Israel uses white phosphorus munitions in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
Norman Finkelstein published a book a number of years ago entitled Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.
In it he looked at various major episodes in the long bloody onslaught on the people of Gaza, amongst them Operation Cast Lead and also the attack on the boat Mavi Marmara and the Goldstone Report, amongst other issues.
He could have written it yesterday about the current genocidal plans of the Israeli state.
The current Israeli offensive is just one more in a long line of massacres. This is not a review of Finkelstein’s book, though any book by him is worth reading and should be read. Rather I just want to use the book to show that what is happening now is not new, it is just more intense.
Israel has murdered before, it has lied, it has committed war crimes and it has always received the support of western states.
Above all we should be clear that we are where we are partly due to the Oslo Accord and also the role played by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. They cannot wash their hands of the affair.
“One of the meanings of Oslo,” former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami observed, “was that the PLO was . . . Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the intifada and cutting short . . . an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence.”
Rabin (left) and Arafat shake hands on the Oslo Accords under the management of then US President Clinton. (Photo sourced: Internet)
In particular, Israel contrived to reassign to Palestinian surrogates the sordid tasks of occupation. “The idea of Oslo,” former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky acknowledged, “was to find a strong dictator to . . . keep the Palestinians under control.”
“The Palestinians will be better at establishing internal security than we were,” Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told skeptics in his ranks, “because they will not allow appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from criticizing the conditions there. . .
They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli soldiers from having to do what they will do.”(1)
In other words, Gaza has bled under the passive gaze of the bureaucrats of the Palestinian authorities and of course of the reactionary Arab regimes that have never lifted a finger to help their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
They have not even threatened to cut off the supply of oil to the West, something they could do right now, but won’t. It has also happened under the gaze of those on the Left who run around shouting Implement Oslo! Two State Solution!
They ignore the fact that Oslo represented an ideological, political and military defeat for the Palestinians. The PLO accepted its role as puppet, administrator of a small urban city-like council and as chief repressor of those who continued to fight for Palestinian freedom.
A look at the Oslo II Accord, signed in September 1995 and spelling out in detail the mutual rights and duties of the contracting parties to the 1993 agreement, suggests what loomed largest in the minds of Palestinian negotiators.
Whereas four full pages are devoted to “Passage of [Palestinian] VIPs” (the section is subdivided into “Category 1 VIPs,” “Category 2 VIPs,” “Category 3 VIPs,” and “Secondary VIPs”), less than one page—the very last—is devoted to “Release of Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees,” who numbered in the many thousands…
The barely disguised purpose of Oslo’s protracted interim period was not confidence building to facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace but collaboration building to facilitate a burden-free Israeli occupation.(2)
However, Israel is now militarily weak. Finkelstein points to a number of attacks where it has shown its weakness. Its predilection is for attacks on the civilian population that can’t fight back.
In 2006, it opted to bomb civilians in Lebanon rather than engage in a proper fight with Hezbollah “terrorizing Lebanese civilians appeared to be a low-cost method of “education.”(3)
In Gaza in Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9, it followed a similar path of aerial bombardments of civilians rather than land invasions, that would see its troops face the wrath of Hamas and other armed organisations. So first they relentlessly bombed Gaza before any troops went in.
When the troops went in, the civilian population was their preferred target then as it is now. The murder of civilians is not new. It is part of an Israeli strategy of claiming easy victories.
An Israelicombatant remembered a meeting with his brigade commander and others where the “rules of engagement” were “essentially” conveyed as, “if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot.”
Other soldiers recalled, “If the deputyBattalionCommander thought a house looked suspect, we’d blow it away. If the infantrymen didn’t like the looks of that house—we’d shoot” (unidentified soldier); “If you face an area that is hidden by a building—you take down the building.”
Questions such as ‘who lives in that building[?]’ are not asked” (soldier recalling hisBrigadeCommander’s order);
“As for rules of engagement, the army’s working assumption was that the whole area would be devoid of civilians … Anyone there, as far as the army was concerned, was to be killed” (unidentified soldier);
“We were told: ‘any sign of danger, open up with massive fire” (member of a reconnaissance company); “We shot at anything that moved” (Golani Brigade fighter); “Despite the fact that no one fired on us, the firing and demolitions continued incessantly” (gunner in a tank crew).
“Essentially, a person only need[ed] to be in a ‘problematic’ location,” a Haaretz reporter found, “in circumstances that can broadly be seen as suspicious, for him to be ‘incriminated’ and in effect sentenced to death.”(4)
In all around 1,400 Palestinians were murdered in Operation Cast Lead, with 80% of them being civilians including 350 children. Israeli casualties were risible in comparison, just 10 combatants were killed, four of whom were killed by friendly fire.(5)
Then as now, Israel wheeled out the old trope of “human shields”. Amnesty International found no evidence of that,(6) in fact, it found evidence of Israel using children as human shields.(7)
It also found that Israel used then, as it does now, white phosphorous against schools, hospitals and even the UNRWA.(8) Furthermore, 99% of the air attacks were accurate.(9) If they murdered civilians, it is because the civilians were the target.
Following the operation, the Goldstone Report was published. It surprised no-one when it found evidence of Israeli war crimes and to a lesser extent of Hamas. It is a salutary lesson for those who now place their confidence in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Goldstone made various recommendations.
Individual states in the international community were exhorted to “start criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
“Where so warranted following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice.”(10)
We know that nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the western governments paid little heed to the report. Goldstone was forced to recant on the conclusions to his report.
Netanyahu for his part announced that he wanted to amend the rules of war leading to Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell asking “What is it that Israel wants … Permission to fearlessly attack defenseless population centers with planes, tanks and artillery?”(11)
Exactly.
And here we are today, with Israel unilaterally amending the rules of war, with the green light from the EU and the USA, amongst others. They murder civilians and no one proposes doing anything.
In Operation Cast Lead, the harshest sentence emitted by an Israeli court was seven and a half months to a soldier who had stolen a credit card!(12) Minor financial crimes are of greater concern than war crimes or crimes against humanity.
After this genocide in Gaza, we can’t expect much from the ICC.
Throughout its history the ICC has opened just 31 cases, including one for genocide. All of them against African leaders. This does not mean that those leaders did not deserve to be judged for their crimes, but that the ICC is just the legal arm of imperialism.
It has never attempted to put on trial the powerful in the West and despite everything even less so Israel. This year it issued a communiqué announcing that it would issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes and did so on its own initiative.(13)
In the case of Gaza, it will do nothing of the sort. Those who place their trust in the ICC or in the Palestinian Authority are fooling themselves. This situation is the result of turning a blind eye to Israel for many years whilst it commits all sorts of crimes.
It didn’t act before and it won’t do so now. Neither will the Arab regimes do much, unless their own populations force them. They fear the Palestinians and their own people as they know that the struggle against Zionism is also a struggle against them.
The more revolutionary Palestinian groups used to say that the path to Jerusalem went through Amman and Damascus. They were right, it does pass through those capital cities and also Beirut, Riyadh, Cairo and all the others and not through the ICC.
In fact, one day the judges and prosecutors of that body should be put on trial for their complicity in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity through their inaction and omission.
It is beyond the scope of this article to deal with the role of Amnesty International in its own reports on Palestine.
They are what Finkelstein refers “as far from being the exception that proved the rule, Amnesty actually constituted a variant of the rule: instead of falling silent on Israeli crimes during Protective Edge, Amnesty whitewashed them.”(14)
I will leave it to the reader to look at the book for more information on that particular betrayal. Suffice to say, we can expect little from such organisations. At best they gather data we can sometimes use.
Notes
(1) Finkelstein, N. G. (2018) Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom. California. California University Press. pp 6 & 7
In the context of the Zionist genocide in Gaza, a number of personalities and Palestinian solidarity organisations have asked that Netanyahu and others be put on trial by the International Criminal Court.
This will not happen, that court has been described in vulgar but accurate terms as a stinker. It is true, its putrid stench is nauseating and the history of international tribunals is full of hypocrisy, even when they judge people who should be tried and punished.
We all know of the Nuremberg Tribunal where the Nazis were put on trial. A correct decision, but Harris the man responsible for the fire-bombing of Dresden that killed 30,000 civilians was not tried, nor were other Allied criminals.
In Tokyo, the Indian judge, Radha Binod Pal argued that the USA should be tried for the atomic bombs used against purely civilian targets. But they didn’t. In more recent times we have seen international tribunals try one group of people but not another.
Radha Binod Pal, dissenting jurist at the Tokyo War Crime trials (Image sourced: Internet)
One of the first tribunals in recent times was the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. That tribunal tried a significant number of war criminals, amongst them people as vile as Ratko Mladić, the butcher of Srebrenica, where they murdered more than 8,000 men and boys.
In all, 111 people were tried, but there were those who they never ever considered putting on trial. Following the war, two high-ranking British officials took advantage of their contacts in the Serbian government and in the name of the British Natwest Bank facilitated the privatisation of Serbian Telecom.
It has been said that not only did that save Slobodan Milosevic but that he used those funds for his later war in Kosovo.
The British officials who collaborated with someone who was nothing more than a war criminal were none other than Pauline Neville-Jones, Britain’s key diplomat in the Yugoslav crisis, seen by many as appeasing Milosevic and her boss the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.(1)
Of course, no one ever proposed trying them for facilitating the war in Kosovo.
Perhaps a clearer example of not trying Europeans is the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
That tribunal decided upon various despicable crimes such as murder, rape and sexual slavery. It also decided upon another issue, particularly in the case of Charles Taylor, that of what are termed Blood Diamonds. Though in reality it did no such thing.
The tribunal rightly tried Taylor, but never looked at the role of the Belgians or the South Africans in the trade of Blood Diamonds. Any black person would do, but no whites, no businesspeople from the sector.
The company De Beers is a key player in the market, not only as far as production is concerned, but also in the sale of diamonds from other companies, controlling 80% of the market. But in the Sierra Leone tribunal, they didn’t even think of looking at the role of companies such as those.
They also set up a tribunal for Iraq, though it was supposedly set up by the “new government”. They tried various high-ranking officials from the Saddam Hussein regime, amongst them his once upon a time minister of defence, due to his use of gas against the Kurdish people, known as Chemical Alí.
The regime massacred thousands of Kurds, wiped off the face of the earth whole towns, displaced the Kurds and tried to repopulate those areas with Iraqis. Something similar to what Israel does with the Palestinians.
There can be no doubt about the regime’s responsibility for war crimes and also for the crime of genocide. But who sold them the gas they used against the Kurds?
Up to 40 German and European companies were involved in supplying the raw materials and know how to Saddam.(2) Yet this was not an issue for the West.
A Dutch court eventually sentenced one person to 15 years in jail.(3) However, Frans van Anrat was arrested and tried after the Saddam regime had been destroyed, not before. No one sought to arrest him and imprison him when the regime was an ally of the West.
In 2023, another Dutch court ordered a Dutch company to compensate five Iranians injured in those chemical attacks.(4) But the use of chemical weapons is a war crime, so why were the directors of the company not charged?
Previously, in 2013, a group of Iraqi Kurds tried to sue a French company that had supplied chemicals to Saddam.(5) So far, they have made little progress on that matter.
However, recently the French courts saw no problem in issuing arrest warrants for the Syrian president, Assad over the use of chemical weapons.(6) US involvement in the supply of chemicals has not been subject to such judicial investigations, nor will it ever be.
The US, however, did not just supply chemicals, it actively participated in their use.
According to Foreign Policy, a magazine that could hardly be described as progressive or opposed to US foreign policy in general, in the war with Iran, Iraq repeatedly used chemical agents, with the US providing satellite imagery to help Iraq target Iranian forces more successfully.(7)
So, evidence is not a key factor in deciding who gets tried by international tribunals and who doesn’t. Political expediency is the key factor, trumping all others. Justice is not what is sought, though it may be an unintended consequence in some cases.
Justice would see all those involved being brought to trial. But many of them pay the wages of the prosecutors and the judges and even pay for the logistics of these tribunals.
The ICC is no different. Its wages are paid by the states who carry out the greatest human rights violations in the world. The refusal to arrest Tony Blair or Netanyahu is not an oversight. They will never bite their master’s hand.
To date the ICC has dealt with 31 cases, including one for genocide. All of these cases were against black African leaders, some of whom relied on western complicity in their crimes. Their western accomplices will never face charges.
Judges and staff International Criminal Court (Photo sourced: Internet)
If western generals, politicians and companies don’t face charges when they are directly involved in war crimes and genocide, they are not going to face charges when they are murky figures in the shadows.
It is highly unlikely that Israel will be brought before the ICC, though sacrificing some lower ranking officers is not beyond the realm of possibility, though it is also highly unlikely.
Placing our faith in an international court which has shown itself to be nothing more than the judicial branch of imperialism is a mistake. In principle there is nothing wrong in taking a case, but believing you will get justice at the court is a criminal level of naivety and gullibility.
It dismissed cases against US allies such as Colombia, but immediately opened a file on Venezuela after the deaths of some protestors. When the Colombian police murdered over 80 protestors in 2021, the ICC looked on passively, just as it does now in the face of a Zionist campaign of genocide in Gaza.
One day it is to be hoped that the prosecutors and judges of that court are put on trial for their own role in facilitating the repression and murder of people around the world. But it won’t be the current western regimes that do that.
Currently the International Court of Justice1 has accused Premier Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights of responsibility for the “forced abduction” of Ukrainian children and their adoption by Russian couples.
The charge implies ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation taking place during war and therefore would be classed a war crime. The Russian side denies the charge saying that instead what has taken place has been voluntary evacuation of families and evacuation of children from orphanages.
The western mass media (wsm) confines itself to repeating the charge and accusatory statements from western politicians, mostly from countries that are part of the NATO military alliance and briefly stating that the Russian leadership denies the charge. Is anyone actually investigating?
Well, Associated Press, a western media agency, says it has and that Russia is guilty. In that case, let’s see the evidence. And we’d have to wonder why a spokesperson for United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) states that it has seen no evidence of Russian abduction of children.
The wsm has only informed us of UNICEF’s position recently in the course of reporting an informal UN Security Council meeting where Maria Lvova-Belova not only denied the charges of abduction but gave actual hard figures on whole family and orphanage children evacuation2.
Ms Lvova-Belova, said that since February 24th, 2022, Russia has taken in more than five million Ukrainians, including 700,000 children — all with parents, relatives or legal guardians except for 2,000 from orphanages in the eastern Donbas.3
To date, she said, about 1,300 children have been returned to their orphanages, 400 were sent to Russian orphanages and 358 were placed in foster homes4.
Lvova-Belova speaking at the informal UN Security Council meeting (Photo sourced: Internet)
Ms Lvova-Belova said her office has met with representatives of UNICEF, Refugees International and the International Committee of the Red Cross and “provide all available information about the situation of children” and are “coordinating with the Red Cross on reunification,” she said.5
The NATO countries declined to send their ambassadors to the meeting while chief NATO state representatives present, e.g. of the USA and UK, walked out of the meeting without listening, accusing Russia of using the situation for propaganda purposes.
Well maybe, UK and USA representatives, but everyone has been issuing propaganda in this war! Anyway why not answer the Russian case with your own counter-evidence? If you actually have a viable case that stands up to scrutiny?
Some war-time children’s evacuation examples
The war damage inflicted in the Donbas region by both sides in this war since 2022 — and by the Ukrainian state alone since 2014 – would make concern for children’s lives a natural motivation for relatives anxious to get their children to somewhere safe.
During the anti-fascist war in Spain, sympathetic families in Britain took in children from the Republican side for their safety from the advancing Spanish military-fascist forces and allied German Nazi and Italian Fascist military.
Later, as defeat loomed for the Spanish Republic, families with children fled to many countries (a few even to Ireland) and yes, to the Soviet Union. In fact a Basque descendant of that evacuation has passed a year in Polish jail accused of spying for Russia without presentation of any evidence.6
Basque and Spanish children, refugees from Spanish Anti-Fascist War (Photo sourced: Internet)
During WW2, children from British cities were sent to homes in rural areas for their safety. Whatever the issues around how they were treated in their new or temporary homes, nobody speaks of “abduction” of Basque, Spanish or British children7.
Well, actually, some children were abducted in Spain, from their murdered Republican parents or from working class women who were told their baby had died in childbirth. The fascist State and the Catholic church presented these children for adoption to rich and loyal childless couples.8
One of the reasons for abduction of children in those cases was to satisfy the needs of childless couples loyal to the regime and required the massive collusion of a number of health and social care agencies, all of which were exposed later. Does this seem a likely risk for Russia to take?
Ukrainian families with children evacuating to Russia (Photo crdt: Wall Street Journal)
Well what about the other objective, social engineering, of creating fascist children, or for example “Germanisation” but in this case “Russification”?
Hardly, the children are from the Donbas region, an area already largely Russian in language and culture and, since attacks of the Ukrainian forces on it since 2014, already hostile to the Kyiv regime and mostly sympathetic to Russia.
The Ukrainian State leadership, one of the main accusers of Russia’s alleged abduction of children, frequently issues population figures of towns and cities in the Ukraine War zone, comparing pre-war with current figures, showing a huge drop between both sets.
Presumably the fall in numbers of inhabitants in towns under their control could not have been carried out by Russia. So are we to accuse the Kiyv regime of the “abduction” an “ethnic cleansing” of thousands of Ukrainians, its own citizens? Or more reasonably, of their evacuation?
Returning to the question of actual evidence, an issue of apparent little importance to the wsm and NATO country states, surely an international agency responsible for children would be expected to have a reasonable handle on this?
Or is UNICEF to come under the accusation regularly thrown at those of us who don’t swallow everything NATO says, i.e. of being “putinistas?
The Target of the Propaganda
It’s worth considering who the targets in this propaganda war might be and the reasons therein. The state intelligence agencies of NATO countries presumably have a fair idea of which are truths and which are lies. So the target is not the heads of states.
THE MAIN TARGET OF THE PROPAGANDA IS US, i.e. the ordinary people in the western world, whether in NATO (which most are) or not. The objective being that we should support our governments in backing US/NATO’s confrontation with Russia.
And that if it should come to world war, which seems increasingly likely, that we support our governments and suffer the consequences, including dying in millions to support their objectives. Without rebelling.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1The western mass media makes a point of telling us that Russia does not recognise the authority of the ICC but rarely adds that nor does the Ukrainian regime. And nor does the USA!
2An interesting exercise to evaluate wsm bias is to put “Russia denies abduction of children” in a mainstream search engine and see how many hits one gets for UNICEF’s statement.
6Pablo Gonzalez, a journalist working for Spanish media, was born in Russia, grandson of such a refugee. He was covering the Ukraine war when detained by their state intelligence service and advised to leave the country; meanwhile Spanish state security visited and interviewed his family, his mother and friends. He left Ukraine but went to Poland and was arrested by their state intelligence service as he was accompanying other journalists crossing back into Ukraine. To this date well over a year later Gonzalez has had no evidence of spying presented against him. Unlike a journalist detained in Russia whose case elicited public concern from western politicians within days, none of them have mentioned the case of Pablo Gonzalez.
There is a long tradition amongst NGOs, sectors of the reformist left, trade unionists and others in Colombia that someone outside the country will save us. The saviours are the North Americans (despite their role in the conflict), the European Union (despite their role as well and that of their companies), and international institutions such as the International Criminal Court, or the mechanisms set up in the peace accord (national ones but financed internationally). So, the decision by the ICC to shut down its preliminary investigation of Colombia was like a bucket of cold water to them. But it was to be expected.
Banner carrying faces and names of youth from Soacha and Bogotá murdered by the Colombian National Army. The banner was displayed in a march in Bogatá on the 6th March, the Day of Victims of State Violence. (Photo credit: GOL)
When Obama was elected as US president, various journalists and representatives of the left and NGOs announced that he would solve Colombia’s problems and now they have come back to say the same about Biden. A constant feature of this discourse of seeking a foreign saviour is the possibility of taking Uribe (not his Defence Minister, Juan Manuel Santos) to the ICC. They sold a false hope to the victims of the state that there they could obtain justice. They knew it was unlikely, as they knew what the ICC was like and its not very encouraging record in the matter.
To date the ICC has only convicted African leaders. It is not the case that these African leaders are saints or innocent, but rather that the ICC does not go after other criminals. It has procrastinated for many years on its case against Israel and has no authority to investigate the USA. The Court’s website currently indicates that it has 15 ongoing preliminary investigations, ten of them in African countries and five others in Georgia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh and the State of Palestine. This last case will not succeed, of that we can be certain. It has pursued a total of 30 individuals, resulting in 4 convictions.1 The ICC is the opium of the people, it has a soporific effect on people in the midst of their struggles and the NGOs promise Heaven and Divine Justice in a coming future.
A boy carries photos of victims in a march in Bogatá on the 6th March, the Day of Victims of State Violence. (Photo credit: GOL)
There were diverse reactions to the decision to shut down the preliminary investigation. Whilst the victims of the False Positives2 criticised the decision, others such as Senator Iván Cepeda and Eamon Gilmore, the EU envoy to the peace process celebrated it. The Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE) lamented the decision, though in a very confusing manner. It continued to praise the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), when it is precisely the existence of the JEP that the ICC used as an excuse to shut down the case.3
Iván Cepeda stated that:
A direct consequence of the agreement signed by Duque’s government with the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor is that once and for all the possibility of reforming the JEP has been discarded. It puts an end to that obsessive aim of the Uribistas. A victory for the peace process.4
A few years ago, he would have denounced the closure of the case as an act of impunity and now he claims it is a victory. As the Greek philosopher Plutarch put it, Another victory like this and all will be lost. Many of us denounced the impunity of the JEP, little did we think that not only would it guarantee impunity in the trials it deals with or excludes from its remit, but that its very existence would be the perfect excuse to shut down international cases against the regime. But the peace acolytes are determined to announce their defeat as a victory.
Protestors holding aloft photos of those murdered and disappeared in a march in Bogatá on the 6th March, the Day of Victims of State Violence. (Photo credit: GOL).
It seems that Senator Gustavo Petro didn’t have much to say about the matter and neither did Senator Alexander López. Piedad Córdoba, however, echoed the statements of Iván Cepeda and said:
They took issue with the JEP and tried to cut its budget, discredit it, dirty propaganda and all in order to cover their own backs. Today the ICC forced the government to strengthen it.5
A young woman carries photos of victims in a march in Bogatá on the 6th March, the Day of Victims of State Violence. (Photo credit: GOL)
It is clear that there are those who in the name of peace would justify any defeat, including a defeat of a proposal they themselves promoted. So, the ICC will not proceed against Colombia, but relax, we have the JEP where the military who, unlike the guerrillas, do not have to tell the whole truth about their crimes and where the businesspeople are excluded.
Of course, the president of the JEP, who once upon a time was the NGOs’ favourite said that he was very pleased with the ICC decision. According to Cifuentes the closure of the investigation against Colombia is a victory won by the JEP,6 i.e. those who for many years talked about how the ICC was going to put the Colombian State in its place, now tell us that the fact the ICC will not proceed against Colombia is a victory.
I really find it difficult to understand their logic, or better still I can’t understand their shamelessness. In the name of their pathetic peace accord, they justify everything and describe it as a victory. Poor Plutarch. If he had to deal with the leaders of the supposed left in Colombia today he would have been more vulgar, but he died many centuries ago, so allow me Plutarch: Another victory like this and the turncoats will be making money like never before.
So, to answer the question posed by this article, who will save us? The answer is no one, or rather, the Colombian people will save themselves, there are no international institutions, nor presidents in other countries who are going to fix the crisis that country has suffered for decades. The only ones who will put Uribe, Santos, Pastrana, Samper and the others in jail are the Colombian people.
“Forget them? That would be a crime against conscience” with images and names of the “disappeared” since 1998. The banner was carried on a march in Bogatá on the 6th March, the Day of Victims of State Violence. (Photo credit: GOL)
Next year is an electoral one and some of those who told us the ICC would do miracles and now celebrate the slap in the face it gave to the victims, will be candidates. They will promise a thousand miracles and when some foreign institution or president says no, they will celebrate it and try to convince us that the defeat was a victory. Changing the saying by Mao, they go from victory to victory to final defeat. Plutarch is as relevant today as ever.
End.
“NOT FORGOTTEN” banner carried on a march in Bogatá on the 6th March, the Day of Victims of State Violence. (Photo credit: GOL)
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