In addition to this legislation, which over the years has been amended, expanded and ratified by the United Nations, there are also a series of treaties known as the Geneva Conventions that focus on the conduct of war. These conventions were initiated by Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman who witnessed the carnage at the Battle of Solferino in 1859, while on a business trip there. Dunant recorded his experiences in a book entitled, A Memory at Solferino, which helped to inspire the creation of the Red Cross, a private humanitarian organization set up to protect and aid victims of war, whether prisoners, refugees or ordinary civilians.
Today, the Geneva Conventions have been signed by 194 countries across the world. The Conventions make certain inhuman acts punishable as criminal offences under a court of law. Of course, the countries who have signed the agreement do not always abide by the rules, but at least the legislation now exists to take nations that break the conventions to task; moreover, they provide a firm basis to ensure that humanitarian treatment of prisoners and civilians in war time remains an achievable goal, rather than an impossible dream.
The Conventions and their various protocols, amendments and revisions, are wide-ranging and extremely detailed, but in essence they focus on humanitarian treatment of all those caught up in warfare and conflict throughout the world, in an attempt to improve general standards and ban inhuman acts. They cover, for example, the treatment of sick and wounded prisoners, the prohibition of certain methods of warfare and the political status of refugees. In addition, they set out ‘laws of war’, that is, rules for the conduct of warfare: for example, under the conventions, it is illegal for soldiers to attack enemy troops displaying a flag of truce, thus avoiding needless casualties.
As well as this extensive legislation, in 2002 a further body, the International Criminal Court, was set up to prosecute contemporary war crimes. This court has identified various acts as illegal, including ‘grave breaches’ of the Geneva Conventions: wilful killing, torture and inhumane treatment, wanton destruction of property, forcing a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of a hostile power, depriving prisoners of war of a fair trial, unlawful deportations and the taking of hostages. It further bans attacks directed against civilians and humanitarian workers, killing surrendered combatants, using civilians as human shields and employing child soldiers. It also outlaws summary executions, rape and pillage, sexual slavery and forced prostitution.
The court only has jurisdiction over these crimes where they are part of a large-scale initiative, as for example when the government of a country, or a prominent political group within it, pursues or condones such acts. To date, the court has indicted such figures as former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
Some important nations, such as the USA and China, have refused to become signatories to the International Court. (This does not, of course, make individuals from those countries exempt from the court’s rulings.) Moreover, many nations have criticized the Geneva Conventions and other international legislative rulings as being unfair and historically based in a way that favours certain countries over others.
It is, indeed, true to say that in the aftermath of World War II, the war crimes and atrocities of the Allied countries were never prosecuted, whereas those of the Germans and other Axis powers were heavily punished. For example, certain appalling attacks that would certainly have been classified as war crimes under the terms of the Geneva Conventions were never punished: the atomic destruction by the USA of the cities of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, for instance, or the mass firebombing of Dresden by Allied Forces. In addition, firebomb attacks by Allied forces on Tokyo and Kobe were not ruled as war crimes by the international courts. In more recent times, the excesses of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, between 1976 and 1999, have been pointed out as having been tacitly condoned for political reasons, as well as a host of other conflicts, both international and internal, in the new millennium.
In this book, we take a look at some of the major war crimes that have been committed throughout history. In Part I, we cover ancient atrocities described in biblical and classical literature, as well as other historical sources: for example, the brutal campaigns of Alexander the Great. Next, we move on to the invasion of Britain by William the Conqueror in 1066, and to the Holy Land battles during the Crusades of Richard the Lionheart. We tell the story of the fifteenth-century tyrant Vlad the Impaler, on whom the legend of Dracula was based; and, from the same period, of the deranged despot Ivan the Terrible, as well as the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, and his attack on the Incas of Peru.
In Part III we explore some of the most notorious war crimes in history, such as the brutal colonization of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; the sinking of the Lusitania, the ocean liner torpedoed by a German submarine in 1906, which helped persuade the USA to enter World War I; and the Armenian genocide, the persecution, deportation and killing of up to two million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. We also cover the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 (also known as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre), in which British Indian Army troops opened fire on an unarmed gathering of what is now estimated to be more than 1,000 men, women and children.
Part IV brings us to World War II, to what is perhaps the greatest war crime of all time: The Holocaust, in which up to six million Jews were persecuted, tortured and brutally murdered by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen of the Third Reich. Our history of war crimes in this period not only encompasses the horrifying experiences of Jews in the extermination camps, but also looks at the treatment of prisoners of war, mentally and physically disabled people and Poles, Serbians, Russian and other ethnic communities. As well as systematic, state-sanctioned killings of these groups, German soldiers also committed hundreds of unlawful bloody reprisals on civilians and prisoners of war, especially towards the end of the conflict, when it was clear that Germany would be defeated. In addition, there were reprisals by Communist partisan troops, especially in Yugoslavia, as well as by Allied soldiers. We also include here some of the war crimes committed by the Allied powers, which were never prosecuted in courts of law, but which, in recent years, have been the subject of much controversy: the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.