[ # On Srebrenica see also / su Srebrenica vedi anche:
Srebrenica and the Politics of War Crimes
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/index.htm
# On Falluja see also / su Falluja vedi anche:
Falluja: il peggior massacro americano in Iraq (LINKS)
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/4482
Guai a occuparsi di Falluja
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/4227
IRAQ = JUGOSLAVIJA / 12: Cronache da Falluja
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3486
IRAQ = JUGOSLAVIJA / 9: FALLUJA COME ORADOUR, LIDICE, KRAGUJEVAC...
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3466
IRAQ = JUGOSLAVIJA / 1: Eyewitness Report from Falluja
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3432 ]
Remembering Srebrenica, Thinking Of Fallujah
Ghali Hassan, Countercurrents.org
22 July, 2005 - On July 11, 2005, American and European leaders
gathered at a ceremony in Srebrenica marking the 10th anniversary of
the death of “at least 8000 Bosnians men and boys” during the war in
Bosnia. As usual, the news of the anniversary was broadcast live
throughout the Western world, and the alleged atrocity was compared
only to that of Fascism (“Europe’s worst massacre since World War II”).
Will Western leaders who commemorated Srebrenica “massacre” and
promised to bring the indicted leaders to justice apply the same
standards of justice to those who committed the Fallujah massacre?
The small Bosnian town of Srebrenica was (supposedly) “protected” by
the UN as a “safe area” at the time when the alleged 8,000 Muslims
(loved to death by the US and its Western allies) were slaughtered by
Serb forces in 1995 while the 370 Dutch military contingents stood by.
The same was repeated few years later in Kosovo when NATO/UN forces
stood by while Albanian terrorists (the KLA) kidnapped, tortured and
murdered Serbs and Gypsies. The Srebrenica “massacre” was just a
propaganda coup for the US-NATO war against the Republic of Yugoslavia.
Subsequently, the US-NATO used the “massacre” to intervene on behalf of
the Bosnian Muslim leaders in the war against Serb forces and in
pursuit of their own imperialist agenda. The aim was to break up the
Republic of Yugoslavia and colonise Bosnia and Kosovo. Credible
evidence provided by US and Western sources showed that the number of
the so-called at least “8000 Muslims” killed by Serbian forces was
inflated to provide the US-NATO with a “humanitarian” pretext to
demonise the Serbs, and gain public relations support for military
intervention in the region. European humanitarian organisations
estimated that between 80,000 and 102,000 Bosnians died during the
Bosnian war (1992-1995).
It is also noteworthy several US reports (e.g. US Senate Staff Report
and the Foreign Military Studies) have accused the Bosnian forces of
deliberately attacking their own Bosnian civilians (e.g. the “Breadline
Massacre” in 1992, and the “Market Massacre” in 1994 and 1995) in order
to get US-NATO to come to their aid against Serb forces.
In addition, the Srebrenica “massacre” was also used by the Croatian
regime (the darling of Western Fascism) as a smokescreen to conduct an
overt criminal policy of ethnic cleansing Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in
Western Bosnia and the Serbian inhabitants of the Krajina in Croatia.
According to Edward Herman, America’s most astute critical reformist,
massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities against Serbs and Bosnian
Muslims was “carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support
within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have involved
the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed
in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were
fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bussed the Srebrenica
women and children to safety; the Croatians made no such provision and
many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina”.
Like the war on Iraq, the US-NATO war on Yugoslavia was an act of
aggression that destroyed the entire Republic and killed an unknown
large number of Serbs, the war largest victim. Over a million people
(now live in Serbia) are displaced refugees from Krajina, Bosnia and
Kosovo as a result of a fascist policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and an
illegal war against Yugoslavia.
The Srebrenica “massacre” was universally condemned in Europe and the
US as “genocide” and crimes against humanity. The Serbs who have been
accused of the killings were described by Western governments and
Western media as “Serb evils”. They are indicted for war crimes and
promises have been made to bring them to “justice”, that is, Western
justice. However when something worse than the Srebrenica “massacre”
happened in Fallujah, it was described by Western leaders and their
media accomplices as a “necessary step to hold elections and bring
freedom and democracy” to Iraq.
The Iraqi city was the subject of heavy US bombardments before and
after the 2003 Occupation. In November 2004, US occupying forces
embarked on “pacifying” the city of Fallujah in order to make an
“example” of Western brutality. Water, food and electricity were cut
off to the city of 300,000 citizens - in violation of the Geneva
Conventions. The aim was to empty the city of its women, children, and
the elderly while preventing the departure of able-bodied males from
leaving, then US forces bombed the city with all the remaining
civilians. Many people were able to leave, but others stayed in their
homes.
For several weeks, US forces bombed the city continuously, with
deliberate violence that has been described as “war crimes”. US
helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter planes, using legally banned
Napalm-type firebombs (MK77s type bombs used in Vietnam) and bombs as
heavy as 500 lb (220 kg), are attacking population centres and shopping
malls. From the air and from the grounds, US forces indiscriminately
killed civilians holding white flags or white clothes over their heads,
murdered the wounded fighters, killed unarmed Iraqis who had been taken
prisoner, and destroyed mosques, hospitals, and health centres
protected under international law.
All males between the ages of 16 and 60 years old were slaughtered. US
forces attacked and occupied the Fallujah Hospitals to prevent the
publication and counting of civilian casualties. Patients and doctors
in the Hospital were taken hostages and abused by US forces and their
Iraqi collaborators. “Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors
have been shot, emergency medicines blocked. Children have been
murdered in front of their families. Now imagine the same state of
affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of
the bombing”, wrote John Pilger.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on 18 December 2004, that US unit
commanders revealed that their troops had orders to shoot all males of
fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed. According to the
Red Cross spokesman and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, more than 6,000
people have been killed and many more have been injured in the first
three weeks of the unprovoked US attacks. The entire city was destroyed
and rendered uninhabitable by humans. Currently there are some 250,000
people reported as being internally displaced by the atrocity. Law
experts have described the atrocity of Fallujah as war crimes and
breach of the Geneva Convention and US Law. It is part of an illegal
war of aggression that has needlessly caused the suffering and death of
thousands of innocent people.
Two independent studies investigating the death toll of Iraqi civilians
found that more than 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US-led
invasion and occupation of the country. In November 2004, the reputed
and peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated the
death toll to be 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children. The
estimate was conservative because it did no include the atrocity of
Fallujah.
The second independent study was by the Iraqiyun Humanitarian
Organization in Baghdad which reported that at least 128,000 Iraqis
have been killed since the US invasion began in March 2003. Dr. Hatim
al-'Alwani, head of Iraqiyun, said that 55 per cent of those killed
have been women and children aged 12 and under. The Iraqiyun compiled
its data from relatives and families of the deceased, as well as from
Iraqi hospitals throughout Iraq. However, the 128,000 figure includes
only those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths and does
not include those were abducted, assassinated or simply disappeared by
the US forces and their collaborators. The number is also includes
those who killed by US forces during that attacks on Fallujah and the
town Qa'im in western Iraq. In addition, tens of thousands of innocent
Iraqi men, women and children are imprisoned without charges. They are
abused, tortured and denied their human rights. Many Iraqi prisoners
and detainees have been murdered in cold-blooded and cowardice fashions
by US-British killers.
As part of US-British war propaganda, Iraqi dead are not counted,
because they are considered inhumane. And even when Iraqi dead are
counted the number of dead is squeezed to serve a crafted purpose. The
July 13, 2005 report by the England-based Iraqi Body Count (IBC)
estimated that Iraqi civilian casualties to be between 22,838 and
25,869, an extremely deflated number and contradicts previous credible
counts. The report is deliberately misleading and designed to normalise
the atrocity and blame the violence on Iraqis, ignoring the US
Occupation as the main cause of the violence today.
When 55 people died in the 7/7 London attack, Westerners and their
allies were in arms condemning the crimes and demanding that the
“perpetrators” be brought to justice for their crimes. However, when
128,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children are murdered by the
policy and violent actions of their Western leaders, the silence is
deafening. The perpetrators of these war crimes were rewarded and
re-elected to high office, thanks to powerful media distortions and
blindfolded “moral values”. There is no two minutes of silence for the
mass slaughter of Iraqi children.
More than two years of brutal Occupation, US plan for Iraq remains
unchanged: the Iraqisation of the Occupation and the violence. This is
done by franchising (contracting) the US violence to US-created local
militia groups, and removing the occupying forces from Iraqi cities and
towns to more protected areas. In other words, the Occupation will be
localised by replacing foreign forces with the US-created Iraqi forces
– the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iranian-trained BADR Brigade, the Wolf
Brigade, including the Chalabi’s thugs, and Al-Hussein Brigade. The
essential criteria to join the echelons of these forces are previous
experience in corruption and pro-Occupation skills in torture and human
rights abuse. They are rightly called the “dogs of the Occupation” by
Iraqis for their brutality and subservient to US forces and CIA
officials.
The militia groups work closely with the Occupation, carrying out US
orders of random house raids, mass arrests of innocent people, and
major violent operations against Iraqi civilians, and anti-Occupation
Resistance. Together with the occupying forces these militia groups are
embarking on violent crimes against Iraqi civilians in order to distort
the image of the Iraqi Resistance and weaken its popular supports. The
US aim in Iraq is to create an atmosphere of terror in order to
terrorise the population and instil fear in Iraqis’ daily life. At the
same time, the US is encouraging sectarian strife and religious
fundamentalism as a way of undermining secular and nationalist
resistance movements.
The strategy is an old imperialist strategy designed to allow the
imperialist forces to role by proxy behind an Iraqi façade. This will
provide safe enclaves for the occupying forces and reduces their
casualties. The occupying forces will be used only in an emergency
situation to protect the puppets. In other words, foreign forces will
be used only when the puppeteers are in danger of loosing control to
suppress the Iraqi people. In addition, public opinion in the US and
Europe will be manipulated through US-crafted rigged elections and fake
sovereignty, depicted as “political process” towards “democracy”.
It is this “political process” and the US-style “democracy” which have
been promoted for Iraq by the US-Western governments, Western media and
Western liberal elites (left and right). Iraqis, who reject this
colonial dictatorship, are labelled “insurgents”. It is an old agenda
of Western imperialism and has nothing to do with the ordinary Iraqi
people. Its aim is to colonise Iraq and siphoned off its wealth into
the bellies of US-Western corporations. It has been admirably rejected
by the Iraqi people. Iraqis are universally united against the
Occupation, and blame the Occupation forces for the continuing violence
in their country.
Speaking at the ceremony to commemorate the Srebrenica “massacre”, the
British foreign secretary, Jack Straw said; it was “a shame on the
international community that this evil took place under our noses. I
particularly regret this, and I am deeply sorry”. It was very
misleading statement because Mr Straw is very aware that “this evil
took place” again ten years later with his government full cooperation
to massacre the people of Fallujah and obliterate their once vibrant
city. Like the “massacre” of Srebrenica, the massacre Fallujah was
premeditated war crimes in contravention of the Geneva Convention, the
US War Crimes Act and the UN Charter.
It has been suggested by law experts that the Fallujah massacre was the
perfect case to indict the president of the United States with war
crime under US law. The Fallujah genocide is a clear breach of the
Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions. “You couldn't have a more grave
breach of the Geneva Conventions than that”, said Naom Chomsky citing
the US War Crimes Act which was passed by a Republican Congress in 1996.
It is worth remembering that in the Nuremberg they did not try
soldiers, and they didn't try unit commanders, they tried the people
who sold the war. One of those on trial , the German foreign minister
(1938–45), Joachim von Ribbentrop, was convicted as a war criminal and
hanged because of participation in the supreme international crime
which ‘encompasses all the evil that follows’. Shouldn’t the world
community follow the same justice and try those who instigated the
illegal war on Iraq? Or are the West’s war crimes tribunals and
international criminal courts part of the imperial strategy?
Unlike Srebrenica, we know that the ultimate responsibility for the
massacres of Fallujah, Baghdad and other Iraqi cities rests with the US
Secretary of Defence, Ronald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
There is an overwhelming prima facia evidence to formally indict those
who committed this international war crime against the Iraqi people.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia
:: Article nr. 13981 sent on 23-jul-2005 05:13 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=13981
:: The incoming address of this article is :
www.countercurrents.org/iraq-hassan220705.htm
Srebrenica and the Politics of War Crimes
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/index.htm
# On Falluja see also / su Falluja vedi anche:
Falluja: il peggior massacro americano in Iraq (LINKS)
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/4482
Guai a occuparsi di Falluja
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/4227
IRAQ = JUGOSLAVIJA / 12: Cronache da Falluja
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3486
IRAQ = JUGOSLAVIJA / 9: FALLUJA COME ORADOUR, LIDICE, KRAGUJEVAC...
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3466
IRAQ = JUGOSLAVIJA / 1: Eyewitness Report from Falluja
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3432 ]
Remembering Srebrenica, Thinking Of Fallujah
Ghali Hassan, Countercurrents.org
22 July, 2005 - On July 11, 2005, American and European leaders
gathered at a ceremony in Srebrenica marking the 10th anniversary of
the death of “at least 8000 Bosnians men and boys” during the war in
Bosnia. As usual, the news of the anniversary was broadcast live
throughout the Western world, and the alleged atrocity was compared
only to that of Fascism (“Europe’s worst massacre since World War II”).
Will Western leaders who commemorated Srebrenica “massacre” and
promised to bring the indicted leaders to justice apply the same
standards of justice to those who committed the Fallujah massacre?
The small Bosnian town of Srebrenica was (supposedly) “protected” by
the UN as a “safe area” at the time when the alleged 8,000 Muslims
(loved to death by the US and its Western allies) were slaughtered by
Serb forces in 1995 while the 370 Dutch military contingents stood by.
The same was repeated few years later in Kosovo when NATO/UN forces
stood by while Albanian terrorists (the KLA) kidnapped, tortured and
murdered Serbs and Gypsies. The Srebrenica “massacre” was just a
propaganda coup for the US-NATO war against the Republic of Yugoslavia.
Subsequently, the US-NATO used the “massacre” to intervene on behalf of
the Bosnian Muslim leaders in the war against Serb forces and in
pursuit of their own imperialist agenda. The aim was to break up the
Republic of Yugoslavia and colonise Bosnia and Kosovo. Credible
evidence provided by US and Western sources showed that the number of
the so-called at least “8000 Muslims” killed by Serbian forces was
inflated to provide the US-NATO with a “humanitarian” pretext to
demonise the Serbs, and gain public relations support for military
intervention in the region. European humanitarian organisations
estimated that between 80,000 and 102,000 Bosnians died during the
Bosnian war (1992-1995).
It is also noteworthy several US reports (e.g. US Senate Staff Report
and the Foreign Military Studies) have accused the Bosnian forces of
deliberately attacking their own Bosnian civilians (e.g. the “Breadline
Massacre” in 1992, and the “Market Massacre” in 1994 and 1995) in order
to get US-NATO to come to their aid against Serb forces.
In addition, the Srebrenica “massacre” was also used by the Croatian
regime (the darling of Western Fascism) as a smokescreen to conduct an
overt criminal policy of ethnic cleansing Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in
Western Bosnia and the Serbian inhabitants of the Krajina in Croatia.
According to Edward Herman, America’s most astute critical reformist,
massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities against Serbs and Bosnian
Muslims was “carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support
within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have involved
the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed
in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were
fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bussed the Srebrenica
women and children to safety; the Croatians made no such provision and
many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina”.
Like the war on Iraq, the US-NATO war on Yugoslavia was an act of
aggression that destroyed the entire Republic and killed an unknown
large number of Serbs, the war largest victim. Over a million people
(now live in Serbia) are displaced refugees from Krajina, Bosnia and
Kosovo as a result of a fascist policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and an
illegal war against Yugoslavia.
The Srebrenica “massacre” was universally condemned in Europe and the
US as “genocide” and crimes against humanity. The Serbs who have been
accused of the killings were described by Western governments and
Western media as “Serb evils”. They are indicted for war crimes and
promises have been made to bring them to “justice”, that is, Western
justice. However when something worse than the Srebrenica “massacre”
happened in Fallujah, it was described by Western leaders and their
media accomplices as a “necessary step to hold elections and bring
freedom and democracy” to Iraq.
The Iraqi city was the subject of heavy US bombardments before and
after the 2003 Occupation. In November 2004, US occupying forces
embarked on “pacifying” the city of Fallujah in order to make an
“example” of Western brutality. Water, food and electricity were cut
off to the city of 300,000 citizens - in violation of the Geneva
Conventions. The aim was to empty the city of its women, children, and
the elderly while preventing the departure of able-bodied males from
leaving, then US forces bombed the city with all the remaining
civilians. Many people were able to leave, but others stayed in their
homes.
For several weeks, US forces bombed the city continuously, with
deliberate violence that has been described as “war crimes”. US
helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter planes, using legally banned
Napalm-type firebombs (MK77s type bombs used in Vietnam) and bombs as
heavy as 500 lb (220 kg), are attacking population centres and shopping
malls. From the air and from the grounds, US forces indiscriminately
killed civilians holding white flags or white clothes over their heads,
murdered the wounded fighters, killed unarmed Iraqis who had been taken
prisoner, and destroyed mosques, hospitals, and health centres
protected under international law.
All males between the ages of 16 and 60 years old were slaughtered. US
forces attacked and occupied the Fallujah Hospitals to prevent the
publication and counting of civilian casualties. Patients and doctors
in the Hospital were taken hostages and abused by US forces and their
Iraqi collaborators. “Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors
have been shot, emergency medicines blocked. Children have been
murdered in front of their families. Now imagine the same state of
affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of
the bombing”, wrote John Pilger.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on 18 December 2004, that US unit
commanders revealed that their troops had orders to shoot all males of
fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed. According to the
Red Cross spokesman and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, more than 6,000
people have been killed and many more have been injured in the first
three weeks of the unprovoked US attacks. The entire city was destroyed
and rendered uninhabitable by humans. Currently there are some 250,000
people reported as being internally displaced by the atrocity. Law
experts have described the atrocity of Fallujah as war crimes and
breach of the Geneva Convention and US Law. It is part of an illegal
war of aggression that has needlessly caused the suffering and death of
thousands of innocent people.
Two independent studies investigating the death toll of Iraqi civilians
found that more than 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US-led
invasion and occupation of the country. In November 2004, the reputed
and peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated the
death toll to be 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children. The
estimate was conservative because it did no include the atrocity of
Fallujah.
The second independent study was by the Iraqiyun Humanitarian
Organization in Baghdad which reported that at least 128,000 Iraqis
have been killed since the US invasion began in March 2003. Dr. Hatim
al-'Alwani, head of Iraqiyun, said that 55 per cent of those killed
have been women and children aged 12 and under. The Iraqiyun compiled
its data from relatives and families of the deceased, as well as from
Iraqi hospitals throughout Iraq. However, the 128,000 figure includes
only those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths and does
not include those were abducted, assassinated or simply disappeared by
the US forces and their collaborators. The number is also includes
those who killed by US forces during that attacks on Fallujah and the
town Qa'im in western Iraq. In addition, tens of thousands of innocent
Iraqi men, women and children are imprisoned without charges. They are
abused, tortured and denied their human rights. Many Iraqi prisoners
and detainees have been murdered in cold-blooded and cowardice fashions
by US-British killers.
As part of US-British war propaganda, Iraqi dead are not counted,
because they are considered inhumane. And even when Iraqi dead are
counted the number of dead is squeezed to serve a crafted purpose. The
July 13, 2005 report by the England-based Iraqi Body Count (IBC)
estimated that Iraqi civilian casualties to be between 22,838 and
25,869, an extremely deflated number and contradicts previous credible
counts. The report is deliberately misleading and designed to normalise
the atrocity and blame the violence on Iraqis, ignoring the US
Occupation as the main cause of the violence today.
When 55 people died in the 7/7 London attack, Westerners and their
allies were in arms condemning the crimes and demanding that the
“perpetrators” be brought to justice for their crimes. However, when
128,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children are murdered by the
policy and violent actions of their Western leaders, the silence is
deafening. The perpetrators of these war crimes were rewarded and
re-elected to high office, thanks to powerful media distortions and
blindfolded “moral values”. There is no two minutes of silence for the
mass slaughter of Iraqi children.
More than two years of brutal Occupation, US plan for Iraq remains
unchanged: the Iraqisation of the Occupation and the violence. This is
done by franchising (contracting) the US violence to US-created local
militia groups, and removing the occupying forces from Iraqi cities and
towns to more protected areas. In other words, the Occupation will be
localised by replacing foreign forces with the US-created Iraqi forces
– the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iranian-trained BADR Brigade, the Wolf
Brigade, including the Chalabi’s thugs, and Al-Hussein Brigade. The
essential criteria to join the echelons of these forces are previous
experience in corruption and pro-Occupation skills in torture and human
rights abuse. They are rightly called the “dogs of the Occupation” by
Iraqis for their brutality and subservient to US forces and CIA
officials.
The militia groups work closely with the Occupation, carrying out US
orders of random house raids, mass arrests of innocent people, and
major violent operations against Iraqi civilians, and anti-Occupation
Resistance. Together with the occupying forces these militia groups are
embarking on violent crimes against Iraqi civilians in order to distort
the image of the Iraqi Resistance and weaken its popular supports. The
US aim in Iraq is to create an atmosphere of terror in order to
terrorise the population and instil fear in Iraqis’ daily life. At the
same time, the US is encouraging sectarian strife and religious
fundamentalism as a way of undermining secular and nationalist
resistance movements.
The strategy is an old imperialist strategy designed to allow the
imperialist forces to role by proxy behind an Iraqi façade. This will
provide safe enclaves for the occupying forces and reduces their
casualties. The occupying forces will be used only in an emergency
situation to protect the puppets. In other words, foreign forces will
be used only when the puppeteers are in danger of loosing control to
suppress the Iraqi people. In addition, public opinion in the US and
Europe will be manipulated through US-crafted rigged elections and fake
sovereignty, depicted as “political process” towards “democracy”.
It is this “political process” and the US-style “democracy” which have
been promoted for Iraq by the US-Western governments, Western media and
Western liberal elites (left and right). Iraqis, who reject this
colonial dictatorship, are labelled “insurgents”. It is an old agenda
of Western imperialism and has nothing to do with the ordinary Iraqi
people. Its aim is to colonise Iraq and siphoned off its wealth into
the bellies of US-Western corporations. It has been admirably rejected
by the Iraqi people. Iraqis are universally united against the
Occupation, and blame the Occupation forces for the continuing violence
in their country.
Speaking at the ceremony to commemorate the Srebrenica “massacre”, the
British foreign secretary, Jack Straw said; it was “a shame on the
international community that this evil took place under our noses. I
particularly regret this, and I am deeply sorry”. It was very
misleading statement because Mr Straw is very aware that “this evil
took place” again ten years later with his government full cooperation
to massacre the people of Fallujah and obliterate their once vibrant
city. Like the “massacre” of Srebrenica, the massacre Fallujah was
premeditated war crimes in contravention of the Geneva Convention, the
US War Crimes Act and the UN Charter.
It has been suggested by law experts that the Fallujah massacre was the
perfect case to indict the president of the United States with war
crime under US law. The Fallujah genocide is a clear breach of the
Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions. “You couldn't have a more grave
breach of the Geneva Conventions than that”, said Naom Chomsky citing
the US War Crimes Act which was passed by a Republican Congress in 1996.
It is worth remembering that in the Nuremberg they did not try
soldiers, and they didn't try unit commanders, they tried the people
who sold the war. One of those on trial , the German foreign minister
(1938–45), Joachim von Ribbentrop, was convicted as a war criminal and
hanged because of participation in the supreme international crime
which ‘encompasses all the evil that follows’. Shouldn’t the world
community follow the same justice and try those who instigated the
illegal war on Iraq? Or are the West’s war crimes tribunals and
international criminal courts part of the imperial strategy?
Unlike Srebrenica, we know that the ultimate responsibility for the
massacres of Fallujah, Baghdad and other Iraqi cities rests with the US
Secretary of Defence, Ronald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
There is an overwhelming prima facia evidence to formally indict those
who committed this international war crime against the Iraqi people.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia
:: Article nr. 13981 sent on 23-jul-2005 05:13 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=13981
:: The incoming address of this article is :
www.countercurrents.org/iraq-hassan220705.htm