International tribunals play by different rules

“Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space. Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the Continent. We are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead. It is not enough to isolate the Jewish Enemy of mankind – the Jew has got to be exterminated.”

Adolf Hitler’s plan to conquer the world began as a campaign against Jews in Germany. His plan was conceived when he was in prison in the early 1920’s.
He dictated his plan to his fellow prisoner, who reduced it into a book, Mein Kampf. Though widely read, few took its warnings seriously. By the time Adolf, his Nazi Party and his Hitlerite co-conspirators were done, they had plunged the world into World War II.

Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor and President of Germany in 1933. By design, through prohibition of other parties, the Nazi Party became the only political party in Germany.

Concentration camps were opened in Germany from 1933 when Hitler became absolute dictator. At this early stage they used to detain opponents of the Nazi Party. The “Enemies of the German State” included Jews, Communists, and Christians. People who were mentally ill were taken from clinics and escorted to specified centres where they killed by injections.

At the height of the Nazi rule these concentration camps had been turned into experimental human laboratories and slaughter houses. In Treblinka and Auschwitz, Jew victims were asked to strip before being driven into death chambers to be gassed.

In Dachau, prisoners who had good skin were killed so that their skin could be harvested for women’s handbags, lampshades and other items. This is just a tip of the iceberg of Nazi atrocities against their citizens. Many more atrocities were committed against the Jews and non-Jews, Germans and non-Germans. The word “genocide” sprang up in the 1940s thanks to the Nazis. Approximately 1.5 million people were exterminated in Maidanek, and four million in Auschwitz. A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be forgotten. The Nuremburg Military Tribunal was created for this sole purpose.

At Nuremburg, 21 Germans stood accused of crimes against humanity, violation of the laws of war, crimes against peace, and conspiracy to seize power. Nuremburg and three of the four crimes did not exist before World War II. For the first time in recorded history a criminal court was created after the crime. For the first time in recorded history criminal laws were passed to criminalise past conduct.

The decision by the International Criminal Court, to apply rules of procedure passed after the trial had already started, in the Kenyan Case against William Ruto and Joshua Sang, is therefore nothing new. It is not the first time that the community of nations has applied different rules in the prosecution of “international” crimes. It is unlikely to be the last. Before the Kenyan cases the community of nations applied the same principle for the Nazis, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Rwanda.

Nuremburg laid bare the Nazi propaganda, machinery, records, leaders and atrocities. After the curtains of World War II had been drawn, civilisation could not ignore the crimes that had been committed because civilisation would not have survived if they had been repeated. After Hitler, and his Hitlerites, the days of the Sadaams, Assads, and company were numbered before they had even begun. Though Kenya may choose to forget or numb the post-election violence of 2007/2008, the world never will.

The writer is an advocate of the High Court of Kenya