By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

SOME time in January 2022, former Syrian intelligence officer “Anwar Raslan, 58, was found guilty of overseeing the murder of 27 people” and the torture of at least 4,000 prisoners at the Al-Khatib detention centre in Damascus, also known as “Branch 251”, in 2011 and 2012. Raslan, who defected and gained asylum in Germany was given a sentence of life imprisonment by the Koblenz higher regional court for war’s “unspeakable crimes” against humanity.

Human rights groups hailed the verdict as a victory that could lead to the prosecution of other “war criminals” in any country. Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet called the event “historic” and served “to spur forward all efforts to widen the net of accountability for all perpetrators of the unspeakable crimes that have characterised this brutal conflict.”

It is a victory indeed, which would have had a more significant meaning if the law was applied also to leaders of superpowers who have attacked smaller nations and killed much more people, on the pretext of pursuing democratic ideals but were truly meant to pursue rapacious ends. Remember Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, the list goes on.

Why was US President Bush not tried for his baseless attack in Iraq where he destroyed another nation citing the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) which were proven to be non-existent by the United Nations (UN) and whose adventure resulted in approximately 126,000 recorded Iraqi civilian deaths? The protracted war declared by the US against Iraq had over a million total deaths in three batches: The Iraq War (2003-2011), War in Iraq re ISIS (2013-2017) and the Gulf War (2019).

Now it is Biden’s turn, judging Putin as a war criminal, in a war that was precipitated by  the United States as early as 2014, pushing Ukraine to gain membership in NATO, when it maintained a fairly peaceful co-existence with Russia as a non-aligned nation.

But like Bush, Biden is an honorable man, or on his way to gain honor among his kind, the superpowers who can never be assigned the blame for crimes against humanity.

This immunity from blame has been enshrined as a birthright, an extended application of the 19th-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States is “destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent”, which justified the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their ancestral homes. The stage has expanded from the North American continent to the entire world, occupying countries, supplanting cultures, taking over economies and resources, installing and uninstalling regimes, until such time that the world becomes one with the ideals of democracy, capitalism, liberalism, equality and respect for human rights, which in fact gets trampled on in the process of a protracted occupation.

In solidarity with all peace-loving people of the world, we pray for the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, not by escalating the blame game, the cyber propaganda and the sanctions, but in trying to understand its roots, and whether some kind of co-existence can be formulated without having to annihilate one another. And yet, I have no response to an observation by a Muslim colleague, “Where was this outpouring of prayer and support when the Muslims were being annihilated in Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Libya? Where were the sanctions for those who perpetrated these atrocities? Who can we seek redress to punish those accountable?

A number of my fellow alumni at the International Visitor Leadership Program-Philippines (IVLP-PH) voice these concerns as we deliberate on the kind of engagement the organization must pursue under its program, Peace and Inter-faith Dialogue, in the context of today’s realpolitik and the pestering dichotomy of the theory and praxis of what we have collectively assimilated in US institutions, particularly the academe.

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