Saturday 29 April 2017

The Release of Sergeant Blackman: War Crime Punishments Compared

We are all, hopefully, familiar with the details of the case of Sergeant Alexander Blackman, formerly of the Royal Marines. The fact that he was filmed shooting a wounded Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011, convicted of murder in 2013 and sentenced to ten years in jail was widely publicised. Equally well publicised was the campaign to reduce his sentence, which has led to his crime being downgraded to manslaughter and his early morning release yesterday. Blackman faces a promising, if uncertain future. Although he cannot return to service with the Royal Marines, he has had offers of jobs in the security industry and both he and his wife are rumoured to be considering book writing offers. It does not stop there, as the Telegraph says:
"A rather more illustrious path could even be on offer from Hollywood with a producer said to be interested in telling his story and talk of Kate Winslet as Mrs Blackman, Tom Hardy as him and Al Pacino as  Jonathan Goldberg QC, the lawyer who led his successful appeal"."
On the downside, the Blackmans will never be safe from attack from Islamist extremists, and already face the prospect of moving house and possibly even changing their identities.
What is of interest to me, however, is the fact that this case became politicised to a marked degree, eliciting a wide range of responses from all shades of opinion. There are those who take the view that Blackman is nothing but a criminal who knowingly violated the Geneva Convention by committing murder and deserved all he got. In 2015, Stop the War writer, Matt Carr said:
"... what Blackman did had nothing to do with ‘survival’. He chose to shoot someone he didn’t need to kill...".
 The polar opposite view is that Blackman was under pressure when he did what he did and allowance must be made for the fact. There are also the grounds which led the courts to change Blackman's charge from murder to manslaughter: the fact that his unit had been stationed in Helmand Province for too long and that he was suffering from mental illness, among other things.
There is scope for middle ground here, but those sympathetic to Blackman have made the running in this case. The Daily Mail on Thursday thundered triumphantly:
"A Mail investigation had revealed vital evidence was ‘deliberately withheld’ from the court martial during Sgt Blackman’s original trial.
Thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, who was in court yesterday, said the ‘villains’ who locked up Sgt Blackman should ‘hang their heads in shame".

Mr Forsyth did not name any of these villains. Presumably he means the senior officers who deplored what Blackman did and the prosecution team that convicted him. Forsyth has hinted that there will be consequences for these people; respect for the legal process appears to be confined to verdicts that he and others agree with.
I take the view that, if Blackman was not given a completely fair trial in the first place, then this verdict is to be welcomed. If, however, all such future trials are to be conducted with partisan pressure from the politically motivated of either side, then justice will not be served. As the Guardian editorial said yesterday:
"....the rules of war...are not a matter of etiquette, but morality; not a luxury, but a necessity...because of the extremity of the situation, and the pressure upon troops, that clear rules are needed".
It's worth comparing the Blackman incident to war crimes committed by troops from other countries. It comes as a surprise to find that no French soldiers were ever tried for war crimes committed during the Algerian War of Independence, despite many allegations against them. To be fair, their FLN opponents never held any such trials either.
The United States Army, like ours, has a mixed record when it comes to such offences. We all remember the outrage caused when the ill-treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq became public. A number of military staff were punished, but as the LA Times reports, those prosecuted were small fry. There are a number of ex-soldiers in prison for crimes in Iraq. There is, for example, in a case that resembles that of Alexander Blackman, that of Sgt. Derrick Miller, one of what Fox News calls "The Leavenworth Ten":
"... Sgt. Derrick Miller of Maryland, on a combat mission in a Taliban-held area of Afghanistan, was warned the unit’s base had been penetrated. An Afghan suspected of being an enemy combatant was brought to Miller for interrogation and wound up dead. Miller claimed the suspect tried to grab his gun and that he shot him in self-defense. But he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison."
Miller is serving a life sentence, as are a number of others. As with Blackman, however, there are people working to secure pardons for all such offenders. A New York Times article says that there is little public support for this:
" Few in the public appear to support revisiting cases in which troops killed unarmed civilians".
Lastly, of course, there are the many thousands of crimes against humanity committed by the German forces in WW2. These are well enough known, but what is less well known is the leniency of some of the sentences passed on German war criminals after hostilities ended. Many were dealt with severely, as were the Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg; many more were not. In just one small example, Damien Lewis, in his book "The Nazi Hunters", records the fate of 14 Germans who had summarily executed eight unarmed SAS prisoners in 1944:
"...the final sentences...were close to laughable. Six...were found not guilty. Of the remaining eight, only one received a ten-year sentence. and two were given sentences of two and three years respectively".
Most of the Einsatzgruppen commanders, who commanded units estimated to have killed a million people behind the German lines in Russia, were given sentences that were later commuted by German courts. A similar thing happened after the Malmedy massacre carried out by the SS during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Lest anyone should bemoan the apparently light sentence of Sergeant Blackman, it needs to be said that precedents have been set.
The bodies of US soldiers, massacred by the Waffen SS at Malmedy, 1944.








Thursday 20 April 2017

The June Election and Personal Attacks

Well, away we go! On June 8th, we will go to the polls. I was surprised at the alacrity with which all parties received the announcement by Theresa May. No doubt there will be much lively and productive debate, but some pretty tawdry ad hominem attacks as well. I know that such attacks are part and parcel of every general election campaign, but they seem to be particularly virulent this time, carrying a residue of ill-will from the EC Referendum campaign. Some of these attacks are downright facile. For example, there was the storm of criticism directed at Theresa May for calling a snap election, having previously declared she would do no such thing.


Well, the critics were right to attack Mrs May on this point, but are we really so surprised? After all, don't all politicians make promises and never fulfil them? Just about every prime minister of this country within living memory has been accused of similar behaviour. Apparently, Mrs May decided to call the election while on a walking holiday in North Wales. Perhaps the fresh air went to her head?
More seriously, and much more maliciously, there are the scurrilous, intensely personal attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. These attacks have been relentless, beginning from the day he became Labour leader and rising to a crescendo at the present time. Most of these attacks come from the right-wing press. A media report from the London School of Economics (LSE) - click on here to read - says:
"Corbyn is systematically ridiculed,scorned and the object of personal attacks by most newspapers.Even more problematic were a set of associations which deligitimised Corbyn as a politician,calling"him"loony,"unpatriotic,"a terrorist friend"and a dangerous individual"
This campaign continues as I write. Today's Daily Mail carries a story about Corbyn's brother attacking the BBC, but makes no serious evaluation of Jeremy Corbyn's first major speech. Even Corbyn's appearance has been ridiculed. The previous prime minister, David Cameron, (remember him?) taunted Corbyn about his attire about a year ago. Perhaps inevitably, some voters are affected by all this antipathy. The Huffington Post quoted a Nuneaton woman last year as saying of Corbyn:
"You want a charismatic leader and to me he's more like Worzel Gummidge".
Does Jeremy Corbyn need a change of image?
Er, well, maybe not that one, and perhaps this is all a red herring. Speaking personally, I shall be voting on issues, not personalities or publicity. It is a sad feature of our democracy that some voters allow themselves to be influenced by appearance, distortion and downright abuse. 
Having said all this, however, there is one politician who, in my opinion, deserves public opprobrium - but isn't getting it. That man is David Cameron. People who did not welcome this forthcoming election should bear in mind that we are only in this situation because of  the EC referendum result - the referendum that Cameron thought he could win. He didn't, and now we go to the polls to make Brexit easier - which is what the Tories want. If Cameron had not called that stupid referendum - and let's not forget that he didn't have to call it - we would not be facing an uncertain future, there would have been no rise in hate crime, no bitterness and division among friends, families and political parties and no election in June.
Cameron looks a bit flustered - is he standing for re-election?