[News] The United States Raises a Middle Finger to the International Criminal Court
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Nov 28 12:30:20 EST 2024
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*The United States Raises a Middle Finger to the International Criminal
Court: The Forty-Eighth Newsletter (2024)*
Emily Karaka (Aotearoa), /Parallel Process: Palestinian Horizon/, 2024.
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: /Ka Awatea, A
New Dawn/, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, 2024.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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Finally, before history ends, the International Criminal Court (ICC)
issued
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arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his
former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against
humanity. The indictment stated that there ‘are reasonable grounds to
believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the
civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival,
including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as
fuel and electricity’. The court found sufficient reasons to believe
that the two men ‘bear criminal responsibility’ for the war crime of
starvation as a method of warfare, the crimes against humanity of
murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, and the war crime of
intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population. Almost
immediately, US President Joe Biden condemned the court’s actions,
stating that the ‘ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli
leaders is outrageous’. The United States, Biden said
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‘will always stand with Israel’.
A short walk from Biden’s White House sits Freedom House, an institution
set up in 1941 and predominantly funded by the US State Department. Each
year, Freedom House releases its /Freedom in the World/ index, which
uses various data points to adjudge whether a country is ‘free’, ‘partly
free’, or ‘not free’. Adversaries of the United States – such as China,
Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia – are consistently found to be ‘not
free’, even if they have electoral processes and legislative bodies of
various kinds (in Iran’s 2024 legislative elections, for example, 15,200
candidates ran for 290 seats in the Consultative Assembly; while last
year in Cuba, the 470 seats in the National Assembly of People’s Power
were elected by 75.87% of eligible voters). Meanwhile, the 2024 index
accords Israel with a ‘global freedom score’ of 74/100 and proclaims it
to be the only ‘free’ state in the region, despite the authors noting
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that in Israel ‘the political leadership and many in society have
discriminated against Arab and other ethnic or religious minority
populations, resulting in systemic disparities in areas including
infrastructure, criminal justice, education, and economic opportunity’.
According to the measurements of this US State Department-funded index,
which is routinely used to disparage countries around the world that it
deems unfree, an apartheid system built on occupation and now genocide
is considered an exemplary democracy.
Willem de Kooning (Netherlands), /Police Gazette/, 1955.
Indices, such as the one from Freedom House, are not as innocent as they
may appear. The design of the index – built on the subjective
assessments of analysts and advisors selected from the world of Western
establishment think tanks – produces outcomes that are often prescribed.
While Freedom House claims to draw from the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights
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(1966), it ignores the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights
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(1966). The latter would necessitate understanding democracy in a far
more capacious way than the mere holding of elections and existence of
multiple political parties. Article 11 of the second covenant, alone,
would expand the idea of democracy to include the right to housing and
the right to be free from hunger. As Article 4 notes, the purpose of the
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is to promote ‘the
general welfare in a democratic society’. Democracy here is used with
the broadest understanding, extending far beyond simple electoralism.
And even with regard to electoralism, there is scant concern in the
Freedom House index for the high rates of abstention
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across liberal democracies and for the collapse
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of a vibrant media culture to hold political parties and leaders to account.
But then, what do those behind such indices care? They think themselves
masters of the universe. The reactions to the ICC indictment from the
United States and Germany – the two countries with the largest
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arms transfers to Israel during this genocide – have been expected, but
nonetheless shocking. Biden’s cavalier reaction confirms that the United
States either does not understand or does not care about the gravity of
its callousness and that the United States fails to grasp that its
rejection of the ICC warrants is the final nail in the coffin of the
US’s ‘rules-based international order
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On the issue of callousness: ahead of the 2024 US presidential election
the Biden administration said
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that Israel had to allow aid into Gaza within thirty days or it would
face a weapons’ freeze, but this deadline came and went without much
concern. The ‘rules-based international order’ was always a bit of a
farce. In 2002, during the US-driven War on Terror, the US Congress
debated the possibility that a US soldier or CIA agent could be charged
with a war crime. To immunise that soldier or agent, the US Congress
passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, which has been
widely called the ‘Hague Invasion Act’. Although the act does not say
that the US can invade the Netherlands to free its personnel from the
ICC, it does say
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that the US president ‘is authorised to use all means necessary and
appropriate to bring about the release of any person… who is being
detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the
International Criminal Court’. Around the time of the passage of this
act, the United States formally withdrew
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from the Rome Statute (1998) that set up the ICC.
Peterson Kamwathi (Kenya), /Untitled/ /– Electoral Charge of Kenya/,
2008–09.
Both US Senators Tom Cotton
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and Lindsey Graham
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have invoked the Hague Invasion Act in response to the ICC’s issuance of
arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, with Graham going so far as
to say that the US Senate should place sanctions, even on allies such as
Canada, for having the temerity to suggest that they would uphold the
warrants. If the US throws the ICC warrants to the winds, then it has
told the world with finality that it does not believe in the rules, or
that the rules are only made to discipline others and not itself. It is
remarkable to see the list of international treaties that the United
States either never signed or never ratified. A few examples are
sufficient to make the case about its disregard for a genuine
rules-based international order:
1. Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the
Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949, never signed).
2. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951, never signed).
3. Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960, never signed).
4. Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and
Registration of Marriages (1962, signed but never ratified).
5. Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War
Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity (1968, never signed).
6. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982, never signed).
7. Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of
Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal (1989, signed but never ratified).
8. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006, signed
but never ratified).
Even more horrifying are the arms control conventions that the United
States has either refused to sign or from which it has unilaterally
withdrawn:
1. Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (1972, withdrew in 2002).
2. Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (1987, withdrew in 2019).
3. Mine Ban Treaty (1997, never signed).
4. Convention on Cluster Munitions (2008, never signed).
5. Arms Trade Treaty (2013, signed but withdrew in 2019).
It is because the US unilaterally left the ABM Treaty and the INF Treaty
that the conflict over Ukraine has become so inflamed. Russia had made
it clear on several occasions that the absence of any arms control
regime regarding mid-range nuclear missiles would pose a threat to its
major cities, were its neighbours to join the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO). On 18 November, in a provocative and dangerous
move, Biden allowed Ukraine to use intermediate-range missiles to strike
Russian territory, which drew a powerful response from Russia against
Ukraine. If Russia had decided to fire one of those missiles at a US
base in Germany in retaliation, for instance, we might already be in
midst of a nuclear winter. The US disregard for the arms control regime
is only part of its absolute disregard for any international law, sealed
in place by its raised middle finger to the ICC.
William Kentridge (South Africa), /Drawing from the film Other Faces/, 2011.
In 1982, the South African freedom fighter and poet Mongane Wally Serote
(born in 1944), who lived in Botswana and worked with the Medu Art
Ensemble (about which we wrote a dossier
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last year), published ‘Time has run out’ in his epic book /The Night
Keeps Winking/. ‘[M]any of us have gone mad’, he wrote, because ‘we are
human and this is our land’. Serote was writing of South Africa, but we
can expand his vision now to Palestine, and indeed to the entire earth.
And then Serote writes:
Too much blood has been spilled
Please my countrymen, can someone say a word of wisdom …
Ah, we’ve become familiar with horror
the heart of our country
when it makes its pulse
ticking time
wounds us
My countrymen, can someone who understands that it is now too late
who knows that exploitation and oppression are brains which being
insane only know violence
can someone teach us how to mount the wounds and fight.
It is time to revisit the ‘great wound’, as Frantz Fanon wrote
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in 1959, to ride the wound and fight.
Ibraheem Mohana (Palestine), /Untitled/, 2024.
Earlier this year, Serote wrote a poem
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for Palestine, part of which I reproduce for the International Day in
Solidarity with Palestine (29 November); for this day, we at
Tricontinental are organising an exhibition featuring the artwork of
Palestinian artist Ibraheem Mohana and twenty children who he has been
teaching art to in Gaza in the midst of Israel’s genocide.
We hear in our eyes the sounds of the siren and of the explosion
As it blasts our eye and hearing
and the red fire
flares its coming in the air with the power of a storm
The red-hot fire holds human flesh in its red-hot dance
It was preceded by a thick black smoke
Which bellows and rages
On
Oh
Human race
And then it ends…
Ah Palestine!
Be.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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