Dehai

Criminals on the International Criminal Court

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.

Lets 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
regions 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 to obvious
attempted coup d’eta.  Saddam Hussein, Muhamar 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 Dafur the Sudanese President was playing a critical role in
the success of the Dafur relief effort, what is still considered the
most successful major International Aid intervention ever.

So while the ICC was indicting Sudans President for the deaths of
“hundreds of thousands, genocide even” eyewitness testimony from Dafur
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 Dafur indictments to keep attention from
being focussed 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” ie 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 Walrus”, 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 an independent journalist in Eritrea, living and
reporting from here since 2006. See thomascmountain on Facebook,
thomascmountain on Twitter or best reach him at thomascmountain at g
mail dot com