If ever you doubt the sense in creating an International Criminal Court, think about this: What is the world to do when soldiers on the "right side" seem to have done something awful? Who can be trusted to seek justice?

It happens, of course. In fact, new U.N. findings suggest it may have happened last year in Afghanistan. Investigators have just finished examining a mass grave in the desert near Sherbergan, stronghold of an Uzbek warlord supported by the United States. The bulldozed grave is packed with the bodies of hundreds of dead Taliban prisoners of war -- most of whom seem to have suffocated after being crammed into unventilated metal transport containers. Who crammed them? U.S.-backed Northern Alliance troops, evidence suggests. The deaths, say U.N. investigators, justify a "full-fledged criminal investigation."

The recommendation ought to be heeded, whether or not the White House will grant the point. Indeed, its Sunday warning against a "rush to judgment" is just hot air blown on a cool process. An investigation in this case isn't less necessary because the apparent victims were Taliban scoundrels and the alleged perpetrators American allies. It's all the more necessary.

That's the point of establishing international rules of conduct and holding every nation to them. The process itself counts for a lot. It establishes that human-rights violations everywhere -- whether inflicted by or against friend or foe -- deserve global attention.

So who should conduct this essential probe? Surely not Afghanistan's fledgling government: Already struggling to keep smoldering animosities in check, it can't possibly pursue a credible investigation. Definitely not the United States: Its ties with the Northern Alliance, onlookers are sure to argue, will taint its judgment. What's needed, plainly, is a multination tribunal to examine charges that Northern Alliance combatants treated POWs brutally.

There's nothing novel in this idea. Indeed, every time combatants of any kind -- self-styled or state-sponsored -- appear to have flouted the conventions of war, the United Nations has to reinvent the Nuremberg wheel. It has to whip up a special tribunal, gather up a coterie of judges and prosecutors and defense lawyers, and cobble a process for examining claims against the latest pack of accused war criminals. Just as tiresome, it must haggle with various parties to the controversy to win the sort of buy-in to make the process work.

How much easier it would be if the world could agree that the Nuremberg Court should never have been disbanded -- or, to put it differently, should be resurrected and sustained. In fact, most of the world does agree, but the United States -- which claims to wage war by the rules -- has misgivings about enforcing global standards with a global court. But why? Its recalcitrance gives breathing room to the world's thugs -- people whose idea of fighting for freedom is waging a massacre. Does this country, haunted by foolish fears of "world government," really want to let such monsters off the hook?

© Copyright 2002 Star Tribune

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