by Michael Arvey
In the aftermath of World War II, my father, a commissioned Lieutenant in the US Navy, deployed to Japan upon completing a Japanese training course at the then Navy's Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The entire family accompanied him to Tokyo (where I learned to speak Japanese before I spoke English), whereupon he ended up working as a Navy translator at the Guam War Crime Trials. Although the Japanese trials were the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials in the East, they received less notice, lacking the horror of gas chambers and other Nazi mass atrocities. Many of the islands in Japan's archipelago underwent their own separate trials. The trials in Tokyo, which prosecuted the Imperial Army's top brass, was the most well known.
Luckily for Guam's Japanese defendants, my father was born with a penchant and a flair for languages, and could learn a language more quickly than I can read a book. I wax hyperbolic, yet it was upon his nuanced interpretive skills that Japanese soldiers received an accurate vetting in that muggy, wan courtroom.
Although he passed long ago, I wonder how he would react to the March 13, 2004 findings of a citizen's International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan at Tokyo, The People v. George W. Bush. After a two year investigation, the tribunal has found President Bush guilty of war crimes resultant to US attacks against Afghanistan in 2001. (See the entire 74-page document presented at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5855.htm)
Nao Shimoyachi, The Japan Times, March 13, reported Bush was found guilty "for attacking civilians with indiscriminate weapons and other arms," and the "tribunal also issued recommendations for banning depleted uranium shells and other weapons that indiscriminately harm people." Anyone hear about this in the US press?
It is appropriately ironic that the tribunal consisted primarily of Japanese citizens, lawyers and professors joined by a small contingent from Germany and the US. My father never had to translate war crime issues such as the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and daisy cutters--only issues such as cannibalism, murder and torture. He would be surprised that the tribunal found the US and Bush guilty of torturing Afghani prisoners of war, however, presumably because the US has long touted itself as a civilized nation. What he wouldn't be surprised at, though, is the charge that the US used illegal weapons of war. The US was guilty of this action in 1945.
The recent Tokyo tribunal, guided by the principles of
International Criminal Law and International Humanitarian Law, found
President George Bush guilty of the following crimes:
The tribunal's summation delineates that the principles of International Law have clearly banned weapons falling into these categories:
a. Their use has indiscriminate effects;
b. Their use is out of proportion with the pursuit of military objectives;
c. Their use adversely affects the environment in a widespread, long term and severe manner;
d. Their use causes superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering.
By these definitions, the weapons unleashed upon Afganistan are deemed illegal (US aggression against Iraq dovetails here as well), and therefore the Commander-in Chief of the US is guilty of war crimes.
The tribunal's judgment concludes: "If truth is known, tyranny and injustice will be defeated. The Tribunal has performed its judicial task. It is now for people to ensure implementation of this verdict." With such lawlessness prevailing in governments that engage in illegal wars, the pursuit of justice would appear to rest upon the shoulders of citizens worldwide.
For my father's sake, it is fitting that one war crime trial was enough in his lifetime, and he didn't have to translate the machinations of President George W. Bush before an international court. As for the rest of the world, how to implement?
Michael Arvey writes from Colorado.
