This man peering at you in the image has ruled that war crimes, made graver by torture and rapes, happened in parts of Ukraine which is now with Russia.
Obviously it’s not a trifle judgement which tomorrow the chamber of assassins would use in an ad-hoc tribunal to implicate Putin if Russia was to lose; like it was with Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia), Jean-Paul Akayesu (Rwanda), Charles Taylor (Liberia/Sierre Leone) and Khieu Samphan (Cambodia) etc, etc.
All of them were judged to be evil by such tribunals, created while Bill Clinton occupied White House, where he mixed work with pleasure between 1992-2000.
That’s where it’s leading to in the case of Putin for this man, Erik Mose, head of Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, brings weight to his findings by visiting dozens of sites and hundreds of witnesses, never mind he was duly escorted and entertained by one of the parties itself, the Ukrainian armed forces.
In boxing parlance, that’s not being a referee but sitting in the corner of one of the two fighters.
But I am only starting.
Mose is beholden to the Hegemon which spends hundreds of millions in creating tribunals, populated with its own men, often mandated by the UN bodies which itself lives on the crumbs tossed by its host in New York.
Why you need ad hoc tribunals when UN itself was created to stop wars and punish war-criminals by the world, fresh from the horrors of World War II in 1945, is a good question.
It’s best answered if you pay attention to who creates tribunals and what they fear—obviously convincing 190-odd nations is a lot more difficult than putting all the king’s men in a handpicked court.
So the route often taken is through UN Security Council which has 15 members and a simple vote gets you the tribunal you want. (Don’t confuse it with veto-powers which is invested in only five nations.)
Now back to our Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, mandated by UN Human Rights body, and its Head who has a history of standing with the war criminals.
So let’s relive Erik Mose in Rwanda where he did a thorough job for his Masters first as deputy and then head of what else but a tribunal by the name of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), between 1999 to 2007.
Rwanda of course registers in our minds as a nation in Africa but for a further help on its geography, view the map below and do make a mental note on its neighbours as I set about recalling that dark history.
The Background to Rwanda Genocide
Rwanda had Tutsis and Hutus sub groups of the same clan, the former only 15% of population but elites and holding the levers of power; Hutus majority but only farmers.
A Tutsi king not surprisingly ruled, as it did through its history even when they were under the benevolence of first Germans and then Belgians. After Hutus rebelled strongly enough in late 1950s, independence came in 1961 but by way of bifurcation of land between Rwanda and Burundi, the former now under Hutus and the latter still under Tutsis.
(We Indians know the colonialists’ rulebook, don’t we. First, grow the majority and minority apart, divide the land, and put your own men in power so that even if the land is relinquished, the loot of the land continues unhindered.)
In this case Tutsis were favourites of colonialists for their loot-agenda. Tutsis in power in Burundi led a genocide of 200,000 Hutus in 1972. (Where was UN? Again a good question.)
Now was the question of cleansing Hutus from Rwanda. The colonialists did two things: In 1989, nine colonial powers, let’s call them West, withdrew from the International Coffee Agreement. Now coffee was Rwanda’s main revenue but as the prices crashed worldwide, the government was on its knees. State-owned companies went bankrupt, health and education services vanished, child malnutrition surged and hyperinflation ruled.
The Rwandans now begged the IMF who, true to their genetic make up, offered loan with savage conditions which only made it worse for the poor Africans. There was famine and social despair.
Then in 1990, a wing of the neighbouring Uganda military, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda. The RPF was led by Paul Kagame, a Rwandan Tutsi leader, trained by the US at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They went on rampage against Hutsis in Rwanda. It was naked aggression but the West painted it as a “civil war.”(As for what did Security Council do, not even authorizing an observer mission, I would say again: Good Question.)
The RPF rampage over next three years gave them much of northern Rwanda. Several hundred thousand Hutus were driven out.
Now the US officially made an entry. In 1994, even as a genocide was unfolding, president Bill Clinton successfully led out most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. The US also blocked subsequent UN reinforcements.
More was coming. On April 6, 1994 Rwanda’s president was slain in a rocket attack on his plane. (The French anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere was to tell a UN secretary-general that it was CIA who were involved in the shoot down.)
This was the flashpoint which launched the Rwandan genocide of hundred days. Tens of thousands were killed. Hutus lost the power. A tribunal was now set up to judge the guilty between the period of January 1 to December 31, 1994. (Who brought them to this point of course was conveniently left from the tribunal’s brief.)
A little diversion here to give you the full picture. Burundi had permitted 600 US army rangers to be around to help RPF. Tanzania had a role in planning the plane’s shoot down and no less invaded Rwanda from the east and south blocking escape routes for the Hutu refugees, fleeing RPF’s atrocities. In the spillover of war, millions of Congolese were killed and Congo itself broke into fragments to be exploited by the Western mining companies. The great lakes region of Africa was drowned in blood.
How Rwanda Tribunal Butchered Justice
Now let’s look at what the tribunal did in its existence of subsequent 17 years.
First the UN Security Council invested the chief prosecutor with the power to indict, arrest and prosecute suspects. The defense prosecutor stood no chance to prepare his case for he needed the approval of masters of Rwanda who were Tutsis. So the power to judge who was guilty and who was not was gifted to the winners of the war. Witnesses thus appeared and disappeared just as in a script. Further which defense witnesses could’ve logically appeared against the powers of the land?
Thus no RPF leader was ever persecuted. NONE. Even as a US State Department document tells us that RPF was killing 10,000 Hutus a month and were responsible for 95 percent of the killing.
Jean-Paul Akayesu, the Rwandan leader who was convicted for genocide, complained of the one-sided judgements of the tribunal. This is what the Rwanda tribunal said in reply: You have made the charge but what’s your evidence to prove the alleged partiality of the Tribunal? And that was that!
The chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, was terminated of her job for probing RPF. She was later to write in her memoirs that the United States and Britain were behind her firing in order to protect RPF.
Nobody was held responsible for shooting down the plane carrying Rwandan president.
And what happened to those who were acquitted, convicted or released after conviction? They are still under house arrest in Niger, without a country, without papers and without the right to join their families. Abandoned by the fake international justice. Others were sent to penal colonies like Benin, Mali and Senegal.
And now we have the same man pronouncing “war-crimes’ in Ukraine territory which has by an overwhelmingly popular vote joined Russia. Another farce is unfolding while the justice itself is hung upside down. The judge who never said a word on perpetrators in Rwanda has now pronounced a scripted verdict on Ukraine.
As for Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader of RPF, he is still in charge of Rwanda after nearly 25 years, feted and hailed as Human Rights hero in Western capitals and their lackey media. He duly visits the genocide memorial in Rwandan capital Kigali to lay wreath on innocent victims on whom apparently he had no role to play. (image below)
As for West’s role, listen to David Scheffer who himself was main negotiator for the United States during the creation of tribunal on Rwanda: “It (the tribunal) was like a battering ram in the implementation of US and NATO policy.”
