Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s for his opposition to racial Apartheid. Now he’s taking a stand on the selective accountability for war crimes.

His remarks come at a time when war hawks are ginning up another case for war, this time with Iran. As long as there is no accountability, we can expect more of the same.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Bush and Blair Should Be Sent to The Hague

Cross posted from Common Dreams

Calling out the international community to stand up and recognize the glaring hypocrisy of sending various African and Asian leaders of relatively weak nations to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face trial for their crimes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has called for the former leaders of Great Britain and the United States, Tony Blair and George W. Bush, to be brought before The Hague to stand trial for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls for both Tony Blair and George W. Bush to be brought before The Hague to stand trial for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Archbiship Desmond Tutu

“The immorality of the United States and Great Britain’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003,” Tutu wrote in an exclusive for the Observer this weekend, was “premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,” and instead of bring peace, democracy, or harmony to the region, “has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.”

Tutu’s missive was delivered following his refusal to attend a global leadership summit in South Africa last week after learning that the former Prime Minister Tony Blair would be in attendance.

“My appeal to Mr Blair is not to talk about leadership, but to demonstrate it,” Tutu said.

Tutu recalls urging — along with millions of other global citizens who mounted the largest global protests in human history — the US and Britain to give UN inspectors more time to determine the veracity of their claims about Iraq’s weapons stockpiles, but was told by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that “there was too much risk and the president [George W. Bush] would not postpone any longer.”

The result?

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

In a “consistent world,” writes Tutu, and based on the level of destruction caused by the US and its willing allies, “those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.”

As The Guardian explains, the ICC, located in the Netherlands, “hears cases on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. To date, 16 cases have been brought before the court but only one, that of Thomas Lubanga, a rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has been completed. He was sentenced earlier this year to 14 years’ imprisonment for his part in war crimes in his home country.”

Tutu met the expected Blair rebuttal about the good that was done in ridding the world of Saddam Hussein by again pointing to the inherent responsibilities of wielding the unmatched power that both Blair and Bush were entrusted with by their people.

“Leadership and morality are indivisible,” he wrote. “Good leaders are the custodians of morality. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.”

“If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children?”

Suffice to say many Islamophobes deny the Genocide against Bosnian Muslims, chief amongst them are Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.

Ratko Mladic goes on trial for genocide

(AlJazeera English)

The trial of General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief accused of orchestrating war crimes and a campaign of genocide, has begun at a special UN court at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made their opening statements against Mladic on Wednesday almost a year after his arrest in Serbia and subsequent deportation after years on the run.

Mladic is accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including orchestrating the week-long massacre of over 7,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica in 1995 during the Bosnian war.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome said the prosecution would present evidence showing “beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes”.

“The world watched in disbelief that in neighborhoods and villages within Europe a genocide appeared to be in progress,” said Groome, describing the beginning of the war in 1992.

“By the time Mladic and his troops murdered thousands in Srebrenica … they were well-rehearsed in the craft of murder,” Groome told the court.

Older but defiant

Dressed in a dark grey suit and dark tie, Mladic, now 70, flashed a thumbs-up and clapped his hands as he entered the courtroom in The Hague.

In the packed public seating area, a mother of one of the Srebrenica victims whispered “vulture” several times as prosecutors opened their case.

Later, Mladic made eye contact with one of the Muslim women in the audience, running a hand across his throat, in a gesture that led Presiding judge Alphons Orie to hold a brief recess and order an end to “inappropriate interactions.”

“Ratko Mladic is clearly not the stocky, physically imposing, bullish man that we remember from images of the early ’90s,” Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips reported from The Hague.

Phillips added, however, that even with his age, the general remained as defiant as ever.

“You could really sense his contempt for this court, which he calls the ‘NATO’ court,” he said.

Axel Hagedorn, a lawyer for many of the mothers of those killed in Srebrenica, said that many of his clients had travelled to The Hague, where they were relieved to finally see Mladic stand trial.

“I think he looks much more healthy than last year, when he appeared, that is good for us, because we hope that he can survive this trial and face imprisonment,” he said.

The Mladic trial would also help build a separate case by the Srebrenica families against the United Nations, he said.

In April, the Dutch Supreme Courht ruled that the UN could not be prosecuted in the Netherlands for failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, but the families’ lawyers plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

“This case is very linked to our case, on the failure of the United Nations to protect the people of Srebrenica,” Hagedorn said.

There are concerns that Mladic’s trial could be disrupted by the defendant’s poor health. He is believed to have suffered at least one stroke while in hiding and was admitted to hospital for pneumonia last October.

Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, died of a heart attack in detention in 2006 before a verdict in his trial could be reached.

‘Biggest butcher’

Outside, protesters held up placards including one that said “we want justice for the victims of Srebrenica”.

Mladic, who was arrested in a village in northern Serbia last May, is also charged over the 44-month siege of Sarajevo during which more than 10,000 people died.

Mladic has refused to enter a plea and rejected the charges against him as “monstrous” and “obnoxious” in a preliminary hearing last June. He says he was defending his country and his people as leader of the Bosnian Serb army. The court entered a ‘not guilty’ plea on his behalf.

He is the last of the main protagonists involved in the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia to go on trial in front of the special court established by the United Nations to prosecute crimes committed during the conflicts.

“This is the biggest butcher of the Balkans and the world,” Munira Subasic, 65, told the AFP news agency. She lost 22 relatives to Bosnian Serb military forces when Srebrenica was overrun in July 1995.

“I’ll look into his eyes and ask him if he repents,” said Subasic, who said she would watch the trial’s opening from the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The case has stirred up deep emotions in the Balkans and Wednesday’s proceedings were broadcast live on big screens in Sarajevo, where thousands died between 1992 and 1995.

“I hope that many of those who are disillusioned and believe that Mladic is a Serb hero will change their minds, and that the trial will demonstrate that he was just a criminal and a coward,” Fikret Grabovica, president of the association of parents and children killed in the siege of Sarajevo, said.

“Even if Mladic lives until the verdict, it will bring only mild satisfaction for the victims of Srebrenica and hundreds of other places in the Serb Republic,” Grabovica added, referring to the entity that rules Serb majority areas of Bosnia.

‘Not satisfied’

Since the end of the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been divided into a federation of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and the Serb Republic.

Mladic’s lawyers last week attempted to have the trial pushed back as the court pondered their request to have presiding judge Alphons Orie removed from the bench. They had argued that Orie would be biased against Mladic because he had already condemned several of his former subordinates.

But Theodor Meron, the president of the court, denied the request.

“I am not satisfied that Mladic has demonstrated that a reasonable observer … would reasonably apprehend bias. I accordingly find Mladic’s request for Judge Orie’s disqualification to be unmeritorious,” he said in a statement.

Mladic is being held in the same prison as his former political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested in 2008 and is now about halfway through his trial on similar charges to Mladic.

Mladic’s lawyers on Monday night filed another request to have the trial adjourned for six months, saying they had not had enough time to prepare, due to “errors” by the prosecution in disclosing documents.

Groome said on Wednesday he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment”.

The “shrieking harpy” as she is known by many, Pamela Geller is at her business once again — lunacy. Now she is taking it to another level and reiterating her support for Serbian war criminals.

In another maniacal post, Geller writes,

Radovan Karadžić, the former Bosnian Serb politician, is on trial (more like a sharia court) in the United Nations Detention Unit of Scheveningen, accused of “war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats during the Siege of Sarajevo” (now an entirely Muslim city, completely ethnically cleansed of non-Muslims.)

Obviously stating that the Hague Court is a Shariah Court is a lame attempt at deligitimizing the Hague and the UN. It is sad to see the depths that Pamela will go to white wash crimes against humanity just because its victims were Muslim.

She goes on,

(Remember that in matters concerning the former Yugoslavia — the media, the court, the prosecution, world governments, NATO, and Hollywood are a single conglomerate.) In the example below, the prosecution and the media attempt to twistKaradzic’s efforts to avoid ethnic cleansing, into a fiendish desire to commit ethnic cleansing

You see it is all a conspiracy from the whole world working in one unit to persecute Karadzic who was actually trying to avoid ethnic cleansing.

An example of Radovan Karadzic preventing ethnic cleansing,

“There are 20,000 armed Serbs around Sarajevo … it will be a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the earth.”

The things that make you go hmmmmm? Karadzic really was trying hard to stop the ethnic cleansing. Imagine if Ahmedinejad said those exact words about Israel, he would rightly be labeled an anti-Semite seeking the destruction of the Jews. Hypocritical Pamela Geller can’t see the rank hypocrisy in her own words.

Geert Wilders

At the same time that he is facing charges for hate speech his party is making advancements in local polls which bode ill for future national elections. Islamophobia is on the march!

For more on Wilders, read Krapuul.nl which is the number one site tracking Geert Wilders.

Wearing a Yarmulke (Yamaka) is okay but not the Hijab

Geert Wilders previously called for a tax on the Hijab, now a recent political event reveals a new tactic in his  discriminatory political agenda. On a side note this is a good compliment to Danios’ article, as it ironically reveals that it is contemporary, if marginal Westerners who want to repress religious freedom and are advocating repressive conditions and restrictions on minorities akin to the ones in the fabled ‘Pact of Umar.’

Wilders goes for headscarf ban in the Hague

A ban on headscarves for city council workers and in all institutions and clubs which get local authority money will be the most important point in the PVV´s negotiations to join governing coalitions in Almere and the Hague, says party leader Geert Wilders.

Speaking to RTL news, Wilders said the ban would be central to talks to form new local authority executives in the only two cities where the party is contesting the March 3 local elections.

The ban will apply to ‘all council offices and all other institutions and clubs which get even one cent of council money,’ he said.

The PVV is tipped to emerge as the biggest party in Almere and second biggest in the Hague.

Speech

Wilders brought up the ban again in a speech to supporters in Almere, where he entered the room to the Rocky theme tune Eye of the Tiger.

The ban will not apply to other religious items such as Christian crosses and Jewish skull caps because these are symbols of our own Dutch culture, Wilders said in his speech, receiving a standing ovation from the crowd.

The speech began with a ‘lengthy tirade’ against the ‘arrogant Labour party’, according to the Volkskrant report of the meeting. ‘If you translate the PvdA’s Arabic language election brochures they say ‘bring your family here. You get benefits, we pay for everything’, the Volkskrant quoted the PVV leader as saying.

‘Almere must become the safest city in the Netherlands,’ he said. ‘There will be an end to subsidies for Turkish macramé and Arabic finger painting. Not just the Netherlands but all of Europe will look to Almere.’

Discrimination

Wilders is currently facing charges of discrimination and inciting hatred against non western immigrants and Muslims. He always maintains he is opposed to Islam, not Muslims themselves.

Earlier this week, Wilders told the Telegraaf the PVV´s commitment to maintaining the current retirement age of 65 would be crucial in negotiations to form a new national government, following the collapse of the CDA, Labour and ChristenUnie alliance last weekend.

Most parties have already ruled out forming a coalition with Wilders. Only the Christian Democrats and right wing Liberals VVD have not done so.

Opinion polls make it likely that four parties will be needed to form a new government after the June 9 vote.