An anniversary worth noting is that of the creation of the International Criminal Court which came into existence on July 1, 2002, as a global tribunal representing the conscience of the world.
Although the ICC is not supported by the United States, China, Russia or India, it represents the strongest international effort ever made to hold to account the perpetrators of war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
The ICC, like the World Court is based in The Hague. I visited that somber chamber some years ago and remember that the Court was hearing a dispute involving Libya.
Today, the ICC is pressing charges against individuals from four African states, Uganda, Congo, the Central African Republic and Sudan. The president of that sad country, Omar al Bashir, has been charged with genocide over his government’s treatment of people in the Darfur region. So far, he’s defied the court and remains in office.
As Erna Paris explains in her immensely readable and profoundly important new book, The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America (Knopf Canada), the ICC came into existence despite multiple efforts by the United States to maim, marginalize, and even kill it before birth .
The American efforts failed. Spurred by the examples of the special tribunals that weighed crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, 108 states have become members, among them Canada.
Paris takes us inside the fateful sessions where delegates gather to discuss, and finally in a midnight session, approve the Rome Statute that launches the ICC. Initially, the U.S. under President Clinton supported the court. The regime of George Bush famously “unsigned” his predecessor’s signing of the pact.
Beyond that, Paris takes us with her as she interviews advocates and opponents, judges and prosecutors, and generals and politicians involved in these fateful discussions.
Ms. Paris is one of the few Canadians I can think of who is internationally recognized as an authority on global affairs. Previous books, notably Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, established her preeminence in a narrow field that includes such names as Margaret Macmillan, Joe Schlessinger and Gwynn Dyer.
Her historical vision is broad; she takes us back to ancient Greece where might vs right was first debated, and to 19th century Europe where the first international effort to control wartime behavior resulted in the Brussels Declaration of 1874. It prohibited military attacks on undefended towns or other civilian targets. Think of Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima!
But the core of the book is her examination, which she carries forward with evident sadness, of the insistent American opposition to the creation of the International Criminal Court.
John Bolton, who was George Bush’s Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, is fingered as the chief villain. He considers the ICC “fundamentally illegitimate.” It would bind countries that haven’t agreed to such constraint. More to the point, it could expose people like Henry Kissinger or Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defence secretary, to criminal charges.
Not all Americans support Bolton. Cherif Bassiouni, the noted Chicago law professor, believes that because the military is controlled by civilians, it is they who should be held accountable. But “civilians, for all practical purposes, are unaccountable … the President is the golden cow that nobody ever reaches.”
Nor is the U.S. military without conscience. Paris writes of Gary Solis, law professor at West Point, who on arrival there was appalled to discover that he would be the first person ever to teach a dedicated course on the Geneva Conventions to officer cadets.
On the people held in Guantanamo, where “enemy combatants” await trial by military commissions, she has Solis predicting that the U.S. will never gain a single conviction.
The world is not prepared, he says, “to see trial, conviction and punishment based upon the lowered standards of rights and procedures that occur in military commissions.”
But perhaps her most cheerless observation is reserved for Robert McNamara, the Kennedy era U.S. Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam war.
Her interview with McNamara leads Paris to conclude he is genuinely remorseful for that crime against humanity. She notes he is not subject to the ICC whose jurisdiction is limited to events after it came into force. “But deep in his bones he seems to believe that he ought to be.”
Not that this is an unhappy book. The ICC, Paris writes, is the “dream reborn” of those like Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Even though the sun climbs slow, the world at the start of the 21st century “stands poised to greet the morning light.”
UPDATE: Robert S. McNamara dies at 93, July 6, 2006
Filed under: Books, Politics | Tagged: Darfur, Erna Paris, genocide, International Criminal Court, Robert S. McNamara, Sun Climbs Slow, war crimes
An important book dealing with a most important issue of accountability…..the time is right,