Dissident Voice

May 24, 2003

You were born in 1945 after a devastating war between nations who all claimed to be defending rightful values. After humanity had allowed millions of its citizens to be slaughtered following the orders of evil leaders, some said it was enough. No more war! And thus you come to life, weak and barely breathing but willed to live by all the downtrodden people around the globe. You got many pet names. Some called you Justice, some called you Humanity or Decency. With the bringing to justice of some of mankind's worst criminals in the Nuremberg Trials you seemed to gain strength but with the Cold War you spent a long time connected to life-supporting systems as two major powers legitimized every criminal act by their fight for world dominance.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire we could notice a temporary recovery in your condition and many believed that now that the remaining world power doesn't need to fight an imagined dangerous competitor the chances for you to grow strong and independent increased. There were signs of hope for you and a few times you were seen taking a few insecure steps on your untrained legs. Alas, you were never to survive. The petty rivalries between nation states in their quest for riches and power overtook their professed concern for freedom, democracy and legitimacy. A mighty nation west of the Atlantic named the United States of America, led by greedy, unscrupulous and unprincipled men, repeatedly assaulted your environment, poisoned the food necessary for your growth and denied you the funds that were needed to uphold your simple and noble existence.

All through your life you took terrible beatings when the USA, and sometimes Israel or some other aggressor, repeatedly, openly or covertly, corrupted or attacked legitimate regimes around the world and persecuted dissenters. The illegal aggressions in Panama and Grenada, the bloody Vietnam war, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the coup d'etats in Chile, Iran and elsewhere, were but a few of the USA's criminal acts that drained you of vital reserves. The unprincipled support for the murderous Contras, the Shah, Suharto, Marcos, Somoza and Mobutu further took its toll and left you weaker with every human death.

In the beginning of the 21st century you seemed to recover for a brief time. Then the US and Britain embarked on an illegal aggression against a sovereign country, Iraq. The man appointed to guard and protect you, the Secretary General of United Nations Kofi Annan, betrayed you and his office. Like a policeman telling a mass murderer to observe leniency when committing his deeds, Annan asked only that the aggressors should try to minimize the destruction. The only thing that saved you from expiring this time was the strong opposition from France, Germany and Russia that at least gave an illusion that some countries were committed to your survival.

The final betrayal came on the 22nd of May 2003. Those countries who earlier had opposed the criminal attack on one of the members of the world community, for whatever true reason strategic or economic, decided to give legitimacy to what they earlier had condemned, and voted unanimously to award the invaders of Iraq the official rule of the occupied country. The motive might have been that they decided that the aggressor, not the ones who opposed the aggression, should pay the bill for the reconstruction of Iraq, especially since the aggressor awarded himself all the fat contracts and the Iraqi oil. The motive doesn't really matter; the Iraqis and principles of law were abandoned. This final sellout of the principles that was your life-blood ended your all too short life.

You reached an age of 58 years and though you never really matured and turned into a strong and healthy adult you managed to stop some threatening atrocities; hadn't you been secretly worked against you could have achieved much much more for the good of humanity. Because many who officially were committed to you failed you at the most critical times, you never got an honest chance to prove yourself, and the might of your foremost enemy, the United States of America, who only relied on you to carry out what suited him, gave you very little hope of ever achieving the victory over the evil you were born to fight.

Perhaps you were born prematurely. A world ruled by one nation, in power of its devastating military and economic might, was not for you. After a president Bush introduced a "New World Order" based on unilateral might and national egoism and not principles, and his descendant George W. Bush later adopted the "Project for a New American Century" resting on the willingness to use unlimited force to reach narrow nationalistic advantages, your time was obviously limited. Though you were hailed and confessed to in official speeches everywhere your every breath was made harder by underhanded sabotaging of it by some of the very people who promised commitment to you. Lies, hypocrisy, greed and naked ambitions for power killed you. Values, ideals and principles were the air you breathed and those were denied you.

You died and left emptiness, despair, countries in chaos and human beings in economic and physical shackles. You might be gone but such is the longing for freedom and justice that lives in human beings that your spirit will not perish. And one day, with the help of informed and decent people in the USA, the land that always was your secret enemy and which dealt you the mortal wound, even the richest and mightiest land on the earth might come to its senses and join an international community in a quest for a decent world.

We miss you, International Law!

Rest in Peace.

Jerre Skog is a Swedish writer, musician and independent observer living in Germany. His writings, politics and satire, can be found on www.skog.de and comments are welcome at jerre@skog.de