On March 24, 1945, the United States Navy established the War Crimes Tribunals Program in Guam, an American unincorporated territory and the southernmost island in the Marianas archipelago. The first of its kind under naval jurisdiction, the War Crimes Tribunals Program prosecuted individuals accused of "Class B" war crimes, broadly defined as "conventional atrocities" or "crimes against humanity." The accused subjects often included Asians and Pacific Islanders who worked as interpreters, police officers, and soldiers for the Japanese military in Micronesia. In this talk, I examine the ways in which the Navy construed and applied the concepts of law and territory, crime and punishment, in the aftermath of the war and in the making of the tribunals. The threshold of incarceration and militarism, I argue, provided the foundational logics of violence through which these and other military tribunals are made possible, or "exceptional." This threshold, or liminal zone of sovereignty, persists into the contemporary global moment because of America’s self-projection as a democratic nation-state, a process by which military tribunals have proven central to its historical expansion and development.
Keith L. Camacho is a Chamorro scholar from the Mariana Islands. He received a Ph.D. in History and an M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Currently, Keith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His area of expertise concerns the study of colonization, decolonization and militarization in the Pacific Islands, with an emphasis on indigenous narratives of survival and sovereignty. |
