I badly want to write on the Charles Taylor trial, particularly the ghastly event of last week, by which I mean the Naomi Campbell-induced interest of the global press. Unfortunately, Kush's father is on the Taylor defence team, and I feel uncomfortable about writing on it while he is involved. It is not that I am conflicted, because I absolutely am not, I just feel that it would be more appropriate, from his perspective, for me to write about the trial after his involvement with it is over. Caesar's wife and all that. And, no, the impressive Courtney Griffiths QC is not the man in question. One of my favourite comments on the trial came from a Guardian below the line commentator who wrote: my dream now is to see Tony Blair in the Hague with Courtney Griffiths prosecuting. Heh. Here is some great writing from Matthew Norman at The Independent, who, in any event, says what I would have said better than I could.
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Looking down the years from this vertiginous height, the war crimes trial you feel sorry for is Nuremberg. No doubt it thought it made quite a splash, what with the convictions of 19 of the 22 Nazi defendants. With the benefit of freshly minted hindsight, however, its flaws become painfully apparent.
Marlene Dietrich may have appeared in that timelessly magnificent 1961 film Judgment At Nuremberg, but neither she nor any major female celeb gave evidence at the trial itself. Not Leni Riefenstahl, not the Andrews Sisters, not even, God help us, the Mitford sisters.
... The oversight cruelly denied Alvar Lidell the chance to intone: "This is the home service of the BBC, and here is the news. In Nuremberg today, Diana Mitford told the court that she assumed the large diamond Herr Hitler gave her, during a visit to the Bertesgarten in 1936, was zirconium. She further insisted that the pearl earrings she received from Hermann Göring during that same visit 'looked like the most frightful tat that might have fallen out of a Christmas cracker, so I gave them to Frau Boormann'.
"Mrs Mitford's evidence was later contradicted by Betty Grable. Having remonstrated with the court for delaying the completion of her new musical motion picture, Mother Wore Tights, Miss Grable claimed that she overheard Mrs Mitford telling Eva Braun that the earrings were 'perfectly exquisite', and that she planned to wear them to His Majesty the King's dinner dance, Adolf's Other Ball, to be held in the Royal Albert Hall shortly after her return from Germany. In other news..."
What did they know about how to stage a decent war crimes trial back then? We shouldn't be too harsh on Shawcross and his colleagues if they naïvely assumed public attention could be held by nothing more captivating than the intimate details of industrialised genocide. Who knows, in the banal world of 1945 perhaps it was. In these enlightened times, no horror that unfolds beyond our borders - avoidable malarial deaths in the developing world, the trafficking of human beings, or malevolent acts of God - has profound meaning and the power to affect until sprinkled with the magic dust of fame.
1 comments:
The ICC is a joke, the real murderers will never be brought to book. As long as they continue to kill by remote control.
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