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Chapter 12: How to Restore Justice in Serbia? A Closer Look at Peoples’ Opinions about Postwar Reconciliation
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Mossadegh of Iran constitutes a crime of the state. In August 1960 the U.S. administration carried out planning and preparations for the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congolese independence struggle and critic of colonial oppression of Africa.“Investigations uncovered ample proof that the assassination of Lumumba was the direct result of orders given by the Eisenhower Administration, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and local clients financed and ‘advised’ by Washington” (Vann 2002). In 2002 the state released material that included an interview with Robert Johnson (the White House minute-taker under the Eisenhower administration), giving a recorded a discussion wherein Eisenhower ordered the CIA to “eliminate ” Lumumba. Other allegations of the United States’ involvement in assassination plots include Cuba,Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic in the 1960s, and Chile in the 1970s (Rothe 2009b). Similarly, other scholars of state crime claim that most cases of conflict and subsequent civilian deaths constitute a crime of the state—recognizing the agentic force and criminality of individuals occupying positions within that government. For example, Kramer and Michalowski (2005, 2006a) have stated that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was itself illegal, and that war crimes were committed through the use of indiscriminate bombing and civilian deaths. Similar arguments have been lodged against NATO on the basis of its bombing campaign againstYugoslavia for failing to minimize civilian casualties. Beyond the issue of undue collateral damage, the realization that military humanitarian interventions are prey to realpolitik of states’ interests comes to bear. For instance, humanitarian intervention has long been criticized in different cases as being politically driven.This is even more problematic when states use humanitarian intervention as pretexts for fulfilling their own economic, military, or political interests.There is the issue of state selectivity. This is evident with the current situation in Darfur, where neither the international political community nor empowered states have used forced interventions ; instead, hundreds of thousands of civilians have died (Rothe and Mullins 2007). There is the critique of hegemonic change from above and beyond the region. Dating back to research on colonialism, neocolonialism, and the dependency models of international relations, there is the questioning of the right of the international political arena or external states to impose Westernized hegemonic values. This has brought into question the moral right to change these types of regimes and conditions; the issue of state sovereignty , which frames international relations, statehood, and states’ rights to self-govern; and the ethical dilemma of unseating a head of state or regime for the stated purposes of a greater good. Further state crimes scholars have long recognized the lessons learned from state intervention based on economic , political, or military self-interests, realpolitik, and political will. M i c h a e l B o h l a n d e r a n d Daw n L . Ro t h e 258 Assassination of Regime Elites 259 Nonetheless, if interventions, such as NATO’s actions or the United States’ unilateral aggression in the guise of military humanitarian interventions and state sponsored assassinations, all ultimately can be claimed as or result in cases of state criminality, can there be any other alternatives or a common ground? After all, the larger goal of criminology, as well as international institutions of social control, is accountability and general deterrence. The whole idea behind the rule of criminal law is to deter violators.As noted in the separate opinion of Judge Schomburg: “I also fully accept, within the margin determined by the Appellant’s individual guilt, the special emphasis on general deterrence . . . in particular when it is to prevent commanders in similar circumstances from committing similar crimes in the future” (2004, xiv, 260). Given that, if the political objective is deterrence and accountability, and if the means to achieve that is the assassination of a head of state responsible for vast atrocities, then is this not a better means of reaching the goal than war? After all, the means can never be considered in isolation from its purpose . Perhaps the answer to this contradiction lies in the belief in the potential of general deterrence for heads of state coupled with the international political community’s publicly stated goal and ideology for ending impunity. This of course assumes there can be a time when the ideal is the real: when the extant realpolitik of international relations is no longer the dominant ideology. Deterrence and Ending Impunity Deterrence is indeed a model of obedience, the...