Tag: International Law

  • What International Order?

    What International Order?

    The recently concluded BRICS summit confirms the process of inevitable transformation of the international order. The US-led West, since the fall of the USSR, has increasingly demonstrated intolerance to their view of the world. The ongoing conflicts in UKraine and Gaza has exposed their duplicity and the entire Global South have come to realise the anamolies in international order and the so-called rules-based system. The West’s unabashed support to Israel’s genocide and babarism in Gaza, despite their peoples’ opposition makes the claims of democracy and humanism in the West sound hollow. Thierry Meyssan dealt incisively with this duplicity of the West, primarily the Ango-Saxon powers, in his speech last year in Magdeburg (Germany), at the conference organized by the magazine Compact, “Amitie avec la Russie”, on November 4, 2023.

    We reproduce the text of Thierry Meyssan’s speech, translated by Roger Lagasse’, and published earlier in voltairenet.org

    In it, he explains what, in his view, constitutes the fundamental difference between the two conceptions of the world order now clashing from the Donbass to Gaza: that of the Western bloc and that to which the rest of the world refers. The question is not whether this order should be dominated by one power (unipolar) or by a group of powers (multipolar), but whether or not it should respect the sovereignty of each. He draws on the history of international law, as conceived by Tsar Nicholas II and Nobel Peace Prize winner Léon Bourgeois.

    – Team TPF

    BRICS Summit 2024 in Kazan, Russia, October 23,2024. Sputnik . Photo hosting agency brics-russia2024.ru

    What International Order?

    Thierry Meyssan

    We’ve seen NATO’s crimes, but why affirm our friendship with Russia? Isn’t there a risk of Russia behaving tomorrow like NATO does today? Are we not substituting one form of slavery for another?

    To answer this question, I would draw on my successive experience as advisor to five heads of state. Everywhere, Russian diplomats have told me: you’re on the wrong track: you’re committed to putting out one fire here, while another has started elsewhere. The problem is deeper and broader.

    I would therefore like to describe the difference between a world order based on rules and one based on international law. This is not a linear story, but a struggle between two worldviews – a struggle we must continue.

    In the 17th century, the Treaties of Westphalia established the principle of state sovereignty. Each is equal to the others, and no one may interfere in the internal affairs of others. For centuries, these treaties governed relations between the present-day Länder, as well as between European states. They were reaffirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when Napoleon I was defeated.

    On the eve of the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II convened two International Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) in The Hague to “seek the most effective means of assuring all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace”. Together with Pope Benedict XV, he prepared them on the basis of canon law, not the law of the strongest. After two months of deliberation, 27 states signed the final proceedings. The president of the French Radical [Republican] Party, Léon Bourgeois, presented his thoughts [1] on the mutual dependence of states and their interest in uniting despite their rivalries.

    At the instigation of Léon Bourgeois, the Conference created an International Court of Arbitration to settle disputes by legal means rather than by war. According to Bourgeois, states would only agree to disarm when they had other guarantees of security.

    The final text instituted the notion of “the duty of States to avoid war”… by resorting to arbitration.

    At the instigation of one of the Tsar’s ministers, Frédéric Fromhold de Martens, the Conference agreed that, during armed conflict, populations and belligerents must remain under the protection of the principles resulting from “the usages established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience”. In short, the signatories undertook to stop behaving like barbarians.

    This system only works between civilized states that honour their signatures and are accountable to public opinion. It failed, in 1914, because states had lost their sovereignty by entering into defense treaties that required them to go to war automatically in certain circumstances that they could not assess for themselves.

    Léon Bourgeois’s ideas gained ground, but met with opposition, including from his rival in Georges Clemenceau’s Radical Party. Clemenceau did not believe that public opinion could prevent wars. Nor did the Anglo-Saxons, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George. At the end of the First World War, these three men substituted the might of the victors for the fledgling international law. They shared the world and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires. They blamed Germany alone for the massacres, denying their own. They imposed disarmament without guarantees. To prevent the emergence of a rival to the British Empire in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons began to pit Germany against the USSR, and secured France’s silence by assuring her that she could plunder the defeated Second Reich. In a way, as the first President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, put it, they organized the conditions for the development of Nazism.

    As they had agreed among themselves, the three men reshaped the world in their own image (Wilson’s 14 points, the Sykes-Picot agreements, the Balfour Declaration). They created the Jewish homeland of Palestine, dissected Africa and Asia, and tried to reduce Turkey to its minimum size. They organized all the current disorders in the Middle East.

    Yet it was on the basis of the ideas of the late Nicholas II and Léon Bourgeois that the League of Nations (League) was established after the First World War, without the participation of the United States, which thus officially rejected any idea of International Law. However, the League also failed. Not because the United States refused to join, as some say. That was their right. But firstly, because it was incapable of re-establishing strict equality between states, as the United Kingdom was opposed to considering colonized peoples as equals. Secondly, it did not have a common army. And finally, because the Nazis massacred their opponents, destroyed German public opinion, violated the Berlin signature and did not hesitate to behave like barbarians.

    As early as the Atlantic Charter in 1942, the new U.S. President, Franklin Roosevelt, and the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, set themselves the common goal of establishing a world government at the end of the conflict. The Anglo-Saxons, who imagined they could rule the world, did not, however, agree amongst themselves on how to go about it. Washington did not wish London to meddle in its affairs in Latin America, while London had no intention of sharing the hegemony of the Empire over which “the sun never set”. During the war, the Anglo-Saxons signed numerous treaties with Allied governments, including those in exile, which they hosted in London.

    Incidentally, the Anglo-Saxons failed to defeat the Third Reich, and it was the Soviets who overthrew it and took Berlin. Joseph Stalin, First Secretary of the CPSU, was opposed to the idea of a world government, and an Anglo-Saxon one at that. All he wanted was an organization capable of preventing future conflicts. In any case, it was Russian conceptions that gave birth to the system: that of the United Nations Charter, at the San Francisco conference.

    In the spirit of the Hague Conferences, all UN member states are equal. The Organization includes an internal tribunal, the International Court of Justice, responsible for settling disputes between its members. However, in the light of previous experience, the five victorious powers have a permanent seat on the Security Council, with a veto. Given that there was no trust between them (the Anglo-Saxons had planned to continue the war with the remaining German troops against the USSR) and that it was unknown how the General Assembly would behave, the various victors wanted to ensure that the UN would not turn against them (the USA had committed appalling war crimes by dropping two atomic bombs against civilians, while Japan… was preparing its surrender to the Soviets). But the great powers did not understand the veto in the same way. For some, it was a right to censor the decisions of others; for others, it was an obligation to take decisions unanimously.

    Except that, right from the start, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t play ball: an Israeli state declared itself (May 14, 1948) before its borders had been agreed, and the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to oversee the creation of a Palestinian state, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish supremacists under the command of Yitzhak Shamir. Moreover, the seat on the Security Council allocated to China, in the context of the end of the Chinese Civil War, was given to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and not to Beijing. The Anglo-Saxons proclaimed the independence of their Korean zone of occupation as the “Republic of Korea” (August 15, 1948), created NATO (April 4, 1949), and then proclaimed the independence of their German zone of occupation as “Federal Germany” (May 23, 1949).

    The USSR considered itself fooled, and slammed the door (“empty seat” policy). The Georgian Joseph Stalin had mistakenly believed that the veto was not a right of censure, but a condition of unanimity of the victors. He thought he could block the organization by boycotting it.

    The Anglo-Saxons interpreted the text of the Charter they had drafted and took advantage of the Soviets’ absence to place “blue helmets” on the heads of their soldiers and wage war on the North Koreans (June 25, 1950) in the “name of the international community” (sic). Finally, on August 1, 1950, the Soviets returned to the UN after an absence of six and a half months.

    The North Atlantic Treaty may be legal but NATO’s rules of procedure violate the UN Charter. It places the Allied armies under Anglo-Saxon command. Its Commander-in-Chief, the SACEUR, is necessarily an American officer. According to its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, the Alliance’s real aim was neither to preserve the peace nor to fight the Soviets, but to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans under control” [2]. In short, it was the armed wing of the world government that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to create. It was in pursuit of this goal that President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany.

    At the Liberation, MI6 and OPC (the future CIA) secretly set up a stay-behind network in Germany. They placed thousands of Nazi leaders in this network, helping them to escape justice. Klaus Barbie, who tortured French Resistance coordinator Jean Moulin, became the first commander of this shadow army. The network was then incorporated into NATO, where it was greatly reduced. It was then used by the Anglo-Saxons to interfere in the political life of their supposed allies, who were in reality their vassals.

    Joseph Goebbels’ former collaborators created the Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit. With the help of the USA, they persecuted German communists. Later, NATO’s stay-behind agents were able to manipulate the extreme left to make it detestable. A case in point is the Bader gang. But as these men were arrested, the stay-behind came and murdered them in prison, before they could stand trial and speak out. In 1992, Denmark spied on Chancellor Angela Merkel on NATO instructions, just as in 2022, Norway, another NATO member, helped the USA sabotage Nord Stream…

    Returning to international law, things gradually returned to normal, until in 1968, during the Prague Spring, the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev did in Central Europe what the Anglo-Saxons were doing everywhere else: he forbade the USSR’s allies to choose an economic model other than their own.

    With the dissolution of the USSR, things began to get worse. The US Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, drew up a doctrine according to which, to remain masters of the world, the United States had to do everything in its power to prevent the emergence of a new rival, starting with the European Union. It was in application of this idea that Secretary of State James Baker imposed the enlargement of the European Union to include all the former states of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. By expanding in this way, the Union deprived itself of the possibility of becoming a political entity. It was again in application of this doctrine that the Maastricht Treaty placed the EU under NATO’s protection. And it is still in the application of this doctrine that Germany and France are paying for and arming Ukraine.

    Then came Czech-US professor Josef Korbel. He proposed that the Anglo-Saxons should dominate the world by rewriting international treaties. All that was needed, he argued, was to substitute Anglo-Saxon law, based on custom, for the rationality of Roman law. In this way, in the long term, all treaties would give the advantage to the dominant powers: the United States and the United Kingdom, linked by a “special relationship”, in the words of Winston Churchill. Professor Korbel’s daughter, Democrat Madeleine Albright, became Ambassador to the UN, then Secretary of State. Then, when the White House passed into Republican hands, Professor Korbel’s adopted daughter, Condoleeza Rice, succeeded her as National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State. For two decades, the two “sisters” [3]patiently rewrote the main international texts, ostensibly to modernize them, but in fact to change their spirit.

    Today, international institutions operate according to Anglo-Saxon rules, based on previous violations of international law. This law is not written in any code, since it is an interpretation of custom by the dominant power. Every day, we substitute unjust rules for International Law and violate our own signature.

    For example:

    • When the Baltic States were created in 1990, they made a written commitment to preserve the monuments to the sacrifices of the Red Army. The destruction of these monuments is therefore a violation of their own signature.
    • Finland made a written commitment in 1947 to remain neutral. Joining NATO is therefore a violation of its own signature.
    • On October 25, 1971, the United Nations adopted Resolution 2758 recognizing Beijing, not Taiwan, as the sole legitimate representative of China. As a result, Chiang Kai-shek’s government was expelled from the Security Council and replaced by that of Mao Zedong. Consequently, China’s recent naval manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait do not constitute aggression against a sovereign state, but the free deployment of its forces in its own territorial waters.
    • The Minsk agreements were intended to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from harassment by “integral nationalists”. France and Germany vouched for them before the Security Council. But, as Angela Merkel and François Hollande have said, neither of them had any intention of implementing them. Their signatures are worthless. If it had been otherwise, there would never have been a war in Ukraine.

    The perversion of International Law reached a peak with the appointment, in 2012, of the American Jeffrey Feltman as Director of Political Affairs. From his office in New York, he oversaw the Western war on Syria. Using the institutions of peace to wage war [4].

    Until the United States threatened it by stockpiling weapons on its border, the Russian Federation respected all the commitments it had signed or that the Soviet Union had signed. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obliges the nuclear powers not to spread their nuclear arsenals around the world. The United States, in violation of its signature, has been stockpiling atomic bombs in five vassal countries for decades. They train allied soldiers in the handling of these weapons at the Kleine Brogel base in Belgium, the Büchel base here in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate), the Aviano and Ghedi bases in Italy, the Volkel base in the Netherlands and the Incirlik base in Turkey.

    Then they say, by virtue of their coups de force, that this has become the custom.
    Now, the Russian Federation, considering itself under siege after a US nuclear bomber flew over the Gulf of Finland, has also played with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and installed atomic bombs on the territory of Belarus. Of course, Belarus is not Cuba. Placing Russian nuclear bombs there changes nothing. It’s just a message sent to Washington: if you want to re-establish the Law of the Strongest, we can accept that too, except that, from now on, we’re the strongest. Note that Russia has not violated the letter of the Treaty, as it is not training the Belarusian military in these weapons, but it has taken liberties with the spirit of the Treaty.

    As Léon Bourgeois explained in the last century, to be effective and lasting, disarmament treaties must be based on legal guarantees. It is therefore urgent to return to international law, failing which we will plunge headlong into a devastating war.

    Our honour and our interest lie in re-establishing international law. It’s a fragile construction. If we want to avoid war, we must re-establish it, and we can be sure that Russia thinks as we do, that it will not violate it.

    Or we can support NATO, which brought its 31 defence ministers together in Brussels on October 11 to listen to their Israeli counterpart announce, via videoconference, that he was going to raze Gaza to the ground. And none of our ministers, including Germany’s Boris Pistorius, dared to speak out against the planning of this mass crime against civilians. The honour of the German people has already been betrayed by the Nazis, who ultimately sacrificed you. Don’t let yourselves be betrayed again, this time by the Social Democratic Party and the Greens.

    We don’t have to choose between two overlords, but to protect peace, from the Donbass to Gaza, and, ultimately, to defend International Law.

     

    Source: “What international order?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 7 November 2023, www.voltairenet.org/article219965.html

    Republished under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND

    Feature Image Credit: ‘Imagine a World free from the Oppression of a US-led global Order’ – www.scmp.com

     

  • Mercenaries in Libyan Conflict: Need for a Strong International Law Against Mercenary Activities

    Mercenaries in Libyan Conflict: Need for a Strong International Law Against Mercenary Activities

    The presence of mercenary groups and foreign fighters in Libya potentially had an impact in intensifying and prolonging the Libyan conflict, further complicating the search for a peaceful solution to the crisis. Foreign fighters and mercenaries have grossly violated domestic and international human rights and contributed to enormous human suffering. Mohamad Aujjar, Chair of the independent international fact-finding mission on Libya, told the UN Human Rights Council that the “mission’s investigations had found that all parties to the conflict in Libya since 2016, including third states, foreign fighters, and mercenaries, have violated international humanitarian law, particularly the principles of proportionality and distinction, and that some had committed war crimes”. Twelve years after violent conflicts and political crises, Libya is turning to a crucial election this year, one that was originally scheduled in December 2021 but could not be held due to disagreement between various political groups. It is considered that the presence of mercenaries and foreign fighters in the conflicting territories will be an obstacle to peaceful elections. African Union chairman stated that “the departure of foreign mercenaries could help Libya to achieve greater stability which was in a constant tussle since 2011”. As mentioned previously, mercenary involvement is one of the primary causes for the prolongation of the Libyan conflict, caused by the absence of firm international law concerning mercenary activities.

    The growing presence of mercenaries in armed conflicts across the world, and the threat that mercenaries are posing towards international peace and human security is a signal of the need for a strong legal framework for regulating mercenary activities.

    The conflict in Libya started when NATO-backed Western powers toppled the former authoritarian leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and failed in placing a stable central authority in the country. In 2014 this political vacuum and crisis turned into a civil war between two rival groups, the Government of National Accord (GNA) in the western parts of the country that is recognised by the United Nations, and the Libyan National Army (LNA) in the eastern parts of the country, headed by Khalifa Haftar. Foreign powers had strategically aligned with the conflicting parties to protect their own parochial geopolitical and economic interests in the region. GNA had the support of Turkey and Western countries like Italy. In December 2020, the Turkish parliament authorised the deployment of troops to Libya in support of the GNA. It is estimated that Turkey sent between 2000 and 4000 mercenaries from Syria to Libya, all of whom were under the direct control of the Turkish military. The Sadat, a Turkish private military firm, was also directly involved in the Libyan conflict. On the other hand, the LNA enjoyed the support of Russia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since 2014, UAE has supported the LNA by supplying arms while Russia sent mercenaries to boost LNA. In February 2021, the UN-led Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) formed a new government called the Government of National Unity (GNU) with Abdulhamid AlDabaiba as Prime Minister with the approval of the Libyan House of Representatives. GNU failed to hold the national election which was the main purpose for the formation of the GNU. Thus, the country was again divided into two camps. On the one side, Egypt, Russia, France, and Qatar supported Bashaga and his eastern supporters. On the other side were Italy, Turkey (with some exceptions), the United Nations, and the United States. The UAE, surprisingly, supported Dbeibah. Once again, the situation on the ground demonstrates that a plethora of foreign actors are interfering in Libyan domestic affairs, each pursuing its interests rather than those of Libya and the entire region. Libya has become another battleground for proxy wars between Russia and Western powers. For Russian oil companies, Libya is attractive due to its vast oil reserves and vital from a military standpoint due to its strategic location. By constructing naval facilities in the Mediterranean, Russia would be able to expand its military presence further west. Regional and global powers are struggling to reshape the region according to their interests in the Sahel region. Russia and Turkey are leaders in this trend by using several mercenary groups. Thus, the complete elimination of mercenaries from Libya is one of the preconditions for peace and stability in Libya.

    The growing presence of mercenaries in armed conflicts across the world, and the threat that mercenaries are posing towards international peace and human security is a signal of the need for a strong legal framework for regulating mercenary activities. There are a few reasons why mercenaries need to be legally regulated. First, mercenaries are beyond state control and may pose a practical threat to state sovereignty and security, as well as challenge the traditional realist idea of the state monopoly to use coercion or force, though realists agree that the nation-states no longer hold a monopoly over coercive instruments*. Second, mercenaries are profit-oriented firms, where financial gain is the goal. This raises both a political and moral dilemma that an individual who does not have any political or ideological affiliation towards the conflict is direct participant in the conflict. Above all, mercenary involvements in conflicts across the world are significantly changing the nature of conflicts by intensifying and complicating the pre-existing dynamics, especially considering they openly defy human rights and avoid related responsibilities.

    The major treatise and conventions that regulate mercenary activities include Additional Protocol I and II to Article 47 of the Geneva Convention (1949), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Convention for the Elimination of Mercenaries in Africa (1972), and the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries (1989). However, these treatises are far from perfect as Sarah Percy says, “International law dealing with mercenaries is notoriously flawed”. According to her, the primary reason why international is weak is that states, back in the 1970s and 1980s, did not care enough to create effective regulations as they were not considered enough of a “practical difficulty” or warranted enough “moral attention” to necessitate legal attention. Another reason is that notably, weaker African states are vulnerable to mercenary activities as even Western states were willing to use mercenaries in the African continent for their strategic gains, and as well these African states have intentionally created loopholes within the law to use mercenaries themselves for their advantage. Immediately following World War II, Western states suppressed the African people’s struggle for self-determination and sovereignty by using mercenaries. Dusoulier says that “the private security industry has a long history on the African continent whether in the Sahel, Mali, or the Central African Republics”. He further points out that this state of affairs is a consequence of two factors: the weakness of government institutions in some countries and the continent’s wealth of mineral resources. Hence, it is evident that the laws concerning mercenaries are not strong enough to contain the spread of mercenary activities across the globe.

    Recent conflicts in Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, and Syria are showing the paucity of international law concerning mercenary activities. Without an effective international framework to regulate mercenary activities, conflicts in this world will be turning more violent and intensified. Bilateral cooperation, information sharing, and the efforts of international organisations are important in this regard. The withdrawal of mercenaries from Libya will contribute to peaceful elections in the country and further lead to peace and stability in the country. Peace and stability in Libya will create a larger scope for peace in the entire Sahel region. 

    REFERENCES

    1. OHCHR. (n.d.). All Parties to the Conflict in Libya, including Third States, Foreign Fighters and Mercenaries, Have Violated International Humanitarian Law, and Some Have Also Committed War Crimes, Chair of Fact-finding Mission on Libya Tells Human Rights Council. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/10/all-parties-conflict-libya-including-third-states-foreign-fighters-and
    2. Cascais, A., & Koubakin, R. (2023b, January 17). Mercenary armies in Africa. Retrieved from https://www.dw.com/en/the-rise-of-mercenary-armies-in-africa/a-61485270
    3. Beaumont, P. (2020, January 3). Turkish MPs pass bill to send troops to support Libyan government. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/02/turkish-parliament-to-vote-on-sending-troops-to-libya
    4. Libya: Help make 2023 the year of ‘free and fair elections’, Security Council urged. (2022b, December 16). Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131817
    5. El-Assasy, A. (2023, February 20). AU Voices Commitment to Reconciliation in Libya. Retrieved from https://libyareview.com/32092/african-union-voices-commitment-to-reconciliation-initiative-in-libya/
    6. Powers, M. (2021, October 8). Making Sense of SADAT, Turkey’s Private Military Company – War on the Rocks. Retrieved from https://warontherocks.com/2021/10/making-sense-of-sadat-turkeys-private-military-company/
    7. Percy, S. V. (2007). Mercenaries: Strong Norm, Weak Law. International Organization, 61(02). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818307070130
    8. On the Approval of the Government of Libyan National Unity. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.embassyoflibyadc.org/news/on-the-approval-of-the-government-of-libyan-national-unity

    Featured Image Credits: Council on Foreign Relations