Iraq, the ICC, and Mrs Windsor's moonlight job

My apologies that this is only in English. If anyone has the time and inclination to translate it, and repost it, I would be most grateful. PR.

Below is the full text of an open letter sent today to the President and staff of the ICC.

The Information Desk, International Criminal Court.

To whom it may concern,

I would be most grateful if the open letter below could be forwarded to the president of your organisation, and to all ICC staff. It is generally critical of your organisation, and will be widely circulated publicly via the Internet, so your staff may be interested and should in fairness be informed of its contents.

My thanks for forwarding my previous email, as mentioned below.

The President, International Criminal Court,
PO Box 19519,
2500 CM,
The Hague, Netherlands.

What follows is and will be, to the best of my ability, a public matter. I am not a journalist but fortunately the world now has an independent media, to wit the multiple Indymedia organisations. I intend to publish this letter and your response, or the lack of it, on as many of their 80 or so Internet sites around the world as I can.

Somewhat over a month ago, the 11th April, to be precise, I wrote to your court, first via your information desk’s email, and then also by registered letter addressed jointly to yourself and to your court’s public prosecutor. I labelled the contents urgent.

I asked that you investigate the behaviour of Mr Blair and Mrs Windsor, both of London, and of Mr Howard, of Canberra, in relation to what appear to be war crimes that had been committed in the previous few weeks in Irag, when armed people under their command attacked that country and killed and maimed many of its children and other citizens. I also asked that the conduct of their officers, civil and military, in this matter be similarly investigated by your public prosecutor, and that they in the meantime be instructed, as a matter of extreme urgency, to cease and desist what appeared to be illegal criminal activities. I asked further that if warranted, they be charged accordingly by your public prosecutor.

Your information desk confirmed that the first message had been passed on to the relevant office, but since then there has been exactly zero response from your entire imposing edifice.

It may be that you have made some attempt to reply properly to my request, which was backed by at least one other person, from Mexico, and perhaps by others again. It may be that your reply is in the mail, or if made by email, was tampered with. If so, my apologies. However, I do still have a telephone, and given that the communications forwarded were marked extremely urgent, as you have heard nothing in confirmation, one might have assumed there were telephones in the Netherlands, and that your budget could cope with one long-distance call to Australia.

Viewing your court’s website, which is your official presence to the somewhat privileged end of the ordinary world, one is entertained first with a slanted view of a very large skyscraper, which is nice if you like that sort of thing, and then with a news page which lists who has been elected to what new position, and what the attendant ceremonies were. If one looks at the page that advertises cases under investigation, the message is that there is no information on cases. Judging from that source, the invasion and bombing of Iraq must have taken place on another planet.

Your court is costing the citizens of this planet, many of whom are not particularly flush with funds, a packet. The aforementioned high-rise alone attests to that. No doubt also, your and your people’s salaries are somewhat above the world average for ordinary folk, as is generally and has always been the case with legal types. We will not particularly begrudge you that if you efficiently get on with the job of reducing nationally-sponsored murder and other war crimes, but so far the signs are not good.

What we, the ordinary folk of this planet, had hoped, was that your court would tackle war crimes promptly, and without fear of position, power or favour. If you are going to nervously avoid taking on the powerful, and to confine yourself to considering the doings of the nastier folk from small, impoverished nations, you will not have our respect. I am not anyone in particular, am sitting typing this in an old caravan, and cannot be confused with anyone with influence on anything other than my three-legged dog, but in the end, you work for us, the ordinary folk. If you do not take notice of this simple fact, after a long waste of money, your court will work for no-one at all.

With much debate and political difficulty, this country, Australia, as with many others, signed the Statute of Rome, and agreed to both play by the rules and to the appointment of a new umpire in international criminal affairs. To the unbounded dismay of many people here, almost before the ink was dry, our own two heads of state, Mrs Windsor and Mr Howard, and their appointed officers and soldiers, participated in an attack on another sovereign state which left many people dead or maimed, and which caused very widespread destruction and distress. That action appears to have been taken in contravention of international law, which your court was set up to and has sworn to uphold. Mr Blair, of London, for his part, appears to have done the same, and to have either authorized or condoned the use of particularly disgusting weapons called cluster bombs, to kill the people of Iraq. His country has also signed the Statute of Rome, and Mrs Windsor is again implicated, as she moonlights as the head of state of the United Kingdom.

If these particular people have some sort of immunity from both investigation and prosecution for extremely serious crimes by virtue of the offices they hold, you are, I think, obliged to publicly explain that as being the cause of your inertia. We, the ordinary folk of this world, are not interested in one law for the powerful and another for the rest of us, as some of our ancestors explained with much trouble at the time of Magna Carta. If this is your difficulty, please say so. It will then have to be similarly addressed.

If not, and if this is not already underway, will you please forthwith commence investigations into the matter of the crimes committed during the recent invasion of Iraq, by whoever. That, I think, is an exact instance of what your court was set up to do. Do not forget to inform us when you do so.

We had hoped that, in classic north American terms, the reign of the international gunslingers was about to be ended by the swearing in of a new sheriff. It now begins to look as though the man with the new tin badge and his underlings are more interested in the trappings, than in getting on with the job. The invasion of Iraq got as far as the main invader proclaiming it virtually over, without your court responding in any way at all, according to your main international public notice board, that is, your website. You may have done a lot and made press statements all over the place, but the world at large does not get to hear or see that, the media being somewhat fragmented and generally serving other interests.

You really want to jack up your communications, if you have been doing your job, and your entire system, if you have not. It has apparently been left to the national court of one of the smallest countries of Europe to respond to the recent murders and other war crimes in Iraq. That is not good enough, sorry.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)