Wars and War Crimes
by Ali Tuygan
It has been a year and a half since Russia invaded Ukraine. Despite the havoc it has caused and the widespread resentment with its global impact, like many other wars, the world is getting used to living with it. Western statements of condemnation are becoming routine like those of the Kremlin drawing less attention than before, and President Zelensky probably has few other foreign parliaments to address. Moreover, missile and drone attacks on cities continue killing civilians including children, and Ukrainian children in occupied zones are reportedly being taken to Russia. But the order of the day remains strategic competition.
The big news of the past week was the tensions between Beijing and Washington with mutual accusations of naval provocation, the US Congress passing a bill to raise the debt ceiling on clearing a major legislative hurdle, and the meeting of BRICS foreign ministers in South Africa calling for a rebalancing of the global order away from Western nations. The BBC also reported that allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine “clouded” the talks.
The sad reality is that war zones including those in Ukraine have never been stages for displays of chivalry, compassion, and respect for innocent life.
After the Second world war, “When European countries refused to give Arab countries their independence, but instead proceeded with a full-scale recolonization of the Middle East, nationalist groups staged open revolts. In 1919 massive demonstrations in Egypt demanded full autonomy and the end of British control. In Iraq population rebelled the following year. The British crushed the uprising with up to ten thousand Iraqis dead. The 1925 Syrian and Lebanese revolt against French rule cost at least six thousand dead…” [i] “Yes, but that was the reaction to a revolt, not a war, and the world was seven decades away from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” some might say.
A more recent shock was the massacre in Vietnam where American soldiers brutally killed more than five hundred women, children, and old men in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. And yes, that was thirty years before the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was signed in 1998.
Soon after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was an international outcry when reports—and photographs—surfaced detailing the abuse, torture, and deaths of its prisoners at the hands of members of the US Army at the Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious facility of the Saddam Hussain era.
ReliefWeb reported on May 6, 2021, that 40% of all civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan – almost 1,600 – in the last five years were children.[ii] ReliefWeb is a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
And last week, the Washington Post reported that Australia’s most decorated living soldier lost a high-profile defamation complaint against three of the country’s top newspapers Thursday, with a judge deeming they had proved that Ben Roberts-Smith killed unarmed prisoners while deployed in Afghanistan.[iii] The crimes he committed made a long list.
The atrocities committed in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, need no elaboration.
And interestingly, the BBC reported last week that “War crimes evidence erased by social media platforms.”[iv]
None of the above justifies the war crimes committed in Ukraine under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. However, these are among the many reasons why the Western public discourse on democracy, respect for human rights, gender equality, and the so-called “rules-based international order” falls on deaf ears in the Global South and why authoritarianism is on the rise.
In brief, to prevent war crimes, the world must prevent wars through effective multilateralism and ensure respect for the Charter of the now dysfunctional UN.
This is why I would continue to insist that to confront Russia or China, perhaps both as they keep moving closer to one another, the West needs to write a success story, a peacemaking one. And given an unhappy past, this success story has to be written in the Middle East. Reaching an understanding with Beijing, Moscow, and the regional countries to end the decade-long suffering and devastation in Syria should be less of a challenge than ending the war in Ukraine. Today is the 467th day of the Russian onslaught against Ukraine and Kyiv is getting ready to launch its long-expected counteroffensive. The people of Syria have been suffering and their country devastated for more than a decade. The Syrian conflict is also Türkiye’s top foreign and security policy challenge. It was a misguided project to start with and it has backfired.
The Foreign Affairs review essay titled “The Forty-Year War, How America Lost the Middle East” by Lisa Anderson about “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East”, a book by the former National Security Council member and veteran Middle East expert Steven Simon offers the reader a good insight into the Middle East’s past.[v]
What the world needs is less lecturing and more genuine peacemaking…
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[i] Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War A World History. Penguin Books, 2018, p.452.
[ii] https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/40-all-civilian-casualties-airstrikes-afghanistan-almost-1600-last-five-years
[iii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/01/ben-roberts-smith-defamation-case-australian-news-sydney-morning-herald/
[iv] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65755517
[v] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/middle-east-forty-year-war-china?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=books_reviews&utm_campaign=The%20Forty-Year%20War&utm_content=20230603&utm_term=FA%20Books%20%26%20Reviews%20-%20112017
