Around 2,000 of them were butchered in thirty-six hours in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Phalangists effectively under Sharon’s control. Sharon had repeatedly insisted that the camps were full of terrorists. In reality, the victims were overwhelmingly unarmed civilians, the PLO’s fighters having been evacuated with an American-brokered promise of protection for their families.
Israel’s own Kahan Commission found Sharon ‘personally’ but ‘indirectly’ responsible for the massacre, though whether an independent court would be so generous is open to question.
Now Sharon’s return to power will put the good faith of supporters of an international justice system to the test. Their critics maintain that the new supranational doctrine of intervention and extra-territorial legality is a fraud, designed to give a spurious human rights legitimacy to big-power bullying of weaker states that threaten their authority or interests. War crimes or human rights violations committed by the major powers, or by Western allies in particular, they argue, will always be treated according to different standards and go unpunished.
The prospects are certainly not encouraging in the case of Israel, which has long been allowed by its Western sponsors to violate a string of UN Security Council resolutions, while other states in the region are subjected to lethal regimes of sanctions and bombing attacks for their transgressions.
Sharon’s most horrific crimes are more recent than Pinochet’s, and his responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila killings is better documented than, say, that of the indicted former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević for the comparable Srebrenica massacre. It will be objected that Sharon has been chosen in a democratic election and that pursuing him for eighteen-year-old crimes will do nothing to advance the chances of a peace settlement.
Such a settlement will become more likely once the majority of Israelis realise that Sharon’s hardline policies of repression will not deliver the security they crave, while sanctions seem more suitable for a state whose citizens have a say in policy, rather than for dictatorships where they have none.
Of course, no Western government is likely to lift a finger against Sharon, though human rights and pro-Palestinian groups are already gearing up to attempt a Pinochet-style legal action if he ventures abroad. There is little prospect even of some mark of disapproval, such as a Haider-style diplomatic protest or the suspension of arms sales called for by a group of Labour MPs. These might at least send Israeli voters the message that there are limits to external material support.
During the Kosovo war, Blair announced that his foreign intervention policy was based on a ‘subtle blend’ of self-interest and moral purpose. Given the reaction to Sharon’s election, that seems to boil down to moral purpose for dealing with enemies, but self-interest when it comes to friends.4
(9/2/01)
Iraq: Where the victims have no vote
It is a fair rule of thumb that the more important a political issue, the less likely it is to be discussed during a general election. That certainly applies to Britain’s 2001 campaign, where the Blair government’s zeal for bombing, occupying and generally interfering in other people’s countries – described by the former Tory prime minister Edward Heath as an attempt to resurrect a colonial system – has not even registered as a flicker on the election radar.
British soldiers and air crews have been shedding blood in the Gulf, the Balkans and West Africa on a scale unprecedented since the demise of empire. But these interventions merit no debate – perhaps because all the main parties support them, or because such issues are considered best not discussed in front of the electorate. The victims have no vote.
Nowhere has more blood been shed or more lives reduced to misery than in Iraq, where ten years after Saddam Hussein’s army was expelled from Kuwait, its twenty million people are still being punished by the British and American governments for the decisions of a man they did not elect and cannot peacefully remove. RAF and US air attacks on the unilaterally declared no-fly zones in Iraq have continued unabated, while politicians in Britain concentrate on the minutiae of marginal tax rates.
The decade-long sanctions siege of Iraq, effectively sustained by the US and Britain alone, has cut a horrific swathe through a country devastated by two cataclysmic wars and a legacy of chemical and depleted uranium weapons contamination. Unicef estimates that 500,000 Iraqi children have died from the effects of the blockade. They are still dying in their thousands every month, while the living standards of a once-developed country have been reduced to the level of Ethiopia.
Aware that they have lost the battle for international opinion over responsibility for this national calvary, Britain and the US have now come up with a plan for ‘smart sanctions’, which they claim will ease the embargo on civilian imports and decisively shift the blame for Iraqi suffering on to Saddam. That is the spin, at least. The reality is that the British scheme currently before the UN Security Council would actually make sanctions more effective, and prolong indefinitely Iraq’s subjection to a form of international trusteeship.
One reason why the allies, as the Blair and Bush governments like to call themselves, are so keen to act is that the existing sanctions are, mercifully, eroding fast. Smuggling, cash surcharges on contracts, unsanctioned preferential oil supplies to Iraq’s neighbours and flights in and out of Baghdad have all helped to ease conditions for ordinary Iraqis. Anglo-American smart sanctions would put a stop to most of that by forcing neighbouring states to police the unlicensed trade across Iraq’s borders. In return for this tightening of the vice, the British are proposing to restrict controls to military and ‘dual use’ goods – those with civilian and military applications.
But the obstruction of dual-use products is at the heart of the problem with the current sanctions. The secretive New York-based sanctions committee already rubber-stamps Iraqi imports of flour and rice. But it has blocked or vetoed more than $12 billion-worth of alleged dual-use contracts. Everything from chlorine and ambulances, vaccines and electrical goods to hoses, morphine and anaesthetics have been stopped, in every case by the British or US representative, on the grounds that they might have military uses.
The same will apply under smart sanctions, as will the arrangement by which Iraq’s oil income is controlled from outside, with a third of it used to pay reparations to cash-rich Kuwait and the cost of administering sanctions.
The pretext for maintaining and tightening the embargo is supposedly to prevent Iraq from developing new weapons of mass destruction and to force it to readmit the arms inspectors withdrawn two years ago. One of those inspectors, Scott Ritter, insists Iraq has long since been disarmed and no longer has the means to develop significant chemical and biological, let alone nuclear, weapons.
No other state in the region – notably nuclear-armed Israel, which daily violates a string of UN resolutions in its illegally occupied territories – is subjected to such punishment. The obvious way out of this inhuman and failed policy would be negotiation for the simultaneous lifting of sanctions and return of UN inspectors. That is unlikely to happen. Iraq has been singled out, not because of the brutality of its dictator, but because it cannot be trusted to toe the Western line in a strategically critical part of the world.5
(30/5/01)
Blair, Berlusconi and the heirs of Mussolini
The choice is not between New Labour and some imaginary, more radical Labour government, Tony Blair never tires of chiding critics from the heartlands, but between his administration and William Hague’s barking, slavering Tories. When it comes to this election, his point is unanswerable. Even in Scotland and Wales, where there are electorally credible challenges from Labour’s left – or in England, where the Liberal Democrats have adopted more progressive positions on some issues – only two parties have the remotest chance of forming a government next month.
The alternatives on offer are a party which, for all its policy outrages and grovelling to the rich and powerful, has brought