[Rwanda, Bosnia, Libya[1]: Three nations devastated by war, their peoples then subjugated to the neo-Liberal economic and commercial interests of Western militarism, their lives abjectly wasted, and all made to seem like the right and proper things to do by organizations, hard-wired into the Soft Machine of mainstream media lies, while defenders of Human Rights, like the FIDH or US Institute for Peace (just to pick the top of the scab), who encourage the fatuous notions of the Right to Protect, preventative wars, preemptive aggressions, beat their empty chests over Stopping the Fucking Genocide!!, and propose humane mass-slaughter and the conscientious destruction of entire national infrastructures and ecosystems as the most suitable way to enforce Democracy and Humanitarianism.
[1] Certainly, Sudan, Syria, and Iraq should be included here, but we didn’t want to break up the tripartite symmetry of this horror show.
[1] Certainly, Sudan, Syria, and Iraq should be included here, but we didn’t want to break up the tripartite symmetry of this horror show.
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THE HUMANITARIANS’ GENOCIDES
By Mick Collins
Cirque Minime/Paris
17 March 2004
In light of recent developments at The Hague (the sudden retirement of a sick Presiding Judge Richard May); and in Paris (the publication in Le Monde of investigating Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière’s report on the shooting down on 6 April 1994 of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents’ plane that is widely considered to have triggered the Rwandan genocide), one has to ask oneself, ‘What could they have been thinking of back in 1993 when ‘genocide’ became the Western Liberal Wasters’ super-charge of choice?’
Most everybody knew from the jump, if few actually acknowledged it, that the genocide charge against President Milosevic—against all the Serbs, really—was based primarily on what happened at Srebrenica in July 1995, and was completely unsubstantiated by any real physical evidence (like where were the 5-8,000 murdered Muslim men and boys stashed?). In fact, these charges of genocide were nothing more than a prosecutorial short cut, what used to be known back in the day as ‘over-indictment’. When I was doing my graduate work on the CDC’s Vacaville campus (read: when I was the Calif. Dept. of Corrections’ guest number B32755Z), the deal usually went down like this here: DA’d charge someone with murder and mayhem, hoping he’d plead down to assault with intent—or maybe Man 2, if they threatened to file all his priors. Then, after he’d caught his time and went before the parole board, he’d have to answer for the original (over)charges, which, though they’d been dropped in the plea deal, stayed on his sheet as ‘silent beefs’. But, if he called the prosecution on their chump deal and told them to shove it right back up in their briefcase and take him to trial, and they couldn’t make the M&M stick: then the accused won it all and he walked. Like with OJ: they tried to get him to plead out to some lesser charge than the capital double beheading, but he took that butt-ugly DA to Judge Ito’s box, and he and Johnny Cochran made the whole depraved, racist Court TV culture eat shit. They finally had to go to civil court to get any money satisfaction out of OJ and his Heisman—but they made sure he’d never play at Hillcrest again.
So it was with Slobodan Milosevic: They had nothing on him but a bunch of lies and war propaganda, and it took them a full two years to expose their freakishly mendacious case—so even their servile and sycophantic supporters, like Marlise (‘You’re So Lame’) Simons over at the NY Times or the hacks at the virulently anti-Serb IWPR (who fired their man at The Hague, Chris Stephens, after he wrote a piece on how a Serb charged with the Srebrenica ‘genocide’, Momir Nikolic, perjured himself while copping a plea and rolling on his two mates), started going all Jell-O-like with their endorsements. But, hey, the stress of having to protect so many criminal witnesses, and to suborn so much perjury, and constantly to suppress one of the last honest and honorable men in his pursuit of accuracy and decency in the historical record, so as his ferocious cross-examinations wouldn’t bring that converted insurance company home-office down around their philistine ears, proved to be too much for Judge May. For those who witnessed the dark looks that crossed his and Geoffrey Nice’s faces each time ‘the accused’ Milosevic impeached another of their witnesses or caught the court in a lie or in some petty connivance to cover yet another of their legal gaffes, it is no surprise that May lost his stomach for daily demoralization and tossed in his rented inquisitor’s robes--and that Nice is rumored to be standing in the same window ready to jump.
But who was it set the evidentiary pin all the way over on ‘genocide’ for these short-hitting teabag shysters? And why?
President & Mrs. Clinton, Warren Christopher, Madame Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Lords Owen and Ashdown, Gen. Wesley ‘Bloody Nuts’ Clark, George Soros, all the Liberal Humanitarians of the day, all so heartily committed to the pervasion of Western waste culture, particularly in the Balkans, Iraq and Central Africa, needed some dodge to cover their venal and deadly commercial machinations, while boosting their image of good-hearted fecklessness (remember their motto: ‘Sorry we didn’t do more sooner. But we feel your pain!’).
So before any new age holocaust had even hit CNN, these Military Humanists and their NGO caddies took a whip-around of the Islamic oil emirates and various NATO client states and wanabe client states and, on a thoroughly extra-legal lark (as these ad hocs, despite all pretenses to being neo-Nurembergers, have absolutely no basis in the UN charter or in international law), cobbled together, en bref, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (plus bref, ICTY), which, from its onset in the Summer of 1993, included the flatulent criminal concept of Genocide on its first things-to-stamp-out-in-smaller-countries list—along with national sovereignty, secularism and any and all tendencies toward politico-economic independence.
It wouldn’t be until the next year, 1994, that the Rwandans would furnish what was by then being called the ‘international community’ with sufficient body-counts (media-furnished photos of 10,000 Jonestowns) to warrant a charge of such delusional grandeur--and an affiliated Tribunal would immediately be formed in Arusha, Tanzania (the ICTR), with the same prosecutor, South African Richard Goldstone (to be replaced by Canadian Louise Arbour in 1996 and Swiss Carla Del Ponte in 1999), and the same questionable connections to the spirits of the UN and international law, but with unqualified loyalty to its Western imperialist sponsors. Though the Arusha Tribunal was created after The Hague Tribunal, it quickly became the precedent-setting court, with Rwandan government officials, lonely as Serbs in the dock, charged with genocide, complicity in genocide, and rape as an instrument of genocide (the first-ever trial of a woman, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, on this sort of rape charge is currently in full swing—see the ever impartial New York Times Magazine cover-story entitled ‘The Minister of Rape’, 15 Sept 2002).
This combine of ad hocs was wedged by the US into an already dysfunctional international justice system as a way to protect itself against unseemly litigation (e.g., charges of war crimes for the 78-day terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, aiding and abetting the RPF missile strike that murdered the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in April 1994, or the use of its US Special Forces, from bases in Burundi and Uganda, and various other Western aid to the Kagame-led RPF invasions and occupations that brought about the extermination of more than 6 million Central Africans (they stopped counting at 6 million!) in Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern Congo between 1990 and the present). Then there was the large moneymaking UN Reparations Commission for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which was also part of this infernal system. And it became clear with the UN Commission on Iraq that the principal purpose of Western-styled international justice was to demonize the victims of Imperialist adventures, while ripping off their national sovereignty and indenturing them in perpetuity to International Financial Institutions (IMF, World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, etc.), as well as establishing fiscal liability on the part of the vanquished for all war damages visited on them by the US and its crime partners in their never-ending search for new markets to terrorize with the dumping of their surplus waste ordnance.
And that other Hague court, the International Court of Justice, had proven itself a real nuisance with its irregular but persistent war crimes charges against the US & Co. (e.g., for the bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong harbor, as well as the similar mining of Nicaraguan ports 20 years later, or Israel’s building of its Wall in the occupied territories of Palestine.)—but the US was able just to shine on the ICJ like it was some sort of small town speed trap. And, when the world responded to the arbitrary and capricious nature of The Hague and Arusha ad hocs with the ratification of the Treaty of Rome establishing the first International Criminal Court (also a Hague venue) in 1998, the US was forced to fall back on its old NATO protection racket tactics, threatening potential subscribers to the ICC with aid boycotts and even military reprisals.
So between 1991 and 1993, with a change in US government from discreet warrior conservatives (Bush 1 or Reagan/Bush 3) to brazen yet craven liberals (Clinton/Gore 2), it became necessary to find a politico-rhetorical hook by which to drag those putative Leftist peace-creeps and draft-dodgers who opposed all ‘military incursions’ or ‘police actions’ from Korea to Vietnam to Chili, Nicaragua, Panama and Grenada to Iraq 1, and who were all set to start spending that huge peace dividend from the ‘collapse of Communism’ on faster modems and the defeat of world hunger with Ben and Jerry’s and socially-responsible mocha lattes all around—to pull these bleeding sphincters like Chris Hitchens and Susan Sontag and Marty Sheen and Dutch Leonard into the run-away train of Western financial and commercial hegemony that would soon run over and flat waste our entire suffering planet. That rhetorical gambit would come to be known as ‘the humanitarians’ genocide’.
Recently, at Carleton University in Ottawa, to an audience of journalist (or under-employed Canadian ACTRA day-players posing as journalists), Kofi Annan said:
There can be no more important issue, and no more binding
obligation, than the prevention of genocide.
And he went on to say:
We must remember the victims –- the hundreds of thousands of
men, women and children abandoned to systematic slaughter
while the world, which had the capacity to save most of them,
failed to save more than a handful, forever sullying the collective
conscience. We must also help the survivors still struggling with
the physical and psychological scars. But most of all, we must
pledge –- to ourselves as moral beings and to each other as a
human community -– to act boldly, including through military
action when no other course will work, to ensure that such
a denial of our common humanity is never allowed to happen
again.
Now, Annan said all this after it was disclosed earlier this week that his UN had, back in 1994, squirreled away (or just refused to acknowledge the existence of) the ‘black box’ from the murdered Hutu presidents’ French-built Falcon 50. So this was not so much a heart felt appeal for the elimination of genocide in our lifetime as it was a kind of ‘Oops, fucked up again. But we still feel your pain!’—a Clintonesque apology for a decade-long cover-up of the UN’s unwavering support for the real genocidaires, the expansionist RPF junta in Rwanda.
And it must be remembered that Annan is the UN power forward that Albright, Cohen and Clinton got for Boutros Boutros-Ghali. One of the things got ‘Booboo’ Ghali broomed (Albright liked to call him ‘Frenchie’, but somehow I doubt she was talking about how the mustache tickled!) was his having some unhappy reservations about bombing the Bosnian Serbs (1994-95) in light of the roles played by the Serbs (partisans), the Croatians (fascist collabos) and the Bosnian Muslims (fascist collabos) in WWII, and how US foreign policy projections in the Balkans were founded on a fundamental inversion of the historical record.
Vis à vis Rwanda, Annan’s predecessor Boutros-Ghali assured his dis-employment with:
‘The Rwandan genocide is 100% the responsibility of
the Americans.’
(see Robin Philpot’s great book, ‘Ça ne s’est pas passé comme ça
à Kigali’—soon to be out in English, one hopes!)
The ‘humanitarians’ genocide’ hook is still hanging out there, dripping its special kind of bloody bile. I’ve never seen a hope-to-die dope fiend get off on the purest stuff as well as some of these liberally made-over fascoids (these Trots who think brown makes them look slimmer—or these bloggers who can burn millions of megs prattling on about Lukacs, Gramsci and Milosevic before busting out their main move for support of Israeli settlement expansion!) get hyper-buzzed on the moral indignation from third-hand stories about genocide. But today, St. Paddy’s 2004, it seems that those who were on the hook for genocide, the hookees, have been replaced in the public’s animus by the hookers.
President Milosevic is far from off the hook. Even after leaving the Tribunal’s effete spirit badly mangled, if not totally broken out of all functionality, and the prosecution gibbering about its shitty luck in turning out its case, and if it could just have a couple more months, a couple hundred more shill-witnesses, a couple more bought-off judges; he will almost certainly not be granted any motion to dismiss, and will have just three months to prepare his defense against a prosecution case (as voluminous in quantity as it was devoid of content) that was ten years in the making and two years in its indecent exposure. And even if he manages to raise enough money to engage his fourth legal associate, the international attorney, Tiphaine Dickson, who has intimate and intricate experience with both Tribunals, and even with his own double-keyed office/cell, with private telephone, computer and fax (whoopee!), at the old Nazi joint in Scheveningen; any consideration of an ‘equality of arms’ is still a weak joke. But then no one expected the US and NATO to fight fair!
Case in point, back to Rwanda :
Check out the headline on the front page of the 9 March 2004 Le Monde:
Revelations on the Attack that Kicked Off the Rwandan Genocide.
The story tells of a French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, and of his six-year investigation on behalf of the families of some of the French crew who died when two Soviet-made SA-16 missiles, traced to a lot sold by the Russians to the government of Uganda, shot down the plane that was bringing Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, back from a peace conference in Arusha. The judge’s report contends (what has been widely known) that this military strike, which went down at 8:20 pm, on the evening of 6 April 1994, and has been consistently banalised by the media and the ICTR as a ‘plane crash’, an accident, was, quite the contrary, a targeted assassination, carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (often referred to as the ‘Rwandan rebel forces’, but in fact a wing of the Ugandan Army that had regularly invaded Rwanda, but came to stay [and not to play] in October 1990) on orders from their leader and the current President of Rwanda, General Paul Kagame. (To this day, Kagame proclaims proudly that Habyarimana’s murder matters not at all to him, because the genocide of his Tutsis was planned long before—as far back as 1959, he says; and his predecessor was just another dead dictator, another dead terrorist! For details, go to
http://www.rfi.fr/actuchaude/special.asp?m1=1&m2=1&identifiant=3952&ID_sRUB=71&id_dos=0 )
http://www.rfi.fr/actuchaude/special.asp?m1=1&m2=1&identifiant=3952&ID_sRUB=71&id_dos=0 )
Now, this is a big story because a lot of those Leftists from the ‘Stop the Fucking Genocide’ movement had made a dark and skinny knight out of the US Fifth Army-trained (at its version of the School of the Americas in Ft Leavenworth, Kansas) and long-time CIA asset, General Kagame, and liberating heroes of his RPF ‘contras’. Much as the Bosnian Muslims were beatified as the hapless martyrs to the New Fascist Serbs, so the RPF ‘rebels’, fighting under the relic encrusted rubric of Tutsi Feudalism, were seen not as the terrorists who in many and varied ways instigated it, but as the ‘freedom fighters’ who put a stop to the ‘first genocide in Africa’. (This last term was embraced with a special warm sense of relief by the Belgians who, for being such a small country, came damn close to wiping out everyone in Central Africa.)
In a real kid-gloves interview by François Soudan in Jeune Afrique/L’Intelligent (no 2249), General Kagame is asked:
JA: The French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière is preparing
to present his conclusions apropos of the 6th of April 1994—
the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana. According to sources
close to the case, his investigation establishes that the responsibility
for the attack lies with the RPF, your party. Does that bother you?
PK: No. Not me nor anyone else here. It makes no sense.
From the beginning, before even starting the inquest, this judge
already accused the RPF. How do you expect us to take this guy
seriously, with such political and ideological presumptions?
JA: Ten years later, the identities of those who perpetrated this attack
that kicked-off the genocide remains a mystery then . . .
PK: Personally, I don’t know who did it. But I’m not the best person
to ask about this matter. Instead, you should ask those who were here:
the French, the Belgians, the UN. They were in Kigali at the time.
Omnipresent.
Even though he tries to blow off this investigation as an expression of France’s bias for the ‘extremist Hutu genocidaires’, you can tell that it’s sweating him some. His iron-clad executive immunity as President of Rwanda seems to be a little heavy, a little tight-fitting, a little chafing in the crotch—even on this Giocometti figure. And knowing just how fickle his friends can be has got to give him some real lower-back pain.
So as President Milosevic is locked into his office/cell to prepare the second act of his heroic defense of Balkan history, President Kagame dips into the emotional mud that is the junk, the media waste product of humanitarian genocide freaks, the globs of revisionist snot, with which he hopes to putty up the cracks in his RPF’s occultation of Central African history. That the ‘genocide’ at Srebrenica never took place was evident long before Nice and Co. failed to tie Milosevic to it in court; that Slobodan Milosevic worked fervently for peace in his republic of Serbia and through out Yugoslavia was only reinforced by the prosecution’s vain attempts to prove otherwise; that the real genocide in Rwanda did not go down as advertised in The New Yorker and on CNN is becoming clearer with each ‘independent’ investigation; and that it was not Hutu extremists killing all Tutsis and moderate Hutus, but Rwandan nationals (Tutsis, Hutus, and even the few Twa who were left) unsuccessfully resisting a protracted invasion, occupation and extermination of their nation, their revolution and their very lives, by a foreign terrorist army with its widely and deeply infiltrated collaborators spreading death and destruction all the way into Congo: all these resonances between the Balkans and Central Africa go to make up the historical record.
We must work (as tirelessly as President Milosevic has) to preserve, protect and defend this historical truth against all efforts by the world media and the ad hoc Tribunals to distort and destroy it, if we are to have the slightest hope of saving ourselves and our children from the horrible consumptive illness unto miserable extinction with which the forces of globalised auto-valorizing value, of the run-away metastasis of end-stage waste Capitalism are determined to afflict us.
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