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Why did the concept of ‘international conflict’ matter so much to The Hague Tribunal?
Under its Charter, the UN has no power to intervene militarily in the affairs of a Sovereign State unless an international conflict of some kind is involved This was crucial in Yugoslavia because all the conflicts were quite clearly civil wars. This meant that the UN, NATO and the main world superpower, the United States, had no power to become involved other than in a purely humanitarian way.
But the UN did become involved. How did they justify this?
They didn’t. Instead, they took advantage of overwhelming public concern – inflamed by sensationalist coverage in western media – to pass their involvement off as exclusively humanitarian. This worked well, but gradually some awkward problems began to emerge.
What were they?
As it was always obvious that the Yugoslav conflicts were civil wars which had not spread over the borders of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, politicians, journalists and military men instinctively used the expression ‘civil war’ on occasions far too numerous to mention. This really gave the game away.
Did this put The Hague Tribunal under pressure?
Yes – and they were clearly very worried about it, especially when people began to question the claims of a huge humanitarian crisis. It was these claims that had persuaded many members of the UN Security Council to (illegally) approve the creation of the ICTY.
Was the claim that the wars in Yugoslavia were international, not national, defensible?
No. As Canadian lawyer Christopher Black (who had served as a defence lawyer at the ICTY): “(Chapter VII) of the UN Charter has always been interpreted to mean and was meant to mean a threat to international peace not national peace. The members of the Security Council recognized this and so had to redefine a national problem as an international one”.
Why wasn’t the ICTY taken to task about this?
It seems no member state was prepared to challenge the will of the USA.
But surely if the ICTY was an illegal court, this means that the UN and the nations – principally the USA – which created and funded the Tribunal were guilty of gross illegality and a monumental fraud?
Yes.