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Tuesday, April 1, 2003 04:29 p.m.

TV station bombings - is the Kosovo war crimes loophole available?

Again, another potential way to make things hot for the man who bombs for Jesus.

The latest yesterday of a series of attacks by US+ forces on Iraqi television installations. Attacks justified on March 26 by UK Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon:

Television stations are not directly targeted in that sense, [but] they are part of the military command and control structures and certainly they are dealt with as other parts of the communications system that allows the military to operate in and around Baghdad are similarly dealt with.
The precedent for attacking broadcasting facilities, mentioned in the article (though it doesn't say Hoon brought the point up), was Kosovo: on April 23 1999, NATO bombed the state-owned RTS building in the centre of Belgrade, killing between 10 and 20 enemy civilians.

The incident was one which the Ex-Yugoslavia war crimes apparatus went through the motions of investigating - the Prosecutor delegated the task to a committee which (surprise, surprise) reported that no further action was warranted, against NATO personnel or anyone else, on account of the bombing [1].

The report deals with the RTS bombing at para 71ff. It said (para 72) that

Disrupting government propaganda may help to undermine the morale of the population and the armed forces, but justifying an attack on a civilian facility on such grounds alone may not meet the "effective contribution to military action" and "definite military advantage" criteria required by the Additional Protocols [2]
And went on to say that
NATO stressed the dual-use to which such communications systems were put, describing civilian television as "heavily dependent on the military command and control system and military traffic is also routed through the civilian system"
This fact was crucial, to take the report at face value, to the Committee's decision to recommend no further action in relation to the bombing (para 76):
The committee finds that if the attack on the RTS was justified by reference to its propaganda purpose alone, its legality might well be questioned by some experts in the field of international humanitarian law. It appears, however, that NATO's targeting of the RTS building for propaganda purposes was an incidental (albeit complementary) aim of its primary goal of disabling the Serbian military command and control system and to destroy the nerve system and apparatus that keeps Milosevic in power. In a press conference of 9 April 1999, NATO declared that TV transmitters were not targeted directly but that "in Yugoslavia military radio relay stations are often combined with TV transmitters [so] we attack the military target. If there is damage to the TV transmitters, it is a secondary effect but it is not [our] primary intention to do that." A NATO spokesperson, Jamie Shea, also wrote to the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists on 12 April claiming that OperationAllied Force "target[ed] military targets only and television and radio towers are only struck if they [were] integrated into military facilities...There is no policy to strike television and radio transmitters as such" (cited in Amnesty International Report, ibid, June 2000 [3]).
In relying on these statements, the Committee was being rather selective. It quotes in para 74 a rather less legally sanitised statement from the Dear Leader:
Tony Blair was reported as saying in The Times that the media "is the apparatus that keeps him [Milosevic] in power and we are entirely justified as NATO allies in damaging and taking on those targets" (24 April, 1999)
No milquetoast notion of dual-use [4] here, mark you!

Now, so far I've not done more than skim and skip through both the official and the Amnesty reports: this piece is by way of setting the topic up for further work as necessary. But already, it seems, the potential for politicians to place their necks on the war crimes block by getting carried away with their message has been flagged by the war crimes industry (even if only in the form of the (at first sight) deeply unsatisfactory report on the Serbian TV bombing. And who, surely, is more liable to get carried away than the Messiah of Mayhem himself, Saint Tony?

[So far as I can see, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court will be the only war crimes jurisdiction covering the present conflict - if so, US personnel, from Bush downwards, will be able to order or carry out with impunity the bombing of whatsoever takes their fancy [5].]


  1. The extent to which the process was victor's justice is hinted at in the tone of the recommendations (para 90):
    The committee has...has tended to assume that the NATO and NATO countries' press statements are generally reliable and that explanations have been honestly given. The committee must note, however, that when the OTP [prosecutor's office] requested NATO to answer specific questions about specific incidents, the NATO reply was couched in general terms and failed to address the specific incidents. The committee has not spoken to those involved in directing or carrying out the bombing campaign....
  2. Something like one of those old-style lynching trials where after that due, sober and learned process that only Mississippi justice could offer, the lynchers were found not guilty and chaired out through the rejoicing throng by the jurors who had just impartially rendered their verdicts.

  3. The 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions (I-IV) (texts here); the report discusses the applicable law on target selection in para 28ff.

  4. The Amnesty Report PDF file is apparently damaged. The cache looks fine.

  5. You've got to love the hint of that great jesuitical Doctrine of Double Effect that comes in so handy for whited sepulchres with a taste for slaughter.

  6. The official kiss-off is here.