An Observer from a Black Sea Town
When it comes to things like human rights, military/humanitarian interventions – small or weak states are always targeted, not big powerful states. It is easy for NATO to intervene (without UN Security Council authorization) to bomb Serbia and Libya because these countries are not big powerful states. NATO recently announced its intention to intervene into North Africa and the Sahel countries, again without UN Security Council authorization. So, NATO doesn’t just circumvent the UN Security Council, but its goal is to unilaterally replace it.
But NATO is reluctant to militarily intervene directly into Russia because the ramifications would be a world war. This is why a little weak corrupt state like Ukraine has been used as a proxy and why over a half a million Ukrainians died needlessly in the cause of some pathetic geopolitical game. Ukraine is next to Russia and so it makes good sense for these two countries to have friendly relations, but unfortunately, the US, UK and EU have fomented a deep hatred of Russia inside Ukraine which should never have happened. Ukraine can only exist if it has friendly relations with Russia. It can have friendly relations with the West too but Ukraine should not be used as a ‘battering ram’ against Russia which is precisely what NATO and the US/UK/EU are doing in Ukraine. Do we have to remind ordinary people of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. After Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, the US could not accept a communist state so close to its border in what the US considered its own sphere of influence. It is why the US supported the Bay of Pigs, and why the US had a problem with Russia placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, which occurred after the US placed nuclear missiles in Turkey within a short range of Moscow. We are seeing the same sort of thing being played out now in Ukraine, which is within Russia’s sphere of influence, but now the West wants the game to be played on their terms, even if it means a global nuclear war.
The UN charter is not a perfect document. There are tensions and contradictions in the Charter. It doesn’t talk about “human rights”, but “states’ rights”. We can see the tensions: for instance, Article 2.7 prohibits the UN from intervening into domestic affairs of any state. It says the UN Security Council is not authorized to violate the sovereignty of any state, yet the SC does precisely that because under Chapter 7, the Security Council can enforce measures against a sovereign state such as economic and diplomatic sanctions while Article 7 specifically 42 gives the UNSC the right to authorize military actions. (But remember the UN has no Army) So that is an example of how the UN charter is contradictory – kind of hedging their bets both ways. One article says the UN can’t intervene while another article doesn’t rule it out. Incidentally, no one has ever test-cased humanitarian intervention in international law. Much of the UN is just a huge irritating echo chamber of meaningless noise.
What it means is that Sri Lanka has sovereignty over its domestic affairs, including times of internal conflict or civil war. That is why there was no direct outside intervention and there shouldn’t be. But Westerners (including academics) think their values are superior to all others and are always looking for ways to influence and meddle into weak countries, and journalists are part of this meddling. It is easy for Western journalists to target a small country like Sri Lanka. They won’t target the big power states like the US, UK, France, or the EU. They do target China and Russia, but Western leaders have to tread extremely carefully with these two countries as they are both nuclear powers, so what they do to gain support of their own populations is to saturate us with dis-information, mis-information and piss-information to smear and undermine these countries in the international community, but it is not working and is having the opposite effect. Unfortunately, in world politics, a country like Sri Lanka is a soft target in which Article 2.7 doesn’t count for much in the eyes of many Westerners.
There have been many attempts by goody Westerners to blow up or exaggerate claims of genocide and human rights violations in Sri Lanka, not because they have a genuine case, but it is a way to apply pressure on Sri Lanka to shift its position geopolitically towards the Western sphere of influence, or to even worm up some sort of justification for intervening, even if it means setting up some sort of war crimes tribunal which would be a travesty and quite farcical. That is not to say bad things didn’t happen. War is messy and bloody. It is not a cricket match with a referee guiding how the players should act. The Tamil Tigers did bad things but because they lost, many have put that aside, and now that it has become politically correct to be anti-Rajapakse, we are living through a period where everybody feels empowered to have a go at the leaders who won the war. ”
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