Putin's War Russian Genocide - the outtakes III

My original intro - completely changed for a variety of reasons.

In this chapter I will try and provide a concise overview of the history and content of international law on:

·                war crimes – occurring in war through formal military and paramilitary action,

·                crimes against humanity – which can occur at any time,

·                genocide – which can occur at any time, often during war or the reason for war,

·                the crime of aggression (aggressive war) – starting a war.

composing the body of international criminal law which accompanies international humanitarian law, to be explained later, defined as ‘most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole’ under Article 5 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute, ICC).[1]

International criminal law covers the most drastic and brutal aspects of human behaviour, usually occurring in the framework of war and conflict, though not always, and should not be mixed up with international treaties and laws relating to peacetime transborder crimes and events of a ‘lesser’ nature, such as smuggling, money laundering and fugitive flight.

The four points and areas of law listed above are immensely complex intertwined subjects where an introduction to an overview of one could be a 1000 pages long book and cause the eminent author, or team of authors, academic agonies over a fear of generalization and loss of key subtleties and nuances.[2] 

I will try and discuss how the individual, president, general and private is now personally criminally liable for international crimes and how the law evolved to this point, one which can be called new justice.[3]

The current legal world order, which you could call a deeply flawed a humane one, was shaped by wars, crimes and superpowers. It was born from the literal fires of hell, as symbolized by the death camp ovens of World War II, a war of genocidal, waged through war crimes and crimes against humanity, in a war of aggression. I think we can find the roots of Sands’ new justice in the traditions and practise of the past.

That said, during and in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we will see the humane world order and its legal framework tested, warped and abused to an unprecedented degree. At the time of writing the scale of atrocity has perhaps not reached the levels of the post Yugoslavia civil war and will hopefully never come close to those of Rwandan holocaust but the bloodlands of Ukraine may become witness again to a level of death and destruction last seen in the 1930s, during the Holodomor and 1940s during the Second World War and its aftermath.[4] The potential is certainly there. Holocaust is technically even easier than it was during the Second World War with the added component of terrifying modern repression technology as potentially deadly as the atomic bomb was at the end of that war. As I will describe later genocide does not need ovens or camps.

The last serious assault on the framework of international criminal law and the idea of new justice occurred in the aftermath of unprecedented terrorist attacks, with world changing implications, the September 11 attacks in 2001, against the United States by the al-Qaeda organization.

The legal assault was carried out by mostly US, though with UK support, politicians, soldiers and lawyers with Israel deserving a dishonourable mention. Will another, more successful, assault occur with via the very best and most expensive British, German and Scandinavian lawyers defending Putin’s mobsters and murderers?

The real question, though, is will a stronger international criminal regime emerge from this war? Will Russian whataboutery destroy the legal order that the neo-con hawks so despised?[5] Can a tyrant leading the world’s largest country, armed with enough nuclear weapons to extinguish humanity, be brought to justice? Is professor Lemkin’s dream of a world of laws preventing and criminalizing genocide, where national sovereignty means the freedom to take care of the nation’s citizens,  doomed to be extinguished in a world of nuclear armed impunity and immunity, where sovereignty is the sovereign ruler’s right to oppress his people and murder his neighbours?  Will Putin share Milosevic’s fate or die warm, fed and coddled at a dacha built with the tears and blood of Russians and Ukrainians? Will war of aggression finally be codified and explicitly banned in a post-invasion world?[6]

And will the 21st century compete with the 20th for bloodiest century in history?[7]

As a final introductory note - This book is being written during the war. I have inserted examples of Russian alleged, potential and actual war crimes into the text or more often the footnotes for illustrative purposes. War crime and terrible events are occurring as I write so I found myself having to revisit fragments while writing, a work in progress is being obsoleted by the rush of events.[8]

Some days it’s difficult to keep up, choose and mention. Even when the Russians aren’t committing atrocities then an attack on human rights with possible genocidal consequences occurs.[9] I start writing about Hersch Lauterpacht and his life work is torn up the British government. I write about Oskar Dirlewanger and along comes a revelation about Russian rape crimes. I quote sovereignty from Lemkin and then a right wing British barrister attacks the very idea of the existence of international. What I write of the past appears in a dark mirror of reality and bounces back to these pages.

There will be mistakes, allegations might prove false, there may be a few false flags. All war crimes and atrocities, which will mostly be Russian, warrant examination in the future in the massive comprehensive works that will come decades down the line, for now my mentions are illustrative and to bring home the fact that ‘of course it can again’. I have no space and less inclination to give Russian positions or answers to allegations, they can save their excuses, whatabout, lies and defences for the ICC.[10] This book is not an examination of what is mostly likely and 90% of the content concerns historically accepted events, except where they may be contradicted by lying textbooks in liar Putin’s lying Russia.

Between submitting the final draft and publication of this book much may occur and/or be written.[11] This is not an academic work but I have found myself obsessively footnoting, forgive me.[12]

[1] “Rome Statute International Criminal Court.” International Criminal Court website, 2011. https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf. Not to be confused with the International Court of Justice.

[2] See Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (United States: The New Press, 2013) clocking in at 959 pages. The table of contents for Jennifer Trahan, Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity: A Digest of the Case Law of the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2010)., is about as long as this chapter – that means just the headings would be the same length as this chapter. Dietrich Schindler and Jiri Toman, eds., The Laws of Armed Conflicts: A Collection of Conventions, Resolutions and Other Documents, Fourth (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 2004) comes in at 1493 pages. The US military Department of Defense Law of War Manual (Maplewood, NJ: Lieber & Sons, 2017) is 1193 pages. Lieber is an appropriate name for the publisher as we shall see. Philip Alston and Ryan Goodman, International Human Rights - Text and Materials (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) comes in at over 1600 pages as a coursebook for law students… Robert Kolb and Richard Hyde, An Introduction to the International Law of Armed Conflicts (Oxford, UK: Hart Pub., 2012) as introduction  is almost 400 pages. Forgive me for the atrocious long, complicated and repeated names of acts, especially annexes to conventions to protocols to conventions.

[3] See Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1-7. The term ‘new justice’ is terrifying and should be for the proponents of national sovereignty as basis of immunity of the individual and state for the committing of atrocities.

[4] In Ukraine during World War Two, a war was waged of astonishing genocidal complexity. It was waged primarily by the Germans against the Jews above all as well as the Slavic inhabitants of their ghastly planned lubensraum and communists, however defined. It was also waged by Soviet forces against Ukrainian and Polish nationalists or capitalists and ethnic Germans and other minorities like the Armenians, Crimean Tatars, Georgians and nearby Chechens. It was also waged by Romanians against Jews and communists, while Ukrainian nationalists fought against the Soviets, Germans and Poles, with brutal ethnic cleansing occurring against Poles and mixed marriages. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010) – Snyder defines the European bloodlands as: “The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.”, 5. I will mostly use borderlands instead because it was not all blood. For Tatar ‘evacuation’ from the Crimea and general purging of minorities in the wake of the Wehrmacht, see Ibid., 238-239

[5] For the coining of whatabout as a technique of reverse accusation which via homo sovieticus became a Russian tradition, Lucian@going2paris.net, “Whataboutism,” Mysite, June 9, 2020, https://www.going2paris.net/post/whataboutism.

[6] Robertson, Crimes, 248.

[7] “Putin's Mariupol Massacre Is One of the 21st Century's Worst War Crimes,” Atlantic Council, May 25, 2022, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-mariupol-massacre-is-one-the-worst-war-crimes-of-the-21st-century/.

[8] This piece was published in the evening of the day that I wrote this sentence - Tatyana Bezruk, “Pits. the Kyiv Region Is Full of the Graves of CiviliansT,” Reporters., May 23, 2022, https://reporters.media/en/pits/.

[9] A rolling database: “Russia's War Crimes in Ukraine,” accessed June 24, 2022, https://war.ukraine.ua/russia-war-crimes/.

[10] On the subject of both the ICC and keeping up with news while writing this book, last evening, as of writing, a story broke of a Russian military spy trying to infiltrate the ICC. And he tricked professor Eugene Finkel, who will be referenced further in this chapter, to write a reference… Russia complicates.

[11]

As a note relating to our discussion during the podvast, the infamous Budapest Memorandum was not a security guarantee given to Ukraine – assurances are not the same as guarantees and a memorandum is not a treaty. The Responsibility to Protect is an actual and important obligation being violated currently by the world towards Ukraine, not that 1994 diplomatic note -“UNTC - Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” United Nations (United Nations), accessed May 28, 2022, https://treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000280401fbb.

[12] If Russian war crime or genocide is not footnoted – see OHCHR, “The Situation of Human Rights in Ukraine in the Context of the Armed Attack by the Russian Federation, 24 February to 15 May 2022 [En/UK] - Ukraine,” ReliefWeb, June 29, 2022, https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/situation-human-rights-ukraine-context-armed-attack-russian-federation-24-february-15-may-2022-enuk. Presumably will be much updated by the time you receive this book, with Russia’s newer and old erwar crimes.

Thanks for reading Fallout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

Updated 7 May 2023 with new cover and title