OPINION: War cannot be condoned. Human suffering cannot be excused. Violence in any form injures all of us… All of us, everywhere, deserve better. Let’s strive to change the unjust colonial UN system and its spawn in Africa and elsewhere, writes Professor Saths Cooper.
Whether it was Aeschylus who wrote in the Greek tragedy Agamemnon some 2 470 years ago “In war, truth is the first casualty”, repeated during the first European war by US Senator Hiram Johnson as “The first casualty, when war comes, is truth”, Putin’s invasion of ‘EUkraine’ (essentially how the EU and US left Ukraine in the lurch, after loudly egging the war-torn country on with unkept promises) has thrown up an infodemic of facts and fiction that are intended to confuse us into taking mindless positions on what could easily become the third European war.
Most of the countries that are members of the UN, were colonies during the two European wars in 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945. Even the 605 brave men of the South African Native Labour Corps, who lost their lives on the SS Mendi in the English Channel in February 1917, were intended to provide menial labour to European troops. Troops from various British colonies were also dragooned during the second European war, at the conclusion of which the UN was formed.
War-mongering is the resort of the few who fail to convince most of us to view the world from their narrow perspectives.
Samuel Johnson aptly stated some 264 years ago: “Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.”
The desire to find answers, not react to symptoms of centuries-old problems, is more appropriate than joining a claque of yay or naysayers.
Most Western leaders, entities and individuals, news and social media stridently urge us to “share the feeling of responsibility and shame” for the terrible human consequences of this central European war where “the Ukrainians are waging the struggle for all of us”.
The central European colleague punting this, whom I hold very dear, enjoined me to “stand resolutely on the right side of history”, asking “What would Mandela do? What would Desmond Tutu do?”
Many of us know what they would have done. They spoke against wars and other acts of aggression that the US and its allies have engaged in since the end of the send European war in August 1945.
Donald Trump, who let out many well-hidden genies in the carefully-closed US bottle, was that meddling country’s only president not to invade a country or create a war. The human rights record after such wars – many ongoing in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America – are dismal, with Afghanistan being the most recent stark example of US military intervention.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, UK, Russia, France, and China – usually use their enshrined veto powers to stalemate decisions that affect the rest of the world, but serve their own national interests. The gross violations of UN statutes, declarations, and protocols by the five countries have become commonplace and accepted, underpinning the UN’s effete status, serving a few countries at the expense of the majority.
The UN needs urgent reform as, like the League of Nations before it, the glaring fault lines in the UN and its other agencies are patently visible. Similarly, the AU needs to step up its tame game of backslapping by one group of middling leaders of terrible ones they bow and scrape to.
The US, Russia and China are not signatories to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute, along with countries such as Burundi, India, Israel, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, the Philippines, Qatar, Turkey, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. The ICC has only jurisdiction over the countries that are signatories to its statute.
It’s, therefore, rich, and deliberately misleading for the US to have Putin arraigned. Genocide, crimes against humanity, war and other crimes of aggression cannot be effectively pursued against leaders in offending countries, who rely on the purveyors of their brand of truth to muddy the waters.
More than 2 500 years ago, Sun Tzu did say: “All warfare is based on deception”. The impression of the ICC being selective in its prosecutions is confirmed, when the UK’s Tony Blair (remember Bush’s representative in Westminster?) confessed that the war in Iraq, supposedly to destroy weapons of mass destruction, caused massive human suffering and destruction, which continue.
The ICC has yet to respond to this confession by a Western leader, undermining the UN system’s credibility, enabling dictators and others who have overstayed their power to feed the social media frenzy of blaming while, disavowing their own culpability. This dangerous evolution makes populism thrive at the expense of the impoverished majority on our fragile planet.
An extremely ugly picture of racism and defiance of accepted wartime convention has emerged during the horrors of the Ukraine war, where “blond-haired, blue-eyed, civilised, Christian” Ukrainians have been favoured over other refugees, including South African students.
The shocking scenes, which all of us have seen on our TV screens and on social media, has prompted outrage. On Monday, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said: “All who flee a conflict situation have the same right to safe passage under the UN convention and the colour of their passport or their skin should make no difference.”
Not a peep from other African leaders, who may be afraid of being personally exposed or shamed.
It is always inimical to point to other examples of intolerance, bigotry, violence and aggression when we see the graphic media content of tremendous human suffering unfurling in one or other part of the world, as we have over the past fortnight. Yet the examples of callous disregard for human life when it is not Western, forces the comparisons that some lives are worth more than others.
The enormous pressure on small countries, various entities (the Western Cape government being one in our midst) and individuals to take sides in a war that nobody, but the few in powered positions try to obfuscate for their own ends.
Hypocrisy, racism and other exceptionalism hinder our ability to embrace our common humanity.
Former US president Dwight Eisenhower – the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, who hated war “as only a soldier who lived it can” – in his farewell January 1961 address warned: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Words that all of us should heed, especially when we are pressured into adopting absolutist positions that impugn our agency and capacity for rational thought.
Worsening matters, after failing to secure a no-fly zone in his country, President Zelensky, on Wednesday, urged the UN to withdraw peacekeeping troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Notably, 13 European powers and the US agreed at the Berlin Conference that ended on February 26, 1885, that the Congo River Basin would be neutral to their colonial depredations, which continue untrammelled to this day. But that story of the “scramble for Africa” and the direct consequences that we still see all around us is one for another day.
War cannot be condoned. Human suffering cannot be excused. Violence in any form injures all of us. We descend to our worst in a turbulent sea of mediocre leaders who make the first grab for their personal life jackets.
All of us, everywhere, deserve better. Let’s strive to change the unjust colonial UN system and its spawn in Africa and elsewhere.
* Professor Saths Cooper is a former political prisoner and a member of the 70s Group.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of and Independent Media.
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