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149 Human Rights and the International Criminal Court JOHN SHATTUCK I must take you first into the heart of the U.S. government where I spent eight years. On one hand, there is a tremendous amount of lip service paid to the subject of human rights in the U.S. government, and values and norms of international law find their way into the discourse of leaders frequently . We know that President George Bush, when he appeared before the UN General Assembly last fall [2002], spent a great deal of time speaking about human rights in the context of Iraq. We also know, to be bipartisan about it, that my boss, President Bill Clinton, spent a great deal of time speaking about human rights in China during the campaign for the presidency in 1992. On the other hand, the U.S. government is not a human rights organization. It is a vast collection of competing interests that are struggling with each other bureaucratically in every conceivable way; and human rights are often seen to be a threat by other elements of the bureaucracy because it limits the freedom of those other competing interests, be it trade with China or U.S. sovereignty in the context of the International Criminal Court. So there is a constant tug of war inside. It is very important for human rights advocates inside to find ways of demonstrating how values and national interests coincide. The genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, which were the two catastrophic events of the post–Cold War world, created major instability in central and southeastern Europe and central Africa, and millions of refugees, and the crisis became a national security interest to the United States even though in both cases it was not perceived to be so at the start. Human rights repression in Islamic countries today is a matter of national interest in the United States in that it blocks political expression and can be seen as the cradle of terrorism. There are plenty of examples of what can happen when we ignore our values in pursuing what we may at that time think our interests are. Let me give you one example, a recently declassified 1990 State Department cable on Iraq, which begins: “Human rights and chemical weapons aside, the interests of the United States and Iraq are generally the same.” Now even where international human rights values and national interests can be shown to be coincidental and the bureaucracy is willing to generally give lip service to it, there are bureaucratic impediments to actually moving forward and using the resources of the U.S. From the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University, “Sovereignty and Intervention,” February 2003 150 WHOSE VALUES? WHOSE JUSTICE? government working with other governments to do such things as intervene in Bosnia or Rwanda to stop genocide. There are five Washington syndromes that I would just quickly point out to those of you who are not familiar with the way the federal government works. First is what I call interagency gridlock, which is that consensus on a new policy is required before it can move forward and if one agency, the Pentagon for example, wants to block a new policy, such as the insertion of troops in Bosnia, that’s what will happen. Then there is the presidential decision-making syndrome. The only way to break the gridlock of the interagency process is to get a presidential decision; but you’re not likely to get such a decision on a tough political issue that may have costs to the President without some degree of political support, which then leads you to what I would call the public opinion syndrome and, particularly in foreign affairs, the public is often not interested until there is presidential leadership. So the president is not going to act without the public behind him. Then there is what I would call the Vietmalia syndrome, which is a combination of fears that come from Vietnam and the crisis of Somalia, when eighteen U.S. rangers were killed in a peacekeeping mission in October 1993. Somalia created tremendous fear in the bureaucracy that body bags were going to be accompanying various human rights adventures in the future. Then there is the human rights catastrophe syndrome, which is that we need action before a crisis becomes severe; but that is often not likely because there is not enough attention paid to it until the horrors begin to flash across the television on CNN. You can...

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