Asia’s bloody record of atrocity crimes – and its lessons

In light of an enhanced public focus on war crimes brought about by Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, scholar-advocate Vinod Bal surveys the history of atrocity crimes in Asia and the lessons that can be learned.

War crimes are dominating the public psyche at the moment.

This is no surprise: Putin’s war on Ukraine and the crimes being carried out at his behest have been in global headlines since February.

The Ukrainian Prosecutor-General’s Office has already opened over 8,000 criminal investigations due to the war, a number of which focus on war crimes carried out by Russian troops. In what was the first of what will be many war crimes trials, a Ukrainian court, in late May 2022, sentenced Russian Sergeant Vadim Shishimarin, 21, to life imprisonment.

Sergeant Shishimarin shot a 62-year-old civilian man in the head. Intentionally targeting a civilian is a war crime.

A shopping mall in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was bombed by Russian forces in June 2022, killing and injuring civilians.

War crimes like these fall under a broad category of acts known as atrocity crimes. Wherever these atrocity crimes are being committed, be it in Ukraine or Myanmar, every one of them is horrific and we must give equal attention to them all. That makes now an apt time to examine atrocity crimes in an Asian context.

Legal scholars generally agree that there are three atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

At its most basic, genocide refers to acts, including mass killing, rape, and sterilisation, that are committed with the intent to destroy a particular group. The Holocaust, for example, was a genocide. The Nazis targeted Jews, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, and disabled people. An estimated six million people were killed.

War crimes are acts, carried out in times of war, that violate the laws of war. Examples include intentionally targeting civilians, torture, pillaging, taking hostages, and using weapons that are indiscriminate like chemical gas.

Lastly, crimes against humanity refer to acts carried out in times of war or peacetime that are a part of a widespread or systematic state policy. For example: enslavement, persecution, apartheid, and enforced disappearance.

Atrocity crimes are marked by their evilness and their disregard for common humanity. While it would be nice to think that instances of such crimes are rare, this is not the case. Indeed, across the world and in Asian history, this is disproven time and time again.

The Nanjing Massacre, for instance, is one of Asia’s darkest moments.

In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army captured Nanjing, then China’s capital city. Over two months, the Japanese killed the remaining Chinese soldiers, murdered Chinese civilians, and destroyed property, all in violation of the laws of war. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, set up to try Japanese leaders of atrocity crimes after the War, concluded as many as 200,000 Chinese civilians died as a result of Japanese action. Particularly egregious however was the violence that women faced. With permissive leadership, the Japanese Imperial Army committed at least 20,000 rapes against women in Nanjing, in one of the most brutal iterations of gendered violence seen in the 20th century.

Nanjing Massacre Memorial, site of 1937 Japanese atrocities known as the Rape of Nanjing. Image: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nanjing_Massacre_Memorial_(10151703745).jpg)

Decades later, Bangladesh became a centre for atrocity crimes. Often called the “forgotten genocide,” the Bangladesh Genocide of 1971 is estimated to have claimed over three million lives.

When civilians in East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – pushed for independence from West Pakistan, members of the Pakistani Armed Forces and the pro-Pakistani Islamist militia, Jamaat-e-Islami, cracked down brutally, massacring millions.

Again, women bore the brunt of brutality with an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 genocidal rapes committed against them. These rapes were supported by Pakistani religious leaders who stated that Bangladeshi women were gonimoter maal, or ‘public property.’

Moving forward in history, the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War in the early 2000s saw war crimes carried out by both sides: the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fighting for Tamil independence and against oppression; and the government and its armed forces, fighting for majoritarian rule.

While the government forces committed more expansive war crimes, both sides were guilty of acts including child recruitment for military purposes, hostage-taking, the denial of food, medicine and clean water, and targeting civilians.

More alarmingly, both government forces and the LTTE were alleged to have used chemical weapons. More than 40,000 civilians died and there remains more than 146,000 civilians unaccounted for. Again, like so many instances of atrocity crimes, sexual violence was utilised as a tool of war. Tamil women, and some men, faced egregious sexual violence carried out by government forces with 13 percent of the Sri Lankan population reporting having experienced such violence. For reference, Sri Lanka’s population is 22 million.

But while Asia has a history of atrocity crimes being committed on its shores, it also has a history of enabling accountability for victims.

Not many people know that it was Asia where the push for joint military tribunals came from. This push came in the wake of World War Two and was the driving force behind setting up the infamous Nuremberg Tribunal for Nazi crimes and the Tokyo Tribunal for Japanese imperial crimes.

It was an Indian official, Mr Niharendu Dutt-Majumdar who wrote the first memorandum suggesting this structure – a structure that has held to account many of those guilty of atrocity crimes globally.

Indeed, the Nanjing Massacre faced the Tokyo Tribunal while the Bangladeshis instituted the International Crimes Tribunal (Bangladesh). Recently, the United Nations has been authorised to gather evidence of atrocity crimes in Sri Lanka and one can only hope that perpetrators of such crimes will face the type of justice that they helped to create.

Asia has a tragic history when it comes to atrocity crimes.

This tragic history will only be compounded with atrocity crimes currently being committed in China and Myanmar, and is projected to be committed in an increasingly Hindu-nationalist India.

However, Asia also has a very important history when it comes to atrocity crimes. Having created the world’s most famed framework for accountability for atrocity crimes, Asia is aptly placed to provide justice for victims and to send a message to perpetrators that the egregiousness with which they commit atrocity crimes will be met with an equally hefty response.

- Asia Media Centre