June 2000

London – It sometimes takes a lot of faith to believe it, but most of Africa is going slowly in the right direction. Once again the pessimists have been confounded. The run up to last weekend’s parliamentary election in Zimbabwe seemed to be African despotism at its worst with President Robert Mugabe blatantly calling on his supporters to “axe” opposition activists. But the heroism of the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and his supporters paid off. Although they did not win, they secured a handsome vote that gives them a great deal of leverage in the new parliament to argue not just for political reform but for economic change too. Mr Tsvangirai is now well placed to topple Mr Mugabe in the presidential election in two year’s time. There may not be the political “renaissance” that presidents Bill Clinton and Thabo Mbeki once spoke of. There are too many wars tearing up...

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By Chris Black Lawyer, Toronto Private justice replacing public justice The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for alleged war crimes raises important questions about the impartiality and, ultimately, the purpose of the International Criminal Tribunal. For centuries, the independence of judicial bodies has been considered one of the fundamental precepts of the quest for justice. As Lord Hewart stated in 1924, it is “…of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” It has also been said that there is nothing more important than the public administration of justice. But in the case of the International Criminal Tribunal a compelling argument can be made that private justice has replaced public justice, that even the appearance of fundamental justice has been replaced by an open contempt for justice. It is clear that from the beginning American, British, French and German interests...

LONDON- Amnesty International’s blast last week against the legitimacy of the Nato bombing of Serbia in a report that the New York Times said “has infuriated Nato leaders”, perhaps produced an unintended result. It confirmed to the Pentagon that it was right to oppose U.S. participation in an International Criminal Court whose reach on the prosecution of war crimes could stretch right inside the American military. For a whole year the joint chiefs of staff campaigned against the wish of their commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, who earlier had made it clear he favoured the establishment of such a court. They won the battle and the U.S. delegation at the UN conference in Rome two summers ago, when the Court’s statutes were written, was mandated to seek wrecking clauses that, in effect, would have drawn a cordon sanitaire around the U.S. military, making future prosecutions, however outrageous the alleged war crime, impossible. In...

LONDON – Endless confrontation can be endlessly counterproductive. There is no conclusive evidence that isolating or cornering a state succeeds in moderating its behaviour. Engagement is the only way, short of war, to produce results that move nations out of their entrenched positions. This may seem to many of my readers a controversial statement. Of course it is. But it is my political credo. And the best example I can give to sustain it is coming to the boil right now- on the Korean peninsula. On June 12th South Korea’s ex-political prisoner and human rights activist and now democratically elected president, Kim Dae Jung, will meet his opposite number Kim Jong Il, president of North Korea, who inherited his position from his notorious father Kim Il Sung, the communist warlord who initiated the Korean War 50 years ago. For this much of the credit must go to President Bill Clinton. There...

Bertrand Russell’s “Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare” was first published in 1959, in an effort “to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war”. Nuclear confrontation had already stimulated a race towards ever deadlier weapons, and a new and more precarious balance of power. Public concern was growing. Russell’s views changed in the years following Hiroshima, and were to change again, as the arms race soared away into hitherto unimagined destructive capacities. Inevitably, Russell’s writing about the bomb was dominated by the fact of the Cold War. Fear of Communism ranged the United States and its European allies into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. A Eastern alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, emerged shortly afterwards. Fear of Communism did not only stimulate military co-ordination: for a time, it also promoted economic co-operation, and the ascendancy of what is now thought of as the Keynesian world order. These were...