Dr.T.R.Sareen, my great historian friend from India, is a prolific writer. Not so long ago I reviewed his eye-opening book on Jinnah and Linlithgow in these columns. I have just got his new book, India and The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945-1952, Life Span Publishers, 2013(!). Looking at the contents, the fifth chapter on Justice R.B.Pal at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has immediately attracted my attention. I will therefore discuss this chapter here.
As is well known by now, Pal was the only judge out of eleven who declared all the defendants not guilty at the Tokyo Tribunal. In his thinking 'The victors have no right to change them(the rules of International Law) in order to punish the vanquished'(p.115).
It would have been certainly difficult to find evidence to show that all of Japan's wars from 1928 to 1945 had been executed according to a certain conspiracy, as was put forward by the prosecution. In this sense Pal's reasoning was well-founded.
But if you go further and deny the existence of a war of aggression, or a war crime, for the reason that these concepts were not clarified in the existing Law, I am afraid it is a bit too conservative an attitude.
Alternatively you could make this Tribunal, together with the preceding one at Nuremberg, an opportunity to create new international norms concerning the aggression, war crime, and related concepts. Already, as early as in the post-First World War years, there was an attempted indictment of Kaiser William of Germany as a war criminal. These examples could well have been codified into the Law. The UN Charter was also in place. Otherwise the mankind would not have had today's International Criminal Court, and would have been totally incompetent before a series of large-scale atrocities.
If Pal's judgement had been the majority opinion, what would have happened? Pal himself was not blind to what Japan had done during the war years. He pointed to the cruelties committed at Nanking, China, and on the POWs. Still, if all the defendants had been not guilty, the conclusion would have been that the war was one of liberation of Asia, or at least of Japan's self-defense. Pal himself used those terms(p.122).
Unfortunately nothing would be further from the truth. When he said that if Japan would be convicted then the Allied powers 'must also be put under the scanner in the same way for their part'(p.126), or criticized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, he was perfectly right. But it is a different matter than the nature of Japan's war. When the Filipino judge thought that the judgement was 'too lenient'(p.124), he represented the mind of the Asians once under the Japanese conquest much better than Pal.
Why then? Probably it was, as was suggested by the author, the influence of Subhas Chandra Bose, Pal's fellow Bengali, and his Indian National Army, who fought with the Japanese. To judge Japan guilty was to judge Bose and his INA also guilty, which was impossible for Pal to do. Already the Defense Counsel for the INA, a famous lawyer who belonged to the Indian National Congress, had declared before Pal's departure for Japan that Japan was a liberator of Asian nations(pp.108-9). Was the freedom of India achieved on the strength of such a fiction? What was Gandhi doing at the time, who had written 'To Every Japanese' in 1942 to make it clear that the Indian people would never welcome the Japanese on their territory. Unless you regard Japan starkly as an aggressor, you cannot fight other imperialist powers. This was the relevance of Pal's criticism of the atomic bombs.
More than a decade ago a cinema was released in Japan which was about Pal, Bose and Tojo(Army general, Prime Minister when Japan declared war on the US). The story was that Tojo assisted Bose to bring independence to India, and Pal, as if in return, declared Tojo not guilty. This shows how Pal's judgement has sometimes been made use of in a very harmful way, although it may not be his responsibility.
This one was a real conspiracy. Six out of the seven who were hanged were Army generals. They were made scapegoats to save others.
I thank Dr.Sareen for expanding my horizon.
As is well known by now, Pal was the only judge out of eleven who declared all the defendants not guilty at the Tokyo Tribunal. In his thinking 'The victors have no right to change them(the rules of International Law) in order to punish the vanquished'(p.115).
It would have been certainly difficult to find evidence to show that all of Japan's wars from 1928 to 1945 had been executed according to a certain conspiracy, as was put forward by the prosecution. In this sense Pal's reasoning was well-founded.
But if you go further and deny the existence of a war of aggression, or a war crime, for the reason that these concepts were not clarified in the existing Law, I am afraid it is a bit too conservative an attitude.
Alternatively you could make this Tribunal, together with the preceding one at Nuremberg, an opportunity to create new international norms concerning the aggression, war crime, and related concepts. Already, as early as in the post-First World War years, there was an attempted indictment of Kaiser William of Germany as a war criminal. These examples could well have been codified into the Law. The UN Charter was also in place. Otherwise the mankind would not have had today's International Criminal Court, and would have been totally incompetent before a series of large-scale atrocities.
If Pal's judgement had been the majority opinion, what would have happened? Pal himself was not blind to what Japan had done during the war years. He pointed to the cruelties committed at Nanking, China, and on the POWs. Still, if all the defendants had been not guilty, the conclusion would have been that the war was one of liberation of Asia, or at least of Japan's self-defense. Pal himself used those terms(p.122).
Unfortunately nothing would be further from the truth. When he said that if Japan would be convicted then the Allied powers 'must also be put under the scanner in the same way for their part'(p.126), or criticized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, he was perfectly right. But it is a different matter than the nature of Japan's war. When the Filipino judge thought that the judgement was 'too lenient'(p.124), he represented the mind of the Asians once under the Japanese conquest much better than Pal.
Why then? Probably it was, as was suggested by the author, the influence of Subhas Chandra Bose, Pal's fellow Bengali, and his Indian National Army, who fought with the Japanese. To judge Japan guilty was to judge Bose and his INA also guilty, which was impossible for Pal to do. Already the Defense Counsel for the INA, a famous lawyer who belonged to the Indian National Congress, had declared before Pal's departure for Japan that Japan was a liberator of Asian nations(pp.108-9). Was the freedom of India achieved on the strength of such a fiction? What was Gandhi doing at the time, who had written 'To Every Japanese' in 1942 to make it clear that the Indian people would never welcome the Japanese on their territory. Unless you regard Japan starkly as an aggressor, you cannot fight other imperialist powers. This was the relevance of Pal's criticism of the atomic bombs.
More than a decade ago a cinema was released in Japan which was about Pal, Bose and Tojo(Army general, Prime Minister when Japan declared war on the US). The story was that Tojo assisted Bose to bring independence to India, and Pal, as if in return, declared Tojo not guilty. This shows how Pal's judgement has sometimes been made use of in a very harmful way, although it may not be his responsibility.
This one was a real conspiracy. Six out of the seven who were hanged were Army generals. They were made scapegoats to save others.
I thank Dr.Sareen for expanding my horizon.
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