Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Fragile tightrope though it might be, the so-called "cessation of hostilities" in Syria was holding this past week, despite a smattering of truce violations. But the eyes of diplomats and other observers were more on the relationship between superpowers Russia and the United States than on the belligerents in the five-year-old Syrian Civil War—clearly a growing misnomer, considering the conflict’s grave international repercussions and implications. With the cessation of hostilities pact reached last month more between regional and global leaders than among the multiple belligerents in the actual war, Moscow and Washington suddenly find themselves having become strange bedfellows—an odd state of affairs after events not only in Syria but also in Ukraine and elsewhere that have had the two nuclear powers at each other’s throats more since 2014 than at any other time since the Cold War era of a quarter-century ago. On first glance, this should be good news. And to a certain...

Any inkling of some semblance of peace in Syria following the bombastic “cessation of hostilities” announcements by the men in charge of US and Russian foreign relations last week was short-lived indeed. Granted, in his public pronouncement of an agreement reached more by the Syrian War’s external agents than by its direct belligerents, US Secretary of State John Kerry did everything he could to dissuade anybody of the idea that what was to be implemented was “a ceasefire”. He said that the parties involved were more comfortable with the more ballpark term of “cessation of hostilities”. Even that term, however, proved a total misnomer. It quickly became clear that last week’s Syrian “peace” charade was really a case of unhelpful superpower intervention in a conflict that has gone from a warranted popular uprising against a tyrannical four-decade old regime to being the latest proxy-war battlefield for the new cold war between Russia and the West and for the burgeoning rivalries am...

“This is where the revolution happens first,” say Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab in their book, Burning Country (Pluto Press 2016), “before the guns and the political calculations, before even the demonstrations—in individual hearts, in the form of new thoughts and newly unfettered words.” The tragedy of the so-called “civil war” in Syria has become so unspeakably monumental and monstrous that, for the public at large worldwide, it has distilled into merely a set of grim statistics, a current titleholder for World’s Worst Conflict, the source of the bulk of Europe’s migration crisis, but unimaginable and, sadder still, unthinkable for the majority in terms of the horror taking place there on a daily basis. It is a country where the superpower-imposed family of dictators who have ruled for over four decades had, until 2011, stilled all opposition and autocratically governed generations brought up resigned to living mute. According to Al-Shami and Yassin-Kassab, “Syria...

With members of the class and faculty at Harvard's  Kennedy School.  I'm in the front row left, standing.  Dr. Kathryn Sikkink  (seated just to  my right)  and  Dr. Luis Moreno Ocampo  (standing, front row,  4th from right).   It was my honor this past week to accept an invitation to visit Harvard University. More specifically, I visited Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School and its Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, both of which are teaching programs and doing research that coincide with areas of investigation included in my latest book, War: A Crime Against Humanity. These areas include ways to reform and improve the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC), as a means of making them more effective in establishing and maintaining world peace; strategies to bolster and protect the rule of law, democratic values, and human and civil rights; tactics for preventing torture and methods for imparting peace ed...

In reviewing the year that ended last night, there are two things that stand out in my mind as particularly significant for the world at large: the burgeoning refugee crisis and the environmental agreement that world leaders drafted at year’s end in Paris. One has been ongoing throughout the year (and decade) and is the direct consequence of the misery caused by constant war and violence, and it is now beginning to significantly affect the leader-nations in the West that, directly or indirectly, feed the source of the crisis—be it through proxy war interests, massive arms sales, political and/or material support for one belligerent or another, or simply through failure to seek a disinterested international humanitarian solution to the root cause of the problem.  The other is just beginning and is a manifestation of how world leaders are finally—very late in the game—waking up to the fact that their countries can no longer ignore the extreme damage that years of corrupt, self-int...

It’s fairly easy to underestimate the gratingly flamboyant US presidential candidate Donald Trump. “The Donald”, as his apologists have dubbed him, is, after all, a perennial poser with a bad comb-over, a kind of cardboard cut-out of the ogre boss man, a comic-book ugly American who holds diversity in utmost contempt and answers the truth with lies, personal insults, unsubstantiated hearsay and vulgar innuendo. As a presidential hopeful, he is a candidate who substitutes megalomaniacal fantasies for concrete projects and blatant prejudice and jingoism for a policy platform. Seldom has a presidential candidate been more often referred to as “a clown”. Among reasonable people it is common to hear the opinion that Trump is “a buffoon”, a “flash in the pan”, “a joke”, and that he will never seriously be the 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States. Nor, they say, will he ever have the wherewithal to win as an independent. “Nobody will even remember he was running,”...