International
Courts
and the Mystery of the Malaysian Airliner
دادگاه جهانی و راز و رمز هواپیمای(سقوط کرده-م) مالزیائی
ISRAEL SHAMIR • AUGUST 4,
2015
People are
not equal in death, either. Some deaths are more
newsworthy than others. The media and politicians
love spectacular acts of terror, fires, disaster,
the death of the wealthy and privileged, a death
conducive to a cause. Such is the death of 300
passengers and crew of the Malaysian airliner flight
17 in the crash in Donbass, near Russian-Ukrainian
border. Their deaths, regrettable as they were, are
deemed to be of much greater importance, or at least
newsworthiness than those of some ten thousand local
people killed by the indiscriminate shelling of
Donbass towns by Kiev regime troops, or that of a
million Arabs. It is conducive to the cause of
pushing Russia into a corner.
The US and
its allies wanted Russia branded with a scarlet
letter. They manoeuvred Putin into a no-win
situation: appear submissive or appear a mass
murderer. Heads I win, tails you lose. They
introduced into the UN Security Council a draft
resolution on the formation of a special tribunal
for the crashed Malaysian liner, containing a
reference to Chapter
VII, the deadliest of all,
dealing with “threat to the peace, breach of the
peace, or act of aggression” and authorising use of
force. If such a resolution would pass, it would
mean Russia gave up its sovereignty. Even in the
unlikely case of fair trial, the impact of such a
submission would be huge. And the trial would be by
a hostile court for whom Truth Is No Defence.
It would
be a miracle for Russia to escape condemnation at
such a court. You say, but Russia is clearly innocent
in the disaster. So what? These guys
are not after truth at all – they hanged Saddam,
they brutalised Qaddafi, they keep Palestinians
locked in Gaza, they want to destroy and subjugate
strong-minded Russia. And what would be a better
gambit than a resolution with the magic words
“Chapter VII”. Their magic can unleash the dogs of
war.
However
the worst consequence would be the surrender of
Russian sovereignty. If they accepted this, they
could be trampled upon at will. No great state ever
agreed to be tried and judged. This is a sign of
“limited sovereignty”, of submission to supreme
authority.
The US
never did. The US did not agree to join the
International Criminal Court, so its citizens could
never be tried. There were a hundred cases in which
the US could and should have been brought to trial,
but it never happened.
As I write
this, the sad anniversary of Hiroshima reminds us of
the greatest crime of the last century, never
brought to trial, but it happened a long time ago.
In 1980s
the US mined harbours of Nicaragua, and in 1986 the
ICJ (International Court of Justice) found the US
guilty. The US refused to comply. They did not
recognise the Court’s right to judge them.
In 1989
they invaded Panama, kidnapped its president and
locked him up in the dungeon of Barad Dur, Florida.
The majority of the Security Council voted for theresolution condemning
the
invasion, in clear and unambiguous language: “The
Security Council …strongly deplores the intervention
in Panama by the US Armed Forces which constitutes a
fragrant violation of the international law and
demands immediate cessation of the intervention” but
the US and its allies vetoed the resolution.
Since
then, there have been many wars and invasions, but
the US never agreed to be judged, always refused to
comply with judgements and vetoed any draft implying
a check upon its sovereignty.
Now, all
of a sudden, they have become adepts of
international law.
It would
be a deadly error for the Russians to submit. Such
tribunals are highly political, and they decide as
they are ordered. The Russians had recently had an
unpleasant experience: they agreed to a tribunal in
the Hague to arbitrate with the run-away oligarchs
who claimed Putin had stolen their hard-earned
winnings. They thought their case was so clear, and
they believed in the impartiality of the tribunal.
They were surprised when the Hague tribunal ordered
them to pay fifty billion dollars to the fugitives.
They are not likely to step on the same rake a
second time.
Poets
describe such tribunals better than lawyers: “I’ll
be judge, I’ll be jury… I’ll try the whole case, and
condemn you to death”, in the words of Lewis
Carroll.
Russia
vetoed the draft, and there was a deafening media
scream condemning Russia for non-compliance. None of
these screamers bothered to demand US compliance in
a single case of transgression. They knew it would
not work. Not only the US: even the smaller Jewish
state of Israel has never agreed to face a tribunal.
Why does
Israel refuse? Justice is a great concept, and Jews
are natural born lawyers, so the Jews know: a judge
can always rule the way he finds fit and find
reasons for the judgment he likes.
The law is
so quirky, and changes so fast! Fifty years ago, an
American would get a jail sentence for having sex
with a person of a different race or the same sex.
Nowadays, race is no objection, but a woman of 30 gets
22 years in jail for her
amorous affair with three 17-year old kids in
Florida. Why, she would get less if she were to kill
them.
Vladimir
Lenin, a lawyer by education, considered the courts
and lawyers to be a tool of the ruling class. He did
not believe in objective justice. Indeed, the judges
do the will of the rulers. As the rulers want to
find Russia guilty, so they will, given a chance.
Granting
all that, what actually happened in the air over
Donetsk? There are many versions: it was a bomb
planted on board the plane, the plane was hit by a
ground-to-air-missile, it was shot down by an
fighter jet. There are complicated conspiracy
versions aplenty, combining these causes, that would
provide strong competition to 9/11. The more
elaborate versions connect this crash with the
mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines
flight 370 a few months earlier.
There is
no doubt that the Russians did not want to hit the
passenger airliner. The Donetsk rebels could not,
for this feat of hitting a plane flying at such
altitude is above their grade. It is said that Kiev
regime, or the then lord of Dnepropetrovsk, the
Chabad tycoon Kolomoysky did it in order to
implicate Russians, but I doubt that.
There are
witnesses to the flight of a Ukrainian Su-25 jet
fighter based in Dnepropetrovsk that possibly could
have shot down the airliner, believing it was the
Russian airliner Rossiya carrying
President Putin. They give even the pilot’s name:
captain Vladislav Voloshin.
Alternatively,
there are witnesses that saw a ground-to-air missile
battery belonging to Kiev or even to the rebels
(which is quite unlikely: they are not that
sophisticated). Who knows the truth? Such things
happen in wartime, and that was a time of intensive
warfare between the rebels and the Kiev regime.
I’ll tell
you an old soldier’s tale. In 1973 my battalion of
Israeli paratroopers seized the Egyptian Ataka
Heights, in the desert between Suez Canal and Nile
Valley. We had sent a group of our best fighters out
for a reconnaissance raid. A friend of mine took
command. It was a dark night in October. On their
way back, my friend forgot to signal his return, and
our sentries opened fire. My friend and three
soldiers were killed. Friendly fire is not a rare
thing. If friends die of friendly fire, strangers
who got into wrong place in the wrong time are also
likely to suffer.
I would
not blame anybody in the plane disaster, excepting
those who had sent the plane over the fighting zone
– Kiev or Dnepropetrovsk flight dispatchers.
Neither
the Ukrainian nor Russian SAM operators, nor the
rebels wanted to shoot down a civilian aircraft.
Even if the Ukrainian jet fighter downed the plane,
he did it without understanding the nature of the
target. But in war, things happen. In 1988, the
Americans shot down a civilian Iranian airliner
Airbus A-300. 300 people were killed, including 52
women and 66 children – same as in the Donetsk
tragedy.
Initially,
the Americans denied their responsibility – they
said the aircraft flew in a forbidden area, and the
pilot did not respond to friend/foe request.
President Reagan acquitted the commander of the
cruiser that shot down a civilian airliner. Later it
turned out, the airliner flew at a permitted
altitude, gave the right responses to the query, but
the ship’s missile defence system, the Aegis,
misinterpreted the signals, and the captain pushed
the red button.
In
February 1973, Israel shot down a Libyan civilian
airliner and killed more than a hundred passengers.
The airliner strayed from its route during a
sandstorm and Israeli fighter-interceptors shot it
down. Israelis said the flag of Libya looked similar
to the flag of Egypt, or the plane could be hijacked
by terrorists, for it flew towards Israel … In the
end, Israel has been deemed guilty, the state never
conceded its guilt but paid for the insurance.
In these
two cases, there was no real war, even though it was
a tension in the area. But Donbass has had a
full-scale war at the time. Anyone of the combatants
could bring down the ill-fated aircraft, mistaking
it for an enemy – if they had technical means.
The sloppy
Ukrainians could do it even in peace time out of
sheer recklessness as they downed the
Siberia flight from Tel Aviv to
Novosibirsk ten years ago. To this very day the
Ukrainians haven’t admitted their fault.
Conspiracy
theories can be useful – they calm media-induced
frenzy. But I would not take them seriously. At war,
the qui prodest rule is not
working. People and planes can be destroyed just by
chance. Israel was a beneficiary of the tragedy, as
it diverted the world’s attention from the bloody
war in Gaza. Kolomoysky, an Israeli citizen, fiery
Zionist, a tycoon and the ruler of Dnepropetrovsk, a
man capable of anything, was a man partly
responsible for the crash, as his dispatchers
ordered the liner to lower its altitude, and the
captain Vladislav Voloshin was under his command.
But this does not mean that Zionists downed the
plane.
I am
certain the Russians weren’t knowingly involved, for
they opened all their secret communications for the
investigators to see. If they were involved, the
Americans would see it via their satellites, and
they would spread the word right away. But the US
keeps mum; they did not present their data. Nor did
the Kiev regime: they sit on the recordings of the
dispatchers with the plane. Will they publish their
records? I wonder.
One thing
is certain – peace be upon the victims. Allah
Yerham, Lord have mercy on them, as our Arab
brothers say in such cases. Anton Chekhov, the
playwright, said: a gun hanging on the wall in the
first act will be shot by the last act. So is a
resolution referring to Chapter VII. Good that the
Russians had guts to veto the draft and postponed a
war for another time. Otherwise, we would have to
ask for the Lord’s mercy on great many people.
اولین بار در مجله اونز بچاپ رسید
برای ارتباط با اسرائیل شمیر با آدرس بالا تماس برقرار کنید
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