WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (2 page)

W
AR 
C
RIMES IN 
H
ISTORY 

In this book, we take a look at some of the major war crimes that have been committed throughout history. In Part I, we cover ancient atrocities described in biblical and classical literature, as well as other historical sources: for example, the brutal campaigns of Alexander the Great. Next, we move on to the invasion of Britain by William the Conqueror in 1066, and to the Holy Land battles during the Crusades of Richard the Lionheart. We tell the story of the fifteenth-century tyrant Vlad the Impaler, on whom the legend of Dracula was based; and, from the same period, of the deranged despot Ivan the Terrible, as well as the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, and his attack on the Incas of Peru.

In Part III we explore some of the most notorious war crimes in history, such as the brutal colonization of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the ocean liner torpedoed by a German submarine in 1906, which helped persuade the USA to enter World War I; and the Armenian genocide, the persecution, deportation and killing of up to two million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. We also cover the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 (also known as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre), in which British Indian Army troops opened fire on an unarmed gathering of what is now estimated to be more than 1,000 men, women and children.

T
HE 
H
OLOCAUST

Part IV brings us to World War II, to what is perhaps the greatest war crime of all time: The Holocaust, in which up to six million Jews were persecuted, tortured and brutally murdered by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen of the Third Reich. Our history of war crimes in this period not only encompasses the horrifying experiences of Jews in the extermination camps, but also looks at the treatment of prisoners of war, mentally and physically disabled people and Poles, Serbians, Russian and other ethnic communities. As well as systematic, state-sanctioned killings of these groups, German soldiers also committed hundreds of unlawful bloody reprisals on civilians and prisoners of war, especially towards the end of the conflict, when it was clear that Germany would be defeated. In addition, there were reprisals by Communist partisan troops, especially in Yugoslavia, as well as by Allied soldiers. We also include here some of the war crimes committed by the Allied powers, which were never prosecuted in courts of law, but which, in recent years, have been the subject of much controversy: the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Part V, we look at the great War Crimes Trials of history: in particular, the Nuremburg and Tokyo Trials that took place in the aftermath of World War II, in which Nazi leaders of the Third Reich and important officials of Japanese government were convicted. We also investigate the high profile trials of individuals such as Dusko Tadic, the Bosnian Serb convicted of crimes against humanity, and Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, who died before his trial came to an end in 2006.

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WENTIETH-CENTURY 
W
AR 
C
RIMES

Part VI continues with a look at twentieth-century war crimes and atrocities between 1950 and the year 2000, starting in 1950 with the No Gun Ri Tragedy, in which US troops gunned down inhabitants of a village in the early days of the Korean War, and ending with the nightmare of Rwanda, in which over one million people were massacred by Hutu militia groups over a period of about four months in 1994. Other notorious crimes of the period include the massacre at My Lai of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, by US soldiers in 1968; the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, in which British soldiers shot down a group of Irish civil rights protesters; atrocities committed during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 until 1999; and the massacres of hundreds of Arab refugees at Sabra and Shatila, carried out in September 1982 by Lebanese militias, with the support of the Israeli armed forces.

War crimes and atrocities continue, sadly, in great numbers into the twenty-first century, with the evil regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; the subsequent invasion of Iraq led by the USA; the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay; the war in Kosovo; and ethnic cleansing, also described as genocide, at Darfur in Western Sudan.

Today, it seems that war crimes and atrocities continue day by day, despite the mass of legislation aimed to prevent and limit such tragedies. However, the fact that the legislation is now in place to identify such crimes and charge the perpetrators is significant: for example, on 5 November, 2006, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging for his crimes against humanity. Whether or not such convictions will help to stem the tide of tyranny and terrorism of the twenty-first century, in which innocent people continue to suffer, remains to be seen; but at least in modern times, war crimes have been identified as such, so that – whether committed by heads of state or by terrorist groups – we can begin to regard such crimes as having no rightful place in our modern global society.

Part One: Ancient Atrocities

The Sword Of David Carves Out The Kingdom Of Israel 

c.10th Century bc

The Bible’s Old Testament books of I and II Samuel, I Chronicles and I Kings are full of the deeds of David, a farmer of Bethlehem who created and was the first ruler of the kingdom of Israel and Judah. In the Bible, David is a strong and extraordinarily successful warrior, a gifted poet and musician – he is invariably depicted in Christian iconography with a harp – and, in startling contrast, a murderous adulterer. David slew the landowner Nabal so that he could make Nabal’s wife, Abigail, his own wife. She was one of many, as David was both promiscuous and fecund. He also sent a gallant soldier, Uriah the Hittite, to certain death by putting him in ‘the forefront of the battle’ so that David could gain Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife.

David is a much more shadowy figure in the historical records of the period in which it is generally agreed that he lived – that is, ten centuries before the birth of Christ, with his death occurring, at the earliest, in 1018 bc but no later than
c
.970 bc. As many records from this period do not mention him at all, it is impossible to assign any more definite dates than these to him. Modern historians agree that around 1003 bc, a strong and warlike man called David did combine the states of Israel and Judah to create a kingdom whose size was unmatched by anything else in the history of Israel. He seems to have built the kingdom by using ferocious military energy to overcome the states and tribes that surrounded and threatened Israel.

King David entered biblical history as a simple shepherd boy, whom God directed the prophet Samuel to seek out and anoint as the Lord’s chosen one. He was taken into the court of Saul, the first king of Israel, initially as a musician. David became the beloved of Saul’s son Jonathan and was raised to a position of military command after his spectacular slaying of the giant Philistine champion Goliath.

David married Saul’s daughter, Michal, whose wedding gift from her husband was the foreskins of 200 Philistines David had slaughtered in an encounter with Israel’s foremost enemy at the time. However, David’s increasing power and popularity in Israel attracted Saul’s jealous displeasure, so much so that David fled Saul’s court and became an outlaw.

With a force of 400 warriors at his command, David established himself as a free-ranging warrior, moving from valley to valley and camp to camp in the wilderness of Judah, where he acted with murderous cruelty when occasion demanded. A base in this early period of his wanderings was the cave of Adullam, near Gath, a city-state whose king was a Philistine vassal. David thus operated as an ally of the Philistines, whose confederation of city-states on the coastal land of Canaan lay to the west of Israel, and who were perpetually at war with Saul and Israel. Eventually, David established himself and his forces in the city of Ziklag.

DAVID’S REVENGE

It was the destruction of Ziklag by the Amalekites that first allowed David to demonstrate just how ruthless he could be. Amalek and his descendents had long been an unrelenting enemy of Israel, and Saul had recently made an unsuccessful attempt to deal with them. David was away from Ziklag, intending to ally himself alongside the Philistines in their last struggle with Saul. However, the Philistines, apparently considered David to be a treacherous ally and refused his help. Returning to Ziklag, David and his men found the city reduced to smouldering ruins, and their wives, including two of David’s, their daughters and their sons taken away as captives of the Amalekites.

At first, the distraught people of Ziklag threatened to stone David, but he persuaded them to visit their vengence on the Amalekites instead and to accompany him in pursuit of their lost wives and children. Eventually David caught up with the Amalekites, ‘spread abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking, and dancing, because of all the great spoil they had taken out of the land of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah’.

David descended on this drunken hoard and slaughtered them, the work lasting from twilight on the day he caught up with them until the evening of the next day. David rescued his wives and the wives and children of his followers, and everything else that had been looted from Ziklag by the Amalekites. He also took all their flocks and herds and drove them back to Ziklag. The Amalekites were wiped out, except for ‘four hundred young men, which rode upon camels and fled’, and the Amalekite state was never again a threat to Israel.

THE CONQUERING KING

Saul and his three sons, including Jonathan, were killed in battle with the Philistines, and their bodies, stripped of their armour and their heads cut off, were fastened to the wall of Beth-shan. ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen . . . and the weapons of war perished,’ mourned the poetical David. At the same time, according to Samuel, David taught the children of Judah the use of the bow: the practicalities of warfare would always come before poetry to David. (He had also slain the messenger who brought the news of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan.)

After the death of Saul, David first became king over Judah in the south, then over Israel in the north. Thus, he became king over ‘all Israel’. He did not stop there. A series of aggressive wars against neighbouring states and tribes, all of which involved the massacre of thousands of men, women and children, as well as looting and pillaging in a grand scale, extended the boundaries of Israel far to the north and south.

One of David’s earliest moves was the conquest of the city of Jerusalem, wrested from the Jebusites and made the capital of his kingdom. David brought the sacred Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and, at God’s command, built a temple there to house it. (Jerusalem’s great Temple was built by Solomon, David’s son by Bathsheba.) It seems that David neither killed nor drove out all the Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem, as the Bible records that he bought land from a local landowner to build an altar in Jerusalem.

David did not treat his later conquests so lightly. Philistines, Syrians, Moabites and Ammonites were slaughtered in great numbers, their lands were pillaged and their wealth looted. Most of the gold that adorned the Temple in Jerusalem was looted from neighbour-ing states.

The tribal state of Ammon and the kingdom of Edom were both overcome by David and incorporated into his kingdom. The people of Edom suffered particularly dreadfully at David’s hands: 18,000 of them were slaughtered in the Valley of Salt (the valley of the Dead Sea) and the rest of them enslaved. David ensured his position by installing garrisons throughout the conquered kingdom.

Hadadezer, king of Zobah, was smote by David as he tried to recover his borderland on the Euphrates. David took from him 1,000 chariots, 700 horsemen and 20,000 men on foot but generously left Hadadezer the horses for 100 chariots. He was not so forgiving towards the Syrians who came from Damascus to aid Hadadezer; David slew 22,000 of them. According to the Bible, 47,000 Syrians were slaughtered in all by King David of Israel, who extended his kingdom almost to the gates of Damascus.

As for the Moabites, the Second Book of Samuel does not give numbers of those slaughtered, telling us only that David used three lines to measure the Moabites, put to death those measured with two lines and chose ‘one full line to keep alive’. David subjugated Moab and turned it into a vassal state of his kingdom.

David’s great ‘empire’ did not last long after the death of his son, Solomon. Never again would Israel be so large or so powerful. And never again would Israel have a leader so strong and so contradictory in his nature. Most of our ‘knowledge’ of King David comes from the Bible, and most of what we know is myth and legend. However, the mythical story was built on fact. Israel did indeed have a strong leader in the tenth century, a man of forceful, contradictory character and undoubted abilities that put him head and shoulders above his contemporaries and ensured him such an enduring place in the history of Israel.