U.S. Cuts Aid Over Global Court

(CBS)  The United States is suspending military aid to about 35 countries in a dispute over an international war crimes tribunal.

Overall, about $48 million in aid will be blocked, according to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. Among the nations affected is Colombia, where some U.S. assistance for fighting drugs and terrorists could be in jeopardy.

The aid cutoff is because the countries failed to meet a Tuesday deadline for exempting Americans from prosecution before the new U.N. international war crimes tribunal.

The Bush administration is simply acting to protect its troops, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

"These are the people who are able to deliver assistance to the various states around the world, and if delivering aid to those states endangers America's servicemen and servicewomen, the president's first priority is with the servicemen and servicewomen," he said.

Under last year's American Servicemembers' Protection Act, Congress set a July 1 deadline for most recipients of U.S. military aid to exempt U.S soldiers and other personnel from prosecution before the new U.N. International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration fears the court could leave American personnel subject to false, politically motivated prosecutions.

According to The New York Times, the administration has citied recent war crimes suits against American officials in Belgian courts over the 1991 Gulf war and this year's Iraq war as example of the politicized prosecutions it fears.

But human rights groups scoffed at that comparison, saying the ICC has safeguards in place to prevent spurious prosecutions.

"U.S. ambassadors have been acting like schoolyard bullies. The U.S. campaign has not succeeded in undermining global support for the court. But it has succeeded in making the U.S. government look foolish and mean-spirited," said a statement by Richard Dicker or Human Rights Watch.

The Clinton administration signed a 1998 treaty that created the court, but the Bush administration nullified the signature and has sought a permanent exemption from prosecutions.

Those efforts have been blocked by the European Union, though the U.N. Security Council last year gave the United States a second one-year exemption when the U.S. threatened to suspend peacekeeping operations in the Balkans if the Council balked.

U.S. diplomats have pressed allies to approve bilateral agreements exempting Americans. Advocates of the court have accused the Bush administration of trying to bully weaker nations and undermining an important advance in human rights.

Under the law approved by Congress last year, at least 27 foreign states were exempted from the military-aid cutoff, including the 18 other members of the NATO military alliance and the two largest recipients of military aid, Israel and Egypt. President Bush could exempt other nations if he deemed it in the U.S. national interest.

The Bush administration did not identify the nations whose aid will be suspended. Boucher said the list would be provided first to Congress.

The State Department has identified 44 of the more than 50 nations that have signed agreements to exempt Americans from prosecution. Not all of the 44 nations were military aid recipients or are participating in the court.

The White House identified six nations that received full waivers: Gabon, Gambia, Mongolia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan.

Sixteen more received waivers until Nov. 1 or Jan. 1 to give them time to complete their ratification processes.

Afghanistan, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Ghana, Honduras and Romania were waived from the aid cutoff until Nov. 1. Albania, Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Botswana, Macedonia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Panama and Uganda were exempted from any aid suspension until Jan. 1.

Mongolia, Senegal, Botswana and Nigeria received waivers even though the State Department had not identified them as signing exemption agreements. The State Department did not say why they were included.

Only about $5 million of the $600 million in this year's Colombian aid is at risk. Most of the remaining money has been already spent or was part of an anti-drug fund that is not considered military aid, even though some of the money goes to Colombian armed forces.

The effect could be greater in 2004. Of the $575 million requested by the Bush administration for Colombia, about $112 million could be jeopardized, according to State Department figures.

As of mid-June, the publicly identified countries who have exempted the United States from the court were: Uganda, Romania, Israel, East Timor, the Marshall Islands, Tajikistan, Palau, Mauritania, the Dominican Republic, Uzbekistan, Honduras, Micronesia, Afghanistan, the Gambia, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Djibouti, Tuvalu, Bahrain, Georgia, Nauru, Azerbaijan, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tonga, Sierra Leone, the Maldives, Gabon, Ghana, Madagascar, Albania, Bhutan, Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bolivia, and Thailand.