White House Blasts Kosovo Inquiry
By JEROME SOCOLOVSKY .c The Associated Press
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - An internal Yugoslav tribunal report on NATO's bombing campaign in Kosovo is testing the limits of international justice - and Washington's patience.
The report looks into allegations that the U.S.-dominated military alliance violated international treaties on the laws of war in its 78-day bombing campaign last spring, aimed at halting a Yugoslav offensive against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
The allegations, presented to chief U.N. prosecutor Carla Del Ponte by a group of Western legal experts and Russian lawmakers, list cases in which scores of civilians were killed by NATO bombs.
They include the strike against a bridge as a passenger train was crossing it, the bombing of a refugee convoy near Djakovica, and the targeting of the Serbian television building in Belgrade.
``We went to her in November and gave her three thick volumes of evidence of flagrant violations of international law against 68 leaders in the respective NATO countries,'' Michael Mandel, a law professor at Toronto's York University, said Monday.
Mandel added that officials thought the NATO leaders were as guilty as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been indicted by the U.N. court for war crimes in Kosovo.
Authorities say many ethnic Albanians were killed by Serb forces during Milosevic's 18-month crackdown against separatists in Kosovo. NATO's bombing campaign forced the Serb troops to withdraw this spring.
The Yugoslav tribunal, set up in 1993 by the Security Council, has jurisdiction over any atrocity committed since the outbreak of hostilities in the Balkans in the early 1990s. Although the court cannot prosecute nations or international organizations, it can bring individuals before its judicial panels.
Any action by the Yugoslav tribunal against NATO would be highly controversial, largely because of the crucial role the alliance has played in arresting Serb, Croat and Muslim suspects wanted by prosecutors for atrocities in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
NATO spokesman Lee McClenny, however, suggested that the alliance was not concerned.
``NATO personnel went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we complied with the laws of war in carrying out the Kosovo campaign,'' McClenny said Monday from NATO headquarters in Belgium. ``I'm sure that any investigation will bear that assessment completely.''
White House spokesman Jim Fallin, however, issued a stern warning to the tribunal last week, calling the idea of investigating NATO's conduct ``completely unjustified.''
He said NATO was exempt from scrutiny because it ``fully followed the laws of armed conflict in training, targeting and operations'' and ``undertook extraordinary efforts to minimize collateral damage,'' meaning civilian deaths.
The United States has long objected to having its troops or officers be accountable to anyone but their own military brass, a stance that has isolated the United States in its opposition to the creation of a permanent international war crimes tribunal.
For her part, Del Ponte denied that a formal investigation of NATO was under way, though she acknowledged her staff had looked into the allegations after her spokesman revealed the existence of the report.
But Del Ponte, a former Swiss prosecutor renowned for her crackdown on Swiss banks' laundering of foreign mob money, is coming under pressure to assert the tribunal's independence in the face of charges of bias from across the political and ethnic divides in the Balkans.
``She's in a tight spot,'' said Frits Kalshoven, a former head of the U.N. commission whose 1993 report on atrocities in Bosnia formed the foundation for the tribunal.
``It is very dangerous for her not to pay attention, to simply discard such requests because they come from the wrong side, politically speaking. Her mandate is not to be political.''
Kalshoven dismissed the claim that NATO's alleged violations can be equated to the massacres attributed to Milosevic's forces.
However, he believes NATO owes the world an explanation, before an independent judiciary, of the causes of the civilian deaths and why the bombing campaign was never formally declared as a war, a potential violation of international conventions regulating warfare.
Drexel Sprecher, who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg for the United States more than a half century ago, agreed.
``There should be a full investigation,'' he said, ``wherever there are claims of injustices.''
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