by VINAY LAL
Johns Hopkins University logo IMAGE/Wikipedia
American newspapers have been abuzz with the news that the President of Sudan, Omar Hasan al-Bashir, in whose name a warrant of arrest has been issued by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, was able to flee South Africa with the connivance of its government despite a ruling by the country’s high court that he should have been detained. There is but no question that South Africa, which at the inception of the court was one of its most enthusiastic advocates, has reneged on its international obligations. What is not less pertinent is that the major world powers, for the most part, are not signatories to the convention that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and indeed there is a large and vocal body of opinion in the United States that is vociferously opposed to American participation in the court. The opposition stems, quite predictably, from considerations such as the supposed fact that the US, being the world’s eminent superpower, cannot permit its politicians and officials to be held hostage to an international body, and that the United States holds its own laws to be sovereign over and above any international treaties and covenants. The court, according to its American opponents, may prevent the United States from the open pursuit of its foreign policy, which is another way of saying that the US cannot obviously permit an international body to exercise some restraint upon its war-mongering policy makers.
I do not, however, propose at this juncture to examine the politics of the International Criminal Court. The question that comes to mind, prompted by a news release from Johns Hopkins University some weeks ago, is why—the why here is to be read with its full rhetorical effect, rather than as a query only about the legal limitations of this international body— a warrant for the arrest of Henry Kissinger has never been issued by the court. This former Secretary of State is, to the contrary, still celebrated as a wise policy maker, and his idiotic punditry, which is a rather mild phrase for the ramblings of a criminally deranged man, earns him not merely the approbation but the purses of his admirers. The cormorant crew of harpies that follows every word of Kissinger as if it were the revealed truth includes among its numbers the former Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who has gifted Johns Hopkins University in excess of US $500 million, much of it to endow dozens of “Bloomberg Professorships”.
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