What is the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal? *
Michel Chossudovsky: First, I would like to provide a bit of a background. The Global Peace Organization was led by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mr. Mahathir Mohamad, in 2005. A major initiative was launched called “The Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War.” It includes a number of very important statements that subsequently led to the formation of the Tribunal and the War Crimes Commission. The Tribunal was involved in several important judgments, including that directed against Bush, et al.
You refer to some principles. What is the essential nature of these principles?
MC: Well, The Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War essentially criminalises any activity that supports war and wars of aggression. One might say that it adopts the basic premises of the supreme crime, which is crime against the peace, but it formulates them in a somewhat different way. This document was drafted by a number of people—I was on the drafting committee of the main document—and for instance it looks at the role of nuclear weapons, but it also looks at economic processes which underlie the war economy and it states explicitly that all commercial, financial, industrial, and scientific activities that aid and abet war should be criminalised. Essentially, this document constitutes the founding principles of subsequent legal procedures.
Who did the prosecutors of this Tribunal charge?
MC: We had several procedures. One was a procedure directed against George Walker Bush et al. ...
Meaning... Tony Blair?
MC: ...and it also included a number of politicians including Donald Henry Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Albert Gonzalez. There was no mention, in that procedure, of Tony Blair. It was essentially directed against the Bush administration.
These were criminal charges. Were the defendants served with these proceedings?
MC: Well, the way the Tribunal functioned is that they formed an amicus curiae...
But did they receive the charges?
MC: Absolutely. The accusations were submitted by the legal team, I believe through the US embassy, and the United States was invited to defend George Bush et al. The same procedures were adopted in relation to the State of Israel on the charge of genocide, and those were transmitted, I believe through the embassy of Singapore. They were served and they declined to send any legal representatives. Then the Court created an amicus curiae, to defend their interests.
Were witnesses called in these different trials?
MC: Witnesses were called and there is a large archive of witnesses. I should mention, in relation to Iraq, we had testimony from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and we also had testimony from people who had been in prison in Guantanamo. Among the key witnesses—and I mention this because everybody worldwide knows about it—there was the testimony of Ali Shalal. He was arrested and sent to Abu Ghraib. He was a professor of theology at the university, he was tortured in Abu Ghraib, and he is known as “the man behind the hood.” It is not he as such but the images of him being tortured went all over the world. Ali Shalal managed to survive and he was released but he also provided a very detailed testimony of the torture. He also said that many of his inmates, who were tortured and released, were assassinated upon their release at the moment they left the building, and he was aware of that. Ali Shalal is a very composed and intelligent man, and I had the opportunity of meeting him personally.
His testimony is generally available on the Internet, on the site of the Tribunal?
MC: These testimonies are available on the site of the Tribunal. The Centre for Research on Globalization has published many of these testimonies over the last few years.
And you are the director of the Centre for Research on Globalization?
MC: Yes, and I was a member of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission which, ultimately, served these charges against George W. Bush et al. and the State of Israel in subsequent cases.
So you mentioned charges... How many judgments have been rendered with respect to the government in the US, for Britain, and the State of Israel?
MC: There were only two main judgments: one in May 2012, which was Chief Prosecutor of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission v. George Walker Bush, and another one, a related one, in the previous year, which was the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission v. George W. Bush and Anthony L. Blair, in November 2011. Subsequently, we had a judgment against the State of Israel. In all, there were four judgments. There also was an advisor opinion in October 2009.
Who were the judges on this Tribunal? Were they experienced people?
MC: The way the Tribunal was built was that we had a number of Malaysian judges, and then there was the participation of one or more foreign judges throughout. All of these judges are permanent jurists, either involved in prosecution, but several of them had been judges and there was a judge from the Supreme Court of Malaysia, so that, essentially, all the legal procedures were followed, even though the Tribunal itself did not have any status to enforce these judgments in Malaysia. It was a tribunal of conscience. The defence was made up of a team of amicus curiae.
You mentioned the judgment against the State of Israel that was rendered, I believe, on November 25, 2013. What was its nature; what did that trial hear?
MC: The evidence was based on crimes committed by the Israeli armed forces, militia...
Where did the evidence come from?
MC: Well, essentially, there were three areas that were envisaged: one was Sabra and Shatila, going back of course to the 1980s; then there was Gaza and the West Bank. We had testimony from all three regions. They did not pertain to any particular, specific time span, there were various time spans involved, and it was on the basis of this testimony that the judgment was rendered. Some of the testimonies had been collected at an earlier period, and other testimonies were submitted on the final days of the judgment.
Was there expert testimony?
MC: There was also expert testimony in all of these procedures. We had people involved who were experts in the use of particular types of weapon systems; there was an examination of the impacts of depleted uranium by prominent scientists. I should mention that in one of the first procedures in 2009, we also had the testimony of people who had been in prison and tortured in Guantanamo, at the concentration camp of the United States. The narrative of these testimonies was quite dramatic because most of the people, if not all of them, were not enemy combatants—they were civilians. In one particular case, the case of Sami al-Hajj, who was actually a journalist working for Al Jazeera, he was picked up by US forces, interrogated, and tortured, and then, after some time, they said to him: “Mr. Al-Hajj, I think we made a mistake, you are not the person we are looking for.” And then they asked him, “What are you going to do when you get out of here?” He responded, “Well, you know, I am a journalist.”
What happened to him for that?
MC: What happened to him for that? He was sent to Guantanamo for seven years. As a journalist, he said what he was going to report on what he saw, and then he was arrested. One issue that I raised as a member of the Commission is who was being arrested, because, in effect, we know that in November 2001, the United States and the Pakistani air force actually airlifted enemy combatants to Waziristan, in Northern Pakistan. So the enemy combatants were rescued in a sense, they were not sent to Guantanamo and this is confirmed in an article by Seymour M. Hersh entitled, “The Getaway.”1
Could you identify yourself, so that we know who you are?
MC: OK. I am Michel Chossudovsky, I am professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Ottawa, founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, which hosts the Globalresearch.ca website.
Could you give us references to this on your website please?
MC: Certainly. There is a lot of material that we published, including the testimonies of Ali Shalal, of Moazzam Begg, a British citizen who was arrested in Afghanistan and who then sued the British government, and he is a human rights activist and has recently been arrested by the British government on alleged charges of terrorism.
* Interview conducted by John Philpot on February 27, 2013. Professor Michel Chossudovsky is founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization that hosts one of the world’s most important alternative media websites, GlobalResearch.ca, as well as Mondialisation.ca (in French). The Site of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is at http://criminalisewar.org.
1. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Getaway: Questions Surround a Secret Pakistani Airlift,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2002.