A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  43. “NATO’s Crimes,” Spectator, March 11, 2000.

  44. U.S. credibility was also damaged by NATO’s overestimation of the damage it inflicted upon Serb forces and hardware. On May 23, 1999, President Clinton claimed that NATO had destroyed between one-third and one-half of Serb heavy weapons in Kosovo. When the war ended two weeks later, however, the Pentagon and NATO admitted that the real damage was no more than 7–10 percent, which amounted to 800 Serb heavy weapons, including 120 tanks. William Jefferson Clinton, “A Just and Necessary War,” New York Times, May 23, 1999, sec. 4, p. 17; Cohen, Defense Department news briefing, Federal News Service, June 10, 1999. Once inspectors gained access to the field and found no more than a few dozen charred skeletons of heavy weapons, the estimates sank further. Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, pp. 154–155. This drop-off is comparable to the discrepancy between original and final estimates of damage done to Iraqi weaponry during the Gulf War. See Thomas A. Keaney and Elliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, 1993), pp. 126–128.

  45. Foreign Press Center briefing with David Scheffer, Federal News Service, April 5, 1999; emphasis added.

  46. White House briefing, “News Conference with President Bill Clinton,” Federal News Service, June 25, 1999.

  47. Special State Department briefing, Federal News Service, April 9, 1999.

  48. State Department briefing, Federal News Service, April 19, 1999.

  49. Defense Department briefing, Federal News Service, May 7, 1999.

  50. State Department briefing, “Erasing History,” Federal News Service, May 10, 1999.

  51. Serge Halimi and Dominique Vidal, “Lessons of War: Media and Disinformation,” Le Monde diplomatique, March 2000, online.

  52. John Bolton, The World Today with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, November 10, 1999.

  53. UN press briefing by the prosecutor for the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, November 21, 2000. See also Christopher Hitchens, “Body Count in Kosovo,” Nation, June 11, 2001, and Michael Ignatieff, “Counting Bodies in Kosovo,” New York Times, November 21, 1999, sec. 1, p. 1.

  54. Anthony Lloyd, “Corpses Testify to State-Run Cover-Up of Kosovo Slaughter,” Times (London), August 20, 2001, p. 1.

  55. Hitchens, “Body Count in Kosovo,” p. 9.

  56. Dusan Stojanovic, “Officials Detail Milosevic Cover-Up Attempt,” Associated Press, July 28, 2001.

  57. UN Mission in Kosovo press release, Novermber, 10, 1999.

  Chapter 13, Lemkin’s Courtroom Legacy

  1. Robert H. Reid, “Milosevic Refuses to Enter Plea,” Associated Press, July 3, 2001.

  2. Marlise Simons, “Milosevic Calls Tribunal Unfair, Infantile and a ‘Farce,’” New York Times, October 31, 2001, p. A6.

  3. “Milosevic Reprimanded for TV Call,” CNN Online, August 24, 2001.

  4. The only prior arrest by U.S. soldiers had been made the previous January, when they had seized Goran Jelisic, the self-described “Serb Adolf.”

  5. Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 231.

  6. Bosnian Serb hard-line president Nikola Poplasen reacted angrily to Krstic’s arrest, claiming it had “embittered and upset” Serbs and would undermine implementation of the Dayton agreement. Poplasen’s regime had been so uncooperative all along, however, that his relations with NATO could hardly have gotten worse. Steven Erlanger, “Bosnian Serb General Is Arrested by Allied Force in Genocide Case,” New York Times, December 3, 1998, p. A1.

  7. Mark Harmon, opening statement at the trial of Radislav Krstic, March 13, 2000, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), p. 1.

  8. Ibid., pp. 11–12.

  9. ICTY press release, “Radislav Krstic Becomes the First Person to Be Convicted of Genocide at the ICTY and Is Sentenced to 46 Years Imprisonment,” August 2, 2001.

  10. Lemkin had lived to see an International Law Commission (ILC) draw up a statute for the permanent international criminal court mentioned in the genocide convention. Drafted in 1951 on the invitation of the General Assembly, however, this charter only gathered dust for the better part of four decades. In 1989 the assembly requested that the ILC “address the question of establishing an international criminal court.” But it was the war in Bosnia and the creation of the two ad hoc tribunals that energized this process.

  11. Margaret Thatcher, interview with David Frost, Frost on Sunday, TV-am, September 3, 1990.

  12. U.S. Department of State Dispatch 1, 8 (October 22, 1990), p. 205.

  13. Ibid., 1, 11 (November 12, 1990), p. 260.

  14. Speech of German Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa, September 27, 1991.

  15. Mirko Klarin, “Nuremberg Now!”, Borba, May 16, 1991 (online), cited in ICTY, The Path to the Hague: Selected Documents on the Origins of the ICTY (online).

  16. UN Security Council Resolution 771, August 13, 1992.

  17. Clifford Krauss, “U.S. Backs Away from Charge of Atrocities in Bosnia Camps,” New York Times, August 5, 1992, p. A12.

  18. Speech of German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel at London conference, August 26, 1992. Before the UN General Assembly in September 1992, Kinkel again spoke about setting up an international tribunal. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas also urged the creation of a court, and three ministers from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) were already working on a draft convention for the tribunal when Eagleburger made his speech, naming names.

  19. UN Security Council Resolution 780, October 6, 1992.

  20. Michael P. Scharf, Balkan Justice: The Story Behind the First International War Crimes Trial Since Nuremberg (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1997), p. 41.

  21. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 211.

  22. Arusha was deemed near enough to enable ready travel to and from Rwanda but not too near to seem like a politically biased institution that would dispense only victors’ (or in this case, victims’) justice.

  23. Andrew Purvis, “Colonel Apocalypse,” Time International, June 10, 1996. The UN would try only the ringleaders of genocide, and the Rwandan government would punish those lower-level culprits who acted on their command. This meant that those who followed orders would receive the death penalty, while those who gave them would earn a maximum life sentence, usually served in a European prison.

  24. Payam Akhavan, “The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: The Politics and Pragmatics of Punishment,” American Journal of International Law 90 (1996), pp. 501, 504–508.

  25. Purvis, “Colonel Apocalypse.”

  26. The measure held that “the policy of the United States [is] to support efforts to bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge for their crimes against humanity.” 22 U.S.C. 2656, part D, secs. 571–574, April 30, 1994.

  27. The SS files alone had filled six freight cars. Gary Bass, “A Look at . . . War Crimes and Punishment; It’s a Risky Business,” Washington Post, November 26, 2000, p. B3.

  28. Elizabeth Becker, “New Links in Khmer Rouge Chain of Death,” New York Times, July 16, 2001, p. A6.

  29. Nate Thayer, “Day of Reckoning,” Far Eastern Economic Review 160, 44 (October 30, 1997), p. 17.

  30. Bou Saroeun, Vong Sokheng, and Christine Chaumea, “Khmer Rouge Deny Killer Role,” Phnom Penh Post 10/15, July 20–August 2, 2001.

  31. Seth Mydans, “As Cambodia Prepares to Try Khmer Rouge Leaders for Massacres, They Deny Guilt,” New York Times, August 21, 2001, p. A9.

  32. Thomas Hammarberg, “How the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Was Agreed: Discussions Between the Cambodian Government and the UN,” part 1: March 1997–March 1999; part 2: March 1999–January 2001, published in Searching for the Truth, the magazine of the Cambodian Documentation Center, May 2001.

  33. Antonio Cassese, Speech Before the UN General Assembly, Novemb
er 7, 1995, UN Document no. A/50/PV.52.

  34. Letter from Jesse Helms to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, April 3, 2000.

  35. Krstic said that Mladic told him he would personally command the units that had arrived, which included a battalion of military police and an interior ministry unit.

  36. Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), “Krstic Accuses Mladic of Srebrenica Attack,” Tribunal Update 195, October 24, 2000.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Justice Robert H. Jackson, “Report to the President on Atrocities and War Crimes,” United States Department of State Bulletin, June 7, 1945.

  39. IWPR, “Srebrenica Massacre Denial—Defense Witnesses Refuse to Accept Massacres Took Place,” Tribunal Update 198, November 15, 2000.

  40. ICTY Transcript: Krstic (IT-98-33), June 22, 2000, p. 4462.

  41. IWPR, “Krstic ‘Feared’ Speaking out over Srebrenica,” Tribunal Update 196, October 31, 2000.

  42. Anthony Deutsch, “Accused Serb General Claims Cover Up,” Associated Press, October 25, 2000. The Serb public had still not come around to accepting that their soldiers committed the bulk of the atrocities in the Balkan wars. A July 2001 poll in Politika found that half the Serbian population admitted that Serbs committed war crimes. But of these, 45 percent still believed other nations had acted more inhumanely and 28 percent thought Serb crimes should be covered up. IWPR, “Regional Report: Serbia’s Faltering War Crime Prosecution,” Tribunal Update 234, September 12, 2001.

  43. Marlise Simons, “Trial Reopens Pain of 1995 Bosnian Massacre,” New York Times, November 7, 2000, p. A3.

  Conclusion

  1. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 27.

  2. ABC News This Week with Sam Donaldson, January 23, 2000.

  3. The Center for Peace in the Balkans, “Bin Laden’s Balkan Connections,” September 2001.

  4. Arthur Koestler, “The Nightmare That Is Reality,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1944, p. 5.

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