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By Amb. Kanwal Sibal

6 July 2023 – India has successfully chaired the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit despite many diplomatic challenges, including having to hold a virtual summit due to the prevailing circumstances.

10 July 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Tony Kevin

The forthcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius on July 11-12  seems already infected by a strange policy fatalism.

5 July 2023 – Hope of a policy breakthrough in Vilnius, Lithuania towards peace in Ukraine, spearheaded by the war-weary East Europeans, seems to have drained away.

There is general acceptance in NATO that the Ukrainian summer offensives in Zaporizhie and again now in Bakhmut have failed to dent Russian defences, with horrific mortality in Ukrainian manpower and enormous destruction of Western-supplied equipment.

The West seems content to let Zelensky go on wasting Ukraine’s increasingly scarce military-age men in a process described by writer Raúl Ilargi Meijer as NATO’s assisted suicide of the Ukrainian nation.

The NATO unspoken strategy seems to be: we know Russia is inevitably winning in Ukraine, but we will make sure we and our Kiev proxies destroy as much as possible of Ukraine’s manpower and national wealth before Russia takes control of the country.

The Kakhovka dam is gone, and what is left of Zaporizhie Nuclear Power Plant seems increasingly at risk of West-assisted Ukrainian sabotage. These two huge assets were the pivots of Ukraine’s industrial and agricultural potential and wealth.

When Russia wins political control over the ruined land of Ukraine, and after it repudiates Western carpetbagging claims to asset ownership there, it will face a huge rebuilding job, comparable to the situation the Soviet Union faced in Ukraine after the 1944-45 vengeful scorched-earth actions by the retreating Nazi divisions.

Meanwhile, Germany under its supine Scholz leadership is de-industrialising, following the loss of cheap Russian gas after the U.S.-conducted sabotage of the Baltic pipelines. German industrialists are taking their capital, management skills and intellectual property elsewhere. France is riven by serious rioting. The EU is distracted and aimless. Western Europe is shrinking in global influence.

In the U.S., only the military-industrial-information complex is doing well. Infrastructure continues to decay. The middle class is eroding and confused. The Democrats are the party of liberal imperialism and the Republicans are still riven between warmongers and America-first nationalist Trumpians. Who knows who will be the next U.S. president, and if he or she can arrest America’s relative decline.

Russia steadily makes reputational headway in what it now describes as the Global Majority (what used to be the Global South). There is an increasingly long queue of governments seeking to join BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The Russia-China strategic alliance is the linchpin of this growing robust and intellectually confident ideology of multipolarity which is attracting the attention of serious governments around the world.

Russia’s task is to win in Ukraine, as it is doing, but without destroying its reputation with China and the Global Majority.

Russia is bringing down the curtain on 320 years since Peter the Great began trying to make Russia a member of European-Anglophone Club. Russia will never trust the West again.

The history of Western diplomatic treachery during the last 32 years since the 1991 end of Soviet Communism has shown Russians that the U.S.-U.K. agenda was always about much more than defeating Communism: it was about expanding American global hegemony and breaking up Russia as a competing world civilisational state.

There is enough evidence now to satisfy the Global Majority that U.S. regime change and controlling operations in Ukraine since 2013 have been above all cynically aimed at weakening and destabilising Russia. Remembering their own viciously exploited colonial history, the Global Majority are glad these Western efforts are failing.

The Vilnius NATO meeting will produce no new miracles of salvation for the doomed Kiev regime. There will be a lot of tired rhetoric about continuing to defend democratic Ukraine.

Nobody – speakers or listeners – will believe it .

Tony Kevin is a former Australian senior diplomat, having served as ambassador to Cambodia and Poland, as well as being posted to Australia’s embassy in Moscow.

10 July 2023

Source: transcend.org

By René Wadlow

7 July 2023 – There is currently a debate, at the highest foreign policy-making level in the U.S.A., concerning the delivery of cluster bombs to Ukraine in support of the ongoing counter offensive.  Ukraine military forces have used most of the cluster bombs they had.  It would take a good bit of time to manufacture new cluster weapons.  Thus, the request for cluster munitions from the U.S.A.  However, cluster weapons have been outlawed by a Cluster Weapons Convention signed by many states.

In a remarkable combination of civil society pressure and leadership from a small number of progressive states, a strong ban on the use, manufacture and stocking of cluster bombs was agreed by 111 countries in Dublin, Ireland on 30 May 2008.  However, bright sunshine casts a dark shadow.  In this case, the dark shadow is the fact that the major makers and users of cluster munitions were deliberately absent from the agreement: Brazil, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, and the U.S.A.

As arms negotiations at the United Nations go, the cluster bomb ban has been swift.  They began in Oslo, Norway in February 2007 and were often called “the Oslo Process.”  The negotiations were a justified reaction to their wide use by Israel in Lebanon during the July-August 2006 conflict.   The U.N. Mine Action Coordination Centre working in southern Lebanon reported that their density there is higher than in Kosovo and Iraq, especially in built-up areas, posing a constant threat to hundreds of thousands of people as well as to U.N. peacemakers.  It is estimated that one million cluster bombs were fired in south Lebanon during the 34  days of war, many during the last two days of war when a ceasefire was a real possibility.  The Hezbollah militia also shot rockets with cluster bombs into northern Israel.

Cluster munitions are warheads that scatter scores of smaller bombs.  Many of these sub-munitions fail to detonate on impact, leaving them scattered on the ground, ready to kill and maim when disturbed or handled.  Reports from humanitarian organizations have shown that civilians make up the vast majority of the victims of cluster bombs, especially children attracted by their small size and often bright colors.

The failure rate of cluster munitions is high, ranging from 30 to 80 per cent.  But “failure” may be the wrong word.  They may, in fact, be designed to kill later.  The large number of unexploded cluster bombs means that farm lands and forests cannot be used or used with great danger.  Most people killed and wounded by cluster bombs in the 21 conflicts where they have been used were civilians–often young.  Such persons often suffer severe injuries such as loss of limbs and loss of sight. It is difficult to resume work or schooling.

Discussions on a ban on cluster weapons had begun in 1979 during the negotiations in Geneva which led to the 1980 “Convention on Prohibition on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which May be Deemed to be Excessively  Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects.”  The indiscriminate impact of cluster bombs was raised by the representative of the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva and by myself for the Association of World Citizens.  My NGO text of August 1979 “Anti-Personnel Fragmentation Weapons ” called for a ban based on the 1868 St Petersburg Declaration and recommended the creation of “permanent verification and dispute-settlement procedures which may investigate all charges of the use of prohibited weapons whether in inter-State or internal conflicts and that such a permanent body include a consultative committee of experts who could begin their work without a  prior resolution of the U.N. Security Council.”

At the start of the review conference of the “Convention on Prohibition on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons ” then U.N. Secretary-General of the U.N. Kofi Annan called for a freeze on the transfer of cluster munitions – the heart of the current debate on U.S. transfers of cluster weapons to Ukraine.

There was little public outcry ot the use by Ukrainian forces of cluster weapons since they were fighting against a stronger enemy.  However, the debate in the U.S.A. may raise the awareness of the use of cluster weapons and lead to respect for the aim of the cluster weapon ban.

René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

10 July 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN 8 July 2023 (IDN) — “Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?” I am reminded of this quote from David Mitchell’s ‘Ghostwritten’ while reading how President Biden has defended his decision to provide Ukraine with banned cluster munitions, bypassing the US law and violating the international ban signed by his NATO allies.

Ahead of the NATO summit on 11-12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania, Mr Biden said, “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition” in the fight against Russian forces, and that it was a temporary move to hold Ukraine over until the production of conventional artillery rounds could be ramped up.

“It was a very difficult decision on my part—and by the way, I discussed this with our allies, I discussed this with our friends up on the Hill,” the US President said in an interview with CNN. “The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition,” reported the Washington Post.

“And so, what I finally did, I took the recommendation of the Defense Department to—not permanently—but to allow for this transition period,” he added.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg dodged a question on whether he believed it was wise for the United States to provide the weapons to Ukraine. “It is for individual allies to make decisions on the delivery of weapons and military supplies to Ukraine,” Mr Stoltenberg told journalists at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. “So this will be for governments to decide—not for NATO as an alliance.”

The Washington Post added: “Russia, US officials have noted, has been using its cluster munitions in Ukraine for much of the war. The Ukrainians have also used them, and President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pressing Mr Biden to supply him with more in order to flush out the Russians who are dug into trenches and blocking Ukraine’s counteroffensive.”

BBC asked the British Prime Minister about his position on the US decision. Rishi Sunak highlighted the UK was one of 123 countries that had signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the production or use of cluster munitions and discourages their use.

Spain’s Defence Minister Margarita Robles told reporters her country had a “firm commitment” that certain weapons and bombs could not be sent to Ukraine. “No to cluster bombs and yes to the legitimate defence of Ukraine, which we understand should not be carried out with cluster bombs,” she said.

But Germany, which is also a signatory of the treaty, said that while it would not provide such weapons to Ukraine, it understood the American position.

“We’re certain that our US friends didn’t take the decision about supplying such ammunition lightly,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin.

A story published in IDN on 6 July quoting President Biden is “under steady pressure from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky” to transfer banned cluster munitions, arguing that the munitions were “the best way to kill Russians who are dug into trenches and blocking Ukraine’s counteroffensive”.

Responding, the independent, nongovernmental Arms Control Association (ACA), said if he decides to give cluster munition, the US will be violating the Convention on Cluster Munitions–

Cluster munitions are designed to disperse or release explosive submunitions, each of which weighs less than 20 kilograms, and includes those explosive submunitions.

The US stockpile includes dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs), surface-to-surface warheads, and other types of older cluster munitions.

Given that cluster munitions disperse hundreds or even thousands of tiny but deadly bomblets, their use produces significant quantities of unexploded submunitions that can maim, injure, or kill civilians and friendly forces during, and long after, a conflict.

“Some types of lethal US and European military assistance to Ukraine, including cluster munitions, would be escalatory, counterproductive, and only further increase the dangers to civilians caught in combat zones and those who will, someday, return to their cities, towns, and farms,” warned Arms Control Association’s Executive Director Daryl G. Kimball.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has been reported saying that Ukraine has given “written assurances” that it would not use these cluster munitions on foreign soil, but to defend its territory, preserve its civilian population as much as possible. Le Monde’s US correspondent Piotr Smolar noted that a paper guarantee is of “relative value”. He added: How will this be determined, with such indiscriminate bombs?”

“Ukraine has also committed to mine clearing efforts once the conflict ends to further minimize the potential impact of the rounds on civilians,” says US Department of Defence (DOD) News. Ukraine has also committed to mine clearing efforts once the conflict ends to further minimize the potential impact of the rounds on civilians. “The US has provided more than $95 million in assistance for Ukraine’s demining efforts.”

The Biden administration has committed more than $41.3 billion in security assistance—weapons—to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. For the past year and a half, President Biden has been clear that we will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes”. Germany has also pledged to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes”.

The US and its NATO allies have assured that, while they will provide all the military equipment to facilitate Ukraine to stand up against Russia (and liberate its territory from Russian occupation?) but do everything possible to avoid the “NATO involvement” in the war.

What if Ukraine cannot retake its territories and the only way left is for some NATO countries’ armed troops to replenish Ukraine’s dwindling strength? [IDN-InDepthNews]

Ramesh Jaura is Editor-in-Chief of IDN, the flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate.

10 July 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change: Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake. Victory is assured.

The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by U.S. backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup, which ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic integration with the European Union, but not at the expense of economic and political ties with Russia. The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble.

But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant.

“First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its territory is teaching us lessons about how to improve the defenses of partners who are threatened by China. It is no surprise that senior officials from Taiwan are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia.

Third, most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American service members.”

Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into public consciousness, the media, which slavishly promotes these conflicts, drastically reduces coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By the time the U.S. concedes defeat, most barely remember that these wars are being fought.

The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos migrate from administration to administration. Between posts they are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations and the war industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves will seek to ignite a war with China. The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China. God help us if we don’t stop them.

These pimps of war con us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our self-immolation.

Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services.

Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy?

Wasn’t the nearly $150 billion in sophisticated military hardware, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged by the U.S., EU and 11 other countries supposed to have turned the tide of the war? How is it that perhaps a third of the tanks Germany and the U.S. provided were swiftly turned by Russian mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, air strikes and missiles into charred hunks of metal at the start of the vaunted counter-offensive? Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was originally known as the “spring offensive,” supposed to punch through Russia’s heavily fortified front lines and regain huge swathes of territory? How can we explain the tens of thousands of Ukrainian military casualties and the forced conscription by Ukraine’s military? Even our retired generals and former CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security officials, who serve as analysts on networks such as CNN and MSNBC, can’t say the offensive has succeeded.

And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia’s invasion took place last year?

How do we defend the decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban eleven opposition parties, including The Opposition Platform for Life, which had 10 percent of the seats in the Supreme Council, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament, along with the Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc? How can we accept the banning of these opposition parties — many of which are on the left — while Zelenskyy allows fascists from the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, as well as the Banderite Azov Battalion and other extremist militias, to flourish?

How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists” sweeping through Ukraine, given that 30 percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten city council members, media outlets, artists and foreign students? How can we countenance the decision by the U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and Moscow apparently being on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty?

I reported from Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 during the breakup of the Soviet Union.  NATO, we assumed, had become obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker in Ronald Reagan’s administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended beyond the borders of a unified Germany. We naively thought the end of the Cold War meant that Russia, Europe and the U.S., would no longer have to divert massive resources to their militaries.

The so-called “peace dividend,” however, was a chimera.

If Russia did not want to be the enemy, Russia would be forced to become the enemy. The pimps of war recruited former Soviet republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits.

It was universally understood in Eastern and Central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion was unnecessary and a dangerous provocation. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War is a business.

In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained and released by WikiLeaks — dated Feb. 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . .”

“Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . .” the cable read.  “Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if the western alliance had honored its promises not to expand NATO beyond Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained neutral. The pimps of war knew the potential consequences of NATO expansion. War, however, is their single minded vocation, even if it leads to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or China.

The war industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

9 July 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

On Friday, the Biden administration said it would send cluster munitions—weapons that scatter unexploded bomblets across a wide area, killing and maiming civilians for decades—to Ukraine.

Facing the failure of Kiev’s military offensive, the United States is desperately seeking to use the provision of ever more destructive and indiscriminate weapons to reverse its setbacks on the battlefield.

Critically, the announcement precedes next week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, at which the United States and NATO are planning to massively expand their involvement in the war. Driven into a corner by its miscalculations, the Biden administration is compelled to take ever more drastic measures.

The aim of the decision to use cluster bombs—regardless of its long-term impact on civilians—is to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible. The reasoning that led in the past to the use of Agent Orange and Napalm—and which will be used to sanction the use of tactical nuclear weapons—is presently at work.

The US, on the eve of Vilnius, is clearly sending a message to Russian president Vladimir Putin. NATO will stop at nothing.

In a briefing Friday announcing the move, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan justified the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as a means of staving off military disaster.

“There is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians because Ukraine does not have enough artillery.”

Sullivan made this statement a little over one month after Ukraine launched its spring offensive, which the American press had touted as an “Endgame for Ukraine,” leading, in the words of retired Gen. David Patraeus, to “significant breakthroughs.”

Instead, the offensive has produced a bloody debacle. Far from inflicting a crushing defeat on Russia, the Biden administration has been driven to one escalatory move after another in an effort to shore up the Ukrainian military.

“We recognize the cluster munitions creating risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance,” Sullivan said. “But we had to balance that against the risk” that Ukraine might “not have sufficient artillery ammunition.”

In other words, the Biden administration weighed the cost of killing and maiming generations of Ukrainian civilians against the benefits of killing more Russian troops. It decided that the deaths of Ukrainian children from unexploded ordnance was a sacrifice America’s oligarchy was willing to make.

Managing to outdo himself in total callousness, Sullivan added that Ukraine would have to be “de-mined regardless.”

Every line employed by the White House to justify sending these weapons of terror to Ukraine could be used to justify the deployment, or even use, of tactical nuclear weapons in the conflict. Yes, the White House would argue, nuclear fallout poses a risk to civilians, but this risk must be “balanced” against the risk of Russian military advances.

The stationing of US tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has already been directly raised by an American think tank. Moreover, the deployment and possible use of nuclear weapons in the conflict will no doubt be on the agenda at the upcoming summit in Vilnius.

Every official statement by the United States about its involvement in the war is justified on the basis that it is once again “saving” a country through military violence—this time Ukraine. But in sending cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine, the United States has made clear that this is nothing but a hollow pretext for pursuing its aim of prevailing over Russia and China in “great power competition.”

The very words used by the United States and its allies to condemn Russia’s alleged use of cluster bombs in Ukraine now fully apply to the US decision to send this weapon to Ukraine.

In February 2022, the US envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, accused Russia of using “cluster munitions” in Ukraine, “which are banned under the Geneva Convention” and have “no place on the battlefield.”

In March 2022, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “We have seen the use of cluster bombs… which will be in violation of international law.” He added, “We also have to make sure the International Criminal Court really looks into this.”

In fact, all of these denunciations of Russian actions on the part of the US and NATO were merely hypocritical pretexts for escalating US involvement in the war.

The decision by the United States to send cluster bombs to Ukraine exposes all of the pseudo-left defenders of US involvement in the war in Ukraine, including those in the Democratic Socialists of America who condemn “preemptive hostility to US imperialism,” as shameless apologists for the US military’s war crimes.

In fact, the US-led war against Russia in Ukraine is a war for American global hegemony, in which Ukrainians are mere cannon fodder. This is entirely in line with the series of criminal wars of aggression waged by the United States over the past half-century.

During the Vietnam War, the US dropped approximately 413,130 tons of cluster bombs in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Many of these submunitions failed to explode on impact and continue to pose a significant threat to civilian populations, leading to countless injuries and deaths decades after the end of the war.

During the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States regularly used cluster munitions to attack civilian areas, in what Amnesty International called “an indiscriminate attack and a grave violation of international humanitarian law.”

In Iraq, the devastation of cluster bombs was compounded by the use of depleted uranium munitions, which, according to one study, led the people of Fallujah to experience higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bombs in 1945.

During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, cluster bombs killed and injured hundreds of civilians and littered the countryside with deadly unexploded ordnance. The United States has been implicated in the use of cluster munitions via its support for Saudi-led forces in the Yemen conflict.

Over 110 countries have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which prohibits the use, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions. The United States, which has killed more people with cluster munitions than any other country, is not a signatory.

A 2008 report by the United Nations explains the devastating impact cluster munitions have on the populations where they are used by the United States and its allies:

Over three decades after cluster munitions were used in Laos and Vietnam, they continue to cause death and injury, disrupt the economic activities of ordinary people, and hamper the implementation of development projects there. Even rapid large-scale clearance efforts, such as those that have been implemented in Kosovo and Lebanon, cannot prevent cluster munition contamination from having an impact. In Kosovo, civilian casualties from cluster munitions are still being reported, and in Lebanon, despite clearance beginning immediately after the 2006 conflict, it could not prevent casualties among the population as they returned to their homes and livelihoods.

The report continues:

Submunitions can prevent or hinder the safe return of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) and hamper humanitarian, peace-building, and development efforts. Unexploded cluster munitions also pose a physical threat to humanitarian workers and peacekeepers.

The White House claims to have discussed and deliberated the move with the utmost care. The decision-makers would have been fully briefed on these known consequences of cluster munitions, and proceeded with them regardless.

Reporting on the decision by Biden to send the weapons, the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Biden has come under steady pressure from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who argues that the munitions—which disperse tiny, deadly bomblets—are the best way to kill Russians who are dug into trenches and blocking Ukraine’s counteroffensive to retake territory.”

The role of Zelensky in promoting a decision to send weapons that will maim Ukrainian children for generations sums up the role of his government, which serves as an instrument in enforcing the will of the NATO powers over the Ukrainian population.

This latest escalation by the United States must be seen as a warning. Washington will stop at nothing to prevent further military setbacks for its proxy force in Kiev and achieve its military goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. The same homicidal logic that justifies the deployment of depleted uranium rounds and cluster bombs will be used to justify even greater and more reckless crimes, from the direct entry of NATO into the war to the deployment and use of nuclear weapons.

9 July 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maung Zarni

As a lifelong activist & accidental genocide scholar – I trained as a sociologist of education and had no formal training in law or genocide studies –  I cannot be selective as to which population I remember, even if @UN #UnitedNations create a hierarchy of worth among human populations.”

All victims and survivors are fellow humans, whether I know their names or stories or not.  #srebrenicia I paid my Buddhist customary respect at the genocide memorial last year.  You cannot study genocides and atrocity crimes, out of necessity – because your own ethnic lot are perpetrators, like my situation as a Burmese –  or out of professional interrst – and not be emotionally effected by the subject matter.

Between 2013 and 2015, I spent 3 years conducting genocide education program which involved talking to the survivors in Cambodia and walking tours of killing fields – over 180 sites of mass killings in 4 years, as well as learning from legal experts at the Cambodian tribunal.   I even heard LIVE Khmer Rouge leaders pleading NOT guilty,  while sitting behind the glass wall in the audience gallery.

I heard  the stomach-turning genocide denial by Aung San Suu Kyi at the world’s court (of states) in the Hague in December before the 1st pandemic lockdown worldwide.   I paid multiple visits to Auschwitz, spoke at the biannual conference organised by Auschwitz Museum, and even produced a 50-mimutes film, “Auschwitz:  Lessons Never Learned”, with the able assistance from a Ukrainian filmmaker and his Uzbak colleague and director.  I recently spoke about the inconceivability of peace, truth or reconciliation in Myanmar at Melbourne’s Eco-Socialism Conference in Australia.

Sadly, countries/societies that perpetrate such heinous crimes did not end well, or did not return to normalcy of freedom, rights or bright future.   Many remain stuck in the vicious cycle of wars, and peacetime atrocities.   Sri Lanka, and Cambodia are two examples.  Myanmar is without a doubt one such country, after Sudan, where atrocities continue unabated. It is also a member of ASEAN, a regional bloc, with no regards for political or social rights,  concerns even for genocides (in its region, in Myanmar or Cambodia) , incomparably more impotent and without any principles to speak of, than EU or the African Union.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is another where the situation remains pregnant with pre-genicidal conditions, according to my local friends there.  Hope is an essential ingredient or fuel for grassroots activism.   But hope is typically constrained by the realities.  One ugly reality is outside interests tend to be too keen to rehabilitate genocidal organizations – if doing so advances there own organizations or state economic and strategic interests.

EU was financing Sudan’s recycling of the genocide militia – the Arab-dominated Janjaweed – as “border control” force, after the Sudan’s genocide (to prevent war, grinding poverty and drought-fleeing Africans from reaching the Fortress Europe). Myanmar’s genocidal regime of President Thein Sein was celebrated for opening up Burma as the last economic frontier (or “emerging market”).   Obama held up Myanmar as an example for Iran and N. korea to emulate!    ICG honored Thein Sein with its higest award.

Never mind that it was Thein Sein who officially declared the intent to commit the crime of mass deportation to the visiting   UNHCR head one Antonio Gueteress!  Future Sec. Gen did nothing.    Kofi Annan  shelved “the genocide cable” from Rwanda – because he knew his American Masters- Bill Clinton – M. Albright – had no concern or interest in the looming genocide of Rwandans, and he was promoted to the chief clerk of the UN, and the Norwegians even gave him the Nobel Peace prize.

UN continued with its time dishonoured tradition of promoting depraved and unprincipled bureaucrats or political appointees.   GUETERRESS got the top job, for ignoring the warnings of Rohingya genocide, straight from the horse’s mouth of reformist genocudaire!   Hope without any regards for such criminal realities is tantamount to delusions.

Prospects for genocides – note the plural – remain strong while fascist and militarist ideologies have increasingly become the order of the day, in many places in the world in 2023, including “Big Power” states.  Nazis even won elections in some places in Germany this year! Add the ecological crisis to these troubling global scenario and you get a pretty good idea of where we are heading as a human race.

Maung Zarni is a Burmese educator, academic, and human rights activist.

8 July 2023

By Eldar Emric

NEZUK, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — A solemn peace march started on Saturday through the forests in eastern Bosnia in memory of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since World War II.

The annual 100-kilometer (60-mile) march retraces a route taken by thousands of men and boys from the Bosniak ethnic group, made up primarily of Muslims, who were slaughtered as they tried to flee Srebrenica after it was captured by Bosnian Serb forces late in the 1992-95 war.

The march is part of several events preceding the commemorations on the actual date of the massacre on July 11.

Nearly 4,000 people joined this year’s march, according to organizers. The event comes as ethnic tensions still persist, with Bosnian Serbs continuing to push for more independence and their open calls for separation.

“I come here to remember my brother and my friends, war comrades, who perished here,” said Resid Dervisevic, who was among those who took this route back in 1995. “I believe it is my obligation, our obligation to do this, to nurture and guard (our memories).”

Osman Salkic, another Srebrenica survivor, said, “Feelings are mixed when you come here, to this place, when you know how people were lying (dead) here in 1995 and what the situation is like today.”

The war in Bosnia erupted in 1992 after the former Yugoslavia broke up and Bosnian Serbs launched a rebellion and a land grab to form their own state and join Serbia. More than 100,000 people died before the war ended in 1995 in a U.S.-brokered peace agreement.

In July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosniak males were separated by Serb troops from their wives, mothers and sisters, chased through woods around Srebrenica and killed. Bosnian Serb soldiers dumped the victims’ bodies in numerous mass graves scattered around the eastern town in an attempt to hide the evidence of the crime.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Bosnia’s carnage was considered the worst in Europe since WWII. There have been fears that the separatist policies of pro-Russian Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik could fuel further instability as the war rages in Ukraine.

Despite rulings from two U.N. courts, Dodik has denied that genocide took place in Srebrenica, even as the remains of newly identified victims are continuously being unearthed from mass graves. They are reburied each year on July 11, the day the killing began in 1995.

A U.N. war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, has sentenced to life in prison both the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and the ex-military commander Ratko Mladic for orchestrating the genocide.

So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been found and buried at a vast and ever-expanding memorial cemetery outside Srebrenica. The remains of 30 more victims will be laid to rest there on Tuesday.

8 July 2023

Source: apnews.com

By Edward Curtin

Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”

He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.

I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died  on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:

Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?

Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.

So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.

When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:

“Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.

So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

     I vote for the bang!

The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.

There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light .

A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..

Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.

Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.”

To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both.

Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are.  It frightened me.  It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth.  I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.

The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears.  Nuclear war was not one them. 

It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness.  As if Mad Magazine’s  Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?”  No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine.  We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”

Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:

At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?

That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience(isbn.nu).  He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.”  Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.

If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later.  Sooner is probable.  Nuclear weapons are very real.  They are poised and ready to fly.

If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools.  We are suicidal.

As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.”  That will be too late.  There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.

Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:

End nuclear weapons now before they end us.

Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.

Make peace with Russia and China now.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

*

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts.

7 July 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Iqbal Jassat

Pariah regimes are known to decay until they turn lifeless. South Africa under white minority rule is a perfect example. It stagnated both in morality and authority, despite claiming staunch Christian values and nuclear power.

Israel faces a similar ignominious end. As a replica of the South African National Party’s apartheid ideology, coupled with racist Zionism and underpinned by settler colonialism, Israel has reached the end of an inglorious reign.

Just as South Africa in its final throes committed horrendous atrocities in the foolish belief that the slaughter of anti-apartheid opponents would allow it to sustain its oppressive rule, Israel today is caught in the same rut.

Israel naively believes that possessing nukes along with a powerful army replenished with sophisticated weapons and having the back of the United States of America, makes it invincible.

The “go to hell” approach whereby it conducts daily rituals of cold-blooded assassinations has all the hallmarks of a rotten regime. Brute military force to punish Palestinians for daring to demand fundamental human rights epitomizes medieval tyranny.

As successive Israeli war criminals keep repeating blunders in pursuit of misplaced Jewish supremacy, they clearly are blinded by hate and prejudice against the indigenous Palestinian population of Muslims and Christians.

Foolhardy and stubborn adherence to policies that are not only in conflict with universally accepted norms of human rights but also at odds with divinely inspired religious and spiritual values is a mirror-reflection of the old South Africa.

Unlike rational understanding and acceptance of the inevitability of mistakes having an ability to come back to haunt, Israel persists doggedly to discriminate, oppress and punish Palestinians, with gusto and impunity.

Four decades ago in 1982, Israel miscalculated as it continues to do, by thinking that driving Yasser Arafat and his PLO fighters out of Beirut into exile in Tunisia, would annihilate Palestinian resistance.

In fact, Menachem Begin, an arch-terrorist responsible for genocidal acts resulting in ethnic cleansing, suggested during a speech as Prime Minister to the Knesset during the PLO’s expulsion, that Israel was on the verge of enjoying 40 years of peace.

Begin cited the Biblical passage “and the land was quiet for forty years,” saying it might well apply to Israel now that “the northern border threat had been dealt with.”

Exactly a repeat of South Africa’s false paradigm which Israeli leaders have followed since 1948: the narrative that applying military force will keep the colonial entity “safe and peaceful”.

The blunder of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon not only failed to bring “peace”, it resulted in forty years of painful consequences.

According to a Haaretz report, Zionist leadership failed to recognize and acknowledge that resistance to Israeli occupation in general and by the Palestinian movement, in particular, was much bigger than the PLO.

To its cost, Israel’s War on Lebanon saw the emergence of Hezbollah, a potent adversary of the colonial regime’s invasion and horrendous massacres in Sabra and Shatila among others.

And all the while in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, grievous atrocities committed by Israel against a defenseless population, sowed the seeds of the first Intifada in 1987 and the rise of Hamas.

Israel’s calculation of weakening the PLO by exiling Arafat backfired as dismally as apartheid South Africa’s war on the liberation movements. Imprisoning leaders of the freedom struggle such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Robert Sobukwe and cold-blooded execution of Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol, and many more cadres, failed to secure apartheid’s illegal reign.

Whether Israel assassinates journalists such as Shereen Abu Akleh; imprisons and tortures leaders of the Resistance; demolishes homes and destroys farmlands; raids, plunders and bombs Gaza; it cannot subdue Palestine’s spirited struggle to free itself from the yoke of Zionist brutality.

As South Africa learned so will Israel, that wielding military power to eliminate as many targets as it wants, will not attain “security” nor sustain any of Zionism’s ill-gotten gains.

Islamic Jihad’s successful thwarting of Israel’s unprovoked onslaught in Gaza, has allowed it to emerge victorious and an important component of Palestinian resistance.

Alongside Hamas and Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad has entrenched itself as a force capable to deter Israeli aggression. More importantly, the message it proclaims is that the Palestinian people will neither retreat nor surrender.

Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the South Africa-based Media Review Network.

22 August 2022

Source: palestinechronicle.com