By Stephen Karganovic
April 02, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- "SCF"
- Acting at the behest of its
political controllers and paymasters, the racist
International Criminal Court [ICC], whose
principal activity since its founding in 2003
has been the malicious persecution of black
African leaders, now, for a change, targets for
judicial abuse a distinguished Eurasian figure.
Observers with an attention span of more than
fifteen minutes (which would exclude the vast
majority in the bamboozled Western countries)
should have noticed immediately several glaring
anomalies in ICC’s “arrest warrant.”
The warrant purports to be based on
humanitarian concern for the welfare of children
allegedly transferred illegally from the Donbas.
The court officers’ public rationale, however,
omits widely known facts regarding the
systematic bombardment of civilians in Donetsk
and Lugansk since 2014. It ignores the
demonstrated death toll of that crime amounting
to at least 14,000 victims, including several
thousand children. Neither this manifest offence
against humanity nor the desire to call to
account its obvious perpetrators, the military
and political structures of the Kiev Nazi
regime, seem to have played
any role in the court’s deliberations.
Why not? How can meticulous adherence to the
provisions of the
Geneva Convention which requires the
evacuation of civilians from areas affected by
armed conflict (Article 49) be deemed grounds
for the issuance of a criminal warrant, while
widespread, systematic, and indiscriminate
lethal shelling of civilians is passed over in
silence, without triggering any prosecutorial
reaction?
For that matter, a further question can also
be raised with regard to another anomaly, just
as glaring. Why have the
alleged atrocities in Bucha and
Kramatorsk last year apparently been memory
holed, to be replaced now by another that has
been obviously contrived? If criminal charges
were to be pressed, why have the Bucha and
Kramatorsk incidents, which at the time of their
alleged occurrence were the subject of
extraordinary propaganda campaigns, suddenly
disappeared from the radar screen? And precisely
when they could have served as the most credible
foundation for an arrest warrant, assuming there
ever was any evidence to support those
allegations? Might the fact that both false flag
operations were efficiently exposed in the early
stages have anything to do with this strange
reticence?
How incompetent – or politically corrupt –
must a prosecutor be to forego a supposedly open
and shut case in favor of a case, and that is
putting it very charitably, that is at best
legally ambiguous and highly dubious? This
question is addressed to the ICC Prosecutor,
colonial lackey and consummate opportunist Karim
Khan, of course.
Two additional considerations must also be
submitted to the judgment of that part of the
public whose brains have not yet been fried by
propaganda. If the welfare of children is
foremost on the minds of ICC staff, what have
they got to say about the tsunami of reports
that the Kiev junta, desperate to replenish its
supply of cannon fodder, is now detaining and
kidnapping underage children and with virtually
no military training sending them to war, where
they have an estimated life expectancy of about
four hours?
Rule 136 0f the Convention on the Rights of the
Child holds plainly that “Children must not
be recruited into armed forces or armed groups.”
Additional Protocols I and II, the
Statute of the International Criminal Court
itself [Art. 8 (b) (xxvi)] and of the
Special Court for Sierra Leone put the minimum
age for recruitment in armed forces or armed
groups at 15, as does the Convention on the
Rights of the Child. Are ICC prosecutors capable
of reading their own court’s regulations, or do
they even care?
Should
credible reports of such odious practices,
unquestionably
in contravention of international conventions
which govern the use of child soldiers, not
merit at least a full scale ICC investigation?
An equally grave question should be raised
concerning the imminent dispatch of
hazardous and banned depleted uranium munitions
by Great Britain to the armed forces of the
Ukrainian junta.
Contrary to the rationalisations of the
British Government,
depleted uranium munitions are provably
detrimental to the environment, as
well as to human beings and all forms of animate
life in the proximity of their impact. That
includes children, of course, who are
particularly vulnerable and subject to genetic
deformations and painful and lethal illnesses.
The catastrophic impact of the use of such
munitions in
Yugoslavia and
Iraq has been extensively studied and well
documented over the past several decades. Former
UN arms control inspector
Scott Ritter has exposed the evils of this
practice professionally and competently. It
is prohibited by international humanitarian law
and if allowed it will constitute a grave threat
to life and health both of children and adults
in the Ukraine. Would not the warning of arrest
warrants for the relevant authorities in the
United Kingdom be a suitable response by the ICC
in the face of a potential disaster of such
magnitude?
It is important to note that the
International Criminal Court is a linear
extension of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY] and that its
conduct cannot be fully understood without
reference to the pattern of lawless behaviour
previously exhibited by its model. Indeed, the
word “conduct” is in this case a more
appropriate terms than “jurisprudence” because
neither court has bothered to develop a body of
law and legal interpretation in the conventional
sense. It is of no significance that ICTY is a
manifestly illegal outfit, set up in
contravention of the UN Charter, while ICC
arguably was properly constituted by
international treaty. In their practical
operation they have both served as tools of the
arrogance of power of global hegemons. Their
joint task has been not to uphold the principles
of international law, but to demolish them in
order to provide a legalistic veneer for the
execution of the hegemons’ criminal
undertakings.
It is therefore scarcely surprising that the
preposterous grounds cited by the ICC for
issuing warrants against Russian officials for
an alleged act of gross turpitude consisting of
the safe evacuation of children from the war
zone in the Donbas had an exact analogue in the
past behaviour of ICC’s infamous model, the
ICTY.
In a nutshell, Serbian defendants in the ICTY
Srebrenica trials were routinely charged with a
grave breach of international humanitarian law,
forced deportation of the civilian population.
In mid-July of 1995, three meetings were held
between the commander of the UN Protection Force
in Srebrenica, Col. Thom Karremans, and the
Serbian Commander Gen. Ratko Mladic to consider
the issue of civilian refugees assembled in a
nearby village. The Serbian side made complete
video recordings of those meetings which leave
no doubt as to what had in fact transpired.
Although the
video evidence unambiguously shows that Col.
Karremans came to Mladic to convey the request
of the UN Command that the refugees be evacuated
to safety onto territory where military
operations were not taking place, ICTY
Prosecution charged Mladic with ordering the
expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the refugees.
What actually happened is that Gen. Mladic
acceded to UN Command’s request, as he had the
duty to do under international law since
fighting around Srebrenica was still in
progress, and as a result the refugees were
properly evacuated, as agreed.
For acting in good faith to protect civilians
in a zone of conflict, Gen. Mladic was indicted,
among other things, for genocide and crime
against humanity, deportation.
The exculpatory video evidence was never
presented in court in its totality. Snippets
taken out of context and appearing to favor the
prosecution case were the only parts allowed to
be introduced into the evidence. Live testimony
by Col. Karremans, who obviously would have been
a key witness, was obstructed at every turn by
the prosecution with the connivance of the
Chamber. Technically, the judges could not be
faulted for not taking into account evidence
that had not been put before them. In the end,
they washed their hands and calmly drew
conclusions that were contrary to the facts, but
with grave consequences for the defendant.
The Russian targets of ICC’s warrants will
never, of course, be in the position of General
Mladic. However, the cowboy style of ICTY´s
corrupt proceedings, fully assimilated by its
subsequent clone, ICC, gives a foretaste of what
awaits anyone unlucky enough to fall in its
clutches.
ICC, like its precursor ICTY, is a disgrace
to law in all its civilised forms. State parties
should be encouraged to withdraw from it while
it is still possible for them to avoid
embarrassment by association.
Stephen Karganovic - President of the
Srebrenica Historical Project
Views expressed in this article are
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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