Do big powers have immunity from war crimes?

Next week’s UNHRC sessions will debate “war crimes” in the backdrop of the 75th anniversary of the carpet bombing of the German city of Dresden during World War II. At the tail-end of that war, US and British planes decimated a defenceless city, which had no military significance. More than 25,000 civilians, mainly women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army of the Soviet Union, were killed and thousands wounded in firestorms resulting from the bombings. The 75th anniversary raised long suppressed issues on what constitutes war crimes.

It is the victors in war who write history. But Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s six volume tome on the Second World War has no mention of Dresden, and for obvious reason. Labelled the ‘man of the century’ for winning the war, Churchill was an accomplice to the premeditated murder of those civilians. His aim -- to demoralise the German population, and get them to rise up against the Nazi Party making it easier for the Allied troops and the Red Army to enter Berlin. US President Harry Truman did much the same thing and in greater magnitude to Japan with the atom bombs. Neither Churchill nor Truman was accused of war crimes. They were considered war heroes who defeated a tyrannical fascist enemy.

Few record what happened in Dresden. Even German researchers have only now come out of the woodwork to write on the subject. Unlike the triumphalism shown over Dunkirk, Normandy and elsewhere, even modern day Germany is reluctant to make a fuss over the 75th anniversary of the Dresden bombings. Let bygones be bygones seems to be their thinking.

A more recent publication, Dresden; The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay succinctly portrays the misery German civilians faced at the hands of the Axis Powers. The moot point of war crimes is brought out in the book. However painful the details of the book are, and even though Churchill wanted to pay back in kind for the German bombing of Coventry, Birmingham, Belfast and London, the author still doesn’t consider Dresden a war crime. He argues that; “War crime above all implies intentionality and rational decision making ... Just as it cannot be assumed that individuals always act with perfect rationality, so the same must be said for entire organizations acting with one will ... Any conflict of such duration and scale will ... create repercussions that start to chip away at the foundations of sanity itself, and in so doing reveal the inherent delicacy of civilization”.

And so, he absolves Churchill and the US/UK Forces from war crimes. Probably only those who have to fight a war – and win it, will understand that realistic logic. A review of the book in the British magazine The Spectator, however says that given the dreadful facts recounted by McKay, “it is impossible to put aside the question of criminality” -- something Churchill escaped.

Other German cities were bombed by air in “purposeful cruelty” - Essen, Pforzheim, Leipzig, Dessau, Wuppertal as the Allies closed in on Berlin 75 years ago. Today, US drones in the air take out Iranian Generals and its Stealth bombers slam projectiles into civilian targets in West Asia. War is ugly.

Just this week, the UN deputy special envoy for Libya, said the UN-backed arms embargo in Libya had become “a joke” and called for accountability on the part of the many countries involved in the conflict, which include the US and UK. So too is the war in Yemen. The irony of Western powers pontificating on war crimes nowadays cannot be missed.