Even as the UN top Human Rights official was reporting to Friday’s ‘Emergency session’ of the UN Security Council (UNSC), West-backed Israel was bombing hospitals in Gaza and Israeli tanks were holding Syrian territory as deep as the suburbs of Damascus.
Meanwhile, US and UK forces continued operations against Yemen and inside the oil-rich desert straddling the border of Syria and Iraq while NATO-backed Ukraine continued to confront a Russia surrounded by new NATO member states.
“A human rights catastrophe continues to unfold in Gaza before the eyes of the world,” said distinguished Austrian lawyer Volker Turk in his formal report to the Security Council Emergency Session as UN Commissioner for Human Rights. This was the very first SC meeting for 2025, urgently summoned by current Council President Algeria.
Turk (60), the UN’s Human Rights chief since 2022 said,“Israel’s means and methods of warfare have killed tens of thousands of people, inflicted vast displacement, and laid waste to the territory. This has raised utmost concerns about compliance with international law.” He went on to “warn” the Council that these many violations are expected to “continue”, pointing out that such Israeli attacks on hospitals were ongoing even as he spoke in New York.
His report on Friday was the Human Rights High Commissioner’s latest update to UN bodies and the world public and repeats many of his carefully legally phrased accusations against Israel made in his previous reports.
What High Commissioner Turk says is perhaps the highest authorised pronouncement internationally but it is echoed by similar reports and claims by many other agencies both Non-Governmental as well as other UN bodies. From the International Court of Justice to Medecins Sans Frontieres to the ICRC, Amnesty International and other very qualified and experienced specialised organisations of atrocities committed by Israeli personnel and units over the past 14 months of the Gaza war launched in October 2023.
In fact, the UN official praised Palestine’s own Ministry of Health and its units in Gaza for their continued dedication and bravery in sustaining whatever medical care they could provide Gazans under impossible conditions.
Full responsibility
He categorically placed full responsibility for the ongoing tragedy (‘genocide’, yet to be legally affirmed, was the only label he did not use) on Israel, not only legally as the “Occupying Power” in Israel-Palestine, but also as the military aggressor fully dictating all access into Gaza.
Israel’s unmitigated and blatant commission of war crimes unceasingly over more than a year in the eyes of a world community has largely shocked and disgusted by this continuing barbarity, with much of that global community now demanding its end. Today’s World column highlights this as but the biggest issue is speedily undermining the global standing of the Western power bloc. That is because, the Western bloc is the only set of countries that not only publicly defend and justify Israel’s actions but, worse, devote massive financing and military re-supply in order to sustain this perpetration of war crimes.
When the UN High Commissioners tells the Security Council that action to end this mega-atrocity is long overdue, he is actually accusing those Permanent Members of the Council for helping sustain its perpetration by using their veto powers to block all efforts so far to stop it.
The West’s deliberate facilitation of Israel’s aggression and genocide not only this past year of the Gazan war but throughout the 64 years of the Zionist Jewish state since Western powers helped European Jews invade Palestine and set up this latest colonial outpost outside Europe. Given the West’s stubborn persistence in sustaining what some critics worldwide and, also, generations of Palestine’s own leaders, describe as a ‘creeping’ genocide and ethnic cleansing much like European colonial countries have done elsewhere in the world.
Sri Lankans are most familiar with such colonial depredations having suffered similar over a much longer period of 450 years under no less than three successive European invasions and occupations.
What the Palestine tragedy has done is revive world memories of European colonialism that tore apart the life of humanity across the Earth in such an irreversible manner and is yet a burden on many countries struggling to recover. The parallel experiences by nations in many other parts of the world is now being freshly recalled and driving many communities and whole nations to newly challenging the continued geopolitical dominance of this same set of Western powers.
The historic discourses of heroic anti-colonialism and national liberation that reverberated across much of colonised humanity are being freshly recalled as those yet subordinated former colonies experience the continued practice of neo-colonialism under new guises of ‘extending liberal democracy’, ‘self-defence’, ‘rule-based order’.
After three-quarters of a century since the ending of formal European colonialism – except in Palestine and a few very small island territories – today, new generations of national leaders are reacting to this perceived need to radically move beyond and outside the post-colonial order in which the former colonial powers yet exert dominance and dictate human choices.
In this, the 25th year of the 21st Century, how much of the ‘Old World’ of colonialism, industrial exploitation, and unfair world trade will Humanity leave behind as it completes the first quarter of a new century of a new millennium?
It is this search for non-colonial alternative futures that has drawn many of the emerging postcolonial nations to the few examples of non-colonial autonomy being set by China, India, South Africa, Vietnam and Cuba and other states.
China’s exercise of global influence has not been militarist or belligerent in comparison with the record of the Western ‘democracies’. This perception of over several decades of China’s gradual emergence as a world power is clearly informing other emerging nations – the majority of humanity – of what is now called the ‘Global South’ in their re-calibration of politics and foreign policy in order to survive this world of brutish dominance.
The discourse in world politics is gradually shifting from simple models of a standardised capitalist globalisation to the recognition of many parallel paths of post colonial recovery. Economic progress is being seen as following diverse models of capitalism of hybrid natures and, also, of forms of socialism and post-socialism.
The IMF-World Bank-WTC conglomerate is now seen for what it is: tools of control and dominance of the Old Order, that is, the old, fading, former Colonial bloc who are also the ‘victors’ of the Cold War. But that War is just the fond memory of older generation ‘victors’ in the Global North. Since the Global South did not share in that victory, the South societies do not view the world today in terms of victors and losers.
Russia is as respected geopolitically as is the Western bloc, especially in view of Russia’s countervailing nuclear power. The blandishment of brute force by the West especially after the Cold War has served to convince the rest of the world of the importance of both economic as well as politico-military power.
Hence, the 21st Century has become the Century of new re-orderings of global humanity. “East and West” may have been a significant geopolitical itinerary of kingdoms, empires and colonial expansions of the past two millennia. In this new millennia, “North and South” seems to be the greater perception of Earth people as they learn for themselves the new potentials of a more integrated and inter-dependent global society.
World’s largest economy
Emerging great power China – soon to be the world’s largest economy – has demonstrated time and again that its expansion is one of trade, investment and economic assistance. If the United States was born out of military dominance – over the indigenous nations – it also has continued that practice of military dominance far beyond its borders even as it set itself up as a new nation straddling the North American continent.
The postcolonial nations of the Global South have learnt from that brutish practice of European colonialism, lessons driven home to us by our own modern thinkers from Ananda Coomaraswamy to Rabindranath Tagore to Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba. Thus, it is not dominance and hegemony and occupation but multipolarity and cooperation that seem to be the priorities in Global South geopolitics. Along with the arrival of cyberspace, ‘networking’ is the outlook.
Despite these streams of geopolitical re-ordering, in our move into 2025, we are compelled to survive another year of intensely violent geopolitics. The dire predictions of UN High Commissioner Turk will follow in the coming months.
The second Donald Trump dispensation is likely to be a mixed one of typical Trumpian “intelligence” together with some hard rightwing aggression across the globe. One must hope that the un-intelligence will trump the aggression at least in a small way that will help mitigate some tragedy.
West Asia itself will continue to be the victim of this vestige of brute European colonialism at least in the coming months. And West Asia’s conflagration will affect the overall world economy in terms of higher energy costs and disruptions of trade and migrant employment.
It can only be hoped that the continued use of belligerent force by the West will hasten the creation of a more equitable multipolarity that, in the long term, pushing the world community toward stability in West Asia.
