There is much talk swirling around the corridors of power and the Foreign desks of newsrooms of ‘natural justice’ as we have a remarkable confluence of Ratko Mladic’s arrest, Colonel Gadaffi’s indictment on crimes against humanity, the killings by the Assad regime in Syria and the extraordinary evidence revealing proof of war crimes in Sri Lanka when Mahinda Rajapaksa and his armed forces finally crushed the Tamil Tigers. In the latter instance, 40,000 civilians died and hospitals were shelled, even after GPS co-ordinates were issues to the Sri Lankan army (though the Tigers were also guilty of war crimes).
Yet David Reynolds marking on BBC Four the 70th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia, was chilling as he related Josef Stalin’s mistakes and ultimate victory saying of Uncle Joe “a mass murderer who never faced justice for his crimes.” In the grand sweep of history, huge numbers of deaths can be skimmed over for they are beyond comprehension and are almost totally faceless, evocative of the quote often attributed to the Soviet Marshal “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Reynolds’ depiction of the Georgian peasant who rose ruthlessly to the highest position in the Soviet firmament as still the gangster he was in pre-Revolutionary days, physically and vocally inadequate with a childish streak of petulance and vindictiveness, is a desperately sad tale for those who suffered under his rule. Of course, Robert Service, a biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, has made clear that if the latter had been in charge maybe not as many would have died, but millions still would have done.
It gets me thinking that so many villains of the twentieth century escaped what is now viewed as routine for those engaged in murderous and abominable misrule – a referral to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Post-World War II alone, in addition to Stalin, there is Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot (albeit he died in his bed in a jungle fastness), Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko and countless more monsters. Their reputations are sundered but in their time realpolitik ruled and still doe to a large extent. It’s called natural justice but it only ever be selective.