SARTRE'S OPENING ADDRESS AT WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
[The record compiled by the International War Crimes Tribunal at its hearings in Stockholm consists of direct testimony, reports of investigators, statements by interested parties, declarations by members of the tribunal, descriptions of physical evidence placed before the body such as parts of weapons used by the U.S. in north Vietnam, photographs and films. The material would make a thick printed volume.
{The tribunal made this material available to the press during the hearings insofar as translators and mimeographs could keep up with the proceedings.
[World Outlook plans to reproduce a sampling of this evidence of the crimes being committed by the U.S. armed forces against the people of Vietnam.
[The document below is the opening address made by Jean-Paul Sartre, the executive president of the tribunal.]
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Our tribunal was formed on the initiative of Bertrand Russell, with the aim of deciding whether the accusations of "war crimes" made against the government of the United States and against the governments of South Korea, of Australia and of New Zealand, in connection with the war in Vietnam, are justified. On the occasion of this inaugural session, the tribunal wishes to make known its origins, its functions, its aims and its terms of reference. It intends to make its position quite clear on the question of what has been called its "legitimacy."
In 1945, something occurred which was entirely without historical precedent: the setting up in Nuremberg of the first international tribunal called on to judge crimes committed by a belligerent power.
Up till that time, it is true, there had existed certain international agreements, such as the Briand-Kellogg pact, aimed at limiting the "jus ad bellum"; but, since no organ had been created to apply them, relations between the powers continued to be governed by the law of the jungle. It could not be otherwise: the nations which had built their wealth upon the conquest of great colonial empires would not have tolerated that their activities in Africa and in Asia should be judged according to these criteria.
After 1939, the mad rage of Nazism placed the world in such danger that the Allies, horrified, decided to sit in judgment on.and to condemn, if they were victorious, wars of aggression and of conquest, cruelty to prisoners, tortures and those racist practices which can be termed "genocidal," without realizing that they were thereby condemning themselves for their conduct in the colonies.
As a consequence -- that is to say, both because it condemned Nazi crimes, and because in a more universal sense it opened the way to a genuine jurisdiction permit-— ting the denunciation and condemnation of war crimes wherever committed and whoever the authors -- the Nuremberg tribunal remains the demonstration of this vitally important change: the replacement of the "jus ad bellum" by the "jus contra bellum."
Unfortunately, as always happens when a new organism is created by the exigencies of history, that tribunal was not exempt from serious failings. It has been criticized as having been nothing but a diktat of the conquerors to the conquered and, which amounts to the same thing, as not having been truly international: one group of nations judging another.
Would it have been better to have chosen the judges from among the citizens of neutral countries? I do not know. What is certain is that, although its decisions were entirely just from an ethical point of view, they are far from having convinced all Germans. And that signifies that the legitimacy of the judges and of their sentences continues to be challenged; and that it has been possible to claim that, if the fortunes of war had been different, an Axis tribunal would have condemned the Allies for the bombing of Dresden or of Hiroshima.
That legitimacy, however, would not have been difficult to establish. It would have been enough if the organ created to judge the Nazis had remained in existence after having carried out that specific task, or if the organization of the United Nations had drawn all the consequences from what had just been done and had, by a vote in its General Assembly, consolidated the body's existence as a permanent tribunal empowered to take cognizance of and to judge all charges of war crimes, even if the accused should happen to be the government of one of those countries which through the agencies of their judges delivered the Nuremberg verdicts. In this way, the implicit universality of the original intention would have been made clear and explicit.
Well, what happened is well-known: hardly had the last German war criminal been judged than the tribunal disappeared into thin air, and nobody has heard anything about it since.
Are we then so innocent? Have there been no further war crimes since 1945? Since then, has nobody resorted to violence, or to aggression? Has there been no "genocide"? Has no strong country attempted to break by the use of force, the sovereignty of a small nation? Has there been no occasion to denounce, anywhere in the world, Ouradours or Auschwitzes?
You know the truth. In the last twenty years, the great historical event has been the struggle of the Third World for its liberation: colonial empires have collapsed and in their place sovereign nations have come int» existence, or have recovered a lost traditional independence, destroyed by colonization.
All this has taken place in suffering, in sweat, and in blood. A tribunal such as that of Nuremberg has become a permanent necessity. Before the judgment of the Nazis, war had no laws, as I have said. The Nuremberg tribunal, an ambiguous body, was no doubt born of the right of the strongest; but at the same time it opened a perspective for the future by setting a precedent, the embryo of a tradition. None can go back on that, prevent Nuremberg from having happened, prevent people from thinking back to its sessions whenever a small, poor country is the object of aggression, prevent them from saying to themselves: "but it is this, precisely this, which was condemned at Nuremberg."
Thus the hurried and incomplete provisions made by the Allies in 1945 and then abandoned have created a real lacuna in international life. There is a cruel lack of that institution -- which appeared, asserted its permanence and its universality, defined irreversibly certain rights and obligations, only to disappear, leaving a void which must be filled and which nobody is filling.
There are, in fact, two sources of power. The first is the state with its institutions. Well, in this time of violence, most governments would be afraid, if they took such an initiative, that it might one day turn against them, and that they might find themselves in the dock. Furthermore, for many of them the United States is a powerful ally: which of them would dare ask for the resurrection of a tribunal whose first action would obviously be to order an enquiry into the Vietnamese conflict?
The other source of power is the people, during revolutionary periods in which it changes its institutions. But, although the struggle remains an implacable one, by what means could the masses, compartmentalized by frontiérs as they are, succeed in uniting and/in imposing on the various governments an institution which would be a. genuine Court of the People?
The Russell tribunal was born of the recognition of these two, contradic-— tory facts: the Nuremberg verdict has made necessary the existence of an institution for the investigation and, where appropriate, the condemnation of war crimes: but neither governments nor people are, at the present time, capable of creating such an institution.
We are entirely conscious of the fact that we have received no mandate from anyone. But if we have taken the initiative of coming together, it is because we knew that nobody could give us a mandate. Certainly our tribunal is not an institution. But it does not claim to replace any established body; on the contrary, it emerged from a void, and in response to an appeal. We have not been recruited and invested with real powers by governments. But then we have just seen that such powers, at Nuremberg, did not suffice to endow the judges with an uncontested legitimacy. Quite the contrary: the fact that the verdicts could be carried out permitted those who had been conquered to challenge their validity; backed up by force, those verdicts appeared as the simple expression of the adage "Might is Right." The Russell tribunal considers, on the contrary, that its legitimacy derives equally from its total powerlessness, and from its universality.
We are powerless: it is the guarantee of our independence. We receive no aid -- except from our supporting committees which are, like ourselves, associations of private individuals. Representing no government and no party, nobody can give us orders: we will examine the facts "in our hearts and consciences" one might say or, if you prefer, openly and independently. No one of us can say, today, how the proceedings will go, or if we will reply by a yes or a no to the accusations, or if we will not reply -- considering them perhaps well-founded but not conclusively proved.
What is certain, in any case, is that our powerlessness, even if we are convinced by the evidence presented, makes it impossible for us to pass a sentence. What could a condemnation mean, even the mildest of condemnations, if we do not possess the means to see it carried out?
We will limit ourselves therefore, if that is what turns out to be necessary, to stating that such and such an act falls under the jurisdiction of Nuremberg. It is therefore, according to that jurisdiction, a war crime, and if the law was applied it would be subject to such and such a penalty. In such a case, we will, if that is possible, decide who are the authors of the crime. Thus the Russell tribunal will have no other concern, in its investiga-
tions as in its conclusions, than to pring about a general recognition of the need for an international institution for which it has neither the means nor the ambition to be a substitute, whose essential role would be the resuscitation of the "jus contra bellum" which was stillborn at Nuremberg -- the substitution of ethical and juridical rules for the law of the jungle.
Precisely because we are simple citizens we have been able, by recruiting our members on a wide international basis, to give our tribunal a more universal structure than that of. Nuremberg. I do not mean merely that a larger number of countries are represented; from that point of view there would be many gaps to fill. But above all, whereas in 1945 the . Germans were only present in the dock, or at best on the stand as witnesses for the prosecution, several of the judges here are citizens of the United States.
This means that they come from that country whose own policies are under investigation, and that they have, therefore, their own understanding of it and, whatever their opinions, an intimate relationship with it, with its institutions and its traditions -- a relationship which will inevitably mark the tribunal's conclusions.
However, whatever our desire for impartiality and for universality, we are entirely conscious that this desire does not suffice to legitimize our enterprise. What we want, in fact, is that its legitimization should be retrospective or, if you prefer, a_posteriori. For we are not working for ourselves and our own edification, neither do we have any pretensions to imposing our conclusions from on high.
What we wish is to maintain, thanks to the collaboration of the press, a constant contact between ourselves and the masses who in all parts of the world are living and suffering the tragedy of Vietnam. We hope that they will learn as we learn, that they will discover together with us the reports, the documents, the testimony, that they will evaluate them and make up their minds about them day by day, together with us. We want the conclusions, whatever they may be, to be drawn by each individual in his own mind at the same time as we draw them ourselves; even beforehand perhaps.
This session is a common enterprise whose final term must be, in the phrase of a philosopher, "une verité devenue" [developed into truth]. Yes, if the masses ratify our judgment, then it will become truth, and we, at the very moment when we efface ourselves before those masses who will make themselves the guardians and the mighty support for that truth, we will know that we have been legitimized and that the people, by showing us its agreement, is revealing a deeper need: the need for a real "War Crimes Tribunal" to be brought into being as a permanent’ body -that is to say, the need that it should be possible to denounce and punish such crimes wherever and whenever they may be committed.
"What a strange tribunal: a jury and no judge"! It is true: we are only a jury, we have neither the power to condemn nor the power to acquit, anybody. Therefore, no prosecution. There will not even be strictly speaking a prosecution case. Maitre Matarasso, president of the legal commission, is going to read you a list of charges which will take the place of a prosecution case. We, the jury, at the end of the session, will have to pronounce on these charges: are they well-founded or not? But the judges are everywhere: they are the peoples of the world, and in particular the American people. It is for them that we are working.