At a recent meeting of the Human Rights Council, France, Spain and the Czech Republic called for an international investigation into supposed war crimes by Sri Lanka in the closing months of its anti-terrorist war.
In doing so, they have joined the chorus of western nations and their pet international NGOs that have been singing the same song of retribution and vengeance against Sri Lanka which, to their chagrin won the unwinnable war.
This call comes in the name of international justice, of crime and punishment. But hidden behind a civilized smoke screen of lofty ideals lies the real truth- the exercise of power by the brute force of political, military and economic might. By a curious irony those who are demanding an international inquiry are trying to stand their own history on its head.
For, as victors in the last World War and interventionist wars from the Balkans to Iraq, they had unilaterally set up tribunals to try the political and military leaders of defeated nations or peoples for war crimes and other offences.
Now for the first time in post-World War 11 history the victor in the war against the LTTE which North America and Europe had banned as a terrorist organization, is proposed to be put in the dock for alleged war crimes and other offences. Sri Lanka has set world records in spheres as varied as politics and sports.
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| NATO bombing of Belgrade 1999. Courtesy Kosovo.net |
They were achieved on its own. Now it seems that some in the world community wish to impose on us another record, unsolicited by Sri Lanka and unwanted by its people. One would have thought that victory against an acknowledged terrorist group, arguably the most ruthless and sophisticated in the world, would have been welcomed with plaudits by those who launched their own war on terror consequent to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US.
Those in the West who urge an internal inquiry might have added legitimacy to their case had they been able to show that all those who have been guilty of war crimes and related offences have been subject to international inquiry, and that both victor and vanquished have been equally punished.
But sadly the victims of such inquiries have always been those who lost in the wars but never those who won them or intervened in them without legal (or even moral) authority. This is true from the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after the defeat of the Axis powers and more recently to the Balkans and Iraq. So much so that, this application of law and non-existent law has been termed, rather caustically, as “Victor’s Justice”, and rightly so.
One of the more sanctimonious frauds enacted in the name of crime and punishment were the post world war tribunals that tried German and Japanese leaders. A Nazi leader Hermann Goering when handed the charge sheet against him said: “The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.” Those words were echoed by Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo at the Tokyo tribunal: “In the last analysis, this trial was a political one. It was only victor’s justice.”
However it was not only the accused that saw the tribunals as political tools wielded by the victorious Allies. The chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg Robert Jackson wrote to President Truman in October 1945 saying that the allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are also violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war….We are prosecuting plunder and our allies are practising it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”
One of the notorious flaws in Nuremberg was the subverting of the rule of law on which Sri Lanka has heard numerous homilies by those that violate it themselves or turn a blind eye when it is violated by their patron states. One principle so blatantly violated was “nullum crimen sine lege”-no crime without law. Three of the four charges against the accused did not exist in law earlier.
Where the accused might have been legitimately charged-the bombing of cities such as London- they were not because the Allies themselves had fire-bombed German cities such as Dresden, killing many thousands when Germany was already on its knees.
Nobody has been indicted for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the first and only atomic attacks in the world, in which hundreds of thousands died and are still dying. It might well be argued that though they were not crimes in 1945 Nuremberg and Tokyo inspired their entry into the international criminal justice system. While that may be true the fact is that international tribunals have not proved to be the impartial bodies that those like Hans Kelsen, the famous European legal theorist of the last century wanted them to be. In fact he later argued that the trial and sentence of Nuremberg could not be allowed to stand as a legal precedent.
In more recent times the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the first special ad hoc court set up by the UN, has came under direct attack for being politicized, biased, unfair and long drawn out. Former US Attorney-General Ramsay Clark claimed that the Yugoslav tribunal was a political tool initiated by the US via the Security Council to justify western influence in the Balkans. The Tribunal has made no effort, for instance, to charge NATO with war crimes in connection with its bombing campaign against Serbia.
The tribunal that tried Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic admitted hearsay evidence, the use of anonymous witnesses in the absence of a jury as evidence, falling far short of the western standards of justice that Sri Lanka is constantly reminded of by its critics. In 1996 a Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted for launching a cluster-bomb attack on targets in Zagreb on the grounds that this was really to terrorize civilians. Similar charges could have been made against numerous NATO cluster bomb raids such as the bombing of Nis in May 1999 in which even a hospital was hit.
One of the best critiques of the hypocrisy behind these international tribunals is made by Danil Zolo, a leading Italian political and legal philosopher in his book “Victor’s Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad” that exposes the “manipulation of international penal law as an instrument of western power.” Zolo views these international courts as tools that serve to ensure US dominance of post-World War 11 politics. “In practice, a dual-standards system of international criminal justice has come about in which a justice ‘made to measure’ for the major world powers and their victorious leaders operates alongside a separate justice for the defeated and downtrodden.”
To the consternation of the wielders of such power Sri Lanka refuses to fit into their “made to measure” moulds. Hence, the concerted effort to vanquish a victor, a status some are still struggling to achieve.
(The writer is a serving diplomat in the Sri Lankan Embassy in Thailand) |
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