U.S. sued in Belgian court for war crimes in Iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,959442,00.html

Let's hear it for Belgium

An attempt to try Tommy Franks for war crimes in a Belgian court has
outraged the US

George Monbiot
Tuesday May 20, 2003
The Guardian

Belgium is becoming an interesting country. In the course of a week,
it has managed to upset both liberal opinion in Europe - by granting
the far-right Vlaams Blok 18 parliamentary seats - and illiberal
opinion in the US. On Wednesday, a human rights lawyer filed a case
with the federal prosecutors whose purpose is to arraign Thomas
Franks, the commander of the American troops in Iraq, for crimes
against humanity. This may be the only judicial means, anywhere on
earth, of holding the US government to account for its actions.

The case has been filed in Belgium, on behalf of 17 Iraqis and two
Jordanians, because Belgium has a law permitting foreigners to be
tried for war crimes, irrespective of where they were committed. The
suit has little chance of success, for the law was hastily amended by
the government at the beginning of this month. But the fact that the
plaintiffs had no choice but to seek redress in Belgium speaks volumes
about the realities of Tony Blair's vision for a world order led by
the US, built on democracy and justice.

Franks appears to have a case to answer. The charges fall into four
categories: the use of cluster bombs; the killing of civilians by
other means; attacks on the infrastructure essential for public
health; and the failure to prevent the looting of hospitals. There is
plenty of supporting evidence.

US forces dropped around 1,500 cluster bombs from the air and fired an
unknown quantity from artillery pieces. British troops fired
2,100. Each contained several hundred bomblets, which fragment into
shrapnel. Between 200 and 400 Iraqi civilians were killed by them
during the war. Others, mostly children, continue to killed by those
bomblets which failed to explode when they hit the ground. The effects
of their deployment in residential areas were both predictable and
predicted. This suggests that their use there breached protocol II to
the Geneva conventions, which prohibits "violence to the life, health
and physical or mental well-being" of non-combatants.

On several occasions, US troops appear to have opened fire on unarmed
civilians. In Nassiriya, they shot at any vehicle that approached
their positions. In one night alone they killed 12 civilians. On a
bridge on the outskirts of Baghdad they shot 15 in two days. Last
month, US troops fired on peaceful demonstrators in Mosul, killing
seven, and in Falluja, killing 13 and injuring 75. All these actions
appear to offend the fourth convention.

The armed forces also deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure,
bombing the electricity lines upon which water treatment plants
depended, with the result that cholera and dysentery have
spread. Protocol II prohibits troops from attacking "objects
indispensable to the survival of the civilian population such as
... drinking water installations and supplies".

The fourth convention also insists that an occupying power is
responsible for "ensuring and maintaining ... the medical and hospital
establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied
territory". Yet when the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was
asked why his troops had failed to prevent the looting of public
buildings, he replied: "Stuff happens. Free people are free to make
mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." Many hospitals remain
closed or desperately under-supplied.  On several occasions US
soldiers acted on orders to fire at Iraqi ambulances, killing or
wounding their occupants. They shot the medical crews which came to
retrieve the dead and wounded at the demonstration in Falluja. The
Geneva conventions suggest that these are straightforward war crimes:
"Medical units and transports shall be respected and protected at all
times and shall not be the object of attack."

The armed forces of the US, in other words, appear to have taken short
cuts while prosecuting their war with Iraq. Some of these may have
permitted them to conclude their war more swiftly, but at the expense
of the civilian population. Repeatedly, in some cases systematically,
US soldiers appear to have broken the laws of war.

We should not be surprised to learn that the US government has
responded to the suit with outrage. The state department has warned
Belgium that it will punish nations which permit their laws to be used
for "political ends". The Belgian government hasn't waited to discover
what this means.  It has amended the law and denounced the lawyer who
filed the case.

The Bush government's response would doubtless be explained by its
apologists as a measure of its insistence upon and respect for
national sovereignty. But while the US forbids other nations to
proscribe the actions of its citizens, it also insists that its own
laws should apply abroad. The foreign sovereignty immunities act, for
example, permits the US courts to prosecute foreigners for harming
commercial interests in the US, even if they are breaking no laws
within their own countries. The Helms-Burton Act allows the courts in
America to confiscate the property of foreign companies which do
business with Cuba. The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act instructs the
government to punish foreign firms investing in the oil or gas sectors
in those countries. The message these laws send is this:  you can't
prosecute us, but we can prosecute you.

Of course, the sensible means of resolving legal disputes between
nations is the use of impartial, multinational tribunals, such as the
international criminal court in the Hague. But impartial legislation
is precisely what the US government will not contemplate. When the ICC
treaty was being negotiated, the US demanded that its troops should be
exempt from prosecution, and the UN security council gave it what it
wanted. The US also helped to ensure that the court's writ runs only
in the nations which have ratified the treaty. Its soldiers in Iraq
would thus have been exempt in any case, as Saddam Hussein's
government was one of seven which voted against the formation of the
court in 1998. The others were China, Israel, Libya, Qatar, Yemen and
the US. This is the company the American government keeps when it
comes to international law.

To ensure that there was not the slightest possibility that his
servicemen need fear the rule of law, George W Bush signed a new piece
of extra-territorial legislation last year, which permits the US "to
use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release" of
US citizens being tried in the court. This appears to include the
invasion of the capital of the Netherlands.

All this serves to illustrate the grand mistake Tony Blair is
making. The empire he claims to influence entertains no interest in
his moral posturing. Its vision of justice between nations is the
judicial oubliette of Guantanamo Bay. The idea that it might be
subject to the international rule of law, and therefore belong to a
world order in which other nations can participate, is as unthinkable
in Washington as a six-month public holiday. If Blair does not
understand this, he has missed the entire point of US foreign
policy. If he does understand it, he has misled us as to the purpose
of his own diplomacy. The US government does not respect the law
between nations. It is the law.


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