Hey thoughty2 here.
Over the past 3500 years, mankind has been at war with itself, to various degrees, pretty
much constantly.
In fact, we’ve only managed 268 years of world peace in all that time because there’s
always some other group of people with land you want, a god you dislike or just because
it’s Monday.
And we’re getting really good at war.
The 20th century was a record-breaker with over 100 million dead people proving we had
really turned into pros; none of this swords and horseback nonsense anymore.
But we’re also more civilized aren’t we?
Only a barbarian would cut a prisoners tongue out and put their head on a stick; a drone
and some laser guided missiles are a far more cultured way of doing things.
And since we fancied ourselves as civilized, we decided to draw up a rule book about what
you can and cannot do when it comes to killing millions of people; I know, but there’s
a right way and wrong way to do it.
So lock up your guillotines and hide away your mustard gas, because you’re not allowed
to use them anymore, you naughty tyrant.
As we discover, what is a war crime?
For thousands of years, there have been rules, both written and unwritten, about how warfare
should be practiced.
The Mahabharata, an epic poem from ancient India, contains a passage saying “War should
be waged for the sake of conquest; one should not be enraged toward an enemy who is not
trying to kill him.”
This is the ancient Indian way of saying; don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The bible also contains passages on war, such as banning people from cutting down trees
outside the city they’re laying siege to.
Apparently “thou shalt not kill” was open to so much interpretation that the sub-clauses
even cover gardening before a massacre.
But the earliest record we have of punishment for a war crime, which wasn’t just the victors
punishing the losers, was when Peter von Hagenbach was beheaded by the Holy Roman Empire for
his treatment of civilians during an uprising in Breisach in 1474.
The reason, they said, was that his crimes were those “he as a knight was deemed to
have a duty to prevent.”
It’s also the earliest example of a case involving ‘command responsibility’, since
he claimed, unsuccessfully, that he was just following orders.
The first international war crime agreement signed was the Strasbourg Agreement of 27
August 1675.
It was between France and the Holy Roman Empire, which at this point was basically Germany,
to forbid the use of poisoned bullets.
You’d think that this was the earliest form of chemical warfare but in fact it had been
happening for over 2000 years.
In 600 BC, the Athenians used a heart toxin taken from the Hellebore plant to poison the
city of Kirrha during a siege.
Around 250 AD, the Persians battled the Romans in Syria by burning sulfur and bitumen to
suffocate them.
And in 1250, when the Chinese were fighting Genghis Khan, they made bombs out of gunpowder,
feces and a variety of poisons like arsenic and aconite root which caused nausea and convulsions.
What a lovely sounding cocktail, but I’ll take a martini thanks.
At the end of the 19th century, many of the major powers were beginning to think that
maybe there was a better way to do things and they decided to adopt an international
version of the Leiber Code, which had been signed by Abraham Lincoln after the American
Civil War.
It outlawed the use of torture to get confessions, killing prisoners, using poisons and putting
proximity mines on respawn locations if you were playing Goldeneye.
Russian Tsar Nicholas II was instrumental in setting up the Hague Convention of 1899
where a lot of this was agreed on and signed by 26 countries.
It also forbade bullets that expanded on impact, using balloons for bombing and they agreed
not to attack marked hospital ships.
There was a follow up in 1907 that covered a lot more maritime law.
Once we had all those laws neatly written on paper, we decided to celebrate by breaking
them all in the horrific slaughter of World War I, where mustard gas filled the trenches,
prisoners were used as forced labour and nobody gave a flying monkey about any of the laws
of combat.
Henry Dunant was a Swiss businessman who became the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1901 for his humanitarian work which led to the 1864 Geneva Convention and the setting
up of the Red Cross.
This first Geneva convention agreed to protect all the people not actively trying to kill
each other such as the wounded, the civilians, the shipwrecked, the POWs.
We needed multiple other Geneva Conventions over the next hundred years since each new
war proved that we were absolutely terrible at actually following them.
But they are the cornerstone of most current humanitarian law.
If you break a law in your own country, then it’s generally clear what the punishment
is, but none of these conventions have a clear punishment written into them so how well do
they really work?
I think you probably already know the answer; they don’t.
It’s not to say they have no value, we have to have some common agreement on what is acceptable
or not but they are extremely difficult to enforce.
If you look at WWII, then the Nuremberg trials famously held various Nazi officers accountable
for their actions.
But what of the 10,000 prisoners who died of dehydration and malnutrition in the Rheinwiesenlager
prison camps, run by the Americans in occupied Germany?
Or how about the 25,000 civilians who died when the British firebombed Dresden?
Or the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Germans raped by Soviet and other Allied
forces after Berlin fell.
Yes, the allies weren’t all goody two-shoes, this was war after all.
Even now, the Allies are pretty stubborn about dealing with what they were up to.
And tend to ignore the atrocities they committed during war.
It’s often been said that the victors write the history books but they also dictate their
own punishment, or lack of it in most cases, when it comes to war crimes.
The Japanese are one of the few countries to admit to breaches of the Geneva Convention
particularly to the surrounding Asian nations such as South Korea and China.
But an apology is mostly all that happened so I’m not sure a fear of saying sorry is
going to keep Kim Jong Un’s chubby finger off the nuclear button.
So has any progress been made?
Are we any closer to really enforcing these rules of engagement?
Well, maybe a little.
When it comes to using illegal weapons, we’ve realized that the best way to stop people
is to not let them have them in the first place.
Just like if you own a gun you’re probably more likely to use it than someone who doesn’t
own a gun.
But I won’t go into that.
For nuclear weapons, the 5 members of the UN Security Council possess them “legally”,
that’s China, Russia, France, UK and the US.
And only four others have them, that we know of; India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea,
but they are not part of the treaty so there’s not a lot we can really do about it except
ask them really really nicely not to end the world.
But according to the treaties for chemical and biological weapons, all stockpiles should
have been destroyed.
No one should keep some spare ones around for a rainy day and any country in the treaty
is supposed to be able to ask the UN to send inspectors to any other country to check they’re
not hiding Sarin gas behind the biscuit tin.
For many of the wars in recent memory, including the current one in Syria, the use or suspected
possession of chemical and biological weaponry has been the key reason given for a US and
British intervention.
And, as you all know, all of those wars have been a resounding success and everyone lived
happily ever after.
So yeah, international war conventions really do work, it’s all totally fine and I’m
just building that bunker in my garden for fun, no other reason.
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