Toronto, Wednesday, February 16, 2000

---

Picture: French president Jacques Chirac with Jörg Haider in 1998

---

Churchill's dark deeds

by MARCUS GEE

WAS Winston Churchill a war criminal? Jörg Haider [above] thinks so. The Austrian right-winger once called Churchill "one of the greatest criminals" of the 20th century. He apparently has not changed his mind.

When asked about the remark the other day, after his party joined the Austrian government and ignited anger across Europe, he refused to back down. Churchill, he said, was responsible for many "bad things," including the Allied firebombing of the beautiful German city of Dresden in 1945.

It hardly seems necessary to reply to such a slur. Mr. Haider is an odious little man whose sympathetic remarks about Hitler and Nazism have disgraced his country. Churchill was the greatest figure of the 20th century, the man who rallied the Western world to oppose and finally defeat the Nazi evil. Mr. Haider's comments about Churchill are a transparent attempt to minimize the crimes of the Nazis by playing up the crimes of those who fought them, a standard trick of Hitler worshippers, Holocaust deniers and other bottom feeders of that type.

And yet the Dresden charge cannot easily be waved off. British and American bombers attacked Dresden on the night of Feb. 13-14, 1945. The city was crammed with German refugees, doubling its original population of 600,000. The Allies dropped 650,000 incendiary bombs, setting off a firestorm that engulfed 20 square kilometres of the ancient city and killed 135,000 men, women and children. Afterward, the German army collected huge piles of corpses and set up steel grills eight metres wide to burn them, 500 at a time, using wood and straw for fuel. The funeral fires were still burning two weeks later.

Dresden was not an abberation. Churchill decided as early as July, 1940, that mass bombing was a necessary and justifiable weapon in the fight against Hitler. British resolve grew after the London blitz and the destruction of Coventry. In 1942, when it became clear that selective bombing raids were not working, the British moved to "area bombing," in which hundreds of bombers flying at high altitudes blanketed German cities with incendiary bombs.

The aim was to destroy not just factories and railyards and other "military targets," but civilians. A British cabinet order of the time [February 1942] says that "the primary objective of your operations should now be focused on the enemy civil population and in particular industrial workers. The aiming points are to be built-up areas, not, for instance, dockyards or aircraft factories." Around 600,000 German civilians died in the bombing campaign.

A war crime? By the letter of the law, certainly. The most fundamental principle of the laws of war is that combatants must be distinguished from civilians. The Geneva Conventions, for example, outlaw not only deliberate attacks on civilans, but any "means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective." Dropping 650,000 firebombs on a city packed with defenseless civilians obviously qualifies.

A justifiable war crime? That is another question. Defenders of the bombing argue that it shortened the war and so saved lives in the end -- the same argument used to justify the atom bombing of Japan. Another thing needs to be said. As brutal as it was, the bombing has no parallel with Hitler's mass extermination of civilians. The two are on different moral tiers, and to suggest otherwise is to make excuses for Hitler.

Yet there is no doubt that Dresden and other attacks like it sent us down a slippery slope. Before the Second World War, world opinion considered the use of air power against innocent civilians to be barbarous. Picasso's painting Guernica captured the outrage of the whole world at the German bombing of the defenseless city during the Spanish civil war. By 1945, bombing cities was just another war tactic -- an inevitable step in the evolution of war.

That backward attitude is with us still. During last year's war over Kosovo. NATO bombers dropped countless tons of bombs on Yugoslav cities. No, these were not mass bombings, and, yes, NATO usually tried to minimize civilian casualties. All the same, a new human-rights report says that at least 500 civilians were killed -- more if you believe Yugoslavia's body count. NATO bombs hit a hospital; they hit a crowded bridge on market day; they hit a broadcast centre full of journalists; they hit a column of fleeing refugees.

War crimes? It depends on how you read the law. A moral problem? Clearly. The aerial bombing of populated cities is not a legitimate tactic in war and should never have become accepted as such. Until we learn that, Dresden's shadow will hang over all of us.