6.
Indonesia and East
Timor—Liquiçá
7.
El Salvador and
Guatemala
MYTHICAL
BLOODBATHS
Račak
Concluding Note
Notes
Index
Foreword by Noam Chomsky
Perhaps the most shattering lesson from this powerful
inquiry is that the end of the Cold War opened the way to an era of virtual Holocaust
denial. As the authors put it, more temperately, “[d]uring the past several
decades, the word ‘genocide’ has increased in frequency of use and recklessness
of application, so much so that the crime of the 20th Century for which the
term originally was coined often appears debased.” Current usage, they show, is
an insult to the memory of victims of the Nazis.
It may be useful, however, to recall that the
practices are deeply rooted in prevailing intellectual culture, so much so that
they will not be easy to eradicate. We can see this by considering the most
unambiguous cases of genocide and cases in which the word has been debased,
those in which the crime is acknowledged by the perpetrators, and passed over
as insignificant or even denied in retrospect by the beneficiaries, right to
the present.
Settler colonialism, commonly the most vicious form
of imperial conquest, provides striking illustrations. The English colonists in
North America had no doubts about what they were doing. Revolutionary War hero
General Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War in the newly liberated American
colonies, described “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts
of the Union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct
of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru,” which would have been no small
achievement. In his later years, President John Quincy Adams recognized the
fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with
such merciless and perfidious cruelty, [to be] among the heinous sins of this
nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement.”
Contemporary commentators see the matter differently.
The prominent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis hails Adams as the grand
strategist who laid the foundations for the Bush Doctrine that “expansion is
the path to security.” Plausibly, and with evident appreciation, Gaddis takes
the doctrine to be routinely applicable throughout the history of the “infant
empire,” as George Washington termed the new Republic. Gaddis passes in silence
over Adams’s gory contributions to the “heinous sins of this nation” as he
established the doctrine, along with the doctrine of executive war in violation
of the Constitution, in a famous State paper justifying the conquest of Florida
on utterly fraudulent pretexts of self-defense. The conquest was part of
Adams’s project of “removing or eliminating native Americans from the
southeast,” in the words of William Earl Weeks, the leading historian of the
massacre, who provides a lurid account of the “exhibition of murder and
plunder” targeting Indians and runaway slaves.
To mention another example, in the June 11, 2009
issue of one the world’s leading liberal intellectual journals, The New York Review
of Books, political analyst Russell Baker records what he learned from the work
of the “heroic historian” Edmund Morgan: namely, that Columbus and the early
explorers “found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and
hunting people.... In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical
jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million
inhabitants.” The calculation is off by many tens of millions, and the
“vastness” included advanced civilizations, but no matter. The exercise of
“genocide denial with a vengeance” merits little notice, presumably because it
is so unremarkable and in a good cause. (1)
Imperial conquest illustrates another thesis that
Herman and Peterson explore: what Obama’s UN Ambassador Susan Rice calls the
“emerging international norm that recognizes the ‘responsibility to protect’
innocent civilians facing death on a mass scale.” It is worth bearing in mind
that the norm is not “emerging,” but rather venerable, and has consistently
been a guiding imperial doctrine, invoked to justify the resort to violence when
other pretexts are lacking.
The Spanish conquistadors in the early sixteenth
century were careful to instruct the natives that if you “acknowledge the Church
as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world,” then we “shall receive you in
all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives, and your children, and
your lands, free without servitude,” and even “award you many privileges and
exemptions and will grant you many benefits,” fulfilling our responsibility to
protect, in current terminology. But those who are protected also have responsibilities,
the Spanish humanitarians sternly advised: “if you do not [meet your
obligations in this way, then] we shall powerfully enter into your country, and
shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can ... and we
protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault,
and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with
us”—words paraphrased by some Islamic extremist groups in their warnings to
Western infidels, doubtless also regarding them as forthcoming and humane.
The Requerimiento of the Spanish conquerors had a
counterpart a century later among the English colonists settling North America.
To this day, the United States is reverentially admired, at home at least, as
“a city on a hill” or, as Ronald Reagan preferred, “a shining city on a hill.”
In April 2009, British historian Geoffrey Hodgson was admonished by liberal New
York Times columnist Roger Cohen for describing the United States as “just one
great, but imperfect, country among others.” Hodgson’s error, Cohen explained,
is his failure to realize that unlike other states, “America was born as an
idea,” as a “city on a hill,” an “inspirational notion” that resides “deep in
the American psyche.” Its crimes are merely unfortunate lapses that do not
tarnish the essential nobility of America’s “transcendent purpose,” to borrow the
phrase of the eminent scholar Hans Morgenthau, one of the founders of the
hard-headed realist school of international relations theory, writing on “the
purpose of America.”
Like the Spanish, the English colonists were guided
by Rice’s “emerging humanitarian norm.” The inspirational phrase “city on a hill”
was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, outlining the glorious future of a new
nation “ordained by God.” A year earlier, his Massachusetts Bay Colony received
its charter from the King of England and established its Great Seal. The Seal
depicts an Indian holding a spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, and
pleading with the colonists to “[c]ome over and help us.” The charter states that
conversion of the population—rescuing them from their bitter pagan fate—was
“the principal end of this plantation.” The English colonists too were on a
humane mission as they extirpated and exterminated the natives—for their own
good, their successors explained. During his second term as president a century
ago, Theodore Roosevelt explained to a group of white missionaries that “[t]he
expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four
centuries ... has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples
already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place,” despite
what Africans, native Americans, Filipinos, and other beneficiaries might mistakenly
believe.
The vulgar politicization of the concept of genocide,
and the “emerging international norm” of humanitarian intervention, appear to
be products of the fading of the Cold War, which removed the standard pretexts
for intervention while leaving intact the institutional and ideological
framework for its regular practice during those years. It is not surprising,
then, that in the post-Cold War era, as Herman and Peterson observe, “just as
the guardians of ‘international justice’ have yet to find a single crime committed
by a great white northern power against people of color that crosses their
threshold of gravity, so too all of the fine talk about the ‘responsibility to
protect’ and the ‘end of impunity’ has never once been extended to the victims
of these same powers, no matter how egregious the crimes.”
That outcome was forecast sixty years ago in one of
the earliest decisions of the World Court, which ruled unanimously in 1949, in
the Corfu Channel case, that “[t]he Court can only regard the alleged right of
intervention as the manifestation of a policy of force, such as has, in the
past, given rise to most serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the
defects in international organization, find a place in international law ... ;
from the nature of things, [intervention] would be reserved for the most powerful
states, and might easily lead to perverting the administration of justice
itself.” Intervention is like the Mississippi River, international law
specialist Richard Falk once observed: it flows from North to South.
Much the same conclusion was drawn in 2004 by a
high-level Panel convened by the United Nations to consider the newly
fashionable concept of “responsibility to protect,” invoked by the United
States and its allies to justify military intervention without Security Council
authorization. The Panel rejected this thesis, adopting the view of the South
Summit—representing the traditional victims—which had condemned “the so-called
‘right’ of humanitarian intervention” in the wake of the NATO bombing of Serbia.
The UN panel reiterated the conditions of the UN Charter that force can be
deployed only when authorized by the Security Council, or under Article 51, in
defense against armed attack until the Security Council acts. Article 51 is
generally interpreted to allow the use of force when “the necessity for action
is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation,”
in Daniel Webster’s classic phrase. The Panel concluded that “Article 51 needs
neither extension nor restriction of its long-understood scope, ... it should
be neither rewritten nor reinterpreted.” The Panel added that “[f]or those
impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of
perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of
nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the
legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively
endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.”
Allowing all to have the rights of Western power
would evidently be unthinkable. Thus when Vice-President Joe Biden says (July
6, 2009) that Israel has the “sovereign right” to attack Iran, and that the
United States cannot hinder any such action (with U.S. equipment) because
Washington “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot
do,” he does not mean to imply that Iran has the “sovereign right” to attack
Israel if it takes seriously the regular threats of aggression by the reigning nuclear
power of the region, while the United States stands by quietly. It is always
necessary to recognize the maxim of Thucydides: “Right, as the world goes, is
only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and
the weak suffer what they must.” This is the fundamental operative principle of
international order.
The traditional imperial powers are alone in adopting
Rice’s “emerging international norm” in the conventional form that she doubtless
has in mind. Again, that should hardly come as much of a surprise. As for the
term “genocide,” perhaps the most honorable course would be to expunge it from
the vocabulary until the day, if it ever comes, when honesty and integrity can
become an “emerging norm.”
Introduction
A remarkable degree of continuity stretches across
the many decades of bribes and threats, economic sanctions, subversion, terrorism,
aggression, and occupation ordered-up by the policymaking elite of the United
States. But no less impressive is the continuity that can be observed in the
ways these policies are understood by this elite, and by the establishment
intellectuals and news media that report about them daily and reflect on or ignore
their consequences.
With both its major rivals and allies in Europe and
Asia devastated during the Second World War, the United States, suffering no
direct damage at all, emerged from the war with a uniquely dominant economic,
political, and military position in world affairs—”50% of the world’s wealth
but only 6.3% of its population,” in the words of the famous postwar
balance-sheet drafted by George Kennan in early 1948 on behalf of the State Department’s
Policy Planning Staff. (2) U.S. leaders recognized exactly what this
unprecedented advantage meant, and set-out to design policies that would
“permit [the United States] to maintain this position of disparity,”
aggressively pursuing U.S. advantages by all available means. The U.S.
“military-industrial complex” mentioned by Eisenhower in January 1961, now well
into its seventh decade and accounting for roughly one-out-of-every-two dollars
spent on military-related purposes worldwide, and the U.S. “empire of bases”
that encircles much of the globe, including the moveable bases its aircraft
carrier task forces provide and the nuclear and conventional force capabilities
of the ever-expanding NATO bloc, reflect and support this effort to deepen and
expand the advantages attained by the United States during the war. (3)
To maintain the global structure of inequality, and
in the process serve the interests of its transnational corporations anxious to
enlarge their business abroad, the United States had to confront numerous
nationalist upheavals by peoples in former colonial areas who sought
independence, self-determination, and better lives. In the pursuit of this
counter-revolutionary end, the United States regularly aligned with local
military and ex-colonial comprador elites to contain and, wherever possible, to
resist and roll-back the kind of threat referred to by one National Security Council
assessment as “an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the
low living standards of the masses.” (4)
This end and this perception of “threat” accounts for
the U.S. support of a string of dictatorships in Thailand, South Vietnam, Indonesia,
the Philippines, South Africa, and Nigeria, to name a few, and a large number
of semi-fascist “national security states” in Latin America. As has long been
observed, while these states were torture-prone and deeply anti-democratic, they
improved the “climate of investment” by keeping their majorities fearful, atomized,
and without political recourse. (5) If local dictators failed, direct U.S.
military intervention frequently followed—and, as in the cases of Vietnam and
more recently Afghanistan and Iraq, sometimes with monumentally destructive
human and material consequences. By one estimate, the United States carried out
“extremely serious” military interventions in at least twenty-nine different
countries from 1945 to 2009. (6)
Of course, the publicly-expressed rationale for this
regressive, no-holds-barred foreign policy was never stated to be improving the
climate for investment, much less to silence indigenous demands for higher
standards of living for the Third World’s masses—though the opening-up of
markets abroad was an objective that also fit ideological principles. Instead,
the prevailing rhetoric of officials, establishment intellectuals, and the media
was always “national security” and the closely-linked “Soviet threat” of the
Cold War system of propaganda, against which peoples, countries, and whole
continents needed the kind of special protection that only the United States
could provide. (7) This “threat to our whole security in the form of the men in
the Kremlin” (Kennan) was regularly invoked even where ludicrously inapplicable,
as in the case of the overthrow of the democratic governments of Mohammad
Mosaddeq by a CIA coup in Iran in 1953 and of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala by a
U.S.-organized mercenary invasion in 1954. But this alleged “threat” was helpful
in these and many other cases, and very much an institutionalized reflex of the
postwar era until the start of the 1990s; it added to the routine demonization
of any U.S. target and the widespread belief in this country of its
“exceptionalism,” its moral superiority, and its proper immunity from
international law. The result was the normalization of anything the U.S.
government chose to do in the realm of foreign policy, regardless of its
brutality and criminality. Hence, also, the near-limitless capacity of the
media and intellectual elite as well as the general public to swallow
U.S.-directed or supported terrorism, aggression, crimes against humanity, and
even genocide straight through the present day.
Back in the early 1970s, Noam Chomsky and one of the
present authors (Herman) wrote a short study of mass killings, centering on the
monumental mass killing that the United States was still carrying out in
Vietnam: Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda
(CRV). (8) Beyond the bloodbaths perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam
(1954–1973), the other theaters of mass atrocity that they surveyed were the
Philippines (1898–1973), Thailand (1946–1973), Indonesia (1965–1969), Cambodia (1965–1973),
East Pakistan (1971), and Burundi (1972). The authors took it as an obvious and
readily demonstrable truth that the United States, “as a result of its dominant
position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, [had] been the most
important single instigator, administrator and moral and material sustainer of
serious bloodbaths in the years that followed the Second World War.” (9) They
also took it as obvious and demonstrable that U.S. officials, with the help of
the media and establishment intellectuals, would engage in “atrocities
management,” producing a stream of propaganda to divert attention away from
U.S.-organized and approved violence, and onto that of its enemies. Thus there
would be good and bad bloodbaths—those that should be ignored and those that should
be focused-on with indignation.
Accordingly, CRV used as its framework of analysis
four categories of bloodbaths: “Constructive,” “Benign,” “Nefarious,” and “Mythical”
(a sub-category under Nefarious). Those bloodbaths carried out by the United
States itself or that serve immediate and major U.S. interests are
Constructive; those carried out by allies or clients are Benign; and those
carried out by U.S. target states are Nefarious and (sometimes) Mythical.
Obviously, the use of these terms was partly ironic and partly serious.
Nevertheless, CRV meant to capture something essential but otherwise unstated
about the politics of bloodbaths and the infamy that attaches to only some of
them: How bloodbaths are evaluated by the U.S. political establishment and its
media, depending on who is responsible for carrying them out.
For that establishment, including the media, the U.S.
invasion of Vietnam was never described as “aggression,” nor was it ever described
or denounced as involving a gigantic massacre, or series of massacres, or a
bloodbath, or genocide, despite the killing of possibly three million or more
people, with a bombing and chemical warfare program that also left very large
numbers crippled and genetically damaged, along with a ravaged land. The only
time a “bloodbath”-threat was invoked was in considering what might happen to
collaborators of the U.S. occupation forces, in the case of an eventual U.S.
withdrawal. (These days, similar warnings are frequently invoked to counter any
suggestion of possible U.S. withdrawals from Afghanistan or Iraq. Only we and
our spunky allies in Kabul and Baghdad stand between millions of innocent lives
and the Islamo-fascists of the Taliban and al Qaeda.) Vietnamese resistance
killings were harshly and indignantly denounced as “terrorism” and more. The
media role in protecting the real bloodbath, including their swallowing the
MIA-POW gambit, (10) was all that a propaganda system could ask. And the response
of the “international community” to these massive killings was extremely muted.
One small indication of the Vietnam war-era media
treatment of the subject is that the little 1973 book on bloodbaths was
actually never published. Officials of the parent corporation, the major media
firm Warner Publishing, saw the book just prior to publication, greatly
disliked it, and caused it to be suppressed (and the publishing subsidiary
Warner Modular was soon dissolved). The contents saw life, however, when the
authors published a muchexpanded version in 1979 under the title The Washington
Connection and Third World Fascism. (11)
The framework used in those earlier works is eerily
applicable to the present. The leading mainstream experts on “genocide“ and mass-atrocity
crimes today still carefully exclude from consideration the U.S. attacks on
Indochina, as well as the 1965–1966 Indonesian massacres within that
country—just as they exclude the deaths and destruction that have followed from
the United States’ and NATO-bloc’s aggressive wars of the past decade.
The recipient of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in the
General Nonfiction category, Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell”: America
and the Age of Genocide, devotes only one sentence to Indonesia, ignoring
entirely the mass killings of 1965-1966, mentioning only its
invasion-occupation of East Timor in 1975 and after. Power writes that
Indonesia killed “between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians” in East Timor; she
then adds, falsely, that the “United States looked away,” when in fact the
United States and its British and Australian allies supplied both the weapons and
diplomatic cover for Indonesia’s bloody campaign without interruption for
nearly a quarter-century (1975–1999). Power’s cursory treatment of the U.S.
wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and the massive U.S. killings in both countries
turns up only in the chapter devoted to life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,
where she notes in passing that “U.S. B-52 raids killed tens of thousands of
civilians” and “indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime.” (12) Notice
that in Power’s hands, the “monstrous regime” is the one that arose after the
other regime’s bombers “killed tens of thousands of civilians”—but no negative adjectives
are applied to the regime that sent along those bombers from the other side of
the planet.
Roy Gutman and David Rieff’s Crimes of War has no
entry for Vietnam or Indonesia; and under none of this encyclopedia-like volume’s
seven entries for Act of War, Aggression, Crimes against Peace, Crimes against
Humanity, Genocide, Systematic Rape, and War Crimes is there a single example
drawn from the U.S. war against Vietnam or Indonesia’s war against its peasant
population. Instead, under the entry for Cambodia, Sydney Schanberg, the former
New York Times reporter and protagonist in the Hollywood film The Killing
Fields, informs readers of the “great irony” resulting from the 1970 U.S.
overthrow of Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk and the years of massive bombings and
eventual U.S. ground invasion—not the death and destruction they entailed, but
only the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a “motley collection of ineffectual guerrilla
bands totaling at most three thousand to five thousand men” when the United
States started to bomb Cambodia in the 1960s, but transformed “into the
murderous force of seventy thousand to 100,000 that swept into Phnom Penh five
years later....” (13)
Similarly, Aryeh Neier’s book War Crimes says little
about the U.S. aggression against Vietnam or Cambodia and nothing about Indonesia’s
killing fields—Neier treats Vietnam simply as the stage upon which the My Lai
massacre of 1968 was eventually played out. (14) International law barrister
and former appellate judge with the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone Geoffrey Robertson’s
assessment of the “Thirty Inglorious Years” that followed the adoption of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948),
and the four Geneva Conventions (1949) refers to the twenty-year Vietnam war as
nothing more than “America’s lamentable mistake [sic (15)] to shore up the vicious
Catholic dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem”— though like Neier, Robertson mentions that a
“few firefight atrocities” such as My Lai “were brought to account.” (16)
Vietnam and Indonesia were also ignored by CNN chief
foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour in her late 2008 documentary Scream
Bloody Murder, an examination of “genocide around the world.” But Amanpour’s
“world” was limited to politically acceptable cases, Nefarious
genocides—Germany under the Nazis, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Iraq under Saddam
Hussein, Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995, Rwanda in 1994, and Darfur
this decade. (17) Vietnam and Indonesia were also never mentioned as cases in
point in the December 2008 report by the U.S.-based Genocide Prevention Task
Force, Preventing Genocide. (18)
In short, the vast killing fields of Vietnam and
Indonesia, which belonged to the category of Constructive bloodbaths in 1973,
remain firmly in that category today; and the other bloodbath categories apply
now with the same political bias and rigor, as we describe below. As the U.S.
government and its proxy regimes in Saigon and Jakarta were the perpetrators of
these mass-atrocity crimes, the victims were rarely acknowledged, the crimes
against them rarely punished (with only low-level personnel brought to book in
well-publicized cases like My Lai), and the most serious crimes of all—the U.S.
aggressions against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the U.S. genocide against the
South of Vietnam, and the Indonesian genocides against Indonesians in 1965–1966,
and the East Timorese from 1975 on—remain outside the ambit of Western
humanitarian concern and the reach of Western-enforced “international justice.”
This highly politicized usage even has a humorous
tinge—as we now supposedly live in an age of high sensitivity to human rights
abuses, when a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) civilian populations against
acts of “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing”
has been proclaimed by the unanimous assent of the UN General Assembly (19) and
when the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been empowered to “put an end
to impunity for the perpetrators” of “atrocities that deeply shock the
conscience of humanity,” in the words of the Preamble to the Rome Statute that
created the Court. (20)
In an amazing “end of impunity” set of coincidences,
it turns out that all fourteen of the ICC’s indictments through mid-2009 had
been issued against black Africans from three countries (the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Uganda, and the Sudan (21)), while carefully excluding
Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, perhaps the most prolific
tandem of killers to rule on the African continent during the current era, but
highly-valued clients of the West. Indeed, Kagame especially is an adored figure
throughout much of the West, feted as a great liberator and statesman on his
many visits to North America, while at home “he plays host to visiting members
of the global—and particularly the American—power elite,” in the words of the
liberal New Yorker magazine, his guests including Bill Clinton, Pastor Rick
Warren, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, and Harvard Business School’s Michael
Porter, “all friends of Kagame and members of his kitchen cabinet of advisers.”
(22) Kagame also appeared as a guest on Amanpour’s Scream Bloody Murder
program, where he was treated graciously.
It is also notable that the ICC’s statute, like the
rules governing the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
as well as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), excludes from
its jurisdiction the crime of aggression. At Nuremberg, however, this was
judged to be “not only an international crime” but the “supreme international
crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole.” (23) Human rights groups such as Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch (HRW) also exclude aggression as a proper area for their
inquiries. Defending what it called its official policy of “neutrality” on questions
of war and peace as the United States and the United Kingdom prepared to launch
their March 2003 aggression against Iraq, HRW explained that it “does not make
judgments about the decision whether to go to war” and “does not support or
oppose the threatened war with Iraq. We do not opine on whether the dangers to
civilians in Iraq and neighboring countries of launching a war are greater or
lesser than the dangers to U.S. or allied civilians—or, ultimately, the Iraqi people—of
not launching one. We make no comment on the intense debate surrounding the
legality of President George Bush’s proposed doctrine of ‘pre-emptive
self-defense’ or the need for U.N. Security Council approval of a war.” (24)
Surely this pretense of “neutrality” results because
the United States wants itself and its principal client to be free to commit
the supreme international crime and therefore the mass-atrocity crimes that
follow from it, which they have done often and for many years, and with
complete impunity. The adaptation of “international justice” to this principle
of exclusion—along with its acceptance by establishment media and
intellectuals—tells us clearly that the system is nicely adjusted to the needs
of the powerful.
Both in its statute and its practices, the ICC has been
no better than the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Like them, the
ICC practices selective investigation, selective prosecution— and, on the other
side of the aisle, selective impunity.
The history of great power crimes against the peace,
crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide shows the
centrality of racism to the imperial project. The powerful, the people at the
center of this project, have always tended to be white European or North
American, their victims darker. The conquest of the Western Hemisphere and the
wiping-out of its indigenous peoples were carried out over many decades, with very
modest opposition from within the morally enlightened Christian world. The
African slave trade resulted in millions of deaths in the initial capture and
transatlantic crossing, with a cruel degradation for the survivors. The steady
massacres and subjugation of black Africans within Africa itself rested on “an unquestioning
belief in the innate superiority of the white race, ... the very bedrock of
imperial attitudes,” essential to making the business of mass slaughter
“morally acceptable,” John Ellis writes. “At best, the Europeans regarded those
they slaughtered with little more than amused contempt.” (25) This dynamic has always
been accompanied by a process of projection, whereby the victims of slaughter
and dispossession are depicted as “merciless Indian savages” (The Declaration
of Independence) by the racist savages whose superior weapons, greed, and
ruthlessness gave them the ability to conquer, destroy, and exterminate.
The dominant institutions today may be more complex
than five hundred or five thousand years ago, but, at bottom, they work no
differently than have their predecessors throughout the ages. Great aggressors
project their ugliest traits onto their victims (the “terrorists,” the
“militants,” and the religious “fascists” and “ethnic cleansers” of the
twenty-four-hour news day), even as they kill halfway around the world in the
name of the Homeland. Demonization of the real victims and atrocities
management remain as important as ever and keep the citizens of the imperial
powers properly misinformed and supportive of bigtime atrocities. The path from
the “White Man’s Burden” to the regimes of selective “human rights” and
“international justice” has been a lot more direct than its current-day
travelers like to believe. Western “liberals” follow the same flags as do their
rightwing counterparts; (26) and when handed the same bloody portfolio but with
a new label that reads “Change We Can Believe In,” often outgun them as well. (27)
Thus President Barack Obama’s UN Ambassador, Susan E.
Rice, has long been an “advocate of ‘dramatic action’ against genocide” and
“mass killings,” the New York Times reported. Like so many of her
contemporaries, Rice believes there is an “emerging international norm that
recognizes the ‘responsibility to protect’ innocent civilians facing death on a
mass scale and whose governments cannot or will not protect them”—and “Never,”
she adds, “is the international responsibility to protect more compelling than
in cases of genocide.” But as with the rest of the U.S. policymaking elite, it
is uncontested for Rice that this alleged norm works in one direction only:
From Washington toward the rest of the world, with the United States the chief
lawmaker, enforcer, judge, and jury. “[T]he international community has a
responsibility to protect civilian populations from violations of international
humanitarian law when states are unwilling or unable to do so,” Rice told the
Security Council in her inaugural address in late January 2009. Singling out “5
million deaths” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the rebel Lord’s
Resistance Army in Uganda which “has for many years terrorized civilian populations,”
and the “genocide in Darfur,” Rice went on to say that the “United States is
steadfast in its commitment to safeguard human rights and end violations of
international humanitarian law, both in conjunction with the United Nations,
and through our other efforts throughout the world.” (28)
Notice that Rice’s catalogue of R2P-worthy
populations in Central Africa made no mention of the prolific body counts that the
U.S. clients Museveni and Kagame have left in their wakes, and who since 1996
have largely carved-up the DRC between them, helping to cause a death toll more
than fifteen-times the scale of the “genocide in Darfur.” (See “Rwanda and the Democratic
Republic of Congo,” below. Also our “Concluding Note.”) Nor, needless to say,
did Rice show the slightest recognition of her own government’s commitment to
violating international humanitarian law and the UN Charter, and the mass killings
at which it excels—the international community’s alleged “responsibility to
protect civilian populations” simply does not extend to the victims of the
government in which Rice serves.
Consider how Iraq, one of the major theaters of
mass-atrocity crimes over the last three decades, is made to fit into the
current R2P doctrine. Expressing a view that is standard among the R2P advocates,
the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect maintains that
the U.S.–U.K. invasion of Iraq could not have been justified on “humanitarian”
grounds. Although “gross human rights violations occurred in Iraq in the 1980s
and 1990s, these crimes were not occurring, nor likely to happen, at the time of
the 2003 military intervention.” For this reason, the invasion “failed to meet
the [guiding R2P] criteria legitimizing the use of military intervention.” (29)
We find this argument remarkable, both for what it
takes into consideration and what it leaves out. Notice that in the judgment of
this Coalition, the relevant question is whether the government of Iraq had
been committing “gross human rights violations ... at the time of the 2003
military intervention.” Left unasked is whether the United States and Britain
had been responsible for gross human rights violations during the years they
enforced the “sanctions of mass destruction” (1990–2003), whether they were on
the verge of committing even more egregious human rights violations by invading
Iraq (ca. 2002–early 2003), and whether they did in fact commit gross human
rights violations from March 19–20, 2003 on, including a death-toll that may
top one million Iraqis, with millions more driven from their homes. (See “The Iraq
Invasion-Occupation,” below.) Thus in this global acid-test for R2P in the
first decade of the 21st Century, these R2P advocates can freely debate the
need for the U.S.–U.K. invasion to protect Iraq’s population against the Iraqi
regime. But neither these nor any other R2P advocate can even raise the
question of the need for a military intervention to protect Iraq’s population against
the U.S.–U.K. invaders. The United States and its allies simply could not kill
a sufficiently large number of foreign nationals for R2P and ICC enthusiasts
and spokespersons to suggest that R2P and the ICC be invoked to stop them.
What this means is that advocacy on behalf of victims
by R2P and ICC campaigners and spokespersons depends on whom their tormentors
are: If victims of the government of the Sudan, the Lord’s Resistance Army in
Uganda, or certain nongovernmental armed groups operating in the Democratic
Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, then yes, they are worthy
of attention, their suffering matters, and the U.S. ambassador is ready to
denounce their tormentors before the world; but if victims of the Ugandan
People’s Defense Forces or the Rwandan Patriotic Front, then no, they fall
within the vast cohort of victims unworthy of our attention, and merit at best
a passing mention. Even more striking, what this does not mean is advocacy on behalf
of victims within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or the U.S. war-zones
of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and beyond— theaters where the responsibility
for mass killings falls closer to home, and where the responsibility to protect
these victims would entail protecting them against Rice’s own government above
all.
On July 23, 2009, the Nicaraguan Catholic priest and
then-President of the UN General Assembly Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann hosted the
first of a three-day “Thematic Dialogue” at the United Nations devoted to the
“responsibility to protect” doctrine. (30) The list of presenters invited to
address the General Assembly included Noam Chomsky of the United States and Belgium’s
Jean Bricmont, (31) two serious critics of R2P, as well as Australia’s Gareth
Evans.
Perhaps no single individual has done more to raise
the profile of R2P and to place it on the UN’s agenda than Evans. He is the author
of a 2008 book on R2P, (32) serves as the co-Chair of the International
Advisory Board of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect at City
University of New York, was co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty, which produced the 2001 report The Responsibility To
Protect (33) that helped bring this phrase into common usage, and is a past
president of the International Crisis Group.
But before all of this, Evans served as the Foreign
Minister of Australia (1988–1996). It was while performing in this role that he
was instrumental to Australia’s completion of the 1989 Timor Gap Oil Treaty
with Indonesia that granted Australian firms the right to explore and drill in
the oil-rich “Indonesian province of East Timor,” in the Treaty’s terms. With
this Treaty, Evans placed Australia squarely in that rare camp of states that
recognized Indonesia’s illegal conquest of East Timorese territory by force in 1975—despite
some 200,000 deaths in East Timor as a “result of the Indonesian invasion and
occupation,” roughly a “third of the population, or proportionately more than
were killed in Cambodia under Pol Pot.” (34)
At a news conference following their presentations
before the General Assembly, a UN reporter asked Gareth Evans to explain the “guidelines”
that R2P advocates will observe before they recommend military intervention,
the ultimate stage of R2P action. “How can you possibly come to an agreement on
the language to use so that you can apply [R2P] without it still being abused?”
the reporter wondered. “How do you define the worst possible crimes?”
The R2P doctrine “defines itself,” Evans replied, “in
the sense that genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic
cleansing are all inherently conscience-shocking, and by their very nature of a
scale that demands a response, whether preventive or reactive....”
“It’s really impossible to be precise about numbers
here,” Evans continued. “In some cases you’re fearing scores-of-thou-sands,
hundreds-of-thousands, or even millions of casualties....” But, he added, “In
other cases the numbers are much smaller. We remember starkly the horror of
Srebrenica and there you’re talking about seven or eight-thousand people as
compared with numbers in the millions. Was Račak with its forty-five victims in
Kosovo in ‘99 sufficient to trigger the response that was triggered by the
international community?”
“The short point is don’t misplay the numbers game,
calibrating the extent of one’s outrage by reference to whether it’s X or Y numbers,”
Evans concluded. “I take the view that once you cross a certain threshold,
you’re in the realm of just conscience-shocking catastrophe which demands a
response one way or the other.... There’s no cookie-cutter approach, I’m
afraid, you can adopt to any of this stuff.”
“There is a way to calibrate reaction,” Noam Chomsky
interrupted. “If it’s a crime of somebody else, particularly an enemy, then
we’re utterly outraged. If it’s our own crime, either comparable or worse,
either it’s suppressed or denied. That works with almost 100 percent
precision.” (35)
In fact, the “cookie-cutter approach” is displayed
dramatically by Gareth Evans himself, who singles out Račak and Srebrenica, assaulted
by Serb armies, as situations demanding a response — but not East Timor,
invaded and occupied by Indonesia, or the Gaza Strip, assaulted and starved by
Israel, or whole countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, with their vulnerable
populations under attack by the United States and its allies. (36)
We find that Evans’ “cookie-cutter” is the standard
establishment approach, with choices regularly made that have nothing to do
with crossing certain thresholds of scale, much less with whether events are
inherently conscience-shocking. Instead, the distinction turns on who does what
to whom—and where does power lie?
Once again, we are back to the difference between Constructive,
Nefarious, Benign, and Mythical bloodbaths. Let us examine some of them by
category in more detail.
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