On 7 April the UN General Assembly decided to suspend Russia’s membership in the Human Rights Council. This establishes a destructive precedent not only for the future of the Human Rights Council, but for the future of other United Nations institutions.
I do not wish to overestimate the consequences of the GA decision. Obviously, it is a blow to Russia’s prestige, and adds to the general atmosphere of Russophobia that we have seen over the decades. We can expect in the future that efforts will be made to exclude other countries from membership in the Human Rights Council – one could think of excluding several NATO countries for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by their forces during the wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. We could think of excluding Saudi Arabia because of its genocidal war against the people of Yemen. We could think of excluding India for its systematic war crimes and gross violations of human rights against the people of Kashmir, including widespread extra-judicial executions. Another credible candidate for suspension would be Azerbaijan because of its aggression against the hapless Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh during the Blitzkrieg of September-November 2020, where war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed, including torture and execution of Armenian prisoners of war. We could think of excluding Colombia because of its lethal para-military activities and consistent pattern of killing human rights defenders, social leaders, syndicalists and indigenous peoples. And, foremost, Israel, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Let us not shed too many tears over the Human Rights Council, whose authority and credibility are questionable, and whose resolutions are routinely ignored by many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Since its creation in 2006 the Human Rights Council has not served human rights well – but it has certainly served the geopolitical and informational interests of the United States and the European Union.
The GA decision also puts a further nail on the coffin of the General Assembly itself. It manifests how the Assembly can and is manipulated by the United States and by the bullying, arm-twisting and blackmailing practices of the Department of State.
Far more serious for the world are the economic sanctions and financial blockade imposed by the US and EU countries on Russia, which will have a long-lasting impact on the world economy, hurting the most vulnerable not only in Russia, but also in Europe, Africa, North and South America, and Asia.
The decision of the GA sets a dangerous precedent and further politicizes the Human Rights Council. One would think that precisely because some countries do not like what Russia is doing that they would like to “tame” it by involving it in the human rights work of the Council. Isolating a country is always counter-productive. What is needed is greater inclusion and greater debate – not exclusion and hate-mongering.
The GA vote illustrates the success of the “information war” that has been waged against Russia for decades – not just since 2022, not even since 2014 and the Maidan coup – long before there was systematic dis-information about Russia and a consistent negative narrative. This has a simple explanation: NATO has had no raison d’être since the Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991. In order to continue existing, NATO must have an “enemy” – and that is the only role that the US and NATO assigned to Russia. The Russian bogeyman is necessary and guarantees that the US military-industrial-financial complex can continue its war on the world and on the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
The allegations of war crimes allegedly committed by Russian forces in Bucha in the vicinity of Kiev precipitated this move by the US to have Russia removed from the Human Rights Council.
How much do we know about the events?
While Ukraine accused Russia of murdering 400 civilians in Bucha before retreating from the town, the Russian government has refuted these allegations, pointing out that Russian forces withdrew in an orderly fashion on 30 March and that no allegations of extra judicial executions were made until 2 April, four days later, when Ukrainian security forces and TV cameras arrived in Bucha. The US and NATO accepted Kiev’s claims uncritically and used them to justify imposing further sanctions against Russia. However, serious doubts have arisen about a possible staged event and tampering with the photos and videos.
Do we have here another false flag operation as we have seen multiple times in Syria, staged chemical attacks that could not be confirmed by expert inspectors? Are the dead persons civilians or military?
Were the bodies those of Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians victims of artillery bombardment?
Were the bodies Russian soldiers wearing white armbands or Ukrainian civilians with white armbands to signal their peaceful intentions and subsequently lynched by Ukrainian Neo-nazi extremists for collaboration with the Russians?
One day we may find out whether the US had advance knowledge of the alleged crimes in Bucha or whether it was involved in manufacturing evidence for the information war.
Of course, nobody knows. Yet.
What we need is whistleblowers, more Julian Assanges and more Wikileaks.
By the way, as Russia appoints a veteran of the war in Syria as its overall military commander in Ukraine, who is expected imminently to launch an offensive in the Donbas industrial area, pundits ask if the tactics that proved successful in Syria could now be employed in Ukraine.
The new appointee is General Alexander Dvornikov, who was sent to Syria
in September 2015 when Russia intervened directly in the war to stop a rebel
offensive backed by Saudi Arabia which was making ground against the forces of
President Bashar al-Assad.
Russian air support for the Syrian army was of crucial assistance for
the Assad government and continues to this day with 182 Russian air strikes
since the start of April according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Gen Dvornikov, who became commander of the southern district in Russia
in 2016, was credited by
Moscow with turning the tide
in Syria. American critics accused him of inflicting heavy civilian loss of
life by bombarding villages, towns and cities, making them uninhabitable.
These may have been his tactics, but they had been used by the Syrian
government since at least 2012. The appointment of Gen Dvornikov was confirmed
by US official, but not by Moscow which does not announce such appointments.
Long before Russians intervened directly in Syria, we would drive
through districts in north Damascus where every structure had been smashed by
shellfire and bombs and the ruins then levelled by bulldozers to prevent them
being used for cover by snipers.
Surviving inhabitants had fled and nobody knew how many had died: in
Daraya, once an opposition stronghold in south Damascus, the tall apartment
blocks were still standing, but gutted and emptied of people.
The Russians fine-tuned and reinforced what the Syrian government was
already doing, suggesting that it rely less on massive but ill-directed
firepower and more on squads of infantry with snipers’ rifles and machine guns.
This is effective, but the problem for the Syrian army – and the same
may be true of the Russians in Ukraine – was that they were short of infantry
and wanted to keep their casualties low. Simple lack of numbers may
also explain the Russian failure to make headway in north Ukraine and the reliance on vulnerable columns of tanks
and armoured vehicles that proved easy for Ukrainian forces to ambush.
A key difference between the military landscape in Syria and Ukraine is
that Syria is a jigsaw puzzle of hostile communities divided by religious and,
on occasion, by ethnic allegiances. Although the same could be right for
Ukraine with the division between Ukrainian and Russian ethnics and the
Neo-nazi militias, which would correspond to Daesh in Syria.
In a Damascus district named Barzeh, artillery fire had reduced
anti-government Sunni Arab neighbourhoods to a tangle of broken concrete beams
and collapsed floors, while nearby tall blocks populated by pro-government
members of the Alawite community, who believe in a variant of Shi’ism, were
unscathed.
In Ukraine so far, Russia has succeeded in mobilising local support in
the Donbas self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk where fighting is
expected to escalate in the near future. And also in the south Russian majority
provinces.
One parallel between Syria and Ukraine which works all too well is that
modern urban warfare everywhere inevitably involves heavy civilian casualties,
and this is true regardless of who is doing the attacking.
Whole districts of Damascus, Homs and East Aleppo have been wrecked or
levelled by Syrian government/Russian bombardment, but the same is true of
Raqqa, formerly the Islamic State de facto capital in northeast Syria, which
was subjected to intense airstrikes and artillery fire by the Americans in
support of Kurdish-led forces.
The city of Mosul, the Isis headquarters in Iraq, suffered a nine-month
siege in 2016/17 by Iraqi troops backed by American airstrikes and much of the
Old City was annihilated. Air forces the world over tend to be dishonest about
their ability to distinguish civilian from military targets. But investigation
on the ground after airstrikes has invariably shown that civilian and military
personnel were in the same place or one can be easily mistaken for the other.
This happens naturally but also as a result of deliberate choice with
jihadis in northern Syria sometimes occupying one floor of a five-storey
building while floors above and below them are occupied by the normal
residents. The same is true for Azov militia in Ukraine.
On the propaganda point of view, there is a contrast between the Russian
armed forces’ intervention in Syria in 2015 and in Ukraine in 2022 is in the
level of military competence.
Western governments had hoped that Russia would become bogged down in
the Syrian quagmire, but instead it made political and military gains using
airpower and a modest number of advisers.
Now Nato want to make believe that Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24
February stumbled from the beginning. Its troops are supposed to have failed to
achieve their objectives, though for Nato and Western media the precise nature
of these is still unclear. They say that too few Russian troops advanced on too
many fronts to enjoy a battle-winning superiority in numbers and were forced to
retreat after suffering heavy losses – the information comes from Kiev, not
Moscow.
Therefore, triumphalism on the part of Ukrainian leaders and western military experts could turn out to be dangerously premature – and the Russian success in Syria was not as atypical as it now Nato and Western media want it appears to be.
General Alexander Dvornikov is no butcher. He is as good strategic as it gets. With him in command, the war may be beginning to end.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário