U.S. afraid of facing responsibility

Katerina Labetskaya and Andrei Zlobin, RIA Novosti, Moscow

Washington has clearly showed the world that it intends to dictate the rules of the game. The lesson was particularly vivid because it concerned humanitarian operations and supremacy of global human law over national law, which humankind learned to regard as unshakeable foundations of the post-Cold War world order.

The U.S. ambassador in the United Nations vetoed a routine prolongation of the mandate of the peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In fact, it is an ultimatum: the U.S. will boycott all peacekeeping operations unless the U.S. military are granted immunity from persecution by the International Criminal Court. The ICC, designed as a symbol of the triumph of the ideology of human rights, will deal with private individuals accused of genocide and crimes against humanity (special tribunals, such as the Rwanda and Yugoslavia ones, were created for this purpose in the past).

The U.S. never liked the idea of signing the statute of the new organisation. It was in December 2000, a few days before the deadline, that the departing president Bill Clinton approved the document. Conservatively minded Republicans see it as a time bomb and a revenge on President Bush. In May George Bush, who believes that U.S. citizens guilty of any crimes should be tried only in the U.S., recalled his predecessor's signature.

The Americans fear that their peacekeepers would be persecuted by the new court for political reasons, for example, for using depleted-uranium weapons in Iraq and Kosovo or altitude bombing in Afghanistan.

Washington is not happy with Europe's striving to create a world according to the EU, where rules and laws dominate over military might. The U.S. threatened not to take part in peacekeeping missions at all and to stop financing them (25 percent of the peacekeeping budget). The U.S. Senate has already approved a law on punishing countries that collaborate with the ICC.

Britain and France are protesting against the pressure mounted by the U.S. and an open confrontation of close allies in the UN Security Council may engender problems that will surface during the creation of future counter-terror coalitions.

Anyway, Europeans will have to prove now that they can deal with peacekeeping tasks on their continent without whimsy Americans.