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Civil
Society Judges the Iraq War
By
Richard
Falk, TFF Associate
September 23, 2005
The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI)
held its final session betweenJune 24-27. This session
was the last and most elaborate of sixteen condemnations
of the Iraq War held all over the world in the last two
years in Barcelona, Tokyo, Brussels, Seoul, New York,
London, Mumbai and other cities. The Istanbul proceedings
invoked the verdicts and relied on some of the testimony
from the earlier sessions; this cumulative nature of the
sessions built interest among peace activists around the
world, resulting in this final session having by far the
strongest international flavor with respect to scope and
national identity of the participants.
This cumulative process, described
by organizers as "the tribunal movement," is unique in
history: Never before has a particular war produced this
level of protest on a global scale - first to prevent it
(the huge February 15, 2003 demonstrations, eleven
million, 600 cities, eighty countries) and then to
condemn its inception and conduct.
The WTI is one expression of the
opposition of global civil society to the Iraq War, an
initiative best understood as a contribution to "moral
globalization."
The WTI generated intense interest
in Turkey, the Arab world, and on the Internet but was
ignored by most of the mainstream media in Europe and the
United States. In Istanbul, the WTI was treated for
several days as a prominent news story. There are several
explanations for this, starting with near-unanimous
opposition to the Iraq War in Turkey. More relevant were
the vivid connections between Turkey and the war:
physical proximity, an array of adverse effects
associated with events in Iraq and, more dramatically, a
contradictory government posture: the refusal of the
Turkish Parliament in 2003 to give in to US pressure to
authorize an invasion of Iraq from Turkish territory,
while the Prime Minister allowed the continuing use of
the huge US air base at Incirlik for strategic operations
during and after the war.
The Istanbul session was organized
by an independent group of Turkish citizens, mainly women
with professional careers, who somehow managed the
funding, organizing, and presentation more successfully
than could have been imagined. The occurrence of such an
event touching on sensitive strategic relations of the
Turkish government also gave concrete reality to a new
confidence on the part of the Turkish citizenry in the
deepening reality of democracy in the country.
The WTI was generally inspired by
the Bertrand Russell tribunal held in Copenhagen and
Stockholm in 1967 to protest the Vietnam War, which
documented with extensive testimony the allegations of
criminality associated with the American role in Vietnam.
The Russell tribunal featured the participation of
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and other notable
European left intellectuals. It relied on international
law and morality to condemn the war but made no
pretension of being a legal body, and its jury contained
no international law experts. This same orientation
toward law was present in the WTI, which deliberately
avoidedany pretension of being a body of trained jurists
reaching a legal conclusion after listening to the two
sides of a contested issue.
Of course, a tribunal of this sort,
when not altogether ignored, is widely criticized on one
hand as a kangaroo court that ignores the other sides of
the legal and political argument and, on the other, is
treated as a meaningless use of a courtroom format since
there is no adversary process, no enforcement powers, and
no political leverage to bring to bear on the indicted
governments and their leaders.
The WTI is not an organ of the
state and cannot count on its judgments being implemented
by such state institutions as police or prisons. And, of
course, the leaders whose behavior is being described as
criminal have every incentive to deny the legitimacy of
the proceedings by ignoring or condemning the
conclusions. But all this criticism misses the point.
The WTI is self-consciously an
organ of civil society, with its own potential
enforcement by way of economic boycotts, civil
disobedience and political campaigns. And on the
substantive issues of legality, the undertaking is
designed to confirm the truth and add to the
persuasiveness of the widely held allegations about the
Iraq War. The WTI was not trying to discover the truth by
way of political, legal and moral inquiry and debate. Its
activity is based on the widely endorsed presumption that
the allegations of illegality and criminality are valid
with respect to the Iraq War. This makes the job of the
tribunal to reinforce that conclusion as persuasively and
vividly as possible.
The motivations of citizens to
organize such a tribunal do not arise from uncertainty
about issues of legality and morality but from a
conviction that the official institutions of the state,
including the United Nations, have failed to act to
protect a vulnerable people against such Nuremberg crimes
as aggression, violations of the laws of war and crimes
against humanity. It is only because of such
institutional failures in the face of ongoing suffering
and abuse like that in Iraq that individuals and
institutions made the immense organizational effort to
put together this kind of transnational civic tribunal.
We should also recall that the Nuremberg Tribunal's
enduring contribution was not finding out whether the
Nazi regime had committed the crimes alleged but
documenting its criminality.
The decision of the WTI was
rendered by a fifteen-member Jury of Conscience, chaired
by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, and composed of
prominent activists from around the world. Two Americans,
David
Krieger, president of the
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Eve Ensler of Vagina
Monologues fame, were jury members. The jury also
included Chandra Muzaffar, Malaysia's leading human
rights advocate and noted author, as well as two
internationally respected Turkish intellectual
personalities, Murat Belge and Ayse Erzan.
A Panel of Advocates - coordinated
by Turgut Tarhanli, dean of the Bilgi Law School in
Istanbul, and myself - organized the fifty-four
presentations offered to the jury. The advocates came
from dvierse backgrounds.
The presentations included some
incisive analyses of international law issues by such
respected world experts as Christine Chinkin of the
London School of Economics, and Amy Bartholomew of
Carleton University, Ottawa; Barbara Olshansky, Assistant
Legal Deirector of the Center for Constitutional Rights,
made a gripping presentation of the gruesome record of
abuse of detainees and prisoners held by the US
Government since 9/11; two former assistant secretary
generals of the UN (Denis Halliday & Hans
von Sponeck) both of whom
had resigned in the 1990s to protest the genocidal
effects of UN sanctions in Iraq; accounts of the
devastation and cruelty of the occupation by several
seemingly credible eye-witnesses who had held important
nongovernment jobs in pre-invasion Iraq; a moving
presentation of why he turned against the Iraq War by Tim
Goodrich, a former American soldier and co-founder of
Iraq Veterans Against the War; and overall assessments of
how the Iraq War fits into American ambitions for global
empire by such renowned intellectuals as Samir Amin ,
Johan
Galtung, and Walden Bello.
Their presentations combined an
acute explanation of the strains on world order arising
from predatory forms of economic globalization with the
view that the US response to 9/11 was mainly motivated by
regional and global strategic aims and only incidentally,
if at all, by antiterrorism.
After compromise and debate, the
jury reached a unanimous verdict that combined findings
with recommendations for action. Its core conclusion
condemned the Iraq War as a war of aggression in
violation of the UN Charter and international law, and
determined that those responsible for planning and waging
it should be held criminally responsible. George W. Bush,
Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell
and Paul Wolfowitz were listed in the jury verdict by
name.
Less predictably, the UN was
severely blamed for failing to fulfill its
responsibilities to protect member states against
aggression. The most controversial recommendation of the
WTI supported the rights of the Iraqi people to resist an
illegal occupation in forms authorized by international
law.
Further recommendations specified
that US/UK media be held responsible for contributing to
the war of aggression, that American and British products
associated with corporations doing business in Iraq, like
Halliburton, British Pertroleum, and Bechtel be boycotted
and that peace movement activists around the world urge
the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Iraq.
The
verdict - see the full text here
- was framed from start to finish as a moral and
political assessment of the Iraq War, and relied on the
guidelines of international law to lend legal weight to
what were essentially political and moral conclusions.
The jury's view of international law accords with a
nearly unanimous consensus of international law experts
outside the United States and Britain. In this sense, the
conclusions of the WTI resemblethe expected and proper
outcome in any normal criminal tribunal functioning under
the authority of the state or the United Nations.
There would never have been a WTI
if these procedures were able to function free of the
constraints of geopolitics. Because they are unable to do
so, the WTI in effect is telling the world what it should
know about the moral, political, and legal character of
the Iraq War, and it is telling this vital story
honestly, comprehensively, and in a manner designed to
motivate citizens and government to take action to end
the foreign occupation of Iraq.
Arundhati Roy imparted the
prevailing spirit of civic dedication and moral
leadership in a press statement at the end of the final
session. Her words summarize the experience for many of
us: the WTI "places its faith in the consciences of
millions of people across the world who do not wish to
stand by and watch while the people of Iraq are being
slaughtered, subjugated and humiliated."
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