Western governments often hide behind humanitarian rhetoric and use it as a basis for their foreign interventionism, starkly violating UNSC international agreements and legislation. Strikes on schools and medical facilities, weddings, funerals, and other sites and activities across the Middle East are often sold as a strike on radical militants aimed at protecting civilians.
Protecting populations against their own government is also touted as justification for conducting military strikes and campaigns in foreign nations, which includes strikes on civilian inhabited cities, as the recent coalition strike on Syria last month demonstrated. The message seems to say that America will protect civilians from being killed by terrorists by killing them with American bombs instead.
Yesterday, the Syrian envoy to the UNSC slammed foreign interventionalism in the name of ‘protecting civilians’, ‘double standards’ and ‘selectivity’.
The Syrian Arab News Agency reports:
New York, SANA – The acting charge d’ affaires of Syria’s permanent delegation to the UN Munzer Munzer stressed that some countries exploit the issue of protecting civilians as a pretext to interfere in other countries’ affairs.
During a UN Security Council session on Tuesday on the “Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict,” Munzer said that Syria will continue to carry out its duty and constitutional right in the protection of its citizens against terrorist groups.
He expressed the Syrian delegation’s reservations about some information and assessments included in the conceptual note related to this session, and on the UN Secretary-General report titled “The Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflicts.”
Syria believes that the protection of civilians is, and will remain, the first and supreme goal for the governments of the whole world which shoulder responsibility to achieve those goals through protection all of humanity against the scourges of the conflicts and wars and preserving the basic rights and dignity of the human being, he clarified.
He criticized some countries’ double standards and selectivity in dealing with the issue of protecting civilians, as these countries exploit this issue to serve their governments’ political goals, such as using it as a pretext to interfere in the other countries’ internal affairs.
Munzer said that the protection of civilians can only be accomplished by full commitment to the principles of the UN Charter and the provisions of international law, on top of them being respecting the sovereignty and non-interference in countries’ internal affairs.
The acting charge d’ Affaires accused some UN reports of being politicized and adopting open sources that are either directly affiliated with the armed groups or supported and financed by the governments of states which are involved in supporting terrorism, citing the so-called the “white Helmets” group which is active in areas under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra which is classified by the UN Security Council as a terrorist group.
He pointed out that the UN humanitarian organizations and teams operating in Syria have documented how the terrorist groups used medical facilities and schools under their control to hotbeds into bases for launching rocket and mortar attacks, and that they destroyed hospitals and looted their equipment, asserting that those organizations and teams saw with their own eyes the depots of terrorist groups in Aleppo, eastern Ghouta, Homs, and other areas which were filled with tons of humanitarian aid, food, and medical equipment that they had been hoarding and not allowing civilians access to them.
The UN team for assessment of the situation in Raqqa has documented in its recent report the full destruction caused by the illegal so-called US-led “international coalition” of the city including the medical facilities, schools and infrastructure, Munzer added.
But military action isn’t the only thing that America exports to foreign nations. The US and its allies often conduct economic warfare, in the form of economic sanctions, against civilian populations, using the pretext of attempting to destabilize their governments, in the name of ‘restoring’ or introducing ‘democracy’, as is the case with Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and others.
Yet, the US touts the right to self determination, allowing populations to determine their own policies, both internally and externally, as in the case of Crimea, and any place where the US supports color revolutions.
But the US, in meddling in the affairs of other countries is by its actions doing anything other than that. The US actively intervenes in the elections of foreign nations, funds opposition groups, and, when these fail, supports military actions to alter the political landscape of these countries. In each case, the US is violating the supposedly sacred principle of self determination and bringing suffering and destruction whenever and wherever it employs these tactics. But it’s for a good cause, or so they say. Apparently, self determination only possesses value when it suits Washington’s interests.
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