U.S. Wanted ICC to Go After 'Black People' in Africa, Not White People: Ret. U.S. Army Colonel
Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, says he was told the court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in an interview published Friday that the U.S. response to the International Criminal Court’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the defense head, show the blatant hypocrisy in Washington.
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Wilkerson told the “Dialogue Works” podcast that he was there when Powell, the former secretary of state, used Washington’s power to “direct the court at Africa, at black people like Charles Taylor.”
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(Taylor, the former president of Liberia who led the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.)
“We didn’t want the court coming after white people. We wanted it going after black people,” he said.
He said the ICC finally “awakened” to that fact and essentially decided that it needed to strike more balance if it was to have any credibility. He said it was about this time that the court “ducked into the Balkans because what happened there was white people.”
“Now they were Slavic white people, they were these horrible Serbs and they were really horrible people like Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milošević,” and that broadened the court.
Wilkerson said he was in Paris in January 2019 when he was joined by other countries to discuss the treatment of Guantanamo inmates he said were “captured, put in Guantanamo for some time, and brutally treated — and they were guilty of nothing except being there when they were captured.”
(In June 2020, President Trump signed an executive order effectively criminalizing investigatory actions by the ICC, Zach Cheung wrote in The McGill Journal of Political Studies. Human rights researchers and ICC staff could have their bank accounts frozen and American visas revoked if they continued the Court’s analysis. The US claimed that the ICC’s investigation into alleged war crimes by American forces in Afghanistan posed an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security. )
Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, said he had reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu Gallant starved Gazan civilians as a weapon of war, which is a war crime.
He told CNN in an exclusive interview that taking Israel to court “lives on the San Andreas Fault of international politics and strategic interests.”
“And, of course, I've had some elected leaders speak to me and very, you know, be very blunt. ‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was, what one senior leader told me. We don't view it like that. This court is the legacy of Nuremberg. This court is a sad indictment of humanity. This court should be the triumph of law over power and brute force.