Can a tyrant who murders his people in his own country be convicted of war crimes?

In this article, I am raising three important questions that you might want to ponder about.

Is a dictator who commits atrocities against his own people, a war criminal?

Sadamm Hussein, the Iraqi dictator gassed the Iranian ground troops during the Iranian/Iraq war. That was in conflict with the rules of warfare as set down by the Geneva Protocol of 1928.

The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, usually called the Geneva Protocol, is a treaty prohibiting the first use of chemical and biological weapons.

What constitutes a war crime?

The definition of a war crime means an act or omission that is committed during an international armed conflict, whether or not it constitutes a contravention of the law in force at the time and in the place of its commission, and that, at that time and in that place, constitutes a contravention of the customary international law or conventional international law applicable in international armed conflicts. (2)
Since the use of deadly gasses in an international armed conflict is contrary to the Geneva Protocol, and as such, is outlawed, Sadamm Hussein would be found guilty of a war crime if he was brought to trial for gassing Iranian ground troops during that conflict between the two countries.

A CNN report dated September 4, 2003, said in part; “Despite being sarcastic and unrepentant, Saddam Hussein will get a fair trial before a war crimes tribunal that was approved just last week, members of the Iraqi Governing Council have said. The court sessions will be "open to the public, with the press, so that people in Iraq can see the nature of crimes committed with Saddam at the helm," said council member Dara Noor Aldin, a judge who helped draft the statute creating the war crimes tribunal. Saddam is accused of crimes against humanity during his three-decade reign of terror, including using chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurds.

In July of 1982, several Shiite militants (in the city of Dujail, Iraq) attempted to assassinate Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, while he was riding through the city. Hussein responded by ordering the slaughter of some 148 residents, including dozens of children. This is the only war crime on which Hussein had been charged before any other charges could go to trial.

For the slaughter of the 148 victims of Dujail, he was tried for crimes against humanity and not for war crimes and later he was executed for crimes against humanity before he could be tried for other crimes. In international law, a crime against humanity is an act of persecution or any large scale atrocities against a body of people, and is the highest level of a criminal offense.

President Bush in 2002 said that Saddam Hussein was a man who was willing to gas his own people. The Halabja poison gas attack against the Kurds in north west part of Iraq occurred in the period March 16–17, 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, killing thousands of people, most of them civilians (most commonly cited figures are 5,000 dead on the spot and 10,000 injured). Thousands more died of horrific complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack.

Based on the definition of war crimes, Saddam did not commit a war crime against the Kurds when he ordered that they be gassed nor did he commit a war crime when he ordered the executions of the 148 victims of the city of Dujail as CNN had suggested in its newscast. His crimes in those incidents were crimes against humanity.

The death of former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot on April 15, 1998 in the Thai-Cambodian border area brought to an end one of the most chilling and bloody chapters of the twentieth century. During Pol Pot's three and a half years of rule over Cambodia as prime minister from 1975 to 1978, the Khmer Rouge killed as many as two million people through mass executions, starvation and slave labor.

There were reports that there were plans to get the United Nations Security Council to set up a war crimes tribunal that would be the course most likely to secure the widest international respect. At the same time, in United Nations discussions on establishing a permanent international criminal tribunal, the United States insisted on retaining a Security Council veto over any future moves to indict alleged war criminals.

With its typical indifference to history, the American media carried interviews with Henry Kissinger, the then U.S. Secretary of State after the death of Pol Pot in which there was no mention of the US contribution to the tragedy of Cambodia. The principal architect of Nixon's Cambodia policy pontificated about Pol Pot's bloody crimes and discussed the prospects of a war crimes trial for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

It would be impossible to try the remaining leaders of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia with war crimes since the mass murders of the Cambodian people were brought about by that country’s own leaders.

After more than five years of negotiations, the United Nations and Cambodia drafted an agreement in March 2003 to set up a war crimes court to try the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and are accused of causing the deaths of 1.7 million people through execution, starvation, disease and hard labor.

The term ‘war crimes court’ is really the ‘International Criminal Court’ that came into being for the prosecution of war crimes committed on or after July 1, 2002.

War crimes are defined in the statute that established the International Criminal Court, includes: grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, such as: willful killing, or causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, torture or inhumane treatment, unlawful wanton destruction or appropriation of property, forcing a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of a hostile power, depriving a prisoner of war of a fair trial, unlawful deportation, confinement or transfer, and taking hostages.

The breaches also include; directing attacks against civilians, directing attacks against humanitarian workers or UN peacekeepers, killing a surrendered combatant, misusing a flag of truce, settlement of occupied territory, deportation of inhabitants of occupied territory, using poison weapons, using civilians as shields, using child soldiers. Further, the following acts as part of a non-international conflict are war crimes; murder, cruel or degrading treatment and torture, directing attacks against civilians, humanitarian workers or UN peacekeepers, taking hostages, summary executions, pillage, rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution or forced pregnancy.

Was President Nixon a war criminal?

It’s ironic when you think of it. The principal architect of Nixon's Cambodia policy pontificated about Pol Pot's bloody crimes and discussed the prospects of a war crimes trial after Pol Pot died for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders but he made no mention about the possibility of Nixon being charged as a war criminal for war crimes committed by American soldiers during the Viet Nam war.

Phoenix was a Central Intelligence Agency operation aimed at eliminating the Vietcong civilian infrastructure. Unlike standard military operations, Phoenix targeted civilians, not soldiers. Phoenix was launched in 1965, the same year the USA announced it would abide by the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam.There were two main components to the Phoenix Program: Provisional Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and regional interrogation centers. The PRUs would kill VCI (Viet Cong) members, terrorize civilians and capture those deemed to have knowledge about VCI structures. At the interrogation centres, CIA interrogators, alongside their Vietnamese counterparts, would torture VCI prisoners in an effort to learn the identity of VCI members in each province.

In summation, I will answer the three questions I have posed. (1) Is a dictator who commits atrocities against his own people, a war criminal? The answer is ‘no, he isn’t. He would be guilty of crimes against humanity. What constitutes a war crime? The answer, (already described earlier) is a crime committed during a war between two or more nations. Was President Nixon a war criminal? The answer is yes he was. Permitting members of the CIA that accompanied American ground troops during the Viet Nam war to torture civilians to obtain information about where the whereabouts of the Viet Cong was against the United Nations Convention on torture.

I would be amiss if I didn’t point out that some may argue that if Nixon was alive today, he couldn’t be charged with a war crime with respect to the torture of Viet Nam civilians by members of the CIA because those criminal acts took place prior to the signing of the United Nations Convention against Torture. However, it must be remembered that the Nazi leaders that were tried and convicted of war crimes in Nuremberg right after World War Two were tried on the basis of the definition of crimes created specifically for the Nuremburg Tribunal, definitions that didn’t exist during the times when the crimes were committed.

The purpose of this piece is to point out that the news media uses the term war crimes in situations where war crimes were not what was committed when in fact, it was other forms of criminal activities that were committed instead.