Visualize The Hague
As Duterte's hearing gets underway on the fourth anniversary of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, I want you to visualize accountability for Putin and Trump
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Visualize The Hague
Buried under the sleaze parade was last week’s update on Trump-regime sanctions on judges for the International Criminal Court. These are judges tasked with overseeing cases dealing with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Eleven of the court’s key judges and prosecutors are being treated like the terrorists they defend the world from — banned from traveling to the US, while US companies who serve them are threatened with fines and prison sentences.
I wrote about Trump’s threats to the ICC last year in my Hot Type column:
Trump accused the court of targeting “our close ally Israel” and issued a retaliatory executive order.
In a recent Guardian report, an ICC judge from Peru says the US sanctions mark the second time she’s been targeted “by a global superpower for her work.” The other time was by Russia, where she was tried in absentia along with the court’s chief prosecutor and seven other judges after they issued an arrest warrant for Putin over his crimes in Ukraine. The same judge had her credit card canceled from a bank in the Netherlands. She told the Guardian it was because “banks are terrified about their relations with the US.” She said it also affected her daughter, whose US visa and Google accounts were canceled. Another ICC judge said she lost all her credit cards, and her Google and Amazon accounts were canceled.
Please keep in mind: these judges are the good guys, and they continue to do their work undaunted.
Today, on the fourth anniversary of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is sitting in The Hague at his crimes against humanity hearing. Duterte is facing three ICC counts of crimes against humanity for 76 murders between 2013 and 2018 in his so-called war on drugs. That number is a small percentage of the likely thousands killed when Duterte was mayor of Davao City and then later president.
In today’s hearing, ICC prosecutor Edward Jeremy said that Duterte, who admittedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for an army of bloggers to promote him and to attack journalists critical of his savage policies, drew up “death lists” and bragged about the murders, as he listed grim details of how people, often young boys, were killed.
It’s important to note that Duterte has a major fan in Donald Trump.
Trump himself championed the Duterte murders, which parallel Trump’s extrajudicial murders in Venezuela.
In a transcript from a 2017 phone call, Trump applauded Duterte’s murderous rampage.
“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump told Duterte, according to the transcript.
In addition to the hearings now taking place for Duterte, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim al-Masri last November for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Gaza conflict, which prompted the retaliation against the ICC officials, according to Trump.
The fact that Trump invited Putin on US soil, after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and five other Russian officials over their war crimes in Ukraine, including illegally deporting children, is a permanent black mark on US history.
So I ask you to please visualize The Hague. Visualize accountability. Visualize justice.
The reason I have invited two Croatian women who documented war trials at The Hague to be Bette community guests this month is because pro-democracy forces need to understand how justice was served. Both said they were in initially in disbelief that criminals responsible for genocide from the former Yugoslavia were actually facing trial.
And among the most important outcomes of these trials were the war crimes, the genocide that occurred, could no longer be lied about, but were now part of the permanent historic record.
A Bette member asked me last week how we can apply pressure to the ICC to pursue charges against members of the Trump regime, who have already earned their place at The Hague for extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and the subsequent cold-blooded domestic murders on the streets of America. Here’s what I told her:
To report crimes — genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression — to the ICC, you can submit information through their online portal, email the Office of the Prosecutor: otp.informationdesk@icc-cpi.int; or mail detailed documentation to the Evidence and Discovery Management Unit in The Hague — EDMU, Office of the Prosecutor, Post Office Box 19519, 2500 CM The Hague, The Netherlands.. Anyone, including individuals or NGOs, can submit factual and evidence-based information.
Four months ago, founding member of NAFO, Matthew Pearce, submitted a dossier of Trump’s crimes to the ICC. I encourage you to read his report here:
I also encourage you to read our report on the stages of genocide:
And also, please review my latest on the DHS/ICE purchasing of concentration camp shells:
I am of the belief that the Putin-Trump regime needs to be stopped immediately, before more atrocities occur, and that targeting the judges of the ICC is an admission of guilt for both Putin and Trump.
Last night, I watched the new film, Nuremberg, starring Russell Crow as Hermann Goering, one of the most powerful Nazi leaders. I’ve written about Goering through the eyes of Berlin journalist Bella Fromm, who wrote that you could hear his medals jingling even before he entered a room.
Crow’s masterful performance of an arrogant man sitting in a German-made cell, as he awaited trial for his crimes against humanity, is still with me today.
Each time I saw him on screen in his prison cell, I pictured Trump in his cell, and I pictured Putin in his cell. Goering committed suicide before he could be hanged for his crimes, but the film showed the hanging scene of another Nazi, Julius Streicher, publisher and founder of the Nazi propaganda newspaper, Der Stürmer. Rather than show the hanging itself, the camera panned to a close up of a urine-soaked floor.
Dictators are just men, broken people who went bad but who try everything to cover for that fact. I call Putin ‘freezer face’ — all the plastic surgery in the world can’t cover his rot. Trump, who paints himself orange and dyes his hair yellow for the camera, is visibly decaying from the inside out.
If justice is served, there will be trials.
And if they are convicted for their crimes against humanity, then maybe too, a camera will cut to a visceral reminder that they were not strongmen or gods, just criminals, who were willing to kill in order to evade accountability.
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