NATO: Velkommen til den næste generalsekretær

I Strasbourg har politiet anholdt 300 mennesker efter voldsomme uroligheder i protest mod NATOs tilstedeværelse i Frankrig og organisationens 60 års fødselsdag, skriver The Independent:

French police detained at least 300 demonstrators after riot police used tear gas and rubber bullets to quell violent clashes ahead of a two-day summit marking Nato’s 60th anniversary.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators have descended on the eastern French city of Strasbourg and two southwestern German towns to protest the cross-border Nato summit.

Protest organizers have called for peaceful demonstrations to highlight their complaints, including anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist and disarmament platforms.

Og hvis Anders Fogh Rasmussen får jobbet som leder af denne populære organisation, er det værd at huske på, at det er “for tro tjeneste” – ikke mindst for statsministerens ubetingede opbakning bag Irak-krigen, “krigen mod terror” og torturpolitikken på Guantanamo.

Men hvordan er det lige, det går med de mennesker, han så blindt fulgte dengang?

John Pilger skriver på ZNet:

In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former President George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, “We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”

(…) Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive.  The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq — “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law” that had left the UN “in tatters”. He said, “There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.”

Og Anders Fogh? Fuldt ud så medskyldig, naturligvis, i “terrorkrigens” forbrydelser som Blair og Rumsfeld nogensinde har været. Så måske han er den næste forhenværende statsleder, der må lide den tort at se sit eget navn på en international arrestordre, udstedt af en domstol i Frankrig,  Spanien eller Belgien?

Det er i hvert fald lidt pinligt for Danmark og danskerne, hvis vores snart forhenværende statsminister ophøjes til international ære og værdighed for sådanne “tjenester”, som en konstant påmindelse om omfanget af vores eget medløberi de sidste otte år. Håber, det glipper for ham.

Billede: Anti-NATO-plakat i Strasbourg, af Flickr-brugeren ctrungnoc.