Del Ponte's Showmanship Might Be Sickening, But It Has Ramifications for the US

"I need Karadzic and Mladic in The Hague before 11 July to be able to participate in the commemoration of Srebrenica," said Hague Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. And I need half a cup of blueberries to make these pancakes.

Or, like how a baseball player would say that he needs a new bat in order to step up to the plate in the big game.

Or, like how a high school cheerleader would say before the prom: "Oh my God! Where's my eyeliner?"

This sickening, self-serving assertion shows once and for all that the international war crimes tribunal is less about justice for the victims and more about symbolic glory for the self-appointed judges.

According to Del Ponte, nabbing the two Serbian fugitives is '"...the only decent way to pay tribute' to those who lost fathers, sons and husbands in the massacre." It also happens to be the prevailing obsession of her long and overextended career which, like an aging baseball player in search of that last home run, should really have been ended long ago.

But isn't this much too harsh a condemnation, in light of the true horror of the spectacle wheeled out by Del Ponte the other day, in the form of a shocking video of Serb paramilitaries executing Bosnian Muslim men in 1995?

"The impact in Belgrade was a shock," said Del Ponte, according to the BBC."I think that the attitude was changing before that. It was just another element that can motivate it to full co-operation with us."

So many questions arise from these statements that one almost doesn't know where to start first. But perhaps most important is this: since the Hague was specifically trying to galvanize Serbian popular opinion and provoke arrests - both of which it apparently did - then why did they wait so long to release this tape?

After all, Del Ponte has been trying to catch Serbian fugitives for years, in the process spending hundreds of millions of European taxpayer money, using NATO like a rude private army of housebreakers, and exerting political pressure on Serbia that has resulted in sanctions and blocked financial aid.

Further, the video release - one of what is promised to be the first in a series - comes at a time when Serbia is under increased pressure to accept the fait accompli of Kosovo independence resulting from NATO's illegal invasion of the province in 1999. But as interventionist bully ICG notes, "pressure works."

Another question that arises from this has to be why the tape (and presumably, others like it) was never leaked to the media. Del Ponte has said that the future video evidence "...will be made public only when we provide it in the court." Considering that the Hague's investigations of Bosnian war crimes have been going on and on for years, one has to wonder who is in charge of "scheduling" the evidence. Really, if this is the "smoking gun" evidence they needed, then why wait until the end to release it?

Unless, of course, the idea was to artificially prolong the Hague's shelf life and in the process drag out the agony for all of those victims to whom the self-appointed matriarch of international justice allegedly wishes to "pay tribute to."

One might consider the following: Carla Del Ponte, who asked you? What truck do you have with the citizens of Bosnia? Not just her (apparent) active caring, but her very right to be involved is as morally bogus as was the late Susan Sontag's, when she brought theater to Sarajevo to show that she felt the pain of the Bosnian Muslims.

The Western world, with very few exceptions, exulted in this display of gluttonous empathy. However, there were some, like Jean Baudrillard, who could see through the sham and spoke of

"...the very features which enabled the inhabitants of Sarajevo to treat the 'Europeans' with contempt, or at least with a sarcastic feeling of freedom that contrasted sharply with the remorse and the hypocritical regrets of their counterparts. They were not in need of compassion, they were in fact the ones to take pity on our dejected condition. 'I spit on Europe', one of them was heard saying.

No one indeed can be more free, more sovereign in a rightful contempt, directed not so much at the enemy than at those whose good conscience balks in the sun of so-called solidarity. And God knows that they have seen lines of those people pass by. Lastly it was Susan Sontag who came to have 'Waiting for Godot' played in Sarajevo. Why not bring 'Bouvard & Pecuchet' to Somalia or Afghanistan? But the worse is not about this cultural soul-boosting. It is about the condescending manner in making out what is strength & what is weakness. They are strong. It is us who are weak and who go there to make good for our loss of strength and sense of reality."

Another topic with important ramifications from this whole sordid mess is that of international justice in general, and the old maxim that information wants to be free. Can the latter ever be so in that holy citadel of freedom itself, the United States?

First of all, there is no logical necessity for horrifying atrocities to guarantee the right of an international judiciary to adjucate on them, obviously for the reasons Baudrillard mentions. This was true before the release of Del Ponte's tape, and it is true afterwards.

However, the United States, for example, has been one of the biggest backers of the ICTY - while hypocritically demanding that its own citizens never be brought before a so-called 'world court.'

Were it not for this hypocrisy, the US would have a compelling point. Sovereign states should not turn over their judicial matters to an unaccountable foreign entity. If Carla Del Ponte lived in America, and was speaking of say, video evidence of US troops torturing prisoners, she would just be called a Democrat, rather than an allegedly apolitical seeker of justice. Yet as it stands, her shocking video releases are thoroughly soaked, not only in other people's blood, but in the sweat and excrement of political duplicity.

Yet if you subtract the international charade of objectivity, and openly indulge the political, then Del Ponte is actually setting a wonderful example for the US. She knew that a picture, and much more a video, are worth thousands of pages of even the most graphic atrocity descriptions in today's visuals-driven popular imagination. So considering that the Abu Ghraib affair apparently represents merely the "tip of the iceberg," why shouldn't the US government release the full evidence (including the apparently "shocking" videos) for this and other officially-sanctioned torture chambers? If fear of international tribunals is holding them back, they can rest assured that most American would be happy to see domestic courts take care of business.

However, they do not wish to release the visual "smoking gun" for exactly the same reasons that Del Ponte does in the case of Serbia: because the appearance of such things on television will galvanize American public opinion. And that will spell big trouble for the Bush Administration, so eager to punish foreign people in international courts, and so determined to hold itself unaccountable before its own citizens.

If Milosevic or any other unfriendly dictator were known to have in their possession such self-incriminating evidence, and be stonewalling its release, the first words out of the American government's mouth would be about their lack of transparency, democracy and lack of accountability before their own citizens. It's high time for the Bush Administration hawks and policy makers responsible for America's own policy of torture to put up or shut up, not just in this but in many other vital matters of national security - and let the chips fall where they may. Anything less would prove the utter erosion of America's legal institutions, and its continuing hypocrisy on the world stage.

Is there hope on the horizon? It is clear that the government will have to be dragged into it against its will. On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the government "...to release four videos from Abu Ghraib prison and dozens of photographs from the same collection as photos that touched off the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal a year ago." Perhaps there is still some life in the battered old system.

However, the government apparently does not want to go down without exposing its vile hypocrisy completely: "...Government lawyer Sean Lane had argued that releasing pictures, even in redacted form, would violate Geneva Convention rules by subjecting the detainees to additional humiliation."