/ 3 February 2023

What makes a war crime, when war itself is monstrous?

Kurtz Brando
‘The horror ... the horror’: Marlon Brando plays the murderous Colonel Kurtz in ‘Apocalypse Now’.

‘Fighting for peace is like f****ng for virginity.” These words on the T-shirt of a peace protester in Israel/Palestine contain some truth. 

War brutally and barbarically disregards human dignity. After millennia of slaughtering, humankind should have developed beyond warfare. It has not. 

Universally the law recognises the right to self-defence, though. I may kill an attacker who unlawfully tries to kill or seriously injure me if my action is the only proportional way to prevent imminent harm. Right does not have to yield to wrong. 

Russia invaded Ukraine, at least as far as we know. Ukrainians have to defend themselves against cruel imperialist foreign rule. When we were still able to watch Russia Today, President Vladimir Putin’s explanations convinced me that mainstream Western media reports were essentially true.

In the 1979 cult film by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, an American captain is sent on a mission in Vietnam to find and eliminate a renegade special forces colonel. 

Colonel Kurtz became the murderous demigod of a tribe. During an eerie trip down a river, the search party witnesses terrible incidents, such as the early morning wholesale destruction of a village and its people by napalm flamethrowers from American helicopters. While Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries is blasted from huge speakers, the commanding officer expresses his joy: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”  

Kurtz is later found under bizarre, surreal circumstances. Multiple corpses hang from trees. He took war to its absurd logical consequences. Played by Marlon Brando, he sits 

in darkness, his bald head glowing, and mumbles: “The horror … the horror.” 

In Ukraine, as elsewhere, both sides accuse each other of “war crimes”. One wonders: What is this? A crime within a crime? Horror inside horror? Atrocities within a super-atrocity? How hypocritical and cynical can one be to criminalise the inevitable progression and result of organised large-scale vicious violence?

The many perversities of war have been with humankind for ages. In 1346 Mongol warriors catapulted rotten plague-infected cadavers over the walls into the besieged Crimean city of Caffa. Smallpox has often been spread intentionally. 

Rape has happened during most wars, either to acquire the enemy’s women, as revenge, or as the expression of frustration and hatred. The Bible contains several examples of the destruction of property and looting, sometimes sanctioned or even ordered by God. Historical texts show that the Crusaders fought not only for the cross but for loot.

International humanitarian law has emerged through several conventions and other international law instruments. The Rome Statute of 1998, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC), is a recent example. 

These rules seek to limit the effects of armed conflict and to prevent suffering that is not justified by “military necessity”. Principles of “the law of war” include a distinction between the necessary and unnecessary; proportionality; humanity; and honour, also known as chivalry. 

The unjustified plunder and destruction of property, cities and villages are often mentioned as prohibited acts, as are attacks on buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science … and even historical monuments.

Several war crimes are criminal offences under the ordinary law of the relevant states. Rape, torture, assault and malicious damage to property are examples. The killing of prisoners of war or soldiers who surrendered is murder, by almost any standards, regardless of it being labelled as a war crime.

Aggression, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is in itself criminal. It is widely acknowledged that Ukraine has the right to defend its territory and people. But once it is a player in the game of war, it is expected to abide by the rules of the game.

It is tempting to be cynical about and even ridicule much of the above. Mostly the losing side — seldom the winner — faces war crime prosecution afterwards. The US, often accused of war crimes, stayed out of the Rome Statute and the ICC.

Do we regard war as a contact sport, like rugby, with rules to prevent injury, where a player could be sent to the sin bin after dangerous or ungentlemanly conduct, such as a high tackle or eye-gouging?  

Do concepts such as “honour” and “chivalry” pretend to envisage a noble standoff, as in the days of Emperor Napoleon and the First Duke of Wellington at Waterloo?  On some battlefields opposing commanders allegedly drank an early morning toast together, before the cavalry charged.

Where does chivalry fit into the world of a youngster who, from the safety of Washington DC, destroys a mosque and everyone inside it in a faraway country with a drone? Religion and its symbols can cause war. So can historical monuments. Yet their destruction is deemed unacceptable.

Targeting civilians is a war crime. The case against Russia seems strong. But, for how long would Nazi Germany and its ally, Japan, have lasted if American bombers did not reduce German cities to rubble; if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not wiped off the face of the Earth by nuclear bombs, regardless of civilian deaths and deformities resulting from radioactivity for years afterwards.

In the Southern African bush war landmines that exploded only up to hip height were allegedly used. The purpose was not to kill but to take off limbs, to leave soldiers on crutches for all to see. 

Is this suffering unjustified by military necessity, or is the negative effect on enemy morale a legitimate aim? Is the hidden sharpshooter who aims for the knees of the target first, before the head, a war criminal? 

The lion-hunting debate comes to mind. According to the romantic narrative, the fearless Big White Bwana with leopard skin around his khaki hat shoots the ferocious beast in the African jungle only when the animal can see him and it is “a case of him or me” — like the knights who slay fire-spitting dragons in fairy tales. Samson in the Bible even tore open the lion’s jaws with his bare hands. 

The lion has little chance against a hunter in a Land Cruiser with an expensive telescope on a long-range rifle, regardless who sees whom first. And canned lion hunting? The farmer-businessman breeds the lion, owns the animal, feeds him to grow large and beautiful, puts him in a cage and creates a fake bushveld background, for the billionaire trophy hunter to shoot him. Why not?

Yet, many find canned lion hunting repulsive, not for what it does to the lion, but to human integrity, morality and dignity. The reported burning of corpses by South African soldiers in Mozambique is unacceptable, not because a dead combatant suffers, but because the family can never say faerewell to a beloved son with a dignified burial.

International humanitarian law is an attempt to save a tiny bit of what we regard as standards of good taste, morality, decency and human dignity, which we pretend to believe in after ages of savagery. It is often impractical and hypocritical. But brutal realism, honesty and therefore cynicism are not always what we need. 

Hypocrisy has a small role to play in our attempts to lift ourselves from the stinking depth of the worst in us — “the horror” Colonel Kurt became a part and perpetrator of.

After all, we also try to soften the inhumanity of hard capitalism with labour and consumer protection laws.  

The famous philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.