 Illustration by Emil Alzamora. |
Today, the Nuremberg archive sits untended, slowly decaying. There is no catalogue system; there are no librarians to make sure it's all in order and, as of this writing, there's no process under way to digitally store the record of the murder of 12 million people by a modern industrial nation. Such a project would not be that expensive and only moderately difficult. Maybe nobody in the world has the stomach or the strength of heart to wade through it all, which would involve stepping into the mindset of the Nazi masterminds every day for years.
But at least the trial record has a home. The Hague, a friendly and unpretentious Dutch city, carries the weight of that crime, as if this were the only place in the world that such evidence of humanity's shadow could be kept secure. The Hague has a long tradition of being a place where freedom and human dignity are guarded, or at the very least remembered.
In many ways the very name of the city is synonymous with justice. The major international courts are located here. Along with the ICJ, a judicial branch of the United Nations designed to settle disputes between countries before they result in war, there is the International Criminal Court (ICC),the world's first standing judicial body to deal with crimes against humanity, in particular, war crimes and genocide. However, no trial has ever taken place there, and when George W. Bush took over the US presidency, he removed the United States from the Rome Treaty, which binds members of the court to a level of international law.
And then there is the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a temporary court that was designed to try Milosevic and his underlings for their ethnic cleansing programs of the 1990s. (Milosevic was the star prisoner there, and his sudden death in his cell last month is mired in controversy, particularly as to the reason drugs that deactivated his blood pressure medication were found in his blood.
When I learned about the judicial organizations that exist in The Hague, I knew I had to see them for myself, based on an old interest for which I can thank one of my high school teachers.
When I was a senior at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, I heard the words "never again" for the first time. Dewey's library included the Holocaust Studies Center, which served the entire New York City school system, and those two words were our mantra. I was one of several Dewey students mentored by history teacher Ira Zornberg, who made presentations to visiting elementary school classes. Most of these students learned about the Nazi atrocities for the first time, and first heard the words "never again" from us. As presenters at the Holocaust Studies Center, we would describe the concentration camps and show students the American reconnaissance photos taken before the US was involved in the war. The photos of large buildings with long lines leading up to their front doors made the biggest impression on me.
According to Mr. Zornberg, these buildings were initially categorized as "soup kitchens" by the Allies, who were still officially in denial of the existence of Nazi concentration camps. Then we would show the Allies' footage from the liberation of the camps, which featured bodies stacked like cordwood and being moved around by bulldozers, along with still-standing but emaciated survivors.
It was easy to conceive of: never again. Our knowledge of the crimes felt like insurance against any future ones being committed. By any reasonable logic, such things could never occur in the light of day. We were being taught about them in school; students had the job of teaching other students; we could do so honestly. There was a measure of real safety in that action.
Yet the strange thing is, we were never taught that Stalin took over many of the former German camps and included them in his own extermination project, including killing any German citizens once loyal to the Nazis that he could get his hands on.
But while we were looking at the Allies' liberation footage and their images of so-called "soup kitchen" lines, there were already a number of brand-new holocausts underway. By the late 1970s, death squads had long since taken over life in Nicaragua, with CIA backing, financing, and logistical support. This spread to Guatemala and El Salvador in the early 1980s. Yet in truth, these were just extensions of too many CIA-manipulated actions in South America to name during the 1960s and '70s.
Indonesia had begun its occupation and massacre of East Timor, again with the guns, money, and tacit consent of the US. Very few people to this day have even heard of East Timor, which is notably the poorest nation in the world, much less have a clue what happened there.
Writes Wikipedia, "The day before the invasion...and subsequent annexation [of East Timor], US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had met President Suharto in Jakarta, where Ford made clear that 'we will not press you on the issue.'" Arms sales to Indonesia were not banned, not even by the Clinton administration more than 20 years later.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War had ended recently, and hardly anyone was talking about Pol Pot in Cambodia, much less doing something about it. It was not until I was studying the Vietnam War in college that I learned we had bombed a country that had absolutely nothing to do with Vietnam, and that the American pullout from the region left a true tyrant named Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in charge.
Again, referencing Wikipedia: "The Khmer Rouge regime is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people (from an estimated 1972 population of 7.1 million), through execution, starvation, and forced labor. It is often said to have been one of the most violent regimes of the 20th century—on par with the regimes of Adolf Hitler and, in the views of many, Joseph Stalin. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population of the country it ruled and time in power, it was probably the most lethal regime of the 20th century."
So, while we were dutifully studying the Holocaust, saying "never again," it was still happening—again and again. And what is seriously frightening is how often there has been United States involvement. It would seem that the Nazis are good for everyone else's image.
Indeed, by these standards, Milosevic is just another genocidal tyrant who took advantage of strife and chaos to write himself a license to kill. Indeed, comparing him to his recent contemporaries, he was something of a B-rate mass killer. Yet despite the incredible history of the latter 20th century, he was the first to be formally accused of genocide and war crimes since the Nuremberg trials. His prosecution almost seems a token gesture.
Now with the world community fixating on the injustice of Milosevic's death, and while we get used to the fact that he may well have been murdered or allowed to succumb to his ailments, we might not want to let that distract us from the ongoing genocides, which, per a quaint 20th-century tradition we still seem to honor, are not named officially as such. There are many, but I'm thinking of one in particular.
Last year, while visiting the ICC, where new cases of genocide will be tried, I somewhat hesitatingly asked the guards at the security checkpoint if they were waiting for Donald Rumsfeld. They said no, they were waiting for George Bush. But of course, with the exception of Milosevic, it's taboo and extremely rare for anyone to call anything besides the Holocaust genocide, and thanks to Bush's removing the US from the Rome Treaty, the United States has granted itself an exemption from that particularly annoying provision of international law.