  UN Human Rights Council in session.
BY ERNEST COREA
IDN-InDepthNews Service
WASHINGTON DC (IDN) - The UN Human Rights Council has rejected Israel’s efforts to bury the Goldstone Report’s conclusions on war crimes in Gaza. Instead, the council has adopted a five-page, three part resolution backing the report’s conclusions and recommendations. The resolution was adopted by a majority of 25-6, with 11 abstentions and some council members not voting.
The resolution covered more ground than did the Goldstone Report. The council approved the full resolution without amendments, however, and in doing so endorsed the detailed follow-up actions which the report proposed and were written into the resolution.
China and Russia – both permanent members of the UN Security Council -- as well as Brazil, Egypt, India, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa were among the “yes” votes. The U.S. voted against the resolution together with Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia and the Ukraine.
Belgium, Japan, Mexico, Norway, and South Korea were among the abstentions. Some council members, including France and the UK, did not vote.
The Human Rights Council established the “UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict” (Dec. 27, 2008-Jan. 3, 2009) headed by Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, an internationally respected jurist. Other members were Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Hina Jilani, a Pakistani attorney and a member of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur; and Desmond Travers, a former officer in Ireland's Defence Forces.
Israeli leaders initially tried to deride the mission’s findings. This turned out to be Mission Impossible, because Justice Goldstone is Jewish himself, his colleagues have impressive credentials, and the judicial tenor of their report was obvious.
The mission found credible evidence that war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity were committed by both sides to the conflict, and urged that action be taken to identify and punish those responsible.
Nevertheless, the very character of the Israeli operation ensured that Israeli forces inflicted more damage than their adversaries, much of it at the expense of the civilian population in Gaza.
BURNS OF WAR
Thus, the Goldstone Report recorded the information they received about the “severity and sometimes unbearable nature of the burns” caused by the use of white phosperous as a weapon of war against the Palestinians.
It noted, too, that “flechette missiles” deployed in Gaza were “particularly unsuitable for use in urban settings where there is reason to believe civilians may be present.” (Flechettes are pointed steel projectiles. Their use in clusters causes widespread, murderous havoc, especially in densely populated areas.)
The report described incidents in which Israeli troops forced Palestinian civilians to take part in house searches. The civilians were blindfolded, handcuffed, and made to move into homes ahead of the invading troops.
As a result of these and other death dealing or life threatening transgressions, the mission found that Israeli forces were responsible for grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, such as “willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out wantonly.”
At the same time, it pointed out that Palestinian actions, specifically rocket and mortar attacks into southern Israel, were war crimes, because where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute deliberate attacks against the civilian population.
Nevertheless, the verbal onslaught on the Goldstone Report raged. While Israeli leaders declaimed against the Goldstone Report, supporters of the Government of Israeli claimed that the mission’s mandate was one-sided and therefore flawed.
FALSE PREMISE
This argument grew out of ignorance or was a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters with falsehoods. The original mandate was, in fact, one sided, calling for an inquiry only into allegations of possible war crimes committed by Israeli forces. Justice Goldstone refused to serve as the mission’s chairman unless the mandate was revised to include both Israeli forces and Hamas. It was revised and, crash, there went another spurious argument.
The next line of attack -- or defence -- was that the Security Council was the wrong place for the Goldstone Report to be considered because the mission was a creation of the Human Rights Council.
As soon as agreement was reached on this point, up came another approach: any consideration of the report at all would inflict irreparable damage on the prospects for a resumption of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.
The fact, of course, is that it is Prime Minister Netanyahu who has caused such damage, without any help from Justice Goldstone and his colleagues or anybody else.
Netanyahu, in the first place, has refused to end illegal construction on occupied Palestinian territory, thereby contravening the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which prohibits an occupying power from moving any of its own civilian population into occupied territory.
He has also, while giving the impression of supporting a “two states” approach to peace, diluted his support with caveats. The Palestinian entity as defined by Netanyahu would be a “Mickey Mouse” state, said a Palestinian spokesman. That’s an insult to Mickey Mouse. Netanyahu’s Palestinian state would be emasculated, unproductive, unable to provide for its people or protect them.
The only possible response to Netanyahu’s two states plan is the comment John McEnroe habitually directed at a linesman making a bad call: “You cannot be serious.” Indeed, Netanyahu does not seem to be.
ABBAS ASSAILED
Others were, and the call for the Goldstone Report to be reviewed and acted on by the Human Rights Council grew. So, out came a devious “parliamentary tactic” in response. Mohammad Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, prompted by U.S. intermediaries, proposed that consideration of the issue by the council should be temporarily postponed -- a “time out” that would let everybody cool off.
Abbas was almost immediately smitten by the wrath of the people’s anger. He did a quick two-step, shifting his position to one of support for a debate of the Goldstone Report at the Human Rights Council.
Netanyahu’s riposte lacked even ingenuity: “Don’t spoil the chances of peace talks” -- having spoiled them himself much earlier. Other Israeli spokesmen said that a charge of war crimes against Israel would be “only a beginning.” Next up would be charges against NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Yes, certainly, war crimes committed anywhere deserve investigation and penalty. Numero. examples exist -- from My Lai to Abu Ghraib and beyond -- to show that this process can and does take place.
And so, on to Geneva, with a brief stopover in New York.
Voting on the resolution came after two days of debate at the Human Rights Council (October 15 and 16) and, immediately before that, a desultory discussion at the UN Security Council (October 14).
Addressing the Security Council in New York, Ambassador Maged Abdelaziz of Egypt, which currently chairs the Non-Aligned Movement of 118 members, said that the Security Council should "seriously consider and act upon the recommendations of the Goldstone Report.
U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff confessed that “we take the allegations in the report seriously,” but then allowed that the U.S. Government has “serious concerns” about the report’s “unbalanced focus on Israel, the overly broad scope of its recommendations, and its sweeping conclusions of law.”
Nobody bothered to tell him that all these concerns could be tested under the detailed procedures set out for the purpose in the report itself.
When discussions shifted to Geneva, the Human Rights Council heard from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, a South African like Justice Goldstone. She said that “a culture of impunity continues to prevail in the occupied territories and in Israel in relation to violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”
She reiterated her support for the recommendations of the Fact Finding Mission, including its call for urgent action to counter impunity.
NEXT STEPS
Twenty speakers followed Pillay, and then came the vote whose outcome had been predicted.
Now, what?
The report specifies several obligations by UN bodies and the parties concerned:
- the Human Rights Council is required to consider the report’s recommendations and bring them to the attention of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, as well as the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
- Israelis and Palestinians are expected to set up independent investigations into human rights violations as outlined in the Goldstone Report.
- the Security Council is to ask both parties to hold such investigations, and the council should also convene a committee of experts to monitor progress of the investigations and report to the council in six months.
- based on the outcome of the experts’ reports, the council would refer outstanding issues to the ICC, if appropriate.
- the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council would also keep the situation under continuing review.
Whether or not these obligations will be fulfilled is up in the air. A few hours after the Human Rights Council’s session was gaveled to a close in Geneva, for instance, the U.S. State Department’s Spokesman Ian Kelly told a press briefing in Washington: “The resolution endorsed the report. But it doesn’t specifically refer the matter to the Security Council. Only the members of the Security Council can decide what goes on the agenda. That’s not to say it won’t go on the agenda, but the resolution does not automatically mean that it will go to the Security Council.”
On a different note, Kelly added that the U.S. feels it should keep its “focus on the main thing here, which is removing the root causes of the violence of last January, and that’s a lack of a lasting and comprehensive peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. So we are focused mainly on the efforts of Special Envoy (George) Mitchell to bring the two sides together.”
Look out for interesting times ahead. (IDN-InDepthNews/17.10.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews Service
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The writer has served as Sri Lanka's ambassador to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and the USA. He was Chairman of the Commonwealths Select Committee on the media and development, Editor of the Ceylon ‘Daily News’ and the Ceylon ‘Observer’, and was for a time Features Editor and Foreign Affairs columnist of the Singapore ‘Straits Times’. He is on the IDN editorial board.
Ernest Corea’s previous IDN articles:
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