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
