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office because the document granting his temporary stay will expire
explained that his application for permanent residency is pending,
the governor's new antiterror restrictions, didn't understand the

Colorado to Delaware, have passed or are considering restrictions on
issuing driver's licenses to noncitizens. Some, like Georgia, Minnesota
Florida's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles now sends
would authorize DMV staff to contact federal authorities if there is
Johnson, associate director of the American Immigration Lawyers
the country any safer."

South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon introduced legislation to
have local cops enforce federal immigration laws. Florida is working
with the Immigration and Naturalization Service on a groundbreaking plan
legal hook to justify their profiling and will prevent illegal
immigrants from reporting crimes against them," says Dan Kesselbrenner,
director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers

Heightening surveillance of foreign students, bills pending in
colleges to report noncitizens to the INS if they repeatedly miss class
or withdraw. An Oklahoma measure would prevent noncitizens from
research assistant for South Carolina's House of Representatives,
describing a bill to restrict university enrollment of students who come

Oklahoma's Joint Homeland Security Task Force even brought up blocking
foreign students from certain courses. Representative Bill Paulk, a task
force member, said legislators are particularly worried about nuclear
courses you would not want foreigners to take."

For more than a century, a recognizable pattern existed among those
newcomers quickly helped build larger communities, they began to occupy
distinct places in the mental and physical geography of the city.

severely complicates the demographic pattern to which most New Yorkers
to 275,000 between 1990 and 2000, are indeed coming in significant
Mexican equivalent of the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the Bronx, or
the Dominican enclave in Washington Heights. That the vast majority of
those who come across the Rio Grande are undocumented also suggests that
either politically or via organized labor, in city affairs.

audiences most recently for his intro to Spike Lee's Summer of
with some groups, particularly Mexicans, establishing a transnational
impossible even to identify a single unified process of Latino
the American dream.

Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guti&eacute;rrez
. Guti&eacute;rrez, an undocumented Mexican
laborer, died in a 1999 construction accident in the Hasidic
neighborhood of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. For Breslin,
migrants face in coming north but shows how harsh the working conditions
provided only loneliness and a gruesome but entirely preventable death
in a cement foundation.

origins of what would otherwise have been yet another mostly forgotten
Matias (near Puebla), to recapture Eduardo's life and surroundings
before arriving in Brooklyn. In the process, Breslin accomplishes twin
goals: to show how Mexican migrants are increasingly making their way
well beyond the Southwest, steadily transforming the demographics of
Midwestern and Northeastern cities; and, more dramatically, he
illustrates how that migration probably has more in common with the
Middle Passage than with any of the heroism now accorded to the
immigrant journey through Ellis Island.

Breslin opens with a series of outsider's observations of life in
impoverished San Matias. Ninety percent of Mexican children will never
result of stories told by relatives and others within their community,
observes, soon become the young adults who are migrating along with
counterparts from India, China and elsewhere to become New York City's
new majority, by which he essentially means people of color.

what unionized American workers receive, Eduardo was tempted to go
then vividly re-creates both journeys, supplementing the two stories
with documentation of parallel dangers that Mexican migrants experience
delivered COD by a coyote on a flight from Los Angeles.

endure such hardship in coming north, there are still some troubling
dimensions to Breslin's account, particularly in his somewhat simplistic
as the subject of his sentences that one begins to fear Buchananesque
Breslin also far too simplistically refers on many occasions to how

Once away from the airport, Eduardo enters a frighteningly impersonal
city, and here Breslin emphasizes the changing meaning of the
contemporary immigrant experience: "Once, they came in dreadful old
ships, from Magilligan in Northern Ireland, from Cobh in southern
subsequent nonwhite migrations, particularly those of Puerto Ricans and
Dominicans, are missing from Breslin's litany, which illustrates the
degree to which the traditional mythology of immigration into New York
is skewing more than a few familiar demographic patterns.

Eduardo's experiences in Brooklyn illustrate some of the unique features
of contemporary Mexican migration. He settles with a handful of others
identity grew rapidly with the influx of Russian and Ukrainian
ongoing research of John Mollenkopf and others demonstrates, even though
their ranks are growing rapidly, Mexican migrants are tending to favor
heterogeneous ethnic neighborhoods rather than grouping together.
necessity for those who stay to form distinct neighborhoods of their

Those working here as undocumented laborers also face conditions hardly
conducive to sticking around. Despite repeated building-code violations
elsewhere in the neighborhood, a slumlord named Eugene Ostreicher was
able to continue building in South Williamsburg, using undocumented
Mexican laborers like Eduardo. While working for Ostreicher in November
supported by only three flimsy, improperly fastened beams; the structure
soon collapsed, and Eduardo drowned in cement three floors below.
Teitelbaum, ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's liaison to the Hasidic
city's Department of Buildings, a bastion of frightening corruption and
But there is no doubting Breslin's crusading spirit, and he's always
to meet girlfriends."

As the book closes, with Eduardo dead and Ostreicher facing minimal
punishment at best, the meaning of the former's sweet dream is
increasingly transient, unregulated and brutal. Still, despite the
Jimmy Breslin has successfully helped open the door.

relations with Cuba," Jimmy Carter proclaimed in a secret Presidential
Directive shortly after taking office in 1977. With that signed order
Carter became the first and only US President to make a rapprochement
with Fidel Castro's revolutionary government an explicit goal of US
foreign policy. Although his Administration succeeded in negotiating the
creation of "interest sections" in Havana and Washington, Carter's
objective "to set in motion a process which will lead to the
reestablishment of [full] diplomatic relations" eventually fell victim
to the cold warriorism of his national security advisers.


What the former President described as "an opportunity to explore issues
of mutual interest" has mobilized almost every conceivable interest
group--commercial, political, humanitarian--across the ideological span
on a gamut of contentious issues relating to Washington's approach to
astutely managed to simultaneously draw attention to the archaic nature
dialogue, and to human rights and democracy.

Carter's trip was carefully scripted to balance competing political
interests as well as his own multifaceted personal agenda. Before he
announced his travel plans, Carter dispatched emissaries to Washington
to discuss with numerous NGO and lobbyist organizations the merits of
such a visit; he then received a comprehensive intelligence briefing
from the Bush Administration and a steady flow of delegations and
specialists at the Carter Center in Atlanta, who shared their expertise
on Cuban issues. Pro-dialogue coalitions like the Cuban American
Alliance Education Fund issued statements signed by numerous grassroots
organizations in "full support [of Carter's] initiative for dialogue."
The rabidly anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation criticized
him for entering into "discussions with the Cuban regime, thereby giving
[it] a measure of legitimacy."

In Cuba, Carter's schedule included three meetings with Castro, two
state dinners, a baseball game and visits to Havana's most prestigious
schools, laboratories and hospitals, as well as meetings with Cuba's
organizer of the Varela Project--a petition drive to reform political
and economic structures. Most significant, in a live nationally
televised address to Cuban citizens from the University of Havana,
Carter carefully underscored the themes of changing both US policy and
Cuba's socialist political system. US-Cuban relations, he said, had been
"trapped in a destructive state of belligerence for forty-two years,"
and he called on Washington to "take the first step" by lifting the
"fundamental right" of free speech and association in Cuba, and for
Cubans to be allowed to "exercise this freedom to change laws peacefully
by a direct vote."

treatment--symbolic and real. A Cuban band played "The Star-Spangled
Banner" when he arrived, and Castro made it clear that there were no
conditions on his visit. "You can express yourself freely whether or not
we agree with part of what you say or with everything you say," Castro
stated in the reception ceremony at the airport.

House that, as the Wall Street Journal recently described it,
"sees a President whose bacon was saved in Florida in 2000 by the
Cuban-American vote," Carter's trip has taken on a whole new political
John Bolton to the Heritage Foundation to proclaim, "Cuba's threat to
our security has been underplayed" and to allege that Castro had "a
limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort"
that Cuba was sharing with "rogue states." Carter exposed this canard,
and infuriated the Administration, by using his visit to Cuba's leading
intelligence briefing with Cuban scientists and the US press corps: He
information that could be used for terrorism, "and the answer from our
experts on intelligence was no."

The Bush Administration clearly fears the impact of Carter's trip. In an
Miami on May 20, at a fundraiser for brother Jeb's re-election campaign,
in which President Bush will express his presidency's hostile policy
Carter visit, outline plans to further restrict travel to Cuba.

Bush's political diatribe. His visit cannot help but contribute to the
momentum on Capitol Hill, and throughout the country, to rethink
Washington's retrograde approach to Havana. This past fall Cuba made its
are slipping, a bipartisan coalition in Congress--the Cuba Working
Group, led by Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake--has organized a task force
an amendment to the Treasury appropriations bill to free travel to the
island--legislation that is likely to get a significant boost from
front-page New York Times photos of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
walking through charming Old Havana.

"The point is that engagement is more likely to encourage Cuba in the
direction of reforms than unrelenting confrontation," says Wayne Smith,
who served as the Carter Administration's first chief of the new US
lost on Bush. But it isn't lost on his predecessor in the Oval
Office--or on the majority of Americans, who believe that diplomatic
constituency in Florida to get the President's brother re-elected as

complaint against former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet for the murder
effect--against former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Americans living here at the time stood nervously outside his office and
General Pinochet's military had seized power, declared a state of
internal war and unleashed a ferocious and bloody spasm of terror and
could and would do nothing for us.

for help, a truckload of Chilean troops had kidnapped our fellow
American Charlie Horman from his home a few miles away. Within
forty-eight hours Horman was summarily and secretly executed. As
memorialized in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film Missing, his body
Within days of Horman's execution, another young American friend, Frank
plunged into the seventeen-year nightmare of Pinochet's military
dictatorship that stamped out at least 3,000 other lives and sent nearly
a million into exile.

free-market economics than to condemn him for his butchery.

magistrate who last year indicted Pinochet on kidnapping and murder
criminal probe into the circumstances of Horman's death, including any
takeover, Purdy and the embassy turned their back on Americans in
need--especially Americans thought to have been sympathetic to Socialist
President Salvador Allende, deposed in the coup.

visibly aged but he is the same truculent functionary I remember from
judge's chambers. He vociferously argued that he had done everything
fear from the Chilean military.

"suspect"--in his investigation.

Thus Purdy becomes the first former US official to face possible
criminal penalties in a case arising from the 1973 Chilean coup.

Infuriated by the judge's ruling, Purdy stomped from the chambers and
angrily confronted a waiting claque of courthouse reporters. With TV
"Momen-fucking-tito!" Purdy's indignation, featured
obscure Purdy is now an important symbol in the quest for international

are sixteen other former US officials, including US Ambassador to Chile
requested that Washington make these officials available. Only by
questioning them can anyone begin to answer key questions like what the
and to what degree functionaries like Purdy were following a State
means by which determination is made."

Some pieces of the Horman puzzle that have emerged from thousands of
pages of recently declassified documents indeed point to some level of
US involvement. "There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest US
intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death,"
reads one State Department memo, obtained by the National Security
light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of
GOC paranoia."

The Chileans might have been paranoid, but Washington was coldly
calculating. The Nixon Administration found it more compelling to
support Pinochet's regime than to fully investigate and solve the murder
bodies had been found and Pinochet's blood orgy was rising to fever
Ismael Huerta. A confidential US Embassy cable to the State Department
small issues in our relationship from making our cooperation more

magistrate. But his patience and polish, his deliberate
even-temperedness, have led not only to indictments of the
of several suspect former and active police officials he had cited who
have to treat these men you know are criminals and murderers as

doesn't act soon on his request to gather testimony from Kissinger and
wants to hear his testimony on these supposedly "relatively small
treat him strictly as a gentleman.


In anticipation of the Second Coming, evangelicals leap to Israel's

Likud says it does not anticipate
That Palestinians will have a state.
So they, in turn, are meant to stop this shrying,
And try to make their peace with occupying.

It is probably safe to say that the war crimes trial in The Hague of the
former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic is not going well. At least
so far. No credible witnesses have come forward to testify against the
man who is credited with starting four Balkan wars. No documentary
evidence has been advanced to prove his "command responsibility" for
murderous ethnic conflicts. The prosecution's bungling has turned what
was once touted as a "water-tight case" into a battle of wits, allowing
Milosevic to mount a fifth war--legal and psychological--against the
court itself.

It is, of course, an uneven battle. The court is supported by the might
of the United States and its vast eavesdropping and
intelligence-gathering facilities. Behind the scenes, Americans have
tried to induce some of Milosevic's former henchmen to testify against
him. (That includes the notorious paramilitary leader known as Arkan,
who was gunned down inside the Belgrade Intercontinental two weeks after
he lunched there with an American intermediary for the CIA.) Publicly,
the United States has linked all financial assistance to Serbia to the
extradition of suspected war criminals; the hope is that some of them
may provide the needed information about Milosevic's "command

The former dictator, on the other hand, has to rely mainly on himself,
his wife and a few supporters. The image of a solitary individual
standing up against the world not only appeals to his vanity but also
seems to energize him. His defense strategy is brilliantly cunning,
designed to play on Serbia's psychological vulnerabilities and continued
Serb resentment of the 1999 NATO bombing. From the outset he has said
that the court is illegal, that it is NATO's victors' justice and that
he would not accept its judgment. Yet, acting as his own defense
attorney, he has used the tribunal as a stage for his antics, playing
the role of a defiant David to NATO's Goliath, the victim of powerful
foreign enemies, and in the process doing all he can to make his a trial
of the whole Serbian nation.

Opinion polls suggest that his strategy is working in Serbia. Even
though four out of five Serbs want to see Milosevic tried
in a Serbian court for crimes committed against his people, a majority
applaud his stand at The Hague.

This is unfortunate. This public perception is likely to discourage
potential witnesses from coming forward. In the absence of compelling
evidence against him in court, Milosevic's political rehabilitation becomes a distinct
possibility. More significant will be the impact on the world's first
permanent court--which is to be established also in The Hague--to
replace ad hoc courts like the one sitting in judgment of Milosevic. But
it is up to the ad hoc tribunal to come up with the precedent-setting
legal standard of "command responsibility" (the conditions under which a
tyrant, even if not directly involved, can be held responsible for
crimes committed by his subordinates).

This raises several broader questions: What sort of justice, exactly, is
being served in The Hague? Why is it that the prosecution, having
claimed to have a water-tight case, appears to be flailing in the dark?
Was the court manipulated by the Clinton Administration? What exactly
was the secret intelligence that the United States and British
governments supplied during the 1999 Kosovo war to prompt the court to
indict Milosevic?

Louis Sell is one of those rare anonymous State Department officials who
venture to write books in their retirement. He was highly regarded by
his superiors and held the rank of political counselor in two major
embassies: Belgrade and Moscow. His tour in Belgrade, from 1987 to 1991,
coincided with Milosevic's rise to power and the outbreak of war in
Yugoslavia. This has placed him in the middle of things. Scores of
secret cables, sensitive intelligence reports, raw National Security
Agency telephone intercepts and even satellite photos landed on his desk
each day. He not only had access to everything the analysts and spooks
produced on the Yugoslav crisis but was one of the few people capable of
placing such material
in the proper context. (He had served in
Yugoslavia in the 1970s and is fluent in Serbo-Croatian.) He returned to
the region in 1995 as political deputy to former Swedish Prime Minister
Carl Bildt, then the European Union's chief negotiator for the former
Yugoslavia. After the Kosovo war, Sell served as director of the
International Crisis Group in Kosovo.

By background and experience, Sell is a bureaucratic insider. Unlike the
more senior officials--Richard Holbrooke or Gen. Wesley Clark--he has no
need to defend his reputation. Nor is he a man prone to
self-glorification. His twenty-eight years in the State Department
conditioned him to shun the limelight. This may be why he could
apparently not bring himself to give the reader his own take on events.
Instead he has chosen a journalistic format, relying mainly on published
sources--news dispatches, opinion columns and books. This was a poor
choice. He knows far more than most authors he quotes in his Slobodan
Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

Indiscriminate reliance on Western press reports is risky. For example,
Sell reproduces a German tabloid story about Milosevic's alleged
involvement in drug trafficking. Far too often he resorts to "Western
journalists" as the only source of this or that information; far too
often the phrase "everybody knew that..." crops up in the narrative as
the sole source for a given Serbian crime. Although he tries to write
dispassionately, his anti-Serb bias gets in the way from time to time.
In one instance, he writes that the high command in Belgrade sanctioned
the July 1995 attack on Srebrenica; the source for the assertion is a
book published in 1994. Is this sloppy writing? Careless editing?

Sell does offer a shrewd assessment of the former dictator. He sees him
as someone "without any core beliefs or values other than his own
political survival." Milosevic, he writes, "was not very good at using
power for anything other than keeping it." He was an enormously
destructive figure. Obsessed with power, he deliberately impoverished
not only Serbia's economy but also its intellectual and social fabric
"in order to eliminate the very capacity for independent alternatives to

The book follows familiar lines; I doubt whether it contains anything
that has not been said before. One does come across interesting tidbits:
Washington took an almost instant dislike to Carl Bildt, because he "had
not developed the habit of deference to Washington" and was unwilling
"to take direction." Needless to say, Bildt did not last long in the

There is, of course, nothing surprising nowadays in high-level American
officials expecting deference from little nations or their
representatives. But this is only a part of America's post-cold war
attitude toward the rest of the world. It also permeates US policy in
the Balkans. Despite the rhetoric about justice and eagerness to help
the people of Serbia, the book suggests that the United States was
interested in the Hague court as a political tool rather than a
mechanism that would add another dimension to international law by
holding individual leaders responsible for war crimes and crimes against
humanity. Everything that would detract from Washington's
policy--whatever that policy is at any given moment--must be dismissed
out of hand or ignored. With a sleight of hand, Sell dismisses British
and French experts who found conclusive proof that Muslim snipers had
fired on their own people in order to stimulate sympathetic media
coverage for their plight. He ignored Canadian Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, who
said he had personally seen a similar incident. Sell also ignores the
fact that Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger accused Milosevic of
war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia in December 1992; Eagleburger's speech
in Geneva no longer fits the official narrative.

Within a year, Milosevic had reinvented himself as a born-again
peacemaker. By 1995 he was the "guarantor" of peace in Bosnia. (He was,
indeed, most responsible for the successful outcome of the peace talks
at Dayton, Ohio.) He shared the stage with Bill Clinton during the
signing ceremonies in Paris. Clinton flattered him. "It's nice to hear
your voice," Clinton told the dictator. The American President, aboard
Air Force One to visit US troops in Bosnia, chitchatted with the Serbian
dictator about the Dayton agreement. "I know it cannot go ahead without
you," Clinton said, according to a recently published transcript of the
conversations monitored by Croatian intelligence.

So, even though "it had long been clear that Milosevic was responsible
for ethnic cleansing and other crimes...in Croatia and Bosnia," Sell
tells us, he was not indicted, because the Clinton Administration was
unable to find a "smoking gun" that would directly link him to the
misdeeds. We are led to conclude that the Administration did not assign
high priority to the task.

On the eve of the Kosovo war, however, the US government became active
in seeking to tie Milosevic to war crimes in Kosovo in early 1999. The
State Department's war crimes intelligence review unit was given a
boost: The number of its analysts and the urgency of its task were
increased. Having no diplomats or spies in Serbia, Sell reports,
analysts used satellite photos to study troop movements inside Kosovo.
The outcome was "precisely the kind of evidence needed to indict
Milosevic on the basis of 'imputed command responsibility'" for ordering
ethnic cleansing or failing to stop it. Canadian jurist Louise Arbour,
the chief prosecutor at the time, must have known that the intelligence
she was given did not meet the standards of proof required in a court of
law. She traveled to Washington, London and Bonn apparently seeking a
policy context for the tribunal's action against Milosevic; but she got
"totally ambiguous" responses. As NATO planes continued to bomb
Yugoslavia, the flow of intelligence material reaching the tribunal
increased, but most of it was part of NATO's massive propaganda campaign
against Milosevic. This must have preyed on the minds of the
prosecutors, leading them to believe that they had a substantial case
that would hold up in court. Indeed, the initial indictment was confined
to war crimes committed in Kosovo in 1999.

The tribunal may indeed have been manipulated by outside forces, as some
of its officers feared. As is frequently the case in the Balkans, a
story always seems clear at a distance, but the closer you get to the
scene of events the murkier it becomes. The drafters of the
indictment--somewhat to their surprise later--had not taken into account
the fact that Kosovo was a secessionist province that had declared
independence in 1991, as a result of which it was placed under Serbian
police rule. The province remained quiet as long as the Albanian
struggle was confined to peaceful means. However horrific the Serbian
repression, it did not include ethnic cleansing. But by 1997, the
Albanians had taken up arms. Milosevic had an armed insurrection on his
hands. Moreover, when the Kosovo war ended, the liberated Albanians had
lost their moral high ground; they embarked on a killing spree of the
defeated Serbs under the noses of NATO peacekeepers.

Once Milosevic was deposed, the legal weaknesses of the Kosovo
indictment became painfully obvious, and the prosecutors moved to
include Croatia and Bosnia, the latter being the prime stage for the
charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Like Sell, I too have
no doubt that Milosevic is guilty as charged, at least with respect to
most counts dealing with Bosnia. I witnessed a good deal while covering
his wars from 1990 to 1996. But it is crucial that this be established
in a court of law. Although the pool of Milosevic's partners in crime
has been shrinking (most recently with the suicide of his former police
minister), a number of them are still at large. The tribunal needs these
former Serbian officials; some should be offered immunity from
prosecution in exchange for their testimony. The prosecutors should work
with local Serbian authorities and hire local private investigators
rather than depend on the might of the United States to force the
extradition of suspected criminals. Without such witnesses and in the
absence of spectacular documentary evidence, the tribunal is heading for

On late-night television the other day I watched Spencer Tracy and
Marlene Dietrich in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, about
the trials of Nazi war criminals. It was a riveting courtroom drama. The
evidence against the accused was overwhelming. By comparison, the Hague
tribunal is more like the trial of Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who
was responsible for a series of gangland murders. Although everybody
knew Capone was guilty, police could not prove it. Eventually he was
sent to jail for tax evasion. One way or another, I suspect, Milosevic
will end up spending many years in jail. Let's hope this will be done
for the right reasons.

The recently announced plans for an international conference on the
Middle East confront the Bush Administration with a major test of its
capacity for international leadership. The question is whether it will
establish an agenda for the conference that will bring peace and justice
to be dictated by Ariel Sharon's government. The atrocious suicide
must not be allowed to derail international efforts to achieve a
political settlement--one that guarantees a viable Palestinian state,

Given this Administration's track record, the prospects of its standing
to ignore UN resolutions calling for withdrawal from the West Bank and
despite a Human Rights Watch report adducing evidence that the Israeli
forces had committed war crimes--using Palestinians as human shields and
wreaking disproportionate destruction on civilian habitations.

Senate resolutions of support for Israel adopted on the eve of Sharon's
DeLay, echoed the Sharon line that Yasir Arafat isn't a "viable partner
for peace." An idea of where DeLay is coming from was provided by his
soulmate, GOP majority leader Dick Armey, who told Hardball host
Chris Matthews that the Palestinians should be expelled from the West
Bank and Gaza. The endorsement of ethnic cleansing by leading
conservatives went almost unnoticed by the mainstream media. As Peter
DeLay put Congress on record "somewhere to the right of the Likud."

sentiment, which prevents the United States from acting in the world's
recently put it, "To call this a case of the tail wagging the dog would
be inadequate--it is more a case of the tail dragging the dog around the
room and banging its head on the wall."

That is why an international conference is so crucial. The concept
recognizes the importance of inserting other critical players in the
international community into Middle East diplomacy. The purpose of the
conference should not be to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It
implementation of a settlement as provided for in UN Security Council
resolutions and by the recent Arab League resolution calling for the
recognition of Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the occupied

dismantlement of the Israeli settlements; Palestinian sovereignty over
East Jerusalem; and recognition of the right of return of Palestinian
refugees while limiting their numbers. But it is one the parties
circumstances cannot be expected to negotiate seriously.

A reasonable interim stage could involve placing the occupied
territories, including Israeli settlements, under international control
pending the establishment of a Palestinian state and stationing
international forces drawn largely from NATO countries to maintain order
may not want peace and to internationalize responsibility for security
in the West Bank and Gaza. It is not Israel's prerogative to determine
international community to decide. Only the international community--in
particular, the US in cooperation with the EU, Russia and the UN--can
forge a settlement that will bring peace at last to both Palestinians
and Israelis.

After years of collecting evidence against Slobodan Milosevic, the
Yugoslav president, who insisted on defending himself, began his opening
statement at his war crimes trial last February, his accusers realized
they'd got more than they
trial was a political farce staged by an illegal court determined to

renowned modern philosophers. Indeed, behind every contemporary war
sorts of objections. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt took to
task the prosecution, which she claimed transformed the trial of one
Nazi functionary into a stage for manipulating history and
indoctrinating future generations. For prosecutors to use the trial of
certain political responsibilities among nations might some day be
adjudicated in an international court; what is inconceivable is that
or innocence of individuals."

take on more urgency as the first permanent international criminal court
begins its work, over vehement US opposition (the Bush Administration
has just announced it is renouncing President Clinton's signature of the
Elizabeth Neuffer, a reporter for the Boston Globe, implicitly
takes it on. Although Neuffer doesn't discuss Arendt's views directly,
her portrayal of the international criminal tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda ultimately serve as a persuasive reply.

Balkans and Rwanda, interspersing stories of survivors with historical
recounts how in each region, power-hungry nationalists exploited old
ethnic tensions to spark a genocide with political aims. Although not
always artfully told, the narrative effectively conveys the tragedy of
each war, highlighting horrors such as the shelling and siege of
Sarajevo, the fall of Srebrenica and the subsequent mass execution of
Muslim men and boys. Concerning Rwanda, she describes how escalating
tensions between Hutus and Tutsis grew increasingly violent until they
culminated in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in less
told before (Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow
We Will Be Killed With Our Families
has become a classic on the
two international tribunals where survivors eventually sought justice.
Her portrayal serves as convincing evidence that, contrary to Arendt's
contention, these courts can and should play more than a traditional
legalistic role.

Consider the story of Hamdo Kahrimanovic. A Muslim elementary school
Omarska concentration camp in June 1992 after Serb nationalists took
later, the Yugoslavia tribunal declared its first trial in session,
called to testify.

understand how Bosnia could have so quickly degenerated from a

As a legal matter, Hamdo's testimony was probably irrelevant to Tadic's
war and haunted the judge long afterward. In contrast to Arendt's
formalistic view of a trial, Neuffer suggests here that the court's
attempt to record and understand the crimes that occurred is as
important as its judgment of any individual who caused the events.

1999, the tribunal had indicted and arrested most of Kozarac's local
able to return home, beginning the process of reconciliation.

The Rwanda tribunal's consequences similarly reach beyond isolated
woman, JJ managed to escape when Hutu extremists attacked her small
genocide and, as the tribunal's investigators eventually learned,

experience contributed more than a legal precedent. Neuffer describes
how JJ, initially intimidated by the imposing courtroom, lawyers and

Unfortunately, the tribunal offered JJ little beyond that therapeutic
effect: It neither provided restitution nor helped survivors discover
justice seems patently unfair: While more than 100,000 lower-level
accused genocidaires pack local prisons awaiting trials where

reluctance to provide necessary support. Created by the UN Security
poorly trained staff, mismanagement and the inherent challenge of
creating a court that functions outside any established legal system.
political snare: Peace negotiations were ongoing, so NATO members were
loath to have their troops arrest indicted war criminals still in
Tanzania, was marred by allegations of corruption.

Over time, both tribunals have improved. Neuffer's final assessment,

Neuffer's book is similarly a qualified success. While well researched
humanize the survivors, for example, that she frequently tries to
re-create their sentiments in a manner that seems forced and
unnecessary. And Neuffer's personal commentary is sometimes strained. In
an apparent nod to Arendt's famous observation about the banality of
that you meet yourself." Such extrapolations are neither convincing nor
to become thoughtless murderers. Moreover, Neuffer would surely agree
greater than the conviction of the individual.

Lawrence Douglas makes that argument forcefully in The Memory of
. An associate professor of law, jurisprudence and social
thought at Amherst College, Douglas writes about the trials of the
Holocaust. Though he takes a more analytic approach than Neuffer's,
examining in often painstaking detail the legal charges and evidence
introduced to support them, Douglas arrives at a similar judgment:
Despite their problems, these legal proceedings provide a form of
justice that's more comprehensive than any individual verdict.

on to discuss Israel's prosecution of Eichmann, followed by several more

Unlike Neuffer, Douglas takes on Arendt directly, challenging her view
Although he recognizes the tension between strictly applying law to the
aims. Although he concludes that the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials were
more successful in their didactic aims than were the trials of
demonstrate the power of law to reintroduce order into a space evacuated
of legal and moral sense."

trial was hampered by the prosecutor's insistence on fitting the Nazis'
unprecedented crimes into conventional legal standards--precisely the
legalistic approach Arendt might have advocated. Eager to use the most
, "boredom on a huge historic scale."

film Nazi Concentration Camps, which Douglas analyzes in detail.
'invitation' of the Americans."

never indicated who was responsible for the horrors portrayed. Nor did
it name or even accurately convey the crimes committed. Instead of
war. For political and procedural reasons, crimes against humanity were
defined in such a cramped manner that the term barely surfaced during
prosecutors to fit the square peg of the Holocaust atrocities into the
round hole of conventional legal forms that they ultimately distorted
the truth. Although the defendants were appropriately convicted, Douglas
maintains that the historic and didactic impact of the trial was
severely limited by the prosecution's adherence to the most conventional
construction of the law.

In the Eichmann trial, the Israeli prosecutors were determined to do
Eichmann prosecution made miscalculations of its own. In the Israeli
attorney general's effort to reach beyond proving Eichmann's guilt to
atrocities, they were mostly not about Eichmann.

Arendt describes as "the terrifyingly normal" person who commits
well as the laws demanding that Eichmann's crimes be intentional ones.

charging Eichmann with crimes against humanity, the prosecutors, eager
By rejecting the broader legal category, argues Arendt, the prosecutors
failed to create what should have been an important precedent for future

Douglas acknowledges these problems but insists that Arendt's criteria
law and reach a judgment; they should create an accurate historical

claims obfuscated the very history they were intended to enlighten. The
Zundel trial, in particular, applied legal procedural rules so strictly
that much of the evidence of Nazi crimes was excluded, allowing
Holocaust deniers to turn the trial into a forum for revisionist

Although for the most part he is thorough and convincing, Douglas
occasionally stumbles. For example, he doesn't adequately respond to
Arendt's charge that a domestic trial of an individual accused of
committing an international atrocity can fall prey to political agendas
that distort the historical record. His point about truth commissions
also misses the mark. Douglas maintains that truth commissions are
truth commissions is that they don't fulfill two important aims of
criminal law: retribution and deterrence. Douglas is dismissive of the
deter would-be international law violators, but a permanent
international criminal court that systematically and effectively
prosecutes perpetrators could certainly, over time, do just that.

criminal tribunals than Arendt would have countenanced. An established
international court that both judges individuals accused of widespread
atrocities and records the experiences of survivors could act as a moral
counterweight to domestic totalitarian leaders. Such a court holds out
the promise not only of deterring the potential architects of organized
thoughtless functionary might find difficult to ignore.


It’s the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of WWI.

December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 22, 2014


December 18, 2014


December 17, 2014

The two countries have resumed a dialogue after fifty years.

December 17, 2014


December 17, 2014

Dick Cheney clarifies what he means by American Exceptionalism.

December 17, 2014


December 12, 2014