International Community military intervention – a Tool for dismantling nations
By Hon. Bol Makueng Yuol, Juba, South Sudan
July 7, 2016 (SSB) — The states that are endowed with abundant economic resources and weak militarily are very much vulnerable to the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in the name of “international community” and the “United Nations Security Council (UNSC)”. The intervention element comes about as a result of the failed attempts by the nation members of IFIs to access and control these resources. Ultimately concerted plans to erode the sovereignty of that target victim country are drawn up.
The designed plans are intended to violate all existing local and international laws and norms with single objective: undermining the principle of sovereignty and legitimacy of governments upon which the international order has been built. By doing this, the international community ceases to be an abstraction and takes on palpable presence as the effective government of the victim country in question. The process is so nicely framed and staffed with everything ranging from media propagandists machinery to intimidate with language of force, economic collapse, the international criminal court (ICC) and all that is scaring to that intended victim country.
If one takes the case of South Sudan, a country that has fought for basic freedom for over 200 years to liberate itself from slavery, colonisation and all forms of dehumanisation, a question would be advanced and seeking urgent answers to it. Where were these bullying predators that are now hovering over South Sudan and all the time threatening with sanctions because of wanting to promote human rights, rule of law and nation building? What relevant lessons of the international community intervention from capturing Manauel Noriega to destruction of Iraq, Libya and many other such kinds of interventions are there to refer to as success stories?
By taking Iraq’s invasion as an example, the reasons of deterring a genuine security threat because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction including nuclear arsenal was not there. Nevertheless, it was invaded, about 150,000 Iraqis were killed, institutions and physical infrastructure were destroyed and an immense humanitarian catastrophe was created in a country that has never experienced food commodity shortages in its lifetime before the invasion. And in terms of nation-state building, Iraq’s cultural and historical identity was heavily shaped by its political, economic and administrative institutions. It was a highly developed country with much greater material and human resources.
Following the invasion, its institutions and production machinery were either destroyed or dismantled and the country presented to the “international community” by the same international community as in dire need of humanitarian relief and nation-state building! At this height of dishonesty and hypocrisy, what is left for the ordinary countries who are not members of the IFIs to conclude? Moreover, the intervention also resulted in wanton looting of Iraqi resources, disorder and chaos followed leaving behind unbelievable Iraq. Under these conditions, was Iraq a failed state before or after the invasion? Sadly, the WMD saga was a fabrication and decoy for looting the country of its resources and the same tactics can be modified and used to replicate the same anywhere including South Sudan.
For instance, last May, an international relief agency in one of the conflict areas in South Sudan organised women and took them to a green vegetation while filming them so as to fabricate that the SPLA attacked civilians and pushed them to feed on “wild vegetation”. The same fabricated situation is accentuated with “eating of human flesh” so as to highlight how dangerous South Sudan is! This is another case of WMD in South Sudan.
As for Libya, it also suffered the same fate as Iraq in the hands of the IFIs. Libyans before the destruction of their country were the proudest community in Africa and the Arab world. Everybody was fed, medically treated, educated and housed freely even the desert nomads and their camels. After the destruction and looting of the country, the international community tries its best to prevent the members of the old regime from participation in the new regime and yet they complain about the lack of capable human resources to manage the new administrative governance and the lack of local capacities.
The fact that the international community plans an intervention with a regime change in mind coupled with a need to replace and prevent a target category from participating in the management of the country is in itself the foundation of anarchy. There is no doubt that the continuation of violence in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere is caused by this evil policy. There is no success story of an international community having created a self-sustaining state it has set out to rebuild. What seems clear is that intervention has become a political hobby by the IFIs to dismantle institutions of a victim country and move on to dismantle more. When they planned and implemented genocide in Rwanda, it was only Rwandese who saved Rwanda and this is the only successful case story for other nations including South Sudan to replicate.
In Bosnia, seven years after the conclusion of the Dayton Accord that brought Bosnian war to an end, the country continued to be governed by the United Nations Office of the High Representative in Herzegovina and Bosnia (OHR). The OHR, which was the UNMISS of Bosnia, used its powers to dismiss the presidents, the prime ministers, judges, mayors, members of parliaments, indeed, dismantling the whole government structures! The OHR made itself the government and passing legislations and creating new institutions without reference to the constitution of the country, no involvement of the Bosnian people. It was a takeover by the illegitimate international community in collaboration with internal traitors.
Nkrumahism teaches us on governance that it is better to misgovern ourselves than being governed by a coloniser. This wicked concept of dismantling sovereignty under the pretext of intervention must be discredited, discarded and abandoned. There is no room for such an intervention for a country that exercises the principle of democracy and with a legitimate government. A clear line must be drawn between these legitimate democratic governments and rotten dictators that are in the process of being imposed through foreign interventions.
While this has been the situation, a lingering question is: Who gets to decide on whose sovereignty to violate and on what basis? Again, capturing leaders of sovereign nations and dragging them to International Criminal Court (ICC), and also, capturing nationals of other countries and imprisoning them in places such as in Guatanamo…what do all these communicate with regard to defining about who the real culprit is?
Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister was right in apologising on the invasion of Iraq and accepting that it was a mistake of bad judgement. This means that the military attack on Iraq was unjustifiable. The traditional international community intervention which has become a license for making destructive wars and creating more chaos as it has done in Yemen and Syria is a cause for dismantling nation-state sovereignties. The temptation that values and institutions of the “international community” are universal and therefore relevant or applicable in every context should be reviewed.
In countries such as South Sudan, both its values and institutions have a much higher degree of legitimacy than some of the “international community” ones. For example, there are some states that are theocratic and where the head of state and ministers are brothers. The international community that talks about promotion of human rights and democracy turns a blind eye to such countries and allowing business to go on as usual amid unlimited human rights violations. In these theocratic states, the source of legitimacy is not rooted in the will of the democratic majority of its people but in the single family dictatorial will. So, where does the international community come up with regime change given that the regime has been a democratic choice of the majority of people?
Erosion of sovereignty by creating certain bodies and designing a way of taking away government functions from nation-state has no relevance whatsoever. Iraq and Libya are today among the works of the international community and which represent symbols of an embarrassment to the civilised world.
If one takes South Sudan that became independent yesterday after about 200 years of struggle – A country that is currently temporarily poor but potentially rich and with most of its territories still under occupation by its former coloniser. Its economic resource (oil) is benefiting the coloniser more than itself; a truly democratic country from its very foundation and promising to be the role model of excellent relations with its neighbours and beyond, why the bullying?
It has to be made very clear that JMEC or any other organisation has no role in appointments or removal of government officials in South Sudan. Most political parties have already voiced their concerns about the unconstitutional mandate JMEC got itself into by appointing members to the parliament and also advancing their intruding into the SPLM’s prerogative territory of the Speaker’s seat in the parliament.
When someone talks about a regime change in South Sudan, this person is in a wrong place doing wrong things at a wrong time. Regime change in Juba does not need to be sponsored by foreigners with handful collaborators from within. No. It is enshrined in the constitution of the country. The democratic practice empowers the entire population of South Sudan to do this. It is only those with ulterior motives who will fail to understand and comply with it and in this case, it will remain a choice for the people of South Sudan to either surrender their right of sovereignty and be recolonised once more or defend it with everything at their disposal.
You can reach the author via his email: Bol Makueng – bmakueng@yahoo.co.uk
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