War crimes in Iraq killed 3.3 million Iraqis
Editorial comment
The US and their western allies have almost always managed to get their political enemies into the International Criminal Court, hand them a trial for genocide and ensured they were humiliated and punished. In some cases, the US clandestinely organized street trials and executions pretending all the while that they preferred due process under the rule of law. The capture and murder of Gaddafi is one such. In Iraq, they made sure there was a sham trial and had Saddam Hussein hanged. In an act of unabashed arrogance they ensured that their television channels (propaganda outlets) displayed the hanging body of Saddam for the entire world to see. In the case of Osama Bin Laden, they bizarrely threw his body into the sea – one would have imagined that they would have wished to treat it as a trophy to display for all to see. So, did they even get Bin Laden? Was that a great big drama for Obama to gain some political points at the same time as Obama’s political fortunes were sagging?
The assassinations of political leaders and innocent people in military attacks in Palestine bear the marks of political illegality. From the sixties for nearly two decades, democratically elected leaders around the world were assassinated in cold blood and replaced by ruthless dictators who were propped up by US military backing only because the latter were pliable to US interests- usually by opening their economies to US interests or by blocking the emergence of socialist-oriented rulers. Indeed, the umpteen dictators who were US instruments of oppression around the world were brutal murderers whose torture camps, and ‘encounter killings’ have yet to be accurately accounted for. The numbers of victims run into millions. The US has blood on its hands; its subordinates and allies have the blood which falls from the American hand of cruelty.
The international law authority Francis Boyle recently charged more than 30 top U.S. officials, including presidents G.W. Bush and Obama, as being guilty of war crimes or crimes against peace and humanity “legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany”. To the US, international law has no place when ‘national interest’ comes in the way. Addressing a conference in Puerto Rica, Francis Boyle said that the American administration under Bush Jr) had shamelessly exploited the 9/11 tragedy and “set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Middle East and Africa under “bogus pretexts.” These pretexts, he said “included fighting a war against ‘international terrorism’ or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, eliminating weapons of mass destruction, the promotion of democracy, and humanitarian intervention. U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, are serious violations of international law and must be counted as punishable. Boyle pointed out that the US indulged in “torture, enforced disappearances, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, ‘shock and awe’ (bombings), and (the use of) depleted uranium, white phosphorus, cluster bombs, drone strikes.”
Countries that the US previously invaded- the Vietnam War is still recent memory- live with the colossal scars that US military operators left behind. If Vietnam was about eliminating the communists and gaining control over the region in the Cold war era, Iraq was sheer greed for oil. That greed was camouflaged in the garb of protecting Kuwait from occupation. How did the US conveniently forget that the real occupier was Israel- just around the corner from Kuwait? Why did they simply also not bomb Israel into the pre-industrial era and complete their job of punishing offenders who dare to occupy someone else’s land?!
US barbarity can be traced to its very creation – extermination of the indigenous peoples. The UK and other western powers have their baggage too- the colonial era. Little wonder then that they have stitched together an alliance of the oppressor to become the self appointed moral policemen of the world? On whose approval, it should be asked.
Very recently, the US scuttled a long awaited conference slated to be held in Helsinki where the main issue was to declare and preserve the Middle East as a ‘nuclear-free region’. Hypocrisy, however, defines US policy in the region. On one hand, it wants Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions even though Iran has allowed each of its nuclear facilities to be scrutinized by the IAEA, and that barring the western media, Iran is seen to be developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. (Memories of the claims that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction ring loud). On the other hand, the US turns a blind eye to Israel’s accumulation of undeclared nuclear weapons.
Will history catch up with these mass murderers who indulge in double speak brazenly? Will the crimes committed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria ever be called to account by the International Criminal Court (ICC)? Or will the power that the perpetrators wield protect them forever? Questions we must ponder over and act upon.
There have been 2.9 million under-5 infant deaths in US Alliance-occupied Afghanistan (2001-2012), 90% avoidable and due to gross US Alliance violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention that unequivocally state that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical requisites to its conquered subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” (see “Afghan Holocaust Afghan Genocide”: Read also this substantive article: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ .
The article we reproduce below by Sherwood Ross titled:” 3.3 million Iraqis, including 750,000 children, were “exterminated” by economic sanctions and/or illegal wars conducted by the U.S. and Great Britain” describes the genocide in Iraq. Independent commissions in the US and UK have declared their governments culpable of war crimes. Yet, the perpetrators of these crimes roam free.
In solidarity,
Ranjan Solomon
Main article
3.3 million Iraqis, including 750,000 children, were “exterminated” by economic sanctions and/or illegal wars conducted by the U.S. and Great Britain
By Sherwood Ross
Approximately 3.3 million Iraqis, including 750,000 children, were “exterminated” by economic sanctions and/or illegal wars conducted by the U.S. and Great Britain between 1990 and 2012, an eminent international legal authority says.
The slaughter fits the classic definition of Genocide Convention Article II of, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and who in 1991 filed a class-action complaint with the UN against President George H.W. Bush.
The U.S. and U.K. “obstinately insisted” that their sanctions remain in place until after the “illegal” Gulf War II aggression perpetrated by President George W. Bush and UK’s Tony Blair in March, 2003, “not with a view to easing the over decade-long suffering of the Iraqi people and children” but “to better facilitate the U.S./U.K. unsupervised looting and plundering of the Iraqi economy and oil fields in violation of the international laws of war as well as to the grave detriment of the Iraqi people,” Boyle said.
In an address last Nov. 22 to The International Conference on War-affected Children in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Boyle tallied the death toll on Iraq by U.S.-U.K. actions as follows:
# The slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis by President Bush in his illegal 1991 Gulf War I.
# The deaths of 1.4 million Iraqis as a result of the illegal 2003 war of aggression ordered by President Bush Jr. and Prime Minister Blair.
# The deaths of 1.7 million Iraqis “as a direct result” of the genocidal sanctions.
Boyle’s class-action complaint demanded an end to all economic sanctions against Iraq; criminal proceedings for genocide against President George H.W. Bush; monetary compensation to the children of Iraq and their families for deaths, physical and mental injury; and for shipping massive humanitarian relief supplies to that country.
The “grossly hypocritical” UN refused to terminate the sanctions, Boyle pointed out, even though its own Food and Agricultural Organization’s Report estimated that by 1995 the sanctions had killed 560,000 Iraqi children during the previous five years.
Boyle noted that then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was interviewed on CBS-TV on May 12, 1996, in response to a question by Leslie Stahl if the price of half a million dead children was worth it, and replied, “we (the U.S. government) think the price is worth it.”
Albright’s shocking response provides “proof positive of the genocidal intent by the U.S. government against Iraq” under the Genocide Convention, Boyle said, adding that the government of Iraq today could still bring legal action against the U.S. and the U.K. in the International Court of Justice. He said the U.S.-U.K. genocide also violated the municipal legal systems of all civilized nations in the world; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and its Additional Protocol 1 of 1977.
Boyle, who was stirred to take action pro bono by Mothers in Iraq after the economic sanctions had been imposed upon them by the Security Council in August, 1990, in response to pressure from the Bush Senior Administration. He is the author of numerous books on international affairs, including “Destroying World Order” (Clarity Press.)