A
Race Between Impunity and War
2002
has witnessed a distressing trend in the Middle East towards announced
ethnic cleansing in the expectation (and sometimes hope) of implementing
extremist agendas for wars that involve the massive displacement
or killing of populations.
Such
declared and undeclared policies are designed to lay the ground
for bolstering the legitimacy of leaders accused of mass crime,
namely the Iraqi and Israeli leaders on the larger Middle Eastern
scale; and, within Israel-Palestine, the top leaders in the Israeli
government and in the Palestinian Authority clinging to power and
waiting to ride the wave of wide-scale violence.
The
race between effective international accountability and the continuation
of mass crime in the fog of war is on. It extends beyond the Middle
East as a model to extremists in power the world over, especially
in Pakistan and India.
Chibli
Mallat is Chair of European Law and Director of the Centre for
the Study of the European Union at the Université Saint-Joseph
in Beirut.
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