How fair are international tribunals?

Dmitri Kosyrev, Vice-President, Russian Association on Foreign Policy, Moscow

Cambodia held parliamentary elections on Sunday, which may be seen as a local event. However, the following trial of the organizers of the 1975-1979 genocide campaign in Cambodia will have a global significance.

In the 20th century, no nation in the world suffered as much decimation at the hands of its own compatriots, on the same scale and with the same systematic character, as in Cambodia under Pol Pot. Neither Hitler, nor Stalin, despite the numerous victims of their atrocities, ever killed every fifth citizen of their countries.

That is exactly what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. The authorities killed according to social status, primarily killing business people and entrepreneurs, city dwellers in general, and educated people overall. Soldiers murdered people by hitting their heads with hoes because their bullets were too precious to waste.

The atrocities committed by "the Khmer Rouge" are monstrous; however, would the tribunal be fair?

To answer this question we should first decide who, in the final analysis, is responsible for Cambodia's tragedy?

The parties will probably include the U.S. officials who ordered carpet bombing of Cambodian territory in the beginning of the 1970's and later installed Marshall Lon Nol at the helm of power. No wonder that after his rule the population met Pol Pot as a liberator. However, there is nobody left in the United States from the former administrations to face the trial, except, perhaps, Henry Kissinger who is already under a lot of fire because of his involvement in the coup-d'etat in Chile and other "dirty" international affairs.

How can we prosecute those young aides of Mao Tsetung in China ("the gang of four"), who supplied Pol Pot with money and weapons and were arrested almost right after Mao's death in 1976? Apparently, only one of those is still alive.

The most puzzling dilemma, though, is what to do with ideological supporters of Pol Pot and his friends, who lived in France for a long time -- French leftist philosophers who welcomed both the "cultural revolution" in China and the "radical" social experiment in Cambodia. Indeed, to conduct such an experiment on the left bank of the Seine River would be a crime against humanity, but who cares about Cambodia? And what should be done with those philosophers -- simply chastise them? After all, they did not kill anybody.

On the other hand, it's important to know how the victims of genocide regard the importance of the tribunal.

The United Nations and Cambodian government have been negotiating the issue of the tribunal for almost 10 years. In this time, the majority of the population in Cambodia has maintained the opinion that the imposed trial would turn out to be a political farce, a sort of concession to foreigners in exchange for economic aid.

The major organizers of the genocide campaign, including Pol Pot, are dead, anyway. However, the executors of their orders are probably still alive and live somewhere locally -- in this regard Cambodian people have reached a consensus: We must forgive and forget. Such is the nature of the local culture and civilization, and it certainly has its logic.

Most probably, foreigners will force the Cambodians to persecute some minor murderers, for example, infamous butcher Ta Mok, and will leave with a sense of an accomplished "good deed", leaving local dwellers with a feeling of having been cheated. What really matters is that the European or American electorate will praise their own politicians for enforcing justice on some dumb-witted Asian people.

The crux of the matter here is the insatiable desire of ordinary people in the West, not even politicians, to export their own concepts of law and justice to the rest of the world. This is so characteristic of our "western" civilization. By the way, the clash of civilizations does not necessarily mean war. More often it happens when a simple housewife from Germany or New Zealand feels compassion for the sufferings of Cambodians shown on TV and decides that her government and the UN must literally stick happiness down Cambodian throats.

So far, the existing international order has been based (and is still based) on the concept of national sovereignty. In particular, this concept demands that a person can be tried only on the territory of the country where he or she committed a crime. That is because strangers cannot and should not try to understand what crime has been committed and how it must be punished or forgiven. Justice is intended for victims of crimes in the first place, and then it serves as a warning for potential criminals.

The tribunal in Cambodia reverses this concept, even though it is being held on the territory of that country and has an international status. There are worse cases, like Indonesia, for example.

In the United States, public circles demand that military personnel be tried for allegedly instigating mass murders on the eve of East Timor's independence in 1999.

For many Indonesians, on the contrary, the same military officers are heroes who tried to protect the Indonesian citizens from armed separatists that forcefully seized power in the country and for decades have been killing those who stood on their way to independence. Nevertheless, in 1999 international news agencies disagreed with Indonesians.

Whose truth will prevail in Jakarta in the end -- that of the local population or "an outlandish version"? What are going to be the consequences for this most populous Muslim country in the world? And what's going to happen with Serbs who endured the same ordeal in 1999, although their Timor is called Kosovo? It is not a rhetorical question as long as the European structures have already raised the issue of holding an International Tribunal on Chechnya. Russia is considered a prime candidate to be put in the dock.

Many analysts in Russia have commented on the recent attempts of Belgian courts to bring to justice some American soldiers, who committed crimes in Iraq, with a certain degree of malicious joy. However, imagine that Belgians, rather than Russians, could start prosecuting Col. Budanov or his commanding officers for their misdeeds in Chechnya.

With the same maliciousness we in Russia comment on actions of American diplomacy that has pacified Belgian justice system and now continues to twist the hands of other governments to gain immunity from International Court for American citizens. However, is it possible that the Americans could be right at least once in a while, and in the atmosphere of general jubilation over the destruction of sovereignty we should follow their example and show a little bit of legal conservatism?

The justice system based on sovereignty has existed for centuries; it has a lot of flaws, it certainly is not perfect, but it is a proven system that helped to create a balanced world no less successfully than nuclear weapons. The only alternative to this system is chaos.

However, each European or American citizen, bursting with desire to impose his or her model of justice all over the world, has been recently destroying this system with surprising enthusiasm and, therefore, has been planting the seeds of chaos when everybody has seemingly the right to judge everybody else's actions from a general standpoint, regardless of the specifics of various civilizations.