Public opinion controls UN tribunal agenda

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Ex-Yugoslavia's present day peace is the fruit, first and foremost, of the outside world's public opinion. From the day, five years ago, when the European Union sent in monitors in an attempt to calm the country's fratricidal war to the large scale, but still insufficient, UN deployment to the NATO occupation and the elections today it was always the force of world public opinion that kept the show on the road. The politicians knew if they walked away and let the murderers do their damndest they would face an aroused even wrathful public at home.

In the world of realpolitik public opinion is supposedly a tool to be manipulated. Yet, increasingly, to the world of instant television and equally instant public reaction the popular mood can quickly alter the politician's agenda.

There is an amusing but rather telling story of Woodrow Wilson, the idealistic, internationalist, president of the U.S. who, following World War I, appointed himself the chief U.S. delegate writing the Covenant of the League of Nations (the forerunner to the United Nations).

One of its provisions was that member states would abrogate all other treaty obligations inconsistent with those of the Covenant. The French delegate, a law professor, Ferdinand Larnaude, raised the question who was going to decide when this was so. According to Dorothy Jones in her seminal work, "Code of Peace," Wilson answered "with the calm assurance of one who has seen the future." "That decision," he said, "will lie with the court of public opinion."

Dropping his voice, Larnaude turned to a fellow French delegate seated beside him, "tell me, my friend, am I at the peace conference or in a mad house?"

Despite this and every jibe Wilson never faltered in his belief that peace and justice were the goals of the new order and that the League was the vehicle for this. Public opinion, he reasoned, was there to keep this end in view and to maintain pressure on the politicians if they should stray or falter. Tragically for Wilson he was over-optimistic. The U.S. Senate never gave him the two-thirds majority necessary for America to accede to the League and public opinion both in America and Europe was never assertive enough to give the League the teeth it needed to avert World War II.

The post-1946 world in modest ways is better formed. Despite America's current political and financial backsliding it is an active member of the UN. Although less interested than it was in foreign affairs during the Cold War, the U.S. is still a long way from being isolationist, by any historical measure of the word. On international crimes--Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia--President Bill Clinton does respond to public opinion, particularly when the media decides to be engaged by an issue. Indeed, America has been rudely teased for putting so much emphasis on public opinion within Bosnia, insisting on going ahead with the recent elections, despite much evidence that the Bosnians are not ready for democracy and despite the danger, now all too apparent, of ballot stuffing.

But Washington was right to take the risk. Public opinion always deserves to be taken seriously. The less it is manipulated and trusted, the more it follows its better instincts. Likewise the more noble and idealistic the political leadership the more those instincts have a chance of rising to the surface. Democracy is a rational gamble that the good will eventually outdid the base. All of which throws into relief what to do about the international War Crimes Tribunal? On the surface it would seem that an honest response to the outrage in public opinion over the raping, torture and murder during this war must be to allow the Tribunal to get on with its appointed task. Yet this is not happening. The Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic and his general, Ratko Mladic, although indicted by the court, walk around free men, unhindered by NATO soldiers who run across them at regular intervals.

Has the sting been pulled on what could have become a remarkable institution and what has been pushed as a necessity since the days of Nuremberg?

But the parallel with the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials doesn't hold water--they were trials of war criminals carried out by conquerors, not mediators. The truth is there are no laws while war is in process. War, indeed, is the breakdown of law.

The irony of an ex-Yugoslavia is that now that fighting has stopped and the rule of law is slowly returning, it is the "war- criminals" who are helping the peace process. In fact, if they were removed from the scene the hand on the peace tiller might not be so steady.

I would judge that outside public opinion is prepared to go along with this, but only for as long as peace is sustained.

The supporters of perfection feel aggrieved that the International War Crimes Tribunal is being sidelined. But they should look on it this way: if it didn't exist with its sword of Damocles hanging there maybe Karadzic and Mladic, not to mention Slobodan Milosevic and Franco Tudjman, wouldn't be behaving with the restraint they are. They know they're in the court of world public opinion and that, belatedly, seems to be giving them pause.