June 26, 2005

World Tribunal on Iraq- Istanbul

The WTI as an Experimental Assertion

Ayça Çubukçu

In order to discuss the future actions and aspirations that the World Tribunal on Iraq may spark, it is necessary to put the global political field in which it was founded in perspective.

Within the last two years, one of the main aims of the World Tribunal on Iraq has been to register a counter-history so that what has happened in Iraq is never to be forgotten. Shall we however be satisfied with this?

Since even before the war on Iraq had begun, millions of individuals, and thousands of organizations and movements have participated in the numerous protests that have taken place around the world, while countless articles and petitions, chants, songs and poems have circulated against the war on Iraq. The World Tribunal on Iraq has been a project to arising from and aiming to organize this reaction --this rejection-- in order to express and strengthen the anti-war resistance collectively and globally by embedding the opposition to this outrageous war in concrete evidence and testimony.

However, even if the WTI achieves its goal of strengthening the global anti-war movement, what can it hope to concretely accomplish now and in the future? After all, some say, neither the global anti-war movement, even as expressed on February 15, 2003, nor the World Tribunal on Iraq has any so-called “enforcement power.” At his point, it is possible to pose some further questions: where today is the global political field? Furthermore, within the global political field, except for that of (some) nation-states and the few international institutions that are nonetheless predicated on the consent of nation-states for their operation, whose “enforcement power,” and under which conditions, can we talk about?

The records of the horrifying war and occupation that the Iraqi people have been bloodily forced into -- these records that are kept with integrity, labor and care-- as well as the collective global subject keeping the records through the World Tribunal on Iraq have the potential to contribute to the perpetual metamorphosis of international law. However, regarding the potential and direction of this metamorphosis, the global Tribunal network forms a broad and diverse political spectrum. Among the ones who support the World Tribunal on Iraq, there are those who find it sufficient that international law and its institutions be amended within its existing framework. In the other end of the spectrum, there are those who hold that as long as the international political field and international law are constituted on the basis of nation-states --at this juncture, operating through the presupposition of the legal impunity of the most powerful nation-states-- it is mistaken to hold naïve expectations with regard to the potential transformation of international law and its institutions. Further still, it needs to be debated whether the so-called international community --often cited as the source of such legal transformations-- is really effective and in which ways and by whom it is open to manipulation.

Having thus situated the global political field, it can be asserted that perhaps, the political value of the World Tribunal on Iraq is not to be located in its potential “enforcement power,” but in the fact that it constitutes, on the one hand, a civil global collective subject acting as a counterpart in the field of force of nation-states, and on the other hand in the field of action and imagination that the World Tribunal on Iraq has created and will be creating in the future.

Without a doubt, Istanbul constitutes both an end and a beginning for the World Tribunal on Iraq. There are diverse hopes within the global World Tribunal network on how the WTI process -- and we may say, experiment-- might take shape in the future. What is clear is that one of the next steps with utmost priority is the dissemination of the findings of the Tribunal in such a way as to be employed in the service of strengthening the global anti-war movement. It is difficult to foresee precisely all of the ways in which the World Tribunal on Iraq will be drawn on -- the ways in which it will be received as a call to further action and resistance against the illegal and illegitimate war on Iraq.  To affirm a few, the persistent, organized will and the findings constituted through the World Tribunal on Iraq can be used in applications to the International Criminal Court; in the assertions of conscientious objectors around the world; in calls to boycott corporations profiting from the countless opportunities for exploitation created by the war Iraq, as well as in local and global anti-war campaigns.

Finally, as long as our current predicament -- namely the legal impunity enjoyed by the United States and the paralysis of international institutions in the face of the invasion and occupation of Iraq --- this predicament from which the World Tribunal on Iraq has emerged does not change in revolutionary ways, it is possible to distinguish the World Tribunal on Iraq itself and similar initiatives it will inspire in the future as a new way of resistance expressing the desire for global peace and justice and the creativity that this desire gives birth to. Although in these shameful times, we may be especially reminded that, as Walter Benjamin observes, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” the future-- we know-- is as open as ever. Further, it is ours -- in hope and solidarity.