Atlas Monitor
4 Dec 2013
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing the case brought against the state of Israel and retired Israeli army general Amos Yaron, charged with perpetrating war crimes and genocide against Palestinians, delivered a landmark verdict finding the both Israel and Yaron guilty of genocide and Yaron of crimes against humanity.
The trial and verdict, more symbolic than consequential, raises issues of the limitations of international law and the ability (or lack thereof) of the law to be applied in any meaningful way to certain segments of society, the legacy of which can be traced back to the era of colonialism when the ‘laws of war’ (LoW) were considered inapplicable to the non-European ‘savage’.
The ‘savage’ was seen as too primitive to understand concepts of the laws of war therefore would unlikely adhere to them according to colonialists.
Frédéric Mégret argues that LoW were drafted in the colonial context produced a double standard apartheid system with regards to the application of LoW with one side clearly protected and the “other” not. Today we can perceive this in the ‘war on terror’ as the US and its allies are fighting a ‘just war’; their enemy Islamist insurgents are engaged in ‘terrorism’ fighting an asymmetrical war.
Elizabeth Dauphinee laments the role of the war crimes court in normalizing or legitimizing war death and argues that by designating certain acts illegal, illegitimate or unlawful it legitimizes others despite the same outcome i.e. death in all cases. The implication is that some deaths matter and others don’t and that only some deaths are made visible in the war crimes trial process while others are made “politically invisible”.
The main point of Dauphinee’s argument is that the war crimes court creates a false dichotomy of just war v war crime and in the process designates “war [as] the permissive institution within which the ‘war crime’ is made possible.”
Thus the war crimes court becomes an instrument of regulation and legitimation rather than eradication and allows for the selective application of the law to the benefit of certain groups over others and perpetuates the same inequality prevalent in colonial times.
Dauphinee endorses Giorgio Agamben‘s assertion that judgement rather than justice is the structural objective of the trial and she astutely observes that we are in “…an age when the goals of war are increasingly lauded as ‘humanitarian,’ and when the corpus of international law is oriented toward governance and not eradication …”
Related articles
- Genocide Charges against the State of Israel: Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com)
- Yoichi Shimatsu ~ Tribunal Issues Landmark Verdict Against Israel For Genocide (shiftfrequency.com)
- 11/20/13 – Long overdue, Israel Convicted of War Crimes! (vaticproject.blogspot.com)
- Amnesty International Accuses Obama of ‘War Crimes’ (breitbart.com)
- Israel Charged with War Crimes and Genocide (fromthetrenchesworldreport.com)
- Israel Charged with War Crimes and Genocide (Complete Judgment of Kuala Lumpur Tribunal) (deadlinelive.info)
- Israel Charged with War Crimes and Genocide (sabbah.biz)
