War And War Crimes: A Very Short Academic Approach

After World War Two (WWII), there was a growing number of significant non-state actors in International Relations (IR) like the OUN (UN) or various specialist agencies connected to it.,. Two key developments which stimulated their growth after WWII:

1. The realization that building cooperation and collective security was a much wider task than merely deterring aggressors in traditional attacks on fixed international order. It, therefore, involved finding ways of agreeing on international policy in a variety of practical areas.
2. The increasing coverage of international law includes new foci, including, human rights, social justice, natural environment, and regarding warfare – war crimes.

The final result of such post-WWII development in IR and global politics was that the application of the OUN system which took place within the context of the growth and expansion of international law and which dealt with war crimes. As a consequence, IR became less concerned with the state’s freedoms and independence alone but more interested in general welfare with regards to including those affecting various non-state actors, such as pressure groups of different kinds, not least those demanding the investigation of war crimes including ethnic cleansing and genocide.

However, since the Cold War’s two nuclear Superpowers for geopolitical reasons, often been supporters of anti-democratic regimes that notoriously violated their own citizen’s rights, like the US support of the authoritarian regime of General Pinochet (1973−1990), in Chile. The removal of such structural condition appeared favorable to a general improvement in those countries requiring the investigation of the violation of human rights which in some cases included war crimes that took place during civil wars.

The phenomenon of war crimes is commonly understood as individual responsibility for violations of the internationally agreed-on laws and customs of warfare. The responsibility is covered both by the commission of war crimes like in a direct way and ordering or facilitating them. In principle, the rule violated must be part of the international customary law or part of an applicable treaty.

Chronologically, the first and unsuccessful attempts at the prosecution of war crimes took place after the Great War. The same problem of individual responsibility for war crimes became once again actual during and after WWII, with the declarations in 1942 and 1943 by the Allied coalition. It was, basically, the expression of the determination to prosecute and punish at least major war criminals on the opposite side but, unfortunately, not on their own as well. Another practical purpose was to establish the tribunals for such cases to take place in Nuremberg in Germany (for the Nazi German war criminals) and Tokyo in Japan (for Japanese war criminals).

The war crimes committed in WWII coveredg the so-called “crimes against humanity” as defined by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal that was established in Nuremberg like killing, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhuman acts committed against civilian populations either before or during a war. In addition, the same category of war crimes included  persecution on political, racial, or religious foundations followed by the crime of aggression and crimes against peace like planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression.

War crimes are in general understood in terms of all those acts that are defined as the so-called “grave breaches” of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol 1 of 1977. Later, war crimes are furhter defined in the 1993 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and by the 1994 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda followed by Article 8 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In the 1990s, some states  established the so-called “international” courts for the matter of prosecution of war crimes with the first such tribunal established after WWII which dealt with cases from the territory of ex-Yugoslavia and which was then followed by the court for Rwanda and the successful negotiation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The conflicts which followed the brutal destruction of ex-Yugoslavia have been widely referred to as Europe’s bloodiest conflict after 1945 partly because of the severity and intensity of the actual warfare and partly because of mass ethnic cleansings on all sides. This war in the 1990s became infamous for war crimes. The case of Yugoslavia’s destruction in 1990s became officially the first military conflict after WWII to be formally judged as genocidal by the Western international community.

Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic

Ex-University Professor

Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies

Belgrade, Serbia

www.geostrategy.rs

sotirovic1967@gmail.com

© Vladislav B. Sotirovic 2023