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.