I See Red

Your old pals – James and Kato – caught up for a lovely evening of discussion about war crimes. The panel of 6 had been put together by the Australian Red Cross and featured luminaries such as:

• Graham Blewitt AM - Director of the Australian Nazi War Crimes Unit and Deputy Prosecutor for the ICTY.
• Justice David Anthony Hunt AO – NSW Supreme Court Judge, Judge on the ICTY, and the ICTR.

Some thoughts from the panel – and some from me.

Location

Where do you put a Tribunal? Outside the country eg. The Hague? Or inside eg. East Timor’s courts?

The ICTY was able to successfully interview rape victims as witnesses primarily because they were taken outside of their communities where their lives would have been made hell. Cf. Iraq where there has been intimidation and assassination.

Domestic courts can be desirable. Proximity to victims makes their verdicts more “meaningful”. However sometimes they are just the cheaper option. In East Timor a shortage of jurists, lack of funds and inability to extradite criminals from Indonesia meant that the shortcomings of the courts were patently apparent to the victims.

Cost

Trials are expensive. The ICTY cost $275 million per year. The ICC is more expensive again.

The “International Community” should pay because they provide a deterrent, which is good for everyone. In Macedonia, when military officers were briefed by the UN about the trials in the ICTY and told that its jurisdiction was continuing, there was a deterrent effect.

It’s a bargain compared to waging a military campaign or to allowing the cycle of violence to continue.

The US

A case against the US for high level bombing in Kosovo was not explored because it could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt – however this was the wrong test. It was enough to prove that there was a case to be answered.

Rumsfield has been indicted by a court in Germany.

Sharon has been indicted by a Belgian court.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs)

• Can process more people.
• They limit the scope of “permissible lies” – it becomes impossible to say atrocities did not happen.
• Often what is wanted by victims is that their pain is recognised rather than that the perpetrators are gaoled – example was West Papua. We should “listen to the victims.” (?)
• Make it easier to live together again as a society (?)
• Do not provide a deterrent for soldiers in other conflicts.
• The “amnesty” granted is a murky area of international law because the Geneva Conventions require states to prosecute war criminals.

Trials and TRCs

A study by Oxfam in East Timor suggested that people wanted violent crimes prosecuted, while the less serious crimes could go through a TRC. This sounded good on paper but the failure of the courts meant that minor criminals were doing penance while the major perpetrators were walking free.

The South African example is often used to show how giving amnesty works instead of trials. However of the 7000 people who applied for amnesty, 5000 were knocked back. So there was still lots of prosecution.

My Thoughts

Unfortunately the event was poorly moderated and as you can see the panelists did not really get stuck into any particular issue. I would have loved to see more discussion on whether TRCs can work with Trials, what makes up this “International Community” and what are the machinations required to get your conflict taken seriously enough to warrant the enormous bill that this type of action requires.

However the most fascinating question was simmering under the surface of the panel. There were those who were fixated on “listening to the victims” and working out what they wanted. In contrast to that approach there were those who seemed more enthusiastic about building a formidable international criminal deterrent. To me, this raised the moral quandary of a “greater good” and of ends justifying means.

It would be simple if the law was only concerned with victims. However (as one panelist argued) dealing with the past is a big part of creating a future for a country that has been torn by war. So doesn’t this mean that there a responsibility to the rest of the country and to those who would be caught up in fresh violence? What about victims in other conflicts who would stand a better chance if the rampaging military knew that impunity was not available?

What does Disco think about these questions?

Saddam to Hang

I am interested in comments made by Greens Senator Kerry Nettle who argues that the Australian government's failure to object to Saddam Hussein's death sentence will make it harder for it to object when Australians face a similar punishment overseas.

What are the real issues at stake here?

1. Are people who are against the death penalty for Saddam those who are against it in general? If you are pro-DP for Saddam, are you against it otherwise? Is there such a thing as a special case?
   
   
2. Is SH the same as Australian drug traffickers who are executed in parts of Asia? Is this a matter of degrees or is there no such thing?
   
   
3. Is the DP a good enough punishment? Should we instead, as Josh Lyman from the West Wing says, sit them in a room watching hours upon hours of home video footage of their victims, of their families forever?
   

Thoughts? Puns?

Mufti Day

What do we think about the recent comments regarding women's clothing and its relation to rape from Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly?

This cartoon by Leunig (not always a fan, but occasionally he comes up with some interesting ones) is interesting viz notions of entrapment in clothing in general.

A few thoughts...some from some friends who have also had this discussion.

1. That women's dress influences men's behaviour is not a new thing - Catholic school uniforms, nuns' habits, brethren scarves have all made statements about modesty and religion. But to make claims like Sheik's which assume that anything less than head to toe covering will lure men and trigger their hormones/lust seems seriously not only anachronistic but just silly. As my friend Alex pointed out, it also takes all control over the female aesthetic out of the hands of women, as it conflates beauty with sexiness, which is disempowering.
   
   
2. "Irene Khan made some interesting comments about this issue to the effect that it was a red herring precisely because the experience of women in countries such as Afghanistan under the Taliban made it clear that sexual violence occurs whether or not women are completely covered. They are still women. Men who wish to attack them still can. That wish does not seem to be strongly empirically linked to what those women are wearing."
   See: wikipedia entry
   
   
3. Or really, is the issue more broadly nothing to do with the fact that a contorvsersial Mufti has outrageous views, but that these same outrageous views* when expressed by others aren't given the same degree of public outrage and mortification? (e.g. the rape case in Italy (requires access) which claimed a women wearing jeans must have consented, as jeans are hard to take off )
   

Some fabulous puns that came out of the discussion:

• Am I a wolf in sheik's clothing?
• Is this the pot calling the mufti crap?
• My! You look sheik.