Russell Tribunal - Criticisms of The Tribunals

Criticisms of The Tribunals

Incidents like the Russell Tribunal were described by historian Guenter Lewy as part of a “veritable industry publicizing alleged war crimes”

Staughton Lynd, chairman of the 1965 “March on Washington”, was asked by Russell to participate in the tribunal and rejected the invitation. Lynd’s objections and criticism of the Tribunal were based on the fact that Russell planned to investigate only non-North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front conduct, sheltering Hanoi from any criticism for their behavior. Lynd wrote that “in conversation with the emissary who proffered the invitation, I urged that the alleged war crimes of any party to the conflict should come before the Tribunal. After all, I argued, a "crime" is an action that is wrong no matter who does it. Pressing my case, I asked, "What if it were shown that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam tortures unarmed prisoners?" The answer, as I understood it, was, "Anything is justified that drives the imperialist aggressor into the sea." I declined the invitation to be a member of the Tribunal.”

David Horowitz was then a member of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. He confirms that the Russell Tribunal never held any intention of investigating alleged Communist atrocities. In his memoirs, Horowitz describes overhearing Jean-Paul Sartre insist that the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front were, by definition, incapable of committing war crimes. "I refuse to place," said Sartre, "in the same category the actions of an organization of poor peasants... and those of an immense army backed by a highly organized country." Horowitz's position does not address the fact that Sartre believed the U.S. was engaged in a genocidal war in Vietnam. Therefore, the larger point Sartre was making was that the position of North Vietnamese and Vietcong on the one hand, as the victims of genocide, were not comparable to that of the United States.

For example, John Gerassi was an investigator for the Tribunal and documented that the United States was bombing hospitals, schools and other civilian targets in Vietnam. He offers first hand and documentary evidence about U.S. war crimes in contrast to the claims of Lewy. His book provides many details of U.S. atrocities and shows the larger motivation for the Tribunal, i.e. to expose war crimes, not to create a show trial in contrast to the claims of Podhoretz and Horowitz.

Judge Richard Goldstone, writing in The New York Times in October 2011, said of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine that “It is not a ‘tribunal.’ The ‘evidence’ is going to be one-sided and the members of the ‘jury’ are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known. In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute."

South African journalist and human rights activist Benjamin Pogrund, now living in Israel, described the Cape Town Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine as "It's theatre: the actors know their parts and the result is known before they start. Israel is to be dragged into the mud."