By BARRY LANDO
Paris.

Jean Michel Aphatie: a cooler head acting like a real journalist

France is in deep trouble. This country has spent several billions of Euros over the past 11 years sending its troops, planes and ships, to join the War against Terrorism in Central Asia. Now, however, the French are finally discovering the threat of radical Islam is at home, under their own noses.

According to a poll in today’s centre-right Figaro, 82% of the 44,000 French questioned fear an increase in Islamic terrorism in France. Provoking this fear, sensational headlines about a network of 12 jihadis—converted in overcrowded French prisons—and rounded up by police over the past few days.

But, more serious, than the threat of radical Islam is the fact that France is menaced by mounting racial tensions stoked by extremists on both sides.

I discussed the rise of radical Islam among France’s five million Muslims in previous blogs. An equally alarming development is that, on the other side, Islamophobes are  also on the rise.

This past weekend, one of the most prominent of Nicolas Sarkozy’s former ministers, Jean-Francois Cope, who is campaigning to become leader of his party, the UMP, , made headlines with the story of a good “French” working class family, whose son, as he was leaving school, had his pain au chocolat ripped from his hands by “a young punk”  (obviously Muslim) who told the distraught little boy he had no right to be eating during the Muslim fast of Ramadan.

Overnight, the little French boy losing his pain au chocolat to a brutish Muslim kid has, in the eyes of many French, become a symbol of what’s really wrong with this country.

It’s also become endlessly discussed on French television.

On the Grand Journal last night, one of the commentators, Jean Michel Aphatie, pointed out that, if you check the dates of Ramadan –which was in the summer for the past couple of years–there’s no way this incident could have recently happened, if it did happen at all.

In any case, as Aphatie pointed out, Cope’s views are far from original. He presented a video of former French President Jacques Chirac, delivering a stunningly crude anti Arab/Muslim diatribe at a banquet in Orleans in 1991:

Imagine, said Chirac, a working man, who together with his wife makes 15,000 francs a year, and is sitting on the landing of his little flat and sees across from him, on the same landing another “head of a family with three or four wives and twenty kids, who, naturally without working, is making 50,000 francs a year–from welfare.

“You add to that,” said the President of France, “the noise–and the smell–and the French worker goes crazy.”

The only difference between Cope and Chirac, suggested, Jean-Michel Apathie, was that Chirac was probably a little drunk at the time.

Indeed, here in Paris, my wife is constantly being forwarded some astonishingly blunt  racist videos–from well meaning friends. Like one received today, that apparently originated with a Catholic professional, we know, an educated, upper class man; who sent it to another Jewish friend of ours, also charming and highly educated; who forwarded it to us:

It’s called “Les Envahisseurs” and is a dubbed takeoff of the science fiction series, The Invaders, from the Sixties. While the original series dealt with evil creatures from another star system trying to take over the earth, this modified version substitutes the intergalactic villains with, of course, the Muslims in France.

They’re fomenting jihad, taking over the streets with their prayers, demanding that schools serve only hallal meat. When the hero turns for help to the authorities, he finds that it’s too late—they too are Muslims!

The furor over Cope’s pain au chocolat tale was still on the mid-day TV news today in Paris.

We watched as France’s Prime Minister proclaimed his determination to go after all forms of “extremism.”

On the same show there was also video of hundreds of outraged French workers, whose jobs are at risk because of factory shutdowns, being blocked by riot police from entering the lustrous automobile show currently going on in Paris. One of the factories being shut down is Peugeot.

The TV news also had live coverage of French President Holland presenting his plan to totally overhaul France’s creaking education system. Unemployment among French under 25 is 23%.

After the President had finished, one expert interviewed on the news show asked, with the government having to drastically cut back its budget, where the money for reform would come.

As he was talking, a crawl ran across the bottom of the screen, a bulletin about the round up members of the internal investigation unit of the Marseilles police. Turns out 19 of them have been hauled in, targets themselves of corruption charges.

One bright spot:  A sponsor of the TV News today was the French Justice Ministry, with a major job offer: they’re looking for more prison guards.

Meanwhile, some 1200 French troops remain in Central Asia, continuing to support the “War on Terrorism.”

Barry M. Lando, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia University, spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with 60 Minutes. His latest book is “Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.” Lando is currently completing a novel, “The Watchman’s File”, concerning Israel’s most closely guarded secret (it’s not the bomb.) He can be reached through his blog.

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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“A racist, biased, colonialist court has no credibility.”

The International Criminal Court, a dispenser of one-sided justice to a select group of Africans targeted by the U.S. and its allies, “violates the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, principles of legality, and fair and equal justice for all without discrimination.” That was the sentiment of many of the 100 or so lawyers, law students and human rights activists who gathered in Montreal, Quebec, for a conference under the heading: “International justice for whom?” This Third International Conference on the Defense of International Criminal Law found little to defend in the conduct of the ICC.

The International Criminal Court is a strange legal animal. Despite its global mandate to prosecute persons for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the ICC has pursued indictments only in Africa, where it has charged 29 people in cases involving eight countries. The organization, based in The Hague, Netherlands, purports to fight against a “culture of impunity,” yet is prohibited from prosecuting crimes committed prior to July 2002, the date of its founding under the Treaty of Rome. Thus, hundreds of years of European slavery, genocide, and every other conceivable form of human rights atrocity are beyond the reach of the ICC. Europe is effectively granted impunity from centuries of crimes in Africa and around the globe.

Countries that are not signatories to the founding treaty, such as the United States, remain outside its jurisdiction, yet cases can be referred to the ICC for prosecution by the United Nations Security Council, where the U.S. is by far the most influential player. The ICC’s former chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, actively sought to enlist the “special forces” and “rare and expensive capabilities” of the U.S. to enforce ICC arrest warrants, and U.S. “observers” take part in most high-level ICC parlays.

“The ICC has pursued indictments only in Africa, where it has charged 29 people in cases involving eight countries.”

“African states did not contemplate that the administration of justice at the ICC, in particular within its first decade of existence, would be discriminatory, selective justice and focused totally on Africa,” said Chief Charles A. Taku, a traditional leader from Cameroon who is also legal counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the African Court on Human Rights and Peoples Rights in Arusha. The ICC has turned out to be “a tool of imperialism,” said Taku.

Selective, or discriminatory, justice is no justice at all. The West – meaning Europe’s former colonial powers and the U.S. – is allowed to posture and pontificate about “fighting impunity,” while the ICC’s exclusive prosecution of Africans gives the impression that “Blacks are inherently criminal and have a propensity to kill each other,” said Taku.

Who pulls the ICC’s strings? In the ICC’s Kenya case, the Court initiated the proceedings on its own authority against Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the country’s founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, and others in the deaths of 1,200 people in violence following disputed elections in 2007. However, it is widely believed that the United States and Britain are using the Court to favor Kenyatta’s political rival, Raila Odinga, and to chastise the country for opening up to diversified trading partners, especially China.

“The U.S. controls the ICC, first of all through the NGOs,” said Otachi Bw’Omanwa, defense lawyer for Kenyatta and his co-defendant, cabinet secretary Francis Muthaura. Much of the evidence used in ICC indictments is actually gathered by non-governmental organizations funded by the United States, said Bw’Omanwa. “More importantly, the U.S. exerts political and military muscle through the UN Security Council.”

“The ICC has turned out to be ‘a tool of imperialism.’”

Both the Kenyan administration and the national assembly tried to stop the ICC’s intervention in the country’s affairs, and many fear the process will inflame tensions, rather than promote reconciliation. However, reconciliation among Africans does not appear to be the ICC’s mission, especially in its cases stemming from the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and the genocide of six million Congolese that followed. Instead, the ICC behaves much like an international arm of Rwanda’s minority Tutsi government and its U.S.-trained president, Paul Kagame.

Iain Edwards is a young lawyer based in London, defense counsel for Victoire Ingabire. A leader of the opposition to Kagame, Ingabire returned to Rwanda from exile in 2010, intending to run in elections under the Unified Democratic Forces banner. Instead, she was charged with collaborating with terrorists and promoting “genocidal ideology” – a catch-all for anyone that does not buy into the version of events that put Kagame in power after the bloodletting of 1994 and drove much of the majority Hutu political class into hiding.

Ingabire’s legal prospects are not good. “The law is simply not respected in the courts of Rwanda,” said Edwards. It is nearly impossible to mount a defense when potential witnesses are treated as accomplices in crime. Yet, the ICC routinely extradites Rwandans back home, despite zero prospects of even rudimentary justice. Edwards say he has 49 witnesses who would testify that one of his clients, Jean-Bosco Uwinkindi, a Pentacostal pastor, was not involved in killing Tutsis in 1994. However, none of them “will accept guarantees of safety” to testify in a Rwandan court “whilst the current regime is in power,” said Edwards. “It is not clear if the accused could even testify in his own defense.”

“ICC behaves much like an international arm of Rwanda’s minority Tutsi government and its U.S.-trained president, Paul Kagame.”

The test for ICC extradition to Rwanda should be: Will the defendant receive a fair trail? The answer is clearly, No, yet the ICC sends most defendants to Kagame’s courts, anyway. “Things look pretty bleak for Rwandans in the diaspora,” said Edwards.

If that is the case, then “isn’t the whole reason for the ICC undermined by transferring defendants to Uganda?” asked David Jacobs, a labor and civil liberties lawyer from Toronto. “Why did it exist in the first place?”

One speaker came to the ICC’s defense. Professor Fannie Lafontaine, of Laval University, a specialist in international humanitarian and human rights law, noted the ICC’s many mistakes, including its “idiotic decision” to issue an arrest warrant against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, which “simply alienated the African Union.” However, she declared: “We will simply not go back to where the worst criminals are sitting on a beach sipping a drink.”

We? Who is “we”? Are “we” the North Americans and Europeans that run the ICC show? And who are “the worst criminals”? Are they the all-African defendants in the ICC’s dock, or the imperial powers that dominate international structures, including the ICC? Aren’t there war criminals sipping drinks in the halls of power in Washington, London and Paris?

“The ICC has been used as an instrument of war, not an instrument of peace, but war by other means,” said Toronto’s David Jacobs. It’s time to “scrap it.”
“Things look pretty bleak for Rwandans in the diaspora.”

Phil Taylor, a journalist who has worked as an investigator for the ICC, mocked the Court’s claim to seek “an end to a culture of impunity.” The Rwandan Patriotic Front, Paul Kagame’s army, which has been repeatedly implicated in the Congolese genocide and the mass killing of Hutus in Rwanda, “was never charged with any crime,” said Taylor.

“A racist, biased, colonialist court has no credibility,” said John Philpot, a defense counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICC, and an organizer of the conference. Junking the ICC is not akin to “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” Under the current political arrangements, the ICC is hopelessly selective in its prosecutions. “If there is a political change, then proper international tribunals can arise. But you cannot respect these [current] tribunals.”

Defense lawyers, whose natural inclination is to work behind the scenes, to speak within the narrow confines of legal immediacies, must expose the ICC as a tool of global power, not justice.

“We have to go public. We cannot limit our work to technical work,” he said.

________________________

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [3].
 [4]
militarization of Africa
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/icc-empires-court

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SPECIAL FROM FAIR—[Fairness & Acuracy in Reporting]
Posted on 08/22/2012 by Peter Hart
There’s nothing quite like the demise of a U.S-allied dictator to get the Paper of Record talking about the “clash” between U.S. “ideals” and the actual policies the country carries out.

Zenawi: Our man in the Horn of Africa. RIP

Today’s New York Times (8/22/12) carries the headline “Ethiopian Leader’s Death Highlights Gap Between U.S. Interests and Ideals,” under which Jeffrey Gettleman lays out the case that the United States kept Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi, who died early this week, in the “good guy” column despite our normally idealistic approach to world affairs.

Gettleman writes that Zenawi extracted prized intelligence, serious diplomatic support and millions of dollars in aid from the United States in exchange for his cooperation against militants in the volatile Horn of Africa, an area of prime concern for Washington.

But he was notoriously repressive, undermining President Obama’s maxim that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.”

But, Gettlemen explains:

Despite being one of the United States’ closest allies on the continent, Mr. Meles repeatedly jailed dissidents and journalists, intimidated opponents and their supporters to win mind-bogglingly one-sided elections, and oversaw brutal campaigns in restive areas of the country where the Ethiopian military has raped and killed many civilians.

The real trick is the first word: “Despite.” Readers are supposed to see these as unusual characteristics for a leader backed by the United States, which of course would much rather the world be governed by those who respect international law and human rights.

That supposed commitment is difficult to locate. After his death, Gettleman reports,  Hillary Clinton praised his “personal commitment” to lifting Ethiopia’s economy and “his role in promoting peace and security in the region.” But she made no mention of his rights record and gave only a veiled reference to supporting “democracy and human rights” in Ethiopia.

Gettleman deserves some sort of award for this passage:

Ethiopia is hardly alone in raising difficult questions on how the United States should balance interests and principles.

Saudi Arabia is an obvious example, a country where women are deprived of many rights and there is almost no religious freedom. Still, it remains one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: oil.

In Africa, the United States cooperates with several governments that are essentially one-party states, dominated by a single man, despite a commitment to promoting democracy.

One could spend considerable time compiling a list of the tyrants, dictators and human rights abusers the United States has supported, from Suharto in Indonesia to Mubarak in Egypt. Or consider the Reagan-era policies of Latin America, which saw the United States supporting strongmen and fielding armies to overthrow governments we didn’t care for.

Elite institutions like the Times need to maintain the comfortable fiction that the United States has a unique and laudable commitment to spreading democracy and human rights. Most people with a passing knowledge of U.S. history would know that there are too many exceptions to this rule to make it a rule at all. Thus, every now and then, an article like this is written to demonstrate that there is in fact some awareness that the United States does not practice what it preaches. An effective propaganda system requires these small openings.

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By Stephen Gowans, What’s left

He’s a virtual dictator who presides over a virtual one-party state controlled by his own ethnic minority. True, he has been elected multiple times, but he relies on violence and intimidation to win “mind-bogglingly one-sided elections.” (1) In the last election, his party won all but two of 546 seats in parliament. (2)

When opposition supporters objected to one of his improbable election victories, he ordered regime forces to open fire, “killing 193 and wounding hundreds. Thousands of opposition leaders and supporters were rounded up and detained.” (3) Opponents who weren’t jailed were denied food aid, jobs and other social benefits. (4)

A rebellion against his regime has been met by “brutal campaigns” involving rape and the killing of his own people. (5) Last year, he sentenced two Western journalists to 11 years in prison for reporting on rebel groups fighting to overthrow his tyrannical regime. (6) And in 2006, he sent his forces into a neighbouring country to occupy it militarily, because it was weak and unable to defend itself.

Syria’s Bashar al-Asad?

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe?

The description fits the picture painted of these two leaders by the US State Department and its echo chamber, the Western mass media. But it is neither of these men. Both are reviled in Washington—and so automatically by the Western press—for reasons allegedly having to do with their bad attitudes to democracy and human rights and so it’s easy to believe the leader depicted above is one of them.

But the real reason the US State Department–and in train the mimetic Western media—treat these men as heinous criminals has to do with their attitudes to Western free enterprise and domination from abroad. Neither man has been willing to open his country to untrammelled exploitation by foreigners (or in Zimbabwe’s case to the descendants of settlers.) Neither votes in the United Nations as Washington directs, and neither is willing to act as a military proxy for the Pentagon.

But Meles Zenawi, the leader I’ve described above—the dictator you haven’t heard about—was willing to do all these things.

Meles, the prime minister of Ethiopia, died last Monday. An anti-Communist, he dropped out of medical school in the 1970s to fight Ethiopia’s then Marxist-Leninist government. As prime minister, he shepherded Ethiopia through a free-market, free-enterprise takeover that opened Ethiopia’s economy to foreign investors. (7) In 2006, when the United States asked him to invade neighbouring Somalia, Meles—the uncompromising local agent of US interests—was only too happy to comply.

For his services the Ethiopian strongman was showered with aid—$1 billion from Washington in 2010, and nearly the same amount last year. (8) And his “military and security services” are celebrated in Washington as “among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favourite partners…in Africa.” (9)

While Meles was of the kind of leader Washington professes to revile, there were no campaigns for Meles’s removal engineered by the US State Department, and then taken up by the compliant media, and from there by liberals, soft-leftists, non-violent pro-democracy activists, and “no-fly-zone-arms-to-the-rebels” Trotskyists. All of these forces were too busy trying to outdo each other in denouncing the rogue’s gallery of socialists and economic nationalists Washington trotted out for disdain, allegedly because they hate democracy and human rights, but actually because they hate foreign domination. Meles never made Washington’s list of rogues. Nor by consequence the Western mass media’s. Nor by consequence the aforesaid leftists’.

Writing Meles’ obituary, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman felt moved to explain the gulf between Washington’s rhetoric about supporting democracy and human rights, and its practice of supporting their very enemies.

“Ethiopia,” wrote Gettleman, “is hardly alone in raising difficult questions on how the United States should balance interests and principles.” Contra Gettleman, the trouble here is that there is no balance between interests and principles. US interests—which is to say the interests of the one percent—vastly outweigh principles, which is why Washington continues to support leaders like Meles and tyrants in the Gulf. Principles are simply rhetoric to cover up the rape of other countries in the pursuit of profit.

“Saudi Arabia,” continued Gettleman, “is an obvious example (of interests trumping principles), a country where women are deprived of many rights and there is almost no religious freedom. Still, it remains one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: oil.”

Right, but not oil, as a resource US consumers and industry depend on that can’t be obtained elsewhere. Indeed, the United States is one of the world’s top oil producers and more than half of US oil is sourced domestically. Neighbouring Canada supplies as much oil to the United States as do all of the oil producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East combined. (10) The loss of Saudi Arabia as an ally wouldn’t leave the United States short of oil. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia is a source of only a small part of the oil the United States consumes. But it is a source of gargantuan oil profits for US businesses, not only directly, but through the recycling of petro-dollars through US banks. Saudi Arabia remains one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: not oil itself, but for what it delivers–immense profits.

Gettleman went on to point out that, “In Africa, the United States cooperates with several governments that are essentially one-party states, dominated by a single-man, despite a commitment to promoting democracy.” (11) But he didn’t say why. If it’s oil profits in Saudi Arabia, what is it in Africa? The Wall Street Journal is more forthcoming. Meles transformed a Communist-controlled economy by “loosening up of lucrative industries” and attracting “investment in agriculture and manufacturing.” (12) In other words, he helped make US investors—the one percent— richer.

Meanwhile, leaders who have resisted their country’s exploitation by the West’s one percent have been destabilized, sanctioned, bombed, and—with the help of plenty of leftists—tarred by the blackest campaigns of vilification.

1. Jeffrey Gettleman (a), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
2. Peter Wonacott, “Ethiopia in flux after leader dies”, The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2012.
3. Wonacott
4. Gettleman (a)
5. Jeffrey Gettleman (b), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
6. Gettleman (a)
7. Wonacott
8. Wonacott
9. Gettleman (a)
11. Gettleman (b)
12. Wonacott

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