War crimes and humbug
By Fan Yew Teng
The 12 European Community states agreed last month to seek a war crimes trial of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for attacking other states, using chemical weapons against civilians and engineering genocide against the Kurds. The proposal was made by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Germany's foreign minister.
The whole idea stinks of Western hypocrisy. The history of war crimes prosecution shows clearly the inconsistencies and double standards of the West.
In the Nuremberg trials, some top Nazi leaders were rightly tried and convicted. In the Tokyo war crimes trials, Marquis Kido, the lord privy seal, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Tojo, the wartime prime minister, was hanged.
However, infamous warmongers like General Nakajima and General Ishi were never tried. Even more shocking was the US decision to protect Emperor Hirohito from prosecution, although there was more than sufficient evidence that the Japanese ruler had played an active role in the planning and execution of wars.
Equally shocking was the conspiracy of certain US agencies in smuggling hundreds of Nazis out of Europe.
War crimes and war criminals cannot and should not be determined by the capricious West; they should be determined by an international, independent body of experts including eminent jurists and scientists.
Those Allied leaders who, during the second world war, ordered the saturation bombing of Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, should have been tried as war criminals. US President Harry Truman, who gave the order to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should have been prosecuted.
The French leaders responsible for napalming Vietnam in the 1950s should have been tried for war crimes. US military and political leaders who resorted to germ and chemical warfare in the Korean war were also guilty of war crimes. The French were also guilty of war crimes and genocide in their ruthless colonial war against the Algerians in the 1950s and 1960s. Did Hans-Dietrich Genscher, this moral giant from Germany, make any noise then?
Did Genscher and the European Community leaders ever call for war crimes trials of the US leaders who prosecuted a war which killed millions of people in Indochina?
Are they unaware of the US subversion of Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, and aggression against Libya, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama?
Did the moral guardians of Western Europe and North America call for trials against leaders of Britain, France and Israel for their war crimes against Egypt in 1956? What do they have to say about Israel's illegal occupation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, and the war crimes of Syria and Israel in the occupation of Lebanon since the mid-1970s? When and where will a war crimes trial be held against the people who carried out the massacres at Sabra and Shatila?
Last but not least, what about the war crimes perpetrated by the US and its allies against the civilians of Iraq? As Ramsey Clark, a former US attorney general, said in his February 12 report to the UN secretary-general, "The bombing that has occurred throughout Iraq is the clearest violation of international law and norms for armed conflict, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Charter. It is uncivilised, brutal and racist by any moral standard."
So if Genscher and his colleagues want a war crimes trial, let there be one. But it should not be a one-sided, kangaroo trial only for Saddam Hussein. Make sure that it is conducted by an independent, international tribunal which will also try George Gush, John Major, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and many other canting humbugs.
Fan Yew Teng, a former opposition member of the Malaysian parliament, is a writer, political commentator and human rights activist.