by Daniel Korski | Jul 4, 2008 | Conflict and security
Today Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim commander, was cleared on appeal of crimes committed during the Bosnian War. The Appeals Chamber of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) determined there was too little evidence to justify Oric’s initial conviction of two years’s imprisonment for failing to stop men under his command torturing and murdering Serbs in and around the enclave of Srebrenica.
I won’t quibble about this particular ruling, but it made me think anew about the role ICTY has played in the post-Miloesevic Balkans and how well it has promoted justice and reconciliation.
ICTY was created during the Balkans Wars as the first international criminal court since the World War II Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. It has been crucial in advancing the cause of international justice, leading to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and ultimately acting as precursor to the ICC. Under the careful guidance of Prosecutors Goldstone and Arbour, the court made serious headway and has probably made more international criminal law precedent than all previous international and domestic war crimes cases.
The big cases, for example against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, are well-known. But ESI, a think tank, has detailed how the conviction of smaller-scale war criminals have had a positive effect.
Still, the architects behind the worst atrocities of the Balkan Wars, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, remain at large. Perhaps worse, against expectations the ICTY process has not lead to real reconciliation in the Balkans while the vagaries of the court’s procedures have given far fewer people the sense that justice is being metered out. Under former prosecutor Carla Del Ponte’s quixotic leadership, the court’s reputation – even among allies – suffered tremendously.
Diane F. Orentlicher has written a huge appraisal of ICTY and writes about:
shortcomings that flow from avoidable patterns, such as overly long pre-trial detention and trials, have needlessly compounded the ICTY’s challenges in Serbia.
The Tribunal’s credibility has suffered further when its prosecutors and judges evince an unacceptably poor grasp of the region whose crimes they have judged and prosecuted for one and a half decades—a weakness reflected not only during trials, but at times also in the Prosecutor’s selection of defendants and charges.
Travelling in the region after a few years’ hiatus, I had the sense that most people – across all communities – see the court as biased, and its procedures arcane even if the small, non-nationalist intelligentsia see things differently: Again read Orentlicher on the court:
Even when it performs well, moreover, the Tribunal’s work can be and has been manipulated beyond fair recognition by nationalist leaders—a dynamic the Tribunal thoroughly failed to address in its early years, and which the Tribunal could still address more effectively than it has to date.
This is a serious problem. And explaining to Serbs that the court is impartialwill be more difficult following Oric’s acquittal today, even though it is just.
How to solve this? Given how many people tune into CSI everyday around the world, I can’t see why a the U.S government could not give tax-breaks to a consortium of film companies who bandy together to make a 10-part, star-studded CSI-style drama about the war crimes, the investigations and the trials. Or even make a special CSI version dealing with the Balkans. That could begin drawing attention to the work behind ICTY and perhaps make headway in explaining the court’s process and procedures.
by Daniel Korski | Jul 4, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
A once-in-a-generation power shift is taking place in the Middle East with the rise of Iran. As the U.S is temporarily distracted in the run-up to the November elections, many in the Gulf fear that Iran will parlay its recent successes, for example by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Shia parties in Iraq, into an even stronger position. Such a shift will have direct consequences for the region and for Europe’s security and well-being.
At present, Iran is unlikely to be mollified – having rejected even generous offers of EU assistance – and a stronger relationship between the EU and the Gulf is now needed to build a bulwark against Iran’s influence, until a new U.S administration decides whether to engage or not in talks with Tehran. But links between the resource-rich Gulf will benefit the EU in others ways too.
France is well-placed to build such a relationship, having enhanced the EU’s links across the Mediterranean and led the way by building a military base in the UAE – probably the biggest political European gesture to the region.
An early step could be to invite the GCC Heads of States to the EU Summit in December 2008; such meeting – the first of its kind – could issue a political declaration, wowing to strengthen ties. The EU could follow up with some quick-win initiatives – like appointing an EU envoy to the GCC who could lead a European Stability Pact-style engagement process – while a dedicated EU-GCC Summit, held under the Czech EU Presidency in late 2009, could follow. Negotiations may be the only way forward, but these should be conducted not from weakness.
by Alex Evans | Jul 4, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
David and I are both out in Japan to speak at a conference on climate change organised by the United Nations University .
Highlight of the day so far: sitting next to the engineering director at Nissan’s technology planning department over lunch, who (it transpired) knew everything there is to know about electric cars. Back at the end of May, I wrote that electric cars were miles away from commercial roll-out. Well, turns out that they’re much closer to reality than I’d thought. Nissan will be rolling out electric cars in Japan in 2010, followed by the US and (in Europe) Denmark in 2011, and then the rest of Europe in 2012.
Think that’s interesting? Try this: on current electricity prices in Japan, a full charge for the car (enough for about 100 miles of driving) might cost as little as 50 cents . Meanwhile, the cars themselves won’t be much more expensive than conventional combustion engine equivalents either.
All in all, a pretty compelling proposition for consumers with oil prices as high as they are. Which left me wondering two things.
The first is simply: will electric power systems be able to cope with the additional demand if take-up of electric cars is rapid? The UK, like many countries, has seen its capacity margin (the gap between peak electricity demand and the amount of power that can be generated with all power stations running at full tilt ) diminish in recent years. People whose job it is to worry about resilience fret about whether the lights would stay on if there were big outages in generating capacity at the same time as spikes in demand – we came close to such a scenario a few weeks back. If cars that used to run on petrol start running on electric power instead, then that problem gets much tougher.
Second, it will be interesting to see what the carbon savings involved look like. Electric cars are only as green as the kind of generating capacity used to charge them up. If the power’s from wind or nuclear, then they’re fabulously clean; if it’s from coal, then they might be even dirtier than petrol cars. So if electric cars do end up adding lots more demand on power grids, governments and power companies had better get a move on with installing low carbon generating capacity if they want them to be a blessing rather than a curse.
All in all, it’s exciting that electric cars are so close – but the power sector must be biting its fingernails.
Update: Sam Roggeveen has more on both of these issues.
by Jules Evans | Jul 2, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence
Yesterday, 150 years ago, two papers were read out at the Linnean Society in London, one by Alfred Russell Wallace and the other by Charles Darwin, which first laid out to the world Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Darwin’s theory continues to have a profound influence on psychology, via the increasingly dominant theory of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) which, like a particularly aggressive turtle on the Galapagos Islands, is busy fighting off all competition and establishing itself as the alpha male of psychological theories.
Still, I have four main reservations about EP. Firstly, its tendency towards biological determinism. ‘Men naturally do this…it’s how men have behaved for thousands of years. Men hunt. Women stay at home. Men are polygamous. Women flirt and gossip’. Etc. Yes, our 200,000 year history may give us a predisposition to behave in a certain way, and I find it very interesting to explore our evolutionary history, but evolution has not yet finished. We are making it up as we go along. So examining how humans behaved in the past may not be as enlightening as thinking how we would like to, or should, behave today.
Secondly, how useful is EP for people suffering from mental illnesses? If someone goes to an evolutionary psychologist, say, with social anxiety, the psychologist may well say ‘social anxiety is adaptive. That’s why it’s survived for so long. So it’s not entirely a bad thing.’ Great! So the socially anxious person goes back to their flat and remains a bitterly unhappy recluse. Or the psychologist says ‘social anxiety comes about because there’s a mismatch between our primitive past, when we lived in groups of around 150, and our industrialized present, when we live in sprawling anonymous cities’. Great! So we’ll have to join a tribe in the Amazon jungle to be happy.
Thirdly, virtue for followers of EP really comes down to social skills. Thus Matt Ridley, a leading EP popularizer, writes in his book The Origins of Virtue : ‘What counts is not strength but social skills…The well-connected inherit the earth.’ The EPers tend to emphasize that humans have evolved incredible abilities to team up, network, make pacts, persuade, schmooze, back-scratch, and arse-lick. And this, to them, is the height of virtue.
They note that monkeys, also, possess these sorts of cooperative and social skills, only we possess them to a much greater degree. So really, we are simply clever monkeys.
But I think human virtue and wisdom are actually much greater than this, and that the EP account of virtue leaves a great deal out. It leaves out our ability to conceive of our own death. It leaves out our ability to imagine the whole stretch of time and space, and our tiny selves in relation to it. It leaves out the struggle, which has happened throughout human existence, to find some sort of common identity and unity with the universe, to find some principle or idea which does not die.
Monkeys don’t, as far as I know, go through this sort of long, hard struggle to find some unity with the cosmos. Humans do however, and this struggle is a crucial part of what it means for many people to be human. It has been right at the centre of what it means to be human for 200,000 years. But followers of EP leave it out.
Fourthly, and finally, followers of EP, like Herbert Spencer and the social scientists who followed Charles Darwin, love to use evolutionary theory to support their own right-wing, laissez faire politics and economics. Thus Matt Ridley, who wrote for the Telegraph , looks on the animal kingdom, and sees only little Thatcherites – struggling for status, making deals, learning to exchange and reciprocate.
At the end of The Origins of Virtue , he rises to a moving vision of a world free of state interference: "If we are to recover social harmony and virtue, if we are to build back into society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital that we reduce the power and scope of the state…Let international and national states wither…Let everybody rise and fall by the strengths of their reputation."
And what did Matt do next? He became chairman of a Yorkshire bank called Northern Rock, which borrowed way too much debt, then became the first victim of a bank run in Britain for a century, and had to be bailed out by the government, in the largest involvement of the state in the banking sector since the 1940s.
How fitting.
