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By Eric Zuesse

29 Nov 2019 – With every passing day, it becomes clearer that the military coup in Bolivia on November 10th was masterminded in Washington DC. This reality will create yet a new difficulty in relations between the U.S. regime and Mexico to its direct south, because the Mexican Government, under progressive President Lopez Obrador, took the courageous and very meaningful step of providing refuge to the U.S.-couped Bolivian President Evo Morales and therefore posed overtly a resistance to the U.S. dictatorship.

Unlike the U.S. itself, which has abandoned the substance of democracy while adhering to its fascist Supreme Court’s interpretations (distortions) of the original intent of the democratic America’s Founding Fathers in their U.S. Constitution, Bolivia’s imposed regime isn’t even nominally legitimate in any democratic sense, because it has abandoned that country’s Constitution, ever since it grabbed power there.

One of the first indications that this was another U.S. coup was that on November 10th, the New York Times, which along with the Washington Post is one of the regime’s two main mouthpieces, refused to call it a “coup” at all, though it obviously was. Headlining on November 10th with the anodyne “Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down”, they lied and alleged that “Mr. Morales was once widely popular” — as if there were any objective measures, such as polls, which indicated that he no longer was. Their concept of ‘democracy’ was like that of fascists everywhere: violent mob actions against a democratically elected Government. “Angry mobs attacked election buildings around the country, setting some on fire.” Far-right mobs are ‘democracy to ‘journalists’ such as at the New York Times.

The next day, November 11th, that fascist ‘news’-paper headlined an editorial “Evo Morales Is Gone. Bolivia’s Problems Aren’t.” Here is how they expressed their contempt for democracy: “When a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option. That is what the Bolivians have done.” ‘Bolivians’ — meaning there that extreme-rightist minority of Bolivia’s electorate. The NYT even had the gall to say contemptuously: “Predictably, Mr. Morales’s left-wing allies across Latin America, including President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, President-elect Alberto Fernández of Argentina and President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, joined by the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, cried ‘coup’.”

Britain’s BBC, on November 11th, was considerably more circumspect in their anti-democratic propaganda: for example, in this video, at 13:00, the BBC asks

“Why are so many of the people out there on the streets now then do you think [demonstrating against Morales]?”

and the respondent didn’t say that this is the way practically every CIA coup is done. So, the desired implication was left with gullible viewers, that this was an expression of a democracy instead of the expression of a fascist mob.

It was left to governments which are resisting U.S. rule to express more honestly, as the Turkish Government’s more honest propaganda-organ, the newspaper Yeni Safak, did finally on November 17th, “Bolivia’s Morales was overthrown by a Western coup just like Iran’s Mosaddeg”. Their columnist Abdullah Muradoğlu wrote:

There are indications that the U.S. was involved in the ousting of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in a military coup. Secret talks between American senators and Morales’ opponents were brought up before the elections on Oct. 20. The talks, which were leaked to the public, discussed action plans to destabilize Bolivia if Morales won the elections. It was stated that the Evangelical Church would support the coup attempt. The fact that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, known as “Tropical Trump”, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are passionate Evangelicals, points to the ideological link to the Evangelical architects of the Bolivian coup. …

Bolivia has abundant resources of tin, copper, silver, gold, tungsten, petroleum and uranium, as well as large quantities of lithium. Lithium is a strategic mine for space technology. Morales became the target of a pro-U.S. military coup, and policies aimed at allocating the country’s resources to the poor rather than a small group played an important role in his demise. …

But it wasn’t only foreign news-media but also a very few honest alternative-news media which were reporting the realities. For example, on November 11th, The Gray Zone headlined “Bolivia coup led by Christian fascist paramilitary leader and millionaire – with foreign support”. The next day, on November 12th, Moon of Alabama’s anonymous blogger bannered “Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia” and he summarized the popular democratically elected and re-elected overthrown leader Evo Morales’s enormously successful record of leadership there, such as:

During his twelve years in office Evo Morales achieved quite a lot of good things:

Illiteracy rates:
2006 13.0%, 2018 2.4%

Unemployment rates
2006 9.2%, 2018 4.1%

Moderate poverty rates
2006 60.6%, 2018 34.6%

Extreme poverty rates
2006 38.2%, 2018 15.2%

It’s no wonder, then, that Morales is so popular in Bolivia.

Then, further about the fascist character of the U.S.-imposed regime, Mint Press News headlined on November 18th, “Media Silent as Bolivia’s New Right-Wing Gov’t Massacres Indigenous Protesters”.

On November 19th, Peoples Dispatch bannered “Hatred of the Indian. By Álvaro García Linera”, and presented a statement by Linera, who was Morales’s Bolivian Vice President. He opened:

Almost as a nighttime fog, hatred rapidly traverses the neighborhoods of the traditional urban middle-class of Bolivia. Their eyes fill with anger. They do not yell, they spit. They do not raise demands, they impose. Their chants are not of hope of brotherhood. They are of disdain and discrimination against the Indians. They hop on their motorcycles, get into their trucks, gather in their fraternities of private universities, and they go out to hunt the rebellious Indians that dared to take power from them.

In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize motorized hordes with sticks in hand to punish the Indians, those that they call ‘collas’, who live in peripheral neighborhoods and in the markets. They chant “the collas must be killed,” and if on the way, they come across a woman wearing a pollera [traditional skirt worn by Indigenous and mestizo women] they hit her, threaten her and demand that she leave their territory. In Cochabamba, they organize convoys to impose their racial supremacy in the southern zone, where the underprivileged classes live, and charge – as if it were a were a cavalry contingent – at thousands of defenseless peasant women that march asking for peace. They carry baseball bats, chains, gas grenades. Some carry firearms. …

On November 26th, the Libya 360 blog headlined “Bolivia: they are killing us, comrades!” and reported:

We are receiving audios all the time, from different parts of Bolivia: Cochabamba, El Alto, Senkata, La Paz… They bring desperate cries from women, from communities that resist with dignity, under the murderous bullets of the military, police, and fascist groups armed by the oligarchies with the support of Trump, Macri, and Bolsonaro. They also bring voices that denounce, voices that analyze, voices that organize, voices that are in resistance. There are weeping voices that are remade in slogans. The united peoples will never be defeated!

The racist, fascist, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist coup d’etat seeks to put an end to all these voices, silence them, erase them, make them inaudible. The communicational fence seeks to crush and isolate the words of the people. The conservative, capitalist restoration, goes for lithium, goes for the jungle, goes for bad examples.

The voices continue to arrive. New spaces of communication are generated. The social and family networks, the community radio stations, the home videos made from cell phones are functioning by the thousands. It is heartbreaking to hear bullets. To see their journey through the flesh, invading the bodies that rise from all humiliations. It generates anger, impotence, indignation, rage. …

On the same day, that same blog bannered “The People Will Not Allow the Coup in Bolivia, says Venezuelan Ambassador”. This opened:

One of the first ‘promises’ made by the self-proclaimed, de-facto government of opposition senator Jeanine Áñez was to “hunt down” ex-minister Juan Ramón Quintana, Raúl García Linera – brother of vice-president Álvaro García Linera -, as well as the Cuban and Venezuelan people that live in Bolivia.

The threat was publicly declared by the interior minister Arturo Murillo, designated by Áñez.

Later on, the communications minister of the de facto government, Roxana Lizárraga, accused Cuban and Venezuelan diplomats of being responsible for the violence unleashed in the country.

The statements came after an attack on the Venezuelan diplomatic office in La Paz on November 11. Armed paramilitaries surrounded the embassy with explosives and threatened to invade the building.

However, the aggression did not begin with the coup. According to Crisbeylee González, who served as the Venezuelan ambassador in Bolivia for more than 10 years, since 2008, the embassy has suffered threats from the organizations in opposition to Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera.

During the days of tension, Crisbeylee, who is also a personal friend of Morales, decided to protect her team and she returned to her country.

On November 17, the Venezuelan diplomatic staff, made up of 13 functionaries and their family members, flew with the Venezuelan state company Conviasa from La Paz to Caracas.

Upon returning to her country, the ambassador spoke to Brasil de Fato and denounced the terror she suffered in the last couple of days.

Brasil de Fato:

How did you all take the news that you would have to leave the country? Was there any hostility before the coup?

Crisbeylee González:

For a while now, the opposition has talked about a “Chavista bunker” referring to the Venezuelan embassy, where we would supposedly be “ideologically orienting” the Bolivian people’s movements and youth. They even talked about us supposedly exerting pressure on Evo so that he would not abandon the socialist, Bolivarian proposal.

There were always certain times when the xenophobia increased, especially during elections. Every time that there were elections or a coup attempt, the principal target is always of course president Evo Morales but right after that, it’s the Venezuelan embassy. The diplomatic mission has always been an element that must be combated.

Since 2012 when there was a coup attempt by the police, they began to say that our embassy carried out military training with the Bolivians. A very similar discourse to what was created in Chile against the Cubans during the rule of Salvador Allende.

And with this, they were able to create a strong expression of xenophobia within the Bolivian middle classes against Venezuelans. The media also helped to create this adverse discourse against Venezuelans.

In these past couple of days [since the coup], one of the first things that they did was to say that the Venezuelans had to leave and that they were going to attack the Venezuelans. Before the elections on October 20, they already talked about attacking the embassy. …

The next day, on November 27th, they headlined “The U.S. Launches Itself in the Most Violent Way Imaginable to Definitively Seize Bolivia”. They interviewed Argentine sociologist Atilio Boron, one of the most internationally renowned political analysts today, so that in just three questions he can give us his vision of the crisis Bolivia is going through.

How would you characterize the coup d’état in Bolivia?

Without a doubt, the coup d’état in Bolivia is part of the tradition of the old military coups sponsored by the United States since the end of World War II. However, this practice dates back even further, as the history books show us. That means that the soft coup that was applied against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, Lugo in Paraguay and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, has been abandoned and the old formulas have returned. In Bolivia, the old formulas were applied, because in reality there was no possible propagandistic basis for the coup. There was no fraud in Bolivia and therefore the OAS avoided using that expression, instead making euphemistic recommendations.

Furthermore, recent studies from the United States convincingly prove that such fraud did not exist. The University of Michigan study (which is the most important center for electoral studies) confirms this. However, the coup plan was not going to stop in the face of these details. They wanted to get Evo out and take revenge. It was a very clear lesson against those Indians who, as they did in 1780, revolted against the Spanish viceroyalty. Somehow what is happening now is a replay of Túpac Katari’s deed. The scenarios have changed and imperialism is different, but the essence is the same. And now, as yesterday, it is being repressed with unprecedented ferocity. …

On November 28th, Peoples Dispatch and Libya 360 simultaneously headlined “Bolivia: What Comes After the Coup?” and opened:

It has been over two weeks since the coup d’état which forced the resignation and exile of President Evo Morales and Vice-president Álvaro García Linera. Since then, thousands of working-class and Indigenous Bolivians have been resisting on the streets the coup and the illegitimate government of Jeanine Áñez. They have been met with extreme violence from the Armed Forces and the National Police, over 30 have been killed, hundreds injured and hundreds have been arrested.

On Monday night, a new agreement was announced reached between the de facto government of Áñez and the legislators from the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) to hold elections in the country in the next 3-4 months.

Peoples Dispatch spoke to Marco Teruggi, an Argentine sociologist and journalist who spent several weeks in Bolivia before and after elections were held in order to understand the agreement reached on elections and the state of resistance in the country.

Peoples Dispatch:

Starting with the most recent, what do you think about the agreement that MAS made with the de facto government of Jeanine Áñez? Did they have another option? Was there enough force on the streets and in the Assembly to achieve anything else?

Marco Teruggi:

The first thing to keep in mind is that in the design of the coup d’état, from the beginning, the possibility of an electoral solution was always contemplated in order to gain legitimacy.

If you had to arrange it in steps, there is the first step which is the overthrow, a second step which is the creation of a de facto government, and all of this accompanied by persecution, repression and massacres. The third moment is the call for elections and the fourth moment is when the elections themselves happen.

This was always proposed in the basic design, it was never about an old-style coup d’état where a de-facto government is installed for an undetermined amount of time, but precisely part of its presentation was to show itself as a democratic process, recognized internationally, under the condition that later they would go to elections.

It was always expected, the question was in what moment, with what conditions, both for the coup supporters and for those who are confronting it. In this sense, this issue was being discussed in the Assembly, where MAS has a majority, and as they had been announcing, they gave the OK for an agreement, in law, to call for elections, wherein the results of the elections of October 20 are also annulled.

I think that just as it was clear that the coup strategy counted with an electoral resolution to legitimize itself, it also was clear early on that the strategy of the MAS legislators was to hold these elections in the most favorable conditions possible. Basically that MAS could present itself in the elections, which it achieved, and with guarantees for Evo, not to participate, but to prevent political-juridical persecution. And also the retreat of the soldiers, for them to return to their barracks, and that the decree which exempts them from penal responsibility in operations of “re-establishing order” is withdrawn.

As such, it is not surprising that MAS has said yes to the elections because it was not going to be possible to remove Áñez through street pressure, even though the actions on the streets conditioned the initial strategy of the coup. It is very important to keep this in mind because otherwise, one could think that MAS proposed a change of tactics, of strategy. But no, it was always the electoral solution, and either way, the streets were an important component to accelerate this process on both ends. …

So, in short: rigged ‘elections’ will be held, in which Evo Morales is to be excluded, and in which there will be no repercussions against the U.S.-stooge-regime participants if their side fails to win those ‘elections’. The Bolivian people won’t have any legal right to hang the coupsters. The U.S. regime will see to that.

___________________________________________

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, of Christ’s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

2 December 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

Interview by Jens Glüsing

28 Nov 2019 – Bolivia’s long-time president, Evo Morales, has fled to exile in Mexico. What led to his departure and the conditions under which he would consider returning.

Morales, 60, was Bolivia’s first indigenous president. The former head of the coca-farmers’ union is a symbolic figure among the Latin American left. His tenure as president began in 2006 and lasted until his forced resignation two weeks ago. Election observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) found “irregularities” in his fourth election on October 20, which has led to violent unrest. Last week, the military called for him to step down. Fearing for his life, Morales fled into exile in Mexico and he is now living in a secret location in Mexico City. The Mexican government has provided him with four bodyguards and an armored SUV.

***********************

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Morales, how should we address you? Mr. Ex-president?

Morales: After my resignation, you can’t actually call me president any longer. On the other hand, the parliament has not yet accepted my resignation. My parliamentary group has thus far been united in support of me.

DER SPIEGEL: Your opponents claim you willingly stepped down.

Morales: It was a coup that had been planned for a long time. It started when they started burning dolls that looked like me. Then they destroyed election documents and set fire to the homes belonging to members of my party and to union leaders. Then the police mutinied and the armed forces rose up against the constitutional order and called for my resignation. That is supposed to be a voluntary resignation? I stepped down so they wouldn’t kill even more Bolivians.

DER SPIEGEL: The OAS has accused you of having manipulated the outcome of the election.

Morales: That is precisely the reason why progressives, the left and moderate governments distrust this organization. It serves the rich and powerful, as I am personally experiencing. I was wrong when I trusted the election observers. They allied themselves with those behind the coup.

DER SPIEGEL: Yet election observers presented evidence of manipulation on the night of the election.

Morales: It is a preliminary report. It says that there were irregularities and other problems, but it does not accuse me of fraud. Of the 35,500 urns in the country, the election observers inspected 72 of them and now say I received more votes than in previous elections. But these were urns from rural and indigenous regions, where people have always voted overwhelmingly in my favor. I asked OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro to wait a couple of days before publication, because otherwise there would be deaths in Bolivia. But he refused. It was a political decision, not a technical or legal one.

DER SPIEGEL: You needed to beat your opponent Carlos Mesa by at least 10 percentage points to avoid a run-off. When the first results came in, it looked like you wouldn’t achieve that margin. Then the counting was suddenly interrupted, and when it continued, things suddenly started lookin better for you.

Morales: The irregularities the OAS found hurt me more than it hurt the opposition. The official count was never interrupted. Only the quick count was stopped. The official count is done publicly, with the participation of the parties. This result was not contested and the ultimate outcome is based on this count. For this reason, I called for a new count, urn by urn, vote by vote. I recognized that normal mistakes had been made, as happens with any election, but no fraud. Mistakes are human, one needs to recognize and rectify them.

DER SPIEGEL: Why was the count interrupted?

Morales: In the first projection of the results, I was seven percentage points ahead, so I said: Okay, with the votes from the countryside, we will win.

DER SPIEGEL: The general who called for your resignation last week was appointed by you. What role did the military play in your resignation?

Morales: I always had a good relationship with the armed forces. I’m the only president in the history of Bolivia who completed military service. I treated the armed forces well and equipped them with airplanes and helicopters. Now I have to watch on television as they use these weapons against the people. But the worst was the police. If they hadn’t risen up against me, we would have been able to put down this coup.

DER SPIEGEL: Since your resignation, over 30 of your supporters have been killed in clashes with government troops. Is Bolivia in danger of erupting into civil war?

Morales: The plotters are responsible for the deaths. Up until my resignation, the police and armed forces had not shot a single person. I watched on television as they fired from helicopters down at the protesters in Cochabamba. It scares me and makes me very sad. They are killing my indigenous brothers and sisters. Simple farm workers.

DER SPIEGEL: Your followers have supposedly called for civil war and they are blockading important cities in the countryside. Do you not have them under control?

Morales: I reject violence. I have said that multiple times. But it is a natural reaction, given the degree to which the poor have been humiliated. The plotters even burned the Wiphala flag, the symbol of the indigenous peoples and our national emblem.

DER SPIEGEL: Who is responsible for this upheaval, in your view?

Morales: All those who do not recognize the election results. Opposition leader Carlos Mesa, who lost the election, and Luis Fernando Camacho, the president of the so-called Santa Cruz Civic Committee. He comes from a very racist family. His father supported the dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer and earned a lot of money that way. The supposed electoral fraud was only a pretense for these people to topple me.

DER SPIEGEL: You have also argued that the U.S. government is partly responsible.

Morales: When I was elected president the first time, the mine workers who had suffered under the military dictatorship warned me: Be wary of the U.S. Embassy! In 2008, we expelled the U.S. ambassador from the country because he was conspiring against us. During the most recent election campaign, I called in the deputy head of mission, because he agitated against me in the countryside. Washington was also the first government to recognize the plotters’ regime.

DER SPIEGEL: Jeanine Añez, the vice-president of the senate, has declared herself the interim head of state, basing her claim on the constitution. Do you recognize that claim?

Morales: Where does her legitimacy come from? She has proclaimed herself president of her own accord and the military hung the sash on her. That is not a transitional government. It is a dictatorship.

DER SPIEGEL: You have called for a national dialogue. Does that call also apply to Jeanine Añez’s interim government?

Morales: We have asked the international community to facilitate a dialogue. We have three conditions. First, before negotiations begin, a commission must be appointed that names the people responsible for the murders of our supporters. The attacks are crimes against humanity, and they cannot go unpunished. Second, if someone is brought to court, they need to be accorded their constitutional rights. At the moment, people are being persecuted simply because they belonged to my government. I feel guilty, because my ministers are being persecuted while I am outside of the country. Third, the murders must stop.

DER SPIEGEL: The country is extremely polarized. You have called for peace, but does peace even have a chance in these circumstances?

Morales: That is, in any case, my greatest wish. Reconciliation needs to happen fast. The military needs to understand that we are all a big family. Some believe they can rule the country because they have a lot of money. This mentality needs to change.

DER SPIEGEL: According to the constitution, the new president needs to call for new elections by January. Do you believe that will happen?

Morales: The deadline is January 22. I have no idea how the plotters intend to accomplish that.

DER SPIEGEL: Will you run again?

Morales: I am legally entitled to run, but if it helps establish peace in the country, I will abstain.

DER SPIEGEL: You already have three terms behind you. Why did you decide to run for a fourth time at all, given that a majority of Bolivians rejected that idea in a referendum that you called yourself?

Morales: I am not clinging onto power. The constitutional court made my candidacy possible. I come from extremely poor conditions and started to work when I was eight. I didn’t want to become a union leader either, but when the coca farmers pushed me to do it, I accepted. And so it continued, until I had the possibility of becoming president. It was not my dream. It was not planned. I could simply have gone home and been happy. I took it on because I could no longer stand the repression and the injustice.

DER SPIEGEL: But it does seem like you are clinging onto power. Opponents accuse you of wanting to establish a socialist dictatorship in Bolivia like in Venezuela or Nicaragua.

Morales: For me, socialism is social justice. It is worth dying for. Without social justice, there is no peace. With our social programs we managed to lower extreme poverty from 15 percent to 8 percent. We have supported an economic model that allows us growth while keeping the International Monetary Fund at bay. We recently had higher economic growth than Chile, which was always heralded as a role model. Contrary to the suggestions of the IMF, we nationalized the energy sector. But nobody forgives us when the model of a socialist, pluralist, left-wing and anti-imperialist country works. It is a class struggle.

DER SPIEGEL: But you also controlled the judiciary, allowing you to acquire powers.

Morales: I always respected the laws. If, one day, I am going to be put on trial for abuse of my powers, it would only be because I don’t have a good lawyer. I did not become president out of a desire to become rich, but out of patriotism.

DER SPIEGEL: Bolivia has a lot of mineral resources, including lithium, which is coveted internationally for its use in batteries for electric cars and mobile phones. You have repeatedly claimed that this played a role in your removal? Why?

Morales: We had a nice agreement with Germany that included plans for the construction of a lithium factory of our own. But several multinational conglomerates did not approve. They are against us processing our raw materials ourselves.

DER SPIEGEL: But it was said that your own government wanted to stop the project.

Morales: I had a strategy for how we would carry on, but since I am no longer president, I no longer have influence over these big projects. The plotters will no doubt cancel the agreement.

DER SPIEGEL: Interim President Jeanine Añez has announced that she will charge you with corruption and electoral fraud if you return. Are you afraid?

Morales: I am not responsible for organizing the election. I was already charged with murder and drug dealing under previous governments. The evidence was faked. So I know how this goes. I am not afraid, because I am not corrupt and did not carry out any electoral fraud.

DER SPIEGEL: Your opponents describe you as godless and possessed by the devil. The interim president entered the presidential palace with a big Bible under her arm. How do you explain this religious fundamentalism?

Morales: Before we decided on a new constitution, Catholicism was the state religion. We made it so that Bolivia became a secular country. All churches have the same rights, no religion is given priority. Faith is something holy. It transmits values and should serve reconciliation. But the plotters are misusing it in order to spread hate and racism. I am Catholic, but I also believe in Pachamama — Mother Earth — and in our indigenous gods. Now my opponents claim that Pachamama is the Devil’s work and that I am Satan incarnate. I don’t understand it.

DER SPIEGEL: Jeanine Añez also claims that the Bolivian conflict is being controlled from outside the country and that agents from Venezuela and Cuba had infiltrated your movement. Is that true?

Morales: In truth, many Venezuelans came into the country in recent months in order to campaign against me. We deported over 1,000 Venezuelans because they became politically active. As for the Cubans, I always admired Fidel Castro. He helped us with our health services and Cuban doctors carried out cataract operations on over 700,000 Bolivians free of charge. That is what I call solidarity among the poor.

DER SPIEGEL: Latin America is more ideologically divided now than any time since the Cold War. That is largely due to the crisis in Venezuela.

Morales: I admire Venezuela, first Chávez, then Maduro. Maduro triumphed against the interventionism of the Americans and overcame an attempted coup. He will also overcome the economic blockade.

DER SPIEGEL: Maduro takes brutal measures against opposition figures and journalists. Do you seriously see him as a role model?

Morales: For how long has Ms. Merkel been in power in Germany? I won’t claim she is authoritarian just because she has been in office for 16 years.

DER SPIEGEL: That is a poor comparison. Germany has a parliamentarian system and the government can be voted out at any time. In presidential systems like in Venezuela, that is not possible. When do you intend to return to Bolivia?

Morales: If it were possible, immediately. I miss my homeland a lot. I miss my work, too. I worked every day from 5 a.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. Now it looks like future generations will have to carry on this struggle.

DER SPIEGEL: What is next for you personally?

Morales: My safety in Bolivia needs to be guaranteed. If they want to put me on trial, they should go for it. I’ll withstand it. But they cannot put me in jail, because I am innocent.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Morales, we thank you for this interview.

2 December 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By John Pilger

24 Nov 2019 – Newspapers and other media in the United States, Britain and Australia have recently declared a passion for freedom of speech, especially their right to publish freely. They are worried by the “Assange effect”.

It is as if the struggle of truth-tellers like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning is now a warning to them: that the thugs who dragged Assange out of the Ecuadorean embassy in April may one day come for them.

A common refrain was echoed by the Guardian last week. The extradition of Assange, said the paper, “is not a question of how wise Mr. Assange is, still less how likable. It’s not about his character, nor his judgement. It’s a matter of press freedom and the public’s right to know.”

What the Guardian is trying to do is separate Assange from his landmark achievements, which have both profited the Guardian and exposed its own vulnerability, along with its propensity to suck up to rapacious power and smear those who reveal its double standards.

The poison that has fueled the persecution of Julian Assange is not as obvious in this editorial as it usually is; there is no fiction about Assange smearing faeces on embassy walls or being awful to his cat.

Instead, the weasel references to “character” and “judgement” and “likeability” perpetuate an epic smear which is now almost a decade old. Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, used a more apt description. “There has been,” he wrote, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing.” He explains mobbing as “an endless stream of humiliating, debasing and threatening statements in the press”. This “collection ridicule” amounts to torture and could lead to Assange’s death.

Having witnessed much of what Melzer describes , I can vouch for the truth of his words. If Julian Assange were to succumb to the cruelties heaped upon him, week after week, month after month, year upon year, as doctors warn, newspapers like the Guardian will share the responsibility.

A few days ago, the Sydney Morning Herald’s man in London, Nick Miller, wrote a lazy, specious piece headlined, “Assange has not been vindicated, he has merely outwaited justice.” He was referring to Sweden’s abandonment of the so-called Assange investigation.

Miller’s report is not untypical for its omissions and distortions while masquerading as a tribune of women’s rights. There is no original work, no real inquiry: just smear.

There is nothing on the documented behaviour of a clutch of Swedish zealots who hi jacked the “allegations” of sexual misconduct against Assange and made a mockery of Swedish law and that society’s vaunted decency.

He makes no mention that in 2013, the Swedish prosecutor tried to abandon the case and emailed the Crown Prosecution Service in London to say it would no longer pursue a European Arrest Warrant, to which she received the reply: “Don’t you dare!!!” (Thanks to Stefania Maurizi of La Repubblica)

Other emails show the CPS discouraging the Swedes from coming to London to interview Assange – which was common practice – thus blocking progress that might have set him free in 2011.

There was never an indictment. There were never charges. There was never a serious attempt to put “allegations” to Assange and question him – behaviour that the Swedish Court of Appeal ruled to be negligent and the General Secretary of the Swedish Bar Association has since condemned.

Both the women involved said there was no rape. Critical written evidence of their text messages was wilfully withheld from Assange’s lawyers, clearly because it undermined the “allegations”.

One of the women was so shocked that Assange was arrested, she accused the police of railroading her and changing her witness statement. The chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed the “suspicion of any crime.”

The Sydney Morning Herald man omits how an ambitious and compromised politician, Claes Borgstrom, emerged from behind the liberal facade of Swedish politics and effectively seized and revived the case.

Borgstrom enlisted a former political collaborator, Marianne Ny, as the new prosecutor. Ny refused to guarantee that Assange would not be sent on to the United States if he was extradited to Sweden, even though, as The Independent reported, “informal discussions have already taken place between the US and Swedish officials over the possibility of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being delivered into American custody, according to diplomatic sources.” This was an open secret in Stockholm. That libertarian Sweden had a dark, documented past of rendering people into the hands of the CIA was not news.

The silence was broken in 2016 when the United Nations Working Party on Arbitrary Detention, a body that decides whether governments are meeting their human rights obligations, ruled that Julian Assange was unlawfully detained by Britain and called on the British government to set him free.

Both the governments of Britain and Sweden had taken part in the UN’s investigation, and agreed to abide by its ruling, which carried the weight of international law. The British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, stood up in Parliament and abused the UN panel.

The Swedish case was a fraud from the moment the police secretly and illegally contacted a Stockholm tabloid and ignited the hysteria that was to consume Assange. WikiLeaks’ revelations of America’s war crimes had shamed the hand-maidens of power and its vested interests, who called themselves journalists; and for this, the unclubbable Assange would never be forgiven.

It was now open season. Assange’s media tormenters cut and pasted each other’s lies and vituperative abuse. “He really is the most massive turd,” wrote the Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore. The received wisdom was that he had been charged, which was never true. In my career, reporting from places of extreme upheaval and suffering and criminality, I have never known anything like it.

In Assange’s homeland, Australia, this “mobbing” reached an apogee. So eager was the Australian government to deliver its citizen to the United States that the prime minister in 2013, Julia Gillard, wanted to take away his passport and charge him with a crime – until it was pointed out to her that Assange had committed no crime and she had no right to take away his citizenship.

Julia Gillard, according to the website Honest History, holds the record for the most sycophantic speech ever made to the US Congress. Australia, said she to applause, was America’s “great mate”. The great mate colluded with America in its hunt for an Australian whose crime was journalism. His right to protection and proper assistance was denied.

When Assange’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, and I met two Australian consular officials in London, we were shocked that all they knew about the case “is what we read in the papers”.

This abandonment by Australia was a principal reason for the granting of political asylum by Ecuador. As an Australian, I found this especially shaming.

When asked about Assange recently, the current Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said, “He should face the music”. This kind of thuggery, bereft of any respect for truth and rights and the principles and law, is why the mostly Murdoch controlled press in Australia is now worried about its own future, as the Guardian is worried, and The New York Times is worried. Their concern has a name: “the Assange precedent.”

They know that what happens to Assange can happen to them. The basic rights and justice denied him can be denied to them. They have been warned. All of us have been warned.

Whenever I see Julian in the grim, surreal world of Belmarsh prison, I am reminded of the responsibility of those of us who defend him. There are universal principles at stake in this case. He himself is fond of saying: “It’s not me. It’s far wider.”

But at the heart of this remarkable struggle – and it is, above all, a struggle – is one human being whose character, I repeat character, has demonstrated the most astonishing courage. I salute him.

_________________________________________________

John Pilger has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards.

2 December 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

24 Nov 2019 – The following letter was authored by more than 65 eminent medical doctors from the UK and around the world, calling for urgent action to protect the life of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange.

We write this open letter, as medical doctors, to express our serious concerns about the physical and mental health of Julian Assange. Our professional concerns follow publication recently of the harrowing eyewitness accounts of Craig Murray and John Pilger of the case management hearing on Monday 21 October 2019 at Westminster Magistrates Court. The hearing related to the upcoming February 2020 hearing of the request by the US government for Mr Assange’s extradition to the US in relation to his work as a publisher of information, including information about alleged crimes of the US government.

Our concerns were further heightened by the publication on 1 November 2019 of a further report of Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, in which he stated: ‘Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.’

Having entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on 19 June 2012, Mr Assange sought and was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government. On 11 April 2019, he was removed from the Embassy and arrested by the Metropolitan Police. He was subsequently detained in Belmarsh maximum security prison, in what Mr Melzer described as ‘oppressive conditions of isolation and surveillance.’

During the seven years spent in the Embassy in confined living conditions, Mr Assange was visited and examined by a number of experts each of whom expressed alarm at the state of his health and requested that he be allowed access to a hospital. No such access was permitted. Mr Assange was unable to exercise his right to free and necessary expert medical assessment and treatment throughout the seven-year period.

A chronology, based on information available to the public, of relevant visits, events and reports from a medical perspective follows:

John Pilger- Julian Assange Could Barely Speak in Court!

• On 31 July 2015, a dentist reported that Mr Assange’s ‘upper right first premolar (UR4) tooth had fractured along with the filling that was in it and the dental pulp of the tooth was exposed’ and ‘that failure to treat this promptly would lead to infection of the root leading to a dental abscess and pain.’ The dentist advised ‘saving this tooth would require root canal treatment’, however, ‘due to the specialised equipment and radiographic requirements this treatment could not be completed in the domiciliary setting.’ ‘Extraction of the tooth’ was identified as ‘another option but […] it may need a surgical extraction.’ This was ‘not recommended in a domiciliary setting especially as we would need preoperative radiographs to assess the root shape and the proximity of the root to the floor of the maxillary sinus. Extractions in this area carry a risk of creating a communication between the mouth and the sinus which could need surgical closure hence radiographs would be essential to assess this risk.’ The dentist ‘advised Mr Assange he should seek treatment in a clinical setting to prevent further progression of his symptoms as soon as possible.’ [1]
• On 4 December 2015, an opinion of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) was formally adopted and it was published on 5 February 2016. It concluded that Mr Assange was being arbitrarily detained by the governments of the UK and Sweden. Crucially, it was made clear at the time that any continued arbitrary detention of Mr Assange would constitute torture. The group concluded that ‘the Embassy of Ecuador in London is far less than a house or detention centre equipped for prolonged pretrial detention and lacks appropriate and necessary medical equipment or facilities — it is valid to assume, after five years of deprivation of liberty, that Mr Assange’s health could have deteriorated to such a level that anything more than a superficial illness would put his health at a serious risk, and he was denied access to a medical institution for a proper diagnosis, including a magnetic resonance imaging test.’ [2]
• On 8 December 2015, a doctor who saw Mr Assange reported: ‘progressive inflammation and stiffness affecting his right shoulder. This requires an MRI scan to determine the exact diagnosis in order to inform a suitably qualified physiotherapist as to how best to treat him in an appropriately equipped medical facility. His current circumstances significantly compromise the ability to satisfactorily investigate and treat him.’ [3] Mr Assange was refused access to a hospital by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. [4]
• On 11 December 2015, a further doctor, a trauma and psychosocial expert, reported: ‘Mr Assange scored 15 out of 20 on the Patient Health Questionnaire […] a multipurpose instrument for screening, diagnosing, monitoring and measuring the severity of depression. […] A score of 15 indicates that Mr Assange suffers from Major Depression (moderately severe)’; ‘At a minimum, it is recommended that his urgent medical complaints regarding the pain in his shoulder be investigated with appropriate equipment’; ‘The Embassy is not a medical setting. The only way Mr Assange can access either urgent medical care or investigations would be to place himself in the hands of the British authorities. Mr Assange is in an invidious position of having to decide between his physical health and the risk of being extradited to the United States. His inability to access proper medical care and assessment — without placing himself into the hands of the authorities — transforms each physical complaint no matter how simple into something that could have catastrophic consequences either for his health or his liberty. He lives in a state of chronic health insecurity’; and ‘The unusual circumstances place Mr Assange in a precarious situation. The effects of the situation on Mr Assange’s health and well-being are serious and the risks will most certainly escalate with the potential to becoming life threatening if current conditions persist.’ [5]
• In October 2017, Doctors Sondra S. Crosby, Brock Chisholm and Sean Love visited Mr Assange. [6] The group examined him for 20 hours over three days. [7] In an article for the Guardian published on 24 January 2018 they wrote: ‘We examined Julian Assange, and he badly needs care — but he can’t get it’; ‘We call on the British Medical Association and colleagues in the UK to demand safe access to medical care for Mr Assange and to oppose openly the ongoing violations of his human right to healthcare.’ [8]
• On 19 June 2018, Dinah PoKempner, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, stated: ‘Concern is growing over his access to medical care. His asylum is growing more and more difficult to distinguish from detention. The UK has the power to resolve concerns over his isolation, health, and confinement by removing the threat of extradition for publishing newsworthy leaks.’ [9]
• On 22 June 2018, Dr Sean Love, who over the course of the previous year had visited Mr Assange several times at the embasy, reiterated his concerns regarding Mr Assange’s health and repeated his call for him to be given access to healthcare in the British Medical Journal. [10] Dr Love wrote that ‘Assange’s detention continues to cause a precipitous deterioration in his overall condition’ and that ‘Because of his health issues, in 2015, Ecuadorian authorities requested that he be permitted humanitarian safe passage to a hospital in London; however, this was denied by the UK.’ Dr Love stated that ‘To this day, Assange remains unable to access hospital based diagnostic testing and treatment — even for a medical emergency. In effect, he has gone without proper access to care for the duration of his six years in confinement.’
• On 21 December 2018, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) issued a further statement opposing the continued unlawful detention of Mr Assange: ‘States that are based upon and promote the rule of law do not like to be confronted with their own violations of the law, that is understandable. But when they honestly admit these violations, they do honour the very spirit of the rule of law, earn enhanced respect for doing so, and set worldwide commendable examples.’ It added: ‘The WGAD is further concerned that the modalities of the continued arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Mr Assange is undermining his health, and may possibly endanger his life given the disproportionate amount of anxiety and stress that such prolonged deprivation of liberty entails.’ [11]
• On 5 April 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, issued a statement following reports that Mr Assange may soon be expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy. He said, ‘According to information I have received, Mr Assange is at risk of extreme vulnerability, and his health is in serious decline. I therefore appeal to the Ecuadorian authorities to continue to provide him, to the fullest extent possible in the circumstances, with adequate living conditions and access to appropriate medical care.’ [12] On 11 April 2019, Mr Assange was expelled from the Embassy and arrested by the Metropolitan Police.
• On 1 May 2019, Mr Assange was described as suffering from ‘moderate to severe depression’ at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court at which he was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment for a bail infringement dating back to 2012. [13]
• On 3 May 2019, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a statement noting it was ‘deeply concerned’ over Assange’s 50 weeks imprisonment. ‘The Working Group regrets that the Government has not complied with its Opinion and has now furthered the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Mr Assange. [14]
• On 9 May 2019, Mr Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, visited Belmarsh prison accompanied by two medical experts, with special expertise in assessing victims of torture. This involved a 60-minute conversation with Mr Assange, an hour-long physical examination and a two-hour psychiatric examination.
• On 23 May 2019, the US government brought charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 against Mr Assange for his publishing activities on behalf of WikiLeaks. On 29 May 2019, Mr Assange was moved to the ‘hospital wing’ at Belmarsh prison following a reported significant deterioration in his health. On 30 May 2019, Mr Assange was too unwell to appear in court, even via video link, for a preliminary extradition hearing. [15] It should be noted that the medical facilities and staffing at Belmarsh prison ‘hospital wing’ have never been divulged to the public.
• On 31 May 2019, Mr Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, reported on his 9 May 2019 visit to Mr Assange, ‘we all came to the conclusion that he showed all the symptoms that are typical for a person that has been exposed to psychological torture over an extended period of time.’ [16]
• On 22 October 2019, Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador, published a detailed and shocking eye witness account of Mr Assange’s hearing the previous day, stating that he ‘exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim.’ [17] His report was corroborated by the eyewitness account of John Pilger, the renowned investigative journalist and filmmaker. [18]
• On 1 November 2019, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer reiterated his alarm at the continued deterioration of Julian Assange’s health since his arrest and detention earlier this year, saying his life was now at risk. Mr Melzer said, ‘What we have seen from the UK Government is outright contempt for Mr Assange’s rights and integrity,’ and ‘Despite the medical urgency of my appeal, and the seriousness of the alleged violations, the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.’ Mr Melzer concluded: ‘Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.’ [19]

Medical doctors have a professional duty to report suspected torture of which they become aware, wherever it may be occurring. That professional duty is absolute and must be carried out regardless of risk to reporting doctors. We wish to put on record, as medical doctors, our collective serious concerns and to draw the attention of the public and the world to this grave situation.

The World Health Organisation Constitution of 1946 envisages ‘the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being.’ [20] We are indebted to those who have sought to uphold this right in the case of Mr Assange.

From a medical point of view, on the evidence currently available, we have serious concerns about Mr Assange’s fitness to stand trial in February 2020.

It is our opinion that Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health. Any medical treatment indicated should be administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital (tertiary care). Were such urgent assessment and treatment not to take place, we have real concerns, on the evidence currently available, that Mr Assange could die in prison. The medical situation is thereby urgent. There is no time to lose.

Appendix

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Nils Melzer, visited Mr Assange in Belmarsh Prison on 9 May 2019, over six months ago. Mr Melzer was accompanied by two medical experts specialised in examining victims of torture and other ill-treatment. The team was able to speak with Mr Assange in confidence and to conduct a thorough medical assessment.

Mr Melzer’s report was published on 31 May 2019:

‘It was obvious that Mr Assange’s health has been seriously affected by the extremely hostile and arbitrary environment he has been exposed to for many years,’ the expert said. ‘Most importantly, in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.

‘The evidence is overwhelming and clear,’ the expert said. ‘Mr Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.

‘In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,’ Mr Melzer said. ‘The collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!’

Report of Nils Melzer, dated 31 May 2019: [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24665]

In his annual report on 14 October 2019 to the Seventy-fourth session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Mr Melzer stated: ‘Further, I would like to thank the Government of the United Kingdom for having facilitated my visit to Mr Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in London in May 2019, including his examination by two experienced medical experts. Although Mr Assange showed a pattern of symptoms typical for long-term exposure to psychological torture, I regret to report that none of the concerned States have agreed to investigate or redress their alleged involvement in his abuse as required of them under human rights law.’

Report of Nils Melzer to the Seventy-fourth session of the UN General Assembly on 14 October 2019: [https://peds-ansichten.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FinalSRTStatementGA14Oct-2019.pdf]

Eyewitness account of Craig Murray (former British Ambassador) of events at Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday 21 October 2019: [https://www.transcend.org/tms/2019/11/in-court-the-annihilation-of-julian-assange/]

Eyewitness account of John Pilger (investigative journalist) of events at Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday 21 October 2019:

Report of Nils Melzer, dated 5 April 2019: [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24454&LangID=E]

Report of Nils Melzer, dated 1 November 2019: [https://ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25249&LangID=E]

Addendum

It is noteworthy that three of the medical practitioners, from whose reports we have drawn, are unidentified, their names having been redacted. In this context, a telling passage from the 26 page report of the psychological expert dated 11 December 2015 offers an insight into the climate of fear and intimidation surrounding the provision of medical care to Mr Assange. On page 20 of the report, under the heading ‘Medical Practitioners’ Concerns regarding examining and treating Mr Assange at the Embassy’, the unnamed psychological expert noted:

“One of Mr Assange’s colleagues commented that there had been many difficulties in finding medical practitioners who were willing to examine Mr Assange in the Embassy. The reasons given were uncertainty over whether medical insurance would cover the Embassy (a foreign jurisdiction); whether the association with Mr Assange could harm their livelihood or draw unwanted attention to them and their families; and discomfort regarding exposing this association when entering the Embassy. One medical practitioner expressed concern to one of the interviewees after the police taking notes of his name and the fact that he was visiting Mr Assange. One medical practitioner wrote that he agreed to produce a medical report only on condition that his name not be made available to the wider public, fearing repercussions.” [21]

It is likely that the aforementioned climate of fear and intimidation severely compromised the medical care available to Mr Assange, even within the Embassy, and given all the other concerns surrounding the extraordinary treatment of Mr Assange it is difficult to conclude other than that the creation of that climate of fear and intimidation was deliberate. If it was deliberate, we as medical doctors condemn such behaviour as reckless, dangerous and cruel. That all this has been played out in the heart of London for many years is a source of great sadness and shame to many of us.

Signed:

Dr Mariagiulia Agnoletto MD Specialist in Psychiatry ASST Monza San Gerardo Hospital, Monza (Italy)

Dr Vittorio Agnoletto MD Università degli Studi di Milano Statale, Milano (Italy)

Dr Sonia Allam MBChB FRCA Consultant in Anaesthesia and Pre-operative Assessment, Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Scotland (UK)

Dr Norbert Andersch MD MRCPsych Consultant Neurologist and Psychiatrist, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (retired); Lecturer in Psychopathology at Sigmund Freud Private University, Vienna-Berlin-Paris (Germany and UK)

Dr Marianne Beaucamp MD Fachärztin (Specialist) in Neurology & Psychiatry Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist (retired), Munich (Germany)

Dr Thed Beaucamp MD Fachärztin (Specialist) in Neurology, Psychiatry & Psychosomatic Medicine Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist (retired), Munich (Germany)

Dr Margaret Beavis MBBS FRACGP MPH General Medical Practitioner (Australia)

Dr David Bell Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, London (UK)

Mr Patrick John Ramsay Boyd (signed John Boyd) MRCS LRCP MBBS FRCS FEBU Consultant Urologist (retired) (UK)

Dr Hannah Caller MBBS DCH Paediatrician, Homerton University Hospital, London (UK)

Dr Franco Camandona MD Specialist in Obstetrics & Gynaecology E.O. Ospedali Galliera, Genova (Italy)

Dr Sylvia Chandler MBChB MRCGP BA MA General Medical Practitioner (retired) (UK)

Dr Marco Chiesa MD FRCPsych Consultant Psychiatrist and Visiting Professor, University College London (UK)

Dr Carla Eleonora Ciccone MD Specialist in Obstetrics & Gynaecology AORN MOSCATI, Avellino (Italy)

Dr Owen Dempsey MBBS BSc MSc PhD General Medical Practitioner (retired) (UK)

Dr H R Dhammika MBBS Medical Officer, Dehiattakandiya Base Hospital, Dehiattakandiya (Sri Lanka)

Dr Tim Dowson MBChB MRCGP MSc MPhil Specialised General Medical Practitioner in Substance Misuse, Leeds (UK)

Miss Kamilia El-Farra MBChB FRCOG MPhil (Medical Law and Ethics) Consultant Gynaecologist, Essex (UK)

Dr Beata Farmanbar MD General Medical Practitioner (Sweden)

Dr Tomasz Fortuna MD RCPsych (affiliated) Forensic Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Adult Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytical Society and Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, London (UK)

Dr C Stephen Frost BSc MBChB Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (Stockholm, Sweden) (UK and Sweden)

Dr Peter Garrett MA MD FRCP Independent writer and humanitarian physician; Visiting Lecturer in Nephrology at the University of Ulster (UK)

Dr Rachel Gibbons MBBS BSc MRCPsych. M.Inst.Psychoanal. Mem.Inst.G.A Consultant Psychiatrist (UK)

Dr Bob Gill MBChB MRCGP General Medical Practitioner (UK)

Elizabeth Gordon MS FRCS Consultant Surgeon (retired); Co-founder of Freedom from Torture (UK)

Professor Derek A. Gould MBChB MRCP DMRD FRCR Consultant Interventional Radiologist (retired): BSIR Gold Medal, 2010; over 110 peer-reviewed publications in journals and chapters (UK)

Dr Jenny Grounds MD General Medical Practitioner, Riddells Creek, Victoria; Treasurer, Medical Association for Prevention of War, Australia (Australia)

Dr Paul Hobday MBBS FRCGP DRCOG DFSRH DPM General Medical Practitioner (retired) (UK)

Mr David Jameson-Evans MBBS FRCS Consultant Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgeon (retired) (UK)

Dr Bob Johnson MRCPsych MRCGP Diploma in Psychotherapy Neurology & Psychiatry (Psychiatric Institute New York) MA (Psychol) PhD (Med Computing) MBCS DPM MRCS Consultant Psychiatrist (retired); Formerly Head of Therapy, Ashworth Maximum Security Hospital, Liverpool; Formally Consultant Psychiatrist, Special Unit, C-Wing, Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight (UK)

Dr Lissa Johnson BA BSc(Hons, Psych) MPsych(Clin) PhD Clinical Psychologist (Australia)

Dr Anna Kacperek MRCPsych Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, London (UK)

Dr Jessica Kirker MBChB DipPsychiat MRCPsych FRANZCP MemberBPAS Psychoanalyst and Consultant Medical Psychotherapist (retired) (UK)

Dr Willi Mast MD Facharzt für Allgemeinmedizin, Gelsenkirchen (Germany)

Dr Janet Menage MA MBChB General Medical Practitioner (retired); qualified Psychological Counsellor; author of published research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (UK)

Professor Alan Meyers MD MPH Emeritus Professor of Paediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts (USA)

Dr Salique Miah BSc MBChB FRCEM DTM&H ARCS Consultant in Emergency Medicine, Manchester (UK)

Dr David Morgan DClinPsych MSc Fellow of British Psychoanalytic Society Psychoanalyst, Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Consultant Psychotherapist (UK)

Dr Helen Murrell MBChB MRCGP General Medical Practitioner, Gateshead (UK)

Dr Alison Anne Noonan MBBS (Sydney) MD (Rome) MA (Sydney) ANZSJA IAAP AAGP IAP Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Specialist Outreach Northern Territory, Executive Medical Association for Prevention of War (NSW) (Australia)

Dr Alison Payne BSc MBChB DRCOG MRCGP prev FRNZGP General Medical Practitioner, Coventry; special interest in mental health/trauma and refugee health (UK)

Dr Peter Pech MD Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (sub-specialty Paediatric Radiology), Akademiska Sjukhuset (Uppsala University Hospital), Uppsala (Sweden)

Dr Tomasz Pierscionek MRes MBBS MRCPsych PGDip (UK)

Professor Allyson M Pollock MBChB MSc FFPH FRCGP FRCP (Ed) Professor of Public Health, Newcastle University (UK)

Dr Abdulsatar Ravalia FRCA Consultant Anaesthetist (UK)

Dr. med. Ullrich Raupp MD Specialist in Psychotherapy, Child Psychiatry and Child Neurology; Psychodynamic Supervisor (DGSv) Wesel, Germany (Germany)

Professor Andrew Samuels Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex (recently retired); Honorary/Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths and Roehampton (both London), New York and Macau City Universities; Former Chair, UK Council for Psychotherapy (2009–2012); Founder Board Member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Founder of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (UK)

Mr John H Scurr BSc MBBS FRCS Consultant General and Vascular Surgeon, University College Hospital, London (UK)

Dr Peter Shannon MBBS (UWA) DPM (Melb) FRANZCP Adult Psychiatrist (retired) (Australia)

Dr Gustaw Sikora MD PhD F Inst Psychoanalysis Fellow of British Psychoanalytic Society Specialist Psychiatrist (diploids obtained in Poland and registered in the UK); Psychoanalyst; currently in private practice (UK and Poland)

Dr Wilhelm Skogstad MRCPsych BPAS IPA Psychiatrist & Psychoanalyst, London, United Kingdom (UK and Germany)

Dr John Stace MBBS (UNSW) FRACGP FACRRM FRACMA MHA (UNSW) Country Doctor (retired), Perth (Australia)

Dr Derek Summerfield BSc (Hons) MBBS MRCPsych Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London (UK)

Dr Rob Tandy MBBS MRCPsych Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalyst; Unit Head, Psychoanalytic Treatment Unit, Tavistock and Portman, London; City & Hackney Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service, St Leonard’s Hospital, London (UK)

Dr Noel Thomas MA MBChB DCH DobsRCOG DTM&H MFHom General Medical Practitioner; homeopath; has assisted on health/education projects in six developing countries Maesteg, Wales (UK)

Dr Philip Thomas MBChB DPM MPhil MD Formerly Professor of Philosophy Diversity & Mental Health, University of Central Lancashire; Formally Consultant Psychiatrist (UK)

Dr Gianni Tognoni MD Istituto Mario Negri, Milano (Italy)

Dr Sebastião Viola Lic Med MRCPsych Consultant Psychiatrist, Cardiff (UK)

Dr Peter Walger MD Consultant, Infectious Disease Specialist, Bonn-Duesseldorf-Berlin (Germany)

Dr Sue Wareham OAM MBBS General Medical Practitioner (retired) (Australia)

Dr Elizabeth Waterston MD General Medical Practitioner (retired), Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)

Dr Eric Windgassen MRCPsych PGDipMBA Consultant Psychiatrist (retired) (UK)

Dr Pam Wortley MBBS MRCGP General Medical Practitioner (retired), Sunderland (UK)

Dr Matthew Yakimoff BOralH (DSc) GDipDent General Dental Practitioner (Australia)

Dr Rosemary Yuille BSc (Hons Anatomy) MBBS (Hons) General Medical Practitioner (retired), Canberra (Australia)

Dr Felicity de Zulueta Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust; Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer in Traumatic Studies, King’s College London (UK)

Dr Paquita de Zulueta MBBChir MA (Cantab) MA (Medical Law & Ethics) MRCP FRCGP PGDipCBT CBT Therapist and Coach; Senior Tutor Medical Ethics; Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, Dept of Primary Care & Population Health, Imperial College London (UK)

To add your signature to the open letter, please email: doctors4assange@gmail.com – Please include your position title, medical qualifications and expertise.

Endnotes

[1] Dr [Redacted], BChD MFGDP(UK) MSc, Dental Surgeon, carried out an emergency dental appointment at the Embassy on 8 May 2015: [https://file.wikileaks.org/file/cms/Dentist%20report%20310715.pdf]

[2] Opinions adopted by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention at its seventy-fourth session, 30 November-4 December 2015, Opinion №54/2015 concerning Julian Assange (Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland): [http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Detention/A.HRC.WGAD.2015.docx] [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17012&LangID=E]

[3] Dr [Redacted] MA MB BChir DCH MRCGP assessed Mr Assange on 12 August 2015 and 2 December 2015: [https://file.wikileaks.org/file/cms/Medical.pdf]

[4] [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/15/ecuador-asks-britain-to-allow-julian-assange-safe-passage-for-mri-scan ; ][https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/15/julian-assange-shoulder-pain-mri-scan-embassy-metropolitan-police ; ][https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/11932732/Wikileaks-Julain-Assange-refused-safe-passage-for-MRI-scan.html]

[5] Dr [Redacted], Trauma and Psychosocial Expert, interviewed Mr Assange on five occasions between June 2014 and June 2015, and interviewed Mr Assange on two further occasions to validate previous findings: [https://file.wikileaks.org/file/cms/Psychosocial%20Medical%20Report%20December%202015.pdf]

[6] Dr Sean Love is a Resident Physician in Anaesthesiology and an Adult Critical Care Medicine Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr Sondra S Crosby is a medical doctor and Professor of Medicine at Boston University, specialising in internal medicine. She is also a faculty member of the Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights department at the Boston University School of Public Health. Dr Brock Chisholm is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with a degree in Psychology, a Masters in Psychological Research Methods and a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and extensive experience in working with victims of trauma.

[7] [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/24/julian-assanges-health-in-dangerous-condition-say-doctors ; ][https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/julian-assange-care-wikileaks-ecuadorian-embassy ; ][https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/06/22/sean-love-access-medical-care-must-guaranteed-julian-assange/#_ftn1]

[8] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/julian-assange-care-wikileaks-ecuadorian-embassy]

[9] [https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/19/uk-should-reject-extraditing-julian-assange-us]

[10] [https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/06/22/sean-love-access-medical-care-must-guaranteed-julian-assange/]

[11] [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24042]

[12] [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24454&LangID=E]

[13] [https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1121387/julian-assange-depression-symptoms-mental-health-treatment]

[14] [https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24552&LangID=E]

[15] [https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/30/wikileaks-grave-concerns-julian-assange-moved-prison-hospital-9738883/ ; ][https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/30/julian-assange-too-ill-appear-court-via-video-link-lawyers-say ; ][https://news.sky.com/story/julian-assange-moved-to-medical-wing-in-belmarsh-prison-over-significantly-deteriorated-health-11731364]

[16] [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24665]

[17] [https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/]

[18] [https://youtu.be/GLXzudMCyM4]

[19] [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25249&LangID=E]

[20] [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/human-rights-and-health]

[21] Dr [Redacted], Trauma and Psychosocial Expert, interviewed Mr Assange on five occasions between June 2014 and June 2015, and interviewed Mr Assange on two further occasions to validate previous findings: [https://file.wikileaks.org/file/cms/Psychosocial%20Medical%20Report%20December%202015.pdf.]

____________________________________________

2 December 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By Chandra Muzaffar

After changing government through the ballot-box more than 18 months ago, many Malaysians are beginning to wonder what the future holds for this nation. Instead of being overly optimistic or unduly pessimistic, we should as rational, thinking citizens assess our situation with a degree of objectivity and balance. My own humble assessment suggests that there are at least 7 pillars of strength in our society just as there are perhaps 3 major pitfalls which in turn are linked to three possible solutions.

Pillars of Strength.

1. Acceptance of religious and cultural diversity.

In spite of verbal eruptions now and then, Malaysians have over time developed a “live and let live” attitude. The vast majority of us accept that this is a land of different cultures and customs, rituals and religions, signs and symbols. This tolerance of differences — though not ideal — allows us to remain together as a nation. This is remarkable because Malaysia is undoubtedly one of the most complex multi-ethnic societies in the world where our differences stretch from geography to the economy, from language to politics.

2. Minimum communal violence.

This live and let live attitude is one of the many reasons why there has been very little communal violence in the country. With the exception of the “May 13th” Incident 50 years ago and a couple of minor skirmishes, we have been spared the sort of violence that has crippled less complex multi-ethnic societies. Violence once it becomes endemic emasculates a society and shackles it from achieving genuine social harmony.

3. Enduring consensus on fundamental religious, cultural and socio-economic principles governing the nation as embodied in the Malaysian Constitution.

It is seldom appreciated that on fundamental religious, cultural and socio-economic principles governing the nation as embodied in the Constitution there is a degree of inter-community consensus that one will not find in many other multi-ethnic societies. For instance the status of Islam as the religion of the Malaysian Federation has not been challenged by any community. Likewise, the right of non-Muslims to practise their religion has never been an issue. The position of Malay as the national and official language has not been questioned by any group. Similarly, the right of non-Malays to study their language and to use it for non-official purposes is accepted by the Malay majority.

Even the principle underlying the Special Position of the Malays and the natives of Sabah and Sarawak has not been disputed by the other communities. If controversy continues unabated, it is in the interpretation and implementation of that constitutional provision especially in relation to socio-economic justice. That the Constitution also explicitly protects the “legitimate interests” of the other communities has not raised eyebrows among Malays or the Bumiputras of Sabah and Sarawak.

It is largely because the Constitution takes cognisance of the rights and interests of the different communities while seeking to preserve a just equilibrium that it has been able to perpetuate a consensus of sorts on potentially divisive challenges linked to religion, culture and socio-economic needs. It is this consensus articulated in the Constitution and practised in reality that is one of Malaysia’s perennial strengths.

4. This strength was further reinforced by a national philosophy— the Rukunegara — that attempted to endow a national mission with a universal vision.

It is significant that in 1970, 15 months after the 1969 riots the nation reiterated its commitment to the nation-building process through a national philosophy which while rooted in the Constitution and loyalty to King and country, expounded a vision of a united, just, democratic, liberal and progressive Malaysia that the vast majority of Malaysians could identify with. It is a pity that after the seventies, the Rukunegara was accorded less significance. There was no concerted endeavour to socialise the nation into a superb philosophy which could have helped to check exclusive religious tendencies and communal cultural trends. Nonetheless, the present elites continue to pay lip-service to the Rukunegara.

5. Nation-building has been buttressed by massive changes in the occupational pattern where the identification of ethnicity with occupation has been reduced drastically in certain sectors of the economy.

By breaking down such identification through education, economic growth, social mobility and the New Economic Policy (NEP), functional interaction among the communities has been enhanced especially in the private sector. Unfortunately, the public services especially the civil service has become more mono-ethnic. It underscores the importance of unrelenting efforts to address ethnic challenges in a multi-ethnic society like ours.

6. Electoral realities have also emerged as a factor in curbing exclusivist communal politics.

With rapid urbanisation from the late seventies onwards, a sizeable number of Federal and State constituencies in Peninsular Malaysia have become more multi-ethnic.( A constituency is multi-ethnic when at least 30% of the voting population comprises ethnic groups that are not from the majority community in that constituency.) Candidates and parties competing in such constituencies would be constrained from making stark communal appeals in order to garner votes. By focussing upon issues that transcend ethnic boundaries they would be contributing towards the process of making politics more multi-ethnic.

7. Orderly political succession

Orderly political succession at the very apex of the political hierarchy is of immense significance in ensuring political stability. Within the Malaysian context, the transfer of power from an incumbent prime minister to his successor has been smooth even if there have been times when there was a bit of uncertainty. The last such transfer was different in that it was not within the same ruling party. The opposition had come to power on the 9th of May 2018. There may have been some anxious moments but in the end convention and good sense prevailed.

One hopes that the forthcoming transfer of power will also be orderly. It may be worth recalling that the only time that an intended transfer of power failed to materialise and instead led to a huge political crisis was in 1998 and it involved Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammad and Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim — the two actors who will determine the next political succession.

Pitfalls

Having offered some reflections on our pillars of strength, let us examine briefly some of our major pitfalls as a nation.

1. Conception of the nation

Many non-Malays, inside and outside the public arena have a skewed view of what the nation is. For them Malaya or Malaysia began after Merdeka. They refuse to acknowledge that Islam, the Malay language and the Malay Sultanates have had a profound impact upon the nation as we know it today. These dimensions of our history form the bedrock of our nation which is why they are integral to our Constitution. The failure to accept that Malaya emerged from Malay polities as implied in our Proclamation of Independence in 1957 is one of the reasons why ethnic controversies in the country generate so much heat and do not seem to dissipate.

A segment of the Malay population also suffers from a psychological block. There is little understanding of how colonial migration, Chinese and Indian domicile and their eventual accommodation as citizens have changed the landscape forever. As citizens they have roles, rights and responsibilities which will not threaten the Malay position in any way if the larger challenge of integration is approached in a just and equitable manner.

2. Barriers in the economy and society

It is not just what we have inherited from history that stands in the way of unity and harmony. There are dichotomies and divisions in contemporary Malaysia that also impede integration. Class dichotomies that express themselves in yawning socio-economic disparities are far more significant in their impact upon the actual lives of people than ethnic differences. In fact, these disparities are often camouflaged through an over-emphasis upon the ethnic question in order to perpetuate elite power and privilege.

At the same time, injustices at the individual level are almost always perceived through ethnic lenses when availability of resources and socio-economic priorities may be far more decisive. These injustices become cannon fodder for politicians determined to perpetuate their power and influence through manipulation of ethnic sentiments.

3. Power and politics subverting unity

What this suggests is that the obsession with politics and power in Malaysia as elsewhere has subverted noble attempts to nurture and nourish unity and understanding among the communities. There are numerous instances to show how worthwhile ventures in education, the creative arts, sports and in the economy which would have contributed to national unity have been stymied by politicians and their underlings pursuing their own narrow political agendas. Indeed, it is the misuse of politics and power — more than any other activity —- that is the bane in the quest for unity and integration.

This brings us to some proposed solutions to the malaise generated by these pitfalls.

Solutions

1) Shared perspective on the nation’s past, present and future.

It is time that we develop a shared perspective on our past, present and future by using the Malaysian Constitution and the Rukunegara as the starting point. Through a deeper understanding of both these documents, we will develop a better grasp of the history and evolution of this land and why certain principles and aspirations are fundamental to our success as a nation. Such an understanding should not only lead to a deeper appreciation of our rights but also a more profound commitment to our responsibilities as citizens. Making all Malaysians aware of this should become a sacred mission.

2) An inclusive commitment to holistic justice

From the earliest days of our nationhood, there were elements in our policies and programmes that displayed an inclusive approach to matters of social justice. In a sense the two prongs of the NEP were both inclusive. This underlying principle should now be made the kernel of public policy. Need, not ethnicity, should be the basis of all policy making. In my very first evaluation of the NEP in the mid-seventies, I had argued for a needs approach. Such an approach has many advantages. It will reduce if not eliminate much of the ethnic angst which hinders national integration. It will curb vile attempts to misuse ethnicity to aggrandize one’s own position. It will endow real meaning to the notion of justice contained in the various spiritual-moral philosophies.

3) Integrity and accountability to temper politics and power

To control, to check the fanatical preoccupation with politics and power one has to strengthen integrity and accountability at all levels of society especially among those who wield power and influence. When integrity and accountability are widely observed, power as a source of privilege acquired through politics loses attraction. This is perhaps one of the reasons why in societies where the level of integrity and accountability is high, politics is also less immersed in power and wealth. The Scandinavian countries are in relative terms good examples.

Conclusion

The 7 pillars of strength weighed against the 3 pitfalls suggest that in spite of everything there is hope. The solutions offered here are also feasible mainly because they are already part of the environment and do not require any massive transformation. The only question is whether Malaysian elites and Malaysian society have the will and the courage to initiate the changes proposed here?

Dr Chandra Muzaffar has been writing and speaking on Malaysian politics since the early seventies.

2nd December 2019

Kuala Lumpur

By Robert J Burrowes

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth.

1. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the time. Most scientists believe that this mass extinction was precipitated by glaciation and falling sea levels (possibly a result of the Appalachian mountain range forming), catastrophically impacting animal life which lived largely in the ocean at the time.

2. The Late Devonian Extinction happened about 364 million years ago and destroyed 75% of species on Earth. Possibly spread over hundreds of thousands of years, a sequence of events that depleted the oceans of oxygen and volcanic ash that cooled the Earth’s surface are believed to have driven the extinctions. It was to be 10 million years before vertebrates again appeared on land. ‘If the late Devonian extinction had not occurred, humans might not exist today.’

3. The Permian-Triassic extinction, which occurred 251 million years ago, is considered the worst in all history because around 96% of species were lost. ‘The Great Dying’ was precipitated by an enormous volcanic eruption ‘that filled the air with carbon dioxide which fed different kinds of bacteria that began emitting large amounts of methane. The Earth warmed, and the oceans became acidic.’ Life today descended from the 4% of surviving species.

4. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction happened between 214 million and 199 million years ago and, as in other mass extinctions, it is believed there were several phases of species loss. The blame has been placed on an asteroid impact, climate disruption and flood basalt eruptions. This extinction laid the path that allowed for the evolution of dinosaurs which later survived for about 135 million years.

5. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, best known of ‘the Big 5’ mass extinctions, occurred 65 million years ago, ending 76% of life on Earth including the dinosaurs. A combination of volcanic activity, asteroid impact, and climate disruption are blamed. This extinction period allowed for the evolution of mammals on land and sharks in the sea.

6. The sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history is the one that is being experienced now. Unlike earlier mass extinctions, which helped to pave the way for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the precipitating cause of this extinction event is Homo sapiens itself and, moreover, Homo sapiens is slated to be one of the species that becomes extinct.

Let me explain why this is so by touching on the diverse range of forces driving the extinctions, concepts such as ‘co-extinction’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’, the ways in which extinction impacts are often ‘hidden’ in the short term, thus masking the true extent of the destruction, and the implications of all this for life on Earth, including Homo sapiens, in the near term.

But before I do this, consider this excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind written by Yuval Noah Harari, commenting on the expansion of ancient humans out of Africa:

‘If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution [which Harari argues occurred during the period between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago and probably involved an internal restructuring of the Sapiens brain to facilitate learning, remembering, imagining and communicating while also, in the case of the earlier date, coinciding with the time when Sapiens bands started leaving Africa for the second time], the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution [about 12,000 years ago], only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools.

‘This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution’ with mammoths, for example, vanishing from the Eurasian and North American landmasses by 10,000 years ago as Homo sapiens spread. Despite this, mammoths thrived until just 4,000 years ago on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel, then suddenly disappeared with the arrival of humans.

While there has been some debate about the full extent of the human impact compared to, say, climate and environmental changes including ice age peaks – see, for example, ‘What killed off the giant beasts – climate change or man?’ and ‘What Killed the Great Beasts of North America?’ – the archeological record provides compelling evidence of the role of Homo sapiens as, in Harari’s words, ‘an ecological serial killer’. There is further well-documented evidence in Professor Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peoplean excerpt of which in relation to New Zealand, where the megafauna survived until Maoris arrived just 800 years ago and then rapidly vanished, can be read here: ‘The Future Eaters’.

And the onslaught has never ended as the inexorable encroachment of Homo sapiens to the remotest corners of the Earth (including virtually all of the thousands of islands of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans) has inevitably led to the extinction of myriad local species including birds, insects and snails. In fact, following the Industrial Revolution about 270 years ago which enabled the development of killing technologies on a scale unheard of previously, the human assault on life on Earth has accelerated so effectively that 200 species of life are now driven to extinction daily.

Whatever other claims they might make about themselves, human beings are truly the masters of death.

So where do we stand today?

According to one recent report, the Earth is experiencing what could be described as ‘just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg’. See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’. ‘Just the tip?’, you might ask.

Extinction-causing Behaviours

The primary human behaviours that are modifying Earth’s biosphere, with catastrophic outcomes for many species, are readily apparent and well-described in the scientific literature: destruction of habitat (such as oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) whether through military violence, radioactive contamination, industrial activities (including ecosystem destruction to build cities, roads and railroads but a vast range of other activities besides), chemical poisoning or other means; over-exploitation; biotic invasion and the effects of environmental modification,including climatic conditions, leading to temperature rise, more frequent droughts, ocean acidification and other impacts which so alter a locality’s environmental conditions that tolerance limits for inhabiting species are breached causing localized extinctions. Unfortunately, however, there are other, more complicated, mechanisms that can exacerbate species loss.

‘In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse.’ In simple language, a species cannot survive without the resources (the other species) on which it depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire systems’.

This is because resource and consumer interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity (including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several higher-level consumers.

Summarizing the findings of several studies based on simulated or real-world data, Dr. Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw explain why ‘we should expect most events of species loss to cause co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural rate at which populations and species are now disappearing, and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive biological communities to collapse. Furthermore, co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the population size of a species could result in the local disappearance of other species depending on the first. This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes.’

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of this phenomenon, Strona and Bradshaw note that ‘As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources – a process known as “co-extinction” – is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss’ [emphasis added] and that ‘ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.’ See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’.

In their own recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Professors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document another frequently ignored element in understanding the accelerating nature of species extinctions.

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’,even in ‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, over exploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists and accountants).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of local populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Another recent study examined ‘Experimental Evidence for the Population-Dynamic Mechanisms Underlying Extinction Cascades of Carnivores’, and was undertaken by Dr. Dirk Sanders, Rachel Kehoe &Professor F.J. Frank van Veen who sought to understand ‘extinction cascades’. Noting that ‘Species extinction rates due to human activities are high’, they investigated and documented how ‘initial extinctions can trigger cascades of secondary extinctions, leading to further erosion of biodiversity.’ This occurs because the diversity of consumer species is maintained due to the positive indirect effects that these species have on each other by reducing competition among their respective resource species. That is, the loss of one carnivore species can lead to increased competition among prey, leading to extinctions of those carnivore species dependent on prey that loses this competition.

Another way of explaining this was offered by Dr. Jose M. Montoya: ‘Species do not go extinct one at a time. Instead… ecosystems change in a kind of chain reaction, just like in bowling. The impact of the ball knocks down one or two pins, but they hit other pins and this ultimately determines your score. Likewise, when in an ecosystem one species goes extinct many others may follow even if they are not directly affected by the initial disturbance. The complex combination of direct and indirect effects resulting from species interactions determines the fate of the remaining species. To predict the conditions under which extinctions beget further extinctions is a major scientific and societal challenge under the current biodiversity crisis…. Sanders and colleagues… show how and why initial extinctions of predators trigger cascades of secondary extinctions of the remaining predators.’ See ‘Ecology: Dynamics of Indirect Extinction’.

To fully grasp the extent of the crisis in our biosphere, we must look well beyond Earth’s climate: There are a great many variables adversely impacting life on Earth, many of which individually pose the threat of human extinction and which, synergistically, now virtually guarantee it absent an immediate and profound response. As reported in the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services researched and published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the scientific body which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services this provides to society – ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPBES Global Assessment ranks, for the first time at this scale, the 5 direct drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact. So what are the culprits behind nature’s destruction?’ Number 1. on the IPBES list is ‘Changes in land and sea use, like turning intact tropical forests into agricultural land’ but, as noted, there are four others. According to this report: one million species of life on Earth are threatened with extinction.

And in their latest assessment of 100,000 species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that not one species had improved prospects of averting extinction since their previous ‘Red List’ report. See ‘News Release’and‘From over 100,000 species assessments in IUCN update, zero improvements’.

Of course, separately from the systemic extinction drivers noted above, including the unmentioned destruction of Earth’s oceans through its absorption of carbon dioxide, pollution with everything from pesticides to plastic, and chronic overfishing which is pushing many ocean species to, or over, the brink of extinction as well, humans also engage in yet other activities that drive the rush to extinction. Hunting wildlife to kill it for trophies or pet food – see ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food” Condemned’ – and trafficking wildlife: a $10-20 billion-a-year industry involving illegal wildlife products such as jewelry, traditional ‘medicine’, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as exotic pets – see ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’ and ‘China must lead global effort against tiger trade’ – play vital roles as well.

In summary, the tragedy of human existence is that the Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens the capacity to plan, organize and conduct an endless sequence of systematic massacres all over the planet but, assuming that we have the genetic capacity to do so, our parenting and education models since that time have ensured that we have been denied the emotional and intellectual capacities to fight, strategically, for our own survival. And the time we have left is now incredibly short.

So what can we do?

Given that the ongoing, systematic industrial-scale destruction of Earth’s wildlife has its origin in evolutionary events that took place some 70,000 years ago but which probably had psychological origins prior to this,it is clearly a crisis that is not about to be resolved quickly or easily.

‘Why the mention of psychology here?’ you might ask. Well, while many other factors have obviously played a part – for example, abundance of a species in a particular context might mean that the issue of killing its individual members for food does not even arise, at least initially – it is clear that, given the well-documented multifaceted crisis in which human beings now find themselves, only a grotesquely insufficient effort is being put into averting the now imminent extinction of our own species which critically requires us to dramatically stem (and soon halt) the tide of wildlife extinctions, among many other necessary responses. See, for example,‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

It is psychologically dysfunctional, to put it mildly, to participate in or condone by our silence and inaction, activities that will precipitate our own extinction, whether these are driven by the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – or by our own dysfunctional overconsumption. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

For that reason, after 70,000 years, we must finally ask ‘Why?’ so that we can address the fundamental driversof our extinction-threatening behaviour as well the several vital symptoms that arise from those drivers. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental question is this: Why are humans behaving in a way that will precipitate our own extinction in the near term? Surely, this is neither sensible nor even sane. And anyone capable of emotional engagement and rational thinking who seriously considers this behaviour must realize this. So why is it happening?

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience, people who are emotionally functional and capable of critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and respond to crises (or even problems) strategically. Despite this profound social shortcoming, some individuals have nevertheless emerged who have one or more of these qualities and they are inevitably ‘condemned’ to sound the alarm, in one way or another, and to try to mobilize an appropriate response to whatever crisis or problem confronts them at the time.

But, as is utterly obvious from the state of our world, those with these capacities have been rare and, more to the point, they have had few people with whom to work. This is graphically illustrated by the current failure to respond strategically to the ongoing climate catastrophe (with most effort focused on lobbying elite-controlled governments and international organizations), the elite-driven perpetual (and ongoing threat of nuclear) war as well as the other issues, such as the use of geoengineering and the deployment of 5G, that threaten human survival. See ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’, ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ and ‘Why Activists Fail’.

Given the preoccupation of modern society with producing submissively obedient students, workers, soldiers, citizens (that is, taxpayers and voters) and consumers, the last thing society wants is powerful individuals who are each capable of searching their conscience, feeling their emotional response to events, thinking critically and behaving strategically in response. Hence our parenting and education models use a ruthless combination of visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to ensure that our children become terrified, self-hating and powerless individuals like virtually all of the adults around them.

This multifaceted violence ensures that the adult who emerges from childhood and adolescence is suppressing awareness of an enormous amount of fear, pain and anger (among many other feelings) and must live in delusion to remain unaware of these suppressed feelings. This, in turn, ensures that, as part of their delusion, people develop a strong sense that what they are doing already is functional and working (no matter how dysfunctional and ineffective it may actually be)while unconsciously suppressing awareness of any evidence that contradicts their delusion. See ‘Why Violence?’,‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’,‘Do We Want School or Education?’and ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

So if we are going to address the fundamental driver of both the destruction of Earth’s wildlife and the biosphere generally, we must address this cause. For those adults powerful enough to do this, there is an explanation in ‘Putting Feelings First’. And for those adults committed to facilitating children’s efforts to realize their potential and become self-aware (rather than delusional), see ‘My Promise to Children’and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Beyond this cause, however, we must also resist, strategically, the insane elite-controlled governments and corporations that are a key symptom of this crisis – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – by manufacturing and marketing a vast range of wildlife (and life)-destroying products ranging from weapons (conventional and nuclear) and fossil fuels to products made by the destruction of habitat (including oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) and the chemical poisoning of agricultural land (to grow the food that most people eat) while also using geoengineering and deploying 5G technology worldwide. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

But we can also undermine this destruction, for example,by refusing to buy the products provided by the elite’s corporations (with the complicity of governments) that fight wars (to enrich weapons corporations) to steal fossil fuels (to enrich energy, aircraft and vehicle-manufacturing corporations) or those corporations that make profits by destroying habitats orproducing poisoned food, for example. We can do this by systematically reducing and altering our consumption pattern and becoming more locally self-reliant as outlined in‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’or, even more simply, by committing to The Earth Pledge (below).

In a nutshell, for example, if we do not travel by car or aircraft, NATO governments will have much less incentive to invade and occupy resource-rich countries to steal their resources and corporations will gain zero profit from destroying wildlife habitat as they endlessly seek to extract the resources necessary to manufacture and fuel these commodities thus saving vast numbers of animals (and many other life forms besides) and easing pressure on the biosphere generally.

You can also consider joining those working to end violence in all contexts by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children(see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rain forest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9 I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Perhaps the key point to be learned from the evidence cited above is that just as we have triggered a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops that ‘lock in’ an ongoing deterioration of Earth’s climate which we are now virtually powerless to halt (if we were even trying to do so), we have also precipitated a biodiversity crisis that is self-reinforcing because the loss of each and every species has an impact on those species that are dependent on it, precipitating chains of events that make further extinctions inevitable. This is one of the ‘negative synergies’, for example, contributing to the Amazon rainforest’s rapid approach to the tipping point at which it will collapse. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point’.

Hence, we are approaching the final act of a tragedy that had its origins in the Cognitive Revolution some 70,000 years ago and which we have not been able to contain in any way. The earlier acts of this tragedy were the countless species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that Homo sapiens has driven to extinction.

Now, in the final act, we will drive to extinction 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after….

Until, one day very soon now, unless you and those you know are willing to commit yourselves wholly to the effort to avert this outcome, the human assault on life on Earth will reach its inevitable conclusion: the extinction of Homo sapiens.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence.

1 December 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat

Modern day Odisha is known to be the ‘epicenter’ of Brahmanism as the socio-cultural-economic dominance of the brahmanical castes in Odisha is complete. One wonders as what happened to it and why Odisha, once the hub of Buddhist activities and culture completely lost to it. I am sure a fair analysis of history need to be done in the greater interest of our secular values and retaining our original heritage.

The heart of brahmanical Odisha is Puri and its famous Jaggannath temple where the temple openly propagate division among communities. Non Hindus are not allowed which is fine as it is their fundamental right to deny people who dont have the faith, yet there are thousands who proclaim as Hindus but not allowed inside the temple. Dalits too are not allowed the entry inside the temple and we heard the story of President Kovind being unwelcome in the temple complex when he visited there.

The temple has enormous wealth. It has huge land space and devotees throng from all over the world. One local shop keeper told me that it is the ‘most powerful god’, I told him every ‘god’ is powerful because of ‘power’ and ‘politics’ of the dominant behind them. Can we say, Tirupathi god is lesser important. Can we say, Kashi Vishwnath is not important or the huge Laxmi Narayan Temple in Trivendram does not matter. Every temple matter in this country because common person expect ‘miracles’ here but the powerful get money and power from them. They have become shelter places for all kind of politicians who influence politics and are not keen on people’s welfare.

Some how, the politicians and power chums never ever interested in people’s welfare so traditionally you are ‘good’ if you do donate to a temple or build a temple but we know all these religious places are not merely religious, they are economy as well as politics for the powerful. So Odisha’s power flow from Lord Jaggannath.

Now, I see big banners and advertisement of Odisha government about its Buddhist heritage. You can find it at the airport but I feel there are not many visitors. I had earlier visited Dhaulagiri where Ashoka defeated his rival army in the battle of Kalinga in the year 261BC. It is assumed that over one lakh people were killed in this war which forced Ashoka to ponder over and reject violence as he embraced Buddhism and massively propagated Buddhism world over. As I visited two beautiful Buddhist heritage sites of Ratnagiri and Udayagiri hills, in Jaajpur district of Odisha, many things came in my mind.

Udayagiri hills are absolutely fascinating and the architecture there look like that it was a University. The sad part is that amidst the beatiful heritage site we have a ‘Mahakal temple’ which look planted and deliberate. I dont know how the archelogocal survey of India allow these things. The first thing should be to investigate as who planted this and whether this is really Mahakal or Buddhist statues ? The Udayagiri site is surrounded by beautiful lush green hills and must be developed fully. Nearly 30 kilometer from Udayagiri hills is Ratnagiri as you cross river Birupa. The Ratnagiri site showed the stunning artifacts of Buddhist era as well as diverse nature of worshipping pattern among the Buddhists. Once you go to see the marvelous structure which start from 2nd BC to 6th to 9th century BC, then you realise how India would have been a country of great minds, both in term of spiritualism as well as architecture. Buddhist era in India was dedicated to education and learning but then we must now explore who destroyed these places learning.

I was pained to see many of these artifacts which were targeted. The excavated artifacts and idols reveals that they must have been attacked by those who were not keen on Buddhism. If it had happened in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, ‘historians’ blamed to Islam and Mughals for the assault on them but what about Odisha. Who were responsible for killing Buddhism and Buddhist places of learning in India. It is important to know because these are the same people who blame Muslims for every attack on India, including breaking the idols of the Hindu Gods and goddesses.

I was wondering as where has the Buddhist population disappeared. Isn’t it the duty of the anthropologists to look for, most of them have been too charitable and polite to the Hinduism and no questions are asked about the Hindu Rajas and their brutality towards Buddhism. A friend informed me that many people call Lord Jaggannath, an avatar of Buddha or Buddha an avtar of Jaggannath. If Jaggannath and Buddha are the same, then I have my doubts about Jaggannath temple which many people suggest was a Buddhist one and conquered by the brahmanical forces and converted into a highly orthdox Hindu temple.

It is good that Odisha government is developing these Buddhist sites which are extraordinary but historians owns a duty towards all to give us a unbiase picture as who were responsible for destruction of Buddhist places and Buddhists in India. The historians have their own biases as they never bothered to speak about Buddhist past of Ayodhya as well as how the brahmanical forces still control Baudh Gaya as a Shiva temple still exist inside the holiest shrine of Buddhist world over. Historical wrongs can not be corrected but it is important to give people the real picture. Historians in India discussed Buddhism in terms of an event and not give detailed picture of how great places of education and learning during Buddhist period were destroyed by the Brahmanical rulers. Perhaps, if this country has such a huge number illiterate and poor people, it is because the democratisation process during Buddhist period became the biggest challenge to brahmanism and its exclusive privileges for particular communities that they were not ready to share them with others and unleashed their caste superstructure with ‘divine sanction’ on the masses. India was never the same again and consequences of the brahmanical assault on Buddhism are being felt now when society is highly polarised and racist caste system being justified and encouraged all over in then name of traditions. It is time to embrace India of Buddhist period and bring equality and enlightenment in the lives of all Indians so that we do not suffocate in the dirty ritual and horrible traditions and survive as a better civilisation which can make all of us proud.

Vidya Bhushan Rawat is a social activist. Twitter @freetohumanity

30 November 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Nicolas J S Davies

Iraqis are mourning 60 protesters killed by police and soldiers on Thursday in Baghdad, Najaf and Nasiriyah. Nearly 400 protesters have been killed since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets at the beginning of October. Human rights groups have described the crisis in Iraq as a “bloodbath,” Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi has announced he will resign, and Sweden has opened an investigation against Iraqi Defense Minister Najah Al-Shammari, who is a Swedish citizen, for crimes against humanity.

According to Al Jazeera, “Protesters are demanding the overthrow of a political class seen as corrupt and serving foreign powers while many Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs, healthcare or education.” Only 36% of the adult population of Iraq have jobs, and despite the gutting of the public sector under U.S. occupation, its tattered remnants still employ more people than the private sector, which fared even worse under the violence and chaos of the U.S.’s militarized shock doctrine.

Western reporting conveniently casts Iran as the dominant foreign player in Iraq today. But while Iran has gained enormous influence and is one of the targets of the protests, most of the people ruling Iraq today are still the former exiles that the U.S. flew in with its occupation forces in 2003, “coming to Iraq with empty pockets to fill” as a taxi-driver in Baghdad told a Western reporter at the time. The real causes of Iraq’s unending political and economic crisis are these former exiles’ betrayal of their country, their endemic corruption and the U.S.’s illegitimate role in destroying Iraq’s government, handing it over to them and maintaining them in power for 16 years.

The corruption of both U.S. and Iraqi officials during the U.S. occupation is well documented. UN Security Council resolution 1483 established a $20 billion Development Fund for Iraq using previously seized Iraqi assets, money left in the UN’s “oil for food” program and new Iraqi oil revenues. An audit by KPMG and a special inspector general found that a huge proportion of that money was stolen or embezzled by U.S. and Iraqi officials.

Lebanese customs officials found $13 million in cash aboard Iraqi-American interim Interior Minister Falah Naqib’s plane. Occupation crime boss Paul Bremer maintained a $600 million slush fund with no paperwork. An Iraqi government ministry with 602 employees collected salaries for 8,206. A U.S. Army officer doubled the price on a contract to rebuild a hospital, and told the hospital’s director the extra cash was his “retirement package.” A U.S. contractor billed $60 million on a $20 million contract to rebuild a cement factory, and told Iraqi officials they should just be grateful the U.S. had saved them from Saddam Hussein. A U.S. pipeline contractor charged $3.4 million for non-existent workers and “other improper charges.” Out of 198 contracts reviewed by the inspector general, only 44 had documentation to confirm the work was done.

U.S. “paying agents” distributing money for projects around Iraq pocketed millions of dollars in cash.The inspector general only investigated one area, around Hillah, but found $96.6 million dollars unaccounted for in that area alone. One American agent could not account for $25 million, while another could only account for $6.3 million out of $23 million. The “Coalition Provisional Authority” used agents like these all over Iraq and simply “cleared” their accounts when they left the country. One agent who was challenged came back the next day with $1.9 million in missing cash.

The U.S. Congress also budgeted $18.4 billion for reconstruction in Iraq in 2003, but apart from $3.4 billion diverted to “security,” less than $1 billion of it was ever disbursed. Many Americans believe U.S. oil companies have made out like bandits in Iraq, but that’s not true either. The plans that Western oil companies drew up with Vice President Cheney in 2001 had that intent, but a law to grant Western oil companies lucrative “production sharing agreements” (PSAs) worth tens of billions per year was exposed as a smash and grab raid and the Iraqi National Assembly refused to pass it.

Finally, in 2009, Iraq’s leaders and their U.S. puppet-masters gave up on PSAs (for the time being…) and invited foreign oil companies to bid on “technical service agreements” (TSAs) worth $1 to $6 per barrel for increases in production from Iraqi oilfields. Ten years later, production has only increased to 4.6 million barrels per day, of which 3.8 million are exported. From Iraqi oil exports of about $80 billion per year, foreign firms with TSAs earn only $1.4 billion, and the largest contracts are not held by U.S. firms. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is earning about $430 million in 2019; BP earns $235 million; Malaysia’s Petronas $120 million; Russia’s Lukoil $105 million; and Italy’s ENI $100 million. The bulk of Iraq’s oil revenues still flow through the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) to the corrupt U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

Another legacy of the U.S. occupation is Iraq’s convoluted election system and the undemocratic horse-trading by which the executive branch of the Iraqi government is selected. The 2018 election was contested by 143 parties grouped into 27 coalitions or “lists,” plus 61 other independent parties. Ironically, this is similar to the contrived, multi-layered political system the British created to control Iraq and exclude Shiites from power after the Iraqi revolt of 1920.

Today, this corrupt system keeps dominant power in the hands of a cabal of corrupt Shiite and Kurdish politicians who spent many years in exile in the West, working with Ahmed Chalabi’s U.S.-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Ayad Allawi’s U.K.-based Iraqi National Accord (INA) and various factions of the Shiite Islamist Dawa Party. Voter turnout has dwindled from 70% in 2005 to 44.5% in 2018.

Ayad Allawi and the INA were the instrument for the CIA’s hopelessly bungled military coup in Iraq in 1996. The Iraqi government followed every detail of the plot on a closed-circuit radio handed over by one of the conspirators and arrested all the CIA’s agents inside Iraq on the eve of the coup. It executed thirty military officers and jailed a hundred more, leaving the CIA with no human intelligence from inside Iraq.

Ahmed Chalabi and the INC filled that vacuum with a web of lies that warmongering U.S. officials fed into the echo chamber of the U.S. corporate media to justify the invasion of Iraq. On June 26th 2002, the INC sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee to lobby for more U.S. funding. It identified its “Information Collection Program” as the primary source for 108 stories about Iraq’s fictitious “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and links to Al-Qaeda in U.S. and international newspapers and magazines.

After the invasion, Allawi and Chalabi became leading members of the U.S. occupation’s Iraqi Governing Council. Allawi was appointed Prime Minister of Iraq’s interim government in 2004, and Chalabi was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Oil Minister in the transitional government in 2005. Chalabi failed to win a seat in the 2005 National Assembly election, but was later elected to the assembly and remained a powerful figure until his death in 2015. Allawi and the INA are still involved in the horse-trading for senior positions after every election, despite never getting more than 8% of the votes – and only 6% in 2018.

These are the senior ministers of the new Iraqi government formed after the 2018 election, with some details of their Western backgrounds:

Adil Abdul-Mahdi – Prime Minister (France). Born in Baghdad in 1942. Father was a government minister under the British-backed monarchy. Lived in France from 1969-2003, earning a Ph.D in politics at Poitiers. In France, he became a follower of Ayatollah Khomeini and a founding member of the Iran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in 1982. Was SCIRI’s representative in Iraqi Kurdistan for a period in the 1990s. After the invasion, he became Finance Minister in Allawi’s interim government in 2004; Vice President from 2005-11; Oil Minister from 2014-16.

Barham Salih – President (U.K. & U.S.). Born in Sulaymaniyah in 1960. Ph.D. in Engineering (Liverpool – 1987). Joined Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in 1976. Jailed for 6 weeks in in 1979 and left Iraq for the U.K. PUK representative in London from 1979-91; head of PUK office in Washington from 1991-2001. President of Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) from 2001-4; Deputy PM in interim Iraqi government in 2004; Planning Minister in transitional government in 2005; Deputy PM from 2006-9; Prime Minister of KRG from 2009-12.

Mohamed Ali Alhakim – Foreign Minister (U.K. & U.S.). Born in Najaf in 1952. M.Sc. (Birmingham), Ph.D. in Telecom Engineering (Southern California), Professor at Northeastern University in Boston 1995-2003. After the invasion, he became Deputy Secretary-General and Planning Coordinator in the Iraqi Governing Council; Communications Minister in interim government in 2004; Planning Director at Foreign Ministry, and Economic Adviser to VP Abdul-Mahdi from 2005-10; and UN Ambassador from 2010-18.

Fuad Hussein – Finance Minister & Deputy PM (Netherlands & France). Born in Khanaqin (majority Kurdish town in Diyala province) in 1946. Joined Kurdish Student Union and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) as a student in Baghdad. Lived in Netherlands from 1975-87; incomplete Ph.D. in International Relations; married to Dutch Christian woman. Appointed deputy head of Kurdish Institute in Paris in 1987. Attended Iraqi exile political conferences in Beirut (1991), New York (1999) & London (2002). After the invasion, he became an adviser at the Education Ministry from 2003-5; and Chief of Staff to Masoud Barzani, President of the KRG, from 2005-17.

Thamir Ghadhban – Oil Minister & Deputy PM (U.K.). Born in Karbala in 1945. B.Sc. (UCL) & M.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering (Imperial College, London). Joined Basra Petroleum Co. in 1973. Director General of Engineering and then Planning at Iraqi Oil Ministry from 1989-92. Imprisoned for 3 months and demoted in 1992, but did not leave Iraq, and was reappointed Director General of Planning in 2001. After the invasion, he was promoted to CEO of Oil Ministry; Oil Minister in the interim government in 2004; elected to National Assembly in 2005 and served on 3-man committee that drafted the failed oil law; chaired Prime Minister’s Advisors’ Committee from 2006-16.

Major General (Retd) Najah Al-Shammari – Defense Minister (Sweden). Born in Baghdad in 1967. The only Sunni Arab among senior ministers. Military officer since 1987. Has lived in Sweden and may have been member of Allawi’s INA before 2003. Senior officer in U.S.-backed Iraqi special forces recruited from INC, INA and Kurdish Peshmerga from 2003-7. Deputy commander of “counterterrorism” forces 2007-9. Residency in Sweden 2009-15. Swedish citizen since 2015. Reportedly under investigation for benefits fraud in Sweden, and now for crimes against humanity in killing of over 300 protesters in October-November 2019.

In 2003, the U.S. and its allies unleashed unspeakable, systematic violence against the people of Iraq. Public health experts reliably estimated that the first three years of war and hostile military occupation cost about 650,000 Iraqi lives. But the U.S. did succeed in installing a puppet government of formerly Western-based Shiite and Kurdish politicians in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, with control over Iraq’s oil revenues. As we can see, many of the ministers in the U.S.-appointed interim government in 2004 are still ruling Iraq today.

U.S. forces deployed ever-escalating violence against Iraqis who resisted the invasion and hostile military occupation of their country. In 2004, the U.S. began training a large force of Iraqi police commandos for the Interior Ministry, and unleashed commando units recruited from SCIRI’s Badr Brigade militia as death squads in Baghdad in April 2005. This U.S.-backed reign of terror peaked in the summer of 2006, with the corpses of as many as 1,800 victims brought to the Baghdad morgue each month. An Iraqi human rights group examined 3,498 bodies of summary execution victims and identified 92% of them as people arrested by Interior Ministry forces.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency tracked “enemy-initiated attacks” throughout the occupation and found that over 90% were against U.S. and allied military targets, not “sectarian” attacks on civilians. But the U.S. officials used a narrative of “sectarian violence” to blame the work of U.S.-trained Interior Ministry death squads on independent Shiite militias like Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

The government Iraqis are protesting against today is still led by the same gang of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles who wove a web of lies to stage manage the invasion of their own country in 2003, and then hid behind the walls of the Green Zone while U.S. forces and death squads slaughtered their people to make the country “safe” for their corrupt government.

More recently they again acted as cheerleaders as American bombs, rockets and artillery reduced most of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, to rubble, after twelve years of occupation, corruption and savage repression drove its people into the arms of the Islamic State. Kurdish intelligence reports revealed that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in the U.S.-led destruction of Mosul.

The cost of rebuilding Mosul, Fallujah and other cities and towns is conservatively estimated at $88 billion. But despite $80 billion per year in oil exports and a federal budget of over $100 billion, the Iraqi government has allocated no money at all for reconstruction. Foreign, mostly wealthy Arab countries, have pledged $30 billion, including just $3 billion from the U.S., but very little of that has been, or may ever be, delivered. On the pretext of fighting the Islamic State, the U.S. has reestablished a huge military base for over 5,000 U.S. troops at Al-Asad airbase in Anbar province.

The history of Iraq since 2003 has been a never-ending disaster for its people. Many of this new generation of Iraqis who have grown up amid the ruins and chaos the U.S. occupation left in its wake believe they have nothing to lose but their blood and their lives, as they take to the streets to reclaim their dignity, their future and their country’s sovereignty.

The bloody handprints of U.S. officials and their Iraqi puppets all over this crisis should stand as a dire warning to Americans of the predictably catastrophic results of an illegal foreign policy based on sanctions, coups, threats and the use of military force to try to impose the will of deluded U.S. leaders on people all over the world.

Nicolas J.S.Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is an independent journalist and a researcher for CODEPINK.

29 November 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kees van der Pijl[1]

 

 

1. Introduction. The MH17 Trial as Political Theatre

Legal Bases of the Prosecution

The Hallmarks of a Show Trial

The ‘Integrity Initiative’ and the anti-Russia Campaign

2. From Outlawing War to ‘Humanitarian Intervention’

The UN Charter and Nuremberg

The Vietnam Tribunal: Salvaging the Nuremberg Legacy Privately

Human Rights and Intervention

3. The NATO Intervention in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslavia Tribunal

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Extradition, Trial and Death of Milošević

The ICTY Precedent

4. The Rwanda Tribunal and the International Criminal Court

Rwanda and the Inculpation of Africa

The International Criminal Court (ICC)

A Return to Nuremberg? Malaysia’s War Crimes Tribunal

5. Lockerbie and Libya

The Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands

Aftermath

6. International Criminal Justice and the Historical Record

 

 

 

1. Introduction. The MH17 Trials as Political Theatre

 

On 9 March, 2020, the trial of those accused of being responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on 17 July 2014, is planned to begin. The decision to hold a trial of MH17 suspects was taken by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, OM) on 19 June 2019, on the basis of the criminal investigation by the Joint investigation Committee, JIT. The JIT members conducting this investigation are the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, and Ukraine and Malaysia (since March 2015). Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia has criticised the late admission of his country to the criminal prosecution, and also has raised doubts about the pertinence of the indictment for murder of three Russians and one Ukrainian, an indictment made public at the JIT press conference also on 19 June 2019.[2]

Whether the JIT under these circumstances is still able to function, is therefore in serious doubt. The decision by the JIT countries that the prosecution and trial of suspects would be conducted by and in the Netherlands, under Dutch law, dates from 5 July 2017. To facilitate the actual trial next year, a special treaty was concluded by the Netherlands and Ukraine covering a number of practical issues such as extradition, video hearing of defendants, and the like. The trial will be held before the Hague District Court, in a special location to accommodate a large trial, the Justice Complex Schiphol (JCS) near Schiphol Airport. On the special website launched to publicise the event, and via which its proceedings will be live-streamed, the court is already being recommended as having extensive experience with cases involving international elements. ‘It has, for instance, heard cases with regard to offences that nowadays are punishable in the International Crimes Act. Examples of offences under this law are genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture.’ As the website continues,

The quality of the Dutch justice system ranks above average compared with other countries. This is confirmed by the EU Justice Scoreboard (a comparison of the justice systems of the European Union member states) and the Rule of Law Index (a global comparison of justice systems). These rankings are based on matters such as the average duration of trials, how judges are trained and the extent to which the justice system is free from discrimination, corruption and political influence. In terms of experience with international proceedings, the Netherlands ranks number one in the world.[3]

 

These self-congratulatory qualifications notwithstanding, we cannot look forward to the trial with confidence, on the contrary. For the sort of justice being dispensed here is a very special, new form of justice, international criminal law. That type of law is not the familiar form of international law, based on treaties, of which states are the legal subjects. It is an individualised form of transnational penal law, national to varying degrees (‘involving international elements’), and with a record that does not give rise to optimism, certainly not where it concerns he role of the Netherlands.

In one of the most disturbing cases, the International Criminal Tribunal for the  Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which also sat in The Hague, the prosecution was principally directed against Serbians and the chief suspect, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, died in his cell after the main charge against him had been dropped for lack of evidence. On the other hand, NATO bombing of Serbia, without even a UN mandate, was not prosecuted and the secessionists’ actions in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia profited from a light touch.[4] Since one of the judges assigned to the MH17 trial, Ms. C.I.H. Kerstens-Fockens LLM, was an intern at the ICTY,[5] the Yugoslavia experience deserves to be investigated closely. In the parallel Rwanda tribunal, only Hutus were investigated and indicted for the massacres in 1994, whilst the Tutsi RPF, which triggered the bloodbath by shooting down the plane of the Rwandan president, was not. The International Criminal Court (ICC) only indicted Africans, whilst George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who ordered the invasion of Iraq, are seemingly above the law. In the Lockerbie trial held in the Netherlands (by a Scottish court), a Libyan who had nothing to do with that disaster was found guilty and sentenced. So if in the upcoming MH17 trial, only Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians are the suspects, this fits the longer trend.

One must fear, then, that the upcoming trial of the MH17 suspects will not depart from the pattern established in the three decades of legal precedent in this area. Indeed, prosecution in international criminal cases has so far turned out to be nothing else but the continuation by different means of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’. First comes the intervention itself (sanctions, ‘colour revolutions’, coups d’état, regime change wars), and then the judicial sequel follows, all part of a single punitive operation. Indeed ‘humanitarian intervention’, harking back to the mediaeval concept of ‘just war’, in all or most cases has been followed by the application of criminal justice to the parties against whom the intervention was launched in the first place. This is the one similarity with the trials of Nazi and Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II, except that the Nuremberg trial of the former laid down the principle that launching a war is the supreme war crime. Humanitarian intervention has functioned as a way round that principle.

In this introduction, I will first briefly summarise the legal bases of the prosecution, before addressing how in the context of the propaganda war accompanying the post -9/11 ‘War on Terror’, trials are approached from a theatrical, ‘spectacular’ angle rather than a strictly juridical one. For the MH17 trial in particular it is also necessary to bring in the so-called ‘Integrity Initiative’, revealed in late 2018 as a secret UK-led project to launch a full spectrum PR campaign against Russia over its alleged ‘hybrid warfare’ against the West. The rest of the document then deals with the separate court cases.

 

Legal Bases of the Prosecution

 

Criminal prosecution in a national setting is conducted by the state, which seeks to uphold criminal law. In accordance with the separation of powers (legislative, executive, and judicial), the prosecutor acts as an arm of the executive, making the case for the prosecution on behalf of the state. The judge then renders a verdict on the basis of the law and what else can be brought to bear on the case, such as jurisprudence, precedent, fairness, and the like. Internationally, however, there is no state, and the prosecution is established either by the United Nations (through the Security Council), by another international institution (in the case of MH17, by Eurojust, an arm of the European Union), or by a treaty between states.

In the case of MH17, an important component of the prosecution was the technical investigation by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB, Onderzoeksraad voor Veiligheid, OVV), which published its final report in October 2015. Now the law of 2010 establishing the DSB prescribes that the Board will not report on matters affecting the security of the Netherlands, or matters prejudicing the country’s relations with other states and international organisations, or harming its economic or financial interests (article 57, 1 and 2).[6] Given the prominent role of the Netherlands in fomenting ‘civil society’ movements in the run-up to the armed seizure of power in Ukraine in February 2014, the involvement of EU and NATO in it, the investments of Dutch companies in Ukraine, and the role of the Netherlands as a tax haven for Ukrainian (and Russian) oligarchs, the question arises what there remained for the DSB to report, with so many restrictions. Further constrained by a bilateral agreement with its Ukrainian counterpart that included a non-disclosure provision, the DSB eventually came to the conclusion that MH17 had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile ‘Buk’, fired from a rebel-held area in eastern Ukraine.[7]

The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was established amidst dramatic political developments in Kiev on 7 and 8 August 2014. These events included a crisis of the Yatsenyuk cabinet established by the coup; the resignation of the fascist leader of that coup, Andrij Parubij, from the key post of Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council—three weeks after the downing of MH17; a possible new coup attempt by Far Right militias, and an impromptu visit of NATO Secretary-General Rasmussen to Kiev, apparently to shore up the position of president Poroshenko. The JIT, formally established under the auspices of  Eurojust in The Hague, meanwhile had been constituted with the Netherlands, Australia and Belgium (4 nationals among the victims, against e.g. Indonesia, 12) as members. Ukraine, which is not a member of Eurojust and had no nationals to mourn in the MH17 disaster, was also included as the country where the tragedy happened. It was also granted an effective veto on what the criminal prosecution might reveal.[8] In combination with the initial exclusion of Malaysia, effectively till March 2015, this underscores the idea of a continuation of politics by different means. As with the DSB, the lead role in the JIT was given to the Netherlands, with Fred Westerbeke, a Dutch prosecutor (Officier van Justitie), coordinating the investigation.

Because of the prior role of the DSB, then, the JIT has continued the judicial process as if the guilty party was known in advance and the prosecution merely had to collect the evidence that would lead to a conviction. Here it has come to rely on two sources. One, the controversial Ukrainian intelligence service SBU, which as  demonstrated in the Bonanza Media documentary of Yana Yerlashova and Max van der Werff, has exclusively provided the JIT with telephone taps, many of which have been tampered with or were even entirely pasted together from different conversations; and two, on the British amateur collective, Bellingcat, set up by Elliott Higgins, and which relies exclusively on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to construct narratives supporting the Kiev/NATO account.[9] This is all the more remarkable since the JIT, as a body evidently set up to serve the Western position, should have access to all the information that can be provided to it by the extensive US, NATO, and other Western intelligence services, including satellite images.

 

The Hallmarks of a Show Trial

 

One further characteristic that the MH17 prosecution shares with past instances of international criminal law is the use of well-timed press conferences and the weaving of a narrative from which neither the political mainstream nor the media serving as its mouthpiece will depart. Academic work on how to organise trials to back up this narrative strategy, consciously dramatising the situation in highly emotive, human interest terms, has been undertaken to allow the effective stage-management of trials in his sense. In the MH17 trial, bringing the next of kin into the court room as active participants (in the probable absence of defendants) would be a case in point.

Contemporary politics relies on heavily mediatised, mass-psychological operations utilising techniques of advanced public relations and advertising, such as repetition, amplification of what supports a given account and dissimulation of contradictory information. All this allows turning the dominant narrative into an imposed consensus from which it is very difficult to dissent. In his visionary work, The Society of the Spectacle, originally of 1967, Guy Debord described modern capitalist consumer society as one in which the gaze of the masses is fixed on a hypnotising spectacle performed on behalf of the providers of goods and services, in which political and entertainment celebrities play the lead roles. And just as it is difficult for anyone in the audience of a theatre play or a movie to tear oneself loose from what is shown, the society of the spectacle holds its audiences captive.[10]

The trials in the young tradition of international criminal law are also turned into spectacles. The demonisation of targeted political or military leaders as the incarnation of evil, the use of well-timed indictments, publicity on behalf of the prosecution to build up pressure towards a particular reading of events, abandoning the presumption of innocence of suspects prior to a judgment, and the use of grieving relatives to add emotional momentum towards achieving these political goals, all have featured in these trials and are amply in evidence in the MH17 case as well.

The similarity of public, political trials to the sort of collective hypnosis analysed by Debord is not just a metaphor. The idea of a theatrical mise en scène is being studied in  a ‘Terrorists on Trial’ research project focusing on ‘the performative and communicative aspects of a terrorist trial’, has been running for several years. The project is led by and based on the insights of a Protestant fundamentalist International Relations scholar, Beatrice de Graaf, one of many academics recruited into the post-9/11 terrorism growth industry. Through a series of seminars on particular cases the project defines ‘the court room as a stage in the struggle for publicity, public support and legitimacy’ (subtitle of the ‘Terrorists on Trial’ project).

 

The seminars aim … to apply a performative perspective to terrorism trials, hence not solely concentrating on the immediate judicial performance of the magistrates and/or the defence, but putting trials in their wider sociological context, adopting notions of social drama and communication sciences.[11]

 

One expert meeting led by Ms De Graaf was titled ‘Terrorism Trials as Theatre’, an idea certainly not lost on those setting up the DSB presentation of its final report, organising the JIT press conferences, and preparing the 2020 trial of the MH17 suspects.

The exploitation of the bereaved as a source of emotional identification, referred to already, has been going on for years. Representatives of the MH17 family members  not only came on stage in the media, but also were deployed as a tool in Dutch diplomacy. This included the sending of letters by or on behalf of the next of kin to Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia after he had expressed doubts on Russian guilt, or to exert pressure on the Council of Europe not to readmit Russia, again in the name of bereaved.[12] Neither did the diplomatic exploitation of the next of kin stop with the Dutch family members; when I attended the conference ‘MH17—Quest for Justice’ in Kuala Lumpur in August 2019, it turned out that the Dutch embassy had been closely involved in the decision of Malaysian next of kin to withdraw from the conference at the last minute, whilst the embassy had lodged a separate protest with the Malaysian government and the organisers over the fact it was being held at all and that ‘conspiracy theorists’ (i.e., critics of the official account, including this author) had been invited.[13]

The invitation to the next of kin to attend the trial is also intended to mobilise the public. The bereaved are being used to create the highly charged atmosphere in which ‘social drama’ and ‘the court room as a stage in the struggle for publicity, public support and legitimacy’ can work to move strictly criminal-legal considerations into the background. The planned appearance of the family members in the courtroom to ‘address the court’[14], as if their grief would count as evidence, is a key ingredient of this dramatisation. Or to cite the ICCT project again,

 

Terrorism trials serve multiple ends, depending on the actors involved, who are all busy trying to mobilise their respective target audiences around their narratives and (in)justice frames. Such trials are a very visible and theatrical means of demonstrating concepts and narratives of (in)justice.’[15]

 

The theatrical approach to political trials intersects with new strategies developed in the British Foreign Office and the US State Department to blockbuster public opinion by massive ‘fake news’ campaigns specifically targeting Russia.

 

The ‘Integrity Initiative’ and the Anti-Russia Campaign

 

In late 2018 it was revealed that the British Foreign Office (FCO) was running a secret disinformation programme, the ‘Integrity Initiative’. The programme was launched in 2015 by an ‘Institute for Statecraft’ nominally located in Scotland, but in fact headquartered in the heart of London, at 2 Temple Place. The Institute itself was set up in 2006 by figures with a background in UK military intelligence. Most of the personnel involved in the Integrity Initiative are also British military intelligence and senior military personnel involved in propaganda. The aim of both the Institute and the Initiative is to mobilise journalists, academics and others involved in propaganda in government and the military, into national clusters committed to a negative view of Russia. Secondly, to launch campaigns against security risks from a point of view of alleged Russian influence, from TV hosts in Serbia via Donald Trump to the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.[16]

The Integrity Initiative is led by Chris N. Donnelly, a former British intelligence officer (he also advises the Lithuanian Ministry of Defence), and co-founder of the Institute for Statecraft. Donnelly’s focus on Russia dates from the Cold War with the Soviet Union and his current mandate is ‘to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the Western media stream’. Possibly its prize achievement in this respect was the idea of one of the Institute for Statecraft writers, Mark Galeotti, to turn around an analysis of Western strategy by General Valerii Gerasimov, then Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, into a positive ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’. Published in February 2013, Gerasimov’s paper  argued that ‘the West was waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified operation’. Galeotti declared this instead to signify that Russia itself had switched to a doctrine of ‘hybrid war’.[17]

This ideological hoax had politicians and journalists all over the West up in arms about Russian ‘hybrid warfare’, coming on the heels of the highly embarrassing  Snowden revelations and those of Wikileaks before them. The trope of Moscow undermining ‘our’ democracy by disinformation, disseminated by ‘troll farms’,  allowed those favouring a normalisation of relations with Moscow, including Donald Trump after his surprise election to the US presidency in 2016, to be labelled ‘traitors’, and any information or opinion contradicting the official narrative, ‘Russian disinformation’ (and/or ‘conspiracy theory’).[18]

The Integrity Initiative’s documents were hacked and made public by the Anonymous network. They show it is primarily funded by the FCO (one-quarter of its £2 million budget, application for 2018-19); other sponsors include the US State Department, NATO, the Lithuanian MoD, Facebook, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation (which also funds the NATO-affiliated think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, IISS, two doors away from the Institute for Statecraft on Temple Place).[19] The Integrity Initiative works closely with the Public Diplomacy Division at NATO HQ in Brussels and in the same city collaborates with the Institute for European Studies at the Free University (VUB-IES), which has a galaxy of partner institutions linked in turn to the Ministries of Defence of various Western countries. According to one hacked document,

 

Through VUB-IES the Integrity Initiative is firmly linked into the EU East Stratcom Taskforce, the EU Disinfo Lab and the European Parliament. The VUB-IES also supports our programme’s collaboration with HQ NATO, NATO’s International Confederation Reserve Officers (CIOR), the Atlantic Treaty Association and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly…. The VUB-IES also provides a valuable direct link for our programme with major national think tanks such as Egmont, Chatham House, Clingendael, etc.[20]

 

To propagate the Russia scare in the United States the Integrity Initiative hired the self-styled ‘information warrior’ who sold the Iraq war to the public, John Rendon, to train ‘a new generation of Russia-watchers’.[21] In 2012 Joel Harding, a former Special Forces officer, began work in the Hilary Clinton State Department to develop methods to create a dominant narrative towards Russia from which there would be no serious dissent. Specifically focussing on Ukraine, Harding envisaged controlling ‘all the information everyone has access to within the operation zone and every zone that can influence the operation outcome across the world’, including social media. Once this goal would have been achieved, a target like regime change in Russia would turn out to be feasible and would be ‘welcomed by every sane person reading, watching, or hearing the news his channels are publishing’. [22]

The Integrity Initiative also has a direct line to figures like the US Special Representative for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, besides contacts with Washington think tanks such as the Atlantic Council and the Center for European Policy Analysis, as well as the FBI.[23] Under Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, originally established to combat online recruitment for jihadism, in 2016 was redirected to attack Trump over alleged Russian collusion. One of the Global Engagement Center’s senior officials, Todd Leventhal, is actually a member of the Institute for Statecraft’s ‘Temple Place resident team’.[24]

Nearby Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, publisher of International Affairs, and linked to the Brussels VUB-IES network) is a key relay of the Institute for Statecraft/Integrity Initiative. Of the six authors of an influential Chatham House study of 2015, ‘The Russian Challenge’, four are listed as members of the Integrity Initiative’s UK cluster. One of them, former UK ambassador to Moscow Sir Andrew Wood, who allegedly handed compromising material about Donald Trump (the ‘Steele dossier’) to US counterparts, in his contribution discusses the prospects of regime change in Russia.[25]

Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent stationed in Moscow, author of a salacious dossier supposedly exposing Trump’s ‘recruitment’ by Russia, is a colleague of one Pablo Miller in the private agency, Orbis Business Intelligence. Miller too was an MI6 agent and was the handler of the former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, whose botched ‘assassination attempt’ was turned into a major diplomatic crisis with Moscow. The Integrity Initiative documents show that both the Skripal affair and the downing of Flight MH 17 were considered in light of the fictional ‘Gerasimov doctrine’ as offering opportunities to ‘expose’ Russian disinformation.[26] However, the Mueller investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia did not uncover any wrongdoing,even though there is no doubt that as a real estate developer, Trump relied on Russian-American mafia connections to finance his business ventures.[27] Since the Integrity Initiative approach (or Harding’s at the State Department) requires a full spectrum coverage of information provision to counter the Russian threat, this has also brought in selected Internet sites as partners of the Integrity Initiative, including Buzzfeed, Irex, Detector Media, and Bellingcat, to name only a few.[28]

The MH17 prosecution too has effectively been made part of the Integrity Initiative. By relying increasingly on Bellingcat, the JIT has surrendered its fact-finding almost completely to this relay of NATO and Ukrainian propaganda. Bellingcat’s Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), analysed in depth by Hector Reban,[29] has come to function as a source for mainstream media too, further rounding out the government-media propaganda loop. Bellingcat’s founder, Elliott Higgins, made his name with Western sponsors when he claimed to have discovered, then still under the pseudonym ‘Brown Moses’, that a chemical warfare incident in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, had been the work of the Assad regime, contradicting the judgement of MIT missile experts and experienced investigative journalists.[30] With Bellingcat, which came online on 15 July 2017, two days before the MH17 tragedy, Higgins placed his OSINT experience at the service of those seeking to build a case against Russia. Because the JIT and the mainstream media chose to give him the credibility of an authoritative source, this could then become the basis for the trial.

Besides the aforementioned Chatham House ‘Russian Challenge’ collection, academic work backing up the Integrity Initiative/ Bellingcat claims has also specifically tackled Russian ‘digital disinformation’ surrounding the MH17 case. One freely available and much-cited article in the Chatham House journal, International Affairs, published in 2018, defines disinformation as a ‘purposeful effort to mislead, deceive, or confuse’.[31] Funded by the EU (through the European Research Council) and the Carlsberg Foundation, the research project ascribes disinformation on the MH17 tragedy exclusively to the Russian state and media, revealing its own propaganda intent by reserving the term ‘information’ (including ‘counter-disinformation’) for one side in the conflict (the West and its client regime in Kiev), and ignoring academic studies that place the civil war and the downing of MH17 in context.[32]

Ratcheting up the circular cross-referencing to the point of caricature, the project’s investigation of ‘citizens’ active on Twitter on the topic of MH17, finds that on the side of ‘information’/‘counter-disinformation’, ‘the most retweeted profile in the entire dataset’ is (surprise, surprise)…  Higgins/Bellingcat. Spreading disinformation on the other hand is the investigative journalist, Max van der Werff, among others. Van der Werff’s name and details have meanwhile been posted on the Kiev Peacemaker (Myrotvorets) list of enemies of the new Kiev regime, several of whom have been assassinated.[33] Also targeted by the ERC/Carlsberg project is Pieter Omtzigt, the one Dutch parliamentarian who kept the government on its toes on the topic (without departing from the mainstream reading of the downing of MH17). In late 2017 Omtzigt was attacked over a trifle by the Dutch mainstream newspaper, NRC-Handelsblad, and forced to give up this portfolio. [34]

The ERC/Carlsberg authors themselves write that ‘historically, intelligence services and propaganda institutions have posed as ordinary citizens to assume a credibility that they lack in their own roles’, but seem oblivious to the possibility that their paragon of ‘information/counter-disinformation’, Bellingcat, might just fit the bill.[35] For according to David Miller, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol and a propaganda specialist, the Integrity Initiative, the umbrella under which Bellingcat too operates, is such an intelligence operation, indeed a ‘military directed push’: ‘The  “charity” lead on this [Donnelly] was also appointed as a colonel in military intelligence at the beginning of the project —a truly amazing fact that suggests this is a military intelligence cut-out.’[36]

With their own links to the Atlantic Council (a major source of the ‘Russian meddling’ hysteria via in-house providers of fake news such as Ben Nimmo)[37] Higgins and Bellingcat operate as mouthpieces of the anti-Russia campaign and thus obtain the unreserved support of the mainstream media and politics. Indeed in sharp contrast to that other ‘citizen’, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who has now been effectively locked up for eight years under conditions denounced by the UN as torture, Higgins ‘gained mainstream acclaim, in part, because “his findings” always matched up with propaganda themes peddled by the US government and its Western allies. Though most genuinely independent bloggers are ignored by the mainstream media, Higgins has found his work touted’.[38]

Bellingcat has meanwhile found its most supportive environment in the Netherlands, which already was prominently involved in the preparations for the Maidan movement and regime change in Kiev before it was granted the lead role in the two MH17 investigations.[39] Besides being invited to provide training courses for mainstream media journalists, Bellingcat in 2019 also received a subsidy of half a million Euros from the Postcode Lottery, which allows it to set up a new headquarters in The Hague. The Dutch government has also launched its own propaganda unit, Raam op Rusland (‘Window on Russia’). Like Bellingcat, Raam op Rusland collaborates with the University of Leiden, but it is also connected to the Institute for Statecraft/Integrity Initiative network. The Raam op Rusland website on 1 November 2019 carried a puerile piece by Mark Galeotti, of ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ fame, claiming that Putin was actually a minnow when still a KGB agent.[40] Because several of its collaborators are former Moscow correspondents of Dutch newspapers such as NRC-Handelsblad, Raam op Rusland and the mainstream media are on the same page against Russia and unfailingly committed to the Gerasmimov Doctrine fiction of ‘Russian meddling’.

Summing up, the choice of the Netherlands as the country where the MH17 trial will be held is entirely fitting, as it is firmly embedded into several layers of propaganda accompanying the forward push of the West into the former Soviet bloc and the USSR.

First, the Dutch-led JIT has allowed what it has presented as evidence to be mainly or even exclusively sourced by the SBU and Bellingcat. The prior DSB technical investigation also was executed by the Netherlands, and has been compromised by the legal limits of its reporting combined with the confidentiality agreement with Ukraine. The JIT itself has been compromised too by the effective veto granted to Ukraine and the initial exclusion of Malaysia.

Secondly, the trial by its exploitation of the emotional potential of statements by the family members will be set up as a theatrical, ‘performative’ rather than strictly juridical process as in al likelihood, no defendants will turn up. This sort of show trial has been prepared by the ICCT seminars of terrorism specialist Ms Beatrice de Graaf, also held in the Netherlands.

Finally, public opinion in the Netherlands and in the West at large has been massaged into a solid anti-‘Putin’ consensus by the combined propaganda flows coming from the Institute for Statecraft/Integrity Initiative complex, amplified in the Netherlands by the blanket endorsement of Bellingcat narratives, by Raam op Rusland and by mainstream media and academia connected with it. This has resulted in a climate of opinion in which an acquittal for lack of evidence of the current suspects of the downing of MH17 would probably not be accepted (and if it would be, there is a solid propaganda apparatus in place to correct that).

This raises the question of how such a profoundly partisan form of justice, prone to serious miscarriage, has come into being in the first place.

2. From Outlawing War to ‘Humanitarian Intervention’

 

The planned trial against the presumed perpetrators of downing Flight MH17 fits in the tradition of international criminal law, although in this case it will be a trial by a Dutch court dispensing justice under Dutch law. So although ‘nationalised’ in the final stage, the criminal investigation and prosecution were international and bear all the hallmarks of previous international criminal trials beginning with the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals. In the case of MH17. the prosecution was the responsibility of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), composed of the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and the coup regime in Kiev. That this regime had seized power following a false flag massacre among demonstrators and police,[41] its members designated by the United States, and were encouraged by the CIA and NATO to begin a civil war against an insurrection in the Donbass area (where the plane came down) was apparently not an obstacle, even though the Kiev regime is the only party in the conflict which has in its arsenal all the weapon systems that can have been used, intentionally or by accident, in the downing of MH17—if it was not a bomb placed on board.[42] As noted, in March 2015, Malaysia was finally admitted to the criminal investigation and became the fifth member of the JIT, only to dissent from its conclusions again later.

Several characteristics of this prosecution place it in the tradition of a new form of law that has taken shape in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With only the United States left as a superpower, the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’ at the time assumed a new form, that of dispensing justice for the world as a whole, ‘extra-territorially’. This form of law, emanating from the ‘new World Order’ proclaimed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, entailed a straightforward assault on the anti-war order established in the United Nations Charter and in the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi war criminals in 1945-’46. In this section I will situate the international criminal law tradition in the context of the shift from the outlawing of war to the rise of the notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in which war is made legitimate again if it serves the higher goal of ending suffering in other countries, to be decided by the United States and its allies and whomever they can bring on board in the United Nations Security Council, or if not, with a ‘coalition of the willing’.[43]

 

The UN Charter and Nuremberg

 

The principles laid down in the UN Charter and applied and expanded in Nuremberg  were the result of a movement against war that had been gathering strength in the course of the twentieth century. Already in the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, the Russian delegate unsuccessfully proposed the creation of a standing international criminal court to ensure the peace by making war illegal.[44] Again after the First World War, attempts were made to outlaw war, most notably in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, named after the foreign ministers of the United States and France. It was recognised early on that some form of justice would be needed to adjudicate conflicts that might spiral into war and in 1922 the League of Nations established the Permanent Court of International Justice (the precursor of the post-1945 International Court of Justice) to settle disputes between sovereign states by arbitration. These were instances of changing the rules governing the legitimacy of war. Older conceptions of just war, which go back to early Christianity, were now gradually abandoned. It needed the horrors of World War II with its 50 to 60 million victims to accelerate the drive towards outlawing war into an explicit prohibition.

The United Nations Charter replaced the right to go to war (jus ad bellum) by a right against war (jus contra bellum). Its Art. 2 (4) rules that ‘All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.’ The only exceptions were: a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or an act of aggression; individual or collective self-defence; and (only for the duration of the Second World War) the fight against the enemies of the United Nations.[45]  In this spirit the London Charter of August 1945, building on the work of the UN War Crimes Commission set up earlier, ruled that those politicians who had launched the war would be prosecuted as war criminals.

The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials (the latter of doubtful legal status given the unilateral way in which the US installed it) aimed to put the UN principles into practice. The Nuremberg Charter in its Article 6 defines the crimes of war under three headings. a) Crimes against the peace (the planning, preparation and initiation of a war of aggression); b) war crimes (killing, maltreatment or deportation of civilians, prisoners of war, and hostages, as well as wanton destruction), and c) crimes against humanity (killing, extermination, deportation and other inhuman measures against the civilian population on political, racial, or religious grounds). In 1946, the United Nations unanimously sanctioned the Nuremberg Charter as an integral part of positive international law, enlarging the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1925.[46] Of course the designation of crimes against the peace, which only punished the country that went to war, as the supreme crime, solved the issue of Allied war crimes and crimes against humanity. For the nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the fire-bombing of  Hamburg en Dresden, were cases of these latter two categories of crimes, or at least should be investigated as such. Also, the issue of the conditions under which Germany and Japan went to war, such as the Versailles peace treaty and the debt and reparations regime imposed on Germany, or the economic blockade of Japan by the United States, were conditions without which the annexations of the Rhineland and what followed, or Pearl Harbor, cannot be understood.

Even so, the Nuremberg legacy must be considered a massive step forward for international legality and a peaceful world, compelling states to negotiate rather than fight. The Tribunal famously declared that

 

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.[47]

 

It was this principle that collapsed with the implosion of the USSR and the Soviet bloc, removing the counterweight in world affairs that had been established by the outcome of World War II.

 

The Vietnam Tribunal: Salvaging the Nuremberg Legacy Privately

 

Ever since Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States would enter World War I to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, the United States has sought to apply a superior jurisdiction over other states. Modelled on the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that established US supremacy over Latin America, at the exclusion of the European powers, the Wilson programme of national self-determination and international organisation (through the League of Nations) sought to apply the Monroe principles to the world at large.

Because of the social linkages of the Democratic party’s historical voter base until the 1980s, Wilson’s call for economic liberalism, democracy and national self-determination, resonated most strongly with later Democratic presidents, from F.D. Roosevelt and H.F. Truman to J.F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In all cases, however, their international idealism led them into foreign wars—the First and Second World Wars, Korea, and the equally murderous interventions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 70s. US and allied warfare in Southeast Asia, using all kinds of forbidden forms of warfare from chemical weapons and population displacement to  massacres of entire villages, caused world-wide uproar as they were still reported by the mainstream media and contributed to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist Left.

Since the Nuremberg principles concerning the illegality of a war of aggression seemed no longer applicable, an attempt was made to resurrect them by private means. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and peace campaigner, took the initiative for a Vietnam Tribunal, assembling leading lawyers and intellectuals. The Tribunal sat in two sessions, in Stockholm in May 1967, and in Roskilde, Denmark, in December of the same year. This Tribunal aimed to apply the principles of Nuremberg to the case of the Vietnam War.

The Stockholm session came to the conclusion that by the norms of international law, the US government had committed aggression against Vietnam. It ruled that the United States had intentionally, systematically, and on a large scale bombed civilian targets in Vietnam; committed repeated violations of the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of Cambodia; whilst the governments of Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea had made themselves accomplices in the US aggression against Vietnam.[48]

In the subsequent session in Roskilde, the complicity of the governments of Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan, was established. It was also found that the US armed forces had indiscriminately used napalm (petroleum jelly that sticks to the skin when burning), as well as fragmentation bombs, gas, and defoliants, all in violation of the Geneva Protocol and other legal obligations; that prisoners had been subject to illegal killing, torture, and other forms of abuse; and that the civilian population had been systematically subjected to US Army brutality, deportation, the introduction of ‘free firing zones’, and detention.[49] In 1971, a former prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials, General Telford Taylor, confirmed that if the standards of that trial would be applied to the American war in Vietnam, its architects would in all probability meet the same fate as the war criminals who were hanged, or jailed for life.[50]

Given that the Russell tribunal was convened privately, it did not have an effect on positive international law. It did however contribute to the hardening mood against the policies pursued by the Johnson and Nixon administrations in the United States. It would take until the Carter administration elected in 1976 boldly recaptured the moral high ground by proclaiming the United States the champion of universal human rights. This would effectively restore the notion of ‘just war’ on human rights grounds, humanitarian intervention, and in the process effectively suspended the notion of ‘crimes against the peace’ for the West. The other consequence of this change was the positing of a superior right for the West in the process.

 

Human Rights and Intervention

 

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in an obvious attempt to shift the normative agenda towards a liberal, ‘Lockean’ interpretation centring on individual rights. As colonial and neo-colonial wars waged by the West were proliferating across the emerging Third World and the Cold War was heating up in the Northern Hemisphere, the UN Charter and Nuremberg were becoming obvious anomalies from the Western perspective. The Universal Declaration aimed to restore priority to the principles of liberalism against the directive, ‘Hobbesian’ state. This Declaration is not, as the legal arrangements aimed at outlawing war, meant to consecrate sovereignty whilst containing the excesses that sovereign exercise of power may entail. Rather it stands in the tradition of the French Revolution’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and the idea of missionary dissemination of these rights. John Locke’s heritage here is packaged in a militant doctrine of liberation, which already made its appearance in US wartime pronouncements such as Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ of 1941. In the Universal Declaration (the draft of which had been prepared by a committee under Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor), there is an obvious implication that no state can organise its society on principles that limit individual freedom. Hence the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia abstained in the vote, not just because their states’ confiscatory power over society would be implicated, but also, as planned economies based on collective property and social organisation, they were in no position to assimilate a set of principles entirely constructed from the liberal, Lockean vantage point of the sovereign individual and private property. The English vintage is even more pronounced in the fact that the Declaration does not attribute human rights to any legislative act or treaty, but considers them innate, known to us through revelation.[51]

The Cold War was not initially conducive to a human rights policy, and it is perhaps a sign of the erosion of the hegemony of the liberal West at the time that the UN in 1966 specified the 1948 Declaration by elaborating a separate Pact on Civil and Political rights, and one on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. Article 1 of both pacts included the right of self-determination entitling them to a free choice of political status and the free pursuit of their economic, social and cultural rights.[52] Only after the US had withdrawn from Vietnam, could Jimmy Carter raise the banner of human rights as the guiding principle of his foreign policy. This was not just propaganda, because it had its roots in the return of a Democratic president to power, one who brought with him the aspirations of a society aspiring to revive the domestic economy at the heart of a burgeoning world market embedded in multilateral agreement. The opening of a new era of civil global aspirations activated the natural law tradition, and this is the source from which the universalistic conception of human rights emanates. The idea of humanitarian intervention now began to reassert itself, although Carter was still reticent in the use of violence.

Humanitarian intervention harks back to the idea of ‘just war’. A just war is a pacifism for the future; it will bring a peace which will be eternal, if only its current enemies will have been defeated once and for all. War in this perspective is inevitable, and acquires a new quality—that of cleansing the world of evil (hence its origins, since St. Augustine, in religion). Its more radical form even claims that it is ‘ethical’ to wage war against foreign peoples for their own good, or that whatever the cost to the civilian population, an embargo can be imposed on a nation to help it. All this worked to absolve the self-styled ‘international community’, in practice, the West led by the US, from the legal restraint on applying force; whereas local violence in the context of civil wars remains outlawed. However, as Peter Malanczuk writes, the problem with a human rights doctrine which claims that ‘justice’ (or ‘morality’ or ‘humanity’) is a sufficient ground for action without a need for further explanation, is problematic. ‘This new version of bellum justum is based upon questionable assumptions to support the alleged universality of a moral theory drawn primarily from certain modern legal philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, whose theories… are not only controversial with regard to domestic legal systems, but seem to be confined… to Western, or rather, Anglo-American realities.’[53] These ‘realities’ dictated ‘the development of theory in international humanitarian law…, in which the notion of collective responsibility had gradually yielded to that of individual responsibility.’[54] In David Wippman’s words,

 

International human rights law … reject[s] the primacy of popular sovereignty rooted in national communities… the ultimate goal is to overcome national politics through claims of right asserted on behalf of individuals and against states and other individuals.[55]

 

This illustrates the role of the West as the self-appointed executor of a ‘global civil society’ in the absence of a state at that level. The US already in the 1960s began to apply its domestic legislation extra-territorially. Export prohibitions for US companies were applied to foreign subsidiaries in France and elsewhere, a policy ratcheted up under Reagan, creating tensions between transnationally applied domestic legislation and international law. A critical step was taken when the US Supreme Court in June 1992 ruled 6 against 3 that the US government is allowed to abduct people from foreign countries and bring them to trial in the US. This established, one year after the collapse of the USSR, the United States as the one supreme power entitled to overruling other states, including in this case, Mexico and Canada, whose protests were ignored.[56] Yet this was only the beginning of the  extraterritorial application of US prosecuting powers in criminal matters, which would acquire its full extent only in the War on Terror. However, the Supreme Court of decision of 1992 was significant in that it established that the citizenship of another state can be effectively suspended by the United States.

Against his background, the United States also arrogated itself the right to intervene in other countries on account of ‘human rights’, which essentially meant the individual’s rights against the state. In line with the neoliberal concept of civil society as the true source of a free economy and democracy, and the state as a likely obstacle to both (and certainly as an obstacle to capital operating from the West), Washington and its allies immediately after the Soviet demise stepped up their intervention in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The doctrine of a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) adhered to by the United States and its Western allies, attributed to them a superior right of armed intervention, by definition ‘humanitarian’.[57]

Since humanitarian intervention is strictly speaking illegal in international law, and the criminal prosecution of those targeted after the intervention therefore is also without legal basis, everything comes to depend on the massaging of public opinion by dramatising ‘humanitarian’ aspects such as the suffering of selected groups of people or the grief felt by the relatives of those who perished, as in the MH17 disaster. Clearly the project to cast ‘the court room as a stage in the struggle for publicity, public support and legitimacy’ (cited above as the subtitle of the ‘Terrorists on Trial’ project),[58] serves a very specific purpose, viz., to replace legality by emotional mobilisation, which already begins with the political or military intervention itself.

In the end we are looking at the extraterritorial application of a humanitarian re-interpretation of international law that is simultaneously an extension, by extraterritorial application, of American legal practice. This can be seen in the extension of the role of the prosecutor as a manager of public opinion. In the United States, prosecutors enjoy ‘exorbitant privileges’, whilst their ‘incendiary press conferences’ to build their case prior to the actual court session, contribute to a prejudicial climate against the accused. These in turn are subject to the humiliating practice of having their full names and portraits disseminated to the public prior to conviction, in a mockery of the presumption of innocence.[59] This is exactly what the JIT has been doing with its highly suggestive press conferences, rich in video animations, but poor in actual evidence and steadfastly followed, even after five years, by a call for witnesses. In its press conference of June 2019, the JIT published the names and pictures of three Russians and one Ukrainian who stand accused of mass murder on account of telephone intercepts. All this was based on a particular narrative in which the downing of MH17 was inserted into a narrative of a ‘Russian invasion’, downplaying the series of events that led to the breakaway of Crimea and the armed uprising in the Donbass. Only thus could the consensus of Russian guilt, played out in the sense of a Debord ‘spectacle’, be maintained. In this respect the equally illegal NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and the subsequent Yugoslavia tribunal were constructed around the one-sided notion of ‘Serbian guilt’, the Rwanda tribunal around Hutu perpetrators, and so on.

Below I sum up the main characteristics of three international criminal trials as a continuation of (different degrees of) Western intervention, and the one-sided verdicts that resulted. It must be feared that this will also happen in the MH17 case (Table 1).

 

Table 1. Three Precedents of the MH17 Court Case

 

Special court	Context of criminal acts	Western intervention …	…in support of (immunity from prosecution for)	Politically targeted side	Prosecuted side (individuals from)
Yugoslavia tribunal	Violent dissolution of federation, ethnic cleansing	Arms supplies, NATO air wars 1990s	Croatia, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo Liberation Army	Bosnian Serbs, Serbia	(mainly) Bosnian Serbs, Serbia
Rwanda tribunal	Mass killings amidst ethno-political strife	Invasion from Uganda & Tutsi seizure of power, withdrawal of UN forces 1990s	Pro-Western Tutsi RPF	Hutu gov’t, army	Hutu government, army
Lockerbie court case	US search for hostages in Israeli-occupied    Lebanon	DEA/CIA involvement with drug lords 1980s	Drugs, arms dealers from Syria, Iran	Libya     (regime change 2011)	Libya
MH17 court case	Break-up of country, civil war	Preparation & direction of seizure of power 2014	Ukrainian nationalists & fascists	Pro-Russian separatistsRussia	Pro-Russian separatists, Russia

 

 

There was also the International Criminal Court, which only convicted Africans, but it considered many separate cases not easily summed up in this way, and there were the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Special Panels (in East Timor), and the tribunal for Cambodia. In all cases the same structure, that the politically targeted side becomes the prosecuted side in the juridical aftermath, whilst those supported are granted immunity from prosecution, can be detected. In the table are the cases I analyse in the present text and compare with the MH17 court case. As we will see, the Lockerbie case was special because the US search for hostages that got them involved with Syrian and Iranian drug lords active in Lebanon, and the downing of the PanAm flight in 1988, occurred when the existence of the Soviet Union still limited the possibility of Western regime change in countries allied formally or informally with the USSR, or in avowed neutrals. Hence the ‘postponement’ of the Libyan regime change to 2011.

3. The NATO Intervention in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslavia Tribunal

 

If we want to grasp the significance of the events surrounding the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia for understanding the trial of the alleged perpetrators of the downing of Flight MH17, we must recognise the similarities between the (illegal) Western intervention and the subsequent criminal trial of those resisting that intervention. In the case of Ukraine, the intervention consisted of the US and EU interference in the country’s internal affairs to prevent Eurasian integration with Russia, culminating in the US-supported, armed seizure of power in February 2014, followed by the break-up of the country along the Ukrainian-nationalist and federalist fault-lines, and war against the Donbass rebellion.

In Yugoslavia, intervention consisted of an actual NATO military operation, first in 1995 over Bosnia targeting the Bosnian Serbs, and then, in 1999, the NATO air war against Serbia and Montenegro in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Yet the main target were Serbians, who were accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. At the origin of these crimes was an alleged project for a ‘Greater Serbia’, a charge in which we may recognise that the individualisation of criminal responsibility for what in reality are always collective acts, somehow must ascribe to these individuals some grandiose criminal project; in Rwanda it would be the planned mass murder of Tutsi’s. In both cases it turned out this ultimately could not be proved.

In both the break-up of Yugoslavia and that of Ukraine the large continental EU countries (Germany, France, and Italy) were inclined to a more conciliatory attitude in the original conflict, even though Germany precipitated the Yugoslav collapse by recognising Croatian and Slovenian secession without proper guarantees for Serbians and other minorities. Yet in both cases, it was the Anglo-US combination that drove through the anti-Serbian/anti-Russian line over such (in Germany’s case, belated) hesitations. In Yugoslavia this happened when the US recognised the secession of Bosnia and NATO unleashed limited air strikes against Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and a full-scale air war against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, in which the first signs of future aggression against Russian and Chinese interests were evident as well.

Bosnia was at the heart of the ethno-cultural dividing lines the Yugoslav communist leadership had to deal with. Already during the guerrilla war against the Nazi occupiers from which it emerged victorious, the Tito leadership decided that to prevent Serbian predominance in Yugoslavia as in the interwar years, the territory of Serbia proper should be reduced so that Serbians would also come to live in, notably, Bosnia and Croatia. Even in Serbia itself, two autonomous regions were created, Vojvodina for the Hungarian nationality and Kosovo for the Albanians in the south. The main cultural dividing lines in Yugoslavia were between Slovenia and Croatia, which prior to 1918 had been part of the (Roman Catholic) Austro-Hungarian empire, and Serbia, which had early on liberated itself from the Ottomans and was Christian Orthodox; and between all these nationalities and the Muslims of Bosnia (once a frontier bulwark of the Ottoman empire) and Kosovo.

When Tito died in 1980, the country’s financial situation came into the open and the Federation had to find ways of servicing a debt of $20 billion, one year after the US ended dollar inflation by raising real interest rates. Faced with stringent austerity measures, powerful centrifugal forces were unleashed, led by new privatising propertied classes often working with Western partners, and criminal elements.[60] The West initially was unanimous about keeping Yugoslavia’s federal unity intact, if only because the chances that the country would be able to service its debt, were greatest as a functioning entity. However, the Vatican, Austria and Germany, notably catholic Bavaria, were receptive to Slovenian and Croatian secession. In response, a new Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milošević, a former banker seeking to introduce capitalist reforms, mobilised the Yugoslav worker base amidst long-simmering anxieties in the population over the wartime genocide of Serbs now that a new, nationalist Croatian leadership appeared to condone wartime fascism. In 1989 Milošević became president of the federation, which was then sliding towards dissolution. When Germany unilaterally recognised the secession of Slovenia and Croatia in December 1991, the United States responded by recognising the Muslim government of Bosnia whilst siding with the radical separatists of Kosovo in an obvious attempt to restore some prestige in the Muslim world after the First Gulf War, and also rein in German influence.[61] At the Brussels NATO summit in April 1992, the Bush administration obtained the allies’ consent with this fateful step. Encouraged by Washington, the Muslim government promptly mobilised against the Serbs, obtaining support from a range of Islamic countries, and turning Bosnia into the key battleground of the Yugoslav civil war and target of NATO intervention in 1995. The massacre of Muslim men by Bosnian Serb militia at Srebenica would be one of the consequences of this constellation of forces.[62]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United Sates not only proceeded to set itself up as the supreme source of human rights, but also indicated it would not tolerate political-economic contenders any longer, neither from among the former communist world now converting to (state) capitalism, nor from nominal allies, certainly not reunified Germany. In a draft Defence Planning Guidance (DPG) for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999, which was modified later but continues to inspire US strategy well into the 21st century, it was claimed that the United States should ‘sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order’. This then would again include the aspect of justice, for what was most important, the DPG claimed, is ‘the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.’[63] Thus the directive role that the US would assume with regard to the prosecution of suspects from the ranks of those resisting its declared pre-eminence, was part of a larger strategy.

Following Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright was promoted to Secretary of State. She would play the role in the Yugoslav collapse that Hillary Clinton would later play with respect to regime changes in Libya and Ukraine (although she resigned before the actual take-over there). In Albright’s case the Yugoslav crisis was turned into a moral drama in which Milošević was cast as a latter-day Hitler and ‘genocide’ became a term loosely applied to vigilante atrocities. Social Democratic governments elected one after another in France, Britain and Germany in the same period proved more inclined to support Washington’s human rights rhetoric than their conservative predecessors. Washington in turn used the Balkans situation to discipline the NATO allies, pressuring chancellor-elect Schröder and his Green foreign secretary Joschka Fischer to agree to a NATO campaign against rump-Yugoslavia without a UN mandate. Although other NATO countries, even Blair’s Britain, wanted a Security Council mandate for war, Madeleine Albright skilfully manoeuvred the alliance into actual operations without one, earning the label ‘Madeleine’s war’ for the ensuing NATO operations.[64] The air war over Kosovo then  entailed the inevitable war crimes such as the bombing of the Serb TV station, use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, the mass displacement of civilians in Kosovo, bombing of bridges over the Danube far away from the contested province, and much more.[65]

Crucially, when European resistance to the NATO campaign began to mount due to the growing list of war crimes (‘collateral damage’), the chief prosecutor of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, Louise Arbour, a personal friend of Albright’s (she would later become a member of the Canadian Supreme Court), was provided with NATO satellite images to back up a claim that not the Atlantic alliance, but Milošević and a handful of fellow Serbian leaders were the war criminals. The timely indictment of the Serbian leadership had the effect of suspending all diplomatic dealings with the Yugoslav state.[66] This takes us to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which was meant to become the showcase of international criminal justice even though it was set up to provide the illegal NATO intervention in the dissolution of the federation with a legal veneer and would end with the death of Milošević in his cell in the Netherlands.

 

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

 

The ICTY and the subsequent tribunal for Rwanda, where a bloodbath took place in 1994 that killed hundreds of thousands of people, were instituted by the UN Security Council in 1993 and 1994. The UNSC has this prerogative under Chapter VII, article 29 of the UN Charter which regulates the right to use force to prevent aggression and preserve the peace. Hence these tribunals are part of the international police role of the Security Council and they cannot therefore be neutral; that would only be possible if the tribunal would be instituted by a treaty.[67] They are therefore, as noted already, the continuation of intervention and regime change by different means.

At first sight, the Yugoslavia tribunal (ICTY), established by UN Security Council resolution 827 (May 1993) appears to continue the line of development that runs from Nuremberg, even taking into account the Vietnam tribunal. However, the rise to global pre-eminence of the United States following the Soviet demise fuelled a desire to ‘constrain national politics and advance a human rights-oriented conception of international society.’[68] Hence the ICTY’s mandate includes war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not crimes against the peace; in addition, only individuals can be brought to trial, not states, organisations, or legal persons. In other words, the criminal sphere itself has been refracted to the individual level, blotting out the sphere of structures, organisations, and states. By turning a blind eye to the fact that the NATO actions were illegal, the ICTY (and also subsequent tribunals and the ICC) had to develop a ‘substitute legality’ by which to judge the actions of its opponents.[69]

The West, already absolved of the charge of crimes against the peace, could not, as it turned out, be accused of war crimes either. Thus in the case of the bombing of the RTS studio in Belgrade, in which 16 civilians were killed for the sole purpose, as Amnesty International put it, ‘of disrupting Serb television broadcasts in the middle of the night for approximately three hours’, both Louise Arbour and her successor as chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, only conceded that ‘mistakes had been made’. When pressed on the issue,  an anonymous committee was established to investigate, but it concluded that there was ‘insufficient evidence’ of war crimes.[70] As David Wippman points out, ‘the Nuremberg, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda tribunals were all imposed on particular states by other states whose own actions would not be subject to scrutiny’.[71]

The mobilisation of public opinion that we have seen in the press conferences of the DSB and JIT in the case MH17, amplified by media reports and interviews, in the case of Yugoslavia was achieved by NATO press conferences. These concentrated on Serbian brutality amounting to war crimes, whilst downplaying actions by Croat or Bosnian Muslim forces, let alone NATO’s. Croats prosecuted were given very light sentences with an eye to reinforcing the position of the Croat government unwilling to extradite generals involved in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina in north-eastern Croatia.[72] Louise Arbour claimed that the Serbians under Milošević had conducted ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, causing the death of two hundred thousand civilians, although observers on the ground contradicted this claim. Forensic team leader Brian Strongman, whose group had discovered mass graves holding up to two hundred victims in Bosnia, declared that he and his colleagues had found nothing like that in Kosovo.[73]

The Yugoslavia Tribunal was a straightforward case of continuing the NATO intervention by legal means; at every step, the origins of the tribunal in US strategy relative to the Balkans (and indirectly, relative to German aspirations) were in evidence. Indeed as Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman during the Kosovo intervention, stated at a press conference on 17 May, 1999, the costs of the ICTY were covered by the NATO countries which had also set up the tribunal.[74] On the other hand, concerning the complaint by the Yugoslav government against NATO, submitted to the International Court of Justice two weeks earlier on 29 April, the Court considered there was no case to answer because the United States is not a signatory to the Genocide Convention on which the main accusation was based.[75] Thus the victim of NATO aggression was denied legal redress.

In the post-Cold War world, the United States was and would remain the director and stage manager of international criminal trials, often assisted by Britain and Canada and occasionally by France and the Netherlands. The impunity granted to the NATO countries demonstrated the extent to which the R2P doctrine represents a repudiation of the prohibition of war established by Nuremberg. By removing the crime against the peace for the West, the post-1991 ‘humanitarian turn’ (taking the place of the wars fought against communism rarlier such as Vietnam) also effectively ended the UN prohibition of violating state sovereignty.

 

Extradition, Trial and Death of Milošević

 

One of the most disconcerting aspects of international criminal law is the fate of those prosecuted and then acquitted. This concerns both the selectivity of the categories of alleged perpetrators, and more particularly, the fate of those whose guilt could not be established and who should accordingly have been released from custody, indemnified, or whatever would have been appropriate. As noted, the specific weakness of these tribunals has been the requirement to amplify individual guilt to make it fit into collective actions that constitute mass violence and war. Hence the accusation of grand conspiracies that in the end could not be proven because they did not exist.

In the case of the Yugoslavia Tribunal this applies to the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Milošević was found dead in his cell in Scheveningen near The Hague on 11 March 2006, after the main charge against him, that of harbouring a secret plan for a ‘Greater Serbia’, had to be dropped for lack of evidence, and with it, the accusation of genocide implicit in that scheme. Milošević had been indicted in May 1999, and a month later the US even put a $5 million bounty on his head. All on the assumption that all Serbians active in the disintegration process of the Yugoslav federation were ultimately under his command.[76]

Following on its earlier indictment, the ICTY issued arrest warrants of Milošević and four other Serbian leaders on 23 January 2001. To this the US attached the condition that IMF and World Bank credit would only be granted after Milošević would have been extradited, with a deadline set for 31 March. Milošević, who had resigned the previous October to avoid a colour revolution turning into a civil war, was arrested on behalf of the new (rump-) Yugoslav government of prime minister Zoran Djindić. On 28 June the Yugoslav Constitutional Court declared the government’s extradition decision invalid, a decision confirmed by president Kostunica. However, at 6 o’clock that same evening Milošević was told to pack his things and without even being allowed to inform his wife, was transported by an SFOR (NATO stabilisation force) helicopter to the Bosnian SFOR base of Tuzla, where he was officially informed of the charges against him—war crimes and genocide. Shortly after midnight, Milošević was delivered to The Hague where a notorious photo shows him being escorted, manhandled by two police officers, to his prison cell.[77] In Yugoslavia, the dramatic abduction caused a cabinet crisis. President Kostunica had to read the news in the newspaper, and several ministers resigned. Djindić had acted on his own, believing Western promises would vindicate him—only to conclude he had been tricked when it turned out that credits for Yugoslavia’s reconstruction were much reduced and Tito-era debt was deducted as well (in March 2003 he would be assassinated).

Meanwhile the trial began with revelations that were most painful for the prosecution. Milošević initially had been accused only of the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, something that turned out difficult to prove, after which the charges were enlarged by including Bosnia and Croatia. His first statement was to deny the tribunal the right to judge him, and that the tribunal was only set up to provide the NATO war against Serbia with a legal cover. Since his microphone was turned off when he began speaking, Milošević’s statement was passed on to a Belgrade newspaper which published it on 18 July 2001. Generally, the arguments of the accused in trials following Western intervention, considered ‘political’, are off-limits and the media have increasingly accepted this as well. However in the ICTY case, it was obvious early on that not all was going as planned. In the sessions of 24 to 27 July 2002, a former head of Serbian state security revealed under cross-examination that he had been promised immunity and a new identity if he would produce statements inculpating Milošević; if not, there would be ‘consequences’. In February 2004 Dutch newspapers reported that the trial was in disarray and on 28 February NRC-Handelsblad headlined ‘Case against Milošević “Falls Apart”’.[78]

In August 2005 the prosecutor, Geoffrey Nice, announced that Milošević would no longer be prosecuted for his presumed intent to establish a Greater Serbia by violent means. By removing this element, on the basis of which Milošević had been cast as the head of a criminal organisation and from which a whole series of subsidiary crimes had been derived, the entire complex of charges unravelled. On 28 November, after three years of trial and less than three months before his death, Milošević asked the judges what he actually was still charged with.[79] Up to that point the former Yugoslav president had produced evidence (mainly on the basis of testimony of Western witnesses) that the humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo had been caused by NATO bombing and that until that time, it was the Kosovo Liberation Army that had committed war crimes.

In the meantime, as reported by his Dutch lawyer, Steijnen, several incidents had happened that began to raise doubts about whether Milošević was being consciously weakened to undermine his defence, or worse. On 1 September 2004, he himself told the judges how his food had been wrongly given to another prisoner, causing a lot of commotion although the food did not look any different from the meal intended for him. In fact on 23 November 2002 NRC-Handelsblad already published a report headlined ‘Milošević Was Given Wrong Medicine’. However, all his complaints and requests to be examined by independent medical experts were rejected. Russian experts travelled to The Hague to examine him and offered to treat him in their clinic in Moscow under a Russian government guarantee he would be brought back, but this too was denied.[80]

The incident with the confusion of dinners in 2004 happened just after the doctors had declared him sufficiently fit to conduct his own defence, only to state the opposite briefly after, causing him to be assigned a lawyer against his preferences (an amicus curiae, ‘friend of the court’ procedure); it was only after witnesses refused to testify under these circumstances that Milošević was allowed to conduct his own defence again.[81]

In January 2006 rifampicine was found in his blood, a medicine to treat lepra and tuberculosis and which happens to neutralise the medication Milošević took to control his high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems. The medical report on this was withheld for two months, whereas normally Milošević received his medical reports without delay.[82] All this happened at a stage in the trial where Milošević was not only gaining the upper hand but also, by calling scores of witnesses from NATO countries, might cause irreparable reputation damage to the West. On 8 March, one day after the rifampicine report had finally got to him, Milošević wrote a letter to the Russian government expressing his suspicion that his health was being consciously undermined; the rejection by the court of his request to be examined in Moscow (other defendants had in fact been allowed to travel abroad for medical examinations) may have been motivated by the fact that specialists there would be able to confirm that. Three days later he was dead.[83]

 

The ICTY Precedent

 

The death of Milošević, whether by conscious neglect or worse, should serve as a warning for anyone placing his trust in the state of law supposedly prevailing in the West and in the Netherlands in particular. Once targeted on geopolitical grounds and subjected to sanctions, regime change operations of various types, or overt military intervention, anyone on the receiving end would be well advised to stay away and take precautions against abduction, even by one’s own government as happened in the case of the former Yugoslav president. The effect of the ICTY and subsequent international criminal trials was to set a false precedent, the ‘Kosovo precedent’. Not a proper legal precedent, but the ‘open abandonment of legality itself as a fundamental point of reference in international relations’.[84]

Under the influence of the United States, the Statute of the ICTY excluded the crime against the peace from being investigated. Milošević was not allowed to cross-examine about the NATO war against Yugoslavia. An important precedent relevant to the JIT case concerning MH17 was that the ICTY, on the recommendation of an expert committee reporting to the Office of the Prosecutor, ‘tended to assume that the NATO and NATO countries’ press statements are generally reliable and that explanations have been honestly given’.[85] The same sort of impunity would be awarded to the Ukrainian government installed by the coup of February 2014, also a potential suspect placed above the law and uniquely, even made part of the prosecution team with a right to veto.

The Kosovo precedent also resonated in the theatrical use of press conferences.

 

In the course of the war, the ICTY prosecutor made dramatic announcements against Serb leaders targeted by NATO, often at press conferences with NATO leaders; unveiled a secret indictment of President Milošević at a time when enthusiasm for the war was flagging in the West; and even assigned NATO the task of pursuing ICTY indictees.[86]

 

Already at the time of the Tokyo trial of Japanese war criminals, the question arose whether a decision by the US commander, general Douglas MacArthur, was a sufficient basis for justice. In the ICTY, no questions as to the basis of justice were asked any longer. This was pure victors’ justice based on a prior assumption of guilt for selected war crimes and crimes against humanity, on the part of those in violation of the Nuremberg Principle IV and the UN Charter, but considering themselves above the law.

This does not mean that those under attack should be absolved of responsibility for war crimes of crimes against humanity in the context of defending their country and its inhabitants. However, by excluding the crime against the peace, and thus justifying the right to go to war, the logical connection established at Nuremberg and in the UN Charter is broken. Indeed the entire constellation of forces involved in the outbreak of violence is reduced to the sole acts of those indicted after the victorious onslaught of the West, supposedly acting for humanity. Yet in the words of Peter Gowan, ‘we know enough about the dynamics of politics to be able to identify not only the perpetrators of atrocities, but the international actors who helped and continue to help create the conditions in which such perpetrators arise.’[87] Those who create the conditions—the structures and agents of transnational capital demanding ‘reform’, the West backing up capitalist discipline by economic warfare or military means—know this too. There is, therefore,

 

Something deeply disturbing about a system of Western power-politics which can casually and costlessly make a contribution to plunging [countries] into turmoil and wars, can then use these wars to further their geopolitical ends and then seek to make political capital out of War Crimes Court judgements of perpetrators of atrocities, while themselves refusing all responsibility.[88]

 

So even if the actual shift in the relations of power has removed, for the West,  the prohibition of crimes against the peace, effectively allowing regime change by force; the legal structures put in place simultaneously are meant to allow the West and especially the US, to assume the mantle of justice in its aftermath. The rule of law itself, in other words, must be suspended to allow its spread, which of course is a contradiction that should be challenged. The tribunals for which the ICTY served as a precedent, were left with only small windows to prosecute crimes because the West was absolved beforehand from the supreme crime of breaking the peace.

 

4. The Rwanda Tribunal and the International Criminal Court

 

On  8 November 1994, the UN Security Council in Resolution 995 established the tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Like the Yugoslavia tribunal it was instituted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and initially shared its chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, with the ICTY. Again like its Yugoslav counterpart, the ICTR process created important precedents that bring out the flawed nature of international criminal justice following on illegal foreign intervention, in this case the Western-supported invasion of Rwanda from Uganda and the subsequent invasion by RPF-ruled Rwanda of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Here too the roles of the United States and Britain were essential, as they would be with respect to the tribunal’s operations.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front of Paul Kagame was effectively granted immunity from prosecution, as were the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and fascists brought to power in Kiev in February 2014 (they of course were even invited to be part of the prosecution in the case of MH17, which is an all-time novelty). One result of the ICTR was that it entailed the effective inculpation of the continent of Africa as the ultimate bedrock of international criminality, whereas in the same period the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia took place without a UN mandate, just as in 2003, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq initiated a series of regime change operations. That the International Criminal Court, which should have covered all countries, only prosecuted and indicted Africans, was preordained by the Rwanda tribunal and by Anglo-America’s claim of moral superiority, exclusively entitling it to ‘humanitarian intervention’.

 

Rwanda and the Inculpation of Africa

 

Like the other cases, the dubious nature of the eventual criminal prosecution in the case of Rwanda was presaged by criminal violence and aggression by forces later exempted from prosecution. The former Belgian colony of Rwanda is inhabited by an originally agricultural, majority Hutu population and a once mainly pastoral Tutsi people, victims of persecution in the past. The event at the root of the eventual massacres of 1994 was the invasion by troops of the (Tutsi-dominated and English-speaking) RPF led by Paul Kagame, in October 1990. This invasion was launched from neighbouring Uganda, and was supported by that country and by the US and the UK. The RPF army (RPA) for all practical purposes was part of the Ugandan army; they wore Ugandan uniforms and Kagame himself had served as director of Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s. France dispatched 600 paratroops to the capital Kigali to protect its citizens resident there. [89]

By the time of the Arusha Peace Accords of August 1993, imposed under US pressure on the government of Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, the RPF troops had occupied much of northern Rwanda and driven out several hundred thousand Hutu farmers. The Arusha agreement among other things required Rwanda to integrate the RPA into the Rwandan army. In contrast to the prompt response by the UN Security Council to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Council did not respond to the RPF invasion until October 1993, after the Arusha Accords, when it dispatched an observer mission, UNOMOR, expected to comprise 5,500 men once fully operational. In December, France withdrew its troops again.[90] The Arusha agreement also included a commitment to new elections in 1995, but since the Tutsi represent only 15 percent of the population and given the resentment over the RPA invasion and the subsequent eviction of Hutus, this was not an attractive prospect for Kagame’s RPF.

In April 1994, RPF commandos shot down the plane carrying Habyarimana, his Burundian counterparty, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and the commander of the Rwandan army along with the entire delegation to the Arusha negotiations. Within two hours after the downing, 50,000 RPF soldiers moved into action on two fronts. Hutu extremists responded by massacres in which the population took part on a large scale, using French arms stockpiled in advance; hundreds of thousands perished (precise figures remain disputed), but the US and Britain still refused to speak of ‘genocide’ (which would have required an intervention) and the Security Council even reduced the strength of UNOMOR to less than 500 men over the protest of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.[91]

In July 1994, the RPF prevailed over the forces of the Habyarimana government and took Kigali. The US response followed promptly: by the end of the month Washington had recognised the RPF government, this time dispatching US troops and large-scale aid to Kigali.[92] The RPF aim was the ethnic cleansing of Hutus from the area adjacent to Tutsi-majority Burundi; millions of Hutus sought refuge in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as the Kagame forces, the ‘heroes of the story’ for putting out the flames of genocide, in turn committed crimes against humanity too.  Gérard Prunier speaks of a ‘deliberate policy of terror which allowed a new power, both ethnically and politically a minority, to impose itself’. Hutus in all likelihood were the most numerous among the victims in the massacres and the RPF terror combined, ruling out a straightforward attribution of guilt to one ethnic group.[93] This then was the case placed before the Rwanda tribunal.

Yet the ICTR proceeded on the basis of a narrative which had the RPF fighting a government and army carrying out a well-planned genocide of Tutsis, not unlike the plan for a ‘greater Serbia’ attributed to Milošević. With US and British support, former Rwandan government and military leaders were arrested in various places and delivered to the seat of ICTR, also in Arusha, Tanzania.[94] Under the principle of judicial notice, the genocide was also declared non-international, which made evidence to the contrary inadmissible, even though the RPF invasion was launched from Uganda, and was followed by an invasion by Rwandan forces into the DRC.[95]

The RPF was effectively granted immunity from the start; not one of its members would be prosecuted by the ICTR. When in 1997 one of the investigators working for the prosecution, Michael Hourigan, found conclusive evidence that the RPF had shot down the plane of president Habyarimana, his inquiry was stopped by Louise Arbour, and his career terminated. A French investigation into the death of the French crew of the downed jet came to the conclusion that Kagame had to get Habyarimana and the Arusha Peace Accords out of the way to realise his aim, a seizure of power in Rwanda. The court’s request to the ICTR to prosecute Kagame was not followed up though.[96]

In 2000 Carla del Ponte was installed as the new prosecutor at the ICTR (and simultaneously at the ICTY). When she decided to broaden her investigation on behalf of the latter to NATO war crimes (when she had not yet been appointed chief prosecutor), she also wanted to begin an investigation into the role of the RPF for the ICTR. In 2000 she publicly stated that the RPF had shot down the government plane and that the history of the Rwandan massacres would have to be rewritten. In response the Kagame government took steps to prevent witnesses against the RPF from reaching the ICTR.[97]

In the case of MH17, the Ukrainian authorities brought to power by the US in the armed coup of February 2014 were likewise awarded immunity from prosecution, indeed they were even included in the criminal investigation. In the case of Rwanda, things never reached that stage but when it appeared that Del Ponte wanted to prosecute Kagame’s RPF, the American prosecutor for the ICTR in Arusha, Michael Johnston, in September 2002 put a stop to that prosecution without notifying her. When three months later Del Ponte ordered it to be resumed, the US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, Pierre Prosper, told her to discontinue any investigations into the RPF/RPA.[98] When she refused, the Security Council under US and British pressure decided to split the prosecutor’s office of the ICTR from that of the ICTY in September 2003. In a cable made public by Wikileaks, the US ambassador reported on a conversation with the ICTR president, judge Theodor Meron, in which Meron recommended that Del Ponte should not be renewed as prosecutor given how she had come to understand her role. A Gambian lawyer, Hassan Bubacar Jallow, appointed in her place, did not prosecute either the RPF or RPA for its crimes either.[99]

When Del Ponte later wrote a book about her experiences, she revealed that the Rwandan authorities kept a close watch on every step of the investigation. They were actually supplied by the Americans with equipment to monitor telephone calls, faxes and Internet traffic. In addition Rwandan intelligence had agents in the interpreter team and among other personnel of the Office of the Prosecutor in Kigali.[100] Thus the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the victorious party that took power in the wake of the massacres and imposed its own dictatorship by terror, secured its immunity from prosecution to the detail, assisted throughout by the United States and Britain.[101] Even though it was never given a mandate for such a selective prosecution, the Security Council did not hold the tribunal accountable for the fact it only prosecuted Hutu suspects. Even after the RPF invaded the eastern DRC, where it linked up with its local proxy, the M23 militia, this did not change. Not content with exculpating the RPF-RPA-M23 bloc, the ICTR went even further when it decreed that Rwanda could henceforth hold its own trials.[102] This gesture would later be repeated in the case of Libya, when the ICC, after first having inculpated Gaddafi and his sons, after the regime change suddenly made it known that the new authorities could be trusted to prosecute the surviving Gaddafi son, Saif al-Islam (cf. below). In other words, justice is in safe hands once ‘our’ side, the pro-Western forces, are in control.

Chief Taku concludes in his contribution to Justice Belied that the ICTR established a new concept of international law, viz., ‘genocidal, ethnic-based justice’. Instead of prosecuting those who had targeted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity, one category of perpetrators were prosecuted on the basis of their ethnicity. This established the myth of the Hutus as sole perpetrators, with dire consequences of their civil rights henceforth; and the Tutsi as sole victims.[103] ‘The moment the RPF seized power, the US gave them immediate recognition. They chose the strongman [Kagame] over the Arusha Peace Accord and arranged for the defeated government to go to the Arusha court.’ So what about the plan for the genocide?

 

All these years of imprisonment later, the courts have not found a conspiracy or orders to commit genocide. Supporters of the Arusha Peace Accord have been doing time, while a military adventurer, personally advised by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, rules Rwanda, intervenes in Congo, assassinates opponents, and receives foreign admirers in Kigali.[104]

 

In a further confirmation that the treatment of Milošević by the ICTY was not an isolated incident, the fate of those whom the ICTR was not able to convict was equally appalling. Most acquitted remained in semi-detention in Arusha nevertheless, mocking the idea of a fair trial. In line with the idea of victors’ justice backed up by the US as the political director of the tribunal, ‘the prosecution served as a lifeline with which the Rwandan Patriotic Front consolidated its grip on power, ensured its political survival, and settled political and ethnic scores.’[105] Although the idea of a conspiracy, as with the alleged plot to create a Greater Serbia, fell through, its alleged architects were kept imprisoned. One of them, Protais Zigiranyirazo, was kept in detention for nine years before being cleared. The fate of other ‘conspirators’ was similar and besides their imprisonment, they were also not returned to Belgium (where they had been arrested)[106] Indeed in a direct repeat of Milošević’s fate, Dr Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, who had been part of a Rwandan government delegation to the UN to plead for an intervention to save lives and guarantee the Arusha Peace Accord, died in prison.[107]

The ICTR in the end did not convict a single Hutu of the nation-wide conspiracy to commit genocide, allegedly agreed in April 1994. After seven-and-a-half years of trial of four high-ranking Hutu members of Rwandan army, all four were acquitted.[108] Yet the immunity of the RPF remained intact. When in 2006, a French magistrate again initiated legal proceedings against the presumed perpetrators of the downing of Habyarimana’s presidential plane, the Kagame government broke off relations with France, repaired only by Sarkozy four years later, with dire consequences for further legal procedure.[109]

Only when the Security Council established the International Residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in July 2012, the possibility of the ICTR to indict suspects was suspended. With it the impunity of the RPF and its ability to arrange the prosecution of its enemies should have ended as well. Thus the West and the RPF ‘lost a valuable tool of their Great Lakes, East, and Central Africa geopolitical strategy’, a loss partly compensated (for crimes committed after 2002) by the ICC’s enhanced prosecution of Rwandan Hutu perpetrators of war crimes, who no longer fell under the ICTR’s jurisdiction.[110] By declaring the genocide an internal affair and leaving out the causes of the extreme violence in Rwanda (the RPF invasion and the downing of the presidential plane), casting it instead as a planned genocide of Tutsis by Hutus, the ICTR failed in its mission. In fact, as the work of Judi Rever, based almost entirely on RPF and internal ICTR sources, has documented, there was a conscious RPF policy to exterminate the Hutus[111]. Yet the ICTR left behind a narrative of a Hutu genocide of Tutsis and few among those who still remember the events, would be able to dissent from that account, or even connect the tragedy to the prior invasion from Uganda and the subsequent war in mineral-rich eastern Congo with its death toll of an estimated four million. Nevertheless Kagame is showered with honorary doctorates in the United States and invited for lectures in places like the Oxford University business school—all thanks to the impunity awarded to him by the ICTR.[112]

There is no Dutch connection to the ICTR as there was in the Yugoslavia tribunal, the Lockerbie case, or the MH17 investigation, prosecution and trial, except for some Dutch investigators helping to gather evidence against minor suspects.[113] However it is worth citing the letter of resignation of the Belgian academic and expert witness, Filip Reyntjens, to the chief prosecutor of the ICTR, in which he took issue with the impunity protecting the RPF. As Reyntjens wrote,

 

[RPF] crimes fall squarely within the mandate of the ICTR. They are well documented, testimonial and material proof is available, and the identity of the RPF suspects is known… It is precisely because the regime in Kigali had been given a sense of impunity that, during the years following 1994, it has committed massive internationally recognized crimes in both Rwanda and the DRC.[114]

 

Had the ICTR done its duty, it would have prosecuted RPF members for crimes against humanity too, ‘and the special “heroic” status [of Kagame and his party] would have been undermined’.[115] In the same vein, one of the clear dangers of an MH17 trial on the current evidentiary basis is that it would enshrine the innocence of the Ukrainian coup regime as part of official history and set in stone a false, but ‘performative’ narrative enacted in a one-sided, theatrical prosecution. The ability of Kagame, wearing the ‘mask of virtue’ granted him by the ICTR, to ‘vet and choose who can serve in public life’ in Rwanda, would be repeated in Ukraine if a verdict of the Dutch court in the MH17 case would likewise exculpate and leave moral authority with the regime in Kiev.

 

The International Criminal Court (ICC)

 

In the slipstream of the Rwanda tribunal, the International Criminal Court has proven to be primarily if not exclusively a court to prosecute and convict Africans.[116] This is far from self-evident because the 2002 Rome Treaty establishing the ICC ‘potentially subjects nationals from all states to scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution.’[117]

However, chief among states refusing its jurisdiction over their citizens (which also include Israel, Sudan, and a few others) the United States has sought exemptions for its military. Right in 2002 the US Congress adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act to ‘protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an International Criminal Court to which the United States is not party’. The act earned its nickname ‘Hague Invasion Act’ because of the provision allowing the President to use military force to liberate any American or citizen of a US-allied country held by the court in The Hague.[118] Eventually Washington concluded a long series of bilateral treaties with countries ensuring no US subject will ever appear before it.

The US attitude was already well brought out when Washington called for an international tribunal to try the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia for war crimes, but demanded that it restrict its work to the period 1975-79; excluding, as a result, the period of the US decision to widen the war to Cambodia and the carpet bombing that killed an estimated three-quarters of a million people, amounting to crimes against the peace and war crimes; and also the period when the US actually collaborated with the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam and thus became an accomplice of its crimes against humanity.[119]

As to the focus on Africa, Chief Taku writes that in spite of the claim by the  ICC’s prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, that she will protect victims wherever they may be threatened, it would seem the ICC mainly serves to shield ‘warmongers, Western economic predators, arms-dealers, and Western-protected promoters of the culture of impunity’.

 

Over the decade of the existence of the ICC, victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other international violations have been crying relentlessly for prosecutorial intervention, from the streets of Gaza, the forests of Sri Lanka, the towns and villages of Iraq, the hills and villages of Afghanistan, to the forests of Colombia and Guatemala.[120]

 

It is not only the United States that is guilty of directing the focus of ICC prosecution on Africa. In fact, the provision in the ICC statute that the UN Security Council may make referrals to the court, tends to shift its attention to the weakest part of the geopolitical economy, Africa.[121] Only the United States has a special military command for Africa, ‘Africom’, established in 2008 but unable to be headquartered there until the removal of Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya in 2011. By a strategy of identifying ‘terror threats’ the Pentagon would hen secure military access to the different states on the African continent. By 2014, only Zimbabwe, Eritrea and Sudan had no dealings with Africom through training, aid, or otherwise.[122]

ICC prosecutor Moreno Ocampo would later express his confidence in the post-Gaddafi forces enthroned by the NATO regime change intervention by declaring them capable of prosecuting Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam themselves (cf. below). However,  with respect to Kenya, he denied that that country was able to sort out the troubles after violence following elections in 2007. Chief Taku concludes from Ocampo’s attitude that he apparently considered that ‘African countries in which the ICC intervened had surrendered their sovereignty to the ICC’. Besides meddling in Kenya, two politicians from Côte d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé, were arrested in 2011, only to be summarily acquitted in 2019 after almost eight years’ detention. The humiliating treatment of Africa has given rise to calls for the continent to set up its own war crimes court through the African Union. However, the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, meant to fill the gap, would demonstrate an ‘alarming timidity’, effectively allowing African dictators a free hand against their subjects.[123]

Justice through special tribunals did not in practice contribute to closure and even less to reconciliation. Thus in the case of Sierra Leone, the United Nations through a treaty with Sierra Leone created a tribunal in 2000. The tribunal prosecuted different parties involved in civil war, but also president Charles Taylor of Liberia. Yet Taylor in fact contributed to the peace process in Sierra Leone that led to the Lomé peace accord of July 1999. Even so he was indicted, tried and convicted. As it turns out, closure and peace are actually much better served by the Truth and Reconciliation commissions as they were set up in Sierra Leone as well as in South Africa and Liberia, than by criminal justice under Western auspices.[124]

Taken together, the experience of the war crimes’ tribunals that prosecuted individuals responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, but absolved those guilty of starting wars in the first place, is profoundly unsatisfactory. It has made the return to the Nuremberg principles more urgent than ever, but so far there has only been one instance, again private, to achieve that goal—the Malaysia War Crimes Tribunals.

 

 

 

 

A Return to Nuremberg? Malaysia’s War Crimes Tribunal

 

Echoing the Vietnam Tribunals at Stockholm and Roskilde in the 1960s, another initiative to fill a gap in international legal practice, also private but much closer to state power, was the Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War. The initiative was taken by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation, set up in 2005 by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who had been prime minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003. The foundation’s goal was to restore the Nuremberg rule that going to war for other reasons than self-defence was a crime against the peace, established by the Nuremberg trials as the supreme war crime from which all others follow. As founder and chairman of the Perdana Foundation, Mahathir wanted to initiate a ‘sustained struggle against war’, on the grounds that ‘it would be morally reprehensible for us to stand by and just watch people being killed while whole nations are being turned into battlefields and reduced to rubble.’[125] The Kuala Lumpur Initiative in fact goes further than Nuremberg by also looking at ‘economic processes which underlie the war economy’ and explicitly criminalises ‘all commercial, financial, industrial, and scientific activities that aid and abet war.’[126]

To prosecute such acts of war, the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal for War Crimes and the War Crimes Commission were instituted, and a number of cases opened for prosecution. The initial prosecution over the invasion of Iraq inculpated the US administration, inviting it to defend the actions of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Attorney General, Albert Gonzales. The charges were communicated to the accused through the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur; in the absence of the accused, the amicus curiae procedure for the defence was followed.

The trial took two years, in which the tribunal heard witnesses giving testimony about the Abu Ghraib prison, about the punitive operation against the city of Fallujah, and also on the prison camp of Guantánamo. Ali Shalal, a professor of theology sent to Abu Ghraib, and whose image (hidden under a hood whilst being tortured) went all over the world, was one of the key witnesses for the prosecution. The Malaysian judges all had been active as judges before; one was a member of the Supreme Court of Malaysia; one or more foreign judges also participated throughout the sessions.[127] In November 2011 the tribunal unanimously arrived at the verdict that George W. Bush and Tony Blair by their decision to invade Iraq were guilty of crimes against the peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The judges ruled that the names of Bush and Blair be inscribed in the register of war criminals kept by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission and that the verdict be reported to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.[128]

In his memoirs, Mahathir relates how he initially was favourably impressed by Blair, but in the financial crisis of 1997-98 had been left out in the cold; then on the issue of going to war with Iraq on a false pretext, the British prime minister (like John Howard of Australia) sided with Bush. This made Mahathir lose all respect for Blair: ‘I now regard him as a war criminal who should be tried as the German and Japanese leaders were tried and punished after World War II.’[129] Since these leaders were hanged, this statement obviously did not go down well given that Blair continues to enjoy celebrity status as an elder statesman in the West.

In November 2013, the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal also condemned the state of   Israel for genocide of the indigenous Palestinian population in the areas occupied by the Israeli state since its foundation and after 1967. Three issues were specifically addressed: Sabra and Shatila, where Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon allowed Lebanese Falangists to enter Palestinian refugee camps and massacre its inhabitants, and Gaza and the West Bank, on the basis of testimony going back to different periods.[130]

Once again, the views of Mahathir were an important source of inspiration. In October 2003, briefly before he stepped down as prime minister after 22 years (in which he had presided over Malaysia’s modernisation and international reorientation in ways not ingratiating him to the West), Mahathir gave a speech to the 10th summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which he chaired at the time. His avowed aim at the OIC event, hosted by Malaysia, was to inspire Muslims now that they had been identified as the target in the ‘War on Terror’ after 9/11. After the invasion of Iraq it was obvious that this was not mere rhetoric. Mahathir’s speech, provoking fury over its alleged anti-Semitism, actually spoke admiringly of the tenacity the Jews as a people had shown in their resistance to oppression over the centuries; an attitude he held up to Muslims as an example to follow. However, he also noted that although the Jews had suffered the loss of half their entire number in the Second World War, they had come back strongly and ‘today they rule Israel with an iron hand and wield influence and authority in countries like the US’. As a result they also ‘rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.’[131]

Clearly these were strong statements, which to Western ears sound uncannily close to traditional anti-Semitic tropes about a Jewish world conspiracy. But this does not mean that they are therefore mistaken. In the meantime, former Italian president Cossiga and many others including people of Jewish background, have made similar statements in relation to 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’.[132] Mahathir’s vehemence must also be related to the fact that his domestic nemesis, Anwar Ibrahim, was close to neoconservative hawk Paul Wolfowitz. As Deputy Secretary of Defence under Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz played key roles in both 9/11 and the Iraq invasion; along with figures like Richard Perle, he is a key player in the belligerent, dual-national Zionist bloc linking the United States to Israel.

Against this background, Mahathir’s speech at the OIC was very badly received in the West, and the verdict condemning Israel for genocide by the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal was met with fury as well. It is a different matter to connect this verdict, in November 2013, to the fact that Malaysian Airlines lost two passenger planes, MH370 and MH17, four and eight months later, respectively. In my book I argue that it is unlikely that Malaysia’s independent course angering the West including Israel, would be a  direct cause of those tragedies. However, if we are looking at conscious decisions in one or both of these cases, the nationality of the plane(s) may have worked to lower a moral barrier in the context of a more complex causal structure n which many other factors too have played a role.[133] But this is speculative as long as we, in spite of the JIT claims in the case of MH17, do not know the full story. Yet the above is again relevant in judging the response in the West to Mahathir’s reservations concerning the responsibility of Russia for the downing.

5. Lockerbie and Libya

 

The story of the Lockerbie trial, held to judge those suspected of the downing of a PanAm jet over the Scottish locality of that name on 21 December 1988, is that of a flagrant miscarriage of justice and another dark chapter in the history of international criminal law. The disaster had its origins in the shady world of Israel’s war against its neighbours and the way it manipulated the United States into complicity with it. It is also imbricated with the drugs trade, which as Peter Dale Scott has shown, has all along accompanied US foreign policy as a means of financing covert operations not authorised by Congress. In many cases, and also in this one, such doubtful, clandestine allies at some point became uncontrollable and turned against their former, covert paymasters.[134]

In the Lockerbie case it was not different. The foreign minister of Australia, Julie Bishop, suggested not long ago that a Lockerbie-style tribunal might be the solution for the MH17 case after her earlier proposal to adopt a Security Council resolution to establish an international war crimes tribunal on the issue, was vetoed by Russia.[135] Hence the Lockerbie case is as important as a precedent as the Yugoslavia one, and an equally distressing precedent at that.

In 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, long coveted as part of the Holy Land, also for its fresh water resources and to destroy the PLO, which had found refuge there. After PLO leader Yasser Arafat had been chased from the country in August, Ariel Sharon allowed Falangist militia into the Palestinian refugee camps where they committed their massacre of civilians, as noted above. A US-French multinational force was deployed in Beirut to try and contain further excesses. In October 1983 241 US Marines perished in a suicide bomb attack; a subsequent attack on a French military contingent killed 56 soldiers. The attacks were ascribed to Lebanese Shia militia (who would form Hezbollah in 1986), but a former Mossad officer later revealed that Sharon did not want US and French forces there and that Israel at the least had advance knowledge.[136]

With the US officially disengaging to avoid further losses, Shia militants took or still held a number of American hostages (including the CIA station chief, kidnapped in early 1985). Washington in the circumstances decided to bribe them free by using the covert arms supply route to Iran (then in a murderous war with Iraq and in dire need of arms and spare parts), later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal. In January 1986, Reagan authorised the deal; national security adviser McFarlane, Oliver North and a team of CIA agents went to Iran to hammer out the details. At the NSC North handled the transfer of spare parts and anti-tank missiles, working with Israeli, Iranian and other arms traders. The huge profits made on the secret arms deliveries to Iran were then used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua in spite of the congressional ban, in what William Casey called ‘the ultimate covert operation’.[137] The operation also soon became mired in the networks of drugs and arms trafficking and organised crime exploiting the poppy and hashish growing areas concentrated in the then Syrian-occupied Bekaa valley.[138]

When Reagan authorised the Iranian arms-for-hostages plan, US narcotics agents of the Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) had become deeply involved in the Lebanese drugs underworld, along with the CIA, also with the aim of obtaining the release of hostages. US businessman Ross Perot, one-time independent presidential candidate, member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and active in a number of US prisoners of war and hostage affairs, told vice-president George H.W. Bush that on his searches for prisoners, he kept ‘discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arms deals… I can’t get at the prisoners because of the corruption among our own covert people.’[139]

In the series of events that ended with the blowing up of the PanAm plane over Lockerbie, agents of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), dispatched to Lebanon to find hostages, ran into the CIA-DEA arms-for-drugs operation that was part of the Iran-Contra network. Inter-service rivalry along with genuine exasperation led to a decision to return and report to Washington. However, Iranians and Syrians close to the Assad family in power in Syria, had infiltrated the drugs route to the US run by the CIA-DEA. Concerned about exposure, they arranged to have the plane carrying the DIA team back to the US blown up. The disaster was conveniently pinned on Libya, keeping the CIA’s contacts in Syria and Iran away from public view.[140]

 

The Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands

 

Right after downing, the United States as the home country of the plane and Britain as the country over which it was blown up, dispatched detectives who immediately engaged in an investigation. After three years this led to the warrant for the arrest of two Libyans in mid-November 1991: one issued by the sheriff of the Scots village of Dumfries, the other by a US grand jury in Washington , D.C.[141] So the accusation came, not from an international prosecution but from two enemies of Libya, both deeply involved in the Middle East quagmire, none more direcly than the United States.

Libya had offered to try the accused itself on the condition of being provided by the evidence. Because in the meantime a French passenger plane had been brought down over Chad, France joined the UK and US in demanding extradition of the suspects and got the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution (731) ‘requesting’ Libya to comply. When it didn’t, a new resolution made the request mandatory under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (Resolution 748), which imposed a range of sanctions, expanded in 1993 under UNSCR 883. Thanks to mediation by South African president Nelson Mandela (who had to remind Tony Blair of the separation of powers when he observed that in a case like Lockerbie, ‘no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge’—a remark still valid regarding the MH17 trial), the solution of a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands was agreed on. The court was established in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1192, and obtained its authority and full control of the premises for the duration of the trial under a special treaty between the UK and the Netherlands.[142]

Two Libyans were charged with 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 in a trial held in the old school building of a former USAF base, Camp Zeist, in the province of Utrecht. It began on 3 May 2000, eleven years and four months after the disaster. Cynthia P. Schneider, US ambassador to the Netherlands at the time, organised a reception for the victims’ families on the eve of the first session,[143] a gesture casting the United States as a compassionate supporter of justice whereas in reality, the tragedy had been the result of its covert operations in Lebanon. On 31 January 2001 the court convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi of 270 counts of murder, acquitting a second Libyan. Megrahi appealed but the appeal was rejected on 14 March 2002 and he was imprisoned in Greenock prison in Scotland. On 28 June 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted Megrahi leave for a second appeal against conviction. After having served eight years in prison, and before his second appeal had been decided on, he was diagnosed with cancer and allowed to return to Libya where he died in 2012.[144]

Five years after the trial, the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser, who issued the arrest warrants in 1991, was reported to have doubts on the reliability of the main prosecution witness, and considering the evidence unsatisfactory. At the second appeal by Megrahi, UN Observer Dr Hans Köchler in a letter dated July 2008 accused the British government of ‘delaying tactics’. Two months later, Köchler protested that Megrahi was defended by a lawyer designated by the court (an amicus curiae arrangement), stating that ‘In no country can the situation be allowed where the accused or the appellant is not free to have his own defence team, and instead someone is imposed upon him’.[145]

The representative of the families of the British victims in fact declared that he thought Megrahi was innocent. UN observer Köchler in hindsight considered the trial politically influenced, in breach of the rule of law, leading to a ‘spectacular miscarriage of justice’ and in 2008 he claimed the entire process bore ‘the hallmarks of an “intelligence operation”.’ For those familiar with the background, this should not have come as a surprise. But then, a trial like this is not necessarily about justice.

The verdict of murder was in the first place a matter of framing Libya as a source of terrorism. That was also the view of law professor Robert Black, who had devised the non-jury trial in Camp Zeist (a Libyan condition). Black called the murder conviction ‘the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years’. In spite of all this, Libya paid compensation of £4.5 million ($8 million) to each family of the 270 victims, a total of £1.23 billion ($2.16 billion), in August 2003.[146]

No wonder the Australian minister of foreign affairs thought of the Lockerbie trial as the model for a trial of MH17. In that way the accusation of three Russians and an Ukrainian of 298 counts of murder should then ideally lead to compensation by Russia—except that Russia is not Libya and has learned to live with sanctions.

 

Aftermath

 

The subtext of the Lockerbie trial and the willingness of Libya to collaborate, was the role the trial played in allowing the country’s return into ‘the community of nations’, as one observer put it. In December 2003, the Bush Jr. administration, eight months after the Iraq invasion that no doubt intimidated all potential regime change target countries, announced it had reached agreement with Libya that weapons inspectors would be allowed in. This was followed by the surrender and dismantling of equipment potentially usable for the production of weapons of mass destruction. In September of the next year, the payments to the family members were made.[147]

However, all of Gaddafi’s concessions on his weapons programmes, and also his willingness to undergo the humiliation of the Lockerbie trial, entailing the damages paid for something the country was not responsible for, eventually proved to have been in vain. In 2011, on the basis of a UNSC resolution instituting a no-fly zone over Libya and mandating the ‘protection of the civilian population’ against government forces, NATO conducted an air war supporting the armed insurrection that led to regime change.

Mindful of the Kosovo precedent, the ICC in the midst of NATO operations indicted Gaddafi and his sons, thus closing off any negotiations and providing the war with a veneer of pseudo-legality. The indictment was supposedly based on prior investigations, whilst NATO was indiscriminately bombing the country for eight months with no objections of a legal nature. However, when Gaddafi was caught and eventually murdered in cold blood, the prosecutor, Mr Moreno Ocampo, fell silent. He was heard of again when he declared, amidst the ruins of war and rival groups claiming power, that ‘the judicial system of Libya was well-equipped’ to try the surviving Gaddafi son, Saif al-Islam, invoking the principle of complementarity—in spite of having indicted him earlier.[148]

For the ‘Terrorism Trials as Theatre’ researchers, on the other hand, the murder of Gaddafi and the NATO regime change in Libya were only a fresh opportunity to reflect on the theatrical possibilities to uphold a particular narrative, and it was even reported at the ICCT event on Lockerbie that ‘the Libyan interim government would perhaps be ready to probe possible other Lockerbie suspects’.[149] Of course that would all come to depend on who the actual interim Libyan government would turn out to be, even apart from the fact that as explained above, the suspects would have to be looked for elsewhere in the first place.

The idea of a ‘third country trial’ did in no way invite repetition. Given the enormous efforts made, the time consumed and the incredible £150 million costs to conduct it, with a grave miscarriage of justice as the outcome, even David Andrews, hired as a legal consultant by the US State Department under Madeleine Albright (and not in any way contesting the final verdict) concluded that a ‘third country trial is not a model that we ought to consider lightly, if ever’. Indeed it is ‘hard to imagine a situation in the future that would lend itself to a similar solution’.[150]

For MH17, the Lockerbie model has obviously been found wanting too, not only for the reasons mentioned (cost, time, effort), but also given the overwhelming evidence that this was a miscarriage of justice. Therefore even the Australian government on reflection came up with the alternative of a domestic criminal prosecution, which has meanwhile turned out to be the Netherlands (Australia too had been named as a possible site for such a procedure). In the words of the Australian website cited above,

 

Domestic prosecutions may be mounted under ordinary criminal law—for  example, for the crime of murder—rather than under international criminal law. However, any such prosecutions would face the same (if not greater) challenges in terms of apprehending accused persons and acquiring necessary evidence as those faced by international or hybrid tribunals.[151]

 

They also share, as the DSB/JIT process so far has amply demonstrated, the same characteristics of political direction, manipulation of public opinion and ultimately, trial theatrics. ‘The verdict of murder was a matter, not of justice, but of framing Libya’—what if, on the basis of equally flimsy evidence in the MH17 case, the verdict of murder will be a matter, not of justice, but of framing Russia? That is what must be seriously feared unless the judges choose to uphold the state of law and reject the ‘evidence’. Otherwise a new, sad chapter will be added to the series of political show trials in the service of Anglo-American geopolitical strategy described here.

 

6. International Criminal Justice and the Historical Record

 

The coming MH17 trial would be held, as argued above, on the doubtful legal basis of the DSB/JIT investigations; organised as a theatrical, ‘performative’ rather than on a strictly juridical basis, in line with the findings of the ICCT seminars of terrorism specialist Ms Beatrice de Graaf; and embedded in a propaganda offensive against Russia launched by the UK with the US, NATO, the Netherlands, and a range of  private organisations, linked together by the UK-based Integrity Initiative.

Whilst different in detail and in the actual balance between international tribunals such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the ICC, and national law, the projected MH17 trial on the basis of the experience so far shares the worst aspects of those earlier prosecutions: the designation in advance of a guilty party, which happens to be, once again, the party which the West, and the UK and US in particular, see as an immediate obstacle to the West’s global pre-eminence—in this case, Russia. These similarities are

• the theatrical presentation of the final report of the Dutch Safety Board in October 2015, the press conferences by the JIT and the use of video animations with swirling, butterfly-shaped Buk missile particles (the tell-take ammunition of the Russian version of a surface-to-air missile allegedly responsible for downing the plane, of which two were found out of the 2,800 or so in a Buk missile warhead),[152]
• abandoning the presumption of innocence of the suspects by accusing, with picture and full name, a number of people of murder on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, and
• the use of grieving relatives of victims to play on emotions and mobilise an impatient media and public opinion demanding convictions. In the case of MH17, the Dutch relatives were used to try and prevent the return of Russia to the Council of Europe and by having them send a letter of protest to Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia when he publicly expressed his doubts on the merits of the accusations levelled against Russia.[153] And as the author himself learned in Kuala Lumpur in August 2019, Malaysian family members were also encouraged to withdraw from the MH17 conference they earlier had agreed to address.

 

But then, as argued above, the prosecution in international criminal cases in the lineage in which we must also situate the Dutch trial of the MH17 suspects, from Yugoslavia and Rwanda via the International Criminal Court to Lockerbie, has revealed a steady growth of theatrical, politically directed elements confirming the fundamentally flawed nature of this type of judicial process. As a spectacle meant to keep the public in thrall, the coming MH17 trial too relies on a prior consensus established by galvanising public opinion along a broad front with massive media backing of the official account.

Why then is it important that a court operating in the context of an international criminal prosecution in the end arrives at a balanced judgement, comparable in terms of legitimacy to a verdict in a purely national court? This concerns both historical truth and the general legitimacy of the principle of impartial justice. If the evidence presented to support the conviction of suspects identified prior to any investigation, but representing a publicly designated adversary, departs too much from the observed reality, the value of a judicial verdict is seriously devalued. Also, because in the past, international criminal prosecutions turned out to have been the continuation of Western intervention by different means, a miscarriage of justice works to continue the conflict in which the intervention took place by lodging in the collective memory a narrative in which the original ‘enemy’ is conformed as such ‘in court’.

Court cases can also contribute to peace and reconciliation by reconstructing an accurate rendition of events but with an eye to achieving closure. Even if there is no real closure, a proper judicial process can help prevent that a verdict in a criminal case continues to be undermined by subsequent accusations from either side, leaving a legacy of lingering suspicions of guilt.[154]

In the case of MH17, a trial in spirit of the accusation of murder along the lines of the JIT press conference on 19 June 2019, and on the basis of profoundly contestable evidence of doubtful provenance, would only serve to confirm the .biased attitude towards Russia, which then once again would be confirmed as the villain. in the story. The aim of the present dossier is to document the weak or even fraudulent evidentiary basis of the MH17 trial as currently envisaged. In that respect it fits entirely in the young tradition of international criminal law: for the weak link of all international criminal prosecutions has been their weak evidentiary basis. On the basis of the Rwanda tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Special Panels (in East Timor), Nancy Combs concludes that they ‘operate in a fact-finding fog of inconsistent, vague, and sometimes incoherent testimony that leaves them unable to say with any measure of certainty who did what to whom’.[155]

Because of the individualisation of guilt in collective political processes involving violence, on which international criminal prosecutions are based, and the need that a verdict identifies a guilty party in a conflict, there will never be a generally accepted dossier.[156] In the case of MH17, the JIT is effectively acting for the NATO-backed Ukrainian coup government (viz., the government ruling on account of an illegal seizure of power in February 2014) facing secession and armed insurrection. The accused represent Russia and the Donbass insurgents, who have refused to accept the seizure of power. The aim of the West is to humiliate Russia once again, destabilise its political structure, and confirm its president, Putin, as the ultimate villain who should be deposed. The trial over MH17 planned for March 2020 is intended to provide a spectacle to convince the public that these are worthy aims. When it will be over and done with, the West will once again have ratcheted up, in its own eyes, its moral superiority over the rest of the world. On that basis, further geopolitical manoeuvres will follow, with fresh prosecutions against those in the way—unless   justice prevails.

 

 

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[1]       This is Part I of a project jointly undertaken with Hector Reban and Max van der Werff after the author’s return from attending a conference MH17—The Quest for Justice, in Kuala Lumpur in August 2019. Many thanks to Mr. John Philpot, international criminal lawyer, for valuable comments.

·           [2]             Bonanza Media, MH17—Call for Justice (Yana Yerlashova, Max van der Werff) 2019. (online);  Cyril Rosman, ‘Brandbrief MH17-nabestaanden aan Maleisische premier: “Stop met verdeeldheid zaaien”. ’ Algemeen Dagblad 30 August 2019 (online).

 

[3]       Hague District Court, ‘About the MH17 Trial’, 2019 (online). Emphasis added.

[4]       Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder. Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity. London: Pluto Press, 2004..

[5]       Hague District Court, ‘About the MH17 Trial’, and see below.

[6]       Rijkswet Onderzoeksraad voor veiligheid. 2010 (online).

[7]       See my Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War. Prism of disaster. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 139-43.

[8]       Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War, pp. 137-8 on the circumstances of the establishment of the JIT. Numbers of victims in Hague District Court, ‘About the MH17 Trial’.

[9]       Bonanza Media, MH17—Call for Justice. A separate 143-page report on the falsification of the phone taps is available as Digital Forensic Services. 2019. Project MH17. Digital Forensic Reporting—Final Report V1.0. (Bonanza Media. MH17 Video and Audio Forensic Analysis) (online).

[10]     Guy Debord, La société du spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1992 [1967]. I was reminded of this reference by Hector Reban.

[11]     International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT). ‘Terrorists on Trial: The Lockerbie Case’, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) 2011 (online), emphasis added. I came across this project when investigating the Lockerbie case but others are scrutinised by it as well.

[12]     Rosman,‘Brandbrief MH17-nabestaanden aan Maleisische premier’; Johan van Heerde,. ‘Nabestaanden MH17: Geef Rusland pas stemrecht in Raad van Europa als het meewerkt met onderzoek’. Trouw, 23 June 2019 (online).

[13]     Kees van der Pijl, ‘Towards an alternative international investigation of Flight MH17? Personal impressions from the conference MH17: The Quest for Justice, Kuala Lumpur, 17 August 2019.’ (21 August 2019).(online).

[14]     Hague District Court, ‘About the MH17 Trial’, gives a detailed list of who qualifies as a relative to be granted this privilege.

[15]     ICCT, ‘Terrorists on Trial: The Lockerbie Case’, emphasis added.

[16]     Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, and Piers Robinson. ‘Briefing Note on the Integrity Initiative’, Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media, 21 December 2018 (online).

[17]     Moon of Alabama,  ‘The ”Integrity Initiative”—A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The “Russian Threat”.’ 15 December 2018 (online).

[18]     Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames, ‘New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics’. TheGrayZone, 8 January 2019.(online)..

[19]     Cited in Mohamed Elmazi and Max Blumenthal,  The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War’, MintPress, 18 December.2018 (online); Moon  of Alabama, ‘British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns.’ 24 November 2018 (online)..

[20]     Initially the Dutch partner was the Hague Institute of Strategic Studies, but this was discontinued, Moon  of Alabama,. ‘British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns.’

[21]     Blumenthal and Ames, ‘New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics’..

[22]     George Eliason, ‘The Terrorists Among US – The Coup Against the Presidency’, The Saker, 16 September 2019 (online). Emphasis added.

[23]     Blumenthal and Ames, ‘New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics’.

[24]     McKeigue et al. ‘Briefing Note on the Integrity Initiative’.

[25]    Keir Giles, Philip Hanson, Roderic Lyne, James Nixey, James Sherr and Andrew Wood, The Russian Challenge. London: The Institute of International Affairs, 2015; Moon  of Alabama. ‘British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns’.

[26]     Blumenthal and Ames, ‘New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine’; Moon of Alabama,  ‘The ”Integrity Initiative”—A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity’.

[27]     Craig Unger, ‘Trump’s Russian Laundromat. How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.’ The New Republic, 13 July.2017 (online).

[28]     Moon  of Alabama. ‘British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns’.

[29]     Hector Reban, ‘MH17 and open source intelligence, a suspicious narrative–part 1.’ MH17, 26 September (online)

[30]     Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War, p. 139. Meanwhile the Douma gas incident has been exposed by an OPCW whistleblower as a false flag attack (already revealed by BBC Syria producer Riam Dalati in February), further undermining Elliott Higgins’ credibility.

[31]     Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ‘State, media and civil society in the information warfare over Ukraine: citizen curators of digital disinformation’ International Affairs, 94 (5) 2018.

[32]     Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis. A study in conflict propaganda, London: Routledge 2017, and my own Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War.

[33]     Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War, p. 147.

[34]    Golovchenko et al., ‘State, media and civil society’, pp. 991 and  986, Figure 1, respectively. Meanwhile Omtzigt has come to champion the cause of the Magnitsky Act, the anti-Russian sanctions project of the fraudster, William Browder, who is a member of the Integrity Initiative UK cluster, Moon  of Alabama, ‘British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns’.

[35]     Golovchenko et al., ‘State, media and civil society’,  p. 992..

[36]     Cited in Mohamed Elmaazi, and Max Blumenthal, ‘Inside The Temple Of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative & UK’s Scandalous Information War’. Zero Hedge, 26 December 2018  (online).

[37]     Moon of Alabama,  ‘The ”Integrity Initiative”—A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity’.

[38]     Boyd-Barrett, Western Mainstream Media, p. 115.

[39]     Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War, chapter 3..

[40]     Mark Galeotti, ‘Putin’s KGB record: not a high-flier or leader, but a solid B’.  Raam op Rusland, 1 November 2019  (online).

[41]         Ivan Katchanovski.,‘The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine’. Paper, American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 3-6 September, 2015 (online).

[42]         Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War, pp. 109-13.

 

[43]     I will rely extensively on my Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq. London: Pluto Press; New Delhi: Sage Vistaar, 2006, especially chapter 11.

[44]     Chief Charles A. Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts: Discriminatory International Justice and the Quest for a New World Judicial Order’. In Sébastien Chartrand and John Philpot, eds., Justice Belied. The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice. Montréal: Baraka Books 2014, p. 19.

[45]     Peter Malanczuk, Humanitarian Intervention and the Legitimacy of the Use of Force [inaugural lecture, University of Amsterdam]. Amsterdam::‘t Spinhuis 1993, p. 14.

[46]     Ton Regtien and Maarten van Dullemen, Het Vietnam-tribunaal Stockholm-Roskilde 1967. [preface, Jean-Paul Sartre]. Amsterdam: Polak & van Gennep 1968, pp. 18-9.; Arthur Eyffinger, The Hague—International Centre of Justice and Peace. The Hague: Jongbloed Law Booksellers, 2003, pp. 74-5.

[47]     Cited in David Jacobs, ‘How the International Criminal Law Movement Undermined International law—Michael Mandel’s Groundbreaking Analyses’. In Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 241.

[48]     Regtien and Van Dullemen, Het Vietnam-tribunaal Stockholm-Roskilde 1967, p. 174.

[49]     Regtien and Van Dullemen, Het Vietnam-tribunaal Stockholm-Roskilde 1967, pp. 174-83

[50]     Cited in Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, rev. ed.,  London: Verso, 2002, pp. 24-6.

[51]     René-Jean Dupuy, La clôture du système international. La cité terrestre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 104.

[52]     Dupuy, La clôture du système international, p. 103; private communication of Mr John Philpot.

[53]     Malanczuk, Humanitarian Intervention, p. 5.

[54]     Eyffinger, The Hague—International Centre of Justice and Peace,  p. 78, emphasis added.

[55]     David Wippman, ‘The International Criminal Court’ in C. Reus-Smit ed. The Politics of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 163 emphasis added

[56]     See my Global Rivalries, p. 402, citing International Herald Tribune, 16 June, 1992.

[57]     Wikipedia, ‘Responsibility to Protect’.

[58]     ICCT, ‘Terrorists on Trial: The Lockerbie Case.’

[59]     Francis Pryer, ‘Ce que révèle l’affaire Epstein. Une justice américaine sous influence’. Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2019, p. 10.

[60]     Cathérine Samary, Yugoslavia Dismembered [trans. P. Drucker]. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995, p. 11; Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy. Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995, .p. 155.

[61]     Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 159-60.

[62]     Cees Wiebes, Intelligence en de oorlog in Bosnië 1992-1995. De rol van de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten [vol. 2 of Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, eds., Srebenica, een “veilig” gebied, 5 vols.].Amsterdam: Boom, 2002, pp. 166-7, 185, 189, 205-6.

[63]     Defence Planning: Guidance  FY 1994-1999 (16 April 1992, declassified 2008). (online)

[64]     See my Global Rivalries, p. 277, citing State Department spokesman James Rubin in Financial Times, 30 September/1 October 2000.

[65]     Alan W. Cafruny, ‘The Geopolitics of U.S. Hegemony in Europe. From the Breakup of Yugoslavia to the War in Iraq’, in A.W. Cafruny and M. Ryner, eds. A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield., 2003, p. 106.

[66]     Xavier Bougarel, ‘Du bon usage du Tribunal pénal international’. Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2002. (CD-ROM ed.); Cf. Global Rivalries, chapter 8, ‘America over Europe in the Balkans Crisis’; indictment of  the Serbian leadership on p. 279, cf. sources

[67]     Sébastien Chartrand and John Philpot, ‘Conclusion’, in Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied. The unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice. Montréal: Baraka Books, 2014, p. 274.

[68]     Wippman, ‘The International Criminal Court’ 2004, p. 156

[69]     Jacobs, ‘The International Criminal Law Movement’, pp. 240-41.

[70]     Nicholas J. Wheeler, ‘The Kosovo Bombing Campaign’. In C. Reus-Smit, ed. The Politics of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2004, pp. 208-10

[71]     Wippman, ‘The International Criminal Court’, p. 152.

[72]     Bougarel, ‘Du bon usage du Tribunal pénal international’.

[73]     Cited in Robin de Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal : De vermoorde onschuld van Slobodan Miloševič, n.p.: Mayra Publications, p. 107. The use of ‘innocence’ in the title in my view is not appropriate for leaders in wartime. At issue is whether he was guilty of the charges against him or not.

[74]     Cited in N.M.P. Steijnen, ‘Het tribunaal had een motief voor Miloševič’ dood’. De AntiFascist , May 2006, p.  5; the ICTY cost rose from $276,000 in 1994 to $96 million in 2001. Cathérine Samary, ‘Fiasco à La Haye’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2002 (CD-ROM ed.).

[75]     Cited in De Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal, p. 143.

[76]     De Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal, p.128.

[77]     De Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal, pp. 132-5. Eight years later, when ‘Putin’ had been substituted for Miloševič as the incarnation of evil, the Dutch mainstream newspaper De Volkskrant carried a photo montage in which the head of the Russian president was pasted on the figure being manhandled on the way to the Scheveningen prison.

[78]     Both cited in De Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal, p. 31.

[79]     Ibid..

[80]     De Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal, p. 21; Samary, ‘Fiasco à La Haye’.

[81]     Steijnen, ‘Het tribunaal had een motief’, pp, 22-3.

[82]     Steijnen, ‘Het tribunaal had een motief’, pp. 20, 22.

[83]     Steijnen, ‘Het tribunaal had een motief’, p. 21. Six days earlier, another Serbian defendant, Milan Babič, had been found dead in his cell already, De Ruiter, Het Joegoslavië-Tribunaal, p. 23.

[84]     Michael Mandel cited in Jacobs, ‘The International Criminal Law Movement’, p. 242.

[85]     Expert report cited in Jacobs, ‘The International Criminal Law Movement’, p. 244.

[86]     Jacobs, ‘The International Criminal Law Movement’, p. 244.

[87]     Peter Gowan, ‘The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy’, New Left Review, 234, p. 103.

[88]     Gowan, ‘The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy’,  p. 104.

[89]     Edward S. Herman, and David  Peterson, ‘Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System’. Monthly Review, 62 (1) 2010, p. 2, Le Monde Diplomatique, ‘Rwanda 1994’opération “Turquoise”’.December 2011.

[90]     Le Monde Diplomatique, ‘Rwanda 1994 opération “Turquoise”’.

[91]     Colette Braeckman,.’Rwanda, retour sur un aveuglement international. Dix ans après le génocide’. Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2004.

[92]     Herman and  Peterson, ‘Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, pp. 24-5, 30.

[93]     Gérard Prunier, ‘Au Rwanda, le génocide tel qu’il s’est produit’. Le Monde Diplomatique, October 1999; Herman and Peterson, ‘Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, p. 25.

[94]     Phil Taylor, ‘“The ICTR is war by other means”—Ramsey Clark.’ In Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 180.

[95]     John Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda.’ In Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 169.

[96]    Herman and Peterson, ‘Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, pp. 26-7.

[97]     Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda,’ p. 163.

[98]     Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, pp. 24-5.

[99]     Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda’, p. 164.

[100]    Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda’, p. 163.

[101]    Jacobs, ‘The International Criminal Law Movement’, p. 246.

[102]    Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda’, p. 165.

[103]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, p. 27.

[104]    Taylor, ‘“The ICTR is war by other means”—Ramsey Clark,’, p. 181.

[105]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, p. 28

[106]    Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda’, pp. 166-7.

[107]    Taylor, ‘“The ICTR is war by other means”—Ramsey Clark.’, p. 183. Taylor notes in passing that Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch sought to undermine the Rwandan delegation to the UN and later even became a witness for the prosecution at the ICTR.

[108]    Herman and Peterson, ‘Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, p. 23.

[109]    Benoît Francès, ‘France-Rwanda, le prix d’une réconciliation : Vers l’enterrement des dossiers du génocide’, Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2010.

[110]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, pp. 28-9

[111]    Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood. The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Toronto: Penguin Random House 2018.

[112]    Philpot, ‘The Dubious Heritage of the International Tribunal for Rwanda’, p. 176.

[113]    Private communication of Mr. John Philpot

[114]    Cited in Herman and Peterson, ‘Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, p. 32.

[115]    Taylor, ‘“The ICTR is war by other means”—Ramsey Clark.’, p. 182.

[116]    Sébastien Chartrand and John Philpot, ‘Introduction’, in Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 13.

[117]    Wippman, ‘The International Criminal Court’, p. 152.

[118]    Human Rights Watch, ‘U.S.: ‘Hague Invasion Act’ Becomes Law’ (3 August 2002) (online).

[119]   Chalmers Johnson,. Blowback. The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, rev. ed. London: TimeWarner, 2002 [2000], pp. 12-3.

[120]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, p. 29.

[121]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, p., 33.

[122]    Glen Ford, ‘The Ailing Empire’s Full Spectrum Dominance’. In  Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied.‘

[123]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, pp. 34-6; Ocampo characterisation on p. 37

[124]    Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, pp. 30-32.

[125]    Mahathir, A Doctor in the House. The Memoirs of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, rev. ed. Petaling Jaya: MPH Publishing 2018 [2011], p. 795.

[126]    Michel Chossudovsky, ‘The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal: Interview with Professor Michel Chossudovsky’.In Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 211.

[127]    Chossudovsky, ‘The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal’, p. 212.

[128]    Richard Falk,‘Kuala Lumpur Tribunal: Bush and Blair Guilty’. Al Jazeera, 28 November.2011 (online); Chossudovsky, ‘The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal’, pp. 212-3.

[129]    Mahathir, A Doctor in the House, p. 438.

[130]    Chossudovsky, ‘The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal’, p. 214.

[131]    Mahathir, A Doctor in the House, pp. 772-3.

[132]  Cited in my ‘Academic Corruption, the Israel Lobby, and 9/11’ (online).

[133]    Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War, p. 117.

[134]    Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War. The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield., 2003; The Road to 9/11. Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 2007, and  Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics. Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1991.

[135]    The Conversation, ‘Lockerbie experience is no model for the effective prosecution of MH17 bombers’, 5 October 2016 (online).

[136]   Cited in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9/11. The Deception That Changed the World [foreword, G. Stanish]. n.p.: www.bollyn.com., 2012, p.  66..

[137]    Cited in Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar in the Nineties. From Krupp to Saddam, rev. ed. London: Coronet. 1991 [1977], Sampson, 1991, p. 357.

[138]    Details in Peter Dale Scott, ‘Transnationalised Repression: Parafascism and the U.S.’ Lobster, 12, 1986, pp. 18, 26.

[139]    Cited in Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule. The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995, p. 317. In 1987, in a later interview Perot added that ‘if you go back and follow the trail, these guys have been working together since the Bay of Pigs.’ Ibid, p. 318.

[140]    Roy Rowan, ‘Pan Am 103: Why Did They Die?’ Time, June 24, 2001 (online). The original cover story by Rowan in Time, 27 April, 1992, which was much more detailed and had boxes summarising other plane crashes related to the Iran-Contra scandal; has disappeared and only the sanitised web version remains. For the original account and further sources see my Global Rivalries, pp. 340, 371.

[141]    David R. Andrews, ‘A Thorn on the Tulip—A Scottish Trial in the Netherlands: The Story behind the Lockerbie Trial’. Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 36 (2) 2004., p. 308.

[142]    Wikipedia, ‘Scottish Court in the Netherlands’ and ‘Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Trial’; Andrews, ‘A Thorn on the Tulip’, pp. 309-10, 317.

[143]    Cynthia P. Schneider, ‘International Justice and Diplomacy’, Brookings, 21 August 2009 (online).

[144]    Wikipedia, ‘Scottish Court in the Netherlands’ and ‘Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Trial’.

[145]    Wikipedia, ‘Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Trial’.

[146]    Wikipedia, ‘Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Trial’.

[147]   Andrews, ‘A Thorn on the Tulip’, pp. 307-8.

[148]    Jacobs, ‘The International Criminal Law Movement’, p. 245; Ocampo cited by Chief Taku, ‘African Court and International Criminal Courts’, p. 33.

[149]    ICCT, ‘Terrorists on Trial: The Lockerbie Case.’

[150]    Andrews, ‘A Thorn on the Tulip’, p. 318.

[151]    The Conversation, ‘Lockerbie experience is no model’

[152]    Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War, pp. 141-2.

[153]    Van Heerde,. ‘Nabestaanden MH17: Geef Rusland pas stemrecht in Raad van Europa’.

[154]    Fannie Lafontaine and Érick Sullivan, ‘And Justice for All? International Criminal Justice in the Time of High Expectations’. In Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 223.

[155]    Beth S. Lyons, ‘Prosecutorial Failure to Disclose Exculpatory Material: A Death Knell to Fairness’. In Chartrand and Philpot, eds. Justice Belied, p. 135, citing Nancy Combs, Fact-Finding Without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 174;.

[156]    Lafontaine and Sullivan, ‘And Justice for All?’, p. 225.