155 - Pursuing Putin's Atrocities: Seeking Accountability
The International Criminal Court (ICC) seeks someday to hold Putin (and other Russian military men) for war crimes and atrocities committed continuously for a year of senseless war against Ukraine. Its chief prosecutor and staff have been gathering evidence ever since the Russian atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere near the beginning of the war were first revealed. Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan has been carefully sifting stories about what the Russian did – and are now doing – to civilians throughout embattled Ukraine.
Khan knows in some detail how Russian soldiers raped and killed civilians, and how those kinds of offenses continue. Khan’s team has observed the ongoing missile and drone strikes on the electrical infrastructure of Ukraine, on civilian living quarters such as apartment blocks, and on innumerable other structures that are not by any stretch of the imagination part of Ukraine’s war effort.
Khan and his team are also trying to find out every detail involving the Russian abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children from their homes in the occupied areas of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and their forced transfer and adoption in Russia.
War is horrific at the best of times, as poetry and photography from World War I, World War II, the Vietnam horror, and civil conflicts in Africa or Asia will testify. But today’s sclerotic combat in Ukraine is as merciless and pointless as any of those earlier episodes of mayhem. Consider the terrible slaughter in Bakhmut, where Wagner Group mercenary recruits and other Russian trainees try to dislodge Ukrainian defenders from the trenches in a reminder that the vast losses in the battle for the Somme in World War I are being matched today. On both sides, the slaughter is much more expressive than instrumental
War crimes of aggression are being committed daily by the Russians. So have the Russians been perpetrating what have been defined by several Geneva Conventions as Crimes against Humanity --criminal offenses subject to the oversight of the ICC. Indeed, as I wrote in this space exactly a year ago, “photographs…depict civilians, their hands bound tightly behind them, shot with Russian bullets – some even from behind. Survivors…recount being raped by Russian soldiers vicariously. Other citizens will recall for…prosecutors how Russian soldiers shot indiscriminately into houses, how they bombed apartment blocks and playgrounds without excuse, and how Russians took delight in strafing small gatherings of unarmed Ukrainians.” (#4, “Putin , War Criminal,” March 10, 2022)
The deliberate targeting for destruction of civilian populations, the willful killing of non-combatants, and the causing of suffering are all war crimes. Barbarity needs to be held accountable.
A successful prosecution depends on proving intent to commit war crimes systematically. There is abundant and continuing evidence of such crimes, with daily piling on of evidence. But it all has to be proved in a court of law and the ICC now seeks as much material evidence as possible so that it can hold Putin and Russia accountable and, unlikely as it now appears, try Russian leaders the Hague.
But Russia is not a signatory to the Rome Convention of 1998 that authorized and provided the initial foundation of the ICC – a brand new tribunal created to penalize and prevent atrocities in war. Ukraine has accepted the reach of the ICC, without signing the Rome document. That permits the ICC to take jurisdiction.
But even more trying to Khan and his team are the obstacles to accountability that are being erected by the Pentagon. The U. S. State Department, the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have all agreed to assist Khan’s efforts to ensure accountability. That is, those parts of the Washington leadership circle want to share intelligence and other information about crimes against humanity likely committed by individual Russians and traceable back to Putin.
The US Department of Defense, however, is refusing to share with the ICC its manifold intelligence of Russian actions and its battlefield reports of atrocities. The Pentagon is opposing fundamental accountability in order to prevent the ICC at some imagined future time coming after and attempting to prosecute Americans for crimes against humanity that are committed even inadvertently.
The Pentagon seeks to avoid setting precedents that could be used against our own armed forces in future wars. Deep down, the Pentagon wants accountability for others, not fully for us.
Military establishments always exhibit antagonism to accountability in war. Americans also fear being judged by citizens whose domestic juridical systems are not as fully developed as our own, and subject to political interference.
But this is one of those critical moments when President Biden should overrule the Pentagon and strengthen accountability because of how important it is in this war of wars to bring Putin and his minions to unchallengeable justice. The ICC wants all of the evidence, much of which has already been gathered by the Pentagon, or culled in the Pentagon from secret sources elsewhere, to be made available to its investigators. Senator Lindsey Graham says that “the sooner we can get this information into the hands of the ICC, the better off the world will be.”
President Biden absolutely needs to overrule the Pentagon. Doing so will emphasize the global importance of accountability, enhance the overwhelming reality that this is not a just war, boost morale at the front, and set an ambitious new standard for trying war crimes.
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