May 21, 2001
War and Accountability
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010521&s=schell>
by JONATHAN SCHELL
Few things are harder than an honest, voluntary accounting by a nation of
its own crimes. When the crimes are committed by other nations, people know
well how to respond. The pictures, those of, say, Serbia's recent
atrocities in Kosovo shown in the Western media, are abundant.
Investigations are energetic, coverage prompt. The outrage is spontaneous,
and the indignation flows easily. Perhaps judicial proceedings will begin,
or "humanitarian intervention" will be contemplated, accompanied by a
gratifying debate on the limits of decent outsiders' moral obligations.
Perhaps in time movies will be made showing, and caricaturing, their evil
and contrasting it with our virtue. Maybe museums of the horrors will even
be founded.
But how different everything becomes when our own countrymen are the
wrongdoers. Investigations move at a snail's pace, perhaps they take
decades, if they occur at all. Whereas before we seemed to be looking at
the events through a sort of moral telescope, which brought everything near
and into sharp focus, now we seem to look through the telescope's other
end. The figures are small and indistinct. A kind of mental and emotional
fog rolls in. Memories dim. The very acts that before inspired prompt anger
now become fascinating philosophical puzzles. The psychological torments of
the perpetrators move into the foreground, those of the victims into the
background. The man firing the gun becomes more of an object of pity than
the child at whom the gun was fired.
All of these responses have been on full display in the reaction in this
country to the excellent, meticulous report in the New York Times by
Gregory Vistica on the killing of at least thirteen civilians in February
1969 in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong by a Navy SEAL team led by
Bob Kerrey, now president of the New School University (where, I should
state, I am a part-time lecturer) and formerly a senator from Nebraska and
presidential candidate. Vistica's original source was Gerhard Klann, a
member of Kerrey's team. According to Klann, critical elements of whose
account have been corroborated by Vietnamese eyewitnesses independently
interviewed, the SEAL team entered the village, known to support the
National Liberation Front, at night, to capture its mayor and an NLF
representative. Upon arriving at a hut on the outskirts of the village, the
team killed five members of a family consisting of two grandparents and
their three grandchildren. The SEALs used knives in an attempt to preserve
silence. Klann says that when he had trouble killing the grandfather,
Kerrey held the man down with his knee while Klann cut his throat. The
team, Klann goes on, proceeded to the village, where it ordered about a
dozen women and children out of their bunker, lined them up and executed
them at close range. Neither the mayor, the NLF representative nor any
enemy soldiers or weapons were found.
Kerrey, while admitting that civilians were killed, disputes this account,
and his version of events has been supported in a statement signed by the
five other members of the seven-man team. All but one of them have declined
individual interviews. About the killing at the first hut, the statement of
the six is vague: It cryptically says, "At an enemy outpost we used lethal
methods to keep our presence from being detected." Kerrey says he did not
participate in this killing or know that those killed were two old people
and three children. When the team proceeded to the center of the village,
the statement says, it received hostile fire, and the civilians were
accidentally killed by the American fire in response. Klann's testimony
obviously deserves special weight, because it was not in the interest of
the testifier and also has been independently confirmed by the Vietnamese
eyewitnesses. Although his account is of course sharply at odds with
Kerrey's, Kerrey has said, "I'm not going to make this worse by questioning
somebody else's memory of it." At the same time, however, he has attacked
the Times and CBS, which worked on the story with the Times, in an
interview with the Associated Press. "The Vietnam government likes to
routinely say how terrible Americans were," he said. "The Times and CBS are
now collaborating in that effort." Kerrey's other responses have likewise
been uncertain and changeable. He has been, by turns, confessional,
apologetic, tormented, defensive, anguished, irritable, forgetful and
contrite.
Kerrey has been an uncommonly thoughtful, constructive, independent public
figure. Volunteering to serve his country in what he believed was a just
war, he found himself instead in a slaughterhouse devoid of reason. (Upon
returning to the United States, he became a fervent opponent of the war.)
He has flatly stated, for instance, "We were instructed not to take
prisoners." If so, he was instructed to commit war crimes, doubly, if the
potential "prisoners" were civilians. According to the US military adviser
on the scene, David Marion, the policy of the local Vietnamese district
chief toward civilians in the area was, "If you are my friend, you will do
fine. You support me and the government of Vietnam, we get along OK. You do
not, you're Vietcong, you die." Marion, who observed the results of these
policies firsthand, confirmed to Vistica that in practice, "Those were the
rules."
I can testify from my experience in Vietnam as a reporter in 1967 that the
rules in other parts of the country were the same. In the northern
provinces of South Vietnam, villagers in "free-fire zones" were warned that
if they supported the NLF their villages would be bombed, and I witnessed
the execution and the results of this policy throughout Quang Ngai and
Quang Tri provinces. The policy, which contravened the laws of war
forbidding the deliberate targeting of civilians, was nowhere written down
in government documents, but it was announced in millions of leaflets
showered from planes on Vietnamese villages, and it was carried out. One
leaflet, for example, read, "Many hamlets have been destroyed because these
villages harbored the Vietcong. The hamlets of Hai Mon, Hai Tan, Sa Binh,
Tan Binh, and many others have been destroyed because these villages
harbored the Vietcong. We will not hesitate to destroy every hamlet that
helps the Vietcong...."
These de facto policies obviously placed an extraordinary moral burden on
the young men sent to carry them out. However, the struggles of Bob Kerrey
to come to terms personally with his experience are of secondary
importance. What is of first importance is exactly what was done that day,
what the response of the American public and government to this will be and
whether anyone is to be held accountable. A serious war crime has been
credibly alleged. Did it happen? Is anyone responsible? Will they be held
responsible?
So far, it looks as if, through a series of subterfuges and evasions, there
will be neither an adequate investigation nor any accountability. In its
editorial, the Times commented: "With the emergence of this story, Mr.
Kerrey's career has entered a new phase of public assessment." Even this
muffled admonition, however, was too much for Mark Shields of the NewsHour
With Jim Lehrer, who called the editorial "an act of moral arrogance rarely
seen." Kerrey, he explained, had not ducked service in Vietnam, as so many
others had done, and had never bragged about that service. But the
question, of course, is not whether Kerrey was a coward or a braggart, he
obviously was neither, but whether on February 24, 1969, he twice ordered
the massacre of civilians, first at the hut, second in the village. The
debate so far has concentrated on whether there was hostile fire before the
killings in the center of the village, as if the unit's entire conduct
could be excused by it. However, that question has no bearing on the
horrifying scene at the hut, which remains without explanation. If the
nation should not engage in any reassessment of Kerrey, should it at least
try to find out, by means of a Pentagon investigation, what happened that
night? Three senators who served in Vietnam and were decorated for their
valor, John Kerry, Max Cleland and Chuck Hagel, think not, as they said on
ABC's This Week. (A fourth, John McCain, wanted to leave the decision up to
the Pentagon.)
Their reasons are noteworthy. You have to take into account the special
circumstance into which the war placed Kerrey, the senators said. The
SEALs' mission "was to take out the civilian infrastructures," John Kerry
observed. The Phoenix program, whose objective was "assassination" of NLF
leaders, was in operation, he added. It was the nature of war that
civilians "suffer the most," Hagel said. Civilians had been killed in the
tens of thousands, Kerry continued, by the firebombing of Dresden and at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In short, they cleared the individual by condemning
the war. As Kerry said, if Bob Kerrey was to be judged, then "you'd have to
investigate the whole war."
Others made similar points. Doyle McManus of PBS's Washington Week in
Review said that the debate was in a "time warp," because in Vietnam it was
policy to kill civilians in free-fire zones, whereas in the more recent
Gulf War this was forbidden. All of that is factually true. What was left
unanswered, however, is whether there could be any accountability for the
deed or for any others like it if they were committed by Americans. If in
fact it was American policy to declare that in wide areas civilians were to
be killed, that policy was a crime against humanity in the strict
definition of the term. Then criminal responsibility would in fact be much
clearer than it would be if soldiers had massacred civilians in violation
of orders. However, the senators were not suggesting a wider investigation;
they opposed any investigation. If the individual soldiers should not be
brought to account (and credible allegations of a war crime should not even
be investigated) because the fault was in policy, not in individuals, and
yet no policy-makers are to be held responsible either, then there will be
no accountability. The answer, the four senators agreed, is to "blame the
war," not the "warrior." But they suggested no method by which a "war"as
distinct from the people who guided the war and fought it, could be held
responsible.
Approval of the deed was symbolized by the Bronze Star that Kerrey received
for the action. Reporters asked him whether he planned to return it, and he
answered with annoyance that he didn't care about it one way or the other.
So far, the Pentagon has not asked for it back.
Some have suggested that the United States has anguished long enough over
the Vietnam War and that it's long past time to put it behind us. The
debate over Thanh Phong, however, occurs in a new context. Today, nations
all over the world, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Poland, the Czech
Republic, Serbia, Rwanda, to name just a few, have been struggling to come
to terms with crimes committed in their recent past. In some countries,
judicial proceedings are under way. In others, truth commissions, offering
amnesty in exchange for full confession, have been founded. Elsewhere,
lustration -- laws preventing wrongdoers of the past from holding office --
has been the recourse. Western countries have been liberal with their
advice. "International civil society" has added its voice. Hundreds of
academic conferences have been held. In still other cases, international
tribunals have been created at The Hague to bring committers of crimes
against humanity to justice. Special tribunals are in operation to
prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo by Serbia. The United States is among many countries
that have sought the extradition of the former President of Serbia,
Slobodan Milosevic, and others to face justice at The Hague. More
important, thirty countries have ratified an agreement to establish a
permanent international criminal court. Taken in their entirety, these
efforts amount to a sort of movement, in the wake of the terrible violence
of the twentieth century, to create a bare minimum of accountability for
the worst crimes in the twenty-first.
The reactions of journalists and senators on news programs in the United
States to the Thanh Phong massacre will not decide the outcome of these
efforts. But if as a nation the United States, the self-styled "world's
only superpower"cannot investigate, cannot condemn, cannot assign
responsibility for the killing of the women and children of Thanh Phong,
then state-licensed murderers everywhere will take heart and those who are
seeking to bring them to justice will be discouraged. The United States
cannot condemn in others what it covers up when committed by its own. The
movement for justice will continue, but the voice of the United States will
be discredited. We'll be missing in action.
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