[I've just had 'International Law' (aka, 'InJust', for short) explained to me by a Belgian prof called Dr. d'Argent (Maître Money?) from the Catholic University of Louvain outside Brussels. Though the course was obviously conceived in French then presented in a tortured translation into something remotely resembling English; and since torturous translations are one of my avocations: I found the course's language generally annoying and only occasionly angering--mainly because, sophomore that I am, I think of the law as a language and have never heard, in any court or classroom, the argument, "Nevermind what he said, you KNOW what he means." Yeah, no shit, that was a frequent apology for the course's grammatical, syntactic and dictional gaffes.
But the worst errors were intentional and factual--i.e., errors of intention & Historical fact. The 'kind' of International Law we were being taught was frequently called 'Humanitarian Law', in that its chief concerns were 'Human Right' & 'war crimes unto genocide', and its highest expression was the International Criminal Court, the Rome Court or ICC. And the source of International Law à la Belge is the UN, so huzzahs all around for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) & the ad hocs, the ICTY and ICTR, loosely charged with adjudicating war crimes and genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, respectively, and only those committed by the Serbs and Hutus, respectively.
But beyond the biases inherent in these 'genetic fallacies' was the instrumental use of such 'over-indictments'--that's a charge for which the 'presumption of innocence' is impossible and the 'burden of proof' is reflexively shifted onto the defendant. It became apparent early-on, when terms like 'genocide', 'aggression' or 'invasion' were strictly applied only to enemies of Western Private Capital, like the USSR/Russia (see Invasions of Eastern Poland, Afghanistan, Ukraine, etc.) or Iraq (Invasion of Kuwait), that the course would merely be a cess pit of the most toxic anti-communist propaganda. What's more, the prof proudly admitted his pro-Fascist bias in a kinda 'Mieux d'être collabo que coco' (see the forthcoming CM/P post on the course).
All of this, as well as a Fb post about Samantha Power's face, made me recall a piece I'd written lo these many years ago, about the relation between Humanitarianism and the instrumentaliztion of Genocide. So, as an appero or a dessert, here's a little cerise sur ce gâteau de merde: a windbag's eye view of just how 'preemptive ethnic cleansing' can be used, like a radical mastectomy against the scourge of Cancer, to put a stop the imagined reciditivism of malignant genocidaires (but ONLY for those who still have a palate for irony):
So, STFG from CM/P--mc]
Maître Christopher Black
Maître Jacques Vergès
THE HUMANITARIANS’ GENOCIDES
by Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/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?’
President Juvéval Habyarimana President Slobodan Milosevic
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.
Johnny Cochraan--'the junkyard dog'
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 journalists (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
)
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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