War Crimes Trials at WSU

Are the officials of Dow Chemical Company, the local Selective Service system, and the Wayne University administration guilty of complicity in war crimes? This will be the subject of public hearings to be held at Wayne University between April 8 and 15.

The decision to hold the hearings was made unanimously at a planning conference for Vietnam Week in late January. The conference was called by the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam and was chaired by Charles Larson, president of the Student-Faculty Council at Wayne. Also represented to the Conference were Detroit and Oakland Students for a Democratic Society, the Fifth Estate, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Detroit Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, and the Young Socialist Alliance.

A Continuation Committee established by the conference, consisting of one representative of every organization wishing to support Vietnam Week, will be organizing a tribunal of prominent experts to preside over the hearings. The tribunal will examine subpoenaed witnesses, weigh the evidence, and present their conclusions. The collected evidence will then be sent to the International War Crimes Tribunal in Paris.

The charge of “Complicity in war crimes” is based on the contention that the U.S. government is committing the crime of genocide in Vietnam. Evidence will be presented that the U.S. is knowingly engaged in the wholesale destruction of the civilian population in Vietnam. This evidence will be presented by medical experts and military men recently returned from Vietnam.

The legal precedent for the Hearings are the Nuremburg trials which were held at the end of World War II. At that time the U.S. participated in convicting Nazi officials on the bases of crimes against humanity. Since the U.S. government participated in framing these laws, it is only logical that it be accountable for its own violations of its statutes.

Part of the purpose of the hearings will be to mobilize a student contingent for a mass demonstration against the war to be held in New York on April 15. The demonstration is being planned by the Spring Mobilization Committee, which includes veteran pacifist A.J. Muste as national chairman, and Rev. James Bevel, one of the founders of SNCC and a close associate of Rev. Martin Luther King, as national director.

The aim of the Spring Mobilization Committee is to mass hundreds of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco on April 15. This would be the largest and most united display of opposition to the war to date.

Related

See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.