WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) Read Free

soldiers. We also include here some of the war crimes committed by the Allied powers, which were never prosecuted in courts of law, but which, in recent years, have been the subject of much controversy: the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
    In Part V, we look at the great War Crimes Trials of history: in particular, the Nuremburg and Tokyo Trials that took place in the aftermath of World War II, in which Nazi leaders of the Third Reich and important officials of Japanese government were convicted. We also investigate the high profile trials of individuals such as Dusko Tadic, the Bosnian Serb convicted of crimes against humanity, and Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, who died before his trial came to an end in 2006.
     
    T WENTIETH-CENTURY  W AR  C RIMES
     
    Part VI continues with a look at twentieth-century war crimes and atrocities between 1950 and the year 2000, starting in 1950 with the No Gun Ri Tragedy, in which US troops gunned down inhabitants of a village in the early days of the Korean War, and ending with the nightmare of Rwanda, in which over one million people were massacred by Hutu militia groups over a period of about four months in 1994. Other notorious crimes of the period include the massacre at My Lai of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, by US soldiers in 1968; the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, in which British soldiers shot down a group of Irish civil rights protesters; atrocities committed during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 until 1999; and the massacres of hundreds of Arab refugees at Sabra and Shatila, carried out in September 1982 by Lebanese militias, with the support of the Israeli armed forces.
    War crimes and atrocities continue, sadly, in great numbers into the twenty-first century, with the evil regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; the subsequent invasion of Iraq led by the USA; the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay; the war in Kosovo; and ethnic cleansing, also described as genocide, at Darfur in Western Sudan.
    Today, it seems that war crimes and atrocities continue day by day, despite the mass of legislation aimed to prevent and limit such tragedies. However, the fact that the legislation is now in place to identify such crimes and charge the perpetrators is significant: for example, on 5 November, 2006, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging for his crimes against humanity. Whether or not such convictions will help to stem the tide of tyranny and terrorism of the twenty-first century, in which innocent people continue to suffer, remains to be seen; but at least in modern times, war crimes have been identified as such, so that – whether committed by heads of state or by terrorist groups – we can begin to regard such crimes as having no rightful place in our modern global society.

Part One: Ancient Atrocities

The Sword Of David Carves Out The Kingdom Of Israel 
    c.10th Century bc

     
    The Bible’s Old Testament books of I and II Samuel, I Chronicles and I Kings are full of the deeds of David, a farmer of Bethlehem who created and was the first ruler of the kingdom of Israel and Judah. In the Bible, David is a strong and extraordinarily successful warrior, a gifted poet and musician – he is invariably depicted in Christian iconography with a harp – and, in startling contrast, a murderous adulterer. David slew the landowner Nabal so that he could make Nabal’s wife, Abigail, his own wife. She was one of many, as David was both promiscuous and fecund. He also sent a gallant soldier, Uriah the Hittite, to certain death by putting him in ‘the forefront of the battle’ so that David could gain Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife.
    David is a much more shadowy figure in the historical records of the period in which it is generally agreed that he lived – that is, ten centuries before the birth of Christ, with his death