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Category: United Nations

  • UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want

     

    The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.

    Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.

    It was “nonbinding,” they said.

    NYT: U.N. Security Council Calls for Immediate Cease-Fire in Gaza as U.S. Abstains

    The New York Times (3/25/24) reported that US’s UN Ambassdor “Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution ‘nonbinding’”—and let no one contradict her.

    That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision. That article focused initially on how Resolution 2728 (which followed three resolutions that the US had vetoed, and a fourth that was so watered down that China and Russia vetoed it instead) had led to a diplomatic dust-up with the Israeli government: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned visit to Washington by a high-level Israeli delegation to discuss Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah and the future of Gaza and the West Bank.

    The Times quoted Richard Gowan, a UN expert at the International Crisis Group: “The abstention is a not-too-coded hint to Netanyahu to rein in operations, above all over Rafah.”

    Noting that “Security Council resolutions are considered to be international law,” Times reporters Farnaz Fassihi, Aaron Boxerman and Thomas Fuller wrote, “While the Council has no means of enforcing the resolution, it could impose punitive measures, such as sanctions, on Israel, so long as member states agreed.”

    This was nevertheless followed by a quote from Washington’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who abstained from the otherwise unanimous 14–0 vote of the rest of the Security Council, characterizing the resolution as “nonbinding.”

    The Times offered no comment from any international law scholars, foreign or US, to rebut or even discuss that claim. Such an expert might have pointed to the unequivocal language of Article 25 of the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

    If the US offered its claim that this language only applies to resolutions explicitly referencing the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, dealing with “threats to the peace,” an international law expert (EJIL: Talk!, 1/9/17) might note that the International Court of Justice stated in 1971, “It is not possible to find in the Charter any support for this view.”

    ‘Creates obligations’

    WaPo: What the U.N. cease-fire resolution means for Gaza and how countries voted

    The Washington Post (3/26/24) quoted an international law expert to note that the resolution “creates obligations for Israel and Hamas.”

    The Washington Post (3/26/24), though like the Times a firm defender of Washington’s foreign policy consensus, did marginally better. While the Times didn’t mention Britain or France, both major US NATO allies, in its piece on the Security Council vote, the Post noted that the four other veto powers—Britain and France, as well as China and Russia—had all voted in favor of the resolution, along with all 10 elected temporary members of the Council.

    The Post also cited one international law legal expert, Donald Rothwell, of the Australian National University, who said the “even-handed” resolution “creates obligations for Israel and Hamas.”

    While that quote sounds like the resolution is binding, the Post went on to cite Gowan as saying, “I think it’s pretty clear that if Israel does not comply with the resolution, the Biden administration is not going to allow the Security Council members to impose sanctions or other penalties on Israel.”

    The Post (3/25/24) actually ran a stronger, more straightforward piece a day earlier, when it covered the initial vote using an AP story. AP did a fairer job discussing the fraught issue of whether or not the resolution was binding on the warring parties, Israel and Hamas (as well as the nations arming them).

    That earlier AP piece, by journalist Edith M. Lederer, quoted US National Security spokesperson John Kirby as explaining that they decided not to veto the resolution because it “does fairly reflect our view that a ceasefire and the release of hostages come together.”

    Because of the cutbacks to in-house reporting on national and international news  in most of the nation’s major news organizations, most Americans who get their news from television and their local papers end up getting dispatches—often edited for space—from the New York Times, Washington Post or AP wire stories. (The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran the same AP report as the Post.)

    ‘A demand is a decision’

    CNN: The US allowed a Gaza ceasefire resolution to pass at the UN. What does that mean for the war?

    CNN (3/27/24) quoted US officials claiming the resolution was nonbinding—and noted that “international legal scholars” disagree.

    In TV news, CNN (3/27/24) had some of the strongest reporting on the debate over whether the resolution was binding. The news channel said straight out, “While the UN says the latest resolution is nonbinding, experts differ on whether that is the case.”

    It went on to say:

    After the resolution passed, US officials went to great lengths to say that the resolution isn’t binding. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller repeatedly said during a news conference that the resolution is nonbinding, before conceding that the technical details of are for international lawyers to determine. Similarly, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby and US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield separately insisted that the resolution is nonbinding.

    Those US positions were challenged by China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun, who “countered that such resolutions are indeed binding,” and by UN spokesperson Farhan Haq, who said Security Council resolutions are international law, and “so to that extent they are as binding as international law is.”

    CNN quoted Maya Ungar, another International Crisis Group analyst:

    The US—ascribing to a legal tradition that takes a narrower interpretation—argues that without the use of the word “decides” or evocation of Chapter VII within the text, the resolution is nonbinding…. Other member states and international legal scholars are arguing that there is legal precedence to the idea that a demand is implicitly a decision of the Council.

    ‘A rhetorical feint’

    Guardian: Biden administration’s Gaza strategy panned as ‘mess’ amid clashing goals

    According to the Guardian (3/26/24), the US’s “nonbinding” interpretation “put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.”

    To get a sense of how one-sided or at best cautious the US domestic coverage of this critically urgent story is, consider how it was covered in Britain or Spain, two US allies in NATO.

    The British Guardian (3/26/24), which also publishes a US edition, ran with the headline: “Biden Administration’s Gaza Strategy Panned as ‘Mess’ Amid Clashing Goals.” The story began:

    The Biden administration’s policy on Gaza has been widely criticized as being in disarray as the defense secretary described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” the day after the State Department declared Israel to be in compliance with international humanitarian law.

    Washington was also on the defensive on Tuesday over its claim that a UN security Council ceasefire resolution on which it abstained was nonbinding, an interpretation that put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.

    But the real contrast is with the Spanish newspaper El País (3/29/24), which bluntly headlined its story “US Sparks Controversy at the UN With Claim That Gaza Ceasefire Resolution Is ‘Nonbinding.’” Not mincing words, the reporters wrote:

    By abstaining in the vote on the UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the United States on Monday sparked not only the anger of Israel, which had asked it to veto the text, but also a sweeping legal and diplomatic controversy due to its claims that the resolution—the first to be passed since the start of the Gaza war—was “nonbinding.” For Washington, it was a rhetorical feint aimed at making the public blow to its great ally in the Middle East less obvious.

    El Pais: US sparks controversy at the UN with claim that Gaza ceasefire resolution is ‘non-binding’

    El País (3/29/24) quoted the relevant language from the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

    After quoting Thompson-Greenfield saying it was a “nonbinding resolution,” and Kirby saying dismissively, “There is no impact at all on Israel,” they wrote,

    These claims hit the UN Security Council—the highest executive body of the UN in charge of ensuring world peace and security—like a torpedo. Were the Council’s resolutions binding or not? Our was it that some resolutions were binding and others were not?

    The reporters answered their own rhetorical question:

    Diplomatic representatives and legal experts came out in force to refute Washington’s claim. UN Secretary-General António Guterres made his opinion clear: the resolutions are binding. Indeed, this is stated in Article 25 of the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.” Several representatives of the Security Council, led by Mozambique and Sierra Leone, pointed to case law to support this argument. The two African diplomats, both with legal training, said that the Gaza ceasefire resolution is binding, regardless of whether one of the five permanent members of the Council abstains from the vote, as was the case of the US. The diplomats highlighted that in 1971, the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) established that all resolutions of the UN Security Council are legally binding. The Algerian ambassador to the UN summed it up even more categorically: “Security Council resolutions are binding. Not almost, not partly, not maybe.”

    Unlike most most US news organizations, El País went to an expert, in this instance seeking out Adil Haque, a professor of international law at Rutgers University, where he is a professor, and also executive editor of the law journal Just Security. Haque, they wrote, “has no doubts that the resolution is binding.” He explains in the article:

    According to the UN Charter, all decisions of the Security Council are binding on all member states. The International Court of Justice has ruled that a resolution need not mention Chapter VII of the Charter [action in case of threats to the peace, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression], refer to international peace and security, or use the word “decides” to make it binding. Any resolution that uses “mandatory language” creates obligations, and that includes the term “demands” used in the resolution on Gaza.” He adds, “For now, it does not seem that the US has a coherent legal argument.”

    It should be noted that the New York Times, when there is a dispute regarding a document, typically runs a copy of the document in question—or, if it is too long, the relevant portion of it. In the case of Resolution 2728, which even counting its headline only runs 263 words, that would have not been a hard call. Despite the disagreement between the US and most of the Council over the wording of the ceasefire resolution, the Times chose not to run or even excerpt it.

    The post UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Unbecoming American: Diplomacy and Distraction


    The importance of “peace” in the rhetoric of the West lies not in the sincerity with which it is preached. Rather “peace”, like the DIE dogma emerging from the recent Awakening Crusade (Wokism) is a term of invidious distraction. The intensity and frequency of its use is determined by the underlying concept of domination. As opposed to actual peace, i.e. the absence of hostilities, “peace” is a political and psychological warfare device deployed for what could be called “terminological” or “linguistic” denial.

    Just as the US Forces, operating behind the United Nations banner in Korea, wantonly destroyed civilian infrastructure from 1951-1953 in order to deny Koreans access to their own country, the strategic aim of “peace”, in whatever form it is praised or promoted, is to deny enemies not only the control of the story line (the cliché “narrative” applies here) but also of the vocabulary to express their interests. Saturation bombing, the West’s tactic of choice, applies to language as well as to dropping high explosive as a means to silence the foe.

    Deprived of the use of the terminology of peace, the defendants opposing Western aggression are forced to use the language of war. As a result, pleas to avoid or prevent war can be translated into belligerent intentions. The West has led the world in the development and proliferation of public deliberative bodies, electoral machinery and mass media. The constant praise and attention given to parliaments, congresses and legislative assemblies is not an expression of vital democratic processes or the active translation of popular will into government action. Instead the purpose of these bodies and the mechanisms for filling them with people is to create and maintain what are best understood as public language machines. Qualifications for membership, beyond certain demographic specifications, demonstrate potential capacity to produce and reproduce the systemic language output the surplus of which is deployed to overwhelm or occlude any other forms of expression.

    This overproduction of verbiage and cant is often decried as a malfunction of deliberative assemblies. However that is an error. Just as a jury trial should not be confused with scientific fact-finding and assessment, the written product of deliberative assemblies is not the distillation of popular will.

    The difference between philosophy and science, a relatively recent distinction, is that philosophy comprises exercises in how to respond to explanations (hierarchical verbal behaviour) while science comprises the exercises in verbalizing the non-verbal, sometimes known as facts or the real world, i.e. the empirical frontier. Philosophy was once subsumed by theology and science was nothing more than a more detailed articulation of the statements subsumed by philosophy, in turn subsumed by theology. So human experience at the empirical frontier was subsumed by religious categories and thus governed by those especially privileged and empowered to approve or disapprove the order in which those statements were subsumed. These approvals in turn were subsumed by theocratic explanations the termination of which was “god”.

    For what has turned out to be a brief period, less than two hundred years, science comprised practices and explanations that largely dispensed with theological termini. Toward the end of the 20th century, that changed. Science was reintegrated into religion. Instead of science being the collective and individual activity of investigating the empirical frontier and producing statements and practices that facilitated the useful manipulation of the environment, Science became the system in which Truth was uttered through rituals and sacraments prescribed by largely inaccessible sacred texts. The trigger for this reversal of humanism and return to a sacerdotal system was the Manhattan Project. The largest single scientific research project in modern history, the Manhattan Project captured virtually every scholarly and technical faculty in the US to produce the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever invented. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the ultimate demonstration of Western nihilism. This gratuitous crucifixion of two entire cities not only raised the United States to the primacy of violence. It also demonstrated the culmination of Western imperialism. As Harvard professor Samuel Huntington concisely remarked in his notorious book Clash of Civilizations (1994):

    The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

    The organization that produced these weapons and gave the United States the power of international extortion also destroyed what remained of independent science. At the same time the enormous – billions in today’s money—funds that built the fission bombs and later the thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs also began the rampant manipulation of living matter known as genetic engineering. Together these two technologies of future terror were wrapped in permanent secrecy. A new priesthood was created. Instead of doctors of divine theology ordained by bishops and ruled by an absolutist pope in Rome, this new sacerdotal class was ordained with security clearances, i.e. access to secrets and sacred oaths to keep them. The possession of superhuman destructive power was initially concealed by myths of wartime necessity. Until the 1970s, the pontiffs on the Potomac preached that such a horrible weapon would be sinful to use. They also did whatever was possible to prevent other nations from sharing this weaponry. Then the rhetoric of “peace” was applied once the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bombs, culminating with the Tsar Bomba. Disarmament and arms control were pursued by the US Government as a means of concealing the original intent of the weapons and the subsequent technological advances as well as impeding Soviet weapons development. Conveniently ignoring the acquisition of atomic bomb building capacity by the state that occupied Palestine after 1947, the US also successfully concealed the fact that its atomic bomb was built to destroy the Soviet Union (and eventually the People’s Republic of China). Despite the declassification of the Sandia oral history of US strategic policy—in which these objectives had been very clearly articulated—the “peace” screen has hidden the atomic core of US aggressive policy from most of the public, both in the US and abroad.

    This concealment was an intentional product of the restructuring of Science as the cult of national war policy, euphemistically called “defence”. The complement to this restoration of religious control over the pursuit of scientific knowledge was the imposition of the private-public partnership known as the United Nations. Advertised as a “new and improved” version of the League of Nations formed after the Great War, this union of the victors from the Second World War was supposed to guard the world from future ravages of war. It initially comprised five bodies. The administration was vested in the Secretariat. The general powers were awarded to a representative General Assembly comprising all member-states on the principle of one state-one vote. The task of peacekeeping was vested in the Security Council selected by the General Assembly with each of the leading Allied powers (the US, UK, France, the USSR and Republic of China) endowed with a veto over any decision taken by the Security Council (and thus a check on potential majorities that might form in the General Assembly). In addition an Economic and Social Council was charged with social development issues and the Trusteeship Council was erected to deal with what the Charter called “non-self-governing territories”, i.e. countries still subject to League of Nations mandate or colonial rule. Quickly the Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council were relegated to the backwaters of international diplomacy. The General Assembly was reduced to a debating society. In essence the Security Council and the international diplomatic corps employed by the Secretariat became the only functional organs of this great peacekeeping institution.

    It did not take long before even the pretence of peacekeeping became a dead letter. The senior intergovernmental organization of the post-war era is itself party to the longest continuing war in modern history—the US invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1945, the civil war it triggered and the United Nations (US in cognito) forces, less the now defunct Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, against the people of Korea, since 1951 constituted as the People’s Democratic Republic (North) and the Republic of Korea (South). There has not been a single armed conflict since 1945 in which the United Nations, acting through the Security Council, has successfully prevented war or restored peace. On the contrary, the domination of the Security Council by the United States has assured that the so-called Blue Helmets have become the Trojan horses for the Western powers in every part of the world they were deployed. Their principal mission has been to prevent local populations from deciding their internal affairs in any way that might conflict with the interests of the United States, Great Britain or France.

    How is it that such sacred trust as the world was told it could place in this great peacekeeping institution could be so consistently betrayed no sooner than the ink had dried in San Francisco? Surely the member-states, initially 45 and now 194, would object to such hypocrisy and aggressive exploitation of international organs. Wasn’t everyone agreed that the horrors of war, demonstrated in the carnage from the Oder to the Yalu between 1936 and 1945, were awful enough? After all the Kellogg-Briand Pact adopted in the interwar period as a cornerstone of international law has not been repudiated by any of the permanent members of the Security Council. Why do governments and peoples accept this regime of constant war against peoples and their human rights to peaceful development and self-determination?

    There are major obstacles and they were built into the system, not accidentally but by virtue of the absolute command of destructive power held by the United States and its vassals. First of all there was the secret power of the atomic bomb and the US regime’s demonstrated willingness to use it against civilians en masse. Then there was the veto power bestowed upon three of the empires with the least interest in any change of the status quo. Although not formally part of the United Nations organization, the Bretton Woods accords created, under US control, the weapons of mass economic destruction known as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Second World War had devastated most of the world’s industrial capacity and disrupted international trade. This left the US not only with its tools for financial manipulation. It created a global captive market for the only country whose industrial and agricultural capacity was untouched by the previous thirty years of violent havoc. Finally the destruction of state power in much of the world extended to both political and civil institutions. It gave the United States oligopoly in the market for consumer goods and information, including entertainment.

    Although the Soviet Union had armed itself with powerful atomic weapons this was a purely defensive posture. As US experts knew the USSR would need at least 20 years to recover both in terms of population and economy to pre-war levels. When POTUS Harry Truman repudiated the Yalta agreements concluded by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he aggravated the conditions that would isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. By refusing to recognize the People’s Republic of China, the US enforced the de facto blockade of most of Asia. This would be magnified by carpet-bombing Korea and Vietnam, instigating the murder of some one million Indonesians and the continuing slaughter of Congolese and other inhabitants of Central Africa. Cuba, still subject to a blockade the UN cannot end, is the only country that has been able to resist invasion by US/ UN troops or proxies.

    So what does the United Nations really do, if it does not keep the peace?

    As the pinnacle of international and intergovernmental diplomacy, the United Nations is the highest deliberative body on the planet. And there it is possible to see its true function. The United Nations is an institution created for distraction and denial. Within its chambers, talk of “peace” substitutes for peace. Its specialized agencies are staffed primarily by agents and assets of the US and its vassals, who owe their assignments and extensive diplomatic privileges to the patronage of the US and the corporations for which it stands. Instead of supporting member-states with the putative expertise available, these transnational bureaucrats apply the resources fed to the United Nations to manipulate national and local policies. Even the promise of appointments or the extension of membership privileges to the diplomatic corps of small and medium-sized states provides bribery or extortion at arm’s length for the corporate interests and foreign policies of the Allied permanent members. The absolute veto power prevents any serious initiative from the General Assembly from being carried into action even if adopted by large majorities in that house.

    The “talk” of peace and peacekeeping is not only the inalienable prerogative of the paramount member. By virtue of the control US-based corporations hold over the global mass media, even that talk can erupt at will into a tsunami of “peace” and “reconciliation” or “human rights” or “free enterprise”. The subsequent flood drowns any alternative voices along with arguments and proposals that do not accord with the will of the US oligarchy. As recently as March of this year, a popular conservative journalist-commentator, Tucker Carlson, was told point blank by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, that even his most open, vocal and visible acts of goodwill toward the owners of the US and NATO would not be heard. Just like the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have no control over global mass media. There may be fans of genuine Russian vodka and millions may dine regularly on some version of Chinese cuisine. Yet none of this competes with Coca Cola and Levis. India may produce more films than Hollywood. Russian composers and authors may enjoy international fame. Everyone has heard of the Great Wall and has thousands of things stamped somewhere “Made in China”. Yet when peace is spoken in Moscow or Beijing it is still translated in the West as “not war”.

    For decades the vast majority of UN member-states have demanded an end to the atrocities by which the occupation of Palestine is enforced through a settler-colonial state apparatus. Yet the onus for peace is placed not on those who monopolize not only armed force and the language of “peace”. Instead the language of “peace” is applied together with incarceration, torture, murder and mayhem against those who pray for peace itself. Intergovernmental instruments and diplomacy are used aggressively to suppress any peace not commensurate with abject surrender.

    At least twenty million Soviet citizens died as a result of the West’s invasion of the Soviet Union by combined forces of Nazi Germany and occupied Ukraine. However the only deaths counted are the estimated six to seven million from Western Europe. The Western Allies in that massive slaughter regularly commemorate their Normandy invasion, only launched to deny the fruits of its unilateral defeat of the Wehrmacht. Until their viceroy, Boris Yeltsin, was replaced by the current President of the Russian Federation, this contempt and its underlying motives were ceremoniously concealed. Meanwhile the deliberative language machines have turned the invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, into a boxing match between the Western devil and the Eastern devil. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS are honored today, e.g. in the Canadian parliament, as early heroes of the continuous battle against Russia. This is not hypocrisy or a mistake. Rather it is the admission of what “peace in our time” was intended to deliver. The some 20 million Chinese that were killed by the Japanese invasion, tolerated by the West in its morbid desire for the extermination of communists, do not count at all. Yet a fraction of the overall war deaths continues to justify the occupation of the Middle East by Euro-Americans. To begin the continuing body count in the Congo—well over ten million since Belgium withdrew (after assassinating its first prime minister)—would be pointless. “Peace” in Africa still means the size of the “piece” of Africa owned or controlled by Western corporations—the same corporations that also profited by the deaths in Eastern Europe from 1939 – 1945.

    The United Nations is not useless as many are tempted to claim. On the contrary it has proven to be a very useful and highly profitable enterprise. By dominating international diplomatic language it diverts attention from the substance of diplomacy. As a cutout for covert military action and subversion, the United Nations diverts attention from the real belligerents in a world long dehydrated by war. Moreover, by its appropriation of the sacerdotal Science instituted since the Manhattan Project, the United Nations and its specialized agencies suppress genuine scientific investigation and the knowledge needed to remedy the illnesses caused by empires that refuse to die—or worse, that will only die by applying diversity, inclusion and equity to the graveyard to which their owners send people every day.

    There is a place for true diplomacy in the world. Conflicts among peoples are just as natural as they are among individuals. Problems solved also expose or create new ones to investigate and solve. That is what science with a small “s” promises humans. In fact that is the essence of humanism. Every explanation implies an organization. Conversely every organization can be understood as an explanation. The United Nations is an organization based on the explanation whose regress is terminated with the atomic bomb. Nearly seventy years cannot alter the fact that an organization borne with the genetic code of atomic annihilation will reproduce death in every generation. If talk of “peace” is to be replaced by peaceful action then clearly a new explanation for international relations is necessary. The language machines created for perpetual war have to be abandoned and real human beings restored to their dignity which includes restoring their language and their voices.

    The post Unbecoming American: Diplomacy and Distraction first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’:  CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about the Gaza ceasefire resolution for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Reuters: Russia, China veto US-led UN resolution on Gaza ceasefire

    Reuters (3/22/24)

    Janine Jackson: Reuters reported on March 22 that the United Nations Security Council had rejected a resolution, proposed by the US, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a hostage deal between the Israeli government and Hamas. Russia and China vetoed the measure, readers were told, while Algeria also voted no and Guyana abstained on a measure that “called for an immediate and sustained ceasefire lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

    US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cited in AP, said that the US had been “working on a hostage deal for months” that would call for a “six-week period of calm,” from which, she said, “we could then take the time and the steps to build a more enduring peace.” Well, what does that wording mean, and what do UN resolutions generally mean, if politicians and news media interpret them variously?

    So helping us to sift through these attempts to respond to the violence of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza is Phyllis Bennis; she’s senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and international advisor to Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as author of, among other titles, Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

    She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

    Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

    JJ: So the US introduced a resolution at the UN, nominally calling for a ceasefire, but also vetoed another resolution calling for a ceasefire, because, Thomas-Greenfield said, it would interfere with negotiations around freeing Israeli hostages. And then there’s this effort to portray the current decision as non-binding. It’s very confusing, especially for laypeople. Does the US want a real ceasefire or not? What’s happening here?

    Al Jazeera: A history of the US blocking UN resolutions against Israel

    Al Jazeera (5/19/21)

    PB: You raise all the right questions, Janine. The real issue has to do with the US view of the United Nations, which is that it’s annoying at best and a threat to US domination at worst, from Washington’s vantage point. So that earlier veto by Russia and China and opposition by Algeria, the abstention by Guyana, of the US resolution came after a history, a long history that goes back years, in fact, of the US vetoing calls for a ceasefire in situations when Israel is attacking, mostly Gaza, on occasion Lebanon, and the Security Council calls for a ceasefire, and the US says, “No, we don’t need a ceasefire yet.” Always meaning, “We haven’t killed enough people yet.” So there’s a long history of that. We don’t really have time to go into that.

    But the US did it twice in a row on the Gaza question, where there were proposals for a ceasefire that the US vetoed, which would’ve passed. The US refused. Then the US comes up with its own resolution, which was a very, very sneaky one, because that quote that you read about what it says, those words were indeed in the resolution, but it did not call for them. The resolution did not call for an immediate ceasefire. There was a recognition by the Security Council, according to this resolution, that a ceasefire would be a good idea, and then went on to say and  therefore the Security Council should go on cheerleading—they didn’t use that word—but saying should support the US-controlled negotiations that are already underway in Qatar.

    So it was a fake resolution. That’s why others did not like it, and weren’t willing to accept it as if it were an actual call. In international law, which is very complicated in a lot of ways, but certain parts of it are pretty clear. One of the parts that’s pretty clear, Article 25 of the UN Charter, says that all decisions, all resolutions, passed by the Security Council are international law. They’re all binding. That’s what the real world of international law says.

    So when a resolution is passed, it needs to say the Security Council demands a ceasefire, period, full stop. If it talks about how the Security Council recognizes that such and such would be a good idea, that’s nothing to be binding on, right? That’s just a statement of what we think is nice.

    Common Dreams: UN Security Council's Gaza Cease-Fire Resolution Is Not Enough—But It's a Start

    Common Dreams (3/25/24)

    So that’s what was distinctive, the new resolution that was passed just a few days ago that the United States was willing to allow to be passed, 14-to-0, with one abstention—the US abstained rather than vetoing it; that was a great step forward. And that one, crucially, did call for an immediate ceasefire, and it also called for release of all the hostages and compliance with international law in the treatment of all those detained by all sides, which is a clear reference to the Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding. And it also, crucially, demanded lifting all barriers to the massive amount of humanitarian assistance that’s desperately needed as famine is moving across Gaza. So that was a huge shift.

    At the same time, the US had weakened it in many ways. It removed the word “permanent” from the description of the ceasefire it was demanding, and said, “We just want a ‘lasting’ ceasefire”; nobody knows what that means. And, crucially, the other weakness was that the ceasefire is only called for for two weeks. It said that the ceasefire should last for the month of Ramadan, but it was passed two weeks into Ramadan, so there’s only about two weeks left, so that’s way too short. And there’s other limitations as well. But it was a very significant shift in the US position, and it really speaks to how the Biden administration is hearing, if not yet fully responding to, but feeling like they have to answer, the demands of this rising movement that is so powerful across the United States and now globally, saying we need a ceasefire now, and we need access for massive amounts of humanitarian aid, without any of the barriers that Israel is putting up.

    Those things are desperately needed, and what we’re looking at now is a question of how that movement is rising, what the impact could be on the elections, that’s one of the biggest pressure points for the Biden administration. If they want to win this election, they have to be seeing that the only way to do it is to change their policy on what has been, up until now, unconditional support for Israel.

    With all the language about criticisms of Netanyahu, and the massive amount of press  about how there’s this big divide between Biden and Netanyahu, between the US and Israel, that’s true only on the level of talking. On the level of acting, the US hasn’t changed a thing. $4 billion a year as a starting point of military aid; all the additional weapons that Israel wants, Israel gets.

    Al Jazeera: Minnesota’s ‘stunning’ uncommitted vote reveals enduring problem for Biden

    Al Jazeera (3/6/24)

    There’s just been no shift in the reality that the US is arming and financing a genocide, and as long as that’s underway, there’s people across this country that are mobilizing this “uncommitted” campaign, in places like Michigan and Minnesota, where those votes really matter, and it’s spreading. It’s about to happen in Wisconsin.

    And at the end of the day, this isn’t just about the election, this is about what has to happen to stop this genocide. And I think what has to happen is that there has to be a way of convincing Joe Biden personally, not just others in his administration.

    And right now, the pressure is rising, and the issue is going to be, how much longer can he keep up the political credibility, when he has people in his own administration resigning in protest of his policies? He has the staff of his own Biden/Harris campaign committee coming out with a public letter saying, “Mr. President, we can’t do our job. We can’t get you reelected with this policy.”

    You have the White House interns. This is my personal favorite of all these protests. These are the most ambitious kids in the country. They all want to be president, right? And yet they’re willing to come out and say, “Mr. President, we are not leaders today, but we aspire to lead in the future, and we can’t do it with this kind of a model, when there is a genocide underway.”

    So the US can do all it wants to say that this is a non-binding resolution, but that’s just not true. They can go out of their way to say that the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, that led to a finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocide right now, or is moving towards a genocide, that that extraordinary brief prepared by the South African legal team somehow is “meritless.” They can claim that, but the rest of the world isn’t buying it, and increasingly US voters aren’t buying it.

    JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I do see also just a lot of regular folks reading things like US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood calling for a “lengthy pause to this conflict” and saying, “Well, we’re not calling for a pause to the conflict. We’re calling for a resolution. We’re calling for a way forward.” And then you see with concerns about a wider war, we have folks like John Kirby, White House National Security Council, on the Today Show saying, “Well, we don’t want a wider war in the region, but we got to do what we have to do.”

    This is terrifying, but I also feel like folks are seeing through it. And so maybe let’s end on that note, that folks are figuring out that this politics-speak, they’re seeing it for what it is—and, more importantly, for what it isn’t.

    Phyllis Bennis

    Phyllis Bennis: “What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war.”

    PB: That’s exactly right, Janine, and I think the good news, if there is any in this extraordinarily devastating time of real genocide in real time in front of our eyes on an hourly basis, the good news is exactly as you say: More and more people in this country and globally are seeing through those false claims.

    It’s a false claim that the UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire is not binding. It is binding. It’s a false claim that the South African charges at the International Court of Justice were meritless. They had all the merit in the world.

    All of these claims are designed to distract us. It’s all a distraction. The change in language is a distraction.

    What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war. That’s not the point here. The point is to stop the fighting, stop the slaughter, stop the denial of food and water and medicine, which is deliberately causing massive starvation on a level that all of the experts in international humanitarian crises admit is the worst they have ever seen—not in terms of ultimate numbers, because the population in Gaza is not very big, but in terms of the percentage of people. Never have we seen 100% of a population facing extreme hunger, with 55% facing immediate famine. This has never happened before, as long as the international humanitarian organizations have been tracking famines. It’s shocking.

    And the fact that it is going on while we watch, with weapons we provide, that we pay for with our tax money, is finally reaching everybody in this country. More and more people are saying no, not in our name, not with our tax money, not anymore.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis. You can find her recent work on UN resolutions on Gaza on CommonDreams.org, as well as ips-dc.org.

    Phyllis Bennis, we have to end it here for today, but of course we’ll stay in conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    PB: Thank you, Janine.

     

    The post ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’:  <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Egypt Has Betrayed Palestinians in Their Time of Greatest Need

    “Famine is imminent” in northern Gaza, where an estimated 70 percent of the population faces catastrophic hunger, according to the United Nations Food Agency. Israeli journalist Zvi Bar’el reported that “Gazans are collecting weeds to prepare meals and mothers cannot breastfeed because they are so weak.” It took more than five months and the loss of more than 32,000 Palestinian lives for the UN…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starvation in Gaza: The World Court’s Latest Intervention

    Rarely has the International Court of Justice been so constantly exercised by one topic during a short span of time.  On January 26, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was applicable to the conflict in so far as Israel was bound to observe it in its military operations against Hamas in Gaza.  (The judges will determine, in due course, whether Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the genocidal threshold.)  By 15-2, the judges noted that “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.”

    At that point 26,000 Palestinians had perished, much of Gaza pummelled into oblivion, and 85% of its 2.3 million residents expelled from their homes.  Measures were therefore required to prevent “real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights found by the Court to be plausible, before it gives its final decision.”

    Israel was duly ordered to take all possible measures to prevent the commission of acts under Article II of the Genocide Convention; prevent and punish “the direct and public incitement to genocide” against the Gaza populace; permit basic services and humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip; ensure the preservation of, and prevent destruction of, evidence related to acts committed against Gaza’s Palestinians within Articles II and III of the Convention; and report to the ICJ on how Israel was abiding by such provisional measures within a month.  The balance sheet on that score has been uneven at best.

    Since then, the slaughter has continued, with the Palestinian death toll now standing at 32,300.  The Israelis have refused to open more land crossings into Gaza, and continue to hamper aid going into the strip, even as they accuse aid agencies and providers of being tardy and dishonest.  Their surly defiance of the United States has seen air drops of uneven, negligible success (the use of air to deliver aid has always been a perilous exercise).  When executed, these have even been lethal to the unsuspecting recipients, with reported cases of parachutes failing to open.

    On March 25, the UN Security Council, after three previous failed attempts, passed Resolution 2728, thereby calling for an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan “leading to a lasting sustainable” halt to hostilities, the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”, “ensuring humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs” and “demands that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain”.

    Emphasis was also placed on “the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance to and reinforce the protection of civilians in the entire Gaza Strip”.  The resolution further demands that all barriers regarding the provision of humanitarian assistance, in accordance with international humanitarian law, be lifted.

    Since January, South Africa has been relentless in its efforts to curb Israel’s Gaza enterprise in The Hague.  It called upon the ICJ on February 14, referring to “the developing circumstances in Rafah”, to urgently exercise powers under Article 75 of the Rules of Court.  Israel responded on February 15.  The next day, the ICJ’s Registrar transmitted to the parties the view of the Court that the “perilous situation” in the Gaza Strip, but notably in Rafah, “demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024”.

    Throughout the following month, more legal jostling and communication took place, with Pretoria requesting on March 6 that the ICJ “indicate further provisional measures and/or to modify” those ordered on January 26.  The application was prompted by the “horrific deaths from starvation of Palestinian children, including babies, brought about by Israel’s deliberate acts and omissions … including Israel’s concerted attempts since 26 January 2024 to ensure the defunding of [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Israel’s attacks on starving Palestinians seeking to access what extremely limited humanitarian assistance Israel permits into Northern Gaza, in particular”.

    Israel responded on March 15 to the South African communication, rejecting the claims of starvation arising from deliberate acts and omissions “in the strongest terms”.  The logic of the sketchy rebuttal from Israel was that matters had not materially altered since January 26 to warrant a reconsideration: “the difficult and tragic situation in the Gaza Strip in the last weeks could not be said to materially change the considerations upon which the Court based its original decision concerning provisional measures.”

    On March 28, the Court issued a unanimous order modifying the January interim order.  Combing through the ghoulish evidence, the judges noted an updated report from March 18 on food insecurity from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC Global Initiative) stating that “conditions necessary to prevent Famine have not been met and the latest evidence confirms that Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”  The UN Children’s Fund had also reported that 31 per cent of children under 2 years of age in the northern Gaza Strip were enduring conditions of “acute malnutrition”.

    In the face of this Himalaya of devastation, the Court could only observe “that Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing a risk of famine, as noted in the Order of 26 January 2024, but that famine is setting in, with at least 31 people, including 27 children, having already died of malnutrition and dehydration”.  There were “unprecedented levels of food insecurity experienced by Palestinians in the Gaza strip over recent weeks, as well as the increasing risks of epidemics.”

    Such “grave” conditions granted the Court jurisdiction to modify the January 26 order which no longer fully addressed “the consequences arising from the changes in the situation”.  In view of the “worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation”, Israel should take “all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full cooperation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”.

    The list of what is needed is also enumerated: food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene, sanitation requirements, and “medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.

    A less reported aspect of the March 28 order, passed by fifteen votes to one, was that Israel’s military refrain from committing “acts which constitute a violation of any rights of the Palestinians in Gaza as a protected group” under the Genocide Convention “including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.”

    In this, the Court points to the possible, and increasingly plausible nexus, between starvation, famine and deprivation of necessaries as state policies with the intent to injure and kill members of a protected group.  It is no doubt something that will weigh heavily on the minds of the judges as they continue mulling over the nature of the war in Gaza, which South Africa continues to insist is genocidal in scope and nature.

    The post Starvation in Gaza: The World Court’s Latest Intervention first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal

     

     

    BBC: Gaza starvation could amount to war crime, UN human rights chief tells BBC

    BBC (3/28/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient.

    Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation.

     

    Prospect: Boeing Is Basically a State-Funded Company

    American Prospect (10/31/19)

    Also on the show: As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour—these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

     

    The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • CPJ, partners urge UN leaders to release full report on journalist Issam Abdallah’s murder

    The Committee to Protect Journalists joined its international partners on Friday in signing a letter urging the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNFIL) to publish its investigation into the murder of Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah, who was killed by Israeli forces in south Lebanon on October 13, 2023. Four journalists injured in the same attack also signed the letter.

    According to Reuters, which published the conclusions of the seven-page report summarizing the investigation, dated February 27, 2024, UNIFIL found that an Israeli tank killed Abdallah by firing two 120 mm rounds at a group of “clearly identifiable journalists” in violation of international law.

    UNIFIL personnel did not record any exchange of fire across the border between Israel and Lebanon for more than 40 minutes before the Israeli Merkava tank opened fire, according to the excerpts of the UNFIL report published by Reuters.  

    The letter, addressed to U.N. Secretary General António Guterres and other leaders, reflects CPJ’s wider calls for action by the international community, published December 2023.

    According to CPJ data, more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, which has included attacks in Lebanon, than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.

    Read the full letter here:

    UNIFILDownload


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • State Department Official Resigns Over Biden Gaza Policy

    Saying her job at a State Department office that advocates for human rights in the Middle East has become “impossible” as the Biden administration continues to back Israel’s assault on civilians in Gaza, foreign affairs officer Annelle Sheline resigned from her position on Wednesday in protest of President Joe Biden’s policy in the region. Sheline noted in an interview with The Washington Post…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UN rights expert report to call for Israel arms embargo over ‘acts of genocide’

    Special rapporteur will tell human rights council Israel’s actions ‘reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group’

    A UN human rights expert will deliver a report on Tuesday saying that Israel has carried out acts of genocide in Gaza and should be placed under an arms embargo.

    Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said in her report there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel was carrying out three of the five acts defined as genocide: killing Palestinians, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction” of the population in whole or in part.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • West Papuan wounds of suffering – diplomatic pressure on Indonesia needed urgently

    COMMENTARY: By Ronny Kareni

    Recent videos depicting the barbaric torture of an indigenous Papuan man by Indonesian soldiers have opened the wounds of West Papua’s suffering, laying bare the horrifying reality faced by its people.

    We must confront this grim truth — what we witness is not an isolated incident but a glaring demonstation of the deep-seated racism and systematic persecution ravaging West Papuans every single day.

    Human rights defenders that the videos were taken during a local military raid in the districts of Omukia and Gome on 3-4 February 2024, Puncak Regency, Pegunungan Tengah Province.

    Deeply proud of their rich ethnic and cultural heritage, West Papuans have often found themselves marginalised and stereotyped, while their lands are exploited and ravaged by foreign interests, further exacerbating their suffering.

    Indonesia’s discriminatory policies and the heavy-handed approach of its security forces have consistently employed brutal tactics to quash any aspirations for a genuine self-autonomy among indigenous Papuans.

    In the chilling footage of the torture videos, we witness the agony of this young indigenous Papuan man, bound and submerged in a drum of his own blood-stained water, while soldiers clad in military attire inflict unspeakable acts of violence on him.

    The state security forces, speaking with a cruel disregard for human life, exemplify the toxic blend of racism and brutality that festers within the Indonesian military.

    Racial prejudice
    What makes this brutality even more sickening is the unmistakable presence of racial prejudice.

    The insignia of a soldier, proudly displaying affiliation with the III/Siliwangi, Yonif Raider 300/Brajawijaya Unit, serves as a stark reminder of the institutionalised discrimination faced by Papuans within the very forces meant to protect civilians.

    This vile display of racism underscores the broader pattern of oppression endured by West Papuans at the hands of the state and its security forces.

    These videos are just the latest chapter in a long history of atrocities inflicted upon Papuans in the name of suppressing their cries for freedom.

    Regencies like Nduga, Pegunungan Bintang, Intan Jaya, the Maybrat, and Yahukimo have become notorious hotspots for state-sanctioned operations, where Indonesian security forces operate with impunity, crushing any form of dissent through arbitrary arrests.

    They often target peaceful demonstrators and activists advocating for Papuan rights in major towns along the coast.

    These arrests are often accompanied by extrajudicial killings, further instilling intimidation and silence among indigenous Papuans.

    Prabowo leadership casts shadow
    In light of the ongoing failure of Indonesian authorities to address the racism and structural discrimination in West Papua, the prospect of Prabowo’s presidential leadership casts a shadow of uncertainty over the future of human rights and justice in the region.

    Given his controversial track record, there is legitimate concern that his leadership may further entrench the culture of impunity. We must closely monitor his administration’s response to the cries for justice from West Papua.

    It is time to break the silence and take decisive action. The demand for the UN Human Rights Commissioner to visit West Papua is urgent.

    This is where the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), with its influential members Fiji and Papua New Guinea, who were appointed as special envoys to Indonesia can play a pivotal role.

    Their status within the region paves the opportunity to champion the cause and exert diplomatic pressure on Indonesia, as the situation continues to deteriorate despite the 2019 Pacific Leaders’ communique highlighting the urgent need for international attention and action in West Papua.

    While the UN Commissioner’s visit would provide a credible and unbiased platform to thoroughly investigate and document these violations, it also would compel Indonesian authorities to address these abuses decisively.

    I can also ensure that the voices of the Papuan people are heard and their rights protected.

    Let us stand unyielding with the Papuan people in their tireless struggle for freedom, dignity, and sovereignty. Anything less would be a betrayal of our shared humanity.

    Filed as a special article for Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Finland Resumes UNRWA Funding, Further Cementing US’s Pariah Status

    As the United States doubled down on banning funds for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Finland said Friday that it would resume contributions to the lifesaving organization in an implicit rebuke of unsubstantiated Israeli claims — reportedly extracted via torture — that staff members were involved in the October 7 attacks. Finnish Minister for Foreign Trade and Development…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Wenda condemns ‘sadistic brutality’ of Indonesian torture of Papuan – calls for UN action

    Asia Pacific Report

    A West Papuan pro-independence leader has condemned the “sadistic brutality” of Indonesian soldiers in a torture video and called for an urgent United Nations human rights visit to the colonised Melanesian territory.

    “There is an urgent need for states to take more serious action on human rights in West Papua,” said president Benny Wenda of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP).

    Describing the “horror” of the torture video in a statement on the ULMWP website, he called for the immediate suspension of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) membership of Indonesia.

    Citing the 1998 Rome Statute, Wenda said torture was a crime against humanity.

    “Indonesia has not signed this treaty — against torture, genocide, and war crimes — because it is guilty of all three in West Papua and East Timor,” Wenda said. His statement said:

    ‘Horror of my childhood’
    “I am truly horrified by the video that has emerged from of Indonesian soldiers torturing a West Papuan man. More than anything, the sadistic brutality on display shows how urgently West Papua needs a UN Human Rights visit.

    “In the video, a group of soldiers kick, punch, and slash the young Papuan man, who has been tied and forced to stand upright in a drum full of freezing water.

    “As the soldiers repeatedly pummel the man, they can be heard saying, ‘my turn! My turn!’ and comparing his meat to animal flesh.

    “Watching the video, I was reminded of the horror of my childhood, when I was forced to watch my uncle being tortured by Suharto’s thugs.

    “The Indonesian government [has] committed these crimes for 60 years now. Indonesia must have their MSG Membership suspended immediately — they cannot be allowed to treat Melanesians in this way.

    “This incident comes during an intensified period of militarisation in the Highlands.

    “After an alleged TPNPB fighter was killed last month in Yahukimo, two Papuan children were tortured by Indonesian soldiers, who then took humiliating ‘trophy’ photos with their limp bodies.

    “Such brutality, already common in West Papua, will only becoming more widespread under the genocidal war criminal [newly elected President Prabowo Subianto].

    ‘Torture and war crimes’
    “According to the Rome Statute, torture is a crime against humanity. Indonesia has not signed this treaty, against torture, genocide, and war crimes, because it is guilty of all three in West Papua and East Timor.

    “Though it is extreme and shocking, this video merely exposes how Indonesia behaves every day in my country. Torture is such a widespread military practice that it has been described as a ‘mode of governance’ in West Papua.

    “I ask everyone who watches the video to remember that West Papua is a closed society, cut off from the world by a 60-year media ban imposed by Indonesia’s military occupation.

    “How many victims go unnoticed by the world? How many incidents are not captured on film?

    “Every week we hear word of another murder, massacre, or tortured civilian. Over 500,000 West Papuans have been killed under Indonesian colonial rule.

    “There is an urgent need for states to take more serious action on human rights in West Papua. We are grateful that more than 100 countries have called for a visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

    “But Indonesia clearly has no intention of honouring their promise, so more must be done.

    “International agreements such as the [European Union] EU-Indonesia trade deal should be made conditional on a UN visit. States should call out Indonesia at the highest levels of the UN. Parliamentarians should sign the Brussels Declaration.

    “Until there [are] serious sanctions against Indonesia their occupying forces will continue to behave with impunity in West Papua.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • US-Led “Ceasefire” Resolution Fails, Condemned for Not Demanding Real Ceasefire

    A U.S.-led resolution promoting a nominal ceasefire action in Gaza was defeated by a United Nations Security Council vote on Friday morning, with those opposed to the resolution noting that the measure didn’t go far enough. Although most member nations supported the proposal, three of the countries on the Security Council opposed it. Votes from Russia and China, which have veto powers on the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • What did the US’s vetoed Gaza ceasefire resolution say?

    Draft resolution put before UN represents important tonal – but not substantive – shift for White House

    After months of vetoing other UN security council resolutions in an effort to defend Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the US has in recent weeks gone on to the diplomatic front foot in New York, drafting and tabling its own resolution that was put to a vote on Friday before being vetoed by Russia and China.

    The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said the resolution would send “a strong signal”. But what was that signal precisely?

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges

     

    South Africa on December 29 presented a historic case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the highest court in the world. In an 84-page lawsuit, South Africa asserted that Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza—following the October 7 Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis and foreigners—constitutes genocide. So far, more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been slaughtered, while over 71,000 have been injured in Israeli attacks.

    Establishment media in the US were slow to cover South Africa’s “epochal intervention” in the ICJ—initially providing the public with thin to no reporting on the case. While the quantity of coverage did eventually increase, it skewed pro-Israel, even after the court in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and ordered Tel Aviv to comply with international law.

    Thin early coverage

    Wall Street Journal: Israel Expands Operations in Southern Gaza Amid Worsening Humanitarian Crisis

    In the Wall Street Journal (12/29/23), the initial accusation of genocide got second billing even in the subhead.

    FAIR used the Nexis news database and WSJ.com to identify every article discussing the genocide case published in the print editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for one month, from the announcement of the case on December 29 through January 28, two days after the ICJ’s preliminary ruling.

    Under international law, genocide is one of the gravest charges that can be brought against a state. Since its 1948 ratification by the UN, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has only been presented to the ICJ on a handful of occasions, and the historic nature of the complaint was not lost on its applicant: “South Africa is acutely aware of the particular weight of responsibility in initiating proceedings against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention.”

    Unfortunately, the two most widely circulating newspapers in the US cannot say the same. In the lead-up to the hearing (12/29/23–1/10/24), the New York Times only published three articles focused on the case (1/8/24, 1/9/24, 1/10/24), while another Times piece (1/10/24) included a brief mention of the genocide charges.

    The Wall Street Journal ran no pieces focused on the charges prior to the hearing. The Journal‘s only mention of the genocide case in the pre-trial period came in a broader article about the war (12/29/23), which included six paragraphs about South Africa’s application. The paper did not reference the case again until the trial began.

    ‘Without any basis in fact’

    NYT: Accused of Genocide, Israelis See Reversal of Reality. Palestinians See Justice.

    The New York Times (1/11/24) seemed to feel that the accusation of genocide was so serious that it should offer readers as few clues as possible as to whether it was true or not.

    During the two-day hearing, each paper ran two articles about it in their print editions. Each published an overview of the case (New York Times, 1/11/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/11/24). For their second piece, the New York Times (1/11/24) looked at both Israeli and Palestinian reactions, while the Journal (1/12/24) focused only on Israeli reactions; the one Palestinian it quoted was identified as an Israeli citizen.

    After the trial’s January 12 conclusion, and through January 27, two days after the court’s announcement of its preliminary ruling, the Times ran five more articles in its print edition primarily about the case, while the Journal ran only one.

    Experts have said that “all countries have a stake” in South Africa’s application, and that the case “has broad implications” (OHCHR, 1/11/24), but the papers’ thin coverage suggested to their readership that it is of little consequence.

    US news outlets’ dismissive reaction to the hearing was consistent with the Israeli narrative surrounding the genocide charges. Israel’s denunciations of Pretoria’s accusation were widely reported—they were “blood libel” (CNBC, 12/30/23); “nonsense, lies and evil spirit” (The Hill, 1/31/23); and “outrageous” (Jerusalem Post, 1/5/24). US officials followed suit, brushing off the allegations as “meritless” (The Hill, 1/9/24) and “without any basis in fact whatsoever” (VoA, 1/3/24).

    So while the ICJ case was met with spirited support from the global human rights community, establishment media’s initial choice to treat it as unnewsworthy may have convinced some audiences to believe what Israel and its allies want them to believe—that South Africa’s application has no basis in reality.

    Uneven sourcing

    The coverage the two papers did offer largely perpetuated US media’s longstanding tradition of skewing pro-Israel (FAIR.org, 8/22/23; Intercept, 1/9/24 ). Though Palestinians are at the center of the case, they often seemed to be an afterthought in the newspapers' coverage of it.

    The papers were mirror images in terms of their frequency of quoted pro-Israeli and pro–South African positions in their coverage. The Wall Street Journal’s three articles that focused on the ICJ case included 23 quoted sources. Of these, 11 (48%) expressed or supported Israeli government positions, and 8 (35%) expressed or supported South African government positions. (Four were not clearly aligned with either party.) In the Times' 10 articles focused on the case, the paper featured 65 quoted sources. Those taking a clear position on one side or the other expressed or supported the South African position more often, with 30 sources (46%), compared to 23 expressing or supporting the Israeli stance (35%). (The remainder did not have a discernible stance.)

    Palestinian voices, however, were marginalized in both papers. Fourteen of the 65 Times sources were Palestinian (22%); 22 (34%) were Israeli. Five of its 10 articles on the genocide case that appeared in print quoted no Palestinian sources. By contrast, only one—a piece about South African domestic politics (1/27/24)—quoted no Israeli sources.

    Of the Journal's 23 sources, five (22%) were Palestinian, and 9 (39%) were Israeli. Two of its articles were evenly balanced between Palestinian and Israeli sources, while one (1/12/24) quoted five Israelis and only one Palestinian—the citizen of Israel mentioned above.

    The lack of Palestinian representation is consistent with establishment media trends, which often neglect Palestinian voices in Israel/Palestine coverage. In fact, a 2018 study conducted by 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, found that, in five major US newspapers’ coverage of Israel/Palestine between 1967 and 2017, Israeli sources were cited 2.5 times more often than Palestinian ones.

    Consequently, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s media resource guide advises reporters: “Interview Palestinians. Your story is always incomplete without them."

    Unchallenged Israeli talking points

    NYT: At World Court, Israel to Confront Accusations of Genocide

    The only independent legal expert quoted in this New York Times article (1/10/24) suggested that it was impossible to say whether a genocide was going on while there was still time to stop it.

    While the New York Times' sourcing was somewhat more balanced, that did not reflect the absence of a pro-Israel skew. The paper failed at the basic task of evaluating arguments, reducing the grave charge of genocide to an unresolvable he said/she said back-and-forth.

    In the Times' most extensive pre-trial article (1/1o/24), Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner and Johannesburg bureau chief John Eligon provided an overview of the hearing. Of 11 quoted sources, only a single independent legal expert was included: William Schabas of Middlesex University, London, who averred that it would be months before South Africa assembled all of its evidence, and "only then can we really assess the full strength of the South African case." Meanwhile, four Israeli sources and a US official were quoted in support of Israel, against three South African sources and one Palestinian source.

    The Times piece also uncritically presented easily refutable Israeli claims about the legality of the IDF military campaign in Gaza:

    Israel’s military insists that it is prosecuting the war in line with international law. Officials point to the millions of messages, sent by various means, telling Gaza’s civilians to evacuate to safer areas ahead of bombings, and say they are constantly working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza.

    Israel's insistence that it follows international law is contradicted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, all of which have documented evidence of war crimes committed by Israel in this conflict, as well as in past conflicts. Journalists' job is to hold the powerful to account, not to simply relay their claims, no matter how flimsy. Yet the Times offered no hint of pushback to Israel's assertions.

    Moreover, those “millions of messages” are often inaccessible to Gazans under rocket fire. The designated “safe zones” are usually announced on social media posts or via leaflets dropped over Gaza containing QR codes to maps (Guardian, 12/2/23). As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, “It is unclear how those residing in Gaza would access the map without electricity and amid recurrent telecommunications cuts.” Since October 7, Israel has purposely cut Gaza’s electricity and internet supply—another violation of international law (Human Rights Watch, 10/21/23; Al Jazeera, 12/4/23).

    Even if Gazans make their way to the designated zones, there is no guarantee that they will find safety; many of the areas that Israel allotted as civilian safe zones have been targeted and bombed by the army (New York Times, 12/21/23). As UNICEF spokesperson, James Elder, told the BBC (12/5/23): “There are no safe zones in Gaza.”

    Unscrutinized statements

    WSJ: Israel Rebuts Genocide Accusation at World Court

    The Wall Street Journal (1/12/24) provided no questioning of the claim that "Israel’s inherent right to defend itself" required the killing of thousands of children.

    The idea that the Israeli military is “constantly working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza” is also patently incorrect. A Human Rights Watch report (12/18/23) found that

    Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.

    Nearly the exact same paragraph about Israel sending "millions of messages" and "constantly working to increase the amount of aid" appeared in the Times the next day (1/11/24), without any analysis.

    Another Times piece, by Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley (1/12/24), offered a brief explanation of the accusations leveled by South Africa, followed by Israel's rebuttal that it is taking “significant precautions to protect civilians.” Again, the Times offered no evaluation of such claims.

    The Wall Street Journal (1/12/24) advanced a similar assertion from Tal Becker, chief lawyer for Israel’s Foreign Ministry: “Israel…recognizes its obligation to conduct military operations in line with international humanitarian law, which requires efforts to minimize civilian casualties.”

    With no scrutiny of Israeli officials’ statements, US news becomes little more than a bullhorn for government propaganda.

    Research assistance: Xenia Gonikberg, Phillip HoSang

    The post Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • There is no moral argument that justifies the sale of weapons to Israel | Mary Lawlor

    Israel has shown it will use these arms indiscriminately against Palestinians. Why does the west continue to supply them?

    Earlier this month, a doctor who had recently returned from Gaza provided shocking testimony about the scale of human suffering that Palestinians are enduring under an Israeli military onslaught that has entered its sixth month. There exist no moral arguments that can justify the continued sale of weapons to Israel by states that respect the principle of the universality of human rights.

    During my work as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Palestinian human rights defenders have emphasized to me the importance of a ban being placed on such sales, given that Israel has demonstrated time and again that it will use such weapons indiscriminately against Palestinians.

    Mary Lawlor is the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders

    Continue reading...

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Journalist Says Line Between Settlers and Israeli Army Has Virtually Disappeared

    Building on an unprecedented wave of settler violence in 2023, Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have intensified since October 7, with over 400 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers over the past five months. Last week, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on three Israeli settlers and two Israeli outposts in the occupied West Bank for assaulting...

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UN human rights branch under liquidity crunch

    Michelle Langrand for Geneva Solutions of 20 March 2024 has an exclusive report on the liquidity crunch and its effect on the UN human rights branch. Here her report in full:

    UN secretary general António Guterres and UN human rights high commissioner Volker Türk at the opening of the Human Rights Council 55th session in Geneva, 26 February 2024. (UN Photo/Elma Okic)

    UN secretary general António Guterres and UN human rights high commissioner Volker Türk at the opening of the Human Rights Council 55th session in Geneva, 26 February 2024. (UN Photo/Elma Okic)

    As the United Nations faces its worst liquidity crisis in recent history, experts, staff and observers worry about the ramifications on human rights work. Correspondence seen by Geneva Solutions reveals concerns at the highest levels of the UN human rights branch in Geneva as they are forced to scale back their operations.

    A patchwork of cost-saving measures taken over the winter holidays at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, from keeping the heat down and closing the premises for two weeks, revealed how serious the UN’s cash troubles were after states failed to fully pay their bills in 2023. The new year didn’t brighten prospects either. In January, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in New York announced that “aggressive cash conservation measures” would be taken across the organisation to avoid running out of cash by August as year-end arrears reached a record $859 million.

    It couldn’t have come at a worse time for a cash-strapped UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) as worsening human rights crises worldwide add to its workload. The Geneva-based office acts as a secretariat for dozens of independent experts, investigative bodies and human rights committees that rely for the most part on the UN’s regular budget and few voluntary contributions from states. Between vacancies and travel restrictions, both insiders and outsiders worry that planned cuts could severely impair the UN’s crucial human rights work.

    Understaffed and overwhelmed

    On 12 February, just as the UN’s Geneva headquarters prepared for one of its busiest months hosting the Human Rights Council’s first session of the year, bad news came from New York. Countries had only paid one-third of the UN’s $3.59bn regular budget for 2024, and instructions from the higher-ups were that the hiring freeze imposed in July 2023 would be extended throughout 2024 across UN operations. The organisation said that $350 million would need to be shaved off through spending restrictions on travel, conference services and others.

    Human rights bodies, where vacancies had been piling up in the last months, would have to continue to run with reduced staff. In a letter from 23 December, UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk had already warned Council president Omar Zniber that 63 posts in over 10 investigative mandates were waiting to be filled while recruitments had been placed on hold. Currently, there are active investigations on serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Iran, Syria, South Sudan and Nicaragua among others.

    “While no compromise has been made in terms of methodology, some of the investigative bodies have had to narrow the scope of both their investigations and their upcoming reports,” the letter reads.

    The fact-finding mission on Sudan was one of the bodies immediately affected. Created in October to collect evidence on atrocities committed during the last year of bloody conflict in which thousands of civilians have been killed and millions displaced, the probe body has struggled to begin work. The independent experts composing it, who aren’t paid, have been appointed since December, but as of late February, the Human Rights Office hadn’t been able to hire a support team due to insufficient cash flow, according to a Human Rights Council spokesperson. The experts, who have been mandated for one year, are due to present their findings in September, with observers wondering whether the western-led proposal will garner the political backing it needs to be renewed.

    That isn’t the only initiative struggling to get off the ground. “We have met with some new mandates, and we realised that they barely have a team, if any, to support them,” said one NGO member who collaborates with the human rights mechanisms and asked to remain anonymous. Observers say most investigative bodies, even older ones, are impacted at some level.

    Kaoru Okoizumi, deputy head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar (IIMM) – the largest human rights probe team  – said six out of 57 staff positions funded through the UN’s regular budget were vacant, significantly affecting their work. The IIMM, which also relies on a trust fund made up of voluntary donations and doesn’t depend on the OHCHR’s budget, is coping better than most.

    Expert committees that oversee states’ compliance with international human rights law, such as on children’s rights and on torture, are also stretched thin. One staffer said they were required to take on more work than normally expected, for example, having to conduct research and compile information about several countries at the same time for one session. “It’s just too much!” they said, adding that their team was short of more than 10 people.

    Another worker from the OHCHR’s special procedures branch, who said was covering for several vacant spots, conceded that the quality of work is affected in such conditions. “Of course, you won’t work as well after pulling all-nighters,” they said. Türk’s letter to Zniber acknowledges that the secretariat was having trouble supporting some 60 special procedures, which are UN-backed independent experts or groups of experts assigned to report to the council on a specific theme or country.

    While the problem of understaffing isn’t new, and many also point to cumbersome months-long recruitment processes that are often incompatible with brief mandates, the situation has worsened. To compensate for the hiring freeze, the UN has also increasingly resorted to temporary contracts that last for a few months and can be exceptionally renewed for up to two years. The two workers, who have living on contract to contract for more than a year, said that there is fear that temporary staff may be among the first to go, along with consultants. “In the food chain of contracts, we’re at the bottom,” one of them said.

    A slim year for the Human Rights Council

    The UN’s human rights branch, which receives as little as four per cent of the UN’s total budget – around $142 million – just enough to cover one third of its activities, has been scrambling to cut back on spending. On Friday, in another letter seen by Geneva Solutions, Türk informed Zniber that his office would be forced to axe certain activities this year.

    OHCHR spokesperson Marta Hurtado confirmed the information to Geneva Solutions by writing: “The office has developed an internal contingency plan, which provides for adjustment pending the complete availability of regular budget resources become available.”

    Among the measures it proposes is postponing some activities to 2025 altogether while as many consultations and meetings as possible would be moved online without interpretation, according to Hurtado, since the UN in New York hasn’t authorised it for virtual meetings. For those that will be held in person, resources to fly in experts and civil society will also be reduced.

    The UN’s recent decision that it would no longer provide online services for meetings has drawn outcry from rights campaigners who argue it curtails the possibility of civil society groups and states with little resources to participate. While the move has been attributed to matters of rules, observers can’t help but wonder if it isn’t, in the end, about the money. Echoing the concerns in the letter, Türks described the impact of these measures on participation from experts and other stakeholders as “deeply regrettable”.

    Another issue raised by the UN rights chief is the difficulty that his office has been facing in providing technical assistance to national authorities. He gave the example of the Marshall Islands, which requested help in 2022 to assess the human rights impact of US nuclear testing in its territory in the 1940s and 50s. A source said that although a first visit finally took place this year, work has been delayed.

    Marc Limon, director of the human rights think tank Universal Rights Group, remarked that work by the Council to help states improve their rights record through capacity-building support was unfortunately “almost inexistent” and regretted that resources couldn’t be spared for what he calls the “hard end of human rights diplomacy”. “While UN investigations must be protected, there is little threat to key commissions of inquiry due to the huge budgets allocated to them in the first place,” he said. Most probe bodies have between 17 to 27 staff while special procedures usually have one or two assistants.

    The Moroccan ambassador forwarded Türk’s letter to fellow states on Monday and said a draft decision regarding the measures would be tabled for the council to consider at the end of the session at the beginning of April.

    Human rights credibility at stake

    One that has raised eyebrows but isn’t explicitly mentioned by the UN rights chief is limiting country visits by UN experts to one visit instead of two. Hurtado acknowledged that special procedures and other expert mechanisms, including probe bodies, would see their country visits “reduced” while not commenting on the number of authorised visits.

    One UN expert, speaking under the condition of anonymity, voiced concern over the restriction. “Country visits are extremely important because they give us a real intimate understanding of a place and the state gets direct feedback on what they’re doing well and what they can do to improve, while also energising civil society,” they said, point out that experts were already barely able to conduct visits during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Limon commented that while it was a wise choice to cut back on some of the “superfluous” debates and activities, reducing special rapporteur trips to countries to one per year, an idea that he said has been floated around before, showed the office “had its priorities wrong”.

    Travel restrictions could also have significant implications for criminal cases. Okoizumi said her Myanmar team only had 65 per cent of its usual travel budget, which is key for the Geneva-based group to reach victims and witnesses. “We do our witness interviews in person because we think it’s important in a criminal investigation to make sure that interviews are being conducted in a way that preserves the integrity of the testimony,” she said.

    The body, set up in 2018 by the Human Rights Council, is currently working to support a case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar for violating the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice, as well as investigations on crimes against the Rohingya at the International Criminal Court and Argentina.

    “These are very concrete proceedings and our ability to support them will be impacted by the number of interviews that we’re able to conduct or the analysis that we’re able to produce and share with these jurisdictions,” Okoizumi said, noting that the ICJ case is particularly time-sensitive as both parties were expected to make submissions this year.

    The international lawyer said this has meant shifting resources to meet shorter-term deadlines at the risk of putting aside other objectives. “The whole point of having an investigative mechanism is to make sure that we can collect the evidence very soon after a crime happens, even if there isn’t an investigation or prosecution until many years or even decades later. So, shifting our resources in that way, overall will have a negative impact,” she explained.

    Top experts within the human rights branch have also rang alarm bells about the wider repercussions of the funding crisis. In a letter seen by Geneva Solutions addressed to the president of the General Assembly, Dennis Francis, dated 23 February, 10 chairs of human rights committees warned that the liquidity crisis “severely threatens the credibility and efficiency of the United Nations human rights system”.

    The experts said the treaty bodies were “being denied even the minimum staff and operational resources required to deliver their critical mandates to advance human rights” at a time of “such a severe existential crisis of multilateralism and of non compliance with international law”.

    Referring to some of the measures being considered, the signatories also argue that suspending sessions “for the first time in their over six decades of history for financial reasons, together with visits to prevent torture and other human rights violations” would lead to “concrete and irreversible” harm.

    “When the collective security system has failed to honour the ‘never again’ pledge of 1945, the least to do is to strengthen human rights monitoring mechanisms, so that human rights violations are documented, even when justice seems extremely challenging to serve. We note with deep regret that the opposite is being done,” the custodians of human rights law wrote.

    Human Rights CouncilOHCHR

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • UN Workers

    Israeli forces have killed a record number of United Nations (UN) employees, making Gaza the deadliest place to be a UN worker in the 79-year history of the UN. Additionally, we now know that Israeli forces detained, tortured, and coerced UN employees to make false statements against UNRWA as part of a smear campaign against the largest humanitarian organization in Gaza that led to 16 countries freezing $450 million in essential aid.


    The post UN Workers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • DRC Bleeds Conflict Minerals for Green Growth


    Activists in Goma denounce state and international inaction after savage attacks by a Rwandan-backed militia. Photo: LuchaCongo.org

    “Inside every phone is the blood of a Congolese person.” These words from Pascal Mirindi, a student and activist in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), encapsulate the deadly links between war, the plunder of resources, and climate breakdown.

    Nowhere is this more devastatingly clear than in the DRC, where M23 militias financed by the Rwandan government, which is in turn funded by the UK, USA, and many more, are committing mass murder and ecological destruction as they surge into the east of the country.

    On the rare occasion that the mainstream media covers the DRC, it is portrayed as a poor nation with a “complicated” conflict-riven backstory. But this framing omits the catalyst for the region’s violence since its colonization – resource robbery.

    “The conflict, which has persisted in the east of the DRC for almost 30 years, and is the deadliest since the Second World War, is mainly economic,” explains Nobel Laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege. Since 1996, more than 10 million people have been killed, with countless more being displaced, raped, or forcibly recruited (even as children) into armed groups. “The link between exploitation and the illegal trade in minerals is recognized as a root cause.”

    On International Women’s Day, Congolese activists in the city of Beni demand justice for the women suffering violence in DRC. Photo: @luchaRDC

    Rich nation, poor nation

    The current fighting has now displaced more than 10 million people, triggering another wave of indiscriminate killings, mass rape, and disease, while militia armies ransack the country’s rainforests with illegal logging and poaching.

    Though the Congolese people have long been vampirized by extractivism, with over 70% living on less than $1.90/day, the DRC is not a poor nation – it is a robbed nation. In fact, the DRC is considered the world’s richest country in terms of wealth in natural resources.

    DRC’s fossil fuels have been profitably exploited by foreign corporations and co-opted local elites for decades, leaving communities like Muanda, which is uncoincidentally both the original site of fossil fuel extraction and the poorest city in the country, scarred by dispossession, disease, and environmental degradation.

    After the deadly Kalehe flood in South Kivu province last May, which killed hundreds and affected another 50,000 people in the flood zone, student activists from Extinction Rebellion Goma University launched the Pétrole Non Merci campaign in order to highlight that the DRC is already suffering the effects of climate catastrophes and that this suffering will only increase if the fossil fuel industry’s expansion is not stopped.

    The students traveled thousands of miles across the width of the country, mobilizing communities to oppose the sale of 30 new oil and gas blocks, most of which overlap protected areas and would be transported by the ecocidal EACOP pipeline. A major focus of their efforts has been to facilitate ongoing educational exchanges on how to claim their rights through nonviolence and to hold officials and corporations accountable to local communities.

    The continued work of building grassroots power to counter resource and human exploitation is now facing crucible conditions. Goma activists are spending long hours caring for the massive influx of internally displaced people amid food shortages and cholera outbreaks. Others in their networks have been displaced and suffered violence and even death. “This crisis only reinforces that the struggle for environmental justice is inextricably linked to the struggle against the cycles of violence that we continue to experience,” explains an activist with LUCHA, a non-violent and non-partisan youth civil society movement in Goma.

    Green growth, red trail

    As global finance gears up for “green growth”, the DRC’s resource wealth has again brought violence, robbery, and ecological destruction. The world’s largest coltan reserves, vast caches of copper, diamonds, tin, gold, and more than 63% of global cobalt are prized by armed gangs who sell them to corporations and wealthy states wanting to manufacture phones, computers, batteries and increasingly, renewable energy technologies.

    In the chaos orchestrated by the militias, minerals are more easily siphoned to Rwanda, where they are exported and bought by multinational firms like Glencore. Nicolas Kazadi, DRC’s finance minister, claims that Rwandan mineral smuggling costs the DRC $1bn per year. The US Treasury estimated that last year more than 90% of DRC’s gold was smuggled to countries including Rwanda and Uganda, where it is refined and exported, mainly to the United Arab Emirates. Rwanda is also somehow the world’s primary exporter of coltan, despite being one of the lowest mineral producers in Africa. Without conflict minerals, the numbers just don’t add up.

    Efforts to regulate conflict minerals and ensure responsible supply chains have been laughable in their inadequacy, and typical in their market-oriented approach that prioritizes profits while ignoring Congolese perspectives and outcomes. “The case of conflict minerals poses questions about how global supply chain capitalism, conflict resolution, and consumer ethics intersect with postcolonial friction and violence,” writes Josaphat Musamba and Christoph Vogel in Dissent Magazine. “Both international and Congolese interveners and elites have contributed to simplistic and misleading imageries of the problem and its solution, in a quest for a quick and seemingly hands-on, human rights–inspired PR operation.”

    Until a decolonized approach that centers communities and ecology is adopted, extraction will inevitably lead to conflict. It is not possible to clean up a supply chain that begins with dirty motives, just as it is not possible to build regional stability and heal generations of trauma in the context of manipulation and structural inequity, better known as ‘development and aid’.

    A rally in Nairobi, Kenya calls out Rwandan aggression in DRC. Photo: @luchaRDC

    Donor darling, donor orphan

    Though this long regional conflict is often portrayed as Rwandans vs Congolese, Hutu vs Tutsi, or even Muslim vs Christian, the primary generator of endless suffering is a more universal clash – power and profit vs people and planet. Colonialism never really ended, it simply now works remotely via economic imperialism. A look at the history of foreign intervention in the region clearly shows that the sources of underlying tensions, that have so far been inescapable, are not due to some inherent failing of Congolese or Rwandan people – it’s structural.

    “Several studies point to the erroneous perceptions of outsiders to explain why their interventions have been unable to address the root causes of conflict in the African Great Lakes region. However, few authors focus on the impact of UN and donor activities on regional fragility,” says policy analyst Léopold Ghins at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. “It is chiefly through these activities that outsiders have become part of the problem they [supposedly] seek to resolve.”

    One way in which the imperial core exacerbates regional fragility is through unbalanced aid allocations. From 2003-16, Rwanda received about 130% and 50% more aid in per capita terms than the DRC and Burundi respectively. Rwanda was dubbed a ‘donor darling’, while the DRC and Burundi were considered ‘donor orphans’.

    Donors now see Rwanda as a useful regional hegemon through which to carry on with the plunder of African resources. Its economy is growing, its infrastructure is developing at speed, and yet this celebrated growth has only benefitted a tiny elite.

    It’s necessary to look up from the accounting books, step out of the board room and into the streets to take notice, but if Rwandans are so happy with their “development success”, why is there a black-clad, machine-gun toting policeman on every second street corner in Kigali? Over the last 24 years under President Kagame, the government has become unashamedly authoritarian with mounting human rights abuses.

    Unhoused Rwandans and those caught begging have been forcibly exiled to a “rehabilitation island” in the middle of Lake Kivu, also known as Rwanda’s Alcatraz. Dozens of journalists have been banned from the country, arrested, and killed. Opposition politicians are routinely locked up, while civil society groups are not allowed to operate independently. Rwanda’s involvement in the destabilization of the DRC, the plundering of its resources, and the commission of the most serious crimes, including the use of sexual violence as a method of war and as a strategy of terror, is widely documented, notably by the United Nations.

    Yet this outcome is touted a development success as the EU and other international institutions cozy up to Kigali for more business as usual, even striking a high-profile advertising deal with FC Arsenal where players wear a “Visit Rwanda” slogan on their jerseys. Sure, visit Rwanda – but only if you don’t plan on asking too many questions and steer clear of the military’s infamous detention and torture camps (whose existence is denied by the government). They will really ruin your holiday.

    Again, activists seem to be doing better investigative journalism than the mainstream media, and are not fooled by spectacle. In a recent solidarity action both outside and inside the UK’s Parliament, activists from Extinction Rebellion UK denounced their government for giving Rwanda vast sums to service its extreme asylum policies, and therefore indirectly enabling mass violence and the theft of $24 trillion in natural resources from the DRC.

    XR activists outside the UK Parliament protest the financing of violence in the DRC. The hand gesture, used by Congolese protesters to call out inaction of international and regional powers, represents being silenced with a gun to your head. Photo: @XRebellionUK

    Zoom in, zoom out

    The closer you look, the more you see when it comes to the ripple effects of foreign intervention – but out of the complexity, a clear pattern of disregard and disrespect emerges to untangle the mess.

    For example, a second by-product of donor policies is the core-periphery structure that has emerged in the Great Lakes. At the core is the Kigali-Kampala axis, with eastern DRC, Burundi, and North-Western Uganda together forming the periphery. Mirroring global relations, people living in the regional core face lower security risks and have higher incomes in comparison to those in the periphery. “This situation has entrenched the notion that areas in the periphery are ‘lagging behind’, and reinforces perceptions of the DRC as ‘an inscrutable and unimprovable mess’,” explains Ghins.

    If we turn from development to peacekeeping, the effects of MONUSCO (Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo) were yet another channel through which outsiders aggravated regional fragility. With a budget of $1.5bn a year, and employing 20,000 uniformed staff, the UN peacekeeping force was the largest mission in the organization’s history. Yet, over its 14+ years in the DRC, it was infamous for protection failures and struggled for credibility.

    Of course, 20,000 staff can’t exist in a vacuum. The presence of large numbers of UN personnel in cities like Goma created dual labor markets for service sector jobs like cooks, cleaners and drivers. High expatriate salaries led real estate prices to soar. Yes, billions of dollars were spent on “peacekeeping”, but it was not guided by affected communities and could not be responsive to their needs. Ghins describes the outcome: “Not only did MONUSCO divert resources away from productive foreign investments in the Congolese economy, but it distorted local markets and may have impeded on the kinds of ‘autonomous recovery’ processes that conflicts are sometimes found to induce.”

    Today, we are witnessing the eruptions that have been kept simmering, waiting for ignition, in no small part by a paradigm of imposed peacekeeping which is ineffective at community-driven peacebuilding. Relying on MONUSCO, Kinshasa had limited incentives to expand its own military capacity in the east. By protecting the main urban centers, MONUSCO bases mostly prevented any armed group from overpowering others. “Even if the UN mission played an essential role in civilian protection, it also ‘condemned’ myriad rebel formations to coexist indefinitely,” says Ghins. A 2019 independent strategic review of MONUSCO agreed that the military aspect of the peacekeeping mission had come to overshadow its civilian and political components. The political process to demobilize and negotiate with armed groups had, in actuality, been stuck for several years.

    As MONUSCO’s presence has come to a close, it is this lack of community focused peacebuilding which is being exploited for profit by President Kagame and other local elites who use a combination of hate speech, scarcity, and fear to ignite passions on their behalf. The international community, or more specifically the imperial core, seems to find the situation amenable to an easy flow of cheap and minimally regulated resources. A united region that could leverage its own collective power over the largest trove of natural resources on the planet, would be far less convenient.

    Over thousands of pages, a complex and detailed analysis of policy would reveal something fundamentally wrong with a development model that benefits a tiny few at the expense of most, while ravaging ecosystems. But, this structural error is equally apparent via a handful of case studies – and perhaps is less likely to get lost in the details. Over the decades, a series of top-down imposed “solutions”, whether in the name of peace or development, were consistently unaccountable to and unrepresentative of the actual communities at which they were aimed. They never failed to do more harm than good.

    First justice, justice first

    Whether a political economy of war was intentionally arranged, a result of good intentions but ill-conceived policy, or a combination of both – it clearly exposes a structure that has driven endless conflict. Underlying racism and the blanket pursuit of growth to fuel profits, regardless of social and ecological costs, created this context and continues its reproduction.

    “We see the height of cynicism in terms of geostrategy and a policy of double standards,” says Mirindi in Goma. “We see what is happening in Ukraine, what is happening in Gaza. Why not, what is happening in the DRC? Why aren’t there sanctions against Rwanda which officially, visibly, supports these militias?”

    The security and humanitarian situation is becoming more and more dire each day.

    Clashes have intensified in recent days between M23 and Congolese government forces in the territories surrounding Goma, the regional capital home to over a million people. Goma airport was bombed twice. Internally displaced people continue to arrive in droves.

    On his way back to one of the crowded refugee camps on the outskirts of the city, Mirindi describes an outbreak of a skin infection that is spreading like wildfire among the displaced children. He is seeking a way to organize medical aid, though he is not a doctor. Out of a resilience born both of necessity and of vision, he and fellow activists, artists, students, and friends are experienced in organizing as a practice of strategy as well as care, yet stress is taking its toll.

    In between patient explanations of history, context, corruption, and atrocities, snippets of existential concern very near at hand slip into focus: “Last night and again today it has become more complicated with the security situation.” And, “The price of food has almost tripled in Goma. We fear that this will continue because all of the surrounding territories and villages that produce food for the city are under M23 control and the population has fled.” Heartwrenchingly, “Young children are dying of dehydration from cholera.” Yet in every conversation, we inevitably return to ordinary people aiding one another in extraordinary ways – the makings of a paradise built in hell.

    Speak truth, act now

    From this brutal context, activists in the DRC are calling for the international community to immediately stop funding Rwanda’s aggression and to hold all who are complicit accountable. Refusing to abandon their right to a future, they are urgently calling for a green transition that puts justice first, not new revenue streams, and that dismantles colonial exploitation once and for all. “Otherwise,” warns Dr. Mukwege, “the so-called green energy transition will remain red with the blood of Congolese men, women, and children” – collateral damage to enrich the same old racist elites.

    Democratic Republic of Congo players silently protested before their AFCON semi-final match against Ivory Coast. Photo: @fecofootcg

    In a silent protest in February, DRC soccer players stood before their Africa Cup of Nations semi-final match against Ivory Coast. They chose not to sing their national anthem, opting instead to cover their mouths with their hands and place two fingers from their left hands to their temples, a display of unity and solidarity with all Congolese people – silenced, with a gun to their heads.

    This hand gesture is not a resignation, it is condemnation and a challenge. The DRC will no longer be silenced. When asked for the first step towards solidarity, Mirindi urges that, “It is really essential that we talk about this situation again and again, to attract the attention of the international community, organizations, public figures and to have more mobilization. If we can continue like this… that way, it will be better.”

    [Goma Actif is organizing a fund drive ‘SOS Congo’ to help support displaced people.]

    This powerful music video by members of Goma Slam Session, a collective of young poets and rappers from the DRC, is part of a campaign to seek justice for the crimes committed in the country from 1993 to date, including those documented in the UN Congo Mapping Project report.
    Bosembo translates as: justice, truth, peace, right, impartiality, fairness, objectivity, honesty, serenity, tranquility, and goodness.
    Goma’s youth continues to be a powerhouse of creativity and resilience, proving that art can be one of the viable alternative strategies that activists can use to organize, communicate, mobilize and influence.

    The author would like to recognize activists from XR Goma University, LUCHA RDC, and XR Global Support for their contributions to this article and for their struggle for environmental and social justice.

    Original quotations were translated from French by the author.

    The post DRC Bleeds Conflict Minerals for Green Growth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UN Probe: Israel Violated International Law in Killing Reuters Reporter

    The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has found that Israel breached international law in its October killing of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in Lebanon. “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable journalists, constitutes a violation of UNSCR 1701 (2006) and international law,” UNIFIL says in its February report. The UNSCR 1701, adopted by the United...

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Kyrgyzstan parliament approves ‘foreign agents’ law

    Stockholm, March 15, 2024—Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov should reject Russian-inspired legislation that would designate externally funded media rights groups and nonprofits that run news outlets as “foreign representatives,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

    On Thursday, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament approved in a third and final reading, without debate, a bill requiring nonprofits that receive foreign funding and engage in what it defines as political activities to register as “foreign representatives,” according to news reports.

    Japarov, who recently defended the law in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has a month to return the bill or sign it into law.

    The bill, an amended version of a draft law previously criticized by CPJ, does not directly target news outlets but would apply to media rights organizations and nonprofits that run several of Kyrgyzstan’s prominent independent news websites, according to CPJ’s review.

    A new provision requires organizations designated as “foreign representatives” to label their publications as being produced by a foreign representative. Other clauses grant authorities sweeping powers of oversight over the activities of “foreign representatives” and allow them to suspend or shutter nonprofits for alleged violations of the law.

    “The ‘foreign agents’ bill passed by Kyrgyzstan’s parliament copies many of the worst aspects of Russia’s foreign agent legislation. It is clearly focused on stigmatizing nonprofits working in news media and threatens to hamstring the work of press freedom organizations,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov must show that his stated commitment to free speech is more than empty words by vetoing the bill and withdrawing his support for any form of foreign agent law.”

    Submitted to parliament in May, the bill has elicited extensive international criticism, including from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.N. special rapporteurs, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Blinken.

    The latest version of the bill, amended by parliament in February ahead of the second reading, removes a controversial clause stipulating prison terms of up to 10 years for vaguely defined offenses, according to CPJ’s review and an analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL).

    Under the bill, externally funded nonprofits must apply to a public register of “foreign representatives” if they participate in activities defined by the law as “political”—including “disseminating … opinions on decisions taken by state organs,” issuing public appeals to state organs and officials, and “shaping socio-political views and convictions, including by conducting surveys of public opinion.”

    The law would require nonprofits to carry out a costly independent audit report each year, according to the ICNL. It would also grant authorities the right to request their internal documents, to send government representatives to participate in nonprofits’ internal activities, and to check—by as-yet-unspecified means—whether their activities and expenditures correspond to the aims listed in their articles of incorporation, it said. The U.N. special rapporteurs said these clauses “may amount to almost unrestricted administrative control over these associations.”

    Authorities would have the power to suspend the activities of nonprofits for up to six months and freeze their bank accounts if they fail to declare themselves as foreign representatives or to label their publications after receiving a warning. Nonprofits that fail to rectify such omissions after suspension can be liquidated by the courts.

    In his letter to Blinken, Japarov said Kyrgyzstan needed to ensure financial transparency of media outlets and NGOs. However, Aibek Askarbekov, an independent human rights lawyer, told CPJ that authorities already had full access to financial data of nonprofits, which are required to publish information about sources of income and expenditures online. The bill instead aims at “exerting tight control” over nonprofits, he said.

    Parliamentary approval of the bill comes amid an unprecedented crackdown on independent reporting in a country previously seen as a regional haven for the free press. In January, Kyrgyz authorities arrested 11 journalists linked to the investigative outlet Temirov Live and raided the privately owned news agency 24.kg. In February, authorities shuttered the prominent news website Kloop.

    CPJ’s emails to Kyrgyzstan’s parliament, lawmaker Nadira Narmatova, who introduced the bill to parliament, and the Office of the President requesting comment on the bill did not receive any replies.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Abuse of counter-terrorism laws threaten human rights globally, warns UN expert

    On 12 March 2024 the recently appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, Ben Saul, warned that two decades of prolific global efforts to counter terrorism have not been matched by an equally robust commitment to human rights.

    In his first report to the Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur painted a counter-terrorism landscape strewn with human rights violations, including unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, torture, unfair trials, privacy infringements from mass surveillance, and the criminalisation of freedoms of expression, assembly, association and political participation. For earlier posts on this topic, see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/anti-terrorism-legislation/

    “The misuse of counter-terrorism measures not only violates the rights of suspected criminals but can also jeopardise the freedoms of the innocent,” Saul said.

    He condemned the rampant weaponisation of overly-broad terrorism offences against civil society, including political opponents, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, minorities, and students. Unjustified and protracted states of emergency continue to undermine human rights, the expert warned.

    “Excessive military violence in response to terrorism also destroys fundamental rights, including through violations of international humanitarian law and international criminal law,” Saul said. “Cross-border military violence is increasingly used by states even when it is not justified under the international law of self-defence.”

    “Many states have also failed to address the root causes of terrorism, including state violations of human rights – while impunity for those violations is endemic,” he said.

    Saul said regrettably, the UN has been part of the problem, by encouraging authoritarian regimes to strengthen counter-terrorism laws in the absence of a rule of law culture or human rights safeguards. “The UN must also do better to meaningfully consult civil society on counter-terrorism,” he said.

    Announcing his priorities for his three-year term, the Special Rapporteur said his focus would include ensuring regional organisations respect human rights when countering terrorism; all coercive administrative measures used to prevent terrorism comply with human rights; and States are held accountable for large-scale violations of human rights resulting from counter terrorism – and victims receive full and effective remedies.

    Saul will also continue the efforts of his predecessor on preventing the abuse of counter-terrorism measures against civil society; protecting the 70,000 people arbitrarily detained in north-east Syria in the conflict against ISIL; protecting detainees and transferees from the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; ensuring that the UN safeguards human rights in its counter-terrorism work, regulating new technologies used in counter-terrorism; and protecting the victims of terrorism.

    “Human rights in counter-terrorism are at increased risk because of rising authoritarianism, surging domestic polarisation and extremism, geopolitical competition, dysfunction in the Security Council and new tools, including social media, for fuelling dehumanisation, vilification, incitement and misinformation,” the Special Rapporteur warned.

    “Double standards and selectivity by major powers in the enforcement of human rights is also eroding public confidence in the credibility of the international human rights system,” he said. “States must move beyond rhetorical commitment to human rights and instead place human rights at the heart of all counter-terrorism measures.”

    Statements Statement of the mandate of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism

    Statements Human Rights Council discusses the protection of human rights while countering terrorism

    Statements UN Office of Counter-Terrorism Town Hall meeting, Statement by Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

    https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/03/rampant-abuse-counter-terrorism-laws-threaten-human-rights-globally-warns-un

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Ariel Henry Announces Plans to Resign Amid Rising Opposition in Haiti

    Unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry has announced he plans to resign amid rising opposition in Haiti, where a coalition of armed groups opposing the de facto leader have declared an uprising, led mass jailbreaks and taken over the country’s airport. At an emergency meeting with international actors in Jamaica, the regional bloc CARICOM has reportedly proposed a plan to set up a seven-member...

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Hunger Killing Gaza’s Children Has a Clear Cause that Few are Willing to Name out Loud

    Following the February 29 Israeli slaughter of at least 115 starving Palestinians lined up for food aid, there was little or no outrage by the same Western media which would have howled if the perpetrator were Russia or Syria.

    According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.

    Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs, “Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”

    The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”

    Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”

    The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.

    In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”

    The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am.”

    But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.

    On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.

    Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.

    As Professor Sachs stated, “…Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”

    Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, “Before yesterday’s ‘Flour Massacre’, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”

    The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.

    You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.

    Starvation in Syria was another matter

    The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.

    In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syrian government.

    Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.

    As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.

    In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.

    Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.

    Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”=good, Assad=bad.

    But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.

    Open the borders

    Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.

    “It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.

    She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”

    This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.

    Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”

    Professor Sachs made an important point: “This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none…They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support…that is not stopping this slaughter.”

    Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

  • First published at RT.com.
    • The post The Hunger Killing Gaza’s Children Has a Clear Cause that Few are Willing to Name out Loud first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What’s Going on in Haiti?

    Haiti is in the headlines again and, as usual, the headlines on Haiti are mostly negative. They are also largely false. Haiti, they tell us, is overrun by “gang violence.” Haiti is “a failed state,” standing on the verge of “anarchy” and teetering on the edge of “collapse.” Haiti, they tell us, can only be stabilized and saved through foreign military invasion and occupation. We have seen these stories before. We know their purpose. They serve to cover up the true origins of the “crisis” in Haiti while justifying foreign military intervention and setting up an attack on Haiti’s sovereignty.

    What is the reality behind the headlines? The reality is that the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. Those countries calling for military intervention – the US, France, Canada – have created the conditions making military intervention appear necessary and inevitable. The same countries calling for intervention are the same countries that will benefit from intervention, not the Haitian people. And for twenty years, those countries that cast Haiti as a failed state actively worked to destroy Haiti’s government while imposing foreign colonial rule.

    On Haiti, the position of the Black Alliance for Peace has been consistent and clear. We reject the sensationalist headlines in the Western media with their racist assumptions that Haiti is ungovernable, and the Haitian people cannot govern themselves. We support the efforts of the Haitian people to assert their sovereignty and reclaim their country. We denounce the ongoing imperialist onslaught on Haiti and demand the removal of Haiti’s foreign, colonial rulers.

    What’s Going on in Haiti?

    • The crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism – but what does this mean? It means that the failure of governance in Haiti is not something internal to Haiti, but it is a result of the concerted effort on the part of the west to gut the Haitian state and destroy popular democracy in Haiti.
    • Haiti is currently under occupation by the US/UN and Core Group, a self-appointed cabal of foreign entities who effectively rule this country.
    • The occupation of Haiti began in 2004 with the US/France/Canada-sponsored coup d’état against Haiti’s democratically elected president. The coup d’etat was approved by the UN Security Council. It established an occupying military force (euphemistically called a “peacekeeping” mission), with the acronym MINUSTAH. Though the MINUSTAH mission officially ended in 2017, the UN office in Haiti was reconstituted as BIHUH. BINUH, along with the Core Group, continues to have a powerful role in Haitian affairs.
    • Over the past four years, the Haitian masses have mobilized and protested against an illegal government, imperial meddling, the removal of fuel subsidies leading to rising costs of living, and insecurity by elite-funded armed groups. However, these protests have been snuffed out by the US-installed puppet government.
    • Since 2021, attempts to control Haiti by the US have intensified. In that year, Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse was assassinated and Ariel Henry was installed by the US and UN Core Group as the de facto prime minister. In the wake of the assassination of Moïse and the installation of Henry, the U.S. has sought to build a coalition of foreign states willing to send military forces to occupy Haiti, and to deal with Haiti’s ostensible “gang” problem.
    • The armed groups (the so-called “gangs”) mainly in the capital city of Haiti should be understood as “paramilitary” forces, as they are made up of former (and current) Haitian police and military elements.  These paramilitary forces are known to work for some of Haiti’s elite, including, some say, Ariel Henry (Haiti’s former de facto prime minister). It should also be noted that Haiti does not manufacture guns; the guns and ammunition come primarily from the US and the Dominican Republic; and the US has consistently rejected calls for an arms embargo.
    • Moreover, as Haitian organizations have demonstrated, it is the UN and Core Group occupation that has enabled the “gangsterization” of the country. When we speak of “gangs,” we must recognize that the real and most powerful gangs in the country are the US, the Core Group, and the illegal UN office in Haiti – all of whom helped to create the current crisis.
    • Most recently, Ariel Henry traveled to Kenya to sign an agreement with Kenya prime minister William Ruto authorizing the deployment of 1,000 Kenyan police officers as the head of a multinational military force whose ostensible purpose was to combat Haiti’s gang violence. But the US strategy for Haiti appears to have collapsed as Henry has been unable to return to Haiti and there is renewed challenge to the constitutionality of that deployment.
    • The US is now scrambling for control, seeking to force Henry’s resignation while looking for a new puppet to serve as a figurehead for foreign rule of Haiti. While Haiti currently does not have a government, it has not descended into chaos or anarchy. The paramilitaries, it seems, are waiting for their orders to act, while the US strategy for Haiti is in crisis.

    Why Haiti?

    For BAP, the historic struggles of the Haitian people to combat slavery, colonialism, and imperialism have been crucial to the struggles of African people throughout the globe. The attacks on Black sovereignty in Haiti are replicated in the attacks on Black people throughout the Americas. Today, Haiti is  important for U.S. geopolitical and economic viability. Haiti is in a key location in the Caribbean for US military and security strategy in the region, especially in light of the coming US confrontation with China and in the context of the strategic implementation of the Global Fragilities Act. Haiti’s economic importance stems from what western corporations perceive as a vast pool of cheap labor, and its unexploited land and mineral wealth.

    BAP’S Position on the Current Situation in Haiti

    • BAP, as with many Haitian and other organizations, have consistently argued against a renewed foreign military intervention.
    • We have persistently demanded the end of the foreign occupation of Haiti. This includes the dissolution of the Core Group, the UN office in Haiti (BINHU), and the end of the constant meddling of the US, along with its junior partners, CARICOM, and Brazil’s Lula.
    • We have denounced the governments of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) (with the exception of Venezuela and Cuba), for supporting US plans for armed intervention in Haiti and the denial of Haitian sovereignty.
    • We have denounced CARICOM leaders, and especially Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, for not only supporting US planned armed intervention in Haiti and offering their police and soldiers for the mission, but for also following US and Core Group dictates on the way forward in Haiti. Haiti’s solutions should come from Haitian people through broad consensus. CARICOM leaders cannot claim to be helping Haiti when they are acting as neo-colonial stooges of the US and the Core Group.
    • We have denounced the role of Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, for not only continuing Brazil’s role in the Core Group, but for also leading the charge, along with the criminal US government, for foreign armed military invasion of Haiti. We remind everyone that it was Lula’s government that led the military wing of the 2004 violent UN occupation of Haiti. Brazil’s soldiers led the mission for 13 years (until 2017).
    • In solidarity with Haitian groups, we have denounced the UN approved, US-funded, Kenyan-led foreign armed invasion and occupation of Haiti. We are adamant that a U.S./UN-led armed foreign intervention in Haiti is not only illegitimate, but illegal. We support Haitian people and civil society organizations who have been consistent in their opposition to foreign armed military intervention – and who have argued that the problems of Haiti are a direct result of the persistent and long-term meddling of the United States, the United Nations, and the Core Group.
    • We demand US accountability for flooding Haiti with military grade weapons. We demand that the US enforce the UN-stated arms embargo against the Haitian and U.S. elite who import guns into the country.
    • We will continue to support our comrades as they fight for a free and sovereign Haiti.

    Long live Haiti! 

    • First published in The Black Alliance for Peace

    The post What’s Going on in Haiti? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New Report on Sexual Violence During October 7 Attack Raises Serious Questions About the UN’s Supposed Anti-Israel Bias

    A United Nations (UN) report recently emerged making damning claims of sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. But not all is as it seems. The report has some glaring epistemological problems, all of which seem to serve the Israeli narrative that its genocide in Gaza is somehow justified. Moreover, the report fits within a wider modus operandi on the part of the world’s preeminent international institution. A more comprehensive examination of the history of the UN’s role in the conflict in Palestine reveals its supposed pro-Palestinian bias is not as clearcut as it’s commonly presented. Indeed, there is evidence that the UN has, if anything, been more a tool of Israel than the other way round.

    Shocking accusations swiftly weaponized by Israel

    The UN released the report on March 4, almost six months after the surprise October 7 attack when members of Hamas’ paramilitary wing breached the Gaza border. Co-authored by its special envoy on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the document claims there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attack. Patten gave a statement in which she said that this took place in “at least three locations” including “the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”

    The following day, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, publicly condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supposedly failing to respond in an adequate manner. Specifically, he criticized Guterres for failing to immediately call for a UN Security Council meeting about the report’s findings. However, as multiple media outlets have pointed out, Guterres does not have the authority to convene a General Assembly meeting. A UN spokesperson responded that “in no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to keep the report ‘quiet.’” She added that Katz’s announcement was made a matter of hours before a press conference about the report’s contents was scheduled to be held.

    Recalling UN ambassador and launching ‘hasbara’ propaganda campaign

    Israel has also withdrawn its ambassador to the UN, claiming that the organization’s leadership is attempting to “silence” the allegations. Katz said in a statement: “”I [have] ordered our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, to return to Israel for immediate consultations regarding the attempt to keep quiet the serious UN report on the mass rapes committed by Hamas and its helpers on Oct. 7.”

    Nonetheless, there are already signs that the Israeli government is seizing on the report as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign to deflect criticism from its committal of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. On March 7, the Jerusalem Post reported that Katz, “has directed all embassies within the State of Israel to begin a large-scale hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign immediately… in light of the findings of the UN report on sexual violence in the Hamas massacre on October 7.”

    An inversion of the Israeli narrative about the UN

    The development represents an inversion of what Israel and Western media commonly characterize as the usual dynamic between the UN and the various parties to the conflict in Palestine. According to this narrative, the UN has a viciously anti-Israel agenda and consistently singles out Israel for criticism. Indeed, hardline Zionists have long complained that the UN is “biased” or even prejudiced against Israel, which often goes alongside the usual conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

    One US-based Israel supporter even set up an NGO called “UN Watch,” which according to its executive director “holds the UN to account” for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Indeed, we will presumably soon hear an Israeli narrative that presents the fact that the UN has produced such a report in spite of such a bias as the most definitive proof possible that its findings are correct. But a deeper investigation shows that the report is, in fact, deeply flawed in both its methods and conclusions.

    A compendium of unverified anecdotes and repetition of Israeli lies

    It has already emerged, for instance, that the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7. Rather, they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel. According to CNN, the UN team met with a total of 33 Israeli institutions. One of these was a “search and rescue” organization that has previously been accused of spreading misinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack. This same organization, for example, had earlier claimed that it found a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach in an apparent attack on her fetus, which turned out to be unverified.

    Foreign Policy magazine pointed out that the report furthermore “did not attribute the sexual violence to any specific armed group.” In other words, even if the allegations are true, they could have been committed by Palestinians (or, indeed, non-Palestinians) who were not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian paramilitary organization. Foreign Policy added that “the U.N. team behind the report had not been tasked with an investigative mission” and that “[s]uch attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.”

    A similar story plays out at the New York Times

    The report was released in the same week that it emerged that significant sections of a New York Times article published in December of last year, which contained similar claims, were in fact false. The story, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.,” claimed that members of the Be’eri kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza border had been raped by Hamas assailants during the course of the October 7 attack.

    But The Intercept reported on March 7 that at least two of the three women “were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” according to a spokesperson of the kibbutz. The Intercept article adds that some of the initial reports about sexual violence came from an anonymous paramedic who had been connected to the international media by a representative of the Israeli government (which, of course, makes this person’s testimony highly suspect). It also states that the kibbutz spokesperson herself “disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.”

    Not an isolated incident, but the latest chapter in a long history

    Neither the UN report nor the erroneous New York Times article would be the first cases of Western institutions or its corporate-owned media spreading misinformation on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, there is a long history of The New York Times specifically taking orders from the Israeli government and its NGO proxies in the Israel lobby. In 2014, for example, the Times deliberately failed to report on the arrest of a Palestinian journalist by Israeli authorities because Israel had ordered it to do so. In 2022, the Times fired a Palestinian photographer on its staff at the behest of the pro-Israel NGO Honest Reporting.

    Even when there is no direct evidence of Israeli intervention, leadership of mainstream corporate media across the West seem to have an almost automatic tendency to sideline, silence and/or fire any of its staff who fail to toe the pro-Israel line. In 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for making a pro-Palestinian remark at a UN meeting held on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Washington-based publication The Hill sacked Katie Halper in 2022 after she described Israel as an apartheid state (a charge that has become mainstream even within Israel). And the UK’s Guardian newspaper fired Nathan J. Robinson in 2021 after he posted a satirical comment about the US’s military funding to Israel on social media.

    Countless resolutions but never any concrete sanction

    As for the UN, though there have been many resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, the organization has seldom imposed any concrete punitive measures against the country in response. Indeed, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the reason why the UN keeps issuing so many resolutions condemning Israel is because Israel (with the encouragement of its backers in Washington) simply ignores them and continues to violate Palestinian human rights and international law.

    In any case, it is the UN General Assembly, rather than the UN’s leadership or staff, that usually issues these condemnations. The UN General Assembly is made up of representatives of governments around the world and so is more representative of global public opinion than the UN’s internal bureaucracy. In any case, General Assembly resolutions can be vetoed by permanent members of the UN Security Council. Since one of those permanent members is the United States (whose number one ally is Israel), it always vetoes any resolution that condemns Israel anyway.

    UN staff slammed by leadership when critical of Israel

    Even when UN officials themselves criticize Israel, they sometimes do so only to get silenced or sidelined by the UN’s hierarchy. For instance, international relations scholar at Princeton University Richard Falk served for decades as a UN expert on the conflict in Palestine. Yet his work has often been thwarted by figures within the UN leadership and administration.

    In 2017, for example, Falk published a report on Israel’s human rights violations through the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). The head of UNESCWA, Rima Khalaf, said that the report represented the first time that any UN report has “clearly and frankly conclude[d] that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.”

    The fact that Israel is practicing apartheid in the occupied territories is so obvious that former US president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, have said so. Even some figures from Israel’s own political, military, intelligence, and legal elite have said so too.  Yet in spite of this, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that Khalaf withdraw Falk’s report.

    Legitimizing the two-state charade while deplatforming the one-state alternative

    Another way that the UN subtly serves the Israeli narrative is its elevation of a two-state solution as the best, and indeed only, means of resolving the conflict. Every resolution passed by the UN General Assembly calling for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is predicated on one Israeli state and one Palestinian state divided by the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 war. This would deliver to Israel 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine while leaving the Palestinians with the remaining 22%. In addition to giving the two sides a completely unfair share of the land (especially considering the rough parity in population numbers), this division would also reward the Zionist landgrab and subsequent ethnic cleansing that took place in the latter half of the 1940s.

    The traditional solution that was proffered by all Palestinian nationalist parties before the 1993 Oslo accord, meanwhile, (that is, a single, secular, non-sectarian democratic state with equal rights for all encompassing the whole of historic Palestine) has been systematically suppressed and deplatformed by the UN’s leadership. Former official Craig Mokhiber was essentially forced to resign for reasons of conscience before publicly voicing his support for the rival one-state solution – again highlighting how the UN hierarchy sidelines those who it considers too pro-Palestinian.

    In a public letter published just as he resigned, Mokhiber stated that the two-state solution has become an “open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” During a media interview shortly after he added: “When people [who work at the UN] are not talking from official talking points, you hear increasingly about a one-state solution.”

    The two-state smokescreen

    This deliberate deplatforming of the one-state solution and narrow focus on its two-state rival serves an important purpose for Israel. Though Israel opposes even the resolutions in favor of two states (presumably because they insist that such a settlement should be based on internationally recognized borders), it nonetheless benefits from the elevation of the two-state solution. This is because it creates a convenient smokescreen for Israel to deliberately stall on making peace while continuing to displace Palestinians in the West Bank, establish settlements in their place, and build infrastructure for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers – all of which is illegal under international law.

    Israel does this as part of a duplicitous sleight of hand in which it publicly proclaims support for a two-state solution while simultaneously itself creating a situation on the ground that makes that solution impossible. It does this for the simple reason that the goal of Zionism from the outset has been the establishment of a Jewish-majority state encompassing all of historic Palestine with the Palestinians ethnically cleansed out of it. As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky puts it in A Land With A People, “the settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise Palestine’ and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.”

    Time to rethink the role of the UN

    Given the UN’s role in providing cover for the continuation of this process all while posturing as the primary locomotive toward peace, it is high time that Palestinians and their supporters stop looking up to it as a source of truth and meaningful condemnation of Israel’s human rights violations. Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.

    The post New Report on Sexual Violence During October 7 Attack Raises Serious Questions About the UN’s Supposed Anti-Israel Bias first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Youth activists need protection against smear campaigns and arrests, says UN expert

    Children and teenagers routinely denied access to support given to older activists against online and physical attacks, says report

    Children campaigning to save the planet and defend human rights must be taken seriously and better protected from online smear campaigns, arrests and physical attacks, a new report by a leading UN expert has found.

    Child and youth activists are at the forefront of human rights struggles globally but are routinely dismissed, excluded and denied access to support available to older activists, according to Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, who interviewed nearly 100 young people from 37 countries.

    Continue reading...

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Excerpts from Türk’s global update to the Human Rights Council

    UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk at the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council, OHCHR/Pierre Albouy

    At the 55th session of the Human Rights Council, Volker Türk – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – made his overview statement on 4 march 2024. Here some highlights:

    ….Around the world, 55 conflicts are flaring. Widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights law are generating devastating impact on millions of civilians. Displacement and humanitarian crises have already reached an unprecedented scale. And all of these conflicts have regional and global impact.

    Overlapping emergencies make the spectre of spillover conflict very real. The war in Gaza has explosive impact across the Middle East. Conflicts in other regions – including in the Horn of Africa, Sudan and the Sahel – could also escalate sharply. Increasing militarisation on the Korean Peninsula raises threat levels. The deteriorating security c risis in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which the Council will address on 3 April, is alarming. In the Red Sea, as well as the Black Sea, attacks are creating shock-waves for the global transport of goods, adding to the economic pain inflicted on less developed countries…..

    In Latin America and the Caribbean, the prevalence and violence of gangs and organized crime have severe impact on the lives and rights of millions of people, including in Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras and Mexico. Punitive and militarized responses have in some cases led to grave human rights violations, potentially further fuelling violence. Only policies grounded in human rights can provide effective and sustainable solutions. Corruption, impunity, poor governance and the structural root causes of violence – such as discrimination and failure to uphold economic, social and cultural rights – must be tackled, with the full participation of civil society and affected communities. International cooperation needs to be enhanced, to address the illegal arms trade and ensure accountability for transnational crimes…

    Fear is fragmenting societies across the world, unleashing fury and hatred. They are also fuelled by a winner-take-all attitude that frames elections as the spoils of conquest.

    ..Good governance requires constant oversight and accountability, via independent checks and balances to the exercise of power, meaning that it is strongly underpinned by the rule of law, including independent justice systems. Fundamental freedoms – the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, peaceful assembly and association – are also essential.

    …

    I am profoundly concerned by the prospect of intense disinformation campaigns in the context of elections, fuelled by generative artificial intelligence. There is an acute need for robust regulatory frameworks to ensure responsible use of generative AI, and my Office is doing its utmost to advance them…

    Autocracy and military coups are the negation of democracy. Every election – even an imperfect one – constitutes an effort to at least formally acknowledge the universal aspiratio n to democracy However, in a so-called ‘illiberal democracy’ – or, as the Prime Minister of Hungary referred to his country, an ‘illiberal State’ – the formal structure of election is maintained, civic freedoms are restricted, the media’s scrutiny of governance is eroded by installing government control over key media outlets, and independent oversight and justice institutions are deeply undermined, concentrating power in the executive branch.

    It is important to recognise that in many cases, this year’s electoral processes will ensure a smooth transfer of power, free of hatred; and that the governance structures that result will broadly achieve their main function of representing the many voices of the people, and advancing their rights.

    But in other cases, I have serious concerns about the human rights context in which several elections are taking place.

    In the Russian Federation, the authorities have further intensified their repression of dissenting voices prior to this month’s Presidential election. Several candidates have been prevented from running, due to alleged administrative irregularities. The death in prison of opposition leader Alexei Navalny adds to my serious concerns about his persecution. Since the onset of Russia’s war on Ukraine, t housands of politicians, journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers and people who have simply spoken their minds on social media have faced administrative and criminal charges, and this trend appears to have worsened in recent months, with many cultural figures targeted. Last month, a new bill passed into law that further punishes people convicted of distributing information deemed to be false about Russia’s armed forces, as well as people who seek to implement decisions by international organizations that the Russian Federation “does not take part in”. I urge a swift and comprehensive review of all cases of deprivation of liberty that result from the exercise of fundamental freedoms; as well as an immediate end to the repression of independent voices and the legal professionals who represent them. The future of the country depends on an open space.

    Iran’s legislative election three days ago was Iranians’ first opportunity to vote since the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 and 2023. It took place in a country that has been deeply divided by the Government’s repression of the rights of women and girls. People who participated in the protests have been persecuted, imprisoned on long sentences and in some cases, put to death. The draft Bill on “Supporting the Family by Promoting the Culture of Chastity and Hijab”, if adopted, would impose severe punishments for acts that should not be deemed criminal in any country. In my ongoing engagement with the Iranian authorities, I have urged immediate reforms to uphold the rights of all Iranians, including the right of women to make their own choices, and an immediate moratorium on the death penalty….

    In the United States of America, in this electoral year, it is particularly important for authorities at all levels to implement recent recommendations by the UN Human Rights Committee to ensure that suffrage is non-discriminatory, equal and universal. A 2021 Presidential executive order acknowledges that disproportionate and discriminatory policies and other obstacles have restricted the right to vote for people of African descent, and emphasises the need to overturn them. Yet according to the Brennan Center for Justice , at least 14 states have passed laws in 2023 that have the effect of making voting more difficult. In a context of intense political polarisation, it is important to emphasise equal rights, and the equal value of every citizen’s vote…

    In Afghanistan, I deplore continuing and systematic violations of human rights, particularly the comprehensive violations of the rights of women and girls, which exclude them from every aspect of public life, including secondary and tertiary education; employment; and movement. Advancing the rights of women and girls must be the highest priority for all who work on and in Afghanistan. The civic freedoms and media freedoms of all Afghans are profoundly curtailed, with many women human rights defenders and journalists suffering arbitrary detentions. The resumption of public executions is horrific. I remain concerned about forced expulsion of Afghans from neighbouring countries, particularly for those who face a risk of persecution, torture or other irreparable harm in Afghanistan.

    In the United Arab Emirates, another mass trial is underway based on counter-terrorism legislation that contravenes human rights law. In December, new charges were brought against 84 people, including human rights defenders, journalists and others who were already in prison. Several were nearing the end of their sentence or have been arbitrarily held in detention after completion of their sentence. Their joint prosecution constitutes the second-largest mass trial in the UAE’s history, after the so-called “UAE94” case in 2021, and includes many of the same defendants. I remain concerned about broader patterns of suppression of dissent and the civic space in the country, and I urge the Government to review domestic laws in line with international human rights recommendations.

    Dialogue between China and my Office continues in areas such as counterterrorism policies, gender equality, minority protection, civic space, and economic, social and cultural rights. As we move forward, it is important that this dialogue yield concrete results, notably in respect of the policy areas raised during the Universal Periodic Review. I recognise China’s advances in alleviating poverty and advancing development, and I have urged that these advances be accompanied by reforms to align relevant laws and policies with international human rights standards. During the UPR, China announced plans to adopt 30 new measures for human rights protection, including amendments to the Criminal Law, and revisions of the Criminal Procedure Law. My Office looks forward to engaging with China on this; I particularly encourage revision of the vague offence of “picking quarrels and making trouble” in Article 293 of the Criminal Law, and I urge the release of human rights defenders, lawyers and others detained under such legislation. I also call on the Government to implement the recommendations made by my Office and other human rights bodies in relation to laws, policies and practises that violate fundamental rights, including in the Xinjiang and Tibet regions. I am engaging with the Hong Kong authorities on continuing concerns about national security laws…

    In many countries, including in Europe and North America, I am concerned by the apparently growing influence of so-called “great replacement” conspiracy theories, based on the false notion that Jews, Muslims, non-white people and migrants seek to “replace” or suppress countries’ cultures and peoples. These delusional and deeply racist ideas have directly influenced many perpetrators of violence. Together with the so called “war on woke,” which is really a war on inclusion, these ideas aim to exclude racial minorities – particularly women from racial minorities – and LGBTQ+ people from full equality. Multiculturalism is not a threat: it is the history of humanity, and deeply beneficial to us all.

    Peace, like development, is built and nourished through rights. It is by upholding and advancing the full spectrum of human rights, including the right to development and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, that States can craft solutions that are durable – because they respond to the universal truth of our equality and the inextinguishable desire for freedom and justice.

    History is a record of humanity’s capacity to surmount the worst challenges. Among the greatest achievements of humanity over the past 75 years has been the recognition that addressing human rights in every country– all human rights; it is not an à la carte menu – is a matter of international concern.

    See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/02/26/human-rights-defenders-issues-at-the-55th-session-of-the-human-rights-council/

    For the ful text, see:

    https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2024/03/turks-global-update-human-rights-council

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • DAWN calls on UN to set up global protection force for Gaza

    Asia Pacific Report

    The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) should act urgently to establish an international protection force to safeguard Palestinian civilians and ensure the unobstructed delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza as a last-ditch attempt to prevent imminent, says DAWN.

    If the UNSC is blocked by a US veto or fails to reach consensus, the UN General Assembly should reconvene the 10th session of “Uniting for Peace” and authorise such a force itself.

    Recent airdrops of aid, now with the participation of the US Air Force, are “inadequate to meet the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza”, says DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now).

    It signals the availability of international military forces to help stabilise the situation.

    “We urgently need the UNSC to authorise an international protection force to ensure the safe and effective delivery of food to starving Palestinian men, women, and children, just as it has done in other situations of catastrophic conflicts,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN.

    “Tragically, without such intervention, it has become clear that Israel will continue to deliberately block such aid, which is the sole cause of the starvation and imminent famine in Gaza.”

    On February 29, at least 117 Palestinians were killed, and more than 750 others were wounded after Israeli troops opened fire on civilians gathered at a convoy of food trucks southwest of Gaza City, highlighting both the desperation of the starving civilian population and their inability to safely access humanitarian aid.

    Aid delivery halted
    International humanitarian organisations have halted all aid delivery to northern Gaza for nearly two weeks due to the lack of security, which is a direct result of actions and policies of the Israeli military, including targeting Palestinian police forces attempting to secure aid delivery.

    The Biden administration reportedly warned Israel last week that as a direct result of its actions, “Gaza is turning into Mogadishu”.

    The same day, the UN Security Council met in an emergency session called by Algeria on what is now being described as the “flour massacre,” but members failed to agree on a statement about the deaths and injuries of civilians seeking aid.

    At a meeting of the UNSC last week under the auspices of UNSC Resolution 2417, UN agencies warned that at least 576,000 people in Gaza were facing famine-like conditions.

    The  UN World Food Programme noted that there would be an “inevitable famine” in the besieged Palestinian enclave, amid increasing reports of children dying of starvation as Israel continued to hinder aid delivery to the population.

    Gaza was seeing “the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world,” Carl Skau, deputy head of the World Food Programme, told the UN Security Council last week, with one child in every six under the age of two acutely malnourished.

    “Civilians and aid groups have described food shortages so dire that people were turning to leaves and bird food and other types of animal feed for sustenance.”

    A new World Bank report has found that Gaza’s total economic output had shriveled by more than 80 percent in the last quarter of 2023, 80 to 96 percent of Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed, and about 80 percent of Gazans had lost their jobs.

    Since the start of the war in Gaza on October 9, Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive has killed more than 30,000, more than 10,000 of them children, and wounded more than 70,000 people.

    “The whole world is watching in horror as Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians, not only impeding the delivery of aid but actually firing and killing people desperately trying to obtain a few sacks of flour,” said Whitson.

    “If the international community doesn’t have the guts to hold Israel accountable for its atrocities and end this grotesque, genocidal assault on Palestinian civilians, the very least it can do is establish a UN protection force to ensure the safe delivery of aid.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.