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What’s the Difference Between War and War Crimes?
The WSJ today reports that a United Nations court has convicted a Croatian general of war crimes and crimes against humanity for engaging in what seemingly appears to be normal wartime activity:
THE HAGUE, Netherland—A commander hailed by Croats as a hero of the Balkan conflict was convicted of war crimes by a United Nations court Friday and sentenced to 24 years in prison for a campaign of shelling, shootings and expulsions aimed at driving Serbs out of a Croatian border region in 1995.
The conviction of Gen. Ante Gotovina was a blow to the Croatian view of its wartime generals as national heroes who reclaimed Croatian land from a more powerful Serb force.
“This is a verdict against the Croatian state,” said Branko Borkovic, a former Croatian army commander. “All of us have been convicted, including the Republic of Croatia.”
Mr. Gotovina was convicted of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, deportation, persecution and inhuman acts, during and immediately after a lightning campaign called Operation Storm that seized back land along Croatia’s eastern border taken over by rebel Serbs early in the Balkan wars. Dozens of Serbs were killed and tens of thousands forced to flee their homes.
We on the editorial staff have been puzzling over what to make of this news — there are a few pieces of the picture that really just don’t make sense. How is General Gotovina’s shelling and shooting any different from historical wartime practices (e.g. the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)? How does international law distinguish between a legitimate act of war and a war crime?
Published in General
I have a problem with any sort of “war crimes” activity. War is a horrible thing. Horrible things happen. Singling out people for “war crimes” for shelling is stupid. But this is the UN, so I am being redundant.
A war crime is anything the winners say it is. As for Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki among others, war is as much a financial and economic exercise as it is a military exercise, which means that your enemy’s productive capacity (productive capacity = capital + labour + resources + transportation.) is a potential target.
International law, the very idea of international law is a joke. I understand and approve of treaties between countries, but the idea of a citizen from country A being convicted by country C for something done to country B is ridiculous. There is no shared history of law, of ideas, values, or even basic social norms among the different countries of this world. How is any international law -that doesn’t have its basis in treaties signed by the countries under the law – to be regarded as anything but an attack on a countries sovereignty?
There are several good points already. I’d just add that in the list of crimes I’d guess that “deportation” is a key motivation for the prosecution. What they’re talking around is ethnic cleansing.
Not to mention preventing the spread of further bloodshed that might occur in the absence of decisive action. Attacks against Hiroshima & Nagasaki helped to conclude not prolong the war. For anyone interested, read “Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire” Quite the eye opener for anyone of the left.
Johannes, what never gets discussed is the casualty estimates that Truman was getting on his desk when the military thought they might have to invade Japan. If memory serves these estimates were running at over one million dead. So the roughly 160,000 dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a relatively light butcher’s bill.
Some info on the man here.
Thanks for this. I wonder what exactly this entails, since it seems to be the crux of the charges against him:
Civilians suffer from collateral damage during war.
Soldiers suffer from collateral damage during peace.
While I agree with the endpoint of some of the above comments, I think that in your underlying philosphy a lot of y’all are not only cynical, but are no better than a bunch of French Jacobins.
War might be terrible, but it has rules. Warriors might not understand that, but soldiers do. Philosopher and Marine Keith Pavlischek has an excellent essay that in part focuses on this. An extract, that begins with a dialogue from Patrick O’Brien’s The Wine Dark Sea:
One nit to pick on “winners”, many of these conflicts don’t have clear winners and losers and the Balkan wars were a good example (although I have generally considered the Serbs as the losers).
150 civilians is a slow month in many Central African Countries where are the trials there? I think these folks are targeted for war crimes because they have little political clout internationally and thus are an easy target. If they still had Soviet sponsorship would it be the same?
And perhaps more importantly they are culturally European. This means that they can be held to standards that will never be applied to “Palestinian freedom fighters”. Croatians just are not good victims. Perhaps that is something they can work on.
Keith goes on to add, in part:
“Absent a commission or a letter of marque from a recognized member of the community of nations the private citizen Dutourd [was] no more authorized to take “prizes” (attacking ships on the high seas) than were mere criminals (pirates) who did it for private gain. Indeed, they were in a moral sense worse than pirates seeking private gain, for they undermined the authority (in terms of the jus ad bellum, the criteria of right authority) by which war could be waged. By doing so, the otherwise benevolent Dutourd was assaulting the laws and customs of war and undermining the just war tradition’s insistence that “wars are conducted according to certain forms” and are not “wild riots” which anyone can join.
… Civilization, even in times of war, rests on certain forms and behaviors. That letter of marque distinguished what was owed to honorable combatants and what was not owed to proto-terrorists like Dutourd.”
Exactly. I cannot comment on the Croatian General; but follow your logic to the end, and Osama Bin Laden gets a pass, as does Blackbeard, for being just like Patton, or George Washington.
As a student of Serbian history, particularly of their recent wars, I share a fascination with these international prosecutions of “war crimes.” If you are really interested in knowing how the international community separates war crimes from war the only answer is, political convenience (i.e., subjectivity). Just look at the justification for intervening in the wars in the Balkans in the 90’s, they claimed what was occurring was genocide rather than civil war, and the only evidence is people of separate ethnicities were killing each other; however they were of the same nation. If one finds intervention appropriate in these wars, and prosecution appropriate for the execution of these wars, then by this logic had the international community intervened in the (successfully) American Civil War, it would have then been appropriate to try Lincoln for the execution of the war (i.e. committing war crimes).
Not that I want to support Qaddafi, but I am always puzzled when it is pointed out that his troops are killing his own people. We killed a whole bunch of our own people in the Civil war.
Perhaps the tribunal will next conduct a thorough examination of Wesley Clark’s record in Kosovo.
Edited on Apr 15 at 10:42 am
Is sovereignty absolute? I don’t think so, I believe sovereignty is limited by natural rights. This was after all the basis for the American Revolution, that the legitimate sovereign authority of the King over these colonies did not extend to violating certain unalienable rights. This was also the basis for the Nuremberg Trials: the idea that even if the Holocaust was completely legal under German law no sovereign authority has the right to commit such unspeakable crimes.
When the UN starts to bring their own sterling members to trail for Human Rights Violations of peoples…They can claim some measure of validity…
The difference between a war and a war crime is pretty straightforward in my book. If the people you are killing are armed enemy soldiers fighting back, that’s war. If you round up and murder unarmed civilians, that’s a war crime.
Speaking of the Civil War, at its conclusion General Robert E. Lee was not charged with any crimes, despite killing thousands of Union soldiers in battle, because he was a general leading an army fighting by the agreed rules of war. On the other hand Captain Henry Wirz was tried, convicted, and executed for war crimes because he was in charge of Andersonville prison, where nearly 13,000 Union POWs died of starvation and disease. Killing men in battle is honorable, killing them in prisons or concentration camps is criminal. There’s a clear, objective, moral difference.
This guy and Milosevic (had he remained alive) probably deserve some punishment.
My problem is that any trial held in “The Hague” has the odor of European political correctness about it.
Bush-Hitler and Cheney-Haliburton, as a reward for their liberation of 30 million Mohammedans, Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds, from the deliberate afflictions of a totalitarian megalomaniac, face the wrath of vengeance from universal jurisdiction leftists who have put them on a most wanted list for detention and punishment.
Leftists use donations to their non-profits to develop schemes for bringing charges of war crimes against the leaders of the country practicing the most avuncular benevolence of all of history’s hegemons which also protects them and their prominent downtown offices decorated with a portrait of Che on their wall, mementos from Fidel on their desk, and Mao’s little Red Book in their bookshelf.
Because power is the opiate of the leftists.
The difference between a war and a war crime is pretty straightforward in my book. If the people you are killing are armed enemy soldiers fighting back, that’s war. If you round up and murder unarmed civilians, that’s a war crime.
So you would consider the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Japan war crimes? They would seem to be under this definition…
War might be terrible, but it has rules. ·Apr 15 at 11:31am
Actually, civilization has rules, and some may pertain to war. Savages have no rules.
Therefore, “A war crime is anything the winners say it is.”
Joseph Stanko
The difference between a war and a war crime is pretty straightforward in my book. If the people you are killing are armed enemy soldiers fighting back, that’s war. If you round up and murder unarmed civilians, that’s a war crime.
There’s a lot of gray area between the extremes, and we can and should debate where the lines should fall. Civilian deaths and collateral damage are an unfortunately but unavoidable byproduct of war. If a uniformed soldier in a just war fires at a legitimate military target, I don’t think that rises to the level of a war crime, no matter what weapon he fires (shells, firebombs, or a-bombs) and regardless of how many civilians die. If you bomb an enemy armaments factory and in the process destroy the school next door, that’s collatoral damage. If on the flight back to base you see another school and decide to bomb it just for fun, that’s a war crime.
“If a uniformed soldier in a just war fires at a legitimate military target, I don’t think that rises to the level of a war crime, no matter what weapon he fires (shells, firebombs, or a-bombs) and regardless of how many civilians die. If you bomb an enemy armaments factory and in the process destroy the school next door, that’s collatoral damage. If on the flight back to base you see another school and decide to bomb it just for fun, that’s a war crime.” By this logic it if you can make it seem like an accident (e.g., bomb an enemy combatant and kill 100 civilians around him as collateral damage) then there is no war crime. But if you shoot get angry and shoot a civilian while at war, then and only then, have you committed a war crime. Wouldn’t it make more sense to dole out a larger punishment for killing 100 civilians rather than the one?
“If a uniformed soldier in a just war fires at a legitimate military target, I don’t think that rises to the level of a war crime, no matter what weapon he fires (shells, firebombs, or a-bombs) and regardless of how many civilians die. If you bomb an enemy armaments factory and in the process destroy the school next door, that’s collatoral damage. If on the flight back to base you see another school and decide to bomb it just for fun, that’s a war crime.” By this logic it if you can make it seem like an accident (e.g., bomb an enemy combatant and kill 100 civilians around him as collateral damage) then there is no war crime. But if you shoot get angry and shoot a civilian while at war, then and only then, have you committed a war crime. Wouldn’t it make more sense to dole out a larger punishment for killing 10rather than the one?
I’m not sure what conclusion you’re arguing for here. Are you suggesting that soldiers should be held accountable for all civilians deaths in war regardless of the circumstances? Or are you arguing that a soldier should be allowed to “get angry and shoot a civilian” with impunity, so long as it occurs during war time? Because neither of those conclusions seem defensible to me.
The difference between a war and a war crime is pretty straightforward in my book. If the people you are killing are armed enemy soldiers fighting back, that’s war. If you round up and murder unarmed civilians, that’s a war crime.
·Apr 15 at 1:34pm
If you round up, disarm and then murder enemy soldiers, that’s a war crime as well (as you noted with respect to Andersonville).
If you attack civilian neighborhoods with the purpose of depopulating them by killing their inhabitants or forcing them to flee, that’s a war crime as well. We have the modern term for that: “ethnic cleansing.”
So you would consider the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Japan war crimes? They would seem to be under this definition… ·Apr 15 at 2:46pm
They are not war crimes.
The British destroyed dams on the Ruhr, dams that were vital to German war production, and destroying those dams caused floods that killed many civilians in their homes. However, in an era of strategic war in which victory entailed destroying the means of production as well as troops and arms on the field, that was a legitimate operation.
The Germans and Japanese located strategically important factories near population centers. One can argue that the Allies should not have used such massive force in those instances, but the targets themselves were legitimate. The Allies were not trying to cleanse Dresden or Hiroshima of their inhabitants to take those cities for themselves.
The better question for our age is this: if an Al-Qaeda cell working out of Pakistan manages to detonate an atomic weapon in a Western city with casualties in the tens of thousands, is it a war crime to attack Pakistan with an atomic weapon knowing that tens of thousands will die?
Milosevic got prosecuted for Kosovo; Tudjman’s subordinates are getting similar treatment for Krajina. This is largely driven by the “it’s all gotta be proportionate” types. There’s a much better case for such jackassery here than in Israel. But it’s still bureaucratic nonsense.
Nyadnar17 International law, the very idea of international law is a joke. I understand and approve of treaties between countries, but the idea of a citizen from country A being convicted by country C for something done to country B is ridiculous.
Joseph Stanko Is sovereignty absolute? I don’t think so, I believe sovereignty is limited by natural rights.
I don’t think there’s a conflict between those two positions. Certainly sovereignty of the state isn’t absolute. But that doesn’t mean that an international body to be determined automatically fills the void. Sovereignty of a state is determined largely by its capability. The same is true of international bodies.
Legitimacy, otoh, is determined by the members. With respect to a state this means citizens and/or residents. With respect to an international body this means its member states/regions.
The better question for our age is this: if an Al-Qaeda cell working out of Pakistan manages to detonate an atomic weapon in a Western city with casualties in the tens of thousands, is it a war crime to attack Pakistan with an atomic weapon knowing that tens of thousands will die? ·Apr 15 at 5:11pm
That is indeed an excellent question. What if instead the cell were working out of London (a not entirely implausible scenario given the number of radical militant Islamists in London these days)? Would we nuke London? I sure hope not.