From Yugoslavia to Libya, the message is clear: justice only for America’s enemies. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su Fatou Bensouda, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, recently revealed that the Mossad directly pressured her in an attempt to halt investigations into the notorious crimes committed by Israel during the genocide in Gaza.
The first approach took place at her own home in The Hague. “They came directly to my house,” she told Al Jazeera. Later, the head of the Mossad at the time, Yossi Cohen, personally held meetings with Bensouda, during which he threatened her and her family should the investigations continue.
Another revelation made by Bensouda — which, however, did not receive as much attention — was that although they traced the agents’ phone numbers and identified their origin in Israel, the officials responsible for security at the ICC and Dutch authorities failed to pursue the intimidation case further. “I felt abandoned. I felt unsupported,” Bensouda confessed.
Her statements constitute new evidence of the protection granted to Israel by multilateral institutions. Furthermore, they indicate that these institutions provide such protection precisely because they are controlled by the imperialist powers — the same powers that created the State of Israel and have sustained it to this day, including during the genocide in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court — also known as the Hague Court — has been one of the most important imperialist tools for attacking countries whose governments are inconvenient to the dictatorship of the United States and its European allies, employing an increasingly evident double standard. Created to prosecute crimes committed during wartime, with the consent of local justice systems and only when they were incapable of doing so because of the consequences of war, the ICC has turned itself into the master of international law and even of national jurisdictions. Persecuting Enemies “The ICC has become an instrument of pressure and destabilization against poor countries,” declared the Justice Minister of Burundi in 2016, announcing the country’s withdrawal from the international court.
In recent years, there has been a genuine rebellion among African countries against the ICC, which seems interested only in prosecuting leaders from that continent. Jacob Zuma attempted to withdraw South Africa, but the South African judiciary reversed his decision and shortly afterward he was removed in what amounted to a coup d’état — something that clearly reeks of an imperialist conspiracy against the nationalist leader of the African National Congress.
Soon afterward, the ICC accused the leaders of Côte d’Ivoire of “crimes against humanity” in order to justify a coup promoted by France (later acquitting them, but only after the coup had already consolidated itself).
Perhaps the most scandalous case (or what should be scandalous) was the imprisonment in The Hague of Slobodan Milošević. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia was the only country behind the former “Iron Curtain” to maintain a sovereign regime, with Milošević at its head. The imperialist powers moved to get rid of him: they fueled a series of wars to disintegrate Yugoslavia, bombed Serbia, and subsequently promoted a color revolution.
Not content with all of this, they used the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (a legal and institutional laboratory for what would later become the ICC) to accuse Milošević of responsibility for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. He was imprisoned in The Hague and died in 2006 before receiving a verdict because those responsible for his imprisonment denied him the medication he needed.
Ten years later, the court finally acknowledged that it had not found sufficient evidence to convict him. There had not been any — nor was any needed, for the mission had already been accomplished: Yugoslavia no longer existed, and its ruins had passed into the hands of the United States and the European Union.
Muammar Gaddafi suffered a fate similar to Milošević’s years later. The ICC also lent support to the assassination of the Arab leader and the destruction of Libya. The ICC’s then-Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, was a man tied to American and Israeli universities and to the NGO Transparency International.
Based merely on reports published by newspapers that supported the invasion of Libya — and which were themselves backed by the governments invading Libya — Ocampo assembled alleged evidence to incriminate Gaddafi, his son, and his son-in-law. He likely laughed in much the same way as Hillary Clinton when imperial-style justice was carried out against Gaddafi.
More recently, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin based on what the author characterizes as an outright falsehood: that Russia had abducted Ukrainian children. In reality, the majority of the population of Donbass had been crushed by the Ukrainian regime since 2014, considers itself Russian, and supported the integration of its regions into the Russian Federation through a referendum.
Children from Donbass fled to Russia together with their families in search of a safe place to escape the bombings and massacres carried out by fascist military and paramilitary forces acting on Kyiv’s orders. Around 15,000 people died at the hands of the Ukrainian regime between 2014 and 2022, and further massacres have been committed since then, but this does not matter to the ICC.
In the next article we will see how the ICC shields imperialist powers – which are the most criminal nations in the world – and the composition of the Court’s internal structure, which is dominated by imperialist interests at all levels, ensuring its functioning as a tool of control and dictatorship over poor countries.