ICC DESERVES SUPPORT

Peacekeeping in Bosnia can go on without U.S. troops, which may be removed by the White House because the United States was not granted immunity from prosecution through the new International Criminal Court. The more important question is how Americans will contribute with military or humanitarian international support as long as the demand for immunity is demanded but not granted.

U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte was alone in votes last weekend for ending the current mission in Bosnia, with 13 of 15 Security Council members voting against its wishes and only Bulgaria abstaining. But the lone vote should have been expected: The U.N. Security Council has known formally since May that the United States would not support the ICC or agree to come under its authority. With the European Union scheduled to take over the Bosnian mission in December, it has had enough warning to speed up the transition. On Sunday, the United States agreed to a three-day extension of the mission, due to end today, to help sort out the transition, but the breakdown in international cooperation over this issue is was sharp and angry.

The United Nations has 14 other peacekeeping missions worldwide, and, before the terrorism war eventually is considered finished, certainly will have more. How the United States will participate in or influence policy for these missions becomes less clear and more complicated under the current standoff. For instance, the United States has yet to say it would remove its 3,100 soldiers from the NATO mission in Bosnia, one of two there, if it lacked a UN mandate, but Germany has said outright and others have suggested that they would not participate without the mandate.

Seventy-four nations have signed and ratified the ICC treaty, but none feel more strongly in support of it than those in Europe. This helps explain why the envoy from Britain, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, was angry enough at the U.S. decision to overcome the specialness of the relationship between his nation and this one and let his unhappiness show at the Security Council meeting. The French ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, was similarly unhappy with the United States but that was hardly surprising.

The purpose of the ICC is to address individual acts of genocide and egregious violations of human rights that now go unpunished. This is distinct from the Hague, which handles cases between states, not individuals. There are several examples in recent years when individuals have committed heinous crimes – in Cambodia in the 1970s, El Salvador in the 1980s, the Great Lakes Region of Africa in the 1990s – that have gone largely unpunished because of a lack of legal avenues to carry out trials, although such trials have existed in the case of Rwanda. Several safeguards have been put into the ICC treaty to protect soldiers from being improperly accused, but the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration earlier, is correct. The ICC carries some risk that spite will cause innocent soldiers to be targeted.

Given that presidents have been willing to risk the lives of these soldiers to keep the peace in troubled spots around the world, however, risking false charges in exchange for supporting a process for imprisoning war criminals and stopping larger conflicts should be acceptable. The alternatives of isolation and single-handed missions are worse than the risk the United States so fears.