Someone who enabled the ‘Hitler of Africa’, backed bombing Libya and has stayed mum on Gaza has been appointed governor general. Still, many ‘human rights’ advocates are celebrating Mark Carney’s selection to represent the King in Canada.
Tuesday Prime Minister Carney announced that former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour will be Canada’s next governor general. Arbour was a leading architect of the liberal imperialist Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which was used to justify overthrowing Haiti’s elected government in 2004 and destroying Libya seven years later. As President of the International Crisis Group, Arbour backed the NATO war on Libya, calling on the UN Security Council to act to protect civilians in Libya. (Alongside Barrack Obama and others, she later criticized the disaster in Libya.)
During her time as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2008, Arbour criticized the Arab Charter on Human Rights for categorizing Zionism as a form of racism when pressed to do so by racist UN Watch. The next year she signed a petition launched by Zionist fanatic Irwin Cotler Titled “The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition.” During the past three years of genocide in Gaza Arbour doesn’t appear to have found a single opportunity (petition, public letter, op-ed, rally, etc.) to have criticized the Jewish supremacist state’s horrors.
But Arbour’s most egregious concession to power took place when she was chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) between 1996 and 1999. She indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes but refused to investigate any potential war crimes NATO committed during its illegal 78-day bombing campaign. Arbour stated, “I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct their operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with international humanitarian law.”
In another important contribution to power serving ‘victor’s justice’, Arbour wasn’t interested in evidence suggesting murderous dictator Paul Kagame’s RPF was responsible for assassinating Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira and most of the Rwandan military command, which sparked the 1994 genocide. According to French government investigators and the National Post, she refused to investigate evidence implicating the RPF in shooting down Habyarimana’s airplane. In 1996 former ICTR investigator Michael Hourigan compiled evidence based on the testimony of three RPF informants who claimed “direct involvement in the 1994 fatal rocket attack upon the President’s aircraft” and “specifically implicated the direct involvement of [Kagame]” and other RPF members. But, when Hourigan delivered the evidence to her in early 1997, Arbour was “aggressive” and “hostile,” according to Hourigan. Despite initially supporting the investigation surrounding who shot down the plane, the ICTR’s chief prosecutor now advised Hourigan that the “investigation was at an end because in her view it was not in our [ICTR] mandate.”
According to Anthony Black, “What Hourigan didn’t know at the time is that Arbour, after having launched the investigation, had been directed by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who had handpicked her for the job) to quash the inquiry. And so she did. Arbour would later (again under the aegis of Albright) be promoted to Canadian Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.” (When the ICTR prosecutor who took over from Arbour, Carla del Ponte, began to investigate the RPF’s role in shooting down Habyarimana’s plane, the British and Americans had her removed from her position. Del Ponte details her ordeal and the repression of the investigation in The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals.)
When the Globe and Mail confirmed that Kagame was responsible for the act that unleashed the genocidal violence, Arbour sought to shift the blame for failing to fulfill the court’s mandate onto ‘Africa’s Hitler’. She admitted there were “very credible allegations” of RPF crimes but said they couldn’t investigate them due to their dependence on the Rwandan regime. But why wait 20 years to tell the world? In 2016 the Globe drily noted, “Ms. Arbour’s revelations about her three-year stint as the tribunal’s chief prosecutor came after The Globe obtained two documents — a deposition by one of Mr. Kagame’s former top aides and an earlier report by investigators at the UN Rwanda tribunal — pointing to the involvement of Mr. Kagame’s forces in the death of Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana.”
In practice, Arbour’s actions legitimated Kagame’s repeated invasions into Congo. Justified as targeting genocidaires 30 years of Rwandan violence has killed several million Congolese.
Ignoring Louis Arbour’s role in facilitating imperialism, Alex Neve, Mark Kersten and Paul Champ have all gushed over her appointment as governor general. They demonstrate the liberal imperialist character of Canada’s dominant ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ rhetoric.
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