UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay: “Pretext-maker” for Western
Military Aggression
Navi Pillay is up to her old tricks: she’s abusing her position as United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to provide a pretext for imperial
aggression against Syria. Today, February 18, 2013, she repeated her call for
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to be referred for investigation to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) for the actions of his forces in trying to
repel the western-back mercenary war against his country, which the UN says has
killed almost 70000 in 22 months of fighting. And she went even further in
calling for immediate action by the international community to end the killing,
up to and including military intervention. 1
What Pillay is seeking is an indictment (arrest warrant) against Assad so as
to demonize the Syrian president and delegimitize his government in the eyes of
western public opinion and to turn Assad into an international pariah in
anticipation of a possible, full-scale, western, military but “humanitarian”
intervention for regime change in Syria.
Pillay’s remarks of today represent an escalation in her crusade against the
Syrian president and the steadfast support his government has enjoyed in the UN
Security Council (UNSC) from both Russia and China, which are permanent members
of the UNSC and, therefore, have veto powers. Previously, Pillay had made an
effort to temper her condemnation of the Syrian president by linking it to a
condemnation of the crimes against humanity perpetrated (and even filmed!) by
the foreign-backed mercenaries. 2
For example, on Friday, January 25, 2013, on CNN’s International News
broadcast at noon 3, she was interviewed from Davos, Switzerland, (at
the World Economic Forum, where high-level technocrats scheme about running the
world’s economy for the next year on behalf of the 1%) by anchor, Hala Gorani,
on the question of alleged and widespread human rights abuses in Syria.
While videos of the unfortunate families of refugees fleeing Syria were
flashed upon the screen, Pillay indicated that she was increasingly frustrated
by the failure of Russia and China (“and several other states”) to allow the
United Nations Security Council to refer the request by 58 member countries of
the United Nations for an investigation into the alleged human rights abuses
by both sides in Syria to the ICC.
The January 25th CNN interview was only the latest of similar interviews of
Pillay by CNN 4 and other mainstream media outlets, following the
issue of a proposed ICC investigation into human rights abuses in Syria. So, why
is this crusade on Pillay’s part important to CNN? Why does she get so much air
time in the West? The answer is that governments and corporate media in the
West are counting on Pillay to provide the same kind of pretext for regime
change in Syria that she provide against the Gaddafi government of Libya.
THE LIBYAN PRECEDENTS
Two very useful precedents for illegal, but so-called “humanitarian”,
intervention by NATO were set by the United Nations in regards to Libya. The
first was that the doctrine of the responsibility to protect was
successfully invoked, for the very first time, as a legal grounds for
over-riding the fundamental principle of national sovereignty as the basis of
international law.
R2P holds that, if a government cannot protect the human rights of its own
citizens, the international community may step in to do so. In the case of
Libya, R2P was used to justify United Nations Resolution 1973, the motion that
authorized NATO to create a no-fly zone over Libya. Resolution 1973 was
perverted by NATO within hours into a full-blown military intervention for
regime change in Libya that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Libyans,
pogroms against black persons resident in Libya, the assassinations of Muammar
Gaddafi and members of his family, massive infrastructure damage, the de facto
partitioning of the country, and a failed state machine.
But the first precedent (above) could not have been realized without the
fancy legal footwork executed in advance by the nimble Navi in demonizing
Mouammar Gaddafi and his son, Saif, at the UN. The second precedent, then, was
the initiative taken by the UN Human Rights Council, chaired by Pillay, in
calling for an international inquiry into violence against civilians in Libya.
This call for an inquiry led the International Criminal Court, acting in the
interests of the US empire and other neo-colonial powers such as France, Italy,
and Britain, to obtain an indictment against the late, former leader of Libya,
Mouammar Gaddafi and his son, Saif, for alleged human rights abuses by the
Libyan government against Libyan civilians. In fact, the entire bureaucracy of
the United Nations was completely finessed by the Empire in using fabricated
abuses of human rights of Libyan civilians as an excuse to delegitimize, unseat,
and demonize the legitimate government of Libya so as to manoeuvre the National
Transitional Council of Libya [NTC] (organized and supported by all of the
western powers) into the position of being recognized internationally as the
legitimate representative of the Libyan people. This manoeuvre, in turn, helped
provide a further pretext for the NATO regime change operation in Libya.
The wholesale replacement of the official Libyan government representatives
at the UN by those of the NTC was achieved in several rapid steps. First, on
February 25, 2011, at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Human Rights
Council (UNHRC), representatives of more than 70 human rights NGO’s
(non-governmental organizations) were assembled in Geneva, Switzerland, on a
petition initiated by UN Watch (a pro-Israeli NGO) and the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED) to hear a litany of accusations of human rights violations
on the part of the Gaddafi government by Dr. Soliman Bouchuiguir, who spoke for
the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR).
The LLHR was closely tied to the NTC and had, in fact, some executive members
in common with it. No evidence of the human rights abuses that the Libyan
government was alleged to have committed against Libyan civilians was ever
entered as evidence. Libya was a member of the UNHCR but its membership had been
temporarily suspended prior to the emergency meeting.
Therefore, it was not allowed to answer the charges levelled by the LLHR, an
organization directly connected to the western-backed opposition. Navi Pillay,
as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, chaired the meeting. She is quoted as
saying, “The Libyan leader must stop the violence now.” And she pointed out that
Libya was a member of the Human Rights Council and pledged to respect human
rights, and was also a State party to various international human rights
treaties. 5 It was also at this meeting that “a statement (was)
delivered on behalf of all of the Council’s independent human rights experts
(who) endorsed the High Commissioner’s call for an international inquiry into
the violence, stressing that the international community should “act without
delay” to protect civilians from serious human rights violations.” 6
The UNHCR report was duly forwarded to the Security Council which formally
suspended Libya from its seat on the UNHRC.
Shortly following the emergency meeting, Libya was prevented from appointing
a new ambassador to the United Nations, following the defection of its two
representatives at the UN to the opposition. 7 Despite having gone
over to the opposition, the two defectors were granted “courtesy passes”
allowing them access to the Security Council chamber where they delivered
anti-Gaddafi remarks.
Libya responded by naming former Nicaraguan Foreign
Minister (under the revolutionary Sandinista government of the 1980′s) Rev.
Miguel D’Escoto Brockman as its new Permanent Representative to the UN. D’Escoto
Brockman had also served as a former Secretary-General of the UN General
Assembly. However, his attendance at the UN was blocked by Susan Rice, US
Ambassador to the UN, because he was on a tourist visa to the USA and not a
diplomatic visa. D’Escoto Brockman rightly criticized UN Secretary General Ban
Ki Moon of betraying the UN Charter and called the UN “a lethal weapon of the
Empire.” 8
On March 28, 2011, Al Jazeera, the TV mouthpiece of the Qatari monarchy, an
ally (with very deep pockets) of NATO in the Persian Gulf, first broadcast the
Viagara libel. 9 In this narrative, which rivals the fantasies of the
Kuwaiti incubator babies (a pretext for the First Gulf War) and of the Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction (the pretext for the Second Gulf War), the Libyan
government of Mouammar Gaddafi was accused of encouraging the mass rapes of
Libyan civilian women by distributing the drug, Viagara, to its troops. There
turned out to be no evidence whatsoever of this wild accusation.
But that did not prevent all the major mainstream media outlets of the West
from repeating it. Nor did it deter Susan Rice and her boss, US Secretary of
State, Hilary Clinton, from condemning Gaddafi. Finally, following the
condemnation by Clinton, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor for the ICC
at the time, issued an indictment (basically an arrest warrant) against Mouammar
Gaddafi and his son, Saif, effectively turning them into pariahs and accused
international war criminals.
There were three problems for the ICC and for Libyan civilians in indicting
the Gaddafis, not the least of which was the lack of evidence. The other two
were the ICC’s own record and the consequences of the Viagara libel. The ICC’s
record was very sketchy to say the least. In his decade of tenure as chief
prosecutor, twenty-nine Africans were indicted by Ocampo but only one was
convicted and not on the original charges contained in the indictment.10
11
In every instance when the ICC, under his leadership, became involved
with political leaders, the leaders indicted were always African and at odds
with the foreign policy goals of the USA. It should be noted that the USA has
not accepted the jurisdiction of the the court over its own citizens, who have
immunity from ICC prosecution. In other words, the ICC is a one-way street along
which the racist and neo-colonial goals of US foreign policy are driven in
Africa, but the crimes of racism and neo-colonialism go unpunished. The ICC has
never issued an indictment for war crimes or human rights abuses against the
likes of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Stephen Harper, Nikolas Sarkozy, and David
Cameron, nor is it ever likely to do so.
Finally, the indictment issued for allegedly distributing Viagara to its
troops was part of a racist campaign in the West suggesting falsely that the
Gaddafi government had so little support among the people of Libya that the
Libyan leader had to resort to hiring black mercenaries from Sub-Saharan Africa
to retain his hold on power. The old shibboleth of black men raping
light(er)-skinned women played very well, as would be expected, in the
mainstream media of the USA, Britain, Canada, France, and other mainly white
countries, where a latent pool of racism lays just below the surface of the
consciousness of a certain part of the population and where an ersatz concern
for the welfare of women is used as a rationale to wage war on foreign peoples,
as in Afghanistan, and now in Mali. 12
The results for black Libyans (one-third of the total Libyan population) and
the hundreds of thousands of black migrant workers resident in Libya were
absolutely catastrophic, including mass arrests, beatings, thefts, kidnappings,
torture, lynchings, and ethnic cleansing. For a thorough assessment of this
chapter in NATO’s war of terror on Libya, please refer to Maximilian
Forte’s excellent new book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s war on Libya and
Africa, published by Baraka Books of Montreal.
NAVI PILLAY, the ICTR, and ICC
Pillay was not just complicit in paving the way for a NATO military
intervention in Libya. She previously established her international credentials
as a servant of the US Empire in the aftermath of a US-sponsored proxy war of
conquest in Rwanda. As President of the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda, she exercised power on behalf of the US victors (and their ex-patriate
Tutsi proxy warriors) by dispensing a sub-standard form of “justice” to the
losers (officials and supporters of the former majority Hutu government) . For a
comprehensive account of that war and the humanitarian tragedy it caused, please
see Robin Philpot’s, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard 13 and
Michel Chussodovsky’s “The US was behind the Rwandan Genocide. Rwanda:
Installing a US Protectorate in Central Africa.” 14
Similarly, she served as a justice of the International Criminal Court at the
Hague (alongside prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, mentioned above) dealing with a
number of black leaders of countries who had run afoul of US foreign policy
goals in Africa.
PILLAY AND WESTERN MILITARY INTERVENTION IN SYRIA
The Western-backed mercenary war for regime change in Syria began in early
2011. 15 It was formally funded at a meeting of the so-called
“Friends of Syria” conference on April 1, 2012, in Istanbul, which was attended
by Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird as well as representatives of about 70
countries. 16
What is less known, however, was that Canada was deeply involved in setting
up the Friends of Syria group at a pre-conference meeting in Tunisia in
December, 2011. 17 At the Istanbul conference, the participants
established a division of labour regarding the mercenary war on Syria. The US
committed to provide “communications equipment”, the absolute monarchs of Qatar
and Saudi Arabia pledged vast sums of money, while Canada undertook to provide
$8.5 million in humanitarian aid (to Syrian refugees) and in “opposition
assistance.” 18
Sending mercenaries to fight for regime change within a sovereign country is
a war crime, according to the Nuremberg Principles and the London Charter of
1945. It is also a violation of the very first article of the UN Charter.
19 As well, it amounts to interference in the internal affairs of a
sovereign country, which sovereignty is the cornerstone of all international
law. Even to threaten regime change in a sovereign country is a violation of
Article 2 of the UN Charter. 20 Furthermore, all of the heinous
crimes perpetrated by the western-backed mercenaries in Syria, some of which
were videotaped by the mercenaries themselves for the entire world to see, and
which include extralegal assassination of civilians, execution of military
prisoners, destruction of civilian infrastructure, bombing public places (such
as schools) and thereby killing and injuring civilians, and many more, are
themselves violations of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war, not to
mention the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
At the same time as various western and Gulf states were waging this
mercenary war on Syria, virtually all of them, including Canada, 21
had signed onto the UN and Arab League Six-Point Peace Plan for Syria which
called for a Syrian-led, negotiated settlement of the crisis, notably without
calling for the removal of Syrian President Assad. 22 Similarly, they
had adopted a communiqué on June 1, 2012 in Geneva, advocating a political
solution, involving the participation of the current government of Syria.
23 UN Special Envoys, Kofi Annan and Lakhtar Brahimi, were charged
with facilitating the negotiated end of the crisis and engaged in shuttle
diplomacy between Moscow, Iran, Egypt, Istanbul and many other capitals for many
months. At the UN Security Council, Russia and China used their vetoes on at
least three occasions to block further economic sanctions against Syria as well
as resolutions authorizing a western military intervention in Syria.
As early as August 2011, Navi Pillay was engaged with the issue of human
rights abuses in this theatre of war. Not surprisingly (given her track record),
she completely ignored the UN Charter and international law and sided firmly
with the western and Gulf states who were underwriting and organizing the
undeclared mercenary war against Syria, while at the same professing support for
the UN’s Six-Point Peace Plan. In August of 2011, she urged the Security Council
to refer the issue of widespread human rights abuses in Syria to the ICC.
24
She repeated this call at the UN and in the media in December of
2011, several times more in 2012, and most recently in January of 2013, when,
for example, she was interviewed by Hala Gorani on CNN. She also complained
about the Russian and Chinese governments’ use of their Security Council vetoes
to oppose resolutions targetting Syria. In her briefing to the UN General
Assembly on February 13, 2012, for example, she stated her one-sided view that
“the failure of the Security Council to agree on firm collective action appears
to have emboldened the Syrian Government to launch an all-out assault in an
effort to crush dissent with overwhelming force.” 25 And, in calling
for the matter to be referred to the ICC for investigation, she unquestioningly
and consistently has quoted the dubious casualty figures supplied by the
foreign-backed Syrian opposition.26
We can now see why CNN and other western mainstream media are so interested
in following the Navi Pillay story: as in Libya and Rwanda, where Navi Pillay
was a player, the present narrative justifying western military intervention in
Syria invokes the responsibility to protect the human rights of civilians, which
allegedly cannot be guaranteed by the target government. Against the backdrop of
ordinary civilians fleeing Syria in their hundreds of thousands (which did not
occur before the start of the western-backed mercenary war), Navi Pillay is
portrayed as being on the side of the angels.
Humanitarian intervention is a powerful tool in the West, where even people
on the “left”, who should know better, fall for it. Take, for instance, the most
recent petition by 58 countries to UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon to approach the
Security Council to refer to the ICC an investigation into widespread human
rights abuses in Syria. The petition was initiated behind closed doors by the
USA and spearheaded at the United Nations by the UK, because of two issues. The
first is the consternation (and surprise) of western states with the steadfast
opposition of Russia and China at the Security Council to any such resolution,
because those two veto-wielding powers learned the hard way, through their
losses in Libya 27, that such an investigation would lead inexorably
to an indictment by the ICC of President Assad and provide a pretext for a
western military intervention in Syria. The second issue was that Syria never
ratified the Treaty of Rome which established the International Criminal Court.
Therefore, like the USA, its citizens cannot be prosecuted by it. These
difficulties are formidable for the success of such a petition. Nonetheless, as
in the case of Libya and Rwanda, creative sidestepping of the rule of
international law is a specialty of legal counsellors of the empire such as Navi
Pillay. The next few months will probably see her tirelessly working her tricks
to achieve that end.
It should be noted, however, that the Syrian government responded directly to
Pillay and the 58-country petition with a statement of its own on January 18,
2013, terming the initiative “the wrong approach.” 28 Instead, the
Syrian government called, among other things, for an end to the foreign-backed
mercenary war, the end of jihadist fatwas resulting in brutalities against
civilians, and the lifting of sanctions.
The problems with the petition cited above did not faze the Canadians for
Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME). In its statement of January 15,
2013, 29 CJPME stated that it applauded the decision of 58 countries
to ask the UN Security Council to refer the Syrian situation to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation: ” ‘If the Security Council
acts on the request, it will send a powerful signal to both the Syrian
government and the opposition that war crimes and human rights violations cannot
be committed with impunity,’ says CJPME President Thomas Woodley.” The statement
also includes a reference to a report by Human Rights Watch that blames both the
Syrian government and foreign-backed opposition with human rights abuses.
CJPME should know better. In fact, war crimes and human rights violations are
committed continuously and with complete impunity by the western powers. The USA
has invaded over sixty countries since the end of World War ll while the hands
of the former colonial powers, stained in the blood of the people of Asia,
Africa and Latin America, are once more reaching for the resources of Libya,
Syria, and Mali. The continuing oppression of the Palestinian people is a due
to western governments’ carte blanche attitude to Israeli aggression.
Organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the National
Endowment for Democracy have all provided the human rights figleaf for western
interventions in Iraq, Libya, Rwanda, and many other countries, by repeating and
circulating allegations of abuses of human rights, which, after the fact, are
proven to be false.
Another group that should know better is the Canadian Lawyers for
International Human Rights (CLAIHR). Two days before Muammar Gaddafi was taken
prisoner, sodomized, and executed by Libyan “rebels” with the assistance of
Western special forces on the ground, 30 Jillian Siskind, President
of CLAIHR, was writing in The Mark and giving video interviews about the fact
that Canadians should be proud of our country’s participation in military
operations, such as in Libya, relating to the responsibility to protect. She
wrote: “Canadians and our government should be proud of our contribution to
international peace and security – not just our participation in the collective
action of R2P, which attempts to bring greater security and a safer future to
populations whose rights have been trampled upon, but also our leadership role
in the great effort that resulted in the R2P doctrine. The principles that we
set forth have now been established as an international norm. On this 10th
anniversary of R2P, we should be celebrating our contribution to international
law…” 31
It appears that there is a sort of collective amnesia amongst some circles in
the West regarding military interventions. The military interventions in
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya, in every case, made things
worse for the majority of civilians: massive infrastructure
destruction, deaths in five to seven figures, homelessness, lawlessness (and
lack of personal security), partition and/or failed state status, ethnic
cleansing, birth defects (due to the use of depleted uranium shells),
long-lasting psychological problems for children, and a worsening standard of
living for the target country’s general population. No matter how much a failure
the last intervention was in protecting the human rights of the civilians in the
target country, those amnesiacs, such as the Canadian Lawyers for International
Human Rights, are always chomping at the bit to begin the next.
During a recent visit on the part of the executive committee of the Hamilton
Coalition To Stop The War to the three sitting New Democratic members of
parliament for Hamilton, one of the MP’s asked, “Can you not see any possible
case in which the doctrine of the responsibility to protect would be
justified?”
The head of the HCSW delegation replied that, given the unequal distribution
of power in the contemporary world, military interventions can only be mounted
with the backing of the great powers of the world, who, of necessity, will pick
and choose where to intervene (or not to intervene) based on their own national
interests.
As the current international struggle over Syria unfolds with greater
rapidity and danger – Patriot missile batteries in Turkey (which enable NATO to
create a back-door, no-fly-zone over Syria); an Israeli airstrike on a Syrian
research facility; US and British special forces on the ground co-ordinating
with the foreign-backed mercenaries; the presence of a large US naval fleet in
the Eastern Mediterranean, including at least one Canadian frigate; unsubtle
NATO threats to seize Syrian chemical weapons; the Iranian government assertion
that it regards an attack on Syria as an attack on Iran – Canadians need to be
wary of crass appeals to their genuine humanitarian instincts posed by the
Syrian refugee crisis and widespread abuse of human rights in Syria.
Navi Pillay, pretext-maker for imperial aggression, is almost within reach of
her presidential target in Syria. Don’t fall for her tricks.
Ken
Stone is a veteran anti-war and anti-racist activist and Treasurer
of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop The War. (www.hamiltoncoalitiontostopthewar.ca)
Notes
4http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/02/un-commissioner-60000-killed-in-syria-since-march-2011/
Pillay was previously interviewed on CNN on the subject of Syrian refugees on
January 2, 2013;
5 UN News Centre, February 25, 2011,
6 ibid;
7Maximilian Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s war on Libya
and Africa, Baraka Books, Montreal, 2012, page 248;
8ibid, page 249;
9ibid, page 253;
10http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1206605—international-criminal-court-prosecutor-reaches-end-of-his-term-with-mixed-record;
12http://www.thespec.com/news/world/article/879242–women-of-timbuktu-remembering-their-dance-steps
. Thanks to the French military intervention in Mali, we are led to believe that
the status of women has been restored in Mali. In Afghanistan, we have been told
by the Harper government of Canada, that the status of women there has been
improved by NATO occupation. Actually, the standard of living of all Afghans has
dramatically deteriorated during the eleven-year-old war which has seen an
increasing number of self-immolations by desperate Afghan women unable to
provide for their children ;
15 The western military intervention in Syria was actually planned
as early as 2007. Please see chapter 14, “NATO and the Levant: Lebanon and
Syria”, of M. D. Nazemroaya’s new book, The Globalization of NATO, published by
Global Research, 2012;
20 ibid;
26 According to journalist Robert Fisk, the casualty figures
jumped 15,000 in one week. Public lecture, Hamilton, Ontario, January 28,
2013;
27 Both Russia
and China suffered from the overthrow of the Libyan government led by Muammar
Gaddafi, not only in terms of the loss of their prestige in being hoodwinked by
NATO’s abuse of UN Resolution 1973 (the no-fly-zone), but also in terms of
business contracts and loans that were nullifed by the new Libyan government.
Public lecture, Dr. Atif Kubursi, September 13, 2012, McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Audio record: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/63312;
video record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6rvEpmRUkw&feature=youtu.be
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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