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 the end, unable to get all its way, the U.S. alongside China voted against the creation of the court.

The American generals had their antennae switched in the right direction. The human rights lobby does indeed have its tail up and this latest report by Amnesty- and a similar one six months ago by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch- has raised the stakes. Amnesty has said that those responsible for the bombings “must be brought to justice” and asked the UN criminal tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, a war crimes court, to investigate its allegations.

Standing at Nato’s doorway, it will not be long before Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and their like will be on the steps of the Pentagon itself. Amnesty is questioning the orthodoxys- even the liberal ones- of our age with a daring that it could not even have contemplated when it was founded forty years ago to campaign against the relatively narrow issue of political prisoners. In challenging Nato’s engagement in what, in the West, was a popular war with Serbia it has staked out what is being described as an extreme position. Doesn’t Amnesty realize that with the end of the Cold War the pursuit of human rights is now Nato’s cause too? Realists should board the new human rights enforcement train steered by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer! After Bosnia Kosovo. And after Kosovo El Timor. And after El Timor Sierra Leone. (We won’t mention Somalia or Rwanda to keep the arguement simpler.)

Published today is a long essay by Amnesty International’s Secretary-General, Pierre Sane, as a preface to its annual report, that is an eloquent and thoughtful rejoinder to the notion that human rights can be successfully pursued Nato’s way.

It begins with two questions: “Are invasion and bombardment by foreign forces justifiable in the name of human rights? And have external military interventions succeeded in winning respect for human rights?” Sane’s argument in a few lines is this: “Amnesty International has long refused to take a position on whether or not armed forces should be deployed in human rights crises. Instead we argue that human rights crises can, and should, be prevented. They are never inevitable. If government decisions to intervene are motivated by the quest for justice, why do they allow situations to deteriorate to such unspeakable injustice?”

Sane points to Yugoslavia. The Nato governments, he says, which bombed Belgrade are the same governments that were willing to deal with Slobodan Milosevic’s government during the break up of the original Yugoslavia and were unwilling to address repeated warnings about the growing human rights crisis in Kosovo. As long ago as 1993 Amnesty was arguing in public: “If action is not taken soon to break the cycle of unchecked abuses and escalating tensions in Kosovo, the world may again find itself staring impotently at a new conflagration.” This begs another question, argues Sane: if the motivation of governments is “peace”, as they often claim, why do they fuel conflicts by supplying arms or allowing their nationals to trade in arms? In the case of East Timor two of the major powers who argued for international intervention- the U.S. and the U.K.- were also the two major suppliers of arms to the Indonesian government, whose security forces were responsible for widespread and systematic violations of human rights in East Timor.

As for military intervention when it does come, the history of the last few years suggests it is a double edged sword. Failure is more likely than success. In Kosovo, writes Sane, “violence is being committed on a daily basis against Serbs, Romas and moderate Albanians. In December, the level of murder, abductions, violent attacks, intimidation and house burning were reported at a rate almost as high as June 1999 when Nato peacekeeping troops were first deployed”.

Sane’s argument returns to the necessity for prevention: A year before the genocide in Rwanda a UN special rapporteur warned of what was to come. Amnesty repeatedly exposed over years the Indonesian government’s gross violation of human rights. “We fear now that our pleas for action in other countries are similarly being downplayed. When some human rights catastrophe explodes, will we again be expected to see armed intervention as the only option?….Why should we be forced to choose between two types of failure when the successful course of action is known?”

Under Pierre Sane, Amnesty has become an organisation that dares to bite the hand that partly feeds it. Sane makes it clear both in this essay and in conversation he has little time for the hypocrisies and the double-thinking of the liberal West . “As an organisation”, Sane is said to have told his staff on taking office, “we have a lot of capital in the bank and we are going to use it.”

Nato and the Pentagon need to watch out. There will more of this to come. They have two choices. Either to fight back or to put their house in order. And part of the latter means signing up for the International Criminal Court.