If he had now been ordered to sink an unsuspecting Iranian warship in international waters near Sri Lanka with a torpedo, “I would probably have struggled with my conscience,” says Robin Snouck Hurgronje, a former submarine commander in the Royal Navy.
“The crucial issue is: if it were a legitimate war, and you receive such an order, you carry it out,” says Snouck Hurgronje (77), who commanded the submarines Tijgerhaai and Zwaardvis, among others. “But this war, as it is called, is based on the whims of Trump and Netanyahu.”
On Wednesday afternoon it was announced that an American attack submarine torpedoed the Iranian frigate Dena. After an emergency message from the ship about eighty kilometers off the coast, the Sri Lankan navy found 32 mostly seriously injured survivors in the sea in the early morning and found 83 dead. In total, the Dena, the newest frigate of the Iranian navy, had about 180 people on board.
The first enemy ship sunk by a torpedo since World War II
“It thought it was safe in international waters,” said Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, at a press conference. Infrared images through the periscope show the Iranian ship as a blast lifts it out of the water, before falling back and sinking, the bow last above water. “A silent death,” said Hegseth. “The first enemy ship sunk by a torpedo since World War II.”
Hegseth could have mentioned at least three other cases since 1945. The best known is that of the Argentinian light cruiser Belgrano, which was sunk by the British submarine Conqueror in the 1982 Falklands War. 323 sailors lost their lives. “But that was a formal war situation and then it is a different story,” says Snouck Hurgronje.
Maritime law
That is also what Dutch lawyers with knowledge of maritime law say. There was a clear legal basis for the sinking of the Belgrano, says emeritus professor of international law Fred Soons. “The British exercised their right of self-defense.”
It is certain that there is now an armed conflict between the United States and Iran, even without formal declarations of war. “But once you resort to violence, you have to judge this incident based on the law of war,” says Soons. “Within this, you may attack the destructive capacity of an opponent anywhere in the world, as long as it is not in the territorial waters of a non-involved country.”
According to him, the big question is whether the American-Israeli attacks on Iran that started on Saturday were “even lawful”.
The Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the port of Rio de Janeiro.
Photo Antonio Lacerda / EPA
Officials in Sri Lanka recover the bodies of Iranian sailors from the Dena.
Photo Eranga Jayawardena / Associated Press
Marten Zwanenburg, professor of military law at the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch Defense Academy, agrees. The basic conditions for using violence are clear, he says. “There must be a UN resolution, the country involved must agree to it, or there must be self-defense. The first two conditions are missing and the US is now trying to stretch the third to breaking point.”
In any case, violence must be “necessary and proportionate.” “On the first condition you will already get wet, and certainly in the case of this ship,” Zwanenburg thinks.
Snouck Hurgronje calls the torpedoing of the Dena a “very far-reaching act and a terrible decision”, also because it happened “so far outside the Persian Gulf”. “I would rather not imagine the pressure that the American commander was exposed to,” he says.
Also read
What we know so far about the war in Iran – in eight maps and graphs
