Stefan Andersson | Author Artist Lecturer

Research plan and book proposal

The People’s Opinion and International Law: The International War Crimes Tribunal; Background, Preparation, Implementation, Reactions and Influence.

The first session of the International War Crimes Tribunal – the so called ”Russell Tribunal”, “Russell-Sartre Tribunal” or ”The Vietnam Tribunal” – took place in Stockholm from May 2 to May 10 1967. A second session was held in Roskilde, Denmark, in the fall of the same year between November 20 and December 1.

The Russell Tribunal is not only a unique event in Swedish history, it was also the first of its kind, and it has inspired other Permanent Peoples’ Tribunals and International Citizens’ Tribunals. The purpose of the tribunal was to make an impartial judgment of the Americans’ warfare in Vietnam based on the reports of eyewitnesses and the judgments of internationally known lawyers, physicians and other experts. The tribunal was to decide if the Americans had committed: 1) Crime against the peace; 2) War crimes; 3) Crimes against humanity.

Originally Russell and his co-workers applied to hold the tribunal in London, but the British government led by Wilson could not allow this because of its ties to the US. Russell then turned to Paris, but was denied by De Gaulle, who did not want to offend the US. He then turned to Switzerland, but the tribunal was not welcome there either.

In this situation Russell turned to Sweden and its Prime Minister, Tage Erlander, who from the beginning was not sympathetic but on formal grounds could not refuse Russell’s request. The tribunal was to be held at the People’s House (Folkets Hus) under the condition that no political or military leader was to be offended.

One reason why Erlander took a negative viewpoint was that Sweden had been in secret negotiations with the governments of the US and North Vietnam to end the war. Erlander did not want to jeopardize these negotiations and encouraged Russell to find another place. Russell, however, insisted and Erlander could not prohibit the tribunal from being held in Sweden.

Because of the tribunal’s unofficial status and the political views of its members many considered it to be a meaningless event. The international media was on the whole extremely negative about the tribunal, and it received an especially bad press in Britain and the United States. The French press provided something of an exception to this rule, but in Sweden only the newspaper Aftonbladet was at all sympathetic to Russell’s initiative.

The main section of my investigation is part two (see p.3), but I will also consider the role of the international media, its criticism of the tribunal and how it supported the war as long as possible. This worked until Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam in 1968 and reported back to the American people what he saw. President Johnson realized that when he lost Cronkite, he also lost the support of the American middle class, and eventually the war itself.

As the war went on and the protests increased, the media switched sides, particularly after Nixon decided to bomb Hanoi around Christmas 1972. After Olof Palme had delivered his now famous “Christmas Speech”, President Nixon called home his ambassador to Sweden and refused to receive a Swedish ambassador to the US. This situation lasted for almost two years.

There has not been much written about the Russell Tribunal either in Sweden or elsewhere. This is regrettable, and the purpose of this project is to fill that gap. Most of the relevant material can be found at The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. In the so called. ”Second Russell Archives” there are a large number of documents from the 1960s that have not been used by any researchers so far, except the Klinghoffers.

The purpose of my planned visit to Bertrand Russell Archives is to continue to go through all the material related to part two: preparations, implementation and, reactions to the Tribunal. Below is an outline of the book I’m planning to write: