International Forecaster Weekly

South Africa to Withdraw from the Internaional Criminal Court

That the ICC has arrived in this situation should be no surprise that the lip service that the court gives to the pursuit of justice for the gravest crimes is just that: lip service.

James Corbett | October 17, 2015

Earlier this week the South African government announced its intention to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. If and when it does so, it will be the first member nation to withdraw from the ICC in the court's short and checkered history...but likely not the last.



    Obed Bapela, a deputy minister of South Africa's ruling ANC party, did not mix words in his criticism of the court. "Whilst at the same time, we are saying ... prevention of genocide, promotion of human rights remain foremost on our agenda, however the ICC has lost its direction, it is no longer an instrument that operates freely and fairly for every member," he noted, adding that the court's most powerful members "trample" human rights and pursue "selfish interests." Without naming names, Bapela concluded that there are "powerful nations that are refusing to be members of the ICC and yet they have unfettered powers particularly in the UN Security Council."

    Of the five UN Security Council permanent members, only the United Kingdom and France are members of the ICC; neither Russia nor the US have ratified the Rome Statute that brought the court into existence in 2002 and China is not even a signatory. As has been noted by others, the idea of an "International Criminal Court" that does not include the United States during an era where the US--formerly led by convicted war criminals like George Bush and Dick Cheney and currently led by a President with his own extrajudicial assassination list--has waged illegal war of aggression after illegal war of aggression and engaged in torture, wrongful imprisonment, kidnapping and a potpourri of other international crimes makes of the court little more than a joke.

    Bapela's blunt assessment of the ICC and its failings were backed up by South African President Jacob Zuma, who delivered similarly scathing remarks about the court in a speech on Monday. “In the eyes of the African leaders, the ICC is biased," he said. "Only Africans they are interested in. This is what has made Africa feel we need to relook at our participation. It looks like it is just meant for us."

    Zuma's perception is backed up by the court's record. In its 13 years of existence it has only ever prosecuted Africans, and visitors to the court's own website will be immediately by a graphic showing that every single one of the court's nine current, active investigations are taking place in Africa. Indeed, there is nothing at all in the court record to demonstrate that the ICC is anything other than a tool of neocolonial aggression.

    Unsurprisingly, this has not stopped a flood of editorials from the usual establishment media outlets in the West chiding South Africa for its criticisms of the ICC like a schoolmarm scolding her students. Of course the court isn't biased, these editorials argue, and even if they are that's a case for extending the reach of the court, not withdrawing from it. This isn't really about the court's vendetta against Africa, they say, it's about the ICC's ongoing investigation of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's trip to South Africa this past summer for an African Union summit.

    What these editorials reveal--more than the smarmy, condescending haughtiness of their authors, that is--is that the neocolonial aggressors are worried that the withdrawal of South Africa from the ICC will begin an exodus of African nations from the court. The ICC, already suffering from a legitimacy crisis, could be reduced to total irrelevance if South Africa's departure started the ball rolling for other African countries, or even the African Union as a whole, to boycott the court.

    That the ICC has arrived in this situation should be no surprise that the lip service that the court gives to the pursuit of justice for the gravest crimes is just that: lip service. The court has only ever been intended for two purposes.

    Firstly, it is as a weapon to be used against the targets of NATO aggression. Witness, for example, ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo's threat to try Gaddafi for feeding Viagra to his troops in order to fuel rapes of his own citizens. That such cartoonish propaganda made its way to the ICC's prosecutor's office before basic investigation showed it to be a complete hoax speaks volumes about the rigor with which the court will pursue NATO's enemies.

    Secondly, the court is intended to set the precedent for a system of "international justice" that has been the apple of the globalist's eye since its very inception. Wearing the cloak of "justice" and appealing to humanity's nobler instincts, the purpose of such a system has always been the consolidation of the arbitration process (and its enforcement) in the hands of the well-connected global elite that has backed the concept since the beginning. This is not conspiracy theory but openly acknowledged history.

    The modern concept of an international rule of law was birthed in the wake of World War I. After witnessing the carnage of the "Great War" and the mechanized destruction of entire nations--destruction that was planned and brought about, as usual, by well-connected political elite in the centers of political and financial power--those same well-connected elite enacted their plan to provide a "solution" to the problem of global warfare: global justice. This idea was articulated in the last of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" where he called for "A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." This was the seed of what was to become the United Nations forerunner, the ill-fated League of Nations.

    Although we are taught in our history classes that the League of Nations was Woodrow Wilson's baby, the Council on Foreign Relations openly admits that Wilson was merely handled by bankster middleman "Colonel" Edward Mandell House and that the League was in fact championed by Elihu Root (JP Morgan's lawyer and CFR founder). When it became evident that the shell shock of WWI was insufficient to get Americans to give up their sovereignty to the globalists, the British conspirators formed the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the Americans incorporated the CFR to work toward their shared goal of a new global order.

    In the wake of WWII, the globalists had their next chance at establishing the framework of that order. The Nuremberg trial was sold to the public as a chance to conduct a fair an impartial international tribunal that would not merely be an example of "victor's justice." What resulted at Nuremberg (and the Tokyo trials) was victor's justice of the most blatant kind.

    Buried in with the expected rhetoric about justice and the rule of law were startlingly frank admissions that the trials would not obey even the most basic rules of evidence. Article 19 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, for instance, states categorically: "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value."

    The prosecuting parties (i.e. the victors) took full advantage of the kangaroo court nature of these trials to pursue their own agendas. The Soviets, for instance, attempted to blame the Nazis for the Katyn Forest massacre, a massacre that they later acknowledged committing themselves.
    This should hardly be surprising given the trial's pedigree. Henry L. Stimson, CFR director and Roosevelt's Secretary of War, is credited as the one who drafted the plan for what became the Nuremberg Trials. He then propagandized them as a "Landmark in Law" for the CFR in their publication, Foreign Affairs. The legal basis for the trials was largely devised by US Army Colonel Murray Bernays who, oh by the way, was the brother-in-law of Edward Bernays, godfather of the modern era of propaganda.

    Still, the "ideal" of impartial international justice was enshrined and Nuremberg was henceforth taught to generations of impressionable schoolchildren as the shining example of Allied righteousness.

    It was this ideal that George H.W. Bush drew on for his infamous "New World Order" speech of September 11, 1990:

    We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.

    The irony, of course, is that Bush was delivering the speech as an example of American righteousness in pursuing the First Gulf War, a war that we now know was based on the same fabric of ridiculous, cartoonish propaganda lies that are used to justify seemingly every war.

    This irony is not coincidental. It is no accident that international tribunals and the ICC are always used to prosecute the enemies of the strongest nations on the planet. The concept of international justice, a concept outlined by CFR members and those of their ilk, is nothing other than an attempt to extend the system of injustice that they control in their own countries across the globe as a whole.

    As for the ICC, the ANC will now take the resolution to withdraw from the court to the South African parliament. Given the ANC's 60% majority, the results of that vote should be a foregone conclusion. And in a further sign that the African Union as a whole might not be far behind, the AU announced last month that they would be setting up their own war crimes court for South Sudan outside the purview of the ICC. Given the fact that they have literally never prosecuted anyone on any other continent and that every one of their active investigations are currently underway in Africa, the secession of Africa from the court would almost assuredly relegate the ICC to utter irrelevance.

    The history of the twentieth century was in many ways the history of the development of the idea of "international justice." A victor's justice wielded like a club by the imperial powers of our day (and the oligarchical interests behind them) to beat back any would-be competitors on the world stage. The same coterie of insiders and globalists who brought that system to its fruition with the creation of the ICC in 2002 hoped that the history of the 21st century would be the consolidation of that system of control in their hands. It still may be.

    But now, with South Africa threatening to withdraw and the African Union potentially not that far behind, we may be witnessing a derailing of that plan. Fingers crossed.