Robert Fisk Exposes Israel’s Hidden Role in the Brewing India-Pakistan Conflict
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | March 4, 2019
Well-known British journalist Robert Fisk recently wrote a very telling and troubling article in The Independent regarding the outsized role of the state of Israel in the burgeoning tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers. The story — despite its importance, given the looming threat of nuclear war between the two countries — was largely overlooked by the international media.
The tit-for-tat attacks exchanged between India and Pakistan last week have seen long-standing tensions between the two countries escalate to dangerous proportions, though Pakistan helped to deescalate the situation somewhat by returning and “saving” an Indian pilot whose plane had been shot down in retaliation for India’s bombing of targets in a disputed area administered by Pakistan.
That bombing was retaliation for a car bomb attack launched by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants, a group that both India and Pakistan recognize as a terrorist organization, against Indian forces. Some analysts have speculated that India’s decision to bomb this area was made by Indian President Narendra Modi, a Hindu ethno-nationalist, in order to rally his base ahead of upcoming Indian elections in May.
Yet, whatever the reason, the bombing has revealed the close ties that have formed between Modi’s India and Israel, particularly between their militaries. As Fisk notes, following the bombing, Indian media heavily promoted the fact that Israeli-made bombs — specifically, Rafael Spice-2000 “smart bombs” — had been used in the attack. Fisk writes:
Like many Israeli boasts of hitting similar targets, the Indian adventure into Pakistan might owe more to the imagination than military success. The ‘300-400 terrorists’ supposedly eliminated by the Israeli-manufactured and Israeli-supplied GPS-guided bombs may turn out to be little more than rocks and trees.”
Recently released satellite images seem to corroborate what Fisk predicted, as the bombing failed to hit its intended target and instead damaged a nearby forest.
Image courtesy of Planet Labs, Google Earth and Digital Globe
Arguably the most important aspect of Fisk’s report is his detailing of the very close ties that have been forged between the Israeli and Indian militaries in recent years. For instance, according to Fisk, India was Israel’s arms industry’s largest client in 2017, spending nearly $700 million on Israeli air-defense systems, radars, ammunition and missiles. Many of those weapons had been promoted as “combat tested” after being used against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the world’s largest open-air prison. That same year, India represented 49 percent of Israel’s arms export market.
In addition to arms purchases, many Indian soldiers have traveled to the Negev desert to be trained by Israeli “special commando” units, and at least 16 elite Indian “Garud” commandos were recently based at two separate Israeli air bases.
Exporting oppression
Just as troubling as this military cooperation is that ethnonationalism and anti-Islam rhetoric are increasingly becoming the basis for the relationship between the two countries.
For instance, a recent Haaretz article, written by Shairee Malhotra and cited by Fisk, noted that “the India-Israel relationship is also commonly being framed in terms of a natural convergence of ideas between their ruling BJP and Likud parties.” Other reports have noted that this has translated into more “aggressive” policies from Modi targeting Kashmir and Muslims elsewhere in India and that continued Israeli goading of Modi’s anti-Islam tendencies could make life much more difficult for the estimated 180 million Muslims living in India.
Indian police beat a Kashmiri Shiite Muslim for participating in a religious procession in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Sept. 19, 2018. Dar Yasin | AP
While some analysts and reports have warned about this danger, Fisk notes that it will be difficult to prevent the Zionist, fascist nationalism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party from influencing India’s ruling party, writing:
It is difficult to see how Zionist nationalism will not leach into Hindu nationalism when Israel is supplying so many weapons to India – the latest of which India, which has enjoyed diplomatic relations with Israel since 1992, has already used against Islamists inside Pakistan.”
Fisk goes on to note that “[s]igning up to the ‘war on terror’ – especially ‘Islamist terror’ – may seem natural for two states built on colonial partition.” Indeed, India’s actions in the disputed Kashmir region share many similarities to Israel’s neocolonial occupation of Palestine. For instance, the Muslim majority of Kashmir are treated as second-class citizens on their own land and their push for self-determination has been brutally suppressed by Indian forces. As of 2016, 500,000 Indian military personnel were present in the region, roughly equating to one soldier for every 25 civilians. As Al Jazeera noted at the time, there have been more than 70,000 killings, about 10,000 enforced disappearances and 7,000 mass graves found since 1947 in Indian-administered Kashmir.
There are many other parallels between Kashmir and Palestine, including the fact that the British government shares a large share of the responsibility for both. Indeed, the British-brokered partition creating the current states of India and Pakistan in 1947 is the root of the current conflict in Kashmir much as the Britain-mandated creation of the Israeli state in 1948 is the root of the current conflict in Palestine. As far as Kashmiris and Palestinians are concerned, the governments of India and Israel picked up where their colonial master of years past left off.
If a deadly conflict ultimately breaks out between India and Pakistan, it will hardly be the first time Israel has armed controversial governments. Israel sold arms to the Rwandan government during the Rwandan genocide and, more recently, to the government of Myanmar during its “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya Muslims. Yet, as Fisk notes, Israel’s export of Zionist nationalism and neocolonialism — and the accompanying oppression that in practice actually helps to create many of the very terrorist groups they fight against — is just as dangerous as its export of arms.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
Guaido returns to Venezuela to the welcome of foreign ‘bodyguard’ envoys
RT | March 4, 2019
Self-declared “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, returned from his South American tour on Monday, arriving into the loving (and protective) arms of ambassadors from the foreign governments backing him.
Despite Venezuelan authorities making it clear he could face 30 years in prison for attempting to overthrow the government and violating a travel ban, Guaido chose to arrive directly to an airport in Caracas.
The risk of arrest was notably mitigated by the presence of ambassadors from Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and several other countries which gathered at the arrival gate to huddle around him like a high-profile human shield. While Guaido was all smiles, his Western-world entourage seemed a bit on edge.
While the media fretted that Maduro might make good on threats to arrest Guaido, the opposition leader passed through customs without incident and headed straight to a rally in central Caracas.
Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence warned the Venezuelan government that Washington protects its investments, stressing how important Guaido is to them, and threatening a “swift response” if anyone tries to bully him.
Shortly after moving unhindered through the airport, Guaido arrived at a demonstration he called for on Twitter the week before. Addressing crowds in the country’s capital city, he called on his supporters to take to the streets for continued demonstrations next Saturday.
While Guaido toured South America and met with his most critical support base – foreign governments – the US ramped up pressure on Maduro’s government, imposing intensified sanctions and revoking visas for state actors.
Russian oil expert detained at Kiev’s request in Greece, lawyer calls arrest ‘politicized’
RT | March 3, 2019
A Russian national has been arrested in Greece and faces extradition to Ukraine on tax-crime charges. His lawyer said he is being persecuted for supporting the former Ukrainian president who was ousted in a Western-backed coup.
Evgeny Kalinin, a Russian energy expert, was arrested by the Greek authorities at Athens International Airport on Thursday, his lawyer, Yannis Rahiotis, told Sputnik.
Kalinin is a well-known oil industry expert, Rahiotis said, noting that his client was on a routine business trip to the country at the time. Kalinin appeared in court on Friday, when he was sent to prison until Ukraine’s extradition request is delivered to Athens.
According to Rahiotis, Kalinin faces unspecified tax-crime charges, which allegedly arise from his past work as a top executive in Ukraine’s oil company.
Kalinin served as vice president of TNK-BP Commerce, a Kiev-based company that specializes in producing and selling crude oil products in Ukraine and Russia, until 2011. The company, which was founded in 2003, also operates a network of gasoline and filling stations in Ukraine.
While the essence of the charges Kalinin is facing are not yet clear, Rahiotis believes they are politically motivated. The lawyer pointed out that Kalinin’s name has been included in a database of the notorious Ukrainian website Mirotvorets (Peacekeeper). The ultra-nationalist site contains a blacklist of ‘traitors’ who it says must be dealt with. On the list, Kalinin has found himself in the company of such big foreign political names as former German chancellor Gerhard Shroeder, who was added to the ‘hit-list’ in November, prompting the German Foreign Ministry to reprimand Kiev for not taking down the website.
“This case is a political one. Kalinin is included into the Mirotvorets list. He is being persecuted because he was a supporter of former president Victor Yanukovich,” Rahiotis said.
Russian diplomats have been in contact with Kalinin, and have been providing him “with all necessary consular assistance,” the Russian Embassy in Greece said, as cited by Sputnik.
Kalinin’s arrest has already drawn condemnation from a senior Russian lawmaker.
The deputy head of the Russian Senate Defense and Security Committee, Franz Klintsevich, has said that by playing into the Kiev’s hands, Athens is undermining its centuries-old relationship with Russia, which has traditionally been an ally.
“It’s still not late to stop. Russia will do everything to free Evgeny Kalinin,” he wrote on Facebook.
Another State Duma MP, Natalia Poklonskaya, argued that Kalinin’s arrest is likely to be politicized and exploited in the ongoing Ukrainian presidential campaign. She also warned Greece against becoming a pawn in a third party’s hands by simply following formal legal guidelines.
Russia and China offer the SCO platform for India-Pak de-escalation
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | March 2, 2019
Saudi Arabia is pushing forward as mediator between India and Pakistan with a messianic zeal that patently enjoys US backing. The Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel Al-Jubeir is arriving in Delhi tomorrow. He was to have visited Islamabad on Friday but rescheduled his plan so that he can touch base with Modi first and thereafter meet the Pakistani leaders, including army chief Gen. Qamar Bajwa.
Modi and Bajwa will be Adel’s key interlocutors. How far the Saudi waltz will advance remains to be seen. How Modi handles the piquant situation will bear watch.
Certainly, the Saudi mediation makes India look rather immature and that becomes willy-nilly a reflection of Modi’s foreign policy legacy. The point is, no matter what Modi may boast about “new India”, the geopolitical reality is that India’s stature diminishes when it needs a small country like Saudi Arabia under an autocratic ruler to help out with what is arguably one of the most critical templates of its diplomacy.
Saudi Arabia has no track record as a peacemaker. On the contrary, it has a notorious reputation the world over as a promoter of terrorist groups.
Meanwhile, India does not have to be beholden to the Saudis to ease its tensions with Pakistan. The indications are that Russia and China are jointly sponsoring an initiative in this regard. China is deputing a special envoy to visit India and Pakistan to discuss the crisis situation. The Pakistani FM Shah Mehmood Qureshi disclosed this in Islamabad.
To be sure, Russia and China, which actively coordinate on the foreign policy front, are in consultation each other on the India-Pakistan tensions. We may also factor in that the foreign ministers of Russia and China had an opportunity last Wednesday to meet EAM Sushma Swaraj at the RIC ministerial.
Following that, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi also briefed Qureshi in a phone conversation where the latter had expressed the hope that “the Chinese side will continue to play a constructive role in easing the current tension.”
Equally, at the height of the India-Pakistan crisis, on February 27, Russian Foreign Ministry also had issued a statement expressing “grave concern over the escalating situation along the Line of Control and the surge in tensions” between India and Pakistan “which are Russia’s friends.” It took a neutral stance and called on both sides “to show restraint and redouble efforts to resolve existing problems by political and diplomatic means.”
It is entirely conceivable that the Chinese special envoy’s visit is a related development signifying a coordinated effort by Beijing and Moscow and in consultation with Islamabad and New Delhi. This is of course a major shift in the tectonic plates of Eurasian politics and it has an added significance insofar as it is taking place in the New Cold War conditions.
Indeed, it does not need much ingenuity to figure out that a US-sponsored Saudi mediation between India and Pakistan must be a worrisome development for both Russia and China, from the geopolitical perspective.
At any rate, on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin telephoned Modi. According to the Kremlin readout, they discussed the “crisis in relations between India and Pakistan” and the Russian leader “expressed hope for a prompt settlement.” The careful wording hinted that Putin offered to lend a helping hand, jointly with China, to ease the tension.
Curiously, the very next day, the Russian Foreign Minster telephoned Qureshi in Islamabad — presumably to follow up on the Putin-Modi conversation — and offered help to “de-escalate” the tensions. The Russian Foreign Ministry readout, cited by state news agency TASS, says: “Moscow expressed its readiness to contribute to de-escalating tensions and that there is no alternative to settling all differences between Islamabad and New Delhi by political and diplomatic means.”
Importantly, Lavrov also outlined to Qureshi how the de-escalation process can be achieved — via the mechanism of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
A Xinhua report since highlighted this aspect — that Lavrov told Qureshi about the “possibility of using the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Regional Anti-terrorist Structure for this purpose.”
Alongside, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova outlined in an important statement on Thursday Moscow’s broad approach. Zakharova said:
“We are worried about the escalation of tension in relations between India and Pakistan and dangerous manoeuvres of both states’ armed forces along the Line of Control that are fraught with a direct military clash.”
“We are urging the sides to display maximum restraint. We continue to assume that contentious matters should be resolved by political-diplomatic methods on a bilateral basis in line with the provisions of the 1972 Simla Agreement and the 1999 Lahore Declaration.”
“We reaffirm our readiness to provide all-out support to the Indian and Pakistani efforts in countering terrorism.”
From the Indian perspective, this adds up to an extremely positive outcome of EAM’s consultations in Zhejiang with her Russian and Chinese counterparts. This must be EAM Swaraj’s finest hour in international diplomacy, as the curtain begins descending shortly on her scintillating stint as India’s foreign minister.
No doubt, the urgency of “de-escalation” of the tensions with Pakistan is self-evident. The “de-escalation” is far from over with the return of the Indian pilot. In fact, the tensions on the Line of Control can spiral out of control anytime in the present supercharged atmosphere.
Without doubt, the international community — read the US and NATO allies — is closely watching. The Afghan endgame is at a most sensitive stage and any eruption of tensions between India and Pakistan will negatively impact the peace process.
India should wholeheartedly welcome the Sino-Russian proposal, cast within an SCO framework as far more preferable to the dalliance with the Saudis and the Emiratis — or, for that matter, any UN intervention.
The fact of the matter is that both Russia and China are stakeholders in India-Pakistan normalisation and neither has any hidden agenda in this regard. Of course, Russia and China are like-minded partners for India in the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, unlike in the Cold War era, Pakistan is keen on Eurasian integration, too.
Do not barter away India’s national security interests
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | March 1, 2019
There has been an avalanche of reports in the international media quoting western diplomats and security officials to the effect that India’s “intelligence-led… non-military preemptive strike” on a big terrorist camp in Pakistan on February 26 was all baloney. Apparently, these reports say, there was so such terrorist camp in existence in Balakot.
Incredibly enough, no one in the government cares to set the record straight. The Foreign Secretary had claimed earlier that the strike killed “a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists, trainers, senior commanders, and groups of jihadis who were being trained for Fidayeen action were eliminated.”
But surprisingly, the day after the FS spoke, Air Vice Marshal R.G.K. Kapoor said it was “premature” to provide details about casualties. He would only say that the Indian armed forces had “fairly credible evidence” of the damage inflicted on the camp by the air strikes.
It is important for the government to clarify, because what happened was a defining moment in India-Pakistan relations and in India’s fight against terrorism. The nation has a right to know. No doubt, crossing another country’s borders and attacking its territory is a major escalation. What is the rationale behind such escalation?
Prime Minister Modi says he’s given a “free hand” to the armed forces. Are we to assume that the IAF suo moto acted on February 26? That is inconceivable.
This calls for deep introspection: What is it that the government achieved through the 60-odd hours between the early hours of Tuesday and the evening of Thursday? There is no shred of evidence that Pakistani side is cowed down in fear.
On the contrary, Pakistan insists that it will retaliate against any act of Indian aggression. Prime Minister Imran Khan disclosed in the National Assembly in Islamabad yesterday that in the night of Wednesday-Thursday, the Pakistani military was in a state of readiness to fire missiles into India.
Some of our self styled experts say we’ve “sent a message” to Pakistan that we’ll hit them hard if terrorism continued. How can they be so sure? The Pakistani retaliation with an attack on India the very next day — an act of war by targeting our military installations — discredits their thesis.
The most unfortunate part is that after precipitating the crisis situation on Tuesday, the government ducked and took help from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to “de-escalate” the situation.
Make no mistake, this fateful move has grave implications. The whole world knows that these two petrodollar states are the principal sponsors of terrorist groups who destroyed Syria.
Importantly, how can we possibly overlook that Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and other terrorist organisations in Pakistan have received direct support from these Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia? There is plentiful evidence of it.
An action request cable archived by Wikileaks, documenting the illicit finance activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, stated that “it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.” The cable continues, “Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” It describes Saudi Arabia as “a critical financial support base” for Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and other terrorist groups.”
By the estimation of the US state department, LeT and JeM are all but synonymous! As far back as in 1993, the LeT became part of the United Jihad Council, an umbrella group for militant Islamists operating in J&K, and in doing so, it formed a direct alliance with the JeM (which claimed credit for the Pulwama attack recently.)
In fact, another Wikileaks cable confirmed that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been funnelling money not just to LeT but to JeM directly. It says:
“Locals believed that charitable activities being carried out by Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith organizations, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Al-Khidmat Foundation, and Jaish-e-Mohammed were further strengthening reliance on extremist groups and minimizing the importance of traditionally moderate Sufi religious leaders in these communities. Government and non-governmental sources claimed that financial support estimated at nearly 100 million USD annually was making its way to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic charitable’ organizations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ostensibly with the direct support of those governments.”
Saudi Arabia has quite openly held out assurances to Pakistan that it need not go after JeM directly.
Indeed, the most dangerous part of the gambit by the Modi government to let in Saudi Arabia and the UAE into its matrix over Pakistan and Kashmir is that this policy shift is completely of sync with the wider geopolitical struggle unfolding in the region.
Quite obviously, Saudi Arabia wants to win Pakistan over in a tug-of-war game with Iran and is doling out to Islamabad generous financial help and a $10 billion investment plan to to build an oil refinery in the Gwadar port project (which actually puts a major Saudi project on Iran’s border.) The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) recent visit to Pakistan has essentially cemented Pakistan’s inclusion in anti-Iran Arab NATO.
Against this backdrop, how could the Indian policymakers blithely overlook the far-reaching, dangerous implications of consorting with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as partners in its fight against terrorism in J&K fomented by Pakistan?
The most intriguing part is the newfound bonhomie between the Indian elite and the sheikhs. Put differently, you don’t take help from the wolf to guard the sheep, right? What explains the Faustian deal to allow them to enter the sanctum sanctorum of India’s foreign policy — Kashmir and the matrix of India-Pakistan relations?
Beware of the lure of green money. The Saudis and Emiratis are great operators in Washington, DC. Their fierce lobbying and charm offensives are legion. If they could manipulate the American political class so brilliantly, our oligarchy must be chicken feed.
US Urges ‘Calm’ While Stoking India-Pakistan Conflict
Strategic Culture Foundation | 01.03.2019
International powers this week anxiously urged India and Pakistan to avoid further escalation of military confrontation. Given the two nations have gone to war on three occasions during the past seven decades and are both nuclear armed, the international concern is palpable.
The US has lately joined calls by Russia, China and Europe appealing for restraint, and for the Indian and Pakistani leaderships to negotiate a resolution to avert a catastrophic slide towards conflict.
American President Donald Trump, while in Vietnamese capital Hanoi for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, claimed that the US was mediating to defuse the crisis between India and Pakistan.
“We’ve been in the middle trying to help them both out,” said Trump.
Incongruously, however, the Trump administration has in fact acted in an opposite fashion, to inflame the recent tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad.
Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both issued statements which “support India’s right to self-defense against terrorism”. The US officials have also laid the blame on Pakistan for sponsoring acts of terrorism by militant groups in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The northern territory of Kashmir has been the cause of bitter dispute between India and Pakistan ever since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.
The massacre of over 40 Indian troops earlier this month on February 14 in the Indian-side of Kashmir has sparked outrage among the wider Indian population demanding revenge. The suicide bomb attack was claimed by Kashmiri militant group Jaish e-Mohammed (JeM). India claimed that Pakistan had a hand in the atrocity through its support for JeM, which the Pakistani authorities denied.
The mounting of air strikes by India this week deep inside Pakistani territory on a militant training camp – purportedly in retaliation for the Kashmir massacre of its troops – represented a dramatic escalation. If India had limited its strikes to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir the retaliation could perhaps have been argued as being proportionate. But the violation of Pakistani territory – some 50 kms west of the historical Line of Control – was arguably an act of war. The last time Indian warplanes struck inside Pakistan was in 1971 during the two countries’ third and last war.
Not surprisingly, Pakistani fighter jets have subsequently launched strikes on Indian-controlled Kashmir. There were also further alleged incursions by Indian warplanes, two of which were reportedly shot down by the Pakistani side. Pakistan also lost one of its jets in a shoot-down but the aircraft apparently crashed inside its territory.
Tensions have boiled over further with the capture of an Indian pilot by the Pakistanis who released video footage of him apparently injured with a bloodied face. That led to outcry in New Delhi that Islamabad was in breach of the Geneva Convention concerning treatment of prisoners of war. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has vowed to return the Indian pilot as a gesture towards de-escalation.
Nevertheless, the tensions and danger of an all-out war continue to mount. There have been several reports of heavy artillery cross-border exchanges between Indian and Pakistani forces. While both governments say they don’t want a war, the dynamic could explode beyond their control.
The Kashmir dispute is certainly fraught with enormous historical difficulties bestowed by baleful British imperialist legacy of partitioning land and people with such contempt for indigenous rights and traditions, as well as from cynically playing partisan politics for imperial advantage. Washington’s contemporary meddling in Indian-Pakistan affairs has echoes of past British subterfuge.
Pakistan’s relations with Kashmiri militant groups whom India denounces as “terrorist” is only part of a complex equation. Another part of the equation is India’s intensive militarization of the province and its alleged abusive occupation of territory and people who aspire to be part of Pakistan. The region is predominantly Muslim.
If a peaceful resolution is to ever succeed there must be an earnest process of demilitarizing the entire Kashmir area. That onus is primarily on India.
One thing that is certainly not constructive is the simplistic and clumsy way that the United States has intervened recently by pointedly taking the Indian side of the narrative. For senior Trump administration officials to proclaim India’s “right to self-defense” against implied Pakistani-sponsored terrorism is in effect a green light for New Delhi to launch air strikes against its neighbor.
That reckless advocacy by Washington is predictably leading to a spiral of violence which ultimately could result in an all-out war between two nuclear states.
President Trump’s self-congratulatory tone about supposed mediation between India and Pakistan is far off the mark from reality. The Trump administration’s belated words appealing for “restraint” and “calm” are belied by the earlier words from Bolton and Pompeo giving India a license to commit acts of war.
Of course, what would one expect from the American side? The Trump administration is currently in the throes of violating the sovereignty of Venezuela with threats of military invasion against that South American nation. Washington has completely lost its compass on international law and norms of conduct.
There are indeed deeper reasons for why Washington would like to see a conflict between India and Pakistan blow up. Such a confrontation would cause major geopolitical problems for China, which is historically an ally of Pakistan but which has also recently endeavored to build a rapprochement with India. Stoking a confrontation in South Asia would serve Washington’s interest in destabilizing China and Russia’s strategic plans for economic integration of Eurasia.
India and Pakistan’s political leaderships must keep cool heads and think of the bigger global picture. Only recently, India’s Narendra Modi and Pakistan’s Imran Khan were expressing an aspiration for improving ties between the two South Asian states. They must resist playing politics for internal political gains, and they must resist being manipulated by external powers which seek to gain advantage at the expense of Asian divisions. The historical thorn of Kashmir can be resolved if India and Pakistan entered into a genuine and mutual compromise.
Militants Continue to Prevent Refugees From Leaving Rukban Camp – Russian MoD
Sputnik – 26.02.2019
Militants are still preventing refugees and their families from leaving Syria’s Rukban camp, head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Center for Syrian Reconciliation Lt. Gen. Sergei Solomatin said on Monday.
“Illegal armed groups operating in the area [spanning] 55 kilometers [34 miles] are preventing the civilians from leaving the Rukban camp”, Solomatin told a briefing.
According to earlier statements, two checkpoints were opened last Tuesday to facilitate the refugees’ withdrawal from the Rukban camp, which lies in the area controlled by the United States. Soldiers from the Russian Reconciliation Center in Syria and crews of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent are working at the checkpoints, and are prepared to provide assistance for those who want to leave the camp.
The Russian Defense Ministry’s Center for Syrian Reconciliation has called on the United States to put pressure on the leadership of opposition groups and prevent them from disrupting the evacuation of civilians from the camp.
Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said refugees from the Rukban camp should have long been evacuated, but the United States and the militants under its control forbade them to leave. The US Department of State spokesman Robert Palladino has replied that the United States had not prevented people who live in the camp from leaving the facility and called on Russia to help facilitate deliveries of humanitarian aid.
The situation in the Rukban camp, which is situated within the US-controlled zone surrounding its military base in At-Tanf, has become increasingly dire as refugees residing there have not been regularly receiving sufficient amounts of humanitarian aid.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry’s Center for Syrian Reconciliation also reported Monday that a number of ceasefire violations had been registered within the Idlib de-escalation zone in past 24 hours. According to Solomatin, more than 55,200 Syrians who evaded from military service were granted amnesty by Damascus. He added that as of Sunday, 224,424 Syrian refugees had returned home.
Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with the government forces fighting against numerous opposition groups and militant and terrorist organizations. Russia, along with Turkey and Iran, is a guarantor of the ceasefire regime in Syria. Moscow has also been providing humanitarian aid to residents of the crisis-torn country.
Fake Humanitarianism Fails its Big Test in Venezuela
By Maximilian C. Forte | Zero Anthropology | February 24, 2019
There it is: Saturday, February 23, 2019, has now come and gone—and it’s not to say that “nothing has changed”. In fact, some important changes did occur, none of which were the ones hoped for by either the self-declared “president” of Venezuela, Juán Guaidó, nor the ones commanded by the President of the US, Donald “Can I have my Nobel Peace Prize now?!” Trump. US options have thus narrowed, as we enter a protracted and potentially more dangerous phase where possible US military intervention draws closer. So let’s quickly review some of the changes introduced by yesterday’s events.
First, the unelected, self-declared “president” of Venezuela is no longer even in Venezuela. He used the opportunity of the US AID stunt to spirit himself across the border to Colombia, with the apparent well-wishes of ushers in the Venezuelan military (he should have been suspicious, unless he really intended to flee), and Guaidó now finds himself as a tourist in Colombia. Second, the military which Guaidó presumed to order, completely ignored him and remained loyal to the established government, the only legal and legitimate one. Indeed, the third point is that in failing the credibility test, Guaidó also failed the legitimacy test: how can he be viewed as a legitimate leader, without anything to lead, and with none of the state machinery following him? That is not a leader; at best, Guaidó can be defined an aspirant to power. He is a legitimate aspirant. Some in the opposition are already speaking of an alternative deal with the Maduro government. Having failed the credibility and legitimacy tests, a frustrated Guaidó had no option other than to invite foreign military intervention—if his own military won’t listen to him, surely other nations’ militaries will? And what about Richard Branson’s much vaunted aid concert? That takes us to the fourth point: that concert was drowned out, not just by a competing concert on the Venezuelan side of the border, and not just because it failed to draw any major international acts (perhaps thanks to Roger Waters), but the events of the day itself meant that not even a word was mentioned about the concert. It was like it had never happened. The fifth development is probably the most significant: US AID via Colombia, and similar “aid” intrusions from Brazil and Puerto Rico, were a resounding failure. The frustration that had been building up for days about the lack of a viable plan, was well warranted, as was Maduro’s optimism. Not well warranted were the raised expectations.
(Note, while the headline in the The New York Times claims that aid came in via Brazil, its source on the ground instead said, “The whole thing has failed” and the trucks “remained stranded on the border”. The story is misleadingly playing on a technicality: the aid left the Brazilian side of the border, but did not pass the Venezuelan checkpoint.)
What’s Next?
This takes us back to the central question of the previous article: what is the US’ next move? Simply insulting the Venezuelan armed forces, in what some called an “irresponsible speech,” by suggesting they are guilty of dereliction of duty, then insulting them further by saying Cuba directly controls the Venezuelan military, and then insulting them yet again by assuming that they should instead take their orders directly from Washington—will not work, and that much has been proven. Threats to the safety of Venezuelan soldiers only augment the offense. The US, speaking the language of “democracy promotion,” has been openly hoping for a palace coup—no such movement is in evidence however. All we know is that Vice President Mike Pence (who is likely leading the Venezuela intervention to shield Trump from any illegalities likely to be committed) will be meeting with aspirant Guaidó at his new lodgings in Colombia. That, and more sanctions, as if Venezuela’s government expected anything else.
Clearly the obese billionaire in the Oval Office relished the prospect of one day (soon) boasting that he had toppled a “regime” by just throwing some scraps of dog food at the feet of “desperate and starving” Venezuelans. (They just have to be desperate and starving, because their place in the natural order of things is that they are citizens of a “shit hole country”.) It would have pleased him immensely, he would have smiled slyly, to know that a well fed American can dangle a MRE pack in front of “hungry” eyes, and then sit back and listen to them scamper and scuffle. Such images enforce the evolutionist paradigm of progress, development, and global dictatorship. Trump would have told his friends: “You should have seen what happened, I just sent in crap like TV dinners to that shit hole country, and those pathetic losers fell all over themselves to get it, and the regime collapsed. Poof! Beautiful. Then I took their oil”. (The last point is important, because Trump has the ethics of a looter, and his foreign policy is a projection of his business practice: theft, scams, and all sorts of other wrongdoing enough to warrant hiding many years of tax returns behind some old yarn about an audit that is apparently eternal.)
Particularly important about the day’s events was the fact that two partners in an intended coup each failed their respective tests. The US and its regional allies showed that they could not even spirit in some boxes of junk “aid” and that they held no sway over the Venezuelan military. Guaidó failed to show that he commanded any support that mattered. He didn’t even have a few miserable boxes of US aid to selectively hand out to build up a patron-client network. Having auditioned for the role of CIA tool, he only demonstrated he was not worthy of the investment. He then fled. Then the government shut down his rumoured base of operations in Caracas: the Colombian embassy. The US could not have achieved less had it picked up any random person off the streets of Caracas.
Regime Survival Got a Boost
The unintended by-product of the US’ inability to command change, is a recipe for regime survival: everything that Venezuelans suffer from now on can be appropriately and rightly blamed on US intervention; opponents of President Nicolás Maduro can be labelled traitors, CIA proxies, and puppets of Washington, with considerable justification—thanks to US intervention; Venezuela will adapt and survive US sanctions like multiple other states have done; US oil refineries, shipping companies, insurance firms and banks—the other side of Venezuelan exports of oil to the US—will now suffer irreversible loss, and the US thus also loses its chokehold on Venezuela. Rather than American hegemony, it’s multipolarity that is advancing, with Venezuela moving closer into the orbits of Russia, China, and India. (India itself is completely unafraid of US sanctions, according to Indian analysts.) The US, especially under Trump, has responded to almost everything and everyone with either sanctions or their twin, tariffs, to the extent that there is virtually not a nation left on earth that is not subject to some sort of tariff or sanction from the US. The US is sanctioning itself into irrelevance, as the rest of the world devises ways of learning to live without it.
What Did We Not See?
What was strangely absent from the day, in all the live television footage and numerous photographs of the events, were at least two things: one was that however many showed up to back Guaidó, it certainly was not the 700,000 to a million people he had promised. The other was the bizarre absence of any Venezuelan soldiers from virtually all of the photographs and live television coverage. How they could maintain a forceful presence, yet remain invisible to the media, is quite an achievement—one that denies the media any coup-worthy moments of manufactured, orchestrated outrage. Of course what was also absent—and we knew this would be—was any evidence of these supposedly starving Venezuelans. Having grown up in a society saturated with media images of the now classic “starving Ethiopian,” emaciated bodies with distended bellies, it’s noteworthy that the coup media cannot pull off such a display with Venezuela—that would be the same Venezuela with the supermarkets stuffed with goods.
Beware of Alternative “Fake News”
These postscripts are intended as memoranda to RT, CNN, and others: please check your sources for the claim that former US Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams was involved in actually smuggling in weapons in the guise of humanitarian aid. However appealing that image may be, it is a dorky and corny tale that arouses suspicion. It generally does not pass the smell test—check the last two links for further insight, and also see the Wikipedia page. Abrams was, after all, a State Department official, and not a field operative. In addition, he is being blamed for the operations that were conducted by Lt. Col. Oliver North and the CIA. The “humanitarian aid” disguise was aimed at the US Congress: Congress appropriated funds for humanitarian aid, and some of the funds were misused to arm the Contras illegally. It was no secret that the US was arming the Contras either—they were backed by the US, and they were armed. Most of that aid went to US bases in El Salvador and Honduras (US allies), where there was no need to “disguise” the aid, and it went to the Contras, a military force—again no need to disguise the aid. It’s not like Abrams called Contra leaders and surprised them: “We’re sending you some bags of rice. Or are we? Wink, wink”. They certainly were not fooling Nicaragua’s government, nor did Nicaragua allow in any such “aid” only to somehow find out it was not real humanitarian aid at all—that never happened. Nicaraguan authorities did capture a US pilot, after an illegal flight resulted in a crash inside Nicaragua, revealing the contents of what the US was sending the Contras: weapons, when Congress had banned military aid to the Contras. Abrams was just one figure among many in the story, and not the most directly involved.
The “Trojan Horse” charge is thus being misinterpreted and turned into something laughable. No serious person thinks the US was trying to smuggle in weapons in US AID boxes, in front of thousands of cameras in the plain light of day. That’s why not-so-secret flights exist instead. The “Trojan Horse” idea instead seems to be a little too complicated for the media which prefers a cartoonish rendition. The serious argument is that the aid was intended to shore up Guaidó’s power, since the aid was going directly to the opposition; and, the aid expressly bypassed the legal and legitimate government authorities of Venezuela, and was thus meant to undermine their authority. Furthermore, Guaidó spoke of the “aid” effort as being one that would create a “humanitarian corridor”—echoing terminology used by the US in Syria—and which would have meant wresting territory from the hands of the Venezuelan state, thus allowing the US free passage in and out at will. In addition, the hoped-for clash (which did not materialize to the extent that was feared) could have served as a pretext for warming up international opinion in favour of a US military “rescue”. That’s the extent of the Trojan Horse in this case—it’s not about grenades inside bags of rice. Otherwise President Nicolás Maduro did not “reject” any so-called “aid” from the US, because none had been given to him. The only thing the Venezuelan government did was to block its borders from being used for illegal purposes by foreign powers—its sovereign right. It did so, and it won.
Also tenuous is the story, repeated on RT several times now, that seems to take great joy in upbraiding rivals like CNN for reporting that Venezuelan authorities had “closed” the Tienditas bridge, built in 2016 and supposedly never opened (a bridge to nowhere?). Venezuelan authorities did in fact move containers to block that bridge, and were recorded doing so by Colombian authorities on February 5, of this year. Moreover, and this is the more important point: Maduro repeatedly said any attempt to move the aid into Venezuela would be blocked. There was never even the slightest hint that Maduro would just stand aside and let it pass. It seems that some foreign journalists are divided by their partisan loyalties and create the appearance of wanting to have their cake and eat it too: the humanitarian aid is not for humanitarian purposes, and has been denounced by several of the leading international humanitarian aid agencies, but it’s not like Venezuela shut down a bridge to prevent aid from reaching suffering masses—this seems to be their odd narrative, designed to satisfy multiple competing constituencies. The events of February 23 will hopefully clarify any lingering misinterpretations, on any side.
Venezuela: An Open Letter to the UN Secretary General
Alfred de Zayas, human rights lawyer & UN independent expert on international order. His report on Venezuela has been buried by the MSM.
OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL ANTONIO GUTERRES
AND TO THE HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS MICHELLE BACHELET
from Alfred de Zayas, 23 February 2019
Dear Michelle Bachelet,
Dear Antonio Guterres
As former UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order (2012-2018) I would like to urge you to once again make your voices heard and make concrete proposals for mediation and peace in the context of the Venezuelan crisis.
The most noble task of the United Nations is to create the conditions conducive to local, regional and international peace, to work preventively and tirelessly to avoid armed conflicts, to mediate and negotiate to reach peaceful solutions, so that all human beings can live in human dignity and in the enjoyment of the human right to peace and all other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. I am particularly worried by the Orwellian corruption of language, the instrumentalization and weaponization of human rights and now even of humanitarian assistance.
I look back at my UN mission to Venezuela in November/December 2017 as a modest contribution to facilitate the cooperation between the United Nations and the Venezuelan government and to open the door to the visits of other rapporteurs. See my report to the UN Human Rights Council and the relevant recommendations.
I believe that it would be timely and necessary for both of you to issue a statement reaffirming General Assembly Resolutions 2625 and 3314 and the 23 Principles of International Order that I formulated in my 2018 report to the Human Rights Council. See para 14 of [the report].
It would be appropriate to recognize the fact that the government of Venezuela has put into effect some of the recommendations contained in my report — and in the six page confidential memo that I personally gave to Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza upon my departure.
Indeed, first the Venezuelan government released 80 detainees — including Roberto Picón and 23 others whose release I had specifically requested — that was on 23 December 2017, followed by other releases in the course of 2018. Alas, there has been practically no information about this in the mainstream media, although it is easily accessible in the internet. See also the comments of Venezuela on my report.
In particular paragraph 46(xvi):
As a result of this on 23 December 2017, 80 people arrested for acts of violence during the protests in the country were released; and on 1 June 2018, 39 more people were released.
And paragraph 46(xviii):
In this regard, the Venezuelan Government values the willingness and disposition of the Independent Expert, who was pleased to inform the competent authorities of the requests he received from some relatives of the persons deprived of their liberty. His recommendations were accepted.
Shortly after my visit Venezuelan authorities met with the UN agencies and made additional cooperation accords, thanks to the valuable efforts Peter Grohmann, the UNDP representative in Caracas.
Now the government of Venezuela has formally asked the United Nations for humanitarian assistance in connection with the current crisis. We must not let them down.
I think that the US should turn over all the humanitarian assistance and medical supplies it has flown into Colombia and have them distributed as soon as possible with the help of the United Nations and other neutral organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Another item of information that is sorely missing from the mainstream media is the delivery last week of 933 tons of food and medicines at port La Guaira — coming from China, Cuba, India, Turkey etc.
Moreover an additional 300 tons of medicines and medical supplies provided by Russia arrived by air.
As I know from my conversations with Venezuelan ministers during my visit in 2017 and the recent conversations I have had with Venezuelan Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Jorge Valero – Venezuela has always welcomed and repeatedly asked for assistance from neutral and friendly governments so as to overcome the adverse human rights impacts of the financial blockade and the sanctions. Such help should be offered in good faith, without strings attached.
I believe that this is the moment for Michelle Bachelet to accept the invitation of the government of Venezuela, extended to her in December 2018, to visit Venezuela personally. Her presence in Venezuela should ban the growing danger of a military intervention by foreign entities. She should endorse the efforts at mediation launched by Mexico and Uruguay at the Montevideo mechanism.
There are ominous parallels with the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 — an illegal war, as Kofi Annan said on repeated occasions.
It is obvious to any first year law student that the constant threats against Venezuela are contrary to article 2(4) of the UN Charter. What many do not realize is that the threats, the economic war, the financial blockade and the sanctions violate the principles contained in Article 3 of the OAS Charter
e. Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it, and has the duty to abstain from intervening in the affairs of another State. Subject to the foregoing, the American States shall cooperate fully among themselves, independently of the nature of their political, economic, and social systems; f. The American States condemn war of aggression: victory does not give rights; g. An act of aggression against one American State is an act of aggression against all the other American States; h. Controversies of an international character arising between two or more American States shall be settled by peaceful procedures; I. Social justice and social security are bases of lasting peace…
Moreover, they violate numerous articles of Chapter 4 of the OAS Charter,
Article 17
Each State has the right to develop its cultural, political, and economic life freely and naturally. In this free development, the State shall respect the rights of the individual and the principles of universal morality.
Article 18
Respect for and the faithful observance of treaties constitute standards for the development of peaceful relations among States. International treaties and agreements should be public.
Article 19
No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.
Article 20
No State may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantages of any kind.
Dear Michelle Bachelet, dear Antonio Guterres: The world looks up to you in the hope that you can avert even greater suffering to the peoples of Venezuela. They need international solidarity as expressed in the report of Virginia Dandan, the then independent expert on human rights and international solidarity.
I remain respectfully yours
Professor Dr. Alfred de Zayas, Geneva School of Diplomacy
The International Criminal Complicity
On Intimidation, Cowardice & Corruption (at the International Criminal Court)
“Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army’s beautiful. But that’s not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master” -Aldous Huxley
By Ronald Thomas West | February 22, 2019
The United Nations is an experiment in democracy founded on the Western principles of international law. Angela Merkel’s conflating globalism with multilateralism (these are NOT the same thing) notwithstanding, the United Nations is a global body established by multilateral treaties. This does not establish ‘globalism’ but serves as a platform for facilitating relationships between sovereign nations. The International Criminal Court is an example of this, where the ‘Rome Statute’ (the multilateral treaty establishing the court) had been ‘midwifed’ from within the UN but created a court (the ICC) that is ostensibly independent. However the UN Security Council may refer cases to the ICC, the UN has no authority over the court and no power to extend or curtail the courts jurisdiction, which is solely over those nations which had opted to enter into the treaty (Rome Statute) creating the court.
However, if the institutions of the United Nations are notoriously politicized and corrupt, and they most certainly are [1] it follows the UN’s closely aligned institutions might be expected to show similar symptoms.
We have recently seen these symptoms (read on) but it should be noted the ICC had been undermined from its inception, particularly by the USA in what appears on its face to have been a geo-strategic policy of fraudulent engagement of the Rome Statute process. In short, the USA participated in the setting up of the court but used its considerable influence to prevent the court adopting a principle of universal jurisdiction. With the court at its formation limited to jurisdiction over nations entering into the Rome Statute treaty, the USA would appear to have disingenuously joined the court (signed on) but never seriously pursued ratification (the legal necessity of a democratic nation’s parliamentary body affirming the state executive signature) and therefor never came under the court’s jurisdiction.
What had been created is a social oxymoron in actuality; a core body of nations (Europe, EU & NATO nations, particularly) determined never to self-prosecute but to use the prosecutorial vehicle provided by the Rome Statute as post-colonial geopolitical device aimed at African states in ongoing state of neocolonialism. Consequently the court has seen to the prosecutions of politicians from Congo, Kenya, Sudan and Ivory Coast but not the French role in Rwanda’s genocide or Paul Kagame, a USA darling:
“He’s [Kagame] actually gotten a free ride from the ICC despite all the evidence of his army creating, sponsoring militias in Congo since 2002. Militias sponsored by Kagame’s troops have plundered, killed civilians and recruited child soldiers in the Congo yet Kagame and his commanders have not been indicted by the ICC” [2], [3], [4]
Relevant to the French immunity (impunity), this raises a question concerning whether European states signatory to the Rome Statute, that is a “coalition of the willing” should have been liable for what amounts to a ‘crime against humanity’, or an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 dead civilians having resulted due to infrastructure destruction (e.g. disease via water contamination), when Iraq had been invaded despite the invading states’ leaders (notably Tony Blair) knowing that invasion’s premise was false. Are the EU & NATO states’ accountability waived by the ICC?
It hardly seems a ‘crime of aggression’ need be adopted to hold states responsible for their acts where existing statutory law should be adequate.
This brings us to a recent case filed by this reporter which points to corruption. For the purpose of defining corruption in the case at hand, identified by the court’s filing reference ICC OTP-CR-295/18 [5] it is asserted (by this reporter) any case of acquiesce in the face of intimidation is a form of corruption, where cases are shelved as opposed to pursued in good faith. A recent example of this is demonstrated in the resignation of an ICC judge citing two instances where the ICC had been subject to threats or subverted. [6]
In the first instance, Turkey arrested an ICC judge with Turk nationality under the pretext of ties to Gulen, an excuse often used by the current Salafi leadership of Turkey to rid itself of principled Sufi members of Turkey’s civil service. [7] The UN Secretary General, rather than confront Turkey with a principled stance no UN member state will unilaterally set precedent with the removal of ICC judges, allowed the precedent to stand.
The other instance causing his resignation (mentioned by Judge Flugge) is the well publicized (policy) threats against the ICC by USA National Security Advisor, John Bolton, in his speech to the Federalist Society. [8]
According to Christopher Black, a longtime barrister working the several international tribunals, including the ICC, the USA plays strongly:
“First of all through key personnel they have placed in the ICC, for example the prosecutors, some judges who are willing to do what they want…
“A judge in my case was threatened by Americans working there that if certain passages in the judgement acquitting the general I was defending were not removed he would face physical problems. This is the type of gangsterism they use to get their way in these tribunals”
Also specific to the USA, at a separate tribunal, according to Black:
“Not only was a judge in my case at the Rwanda tribunal pressured but I myself was threatened by the CIA while I was there to stop raising questions and presenting evidence they [the US side] did not like” [9]
The preceding suggests Turkey may have arrested the judge with Turkish nationality as a quid pro quo on behalf of a 3rd party to dispense with a judge perceived as a threat. In any case it’s clear the ICC is compromised.
Bearing the preceding in mind, in the case filed by this reporter, to begin it should be noted it was the ICC itself that invited my filing, when the Office of the Prosecutor had responded, on 3 July 2018, to a letter I’d emailed to a German international law attorney on, 30 June 2018, copied to the ICC.
In both the letter and the complaint a clear line of evidence had been provided pointing to Turkey had (false-flag attack, in league with al Qaida) arranged the indiscriminate murder of well over 1,000 civilians at Ghouta, Syria in August of 2013. According to a Turkish parliamentarian, Eren Erdem, citing Turkish state produced investigative files in his possession, the chemicals used to produce the Sarin gas in this attack had been sourced in Europe. Turkish MP Erdem is on record stating:
“All basic materials are purchased from Europe. Western institutions should question themselves about these relations. Western sources know very well who carried out the sarin gas attack in Syria. They know these people, they know who these people are working with, they know that these people are working for Al-Qaeda. [What] I think is Westerns are hypocrites about the situation”
In this regard it is noted the court’s Office of the Prosecutor takes on the responsibility of assembling evidence:
“At the ICC, most evidence is collected and secured by the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP)” [10]
In the present case (ICC OTP-CR-295/18) the filing party (Ronald Thomas West) had assembled ample evidence to justify initiating a preliminary investigation that should have triggered the court looking into whether there had been the associated crime of ‘aiding and abetting’ committed within ICC jurisdiction. To bolster this, the case had been made an additional, associated crime of aiding and abetting had been demonstrated where German intelligence had misinformed German politicians of the facts actually surrounding the Ghouta sarin attack, so far as to blame Assad.
This last (immediate preceding) would not necessarily constitute a prosecutable crime (depending on what the judges might be inclined to believe on a given day) but there is more. This reporter had provided the necessary evidence to the concerned politicians correcting the record; indisputable evidence Turkey’s intelligence agency was providing sarin to al-Qaida militants within a timeline consistent with the Ghouta attack. [11]
This evidence submitted to the German executive (office of the Federal Prosecutor) and oversight (parliamentary leadership of all parties represented in the federal parliament) was never acted on; the German political establishment closed ranks across the political spectrum to deny the government of Syria honest assessment of the Ghouta attack. The false-flag crime accordingly sustained as a successful political ploy in regime change endeavors by EU and NATO states where those very states have become complicit in aiding and abetting a war crime with the act of material concealment of the actual perpetrators identity (a NATO state.) [12]
The German politicians (and related institutions) had been provided with the evidence on 2 December 2015. By the time this (very same) evidence had been provided to the ICC in a formalized complaint on 4 July 2018, thirty one months had passed without action by the Germans, satisfying the requirement Germany should have had opportunity to redress the wrong.
On 6 February 2019, one week after the resignation of Judge Christoph Flugge, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor replied to this reporter with:
“The Office of the Prosecutor has examined your communication and has determined that more detailed information would be required in order to proceed with an analysis of whether the allegations could fall within the jurisdiction of the Court. The Prosecutor has determined that, in the absence of such information, there is not a basis at this time to proceed with further analysis”
Essentially what the ICC has done is, to shelve the case with a demand this reporter who’d made the filing (at their invitation) provide information beyond simple and clear evidence aiding and abetting of a war crime is ongoing by a state within the jurisdiction of the court. This general, non-specific language, in the common vernacular, are called ‘weasel words.’
Why? Clearly the ramifications of adopting the practice of prosecuting the politicians empowering false flag geopolitical engineering by intelligence agencies is frightening and no doubt opposed by politician & spy alike.
Were the ICC to proceed in this case (whether it were a successful prosecution or acquittal), not only would it likely topple Angela Merkel, but it likely brings into reach Davis Cameron and his spy chief Alex Younger, also Francois Hollande and his spy chief Bernard Bajolet… and so on.
In the case of Germany, there is a safe assumption: There will be no prosecution of these crimes due to a German constitutional loophole larger than the Brandenberg Gate … “for the good of the state.” Because at the end of the day, it is (a commonly used German expression) “just not possible” to rock the boat with Turkey or cross the USA.
Why the International Criminal Court matters (in the present moment) has little to do with justice and much to do with exposing the corruption of foundational principles across the spectrum of international institutions.
*
The ICC had been provided a nearly identical draft of this (preceding) with opportunity to comment. [13] Prior to releasing this for initial publication at the Ft Russ news website, two weeks have passed and no reply has been forthcoming. The ICC also declined to clarify the nature of “more detailed information [that] would be required” and has remained silent on my asking whether the German authorities had been contacted with request for information and if so, the nature of any reply.
Noteworthy is the ICC does not deny the “allegations” (the evidence is too strong) nor does the ICC altogether dismiss the possibility of jurisdiction (they have jurisdiction over complicit parties within the EU, only are either intimidated and afraid or too corrupted to exercise it, probably a combination) rather finds a ‘weasel words’ excuse to shelve a case that would call out the hypocrisy of the European signatories to the Rome Statute based on the criminality of the EU/NATO intelligence agencies.
The net result is, as of this moment the false-flag sarin attack at Ghouta, Syria (and murder of well over 1,000 innocents) during the month of August 2013 remains a successful sleight-of-hand attack blamed on the wrong party and the crime of aiding and abetting the perpetrators, it could be argued, extends to the International Criminal Court itself, in case where refusal to correct the public record protects the guilty parties. I would describe this as ‘international criminal complicity’ when a UN associated judicial body becomes aware of an easily rectified element of a major war crime, as simple as recognizing an evidence based false-flag, and instead chooses to sit on its hands.
The pity of it all is, if there were courage to pursue jurisdiction over those complicit parties within the Rome Statute’s signatory states, a precedent would be established perhaps leading (over time) to further precedent where anyone complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity could be arrested when stepping on any Rome Statute nation’s soil and progress made in realizing accountability.
Ronald’s Maxim
In any democracy, ethics, self restraint, tolerance and honesty will always take a second seat to narcissism, avarice, bigotry & persecution, if only because people who play by the rules in any democracy are at a disadvantage to those who easily subvert the rules to their own advantage
References:
[1] http://www.innercitypress.com/index.html
[2] http://www.therwandan.com/the-icc-has-given-africas-most-prolific-genocidaire-a-free-ride/
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41283362
[4] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/rwanda-paul-kagame-americas-darling-tyrant-103963
[7] https://www.dw.com/en/from-ally-to-scapegoat-fethullah-gulen-the-man-behind-the-myth/a-37055485
[9] https://www.rt.com/news/450611-us-icc-manipulation-experts/
[10] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-642-35076-4_4.pdf
[11] https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/04/15/what-can-be-known-vs-what-will-be-known/
[12] https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/10/12/a-breaking-point-in-geopolitical-torsion/
[13] copy of this post & relevant questions requesting information were sent to the ICC on 9 February 2019
Telling Only Part of the Story of Jihad
By Daniel LAZARE | Consortium News | February 21, 2019
A recent CNN report about U.S. military materiel finding its way into Al Qaeda hands in Yemen might have been a valuable addition to Americans’ knowledge of terrorism.
Entitled “Sold to an ally, lost to an enemy,” the 10-minute segment, broadcast on Feb. 4, featured rising CNN star Nima Elbagir cruising past sand-colored “Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected” armored vehicles, or MRAPs, lining a Yemeni highway.
“It’s absolutely incredible,” she says. “And this is not under the control of [Saudi-led] coalition forces. This is in the command of militias, which is expressly forbidden by the arms sales agreements with the U.S.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” she adds. “CNN was told by coalition sources that a deadlier U.S. weapons system, the TOW missile, was airdropped in 2015 by Saudi Arabia to Yemeni fighters, an air drop that was proudly proclaimed across Saudi backed media channels.” The TOWs were dropped into Al Qaeda-controlled territory, according to CNN. But when Elbagir tries to find out more, the local coalition-backed government chases her and her crew out of town.
U.S.-made TOWs in the hands of Al Qaeda? Elbagir is an effective on-screen presence. But this is an old story, which the cable network has long soft-pedaled.
In the early days of the Syrian War, Western media was reluctant to acknowledge that the forces arrayed against the Assad regime included Al Qaeda. In those days, the opposition was widely portrayed as a belated ripple effect of the Arab Spring pro-democracy uprisings elsewhere in the region.
However, in April-May 2015, right around the time that the Saudis were air-dropping TOWs into Yemen, they were also supplying the same optically-guided, high-tech missiles to pro-Al Qaeda forces in Syria’s northern Idlib province. Rebel leaders were exultant as they drove back Syrian government troops. TOWs “flipped the balance,” one said, while another declared: “I would put the advances down to one word – TOW.”
CNN reported that story very differently. From rebel-held territory, CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh described the missiles as a “possible game-changer … that may finally be wearing down the less popular side of the Shia-Sunni divide.” He conceded it wasn’t all good news: “A major downside for Washington at least, is that the often-victorious rebels, the Nusra Front, are Al Qaeda. But while the winners for now are America’s enemies, the fast-changing ground in Syria may cause to happen what the Obama administration has long sought and preached, and that’s changing the calculus of the Assad regime.”
Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New York Times all reacted the same way, furrowing their brows at the news that Al Qaeda was gaining, but expressing measured relief that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was at last on the ropes.
But now that Elbagir is sounding the alarm about TOWs in Yemen, CNN would do well to acknowledge that it has been distinctly more blasé in the past about TOWs in the hands of al Qaeda.
The network appears unwilling to go where Washington’s pro-war foreign-policy establishment doesn’t want it to go. Elbagir shouldn’t be shocked to learn that U.S. allies are consorting with Yemeni terrorists.
U.S. History with Holy Warriors
What CNN producers and correspondents either don’t know or fail to mention is that Washington has a long history of supporting jihad. As Ian Johnson notes in “A Mosque in Munich” (2010), the policy was mentioned by President Dwight Eisenhower, who was eager, according to White House memos, “to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect” in his talks with Muslim leaders about the Cold War Communist menace.” [See “How U.S. Allies Aid Al Qaeda in Syria,” Consortium News, Aug. 4, 2015.]
Britain had been involved with Islamists at least as far back as 1925 when it helped establish the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and both the U.S. and Britain worked with Islamists in the 1953 coup in Iran, according to Robert Dreyfus in “Devil’s Game” (2006).
By the 1980s a growing Islamist revolt against a left-leaning, pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan brought U.S. support. In mid-1979, President Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, armed the Afghan mujahideen — not at first to drive the Soviets out, but to lure them in. Brzezinski intended to deal Moscow a Vietnam-sized blow, as he put it in a 1998 interview.
Meanwhile, a few months after the U.S. armed the mujahideen, the Saudis were deeply shaken when Islamist extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and called for the overthrow of the royal family. While Saudi Arabia has been keen to repress jihadism at home, it has been a major supporter of Sunni extremists in the region, particularly to battle the Shi‘ite regime that came to power in Tehran, also in 1979.
Since then, the U.S. has made use of jihad, either directly or indirectly, with the Gulf oil monarchies or Pakistan’s notoriously pro-Islamist Inter-Services Intelligence agency. U.S. backing for the Afghan mujahideen helped turn Osama bin Laden into a hero for some young Saudis and other Sunnis, while the training camp he established in the Afghan countryside drew jihadists from across the region.
U.S. backing for Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamist government in Bosnia-Herzegovina brought al-Qaeda to the Balkans, while U.S.-Saudi support for Islamist militants in the Second Chechen War of 1999-2000 enabled it to establish a base of operations there.
Downplaying Al Qaeda
Just six years after 9/11, according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the U.S. downplayed the fight against Al Qaeda to rein in Iran – a policy, Hersh wrote, that had the effect of “bolstering … Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”
Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, policy toward Al-Qaeda turned even more curious. In March 2011, she devoted nearly two weeks to persuading Qatar, the UAE and Jordan to join the air war against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, only to stand by and watch as Qatar then poured hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into the hands of Islamist militias that were spreading anarchy from one end of the country to the other. The Obama administration thought of remonstrating with Qatar, but didn’t in the end.
Much the same happened in Syria where, by early 2012, Clinton was organizing a “Friends of Syria” group that soon began channeling military aid to Islamist forces waging war against Christians, Alawites, secularists and others backing Assad. By August 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the [anti-Assad] insurgency”; that the West, Turkey, and the Gulf states supported it regardless; that the rebels’ goal was to establish “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria,” and that “this is exactly what the supporting powers want in order to isolate the Syrian regime….”
Biden Speaks Out
Two years after that, Vice President Joe Biden declared at Harvard’s Kennedy School:
“Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria… The Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. what were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” (Quote starts at 53:25.)
The fact that Obama ordered the vice president to apologize to the Saudis, the UAE and Turkey for his comments provided back-handed confirmation that they were true. When TOWs turned up in the hands of pro-Qaeda rebels in Syria the following spring, all a senior administration official would say was: “It’s not something we would refrain from raising with our partners.”
It was obvious that Al Qaeda would be a prime beneficiary of Saudi intervention in Yemen from the start. Tying down the Houthis — “Al Qaeda’s most determined foe,” according to the Times — gave it space to blossom and grow. Where the State Department said it had up to 4,000 members as of 2015, a UN report put its membership at between 6,000 and 7,000 three years later, an increase of 50 to 75 percent or more.
In early 2017, the International Crisis Group found that Al Qaeda was “thriving in an environment of state collapse, growing sectarianism, shifting alliances, security vacuums and a burgeoning war economy.”
In Yemen, Al Qaeda “has regularly fought alongside Saudi-led coalition forces in … Aden and other parts of the south, including Taiz, indirectly obtaining weapons from them,” the ICG added. “… In northern Yemen … the [Saudi-led] coalition has engaged in tacit alliances with AQAP fighters, or at least turned a blind eye to them, as long as they have assisted in attacking the common enemy.”
In May 2016, a PBS documentary showed Al Qaeda members fighting side by side with UAE forces near Taiz. (See “The Secret Behind the Yemen War,” Consortium News, May 7, 2016.)
Last August, an Associated Press investigative team found that the Saudi-led coalition had cut secret deals with Al Qaeda fighters, “paying some to leave key cities and towns and letting others retreat with weapons, equipment, and wads of looted cash.” Saudi-backed militias “actively recruit Al Qaeda militants,” the AP team added, “… because they’re considered exceptional fighters” and also supply them with armored trucks.
If it’s not news that U.S. allies are providing pro-Al Qaeda forces with U.S.-made equipment, why is CNN pretending that it is? One reason is that it feels free to criticize the war and all that goes with it now that the growing human catastrophe in Yemen is turning into a major embarrassment for the U.S. Another is that criticizing the U.S. for failing to rein in its allies earns it points with viewers by making it seem tough and independent, even though the opposite is the case.
Then there’s Trump, with whom CNN has been at war since the moment he was elected. Trump’s Dec. 19 decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria thus presented the network with a double win because it allowed it to rail against the pullout as “bizarre” and a “win for Moscow” while complaining at the same time about administration policy in Yemen. Trump is at fault, it seems, when he pulls out and when he stays in.
In either instance, CNN gets to ride the high horse as it blasts away at the chief executive that corporate outlets most love to hate. Maybe Elbagir should have given her exposé a different title: “Why arming homicidal maniacs is bad news in one country but OK in another.”
Why Turkey won’t abandon the S-400 deal with Russia
By Ali Hussein Bakir | MEMO | February 20, 2019
Washington’s first deadline for Turkey to respond to its offer to buy the Patriot missile defence system passed last Friday with no progress made. Only one day after the deadline, US Vice President Mike Pence raised the issue once again with Ankara regarding Turkey’s recent deal to acquire the Russian S-400 missile defence system. In his speech at the Munich Security Conference last Saturday, Pence threatened Turkey, without mentioning it explicitly, when he said, “We’ve also made it clear that we will not stand idly by while NATO Allies purchase weapons from our adversaries. We cannot ensure the defence of the West if our allies grow dependent on the East.”
The Americans agreed recently to offer Turkey the Patriot missile deal, worth about $ 3.5 billion, but linked its agreement to do so on several conditions, including the need for Ankara to abandon the S-400 deal with Russia. The Turks initially welcomed the offer, but rejected the conditions tied to it. They also linked any possible agreement to the extent that it serves Turkey’s interests, especially regarding the timeframe offered for delivery of the system. The government in Ankara also stipulated the need for the deal to include the transfer of technology to Turkey as well as financial provisions to help pay for it.
According to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the US responded positively to the possibility of delivering the system early, but it has not yet responded to the matters of joint production and financial arrangements. Since the official deadline for the response to the American offer will expire entirely at the end of March, this means that the debate on the topic will continue for another few weeks, at least. This will occur amid American threats to stop the delivery of F-35 fighter jets to Ankara and the possibility of imposing sanctions if it does not back down from the S-400 deal with Russia.
However, Turkey believes that removing it from the F-35 production programme will lead to higher costs for the Americans, and it will also hamper delivery times to many allies. More importantly, it will damage Washington’s already shrinking credibility. The Trump administration’s arrogant, exploitative behaviour only strengthens Turkey’s commitment to its deal with Russia, as it seems that pulling out is nearly impossible under the current circumstances.
There are three possible reasons why Ankara will not abandon the S-400 deal with Russia. First, the lack of trust in Washington’s sincerity, especially as the latter has not kept its promises on several occasions, most recently by threatening to cancel the delivery of the F-35s. Ankara believes that the US will be able to cancel the Patriot deal, threaten to do so or use it as a means to blackmail Turkey if and when it deems it necessary to do so. Furthermore, the lack of a financial incentive makes it very costly for Turkey to buy the Patriot system from the US, especially in the current economic climate. Unless Washington discusses this aspect of its deal, the Patriot offer will not be attractive from a purely financial point of view, neither on its own or when compared with Russia’s S-400 offer.
Finally, Washington has so far refused to transfer the technology to Turkey as part of the potential deal with Ankara. If this is not done, Turkey will not achieve its declared aims, and so it would be taking the Patriot system for purely political reasons in order to be balanced in the relationship between Russia and America. When all things are considered, therefore, it is almost certain that Ankara will stick to the S-400 deal with Russia.
This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Arab on 19 February 2019
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The Scofield Bible—The Book That Made Zionists of Evangelical Christians
By Maidhc Ó Cathail – Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – October 2015
“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgement.” —The New Scofield Study Bible
Since it was first published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible has made uncompromising Zionists out of tens of millions of Americans. When John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), said that “50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel,” it was the Scofield Bible that he was talking about.
Although the Scofield Reference Bible contains the text of the King James Authorized Version, it is not the traditional Protestant bible but Cyrus I. Scofield’s annotated commentary that is problematic. More than any other factor, it is Scofield’s notes that have induced generations of American evangelicals to believe that God demands their uncritical support for the modern State of Israel. … continue
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