Empire and the discourse of “justice”

Part 1: Pursuing “justice”:

No political leader in history ever rallied support for a project of  imperial
aggrandizement and war by declaring to his followers and the outside world
that he wanted to pursue an unjust cause.  On the contrary, every leader
who engages in war declares very loudly indeed that his cause is not only
just but also, beyond that, imperatively so.  (That is one of the many
problems with “just war” theory.  Every leader of a belligerent nation
is convinced that his cause is just: So why do wars happen at all then, if there is one single, self-evident definition of what justice is?)

George W. Bush’s present set of wars in the Global War on Terror is no
exception.  I’m sure JWN readers all remember the declaration he made, immediately after 9/11, that
“Either we’ll bring Osama Bin Laden to justice or–”  and this had a
peculiarly ominous ring to it– “we’ll bring justice to him.” How much better it would have been, though, if the US government had simply stuck to the version of “bringing OBL to justice” rather than trying to “bring justice to” him and countless other US foes around the world…

Over the past four years we’ve seen the Bush cabal pursue its campaign
of “bringing justice to” its opponents in a number of different ways, in a
number of different places.  In Afghanistan and Iraq it did so through
war, and in the case of Syria it has done so by the deployment of…
a UN-appointed “Special Prosecutor”.

The UN’s appointment of German national Detlev Mehlis to play exactly the
same investigative role in Lebanon and Syria that is played within the US
justice system by a Special Prosecutor had a couple of significant features
to it:

1. Particularity.  Activists and leaders in political opposition
   parties get assassinated regularly throughout the world, in a number of contexts.
    But never before the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in Lebanon last
   February has the UN Security Council responded by rushing to create this
   quite unprecedented form of a judicial investigating mechanism in response
   to such an  act.
2. The international politics of it.  “Containing” Syrian
   power had already, from August 2004 on, proven to be something that the
   Bushies and the French could agree strongly on.  After Hariri’s killing,
   upping the ante against Syria and its allies inside the Lebanese system  certainly
   looked like a campaign that could continue to help Washington and the bastions
   of “Old Europe” in France and Germany mend the fences that had earlier been
   badly torn by the Bushies’ reckless and unilateral rush to invade Iraq.

Please note that I am not arguing here that the full facts about
the killing of Hariri should not be sought out and made public, and those
reponsible tried in a court of law.  Indeed, I believe they should be.
 I am just noting some political facts about the context of the Mehlis
investigation that cannot be ignored.

Let me introduce a historical analogy…

Back in the late 1800s, there was a mixed-race, Arab-African slave trader
operating out of Zanzibar called
Tippu Tip,
whose slave-capturing activities deep in the African interior became
notorious in liberal circles of the west.  (Though we should also note
that he was also known for having met and given material aid to imperial western
“explorers” such as Britain’s Henry Morton Stanley.)  Anyway,  in
1889, western anti-slavery activists decided to convene a grand conference
in Europe to pursue their unquestionably well-intentioned campaign.  In
response to urgings from Belgium’s King Leopold II, they agreed to hold the
conference in Brussels.  According to Adam Hochschild’s brilliant
account
of this whole episode, Leopold had previously polished his credentials
for the position of conference “host” by getting himself elected “honourable
president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human
rights organization.”(p.92)

Four years earlier, European rulers meeting in Berlin had grandiosely
divided up the entire land-mass of sub-Saharan Africa between themselves
, and Leopold had “won” the whole area of Congo (now DRC) for himself…
 Unfortunately, Tippu Tip also claimed dominion over large parts of Congo–
and Leopold’s envoys had struck several mutually beneficial deals with him.
 But by 1889, Leopold decided he wanted to end Tippu Tip’s activities
there completely.  Hosting the anti-slavery gathering gave him more
power and international prestige to do so.

What Leopold ended up instituting in the expanses of Congo was a vast, personally
owned and controlled platation in which, over the 14 years that followed
some ten million Congolese people (the estimates actually run anywhere from
a “low” of five million to a high of 30 million)
lost their lives
because of the extremely harsh system of forced labor used therein.  The
basic resource Leopold’s people were extracting there was rubber, which could
not yet be farmed.  Instead, indigenous Congolese people were forced
to gather huge amounts of it in the wild and turn it overit as tribute to
Leopold’s trading company; those who failed to contribute their allotted
amounts were hunted down, mutilated, and killed; and their communities broken
and scattered.

…  So was the whole “anti-slavery” campaign that Leopold had so publicly
espoused actually worth pursuing?  Or was it a sham, designed only to
cover up his own greedy and immoral ambitions?   Or was it a campaign
worth pursuing– but just not in that particular way, and particularly
not by being spearheaded by that grasping, imperial leader?

Not easy questions to answer.  But there seem to be numerous worthwhile
lessons that we can take from the story of Leopold and Tippu Tip as we look
at the story that continues to unfold between the Bush administration and
Bashar al-Asad today…

Part 2: Eschewing “justice”:

There is also, of course, the breathtaking chutzpah of a US administration
that aggressively pursues its version of  “justice” in various international
contexts while it equally aggressively seeks to evade the demands
of “justice” in others.  Exhibit Number One in this regard is the administration’s
disgraceful and now long-sustained
refusal to comply
with the most basic requirements of the Geneva Conventions regarding the
treatment of detainees.

We could talk about the decision to invade Iraq in the first place having
been unjust, or even– as Kofi Annan once notably said– illegal. And we
should certainly, now, talk about decisions taken knowingly by people in
the administration to unfairly, illegitimately, and perhaps illegally pump
up the WMD-based “case” for launching that war while they also systematically
and actively suppressed the counter-evidence in that regard.  Yes, it
is excellent that here in the US we have our own Special Prosecutor who has
looked into this matter, and has issued five indictments against Cheney aide
Lewis Libby.  Also great that Libby is
contesting these charges
, which means that we ought to be seeing a great cascade of facts into the
public domain.

Then, at a broader level, there is the Bush administration’s position toward
the International Criminal Court (and a number of other treaty-based international
institutions.)  In the case of the ICC, the Bushies have not only stood
aside from joining the court– which is the right of any nation– but they
have also campaigned actively around the world to gain a special immunity
for US government agents from any vulnerability to the provisions of the
ICC in countries where they happen to be working that actually are members
of the ICC regime.  

In other words, regarding the ICC as also the whole question of the treatment
of detainees, the Bush administration does not stop at flouting these international
rules on its own soil– but it seeks to export its defiance of them and
impose it on other nations.  By seeking special immunities for US
government agents within the legal systems of other countries, it is mocking
the whole basis of the “rule of law”, which is that of the equal rights and
responsibilities of all legal entities under a system of law.

Part 3: So what is “justice”?

The Bush administration’s uses and abuses of the whole discourse of justice
in the international arena at least serve one very useful purpose: they force
all of us, around the world, whatever citizenship we carry, to probe more
deeply into the meaning that the concept of “justice” has, and ought to have,
in international  affairs.

In this regard, upholding the merely procedural requirements of justice is
not nearly sufficient.  Creating international criminal courts and appointing
international “special prosecutors” are not steps that in and of themselves
push forward the cause of “justice.”   In recent years, too many of
my colleagues in the human rights movement have become seduced by the idea
that creating “international” or other “special” criminal courts is a necessarily
helpful way to pursue the cause of justice internationally, and that
all that remains once such courts have been created is to ensure that their
procedures are exemplary and fair.  Far too often, these rights advocates
end up ignoring almost completely the political context in which these courts
operate, and the political agendas they end up serving…  

(Case in point: the Iraqi Special Tribunal that’s trying to try Saddam Hussein…
 Human Rights Watch has kvetched a lot about the skewed nature of the
procedures inside the trial room– but they’ve made barely any mention at
all of the role of the US occupation in establishing this court, and since then,
in effectively controling all of its work from behind the scenes.  See,
for example, the bottom of
this
US Justice Department information sheet about the work of the “Regime Crimes
Liaison Office” in Baghdad.)

This blog post is not nearly long enough for me to go very deeply into all
my thinking on the nature of justice in a global context!  I’ll just
note briefly here a few broad conclusions I’ve come to over the years:

1. Any system of global justice worthy of the name must be based on a
   fundamental commitment to human equality.  It cannot allow any exceptionalism.
2. Deliberations over establishment or reform of global justice instruments
   and institutions should be as culturally inclusive as possible.  Right
   now, we have the skeleton of a global justice system that is configured largely
   according to the model that (for purely contingent historical reasons) grew
   out of one particular point of the history of one particular continent, Europe.
    This system has many good values, but it is also has some defects;
   and where it claims universality, primacy, or any other form of a monopoly
   it unhelpfully crowds out consideration of other forms of justice systems.
3. If a global justice system is to be worthy of its name it must recognize,
   address and seek to correct imbalances of power and of resources in the global
   system as a whole.  In particular, no community that has stolen the resources of
   other communities through slavery or imperial or other forms of dominance
   should be exempt from attempts to redress those earlier harms in peaceable,
    negotiated ways.
4. If human society is to flourish, or even survive, then justice systems
   should be forward-looking and aim at serving policies that further the flourishing
   of each one of the world’s billions of people. 

Anyway, it’s probably about time that a blog with the slightly ambitious
name I gave to this one started to address such issues more deeply, don’t
you think?