More than anything else, the recent decision by the International Criminal Court to place Sudanese President Omar Al-Beshir under arrest, revealed beyond the shadow of a doubt, that crimes against humanity neither take place in Palestine nor Iraq, but in Sudan.
For a long time, we, like many others around the world, had imagined that the Palestinians were being subjected to a campaign with the express purpose of exterminating them as a nation and sequestering their property for the benefit of settlers coming in from outside Palestine.
Those who objected to these policies were exposed to arbitrary arrest, torture and to having their homes demolished. And in the end, they were subjected to a complete siege inside their own country and deprived of food, water and electricity in a crisis that former US President Jimmy Carter recently described as the worst violation of human rights in the world today.
We, like many others around the world, also imagined for a long time that the Iraqi people were subjected to a systematic destruction of all the state institutions that were in place before the invasion. Their antiquities have either been ruined or stolen and any Iraqi who resisted this invasion was arrested, jailed and molested by the men and women of the occupation forces in a way described by all human rights organizations as surpassing our wildest imagination when it comes to evil and aggression.
Therefore, we imagined, as did many around the world, that those who should be accused of crimes against humanity were US President George Bush and his aides Rumsfeld and Cheney, since they were the architects of all these horrors that will most likely continue to happen until a new administration takes over the White House.
We also imagined for a long time, as did many around the world, that throughout the past 50 years, Israeli leaders were accused of crimes against humanity, starting from Menachem Begin, who decreed breaking the bones of the children of the Palestinian resistance, to Ehud Olmert, via Ariel Sharon who orchestrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
That’s why we thought, through our false expectations, that President Bush or his vice Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the US, or Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert in Israel, would be the ones to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and the ones whom the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor would want to place under arrest.
It seems that Bush too, who shared our expectations and in this unique case, agreed with the rest of the world in rejecting the UN suggestion to set up an International Criminal Court.
But as usual, Bush was wrong, for neither he, nor his allies in Israel were held accountable by the court they rejected, but then he began to show enthusiasm for it when its Prosecutor General, Argentinian Luis Moreno-Ocampo, corrected our thoughts on the subject.
In fact, ever since the Court made its recent decision and Bush has been transformed from the accused to the judge, not sparing a single moment before threatening Sudan with more sanctions if it doesn’t yield to the Court’s decisions.
Hence we’d like to thank the International Criminal Court for meeting the expectations of global public opinion.
Indeed if it wasn’t for the ICC we would never have known that neither Bush nor the Israeli leaders had committed war crimes or violated human rights. Congratulations to them all and may they continue their great work for the sake of humanity in Iraq and Palestine especially since they are now comfortable with the fact that what they do does not grate on the conscience of the ICC nor its Argentinian prosecutor.
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
