BACKBENCHER
8/27-28/2011
Rod Kapunan
Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago was the principal sponsor of a bill that ratified our subscription to the Statute of Rome that created the International Criminal Court. Once signed by President Aquino, this measure would formalize the devolution of the country’s sovereignty to the European powers to try our leaders and soldiers entrusted with the patriotic duty of keeping the territorial integrity of this country intact.
That means that any Filipino driven by the zeal to defend the Motherland could end up being held accountable for crimes of genocide, human rights violation, war crimes, and other atrocities that at times are the consequences of intense fighting. As Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile would put it, the statute could “expose Philippine presidents to all kinds of suits…”
That decision brings to our recollection the proverbial saying of us “getting our own rope to hang ourselves with.” We say this because our membership to that European-based organization would not guarantee that our leaders and soldiers would be spared from being charged in exchange for our membership. In the first place, the aftermath of war is always taken as circumstantial or “collateral damage”, as the West would put it.
Worse, these idiots failed to realize that even with our membership, it will still be those Europeans now lording the ICC that will determine who will be charged and prosecuted for war crimes. What has been validated is the fact about their stupidity in not seeing the hues of national interest hanging above the heads of those entrusted to enforce their brand of justice. There are prognostications that most likely our soldiers will end up being charged, than those roaming rebels once the conflict in Mindanao deteriorates into another full-scale war.
If that happens, by implication the cause of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front could be interpreted as a just cause. That then would put a heavy international pressure on us to give in to their demand for an independent state just as what happened in Serbia where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the US helped create the state of Kosovo by force, and lately in Sudan where after a long-drawn civil war instigated by them, the Sudanese government had to hold a referendum to legalize the partition of their country. Most fearful, our leaders and soldiers will be hunted like rats by occupying NATO forces on orders of the ICC.
Although called an international organization, the ICC is far from being one. Except for France, Italy, and Germany and a cluster of tiny European states that had their own history of imperialist conquest in Africa, Latin America and Asia, none of the leading and regional powers like the US, Russia, China, India, Brazil and Argentina are members of the ICC. Not one would recklessly compromise their national sovereignty all for the noble cause of humanity.
It is this aspect about the ICC that exposed our hankering politicians as utterly ignorant! In fact, while the ICC encounters difficulty in convincing others to join, the Philippines, like manna from heaven, volunteered to join. More than that, not one of those senators who voted to ratify that opprobrious treaty could explain why criminal states of the US and Israel have refused to join the ICC. Everybody knows the US has always been able to get away with from its long list of war crimes. Certainly, it would be foolish now to allow its soldiers and its presidents to be placed in default of being tried as war criminals at The Hague.
Despite that, the ICC continues to praise the US for its active participation in various military interventions and in securing the arrest of those charged as war criminals. This scenario is now likely to happen to Libya’s Moammar Gaddhafi; that after being savagely attacked by international gangsters calling themselves NATO, he now is likely to stand trial for alleged war crimes against his own people.
Hence, for all of Senator Santiago’s hallucinations of the Morgenthau era of international relations, she miserably failed to read between the lines that the creation of the ICC is part of that concerted plot to substitute the UN with a NATO-created and controlled international organization. As collaborating quisling, she could not see that the objective of the European-based mafia is anachronistic to the four principles of the UN, foremost of which is the respect for equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
It did not even seep into their brains that to capture those accused of war crimes would require the commission of aggression which constitutes a violation of the UN Charter. This has lead scholars on international relations and international law to suspect that indeed NATO and the US are collaborating to systematically supersede the role of the UN. Such is the familiar case now of NATO and the US acting as the conduit of the ICC.
Although the ICC projects its role as supplementary to the International Court of Justice, in truth its function runs counter to the charter of the UN, much that the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of an independent state is the cornerstone for which it was created. There may have been sporadic internal fighting in many countries, but somehow those conflicts were prevented from escalating precisely because of that limitation in the UN Charter.
Since ICCs concept of justice points at the individual or group of players in an internal conflict, the view about the inviolability of one’s sovereignty has all of a sudden been erased. Consequently, things had been made easy much that it has for its main frame the concept of bringing to court “people” it may identify as war criminals, while they run the show of acting as prosecutor, judge and executioners, all rolled into one. This has now become their most convenient passport to justify aggression.
Without the world knowing it, the ICC stands as more formidable than the UN Security Council. Unlike the UN Security Council which has to secure a prior unanimous approval from all the permanent members to militarily intervene, the ICC has at its disposal a fully armed war machine called NATO. The people of Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and now Libya all could tell their harrowing experience of savage aggression, while NATO and its Kangaroo Court denudes the world about its role to humanity.
Thus, after being “liberated” and their leaders tried and executed as war criminals, oil-rich countries like Iraq ended up having its oil fields owned by foreign companies, and their people driven to extreme poverty. This again is likely to happen in Libya, with Senator Santiago not asking whether hapless states ever voted to join the ICC.
(rodkap@yahoo.com.ph)
