Kamala Harris, the brilliant American vice-president, took an important step at the Munich conference on February 18. “The United States has formally established that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine”. And she demanded that “justice be done”. These are the strongest words a senior US official has spoken about Ukraine.
She is a prosecutor by profession, she knows the file and the value of words. In all respects, she is right. The Russian leaders and their army are directly responsible, not only for having covered up or disguised individual “slippages”, but have chosen terror as a military strategy, bombing civilians, deporting them en masse, killing thousands of innocent people, creating , in the towns and villages they occupied, centers of torture. It is a planned method, not an excess of a few roughnecks, and we would like Putin and his relatives, as they deserve, to be brought before the International Criminal Court one day. Dozens of NGOs, at this very moment, are investigating to carefully establish the facts, the evidence.
But allow me a few remarks on the American “camp of good”. Who dumped tons of napalm on Vietnamese civilians in the last century? Who started the mad war in Iraq, an objective that had nothing to do with Bin Laden’s terrorist attack – which President Chirac, alone in Europe, supported? Who has committed appalling abuses in Afghanistan (the latest being the dropping, on the orders of Donald Trump, and against the advice of the Yankee general staff, of “the mother of the bombs”, who could only to exterminate combatants and mixed civilians)? Who turned Abu Grahib prison into a monstrosity, not to mention the clandestine sites where inmates were treated worse than beasts? Trump and especially Bush could have feared the worst as the policy of the “neoconservatives” was murderous.
There is no intrinsic “good side”, there is no binary division of a world that refuses to do so. President Biden is right to support Kyiv. But, he who is a Catholic, he should meditate on this sentence from the Gospel (Matthew, 7): “Remove the beam that is in your eye, then you will see how to remove the speck that is in your brother’s…”
