NOTE: Our comments are in [square brackets].

INTEGRAL QUOTE:

Washington, April 3 - From the brief room at the State Department to the corridors of Whitehall in London and NATO headquarters in Brussels, a word usually avoided by policy makers is being uttered ever more frequently to describe events in Kosovo: GENOCIDE.

It is not used merely to cudgel the Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, and to warn that he could be held culpable for atrocities and to press him to stop. Nor is it used solely to place him in the public mind squarely in the ranks of this century's tyrants and to ally Americans and Europeans to defeat him.

Policy makers in the United States and Europe are invoking the word

to help provide a legal justification for their military campaign against Serbia. It is one based in part on concepts of humanitarian law, where no word is more evocative.

At the same time, the public invocation of genocide - something political leaders had been distinctly reluctant to do during the strife in Bosnia and Rwanda - is itself helping to create a new model of international law that may be used to justify similar interventions in sovereign countries.

A broad spectrum of legal scholars agree that there is currently NO simple, straignhtforward or obvious LEGAL BASIS for the bombing of Serbian targets to be found in treaties, the United Nations' Charter or binding resolutions or *ANY* OTHER WRITTEN INTERNATIONAL LEGAL CODE.

"The traditional view of international law would clearly prohibit what is happening." Professor Abraham Chayes, of the Harvard Law School, said in an interview.

One feature of this approach is to bypass the United Nations whose Charter is the fundamental legal document on the international peace and security. In fact, the Charter explicitly forbids regional alliances like NATO from taking military action without first seeking the Security Council's prmission. United States policy makers did not seek such authorization, officials have acknowledged, in part because of Russia and China would be expected to veto it.

While [Clinton] Administration officials said they did not set out to create any new broad precedents for military intervention, they have insisted that there is an adequate basis for their action.

Col. P.J. Crowley, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said, "We believe there is legitimate and sufficient legal grounds for the United States and NATO for the use of force in this situation." He cited two recent United Nations resolutions calling on Yugoslavia to take measures to end the suffering in Kosovo. Those resolutions do not, however, contain any authorization of the use of force.

A senior Administration official said that the resolutions have been made to "support rather than authorize" the use of force. The official who spoke on the condition of anonymity [!], said that there are several factors the United States and its allies believe provide a legal foundations for the military action.

The "humanitarian crisis unfolding" is prominent among them, the official said. In addition to accusations of genocide, the official said, there are "abhorrent crimes against humanity that violate international law and that are every bit as serious as genocide,"

Genocide is defined in a specific convention, which the United States and Yugoslavia have both signed, that does not explicitly provide for armed intervention as remedy.

Russian and Yugoslav leaders have loudly asserted that the bombing is a clear violation of international law, which traditionally elevates the value of national sovereignty in most situations.

But Professor Chayes, a former State Department legal adviser, said that while there is little traditional justification for the current bombing campaign, "some people have argued for a humanitarian exception allowing for the intervention with force to prevent large-scale violations of human rights."

"That certainly is in many ways a new idea in terms of international law and raises a lot of difficult questions," he added.

In the amorphous field of humanitarian law, "There's a great deal of debate about what the threshold for intervention should be," said Diane F. Orentlicher, a human rights lawyer and law professor at American University." But the treaty does provide a bright line in saying that states should not stand idly by when there is genocide but have a duty to put stop to it. It is the legal embodiment of the vow 'never again.'"

The [anonymous] Administration official said that another important element of the humanitarian factor is the legacy of the Nuremberg Tribunal set up after World War II, which prohibits systematic abuses of civilians, even by a state within its own borders.

W. Michael Reisman, a professor of international law at Yale University, said he believes that what is occuring in Central [sic!] Europe "has produced a critical moment and a basic change in international legal practice." Although he believes that international law has been used to deal with humanitarian issues, Professor Reisman said what is happening in Central [sic!] Europe is of an unprecedented scale.[!?]

"We now have something that goes far beyond the usual notion of using force for self-defense," he said "We have a massive use of force against a Government over inappropriate treatment of their own nationals." It may also bring about the redrawing of a sovereign state's borders.

Traditionally, the cases in which military intervention has been sanctioned for humanitarian reasons have applied to campaigns with limited objectives. Professor Ruth Wedgwood of the Yale Law School said the classic example is the Israeli raid at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976 to rescue its citizens from terrorists who had hijacked their plane. "The idea of humanitarian bombing is much heavier." she said.

[Actually, it is exactly Orwellian. "Humanitarian bombing!" is contradiction in terms and represent a nice example of Orwellian "double speak."]

Nonetheless, Professor Wedgwood said she believes what is happening may provide a model for the future. [Would this model then be reimplemented to punish America - the main violator of human rights? Should US be humanitarily bombed?] "We are pushing the envelope, being legally innovative," she said.

What underlines the discussion is a deeply held anxiety among international legal authorities about how fully international law is respected by political leaders. International law has traditionally been derided as something to which policy makers claim fealty when it is to their advantage and ignore or interpret very loosely when it is not on their side.

Professor Thomas M. Franck, of the New York University Law School, said he believes that the allies can justify their action by arguing that even if they have violated the United Nations Charter and international law, it was necessary to counteract even greater violations by the Belgrade Government [which was trying to defend integrity of its own country against separatists and terrorists armed, trained and equipped by the West] of laws that prohibit a government from abusing its own citizens [who like to carry bazookas on their sholders].

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