The attitude of Western silence of the scene of the killing of the Palestinian citizen – for example not exclusive – Abdel Fattah al-Sharif last Thursday in the Palestinian city of khalil by the Israeli occupation army, in contrast, the Western condemnation of the terrorist bombings that hit Paris last November and Brussels this month, brings us back to the double standards applied by Western countries in the field of human rights protection. This silence on the killing of the Palestinian citizen comes in its natural framework ! For those states that as long as human rights concepts employed selectively to serve its higher interests. One of these concepts is the right of “international and humanitarian intervention” and the right of “self-determination” that it is indifferent to the fate of peoples, and in this context, a killing that comes, to show the manipulation practiced by the major powers in the field of human rights concepts.
Political transformations are not limited in the post-Cold War witnessed by the international community on the disintegration of the Soviet Union ,and the collapse of the of socialist system in Eastern Europe, but also pulled on the concepts of public international law as employed politically to serve the interests of the system of capitalist countries, particularly the United States , which sees the end of the cold war as a victory to it.
Among these terms, the term of human rights, where the system was able to employ it on two levels of recovery . the first is to work on the recovery of the principle of international humanitarian intervention to the contemporary international politics, and that principle is aimed at reducing the human rights violations that the citizens of the state who are exposed to it . But what is observed on this principle through the practical experience is the selective way in its application by the superpower (the United States) and major powers that the strategic considerations were dominated on the account of ethical practices in international humanitarian intervention. The applications were used under the pretext of protecting the Kurds from the abuses of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime in the post-Cold War, and the intervention in Somalia under the pretext of the collapse of State for Humanitarian and famine, and intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to stop the abuses that they were exposed by the Serbian state. All of these interventions were done to strategic considerations, and in the case of Iraq , the British, US and French intervention has detracted from its sovereignty and was the cause to contain and weaken it and to be ended to the occupation of it in April 9 2003, while the US intervention in Somalia was a political motive to emphasize the US monopoly in the capabilities of the global system in post-cold war, and the economic motive was to transfer of huge amounts of “Almaz – dimond” of Somalia, and the strategic motive was to tighten its control over the entrances to the Red Sea, and after completing its failed humanitarian functions , the USA was withdrawn from Somalia, to deepen the process of its ongoing collapse to the present day .
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention in Kosovo came to fold the last page – according to their point of view- of the pages of the Cold War to get rid of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic who has a tendency of hard ethnic nationality , and to stop the migration of Kosovars who were crowded on the edge of Europe. If Western countries were already involved in a lot of human rights, why it did not intervene in a lot of civil wars that have occurred in various regions of the world after the end of the Cold War ? Why, for example, did not intervene to stop the humanitarian massacres of the Rwandan people in 1994,in which the lives of more than half a million people were occurred, Why they were kept silent as the same silence of graves, that it sees this bloody scene?
The superpower and major powers involved in the protection of human rights ! they do not apply its standards to the allied nations and trading partners such as China, for example, while imposed on vulnerable countries such as Nigeria because of human rights violations a series of economic and diplomatic sanctions and lasted six years from 1993 to 1999, while the countries opposed to its policies, such as Iraq that it imposed on it a standard post of modernism in the field of protection of human rights! It is an international humanitarian intervention, which lasted from 1991 to 2003.
After the occupation of Iraq , the intellectual and research institutions began to adopt a new concept of a “transitional justice” as a developed formula for humanitarian intervention and new style for domination in the name of human rights . The West , which creates political pluralism and economic progress and military and technological development, will not fail to reshape the legal terms that serve their interests, especially if the environment was found that encourages it to do so.
As for the second term, it is the right of self-determination. And the literature of human rights classified it as the collective human rights , and it has been defined by the jurisprudence of international law, and professors of international relations as a “right” of every people to choose the form of government and its political system in complete freedom and without any external interference, and to benefit from its natural resources and enjoy the spiritual and physical heritage without being restricted and as they want.
The principle of the right to self-determination has remained until the end of World War II as apolitical principle with the literary value . But it soon became after the establishment of the United Nations in the year 1945, a legal principle of just rise to the ranks of the legal rules that may not be violated. Perhaps the proof of that is the keenness of the authors of the Charter of the United Nations in referring to it in the first article – the second paragraph by saying, “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights of peoples and that have their own self-determination, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen public peace. ”
And due to the importance of this right , the General Assembly of the United Nations has issued several resolutions to confirm it, including Resolution 1514 issued on 14.12.1960, which was entitled “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” which explicitly provided in the second paragraph of the preamble to the resolution that “for all peoples the right to self-determination, but under this right – to determine freely their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and political growth ” and resolution No. 2625, issued on .24.10.1970, and in addition to the first article of the first paragraph in each of the two international eras for civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights of 1966, have confirmed the content of the preceding paragraph.
Some of the scholars of international law conclude from those advertisements that the right of self-determination is the collective rights of human being , only directed to the state of people under occupation or colonial domination for the independence of peoples, and therefore may not be allowed to be protested by a particular group living within countries and so as not to be in front of this group a state of demands on their rights in an orderly and intended way but only to work to ensure these rights within the entrance of human rights no more , and in a national perspective in the first place. So these scholars deny the legitimacy of any right of self-determination authorizing or encouraging any action on any action which would dismember or impair totally or partially the territorial integrity and political unity of independent sovereign states.
In the post-Cold War , the right to self-determination moved from its framework of Independence to its breakaway , noting that the Western countries had worked on the politicization it by internationalization of the domestic issues within a single country and promote national and religious movements to demand secession from the state, under the pretext of human rights violations and in this context that the Western countries forced Indonesia to hold a referendum in 1999, that determines the fate of East Timor, and the United nations organized and sent troops towards East Timor to ensure the right of the Timorese to secede from Indonesia and protect them from militias which are supporting the minority that support the unity with it, and actually the East Timor was separated from Indonesia , as Western countries encouraged southern Sudan to be separated from the mother country.
The wonder here, and before the murder scene, almost daily in Palestine since its occupation and to this day: Why the case of the occupied Palestinian people do not receive , which is the oldest legal, political and humanitarian issue in the United Nations history, the right to self-determination, that the occupation is seeking to confiscate the land, identity and rights? What are the self-conditions that become available for other people and are not available for the Palestinian people ?, and here it must be said, and reminders ,to make a mistake who thinks that the elimination of state regulation in Iraq and the Levant “Daash” means completely to eradicate terrorism in the Middle East environment, in order to get rid of it once and for all requires a re-consideration of the concept of human rights through a just solution to the Palestinian issue. Because this terrorism is one of their political consequences in the Arab world .
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies