Who will judge NATO's crimes?

BELGRADE -- An Amnesty International representative says this organization is "seeking mechanisms" so that NATO is tried for the crimes committed in Serbia and Afghanistan.

Sian Jones told Belgrade daily Politika that AI “is looking go mechanisms for NATO to answer for their crimes, because no world organization currently has jurisdiction over the most powerful military alliance on the planet.”

“We will continue to put pressure on NATO, because over the last ten years there has been clear proof that in 1999, during the bombing of Yugoslavia, there was a violation of human rights,” Jones said.

AI stated in its 2002 report that the NATO bombing of Radio Television Serbia, RTS, in which 16 people were killed, should be seen as a war crime and a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

“NATO is now immune to prosecution, whether for killing civilians in Serbia, or the killing of civilians, which we believe is still going on, in Afghanistan,” Jones said.

She said that the reason can be found in the “complicated fact that the Alliance is at the same time an organization of individual countries, but an entity itself.”

The European Director of the International Federation of Journalists, Marc Gruber, told Politika that the fact that NATO has not faced any legal responsibility for what it did in Serbia ten years after the fact is “a big problem which is not easy to solve at all”.

“No court can start a trial against NATO, as there is no basis for it in international law, because the North Atlantic Alliance is an international coalition of states,” Gruber said.

“We strongly condemn this crime. The least that NATO could do is offer an apology. We have been protesting for ten years against the fact that NATO targeted a television station, knowing there were journalists inside. The media can never be a military target,” Gruber told Politika.

The NATO bombing of the seat of Radio Television Serbia 10 years ago, when 16 employees were killed and another 16 were injured, was a deliberate attack on a civilian building and is a war crime for which no one has answered so far, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL assessed. They stress that in early 2000, NATO officials claimed they bombed RTS because of a propaganda role it had, in order to weaken the morale of citizens and armed forces. They point out NATO did not issue any special warning, although it was well-known there were many civilians in the building. AI assesses the civilian victims could have been avoided if NATO had adhered to rules of warfare. AI calls on NATO member-states to conduct independent investigation, take over full responsibility and pay damages to the victims’ families.