The Justice Dilemma

Leaders and Exile in an Era of Accountability

Daniel Krcmaric

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501750229
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Abusive leaders are now held accountable for their crimes in a way that was unimaginable just a few decades ago. What are the consequences of this recent push for international justice? In The Justice Dilemma, Daniel Krcmaric explains why the "golden parachute" of exile is no longer an attractive retirement option for oppressive rulers. He argues that this is both a blessing and a curse: leaders culpable for atrocity crimes fight longer civil wars because they lack good exit options, but the threat of international prosecution deters some leaders from committing atrocities in the first place. The Justice Dilemma therefore diagnoses an inherent tension between conflict resolution and atrocity prevention, two of the signature goals of the international community.

Krcmaric also sheds light on several important puzzles in world politics. Why do some rulers choose to fight until they are killed or captured? Why not simply save oneself by going into exile? Why do some civil conflicts last so much longer than others? Why has state-sponsored violence against civilians fallen in recent years?

While exploring these questions, Krcmaric marshals statistical evidence on patterns of exile, civil war duration, and mass atrocity onset. He also reconstructs the decision-making processes of embattled leaders—including Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Charles Taylor of Liberia, and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso—to show how contemporary international justice both deters atrocities and prolongs conflicts.

CHAPTER 1

Justice Goes Global

By 1979, the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had presided over the killing of some three hundred thousand people, pillaged his country’s economy, and started a war with neighboring Tanzania. After eight tumultuous years in power, Amin’s regime was on the verge of collapse. Ugandan rebels and their Tanzanian allies, both determined to take down Amin, were rapidly closing in on the capital city of Kampala. Despite his long-standing claim to be the indispensable “Big Daddy” of Uganda, Amin opted not to make a last stand against his adversaries. He had a better option: exile. Before Kampala fell, Amin and his family boarded a plane that delivered them to safety. After a brief stop in Libya, Amin settled into a long-term retirement in a beautiful villa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to a journalist who caught up with Amin during his exile, the former leader liked to spend much of his time frequenting Jeddah’s finer hotels. Indeed, Amin “had spent the previous years taking a morning swim in the pool of the local Hilton, having his back massaged by an Egyptian masseur at the Intercontinental, and finally having lunch at a third hotel.”1

As shocking as the Amin example may seem, there is a long history of abusive rulers finding safe havens abroad once they were no longer welcome at home. In 1986, for instance, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos retired to Hawaii when the People Power Revolution toppled him following a fraudulent election. That same year, as protests raged throughout Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier took a similar exit option by fleeing to the French Riviera. In short, exile was once the default option for dictators in distress.

Today, however, embattled leaders seem to think twice about exile. Consider the tale of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In 2011, as the Arab Spring spread throughout the region, Gaddafi faced growing unrest within Libya. Peaceful protests morphed into a full-blown civil war, and the Libyan rebels eventually gained the upper hand in the conflict. As the rebels marched on Tripoli, Gaddafi faced a predicament eerily similar to the one Idi Amin had encountered several decades earlier. Should Gaddafi stay in Libya to battle it out or flee to a foreign safe haven? Guided by a desire to avoid further bloodshed in Libya, speculation among the punditocracy ran rampant about possible exile destinations for Gaddafi.2 But unlike Amin, Gaddafi opted to fight rather than take flight, a move that ultimately cost him his life.

Gaddafi is not the only leader digging in his heels instead of retiring abroad these days. After Laurent Gbagbo refused to recognize that he had lost the Ivory Coast’s 2010 presidential election, opposition fighters advanced toward Abidjan. As he hunkered down in the presidential palace, it must have been a moment of soul searching for the former strongman. Just a couple of months earlier, a delegation of West African diplomats had visited Gbagbo and pressed him to stop the violence and go into exile.3 But Gbagbo refused to go quietly into the night and instead clung to power until opposition forces captured him. Similarly, when Syrian rebels pushed toward Damascus in December 2012, many thought that Bashar Assad would try to save himself by fleeing abroad.4 Assad himself appeared open to this possibility if the circumstances were right and reportedly was “looking for a way out.”5 Yet, in the end, Assad decided to keep fighting in Syria rather than seek a retirement home abroad.

What explains the divergent behavior of these leaders? Why have recent leaders like Gaddafi, Gbagbo, and Assad desperately clung to power whereas past leaders such as Amin, Marcos, and Duvalier were willing to spend their days in exile? The answer, I argue in this book, is that something new is happening in the world of international justice. For a long time, advocates of global accountability had little to celebrate. Despite employing lofty rhetoric about ending impunity for the world’s worst war criminals, tangible successes were elusive. In fact, proponents of international justice—relying on the idea that some crimes are so heinous that the perpetrator should be punished regardless of national borders—were frequently mocked as out-of-touch idealists.6 Accordingly, the prospects for international accountability were once bleak: oppressive leaders simply went into exile in posh locales where they could retire without fear of prosecution.

But the world is now a smaller place for tyrants. Consider the leaders just described: Gaddafifaced an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant at the time of his death, Gbagbo was extradited to the ICC and charged with crimes against humanity, and Assad was widely condemned as a war criminal.7 In a world of globalized justice, fleeing abroad to a quiet exile no longer guarantees that a violent ruler can escape the long arm of the law.

A variety of international criminal tribunals have proliferated since the 1990s. To address mass atrocities, the United Nations (UN) created ad hoc international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and hybrid tribunals popped up to judge war criminals in places such as Sierra Leone, East Timor, Cambodia, and Chad, among others. Foreign courts also joined the fray by invoking universal jurisdiction to initiate prosecutions for crimes committed on the other side of the globe. The tribunal-building process culminated with the Rome Statute in 1998, the treaty establishing the ICC, the first permanent international court with broad jurisdiction over mass atrocities. Equally important, many of the world’s most powerful states—especially Western democracies—started to provide the muscle to make tribunals work by apprehending and transferring indicted war criminals. The results have been impressive. In the world of international legal proceedings, few scenes are as striking as watching once-untouchable tyrants face justice for their misdeeds. Though the march toward global accountability has been uneven and undoubtedly remains a work in progress, it is hard to disagree with human rights activist Paul van Zyl’s claim that “the international justice genie is out of the bottle.”8

This book is about the effects of this dramatic change in world politics, sometimes called the “justice cascade” (Sikkink 2011) or the “revolution in accountability” (Sriram 2005). More precisely, I examine one specific part of this justice cascade: the new trend toward international prosecutions of heads of state.9 I focus on prosecutions that (1) are international/foreign in nature and (2) target political leaders because this sort of prosecution raises unique implications for the exile dynamics that are at the core of the book.10 While other aspects of the justice cascade (e.g., domestic trials of unpopular rulers or international prosecutions of the rank and file) are important in their own right, the pursuit of globalized accountability for those at the very top is a qualitatively different phenomenon. As I explain later, heads of state have historically been a protected class of individuals who were essentially immune to arrest on foreign soil no matter how badly they behaved. Only in the past couple of decades has the special status of political leaders in international law been challenged.

I primarily take a positive perspective rather than a normative one. From a normative or moral standpoint, things seem relatively straightforward. Few would dispute that it is appropriate to hold leaders legally accountable for committing atrocity crimes. Moreover, most would agree that fewer oppressive rulers escaping to comfortable, if not luxurious, foreign retirements is a welcome change. But from a perspective that investigates the political effects of international prosecutions, things are far more complicated. As I will show, pursuing global justice for abusive leaders produces difficult and inescapable trade-offs. Simply put, there is a justice dilemma.

The Argument in Brief

My argument starts with a simple observation: exile can be a pragmatic political solution. Specifically, exile provides a mechanism for leaders, especially those facing domestic unrest, to give up power in a manner that is relatively costless. Leaders who might refuse to step down because they fear domestic punishment upon retirement can instead go into exile and find a safe haven abroad. Thus, exile offers a “golden parachute” exit strategy that facilitates leadership transitions. Though they give up power, leaders will likely view exile abroad—and the secure retirement it typically affords—as the best option available when the risk of domestic punishment is high. For this reason, there has been an extensive history of rulers fleeing abroad once they were no longer safe in their home countries.

The justice cascade, however, complicates the exile option for some leaders. The globalization of accountability means that leader culpability (whether leaders have previously presided over atrocity crimes) now influences the search for a safe haven. Today’s culpable leaders have to worry that fleeing into exile will ultimately land them in the jail cell of an international tribunal, which creates incentives to entrench in power rather than retire abroad. But nonculpable leaders—those who refrain from committing mass atrocities against civilians—can still safely go into exile because they do not need to fear international arrest. In more concrete terms, exile remains a viable exit strategy for “merely” unpopular or corrupt leaders such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré, but a similar retirement for culpable mass killers like Muammar Gaddafi, Laurent Gbagbo, and Bashar Assad is increasingly problematic.11

By making the availability of a safe post-tenure exile conditional on a leader’s behavior while still in power (i.e., the leader’s culpability), the justice cascade generates two effects that pull in opposite directions. On the negative side, the justice cascade exacerbates conflict. By undermining the possibility of a secure exile for culpable leaders, international justice incentivizes such leaders to double down on the battlefield and keep fighting during civil wars when they otherwise would have retired abroad. On the positive side, the justice cascade deters atrocities. Precisely because leaders now know that committing abuses will decrease their future exit options, international justice effectively increases the costs of brutality. Taken together, these predictions form the justice dilemma: deterring atrocities and prolonging conflicts are two sides of the same coin.

To test the argument, I exploit stark over-time variation in the threat international justice poses to leaders. In the past, punishment expectations were low because realpolitik strategies consistently trumped concerns about international justice. Moreover, prevailing ideas about international legal order, based on respect for sovereignty and head-of-state immunity, protected leaders from arrest while in foreign countries. As a result, all leaders—even notoriously brutal ones—historically had little to fear from international justice. In recent years, however, the landscape for pursuing justice across borders has changed dramatically: a slew of oppressive leaders have been arrested and transferred to foreign or international courts as part of the justice cascade. This rapid change in the likelihood of international punishment provides a unique empirical opportunity, perhaps even “some kind of natural experiment” (Kim and Sikkink 2010, 944).

Building on this insight, I argue that the push for international justice reached a tipping point in the late 1990s. Specifically, I suggest that two key events in 1998 marked a critical juncture. First, the signing of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court institutionalized the previously ad hoc legal regime and signaled to leaders that the international community was interested in pursuing justice globally on a permanent basis. Second, the arrest of former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet in the United Kingdom—the first time a leader was actually arrested in a foreign state for international crimes—provided a powerful demonstration effect that shattered the expectation of impunity leaders had once enjoyed. While these are certainly not the only two factors that mattered, the landmark events of 1998 constitute the watershed moment in a shift from an era of impunity to an era of accountability.

Much of my book is devoted to evaluating how this shift from global impunity toward accountability has shaped patterns of exile, civil war duration, and mass atrocity onset using both quantitative and qualitative methods. While neither method of inquiry is without potential pitfalls, a multimethod research design allows the strengths of each approach to help compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The statistical tests, by establishing correlations between independent and dependent variables across a wide variety of contexts, demonstrate the generalizability of the theory. The quantitative approach also prevents cherry-picking only the cases that are consistent with my theoretical expectations. Three main statistical findings bolster my argument. First, leader culpability had no effect on the likelihood of exile during the impunity era, but today’s culpable leaders are nearly six times less likely to go into exile. Second, because they lack good exit options, today’s culpable leaders tend to fight longer civil wars. During the accountability era, the likelihood of a war ending is cut in half if a culpable leader is in power. Third, this dark side of justice also produces a benefit: deterrence. Today’s leaders are over six times less likely to initiate mass killings than their peers were during the impunity era.

While the quantitative tests provide data on general trends, qualitative case studies are generally better at illustrating causal processes. If my theory is correct, we should not only observe the predicted correlation between variables, but we should also see leaders reasoning and behaving in a manner consistent with my argument’s expectations. By turning to creative sources of qualitative data such as the testimonies of arrested leaders, the accounts of the diplomatic contacts who helped arrange leaders’ escapes into exile, and the perspectives of killed leaders’ surviving deputies, I work to reconstruct the decision-making processes of embattled leaders. Specifically, I offer case studies of Charles Taylor, Muammar Gaddafi, and Blaise Compaoré to illustrate how leaders think and act in ways that are consistent with the theory.12 Overall, the combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence provides compelling support for the argument.

Debating Peace and Justice

Evaluating international justice is a tricky business. One challenge is that there is “a dizzying array of lofty objectives for international war crimes tribunals” (Bass 2000, 284). The absence of a clear benchmark for judging success or failure has even led some to conclude “that the performance of international criminal courts cannot be assessed reliably” (Damaska 2008, 330). There are, however, certain objectives that repeatedly show up in discussions of international...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Justice Goes Global
• 2. The Justice Dilemma
• 3. The Mechanism: Exile
• 4. The Perverse Effect: Prolonging Civil Wars
• 5. The Positive Effect: Deterring Mass Atrocities
• 6. Grasping the Dilemma
• References
• Index