The reception of individuals guilty of violations of international criminal law after a conflict differs greatly, ranging from bringing them to justice in war crimes trials to ignoring their crimes or even glorifying them as heroes. Such issues have led to controversies in many countries, including Australia, the United States, Germany, the Baltic states, Japan, and the former Yugoslavia.
A book by Mark Aarons argues that Australia has been "a safe haven for war criminals" including Nazis, Khmer Rouge, former Chilean secret police, and those guilty of war crimes in the Yugoslav Wars. [1] Some have played a role in Australian politics or the intelligence services. [1] [2]
In 2023, former Australian SAS soldier Oliver Schulz was arrested and charged with murdering unarmed Afghan civilian Dad Mohammad. He is the first person to be charged in connection with the Brereton Report, a report published by the Australian Defence Force on war crimes in Afghanistan. Schulz is also the first Australian soldier to ever be charged under Australian law with a war crime. In 2023, Australia's most decorated soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, lost a defamation suit he filed against several publications which had accused him of being a war criminal. The case is currently under appeal. [3]
Former President of Croatia Ivo Josipović has highlighted that former Yugoslav countries were reluctant to prosecute their own nationals for war crimes because "everybody considers their own people to be heroes and only sees the victims on their own side". [4]
In Republika Srpska, memorials to victims of the Bosnian genocide are forbidden. Instead, memorials are erected to commemorate Serb perpetrators of war crimes such as Radovan Karadžić. [5] Secondary school textbooks discuss Karadžić without mentioning that he was convicted of war crimes and genocide. [6] In Serbia, convicted war criminals such as Vojislav Šešelj enjoy public support which goes along with Bosnian genocide denial as well as denial of other war crimes committed by Serbs. [7] [8] [9]
After the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted six Bosnian Croat military leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity in November 2017, Prime Minister of Croatia Andrej Plenković described the verdict as a "deep moral injustice". [10] Branimir Glavaš, a former Croatian general and current politician who was previously found guilty of torturing and murdering Serb civilians in the town of Osijek during the Croatian War of Independence, received a warm welcome following his release in 2015 which included a concert in front of 1,500 people featuring singers Miroslav Škoro and Mate Bulić. [11]
In Kosovo, convicted war criminals such as Lahi Brahimaj and Rrustem Mustafa have been appointed to state offices. When Sylejman Selimi was released from prison after serving his sentence for war crimes, President of Kosovo Hashim Thaçi said: "Kosovo is better and safer with the living hero Sylejman Selimi at liberty." [12] Following the death of Kosovo Albanian war crimes convict Haradin Bala in January 2018, the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo held a minute of silence to mark his death. [13]
Johan Tarčulovski, the only Macedonian citizen to be convicted by the ICTY, was elected to Parliament in 2016 for the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party. A high-ranking member of the party told Balkan Insight , "He is our Macedonian hero and we are proud to have him among our ranks. Who best to work for Macedonian interests than Tarčulovski?" [14]
In Cambodia, Pol Pot's tomb has been the focus of cult activities. [15]
Some German war criminals were put on trial at the Nuremberg trials, although most escaped responsibility for their crimes. [16] Today Germany denounces the actions of Nazi war criminals and does not have memorials to them. [17] In contrast, there are many Holocaust memorials in Germany. [18]
SS officer Joachim Peiper, convicted and sentenced to death for his role in the Malmedy massacre, but eventually reprieved, later achieved cult status among those who romanticize the Waffen-SS. [19]
Major Japanese war criminals convicted and executed by the Tokyo Trial are enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine. [20] Visits to the shrine by Japanese prime ministers have therefore been subjects of controversy. [21]
A number of Nazi war criminals immigrated to various countries in Latin America, including Josef Mengele, Klaus Barbie, and Franz Stangl. [22] In 1961, Argentina protested against Israel's abduction of Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, and initially demanded his return to Argentina. Before his abduction, Eichmann openly discussed his crimes with other German immigrants. [23] [24] Following his arrest a wave of antisemitic attacks were committed against Argentine Jews. [23]
Commemoration of the Latvian Legion, a Waffen-SS formation during World War II, is controversial due to the war crimes committed by it. Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires was celebrated as a state holiday from 1998 to 2000. [25] Annual marches continue to be held as of 2018 and are opposed by groups such as Latvia Without Fascism. [26]
Controversy has arisen around figures such as Adolfas Ramanauskas, Jonas Noreika, and Juozas Ambrazevičius, who are viewed as heroes due to opposing Soviet aggression against Lithuania but who have been accused of Nazi collaboration. [27] [28] [29] Noreika's involvement in the mass murder of Jews has been proven beyond any doubt. He directly gave the order to carry out the Plungė massacre, in which 1,700 Jewish men, women, and children were killed. In 1997, Noreika, who was executed by the Soviets in 1947, was posthumously the Order of the Cross of Vytis by the Lithuanian government. [30]
As of 2020 [update] , Paul Kagame is president of Rwanda. He was in command of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which committed widespread war crimes during the Rwandan Civil War, for which the commander is legally responsible under the doctrine of command responsibility. Kagame was not tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. [31] [32] [33] According to scholar Filip Reyntjens, Kagame is "the greatest war criminal" currently in power measured by the number of people killed. [34]
In 2019, Omar al-Bashir, who was previously indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the Darfur conflict, was deposed as President of Sudan and arrested. [35] In December 2019, he was convicted of corruption and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. [36] As of October 2020, the Sudanese government is exploring the possibility of a hybrid tribunal to try al-Bashir and others for war crimes. [35]
Talaat Pasha, the architect of the Armenian genocide, is buried under the Monument of Liberty, Istanbul, dedicated for "heroes of the fatherland". [37] The glorification of Talaat and other Armenian Genocide perpetrators goes along with Turkey's state-sponsored Armenian genocide denial. [37]
There are competing legacies of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who is viewed as a national hero by some but who led an uprising that involved widespread massacres of Jews. [38] The World War II-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) is also controversial, being viewed by some Ukrainians as a national movement. However, the UPA in collaboration with the Nazis was responsible for mass killings of Jews and Poles during the Holocaust in Ukraine. Renaming of streets after Nazi collaborators and erection of monuments to them has been criticized by civil society groups. [39] [40]
Twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor, the United States' highest military honor, for alleged "gallantry" and "bravery" during the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre in which hundreds of Lakota civilians were killed. [41] In 2019, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley introduced a bill to revoke the medals. [41]
Only one United States soldier, William Calley, was convicted for the 1968 My Lai massacre of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army units. [42] However, Seymour Hersh's reporting on the massacre, "I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer", won the Pulitzer Prize. [43]
President Donald Trump's use of pardon powers to pardon soldiers convicted of or charged with war crimes has attracted criticism. [44] [45] [46] According to law professor Stuart Ford, some of the pardons are illegal under international law, which requires that countries hold war criminals accountable. [47]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.
Victor's justice is a term which is used in reference to a distorted application of justice to the defeated party by the victorious party after an armed conflict. Victor's justice generally involves the excessive or unjustified punishment of defeated parties and the light punishment of or clemency for offenses which have been committed by victors. Victors' justice can be used in reference to manifestations of a difference in rules which can amount to hypocrisy and revenge or retributive justice leading to injustice. Victors' justice may also refer to a misrepresentation of historical recording of the events and actions of the losing party throughout or preceding the conflict.
The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place from 1991 to 2001 in what had been the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The conflicts both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which began in mid-1991, into six independent countries matching the six entities known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia. SFR Yugoslavia's constituent republics declared independence due to unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries, which fueled the wars. While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.
The Bosnian genocide took place during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995 and included both the Srebrenica massacre and the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing campaign perpetrated throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25000–30000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
Efraim Zuroff is an American-born Israeli historian and Nazi hunter who has played a key role in bringing Nazi and fascist war criminals to trial. Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, is the coordinator of Nazi war crimes research worldwide for the Wiesenthal Center and the author of its annual "Status Report" on the worldwide investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals which includes a list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.
Anti-Serb sentiment or Serbophobia is a generally negative view of Serbs as an ethnic group. Historically it has been a basis for the persecution of ethnic Serbs.
The White Eagles, also known as the Avengers, were a Serbian paramilitary group associated with the Serbian National Renewal (SNO) and the Serbian Radical Party (SRS). The White Eagles fought in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars.
Gideon Greif is an Israeli historian who specializes in the history of the Holocaust, especially the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp and particularly the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. He served as a visiting lecturer for Jewish and Israeli History at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin during the academic year 2011–2012. He headed a commission that issued a report in July 2021 that denied that the killing of Bosnian Muslims at and around Srebrenica in July 1995 constituted genocide.
During the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), propaganda was widely used in the media of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, of Croatia and of Bosnia.
Joint criminal enterprise (JCE) is a legal doctrine used during war crimes tribunals to allow the prosecution of members of a group for the actions of the group. This doctrine considers each member of an organized group individually responsible for crimes committed by group within the common plan or purpose. It arose through the application of the idea of common purpose and has been applied by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to prosecute political and military leaders for mass war crimes, including genocide, committed during the Yugoslav Wars 1991–1999.
Callixte Mbarushimana is a Hutu Rwandan and former United Nations employee (1992–2001) who is alleged to have participated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. On 28 September 2010, Mbarushimana was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for crimes against humanity and war crimes allegedly committed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009. He was arrested in France in October 2010 and extradited to the ICC on 25 January 2011. However, he was released on 23 December 2011 as the ICC found there was insufficient evidence for prosecuting him.
Sylejman Selimi is the former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who was convicted of war crimes for the torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners at the Likovac detention center during the Kosovo War. After the war, he served as Security Force of the Republic of Kosovo; he left this position in 2011 and became the ambassador to Albania.
Serbia, as a constituent subject of the SFR Yugoslavia and later the FR Yugoslavia, was involved in the Yugoslav Wars, which took place between 1991 and 1999—the war in Slovenia, the Croatian War of Independence, the Bosnian War, and Kosovo. From 1991 to 1997, Slobodan Milošević was the President of Serbia. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has established that Milošević was in control of Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia during the wars which were fought there from 1991 to 1995.
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries. Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"". According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".
The Prosecutor v. Ratko Mladić was a war crimes trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, concerning crimes committed during the Bosnian War by Ratko Mladić in his role as a general in the Yugoslav People's Army and the Chief of Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska.
Bosnian genocide denial is the act of denying the occurrence of the systematic genocide against the Bosniak Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or asserting it did not occur in the manner or to the extent that has been established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) through proceedings and judgments, and described by comprehensive scholarship.
The Grubori massacre was the mass murder of six Serb civilians from the village of Grubori, near Knin, on 25 August 1995 by members of the Croatian Army (HV) in the aftermath of Operation Storm. The massacre was listed in the ICTY's indictment of Croatian wartime generals Ante Gotovina, Ivan Čermak and Mladen Markač.
Denial of the genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a Nazi German puppet state which existed during World War II, is a historical negationist claim that no systematic mass crimes or genocide against Serbs took place in the NDH, as well as an attempt to minimize the scale and severity of genocide.
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