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Victor's justice

The label "victor's justice" (in German, Siegerjustiz) is applied by advocates to a situation in which they believe that a victorious nation is applying different rules to judge what is right or wrong for their own forces and for those of the (former) enemy. Advocates generally charge that the difference in rules amounts to hypocrisy and leads to injustice. Targets of the label may consider it derogatory.

Why should victors be just?

The concept that a victor should be just appears to be a recent idea, possibly being part of the just war doctrine. In previous times, victors did as they liked with their defeated enemies, killing, torturing, mutilating and enslaving their populations. This was accepted as the way the world was.

However, the world subsequently aspired to higher ethical standards, and in the 19th century the Geneva conventions set up laws of war that proscribed extreme behavior, and created the concept of war crimes.

Allegations of victor's justice

Claimed examples of victor's justice have included:

• the actions of the Communists after the October Revolution
• those of the Brazilian government after the Canudos insurrection around 1900

After World War II, there were calls for vengeance on Nazi Germany. The Western Allies made a self-conscious decision to carry out war crimes trials, and to set up the Marshall Plan (a program to finance economic restructuring of Europe by providing grants and loans), rather than to simply executing their enemies, and imposing reparations on the German people as it has been suggested by the so called Morgenthau plan.

For the U.S., the main war profiteer of WWI and WWII, establishing the Marshall plan was no real problem, and in the end by no doubt they earned much more money than they could have ever obtained from Germany and Europe by conventional reparations.

The Soviet Union however followed a similar plan to the Treaty of Versailles of World War I in the areas of Germany that it occupied. Throughout East Germany, whole industrial plants were dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union for later (unsuccessful) use. German prisoners of war and civilians were deported to the Soviet Union for use as forced labor, some never returning. To this day the former East Germany still has not recovered its former prosperity.

However, at the Nuremberg Criminal Court for war crimes only German war criminals were prosecuted, whereas what are viewed by some as war crimes by Allied troops were not. Numerous Germans and others consider this to be a betrayal of the principles of the Nuremberg Trials.

Examples of alleged Allied war crimes during and after World War II included:

• The Katyn Massacre, though technically the Soviet Union was not one of the Allies at the time. Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg would later try to indict Germany for this atrocity.
• The Laconia Incident. German Admiral Karl Dönitz would later be prosecuted for war crimes for the resulting Laconia Order even though Allied submarines often refused to rescue survivors as well.
• the campaign of strategic bombing in World War II including the bombing of Dresden and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• the treatment of collaborators, and alleged collaborators, after World War II
• the deaths of thousands of German POWs in transit camps such as the Rheinwiesenlager after World War II
• the bombing of refugees fleeing from eastern Germany to the west
• the systematic rape of German, Central European and Eastern European women by the Soviet Red Army
• The Prussian Holocaust

None of these resulted in war crimes prosecutions.

Attempts to ensure the fairness of war crimes prosecutions

Since then, the accusation of victor's justice has arisen in every subsequent conflict where war crimes prosecutions have been made. Examples of include the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and Afghanistan.

The International Criminal Court was set up in 2003 as a treaty arrangement between member states in an attempt to provide a neutral international court that avoids the accusation of "victor's justice", and that would prosecute all alleged war crimes, on either side of any conflict. The United States has currently refused to join the ICC, and critics of this decision sometimes claim that this comes out of a desire for victor's justice - given that the United States is almost certain to win any war it participates in. See the article on the court for more detail on US and other objections to it.

Current allegations of victor's justice

• The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, finansed mostly by NATO countries, prosecutes mostly people from states attacked by NATO countries.

Two current U.S. courses of action have led to allegations of victor's justice:

• After the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. set up prison camps such as Camp X-Ray, and a special courts system designed to try those accused of war crimes.

• There has been concern that the U.S. intention to set up a justice system in Iraq to try war crimes committed by the former Iraqi Ba'ath regime represents a desire for victor's justice through show trials. The U.S. has stated that they need to do this, as the ICC cannot prosecute crimes committed prior to its creation. However, there is no way possible U.S. war crimes in Iraq can be tried except in U.S. courts.

See also

• Arthur Travers Harris
• Camp X-Ray
• Nuremberg Trials