The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal accuses
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney of war crimes. They are serious accusations, but
this isn’t a serious court.
For
decades, critics have politely pointed to Malaysia as a country of parallel
universes. Laws separate race and religion, and people who live and work side
by side are forced to coexist within different worlds as defined by successive
UMNO coalitions and at times enforced by the courts, civilian and Islamic.
Prime
Minister Najib Razak has attempted to change this. He has announced a series of
political and economic reforms that he and the reformers in his United Malays
National Organization (UMNO) hope will make Malaysia a fairer and more
competitive place.
The
initiatives, however, haven’t stopped protestors like the Bersih
movement from campaigning for free and fair elections. They also fear Malaysia
won’t change, and will instead slip back to its autocratic ways, which found
real traction under Najib’s predecessors, in particular former premier Mahathir
Mohamad. His style of autocracy has never been far from the surface of
Malaysian political life and was again on display in Kuala Lumpur in recent
weeks when political mischief went on show in the guise of putting Western
leaders in the dock through a court with no jurisdiction or legitimacy other
than it being backed by Mahathir, who attended the hearings.
As an
eye witness to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the wanton destruction caused
elsewhere by the War on Terror, I can testify to the sheer ferocity of the
conflicts. There’s little doubt that a legal case against Western leaders for
their behavior throughout the first decade of this century could be made. But
the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) is certainly not the answer.
In its
final round of hearings, the KLWCT has found former U.S. President
George W. Bush along with another seven associates guilty of crimes of torture.
It said
the eight accused – Bush; former Vice President Dick Cheney; former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; former counsel to Bush, Alberto Gonzales; former
general counsel to the vice president, David Addington; former general counsel
to the defense secretary, William Haynes II; former Assistant Attorney General
Jay Bybee and former Deputy Assistant General John Yoo – had engaged in a web
of instruction and directives leading to a common plan, purpose and conspiracy
to commit crimes of torture and war crimes in relation to the War on Terror as
conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among
the evidence provided, Abbas
Abid testified his fingernails had been pulled out with a pair of pliers.Moazzam Begg told how he was
kept in a hood, beat and locked away in solitary confinement.
The tribunal says Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld were aware that the U.S. had violated the 1984 Torture
Convention and the Geneva Conventions but they had failed to intervene. This
came after legal opinions asserted in their defense that the Geneva Conventions
didn’t apply to suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees and that as such there
was no torture occurring within the meaning of the Torture Convention. As a
result, interrogation techniques which included cruel, inhumane and degrading
treatment, were actually allowed.
Unanimously,
under KLWCT President Lamin Mohammad Yunus, a bench of five judges ruled the
prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubt charges of crimes of torture in
accordance with Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter. The court says it was
following the Nuremberg model.
People
inside the court also like to compare the KLWCT with the Russell Tribunal,
established by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell and his French
counterpart Jean-Paul Sartre to evaluate American foreign policy in North and
South Vietnam after the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
The
KLWCT wouldn’t be described as a kangaroo court if it had any form of
legitimacy. It does not.
But
when following the proceedings in the mainstream press or through the national
wires one could be forgiven for thinking that this tribunal ranks alongside the
Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia or similar international courts established to
try those responsible for tragedies in Rwanda, Lebanon and the former
Yugoslavia.
Indeed,
the coverage has been unquestioning and has found friends elsewhere. The Tehran
Times, for example, trumpeted the Malaysian verdict as: “It’s official
– George W. Bush is a war criminal.”
It was
a second KLWCT conviction for Bush. He
and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair were last November found guilty in
absentia of committing “crimes against peace” during the Iraq war after a four
day hearing. It then
said: “Unlawful use of force threatens the world to return to a state of
lawlessness. The acts of the accused were unlawful.”
Mahathir
stepped down in 2003 after 22 years in power and after limiting his country’s
involvement in global attempts to track down and weed out Islamic terrorists in
the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
He
branded Bush and Blair as “child
killers.” Then, in 2007, he announced plans to establish the KLWCT and the
Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalize War (KLFCW) with about as much gusto as
he had mustered when announcing Malaysia’s sponsorship of Formula One racing in
the mid-1990s.
Both
organizations fall under the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC).
Following the latest verdicts, Mahathir
derided his fellow Malaysians in business and politics saying he was
shocked that “war criminals” had been invited to visit the country and
apparently – unsure of his own legal ground – asked whether local police had
the power to arrest such people for war crimes.
The
police and most other people of legal and political clout are doing their best
to ignore Mahathir’s efforts to create a ceremony upon which to stand. Blair’s
“conviction” didn’t stop David Cameron from becoming the first British
Prime Minister in 20 years to visit Malaysia, in March. Nor has it stopped
Najib from forging closer ties with the West, and that includes broadly backing
Washington and its stance over Iran’s nuclear program.
The
findings of the tribunal will be submitted to the International Criminal Court,
the United Nations and the Security Council and Mahathir is hoping the names of
the accused will be entered into the Register of War Criminals and thus
legitimize his homespun legal system and backyard court.
“In a
way, of course those who attended these proceedings can learn a lot about
international law and the laws of the United States,” he was quoted as saying
by the local press, adding the panel had listened carefully to both the defense
and the prosecution.
Malaysia
has, though, had issues with Mahathir’s comprehension of the separation of
powers. It was a point of contention with the Malaysian Bar Council for most
his tenure as the country’s leader.
War
crimes tribunals are a complex affair. They take years not days and are also
transparent – this includes budgets, funding, mandates, the legal brinkmanship
and often the excessive bickering and politicking that inevitably accompanies
such trials, whether at Nuremburg after World War II or the tribunals currently
underway in Cambodia or The Hague.
Old
habits die hard in Malaysia. The spokesman for the KLWCC also happens to be
prosecutor Aravant Singh who would only say that the tribunal receives funds
from the public. A tribunal source added that this included corporate
donations. The list of donors was not made public.
Asked
who had mandated the tribunal, he
said in a statement: “The tribunal is set up under the KL War Crimes
Charter. It is a people’s initiative – a tribunal of conscience. As such the
issue of jurisdiction is universal in the sense that peoples initiatives are
across borders as regards war crimes.”
He said
the tribunal also followed a failure by international institutions in handling
the U.S. and U.K. with regards to the “unlawful invasion of Iraq on unjustified
and unsupported claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction after more than 240
complaints were filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“The
U.S. war on terror and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in massive
deaths and unlawful detentions and torture. But there has been no international
sanction,” he says.
Mahathir’s
antics and the unconventional tactics of the KLWCT simply detract from
tribunals where very serious issues are being dealt with, such as the genocides
in Cambodia and Rwanda. Despite their flaws (and there are many) they hold a
recognition backed by a U.N. mandate that legitimizes their investigations,
prosecutions and findings among the public and victims they serve.
The
Kuala Lumpur tribunal holds none of these characteristics. Mahathir is an old
political stager and may have had his day in court, which should delight him.
But to be clear in regards to Bush, Blair and the War on Terror, no one else
has legitimately had theirs.
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