Radovan Karadžić awaits his verdict, but this is two-tier international justice

The ex-Bosnian Serb leader has been prosecuted, yet the war crimes tribunal resists calls to indict others

• 
• • Ed Vulliamy
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 30 September 2014 20.15 BST

Illustration by Belle Mellor

There he was, on the other side of the bullet-proof glass: Radovan Karadžić himself, inches away, accused of genocide and other war crimes across Bosnia during the 1990s. He saluted me with an entwinement of avuncular cordiality and cold-like-ice.

This was an “interview” to which Karadžić, defendant at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, is entitled before his prosecutors called me as a witness, back in 2010. During cross-examination, Karadžić posited the bizarre notion that only ONE person had died in the infamous concentration camp at Omarska it had been my curse to uncover in 1992.

This week, nearly five years after his trial began, come the closing arguments that will lead either to Karadžić’s acquittal or conviction for ordering the hurricane of violence he himself called ethnic cleansing between 1992 and 1995.

If nothing else, the prosecution will serve to remind us that carnage of that kind is still possible in modern Europe: death, torture, mass rape and mutilation in the camps; the siege and torture of a great European capital, Sarajevo; the summary massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica. Karadžić has asked for 17 hours to outline his explanation for all this, under his alleged command.

Karadžić was political commissar of the Bosnian Serb project for a racially “pure” state during those years and, along with the verdict on his military counterpart, General Ratko Mladic, the outcome will be the highwater mark of the two-decade enterprise in what was to be groundbreaking international law enforcement by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The man leading the Karadžić prosecution, Alan Tieger, was there at the outset prosecuting its first defendant in 1996, a parish-pump sadist and murderer called Dusko Tadic, now free after serving his sentence.

I was called by the tribunal in the early days, when it was lean, keen and felt right on its side. The court had been established in 1993 through both contrition and ambition. Contrition, because the UN had already become inept and cynical to the point of complicity in the slaughter it now sought to prosecute (though ironically, the worst was yet to come in 1995, when Dutch troops delivered the “safe area” of Srebrenica to the slaughter). Ambition, because the ICTY was seen as putting into action a brave new world of human rights, whereby the bullies of history would be held to account.

A lot can happen to a UN organism in 20 years. I testified in eight trials, have given months of work to the tribunal, and watched it bloat: heard clear language of law and liability replaced by jargon and anagrams; watched communication become a logjam of bureaucracy and hierarchy; listened to the wretched survivors summoned to testify, and wonder how much money was being made in their name. Answer: one hell of a lot.

But more important clouds have gathered over the ICTY. One concerns the promise – oft-spoken and crucial to the Hague’s raison d’etre – that its existence would deter mass murderers of the future. President Assad of Syria shows no sign of such quaking in his shoes.

A second was the tribunal’s extra-judicial brief: that it not only judge those accused, but also promote reconciliation. One of the tribunal’s major achievements has indeed been that the narrative of the war was told from witness chairs during “victim testimony”– the voices of the survivors. But there has been no reconciliation.

Bosnia is a living example, because there has been no reckoning. Reckoning, a prerequisite to reconciliation, is a harsher word which entails coming to terms with the calamity, staring at oneself in the mirror, and making amends – historical, political and material. This has not happened in a land still riven by partition as dictated by the vanities of the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the war by rewarding Karadžić’s project and granting his “Republika Srpska”, where children attend two schools under the same roof, where denial of the massacre at Srebrenica and concentration camps is still de rigeur and a means of maintaining power.

To this reality even 20 years on, the ICTY has added little or nothing: one could argue that more community-level bonding between ethnicities resulted last year from protests against privatisation, flooding, and the qualification of Bosnia’s football team for the World Cup in Brazil.

And doubts raised by recent verdicts have seemed to unravel the ICTY’s own work. Two rulings in the appeals chamber in 2012 and 2013 overturned the crucial convictions of the Croatian general Ante Gotovina and the commander of the Serbian (Yugoslav) army Momčilo Perišić. Chaired on both occasions by Judge Theodor Meron – a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli diplomat and US citizen – a majority of judges ruled that theevidence lacked “specific direction” to the troops under the generals’ command to commit atrocities. In other words, the buck stops short of the top, even when we all know war crimes have been committed.

This was galling for prosecutors because once the dramatic “victim testimony” was entered against small fry like Tadic, the hard, drier, work had been to establish chains of command that connected the political and military leaderships to the atrocities. For instance – in a tip to President Assad – the bench under Judge Meron deemed that to shell a community into the rubble until the survivors flee does not constitute deportation, since the emptying out of population was not “specifically directed”.

There were vehement dissenters from the bench in both cases: but back home, to illustrate the point about reconciliation, Bosnian Croats whooped and celebrated the liberty of Gotovina while spitting their outrage at that of Perišić; Bosnian Serbs did exactly the reverse. One’s own side cannot commit a war crime, it seems – only the enemy – in the land of un-reckoning.

But the most severe doubt about the ICTY, which does not concern its remit so much as its legacy, is who gets prosecuted in the brave new world of human rights. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Observer that former British prime minister Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes in Iraq, he raised the question: how high are future indictments at the permanent international criminal court or other ad-hoc tribunals like the ICTY going to aim? So far, the ICC has failed to indict a single person who is white. It staunchly resisted calls for an indictment for General August Pinochet of Chile; Blair is not even on its radar screen, for all the archbishop’s pleading.

The questions remain, beyond Karadžić. Why Charles Taylor and not Blair, Bush or the Israeli bomber command that targeted schools in Lebanon and civilian shelters in Gaza? At what point does the ICC address environmental or corporate crime: mining companies before which entire communities in Africa and Latin America vanish, or banks involved in systematic laundering of the profits of drug cartels?

Legal philosopher Costas Douzinas has written a book daring to suggest that “human rights” are becoming tools of the powerful nations, more than sacrosanct principles as defined by his ancestors in Greece, the French revolutionaries and Tom Paine.

It has been a long, worthwhile haul from the Tadic trial to that of Karadžić, and an acquittal over “specific direction” would be grotesque while the earth still gives up its dead around Srebrenica and the camps. But after that, for Douzinas to be proved wrong, the lucrative carousel of international justice needs to raise, not lower, its sights.

Awkward questions for Tesco should be answered by its accountants too

Auditors are vital to the financial markets. But when they miss a catastrophe in the offing, they’re not doing their job

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 29 September 2014 20.49 BST

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

So the supermarket that shoved horsemeat in its burgers now admits to sprinkling horse manure on its balance sheet. That quip has been doing the rounds since Tesco confessed last week to exaggerating its profits by £250m, and it strikes at the heart of the scandal. Just as a meat patty is manufactured, so too are a set of accounts. Neither falls from the sky, or gets slung together by a solitary bloke at twilight. They are instead a huge co-production of staff, auxiliaries and quality controllers, and they reflect the culture of the environment in which they are assembled.

Conversely, whoppers as large as the one Tesco has been caught telling won’t suddenly have popped out of the mouths of a mere handful of managers. Profits forecast for the biggest of FTSE 100 retailers will have been chalked up by advisers working to standard company practice, sweated over by executives and signed off at top levels of the company. Yet the result, according to new chief executive, Dave Lewis, is the kind of accounting he hasn’t seen during 27 years in business.

The horsemeat disgrace exposed a systemic dysfunction in capitalism: the abuse of suppliers by all-powerful supermarkets resulting in dinners that families couldn’t trust. Last week’s accounting scandal opens the door on another systemic breakdown: how one of those same giant businesses, struggling to pep up a flagging stock price, produced numbers that the business world couldn’t believe.

For understandable reasons, the press has largely spun this as the latest episode in the downfall of Tesco. Who wouldn’t tell that story? It’s simpler, starker and focuses on a high-street institution – what could be more satisfying than a tale of hubris at one Britain’s last remaining world-leading companies, especially if it allows a moist recollection of former Tesco boss Terry Leahy, one of the country’s dwindling number of business people of international repute.

But then awkward questions arise that force us to pull back the frame. The one that foxes me: where were Tesco’s auditors in all this? PwC is one of the Big Four accountancy firms who between them carry out around 90% of all audits for FTSE 350 companies. The £2.7bn-turnover partnership went over Tesco’s accounts for the 12 months to February this year, and gave the supermarket chain a clean audit in May. Just a few weeks later, on 29 August, Tesco executives issued their now infamous forecast – the one that exaggerated their likely profits by 25%.

You can imagine that in the course of a not-so-balmy summer, one of Europe’s biggest businesses suddenly went off its collective trolley and put out a confected set of figures – which, let me emphasise, were not checked over by its auditors. But consider this: back in May, PwC plainly was not entirely comfortable with the numbers it was signing off for Tesco. It went so far as to note its concern over commercial income – the fees paid by suppliers for Tesco giving their products prominence within their stores, and the income overstated in August by the supermarket chain.

On page 66 of the annual report, the auditors note that “commercial income is material to the income statement and amounts accrued at the year end are judgmental. We focused on this area because of the judgment required in accounting for the commercial income deals and the risk of manipulation of these balances.” In the polite, formulaic world of company reporting, this is a warning klaxon. And yet the auditors then went on to list the measures they’d taken to allay their concerns – and to sign off the numbers.

PwC has been Tesco’s auditor for over 30 years. For that service, Tesco paid PwC £10.4m in the last financial year – plus another £3.6m for other consultancy work. Of the 10 directors on the supermarket’s board (leaving aside the chief executive and the chief financial officer, both of whom are relatively new), two are ex-PwC: Mark Armour, a non-executive director, and Ken Hanna, chair of the company’s own audit committee.

Now imagine yourself as a senior executive at Tesco. The business has never been the same since Leahy left. The slump has dampened consumer spirits, some of the company’s foreign adventures now look ill-judged, and Aldi and Lidl are eyeing up your customers. And your remuneration partly depends on the share price – which is listing, badly. How and when to count commercial income is already one of the greyest of grey areas in accounting. Why wouldn’t you be a bit more “aggressive” in your forecasting?

To be clear, we don’t know that anything like this happened – yet it’s exactly to avoid such suspicions arising that we have auditors. This is why the government demands the vast bulk of limited companies (and hospitals and charities) have their accounts audited.

Just as with credit-rating agencies, auditing is a necessary part of the financial markets – but the auditors are paid by the very companies they are judging. Just as with S&P and Moodys, they form a small but powerful “oligopoly” – what was once the Big Eight shrank to the Big Five and, after the Andersen debacle at Enron, to the Big Four. And just as with the credit-raters, the result is often so unsatisfactory as to be useless.

All those banks that collapsed in the crisis were signed off as perfectly sound by PwC and its fellow auditors. But then, as Jeff Skilling, chief exective of Enron, said in 2004: “Show me one fucking transaction that the accountants and the attorneys didn’t sign off on.”

Nor was that a one-off lapse: in May this year, the regulators at the Financial Reporting Council noted that PwC audits, while generally of “a good standard”, were also too accepting of management fudge. As Prem Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Essex, argues: “If some used car dealer was engaged in a fraction of the shortcomings, warnings and scams that big accountancy firms have been involved in, he would be put out of business.”

For their part, accountants are often aware of their industry’s shortcomings. For his book Accountants’ Truth: Knowledge and Ethics in the Financial World, Matthew Gill interviewed 20 young accountants at the Big Four firms. He found a bunch of men well aware of the boredom of the audit and of the shortcuts they were forced to make.

Some defended what they did. One told him: “I don’t think there’s anything unprofessional in giving views of facts directed by whoever it should be.” Another described his discomfort at working in his firm’s corporate-finance department and supporting what he described as “immoral” and “borderline corrupt” tax wheezes. But rather than voice his qualms, he simply moved department. Whistleblowing was not for him: “I would have felt I would look slightly ridiculous.”

Read that last sentence and recall that the person who blew the whistle this month on Tesco wasn’t the company’s audit committee or ethics committee – and they don’t appear to be from PwC either. As far as we know, the anonymous whistleblower worked for Tesco’s UK finance director, Carl Rogberg, and their report was at first ignored.

When last week’s scandal broke, Tesco chair Sir Richard Broadbent airily opined: “Things are always unnoticed until they are noticed.” He forgot to mention that that goes double if people are paid to turn a blind eye.

Branson's fine print on unlimited leave for staff

 

We should be open to the idea of self-managed holidays, but it won’t work in a climate of anxiety

• 
• • David Boyle
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 September 2014 18.20 BST

'If you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would you ever dare to pack your bags, let alone head off on holiday?' Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features

Half Brazilian, half Austrian, Ricardo Semler runs one of the strangest companies in the world – though perhaps “runs” is the wrong verb. He recently held a party to celebrate 10 years of not making any decisions.

Semco is a Brazilian engineering conglomerate, and over the past two decades Semler has led a dramatic series of experiments to find ways of accessing the enthusiasm of his staff.

They now manage the company themselves. They work in teams without job titles. Like Richard Branson’s much-heralded experiment announced earlier this week, they choose their own holidays and their own hours. However, although Semco is on the syllabus of most of the world’s business schools, few business graduates have copied it. Quite the reverse: iron control by IT system seems to be the trend.

But the salaries, holidays and hours Semco’s employees choose are transparent, and therein lies the power. It isn’t so much the power of self-control but the power of peer control. The most imaginative companies have realised the same thing in recent years: that group pressure may be a good deal more effective at controlling their workforce than an IT system, powered by a top-heavy, heavy-handed human resources department.

It is the same revelation that hit Muhammed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. He realised that peer pressure by borrowers on each other was far more effective at avoiding bad debts than the traditional command-and-not-quite-control.

Branson is only the most recent business leader to grasp this – he got the idea from Netflix – and the power of small teams answerable to each other has done wonders for productivity in companies such as General Electric and WL Gore.

But before we take Branson’s approach at face value, there are a few things we need to think about. Peer control can be pretty ferocious. It can lead people to extremes. Even some of the most disillusioned first world war soldiers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, went back to the trenches willingly – strove to do so, in fact – so as not to let their colleagues down.

I’m self-employed. I have complete control of my holiday entitlement and I still don’t take it. It may be that self-managing teams can also be kinder and more understanding, once you have earned their trust. Given the choice between working in an Amazon warehouse, timed when I go to the loo, and in a self-managed team choosing my own holiday schedule, I know which one I would prefer. But that isn’t to say it would always be comfortable or that there wouldn’t be places where people suffered the consequences of coercive, bullying, group dynamics.

There are two other peculiarities about Branson’s thoughts on the subject, which are taken from his new book The Virgin Way. One is that it applies only to his head office staff in the US and UK – just 170 people. Virgin doesn’t do much except invest and rent out its name to other companies. Behind this apparent empire is a vast database and linked call centres, but not much else. Branson’s company owns just half of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, and only around a tenth of Virgin Media, a subsidiary of a different company entirely.

He says he will be encouraging them all to use the same idea if it is successful. But the real test is whether similar arrangements are offered to frontline staff bearing his logo, which he barely has the power to do.

The other peculiarity is that Branson seems to be trying to have it both ways. He reveals himself to be not quite the radical, bearded, liberal-minded guy he might occasionally look like.

He rather gives the game away on the company blog when he “assumes” that his staff will only take holidays “when they feel 100% comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business – or, for that matter, their careers!” This convoluted sentence faces all ways at once. It seems to be saying you can manage your own holiday entitlement – if you dare.

The self-managed holiday idea is a radical experiment and needs testing out. But in Branson’s formulation, it is doomed from the start: if you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would ever take a long weekend, let alone head off on holiday?

It is a sentence that seems to emerge from a nervous manager in a bit of a muddle. He is opening the doors of the cage but not quite daring to put down the whip.

India’s Mars mission could be a giant leap

Critics say India has too much poverty for such an endeavour. But space exploration should not be the preserve of the rich west

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 24 September 2014 20.44 BST

Staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft successfully entered the Mars orbit on Wednesday. Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

After a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles, an Indian satellite has arrived in orbit around Mars. To have done so on an economy ticket – at $74m “the cheapest interplanetary mission ever to be undertaken by the world”, according to the mission’s leader – only adds to the significance of the event.

India’s space agency – the Indian Space Research Organisation – is a late entrant to the space race, and the success of Mangalyaan (“Mars craft” in Hindi) makes the country an Asian leader in space exploration, if not yet a global one. The mission has been received with delight on India’s social media and across its political spectrum, where “national pride” is the watchword.

To reach a distant world, where others have failed, might have had special significance for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, as he finally heads off to the United States for an official visit, having been denied a visa in the past because of doubts over his role in the 2002 Gujarat bloodshed. Modi and his ministers have been quick to assert collective pride in Mangalyaan as part of their vision of a globally ascendant India, ignoring the fact that the mission was actually fostered by their predecessors.

But questions are being asked. The Economist, not a known advocate of the poor or of government spending on social welfare, demanded to know – not only of India but of Sri Lanka, Belarus, Bolivia and Nigeria, all “minnows” with fledgling space aspirations: “How can poor countries afford space programmes?” Cut aid to such over-reaching parvenus, some in Britain have suggested. The criticism seems partly directed at the fact that the mission was not privately funded, as research in the west increasingly is; state money was channelled towards it without any marketable product emerging.

But inquiry and exploration are not the prerogative of advanced capitalist western nations – with the rest of the world eternally condemned to be a footnote in the history of science, even as its historical contributions to knowledge are forgotten. A country, however “largely third world” its “reality”, as one peevish British economist put it, does not have to circumscribe its sphere of achievement to feeding its people, important as that is. Indeed, it can be argued that in a better world the search for knowledge and the quest for social justice would be necessarily intertwined. As the Economist concedes, India’s weather satellites helped reduce the number of deaths during cyclone Phailin last year.

The real problem, of course, is that in economies that are in addition seeking to win the global capitalist growth race, such symbiosis between people and science is increasingly rare. It’s what the progressive economist Jean Drèze may have had in mind when he described the Mars mission controversially as a flag-waving “delusional dream” – when public health and energy needs ought to be met first. Recent floods in Kashmir speak of failures, technological and political, to anticipate and respond to natural disasters. Indeed, placing industrial development over ecological interests often causes such disasters in the first place.

Serious questions remain about whether science and technology – and not just in poorer countries – can have a greater good in mind when the bottom line is profit. The space race between the US and the Soviet Union was not an affordable luxury undertaken for the sake of knowledge, but intrinsically tied to the military-industrial complex. Whatever the intellectual commitments of India’s space scientists, there’s no doubt that the language of national “heroism” and technological “might”, which underpins a dangerous religiously inflected military and nuclear standoff in the region, afflicts much of the praise poured on the Mars mission’s success.

Perhaps national science and technology policy can be fully prised away from corporate and defence industry interests, and placed firmly in the province of economic justice and social progress. But the current administration’s record is not encouraging: Indian ministers have flouted scientific advice by fast-tracking environmental clearances to corporations including mining firms.

Yet India is fortunate in having a long and diverse history of campaigning science movements that have sought to draw both on indigenous knowledge traditions and direct modern scientific research towards progress in health, literacy, environment, nutrition and sanitation. The best way for India to commemorate the success of Mangalyaan would be to reopen a national debate about how science and technology can best be harnessed in the widest interests of its people.