Sartre answers to value of War Crimes Tribunal

International opposition to the war in Vietnam has now centred upon the International War Crimes Tribunal, set up on the initiative of Bertrand Russell, and due to begin its proceedings on April 26. In this feature Salient reprints extracts from an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, executive president of the Tribunal, in which he answers questions concerning its aims and scope. The interview was first published in "Le Nouvel Observateur"; the English version is by courtesy of "New Left Review."

Q: It has been said that Bertrand Russell's Tribunal will be able only to deliver a parody of justice. It is made up of committed intellectuals, hostile to American policies: their verdict, it is said, is known in advance: "It will be like Alice in Wonderland" —the sentence first, the trial afterwards."

Sartre:

Let me outline the purpose, and the limits of our tribunal. There is no question of judging whether American policy in Vietnam is evil—of which most of us have not the slightest doubt—but of seeing whether it falls within the compass of international law on war crimes. There would be no point in condemning, in a legal sense, the onslaught of American imperialism against countries of the Third World which attempt to escape its domination. That struggle is in fact merely the transposition, on an international level, of the class struggle, and is determined by the structure of the groups engaged in it.

Imperialist policy is a necessary historical reality. By this fact it is beyond the reach of any legal or moral condemnation. The only thing possible is to combat it: intellectually by revealing its inner mechanism, politically by attempting to disengage oneself from it, or by armed struggle. I admit that I am, like other members of the tribunal, a declared enemy of imperialism and that I feel myself in solidarity with all those who fight against it. Commitment, from this point of view, must be total. Each individual sees the totality of the struggle and aligns himself on one side or on the other, from motives which may range from his objective situation to a certain idea that he holds of human life. On this level one may hate the class enemy. But one cannot judge him in the legal sense.

It is even difficult, if not impossible, so long as one keeps to the purely realistic viewpoint of the class struggle, to see one's own allies in legal terms and rigorously to define the "crimes" committed by their governments. This was clearly shown by the problems of the Stalinist labour camps. One either delivered moral judgments on them, which were entirely beside the point, or satisfied oneself with evaluating the "positive" and the "negative" in Stalin's policies. Some said: "It's positive, in the last analysis," and others said, "It's negative." That, too, leads nowhere.

In fact, though the development of history is not determined by law and morality— which are, on the contrary, its products—these two superstructures do exert a "feedback" effect on that development. It is this which allows one to judge a society in terms of the criteria which it has itself established. It is therefore entirely normal to inquire, at any given moment, if such and such an action can really be judged purely in terms of utility and likely out come, or whether it does not in fact transcend such criteria and come within the scope of an international jurisprudence which has slowly been built up.

Marx, in one of his prefaces to "Capital," makes a remark to the effect that—We are the last people who can be accused of condemning the bourgeois, since we consider that, conditioned by the process of capital and by the class struggle, their conduct is necessary. But there are moments, all the same, when they exceed the limits.

The whole problem is to know if, today, the imperialists are exceeding the limits.

When Talleyrand says: "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake," he sums up very well the way in which political actions have always been considered throughout history. They might be skilful or clumsy, effective or illstarred, but they always escaped legal sanction. There was no such thing as a "criminal policy."

And then, at Nuremburg, in 1945, there appeared for the first time the notion of a "political crime." It was suspect, certainly, since it consisted in imposing the law of the conqueror upon the conquered. But the condemnation of the leaders of Nazi Germany by the Nuremburg Tribunal only had any meaning at all if it implied that any government which, in the future, committed acts which could be condemned under one or other of the articles of the Nuremburg laws, would be subject to trial by a similar tribunal. Our tribunal today merely proposes to apply to capitalist imperialism its own laws. The arsenal of jurisprudence, moreover, is not limited to the laws of Nuremburg; there was already the Briand-Kellog pact; and there are the Geneva Convention and other international agreements.

The question in this case is not one of condemning a policy in the name of history, of judging whether it is or is not contrary to the interests of humanity; it is rather a question of saying if it infringes existing laws. For example, you may criticise the present policies of France, you may be totally opposed to them as I am, but you cannot call them "criminal." That would be meaningless. But you could do so during the Algerian war. Torture, the organisation of concentration camps, reprisals on the civilian population, executions without trial could all be equated with some of the crimes condemned at Nuremburg. If anybody at the time had set up a tribunal like the one conceived by Bertrand Russell. I would certainly have agreed to take part in it.

Because it was not done at that time with reference to France is no reason not to do it today with reference to the United States.

Q: You will be asked by what legal right, since it is the law you are invoking, you are setting yourselves up as judges, which you are not ...

Sartre:

Quite true. After that, people will say, anybody can judge anything! And then, doesn't the project risk falling on the one side into petit-bourgeois idealism (a number of well-known personalities make a protest in the name of exalted human values) and on the other into fascism, with a vengeance-seeking aspect to it which recalls Arsene Lupin and the whole of fascist; literature?

To this I would reply first of all that there is no question of condemning anybody to any penalty whatever. Any judgment which cannot be executed is evidently derisory. I can hardly see myself condemning President Johnson to death. I would cover myself with ridicule.

Our aim is a different one. It is to study all the existing documentation on the war in Vietnam, to bring forward all the possible witnesses—American and Vietnamese—and to determine whether certain actions fall within the competence of the laws of which I have spoken. We will not invent any new legislation. We will merely say, if we establish it—and I cannot prejudge this—"Such and such acts, committed in such and such places, represent a violation of such and such international law, and are, consequently, crimes. And there stand those who are responsible for them."

This would, if a real international tribunal existed, make the latter subject—by virtue, for example, of the laws applied at Nuremburg— to various sanctions. So it is not at all a question of demonstrating the indignant disapproval of a group of honest citizens, but giving a juridical dimension to acts of international politics, in order, to combat the tendency of the majority of people only to judge the conduct of a social group or of a government in expedient moral terms.

Q: Does this not lead you to the view that there is a way of waging war which is to be condemned, and another which is not?

Sartre:

Certainly not! The onslaught of imperialism against certain peoples of the third world is a fact which is clear to me. I oppose it with all my strength, but there is a point in my saying whether there is a good and a bad way in which it can be carried out. In fact, although the good, peaceful people in our consumer societies would like to ignore it, everywhere there is fighting, struggle; the world is in flames and we could have a world war from one moment to the next. We have to try and find out whether, in the course of this struggle, there are people who are exceeding the limits; whether imperialist policies infringe laws formulated by imperialism itself.

You might of course ask whether it is possible to fight an imperialist war of repression without violating international laws. But that is not our business. As an ordinary citizen, as a philosopher, as a Marxist, I have the right to believe that that type of war always leads to the use of torture, to the creation of concentration camps, and so on. As a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, that does not interest me. I only have to discover whether laws have been violated, in order to reintroduce the legal notion of international crime.

We must ask ourselves whether the views, correct ones, which we hold about politics must necessarily lead us, as they did many people in the Stalinist period, to consider politics solely from the angle of expediency, and to indulge in passive complicity by only judging a government's action from a practical perspective. Does a political tact not also possess an ethico-juridical structure?

On this ground, our judgments cannot be given in advance, even if we are committed, as individuals, in the struggle against imperialism. To want to set up a real tribunal and to pronounce sentences would be to act as idealists. But we have the right to meet, as citizens, in order to give renewed strength to the notion of a war crime, by showing that any policy can and must be objectively judged in the terms of the legal criteria which exist.

When somebody shouts out in a meeting: "The war in Vietnam is a crime" we are in the realm of emotion. This war is certainly contrary to the interests of the vast majority of people, but is it legally criminal? This is what we will try to determine. We cannot say in advance what our conclusions will be.