The UN Mission in Bosnia and the International Criminal Court

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The UN Mission in Bosnia and the International Criminal Court

Workers Threaten Court Action against Monopoly Food Chain

Letter to the Editor:
British and European Pension Schemes in Crisis

The UN Security Council agreed on Wednesday (July 3) to extend the mandate of the UN mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH) until July 15. The decision came hours before an effective three-day extension was due to expire and amid continuing disagreement over a US demand that American peacekeepers be placed beyond the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court (ICC). Washington has expressed concerns over the risk of "politicised prosecutions" of US peacekeepers before the ICC, whose jurisdiction the US does not accept.

"It was clear that we weren't going to be able to reach agreement on a resolution regarding the International Criminal Court by midnight, [so] we took the decision to adopt the extension of the Bosnia mandate," said John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the UN.

This second brief extension in four days came after Council members rejected two compromise US proposals regarding troop immunity, and after a letter from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Had the mandate not been renewed, the Council would have been forced to order the withdrawal of UNMIBH and its 1,500-member police training force. It would also have had to remove its approval for the 18,000-strong NATO-led stabilisation force.

Under the new US proposal, based on Article 16 of the ICC establishing statute, peacekeepers from any country that has not yet ratified the Rome Treaty would be granted a 12-month immunity from prosecution. After that, the court would be able to pursue troops suspected of war crimes, only if the Security Council first approves the measure. Since the five permanent Council members – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States – have the power to veto any Council decision, American troops would be all but untouchable.

In his letter to Powell, the Secretary General stressed that the US proposal would turn Article 16 into "a blanket resolution" that would be automatically renewed every 12 months. The proposal would "force States that have ratified the Rome Statute to accept a resolution that literally amends the treaty", Annan said.

In the course of the dispute, Washington threatened to close all UN peacekeeping missions one by one if its demands were not met.

Seeking to allay US concerns about the possibility of frivolous and politically motivated prosecutions of American soldiers by the ICC, Annan wrote: "I can state confidently that no peacekeeper or any other mission personnel have been anywhere near the crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC." He also called on Washington not to put the entire UN peacekeeping system at stake because of a "highly improbable" threat to its troops.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador who heads the Security Council this month, said Annan's letter was among "a number of elements in the minds of a majority of members of the Council which led them to believe that further time on this question would be necessary". He said the consultations would resume next week.

A public debate is also expected to take place next week, following a call from Canada's ambassador, Paul Heinbecker, for a public meeting to allow Council non-members to have their say.

At its emergency session on Wednesday, the Council discussed several options, including another short-term extension of UNMIBH's mandate, allowing the current mandate to expire without any action, as well as the possible adoption of a resolution calling for an early transfer of the UN police force's duties to the EU, which is scheduled to take over on January 1. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was quoted as saying that the EU is "in a position to accelerate the procedures if necessary", but hoped that "an agreement can be found ... so that a vacuum is not created".

These events underline the double standards of the US administration on international bodies and the prosecution of war criminals. The US demands that all such bodies be under its control and serve its hegemonic interests. It will not allow uniform standards, because it acts as if it should be above any such standards of democracy and justice, pursuing its self-serving aims wherever it pleases and demanding that all submit to its dictate. It attempts to use the United Nations itself in this fashion, attempting to manoeuvre and bully so that its interests win out, and refusing to follow its obligations. It was instrumental in setting up the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in which, rather than Bush, Blair or NATO leaders being put on trial for the criminal aggression, Slobodan Milosevic has been singled out accused of war crimes. Now, as the International Criminal Court began its work on July 1, having refused to ratify the Rome Statute, the US is demanding exemption from its jurisdiction.

The issue of sovereignty is also being used by the US administration in a two-faced manner. The US is the worst transgressor of the sovereignty of nations and peoples, yet when it comes to the ICC it is hypocritically using this issue to refuse to put its name to the Court's ratification. Only if it could manipulate such a Court would it be happy with it. There are certainly issues of international law which need to be taken account of with the International Criminal Court, as the politically motivated trial of Milosevic makes clear, so that the big powers are not able unilaterally to indict leaders of states they choose to label as "rogue", "dangerous" or "terrorist". But the fact that the US wishes to act with impunity, and apply selective and inconsistent standards to international justice, and escape from its jurisdiction of the Court, has set it at loggerheads with the UN over the ICC. Furthermore, "terrorism" as such is not included in the list of war crimes. It might be noted in passing that Israel voted against the Rome Statute because it objected to the classification as a war crime of the "transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory".

The fact that it is the participation of the US in the UN "peacekeeping" operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina which has proved the concrete sticking point for the United States itself speaks volumes for the conduct of these troops if the US is worried that they might be subject to prosecution by the ICC. It further indicates that the US courts would not be prepared themselves to entertain that its troops might be guilty of acts of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. The claim of the US that such indictments might be politically motivated is a sick joke, given the record of the US in acts of aggression around the world in which countless crimes have been committed, given the administration's politically motivated pursuit of whom it considers "war criminals", and given its role in backing war criminals such as Pinochet and Sharon.

It is also significant to note that, while the British government has ratified the Rome Statute setting up the ICC, and distanced itself from the US over its failure to accept the court's jurisdiction, nevertheless it is the case that, as The Independent reported, British troops serving in Afghanistan received immunity from prosecution in the Court. Furthermore, Downing Street also distanced itself from the remarks of Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, criticising the US.

The Judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal stated that "crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced". In the final analysis, it is incumbent on the world's people to adjudicate on such crimes, uphold the rule of law and punish the guilty. The working class and people of any country must first and foremost hold their leaders to account. That the US is set against such accountability shows that it is the biggest flouter of the rule of law and has raised criminality to state policy.

Food retailer, The Big Food Group, which owns Iceland, is facing legal action by its workers after scrapping its final pension scheme.

BFG are saying that the scheme is too expensive, and see the move as a massive cost-cutting exercise by slashing what amounts to a huge lump out of its wage bill. Its aim is to maximise its profits. Over 900 employees are at present affected.

Workers are rightly saying that this is a breach of contract and are demanding that their future livelihood in retirement is guaranteed as well as for future members of the pension scheme.

The move by the company follows others such as BT, Abbey National and Marks and Spencer, who have shut their final pension schemes too.

Workers face the prospect of a big battle against the anti-social offensive, and demand that not only the right to a livelihood be recognised but that it include the issue of a decent standard of living in old age, as is their due.

Recent moves by employers to close down pension schemes based on the firm paying their retired employees a proportion of their final salaries, stems from their recognition that the long-worshiped stock market cannot be the basis of generating stable pension-funds.

While the stock market was producing unusually bumper returns in the 1980s/1990s, companies had cut back on their payments into these funds. The Tories boasted that Britain, with its increasingly stock-market based pensions, was better prepared for the paying of future pensions than anyone else in Europe. However, this was based on a house of cards – a stock-market boom and was little better than a lie.

Euro-sceptic Tories even went so far as to suggest that Europe would have to raid British pension funds to pay their destitute continental pensioners. Meanwhile the European establishment told British pensioners that their continental counterparts were better paid, and being further in the EU would have them share in those benefits.

The reality is that both European and Anglo-Saxon pension schemes are now in deep trouble. When the history of our era finally comes to be written, it is not improbable that it will be concluded that during the era of the Cold War, a couple of generations of pensioners were really handsomely provided for by historical standards, but that this was an exceptional era in European history rather than part of any steady economic progress among the G8 countries. An aristocracy of labour had to be accommodated then to safeguard the "western" "way of life".

What we have recently seen in the EU is an attempt to foist the Anglo-Saxon (shares-based) pension provision onto the working peoples of Europe. The leaders of Europe hope that they can get 1980s and 1990s rates of return to replace the Social Insurance Schemes that everybody copied from Germany, and which have become hugely expensive and which the establishment want to run down. However, this is now a fanciful hope.

Europe's leaders hope that in bringing in the stock market they can then avoid being directly responsible for the pension fiasco when the crunch comes. But they have probably left it too late to pull the stock market "con" on their people in the way it was done in Britain.

The need to provide for the retired – who are one of the most active politically
parts of the population – could change the main western societies dramatically. In the EU it could yet force the dismantling of central mechanisms of the Euro. In Britain, the generation, some of whom voted for Thatcher and the sale of council homes and cheap mortgages, could yet be the generation that votes for the democratic reform of our public finances so that they do not have to sell off the homes – that they have now paid off – to pay for their old age. Any democratic reform of our public finances will be seriously handicapped by our further financial entanglement in the Euro.

(signed)