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An international tribunal should be set up to investigate the US atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to Sergey Naryshkin,
speaker of Russia's Duma, or lower house of parliament, Russian state news
agency Itar-Tass reports.
Speaking at an event in Moscow's State Institute of International
Relations, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the bombings on Wednesday
evening, Naryshkin, one of Russia's most influential officials and a member of
President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, criticised international law
experts, intellectuals, historians and military science experts for failing to
come to a definitive stance in the aftermath of the Second World War on whether
the use of atomic weapons against Japan was acceptable.
"Nobody should allow themselves to forget the tragedy of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki," Naryshkin said. He added that if those responsible for the
bombings were not punished "there could be very, very serious
consequences."
Russia currently has a nuclear arsenal of around
4,500 warheads—the second largest
in the world after the U.S.—after the two countries competed in a nuclear arms
race during the Cold War. The then-Soviet Union brought the world to the brink
of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Putin recently announced
that 40 new intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads
would be deployed this year.
The Duma speaker went on to accuse the U.S. of trying to whitewash the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the sake of their own "national
prestige" and reputation, likening them to the operations which had been
the subject of international tribunals such as the crimes committed by the
Japanese military regime and the Nazis.
War crimes committed by winning sides in the Second World War is a
contentious issue as the USSR's Red Army is also alleged to have committed
atrocities, which have not been the subject of a tribunal. One of the most
notable examples of this is the so called Katyn massacre, in which thousands of
captured Polish officers were executed near Smolensk, after the Soviet Union
and Germany invaded the country from either side.
The Kremlin denied culpability at the time and it was not until the fall
of the Soviet Union that president Mikhail Gorbachev handed Poland papers which
"indirectly but convincingly" proved the Soviet secret police was behind the executions.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings remain the first and only instances
of the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. In the space of three days in August
1945, U.S. forces dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The instant impact devastated around a third of both cities and
eventually killed a total of 135,000 people. The BBC reported at the time that U.S. forces also dropped leaflets in other
parts of Japan, warning that similar attacks would follow across the country if
Japan's emperor Hirohito did not officially surrender. On 14 August, Japan
surrendered, ending the Second World War with Allied victory.
"From my point of view," said Naryshkin, who also heads
Russia's Historical Society, "one thing is indisputable—the method chosen
by the USA in 1945, was not founded on humanitarian considerations nor on
military necessity."
Naryshkin conceded that the Japanese regime had committed atrocities
against civilians in China, Korea and other states in the Far East during the
Second World War, but argued that "humanity gave a civilised response to
such behaviour, such as the Tokyo and Khabarovsk tribunals," referring to
the war crimes trials against Japan's military leadership.
"However the civilian population of the cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki had no relation to these [war] crimes," Naryshkin added.
"[The bombings] have not become the subject of an international tribunal
so far. But when it comes to crimes against humanity there is no statute of
limitations."
Last month world governments appealed to the U.N. to determine who was
responsible for downing the civilian airplane MH17 over eastern Ukraine last
summer through an international tribunal. On that occasion Russia used its
position as a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council to block the proposal. Earlier the Kremlin issued a statement criticising the impartiality of
the international investigation into the downing of the plane, as Western
intelligence suspect that the jet was shot down by pro-Russian rebels, possibly
using a Russian-made Buk missile.
Naryshkin also compared U.S.-led air operations in Yugoslavia in the
1990s and subsequently in Iraq, Libya and Syria to the atomic bombings in 1945,
listing them as further examples of Western "disregard for human
life."
Another Russian member of parliament from president Vladimir Putin's
United Russia party, Franz Klintsevich, told Tass that he is already preparing
to table an appeal from Russia's Afghan war veteran society to the Ministry of
Defence, asking for an international tribunal to be set up into the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bombings.
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