The ICC (Imperialists’ Criminal Court) DIE HARD III Herman Tiu Laurel 09/05/2011

The ICC (Imperialists’ Criminal Court)

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

09/05/2011
The African Union (AU), a body representing 54 nations of that vast continent, called on all its members last July 1 to disregard the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Libya’s Moammar Kadhafi. Jean Ping, Gabonese diplomat and current chairman of the AU’s administrative branch, referred to the ICC as “discriminatory” in that it only goes after alleged crimes committed in Africa while ignoring the many serious ones perpetrated by the West in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Before that, there was already increasing criticism in Africa against the ICC, a court repeatedly denounced as an instrument of neocolonialism. A few years earlier (in 2009), an arrest warrant issued by the ICC against President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan was similarly rejected by the AU. Bashir had even challenged the order by traveling all over Africa, tempting Western powers to coax any of the AU member-states to arrest him — something that the union obviously did not capitulate to.

Elsewhere within the AU, the ICC also managed to perform a similar stunt. In Côte d’Ivoire, a year after its elections were marked with massive fraud by the camp of former IMF executive-turned-presidential candidate Alassane Ouatara, which was used by the West, led by France, as a pretext for storming the presidential palace of then incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo to effect his arrest, the ICC is now threatening to launch investigations into alleged post-election violence there.

Still, the earliest target and victim of the ICC was Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. The late journalist Olley Maruma wrote about this in the Southern Times of South Africa: “Following the defeat of Serbia, Milosevic was abducted by Nato commandos and taken to the Hague… That the United States, which is not a member of the ICC, was the principal organizer of Milosevic’s trial at the Hague, exposed the fraud of the entire enterprise.”

In his article, “ICC — ‘Western kangaroo court,’” Maruma tells us that “In Africa, the International Criminal Court at the Hague is considered by many to be a Western kangaroo court set up to hound, jail and silence African and Third World leaders who refuse to submit to the grip of Western hegemony and domination…

One hundred and eight states are members of the court. Among those that have refused to join are China, Russia, India and the United States… The widely-held negative view of the ICC was neatly summed up by Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, the president of the United Nations General Assembly… (who) dismissed the ICC’s indictment on Al-Bashir as ‘absurd and politically motivated… (noting that) A few people with a very dubious past and with very little credibility pretend to know better than the whole African Union’… (which is why he argued) that for international justice to regain its credibility, ‘it would be important to begin by indicting people from powerful nations, not to pick on the smaller ones.’”

The powerful, and to be precise Western, nations have murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, now, in Libya (with 30,000 bombs dropped in 8,000 runs). The numbers of innocent lives these Western powers have killed cannot be matched by the military capacity of those tyrants even if they had the desire to.

All told, the ICC is a kangaroo court of the West; as a forum for justice, it is a fraud. The West’s crimes abound with impunity, yet there are a number of Filipino personalities still praising the ICC, such as writer Ceres Doyo or legal “luminaries” Raul Pangalangan and Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago. Could this be motivated by what many believe is a naked ambition (of some) to join the ICC bench to jump in cadence to the march of Western imperialism?

An honest look at the record of the ICC is all that is required to see the truth behind it, as our 18-year-old scholar and regular radio text-discussant Angeline Lim messaged to us: “The ICC is running after Kadhafi, but the likes of Kissinger, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, and particularly Cheney who was responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison tortures (one of the most disturbing pictures leaked out was that of a detainee tied to a wooden crate with electric wires attached to his private parts, hands and feet), have clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and human rights, yet they are untouchable; this clearly shows the ICC is only after select enemies.”

And in another text she said: “Gen. Wesley Clark, commander of the Nato air war against Serbia, is liable under the Geneva Convention of ’49 for the illegal bombing of water treatment plants, hospitals, and schools which killed 2,000 while Bosnian Gen. Obrenovic who led the assault on Srebrenica was turned over to the war crimes court in the Hague. This is the same situation for the ICC against Milosevic.” Quite simply, Angeline is able to easily discern the truth from historical facts as she is untainted by a fraudulent mind.
Back here at home, the Philippines also has its own miniscule secessionist minority — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), along with its rogues such as commander Umbra Kato — that has continued to sow violence and terror to attract international attention and invite foreign intervention.

Catering to the foreign powers seeking entry into our areas of natural wealth, particularly oil and gas in Mindanao and the Sulu Sea, the MILF, as did the Kosovo Liberation Army and the al-Qaeda in Libya (both Nato instruments), is sure to carry out civilian massacres to compel the Philippine military to react and bring about collateral damage, which will serve as basis for an ICC indictment. Philippine police and military forces are then going to be stymied or criminalized, both resulting in the debilitation of the authority and sovereignty of the RP government.

As Western powers through the ICC have done this before, they will surely do it again to regain as many lost ground since World War II, all in the advancement of their neocolonial resurgence this century.
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8 on “Sci-Tech Innovations: Key to Filipinos’ Economic Emancipation” with DoST NCR Director Tess Fortuna and DoST innovators; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110905com5.html