When US National Security Advisor John “The Walrus” Bolton threatened the International Criminal Court with US Sanctions many of us here in Africa cheered, long having given up hope that the ICC would ever be held to even the slightest account, least of all for its crimes against our continent.
The Peoples Indictment against the ICC is a long one running from its failures to indict to the criminal indictments it issued.
Let’s start with the Horn of Africa, where the ICC never indicted anyone for the genocidal blockade of food and medicine against the people of the Ogaden in Ethiopia by the former TPLF regime from 2007 until this year during a series of famines unprecedented in the region’s history. The Ogaden’s Somali children in their hundreds of thousands starved to death while international food aid was used to pay the salaries of the Luo Police death squads, aka “the wheat police.”
Yet the ICC indicted Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Dafur in an all too obvious attempted coup d’état. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi . . . Omar Al Bashir, all aboard when it comes to demonizing the latest ‘“Islamic/Arab Terrorist Threat,” better yet a black Islamic terrorist.
The problem is that while the ICC was vilifying Bashir for alleged crimes in Darfur the Sudanese president was playing a critical role in the success of the Darfur relief effort, what is still considered the most successful major international aid intervention ever.
So while the ICC was indicting Sudan’s President for the deaths of “hundreds of thousands, genocide even,” eyewitness testimony from Darfur credits him with just the opposite, that Bashir was helping save hundreds of thousands of lives through active support for the relief effort, personally directing government logistical and security efforts without which the UN admits it could not have succeeded.
The ICC indicted Bashir when they should have been indicting the Ethiopian regime, using the Darfur indictments to keep attention from being focused on the real genocide taking place in the Ogaden. Genocide by starvation is cost effective and “deniable,” low risk mass murder, you know, “solving the Somali problem” and the ICC knows about this making them criminally complicit.
Next door to the Ogaden in Somalia at least one million children under five-years old have starved to death in a series of droughts and famines since 2011. According to UN FAO statistical projections between November 2015 and April 2016 upwards of 400,000 Somali children died of starvation. This following the UN’s own estimation that 250,000 children starved to death from 2011-2012. So many deaths because not enough food aid was delivered? UNICEF just didn’t have the money? And nobody, nobody has been indicted for this series of genocides, in spite of the fact that this is public knowledge?
This has been a war on the Somali people, directed by former senior US intelligence leaders running the UN “relief operations,” i.e., UNICEF and Anthony Lake, that continues as I write, a war of hunger and famine to bring a people to their knees.
Isn’t this the job of the ICC?
What about Libya, where all the charges against Gaddafi were proven to be fabricated and an entire country attacked and plunged into chaos and anarchy, tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands of black Libyans ethnically cleansed from their homes? What about the thousands of black Africans guest workers lynched by racist Arab militias? Not a word of protest from the ICC to this day, let alone indictments against Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, Susan Rice or the Queen of Chaos herself, Hillary Clinton.
So when the national security advisor to President Trump threatens the ICC with sanctions, we here in Africa can hardly help but smile, who knows, maybe one day Africa will finally see some justice done.
Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent Western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritea since 2006. He may be contacted at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.
The ICC is a western creation and, like the United Nations itself, little more than a useful tool to further the interests of western capital and continue the legacy of plunder and exploitation that goes by the name of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. Because it advances their interests too, China and Russia, ostensibly champions of the oppressed, also support it, intending to dominate it á la USA just as soon as their economies allow.