One of the ‘side events’ of the the opening week of the 73th UN General Assembly was a meeting of the Syria Impartial International Investigative Mechanism. The SyriaIIIM was apparently the brainchild of Aurelia Frick, Liechetenstein’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the meeting was hosted by Liechtenstein together with Qatar.

Nobody from the Syrian government, to present atrocities against its people by terrorists and Western regime-changers alike, was at the meeting. Representing Syria were Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets.  The White Helmets are funded by NATO countries and George Soros’s Open Society to produce propaganda against the Syrian government in order to promote a Libya-style no-fly zone in Syria.  They are staffed by the most vicious gangs operating in Syria, notably the ISIS-aligned al ZInki, which is known for atrocities such as bombing bakeries

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and sawing off the head of young Abdullah Issa.

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The fraudulent nature of White Helmet activity is explored in this Photo Tutorial on the Death Squad Helmets from Miri Wood.  Perhaps the most blatant and most unequivocal example of fraud was the staging for the cameras of a chemical attack in a hospital in East Ghouta, Damascus, in order to provoke a punitive strike against Syria, or even open war.  The White Helmets rushed some children into the hospital, hosed them down, rubbing water in their eyes, and later rewarded them with sweets and cookies.  Neither local residents nor hospital staff knew anything of a chemical attack.

Also invited to speak at the SyriaIIIM meeting was Simon Adams of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, likewise funded by George Soros to facilitate the partition and/or the destruction of Syria.  In the speech he planned to give, Adams claims that ‘millions’ of civilians in Syria still face the threat of mass atrocity crimes’.  As time was short, Adams gave way to ‘our friends from Syrian Civil Defense’, which included its chief spokesman Raed Saleh.

In a paper ‘Failure to Protect: Syria and the UN Security Council’ ( here),  Simon Adams argues for an agreement by the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council to refrain from using their veto in future mass atrocity situations – Russia and China have in the past vetoed any attempts to have Syria referred to the ICC.

The relentless propaganda against the Syrian government and its president Bashar al Assad, funded by agents intent on regime change in Syria, all the while ignoring al Assad’s popularity with his people, has been discussed by a number of analysts, including Daniel Lazare in ‘A New Anti-Assad Propaganda Offensive‘.

The underlying assumption of the meeting and of the SyriaIIIM is that it is the Syrian government that should be held accountable – certainly there is no indication that the agenda included any investigation into atrocities carried out by members of the gangs staffing the White Helmets. Thus the Syria ‘Impartial’ Investigative Mechanism clearly has not the remotest intention of being impartial, and ‘by accountability to shape Syria’s future’, Frick means getting rid of Bashar al Assad by hook or by crook, so that NATO and its partners can shape Syria’s future according to their own priorities.

The SyriaIIIM was founded in 2016 as is an ‘independent investigative panel to work toward the prosecution of those responsible for war crimes or crimes against humanity in Syria. Its functions are:

  • the collection and consolidation of evidence regarding violations of international humanitarian law and human rights violations and abuses as
  • the preparation of files in order to facilitate and expedite fair and independent criminal proceedings, in accordance with international law standards, in national, regional or international courts or tribunals that have or may in the future have jurisdiction over these crimes, in accordance with international law.

Syria’s position is that the body is illegal and violates the UN Charter.  As Syria is not a signatory to the ICC, at present Syrian can only be tried in the ICC by referral from the United Nations Security Council.

The purpose of the SyriaIIIM, therefore, is to prepare and present a case for prosecution to the UNSC.  That someone like Raed Saleh, associated with both fraud and atrocities in Syria, should have a role in bringing members of the Syrian government or armed forces to ‘justice’ in The Hague destroys the credibility of the SyrianIIIM, and undermines that of the United Nations and the concept of international law.

Recently John Bolton, speaking on behalf of Donald Trump and the US government, caused a stir when he announced that the U.S. considered the ICC illegitimate. Of course any suggestion that US citizens should have impunity when it comes to war crimes, but not others, is obnoxious, and people leapt to condemn his position, even outlets one would expect to be critical of the United Nations, such as Global Research, here and here.  The Trump administration has also pulled out of UNESCO, the Human Rights Council, the  negotiations for the Global Compact on Migration, and tragically for Palestinian refugees, their mainstay the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency.

Whatever Trump’s own motivations and intentions, it is right in principle to question the ICC and the United Nations bureaucracy.  UN institutions are frequently corrupt and should not automatically be given credibility.  All UN personnel and institutions that have concerned themselves with Syria, for example, have been consistently biased, including Staffan de Mistura, the OPCW , who like SyriaIIIM rely on the White Helmets for informtion, and UNICEF  – it is hard to forget UNICEF’s Justin Forsyth pretending to hold a conversation  with propaganda tool Bana Alabed, despite knowing that Bana could not speak a word of English, while at the same time participating in her exploitation.

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) forms, with America’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the pharmaceutical companies, a dangerous network of corruption with no regard for the safety of the public (see also the WHO’s role in the flu epidemic scam.)  The description of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an amateurish, ramshackle operation’ is perhaps too kind – others have pointed to its propensity for manipulating data to suit a political agenda.  The bodies concerned with nuclear proliferation are a farce – there is no pressure on the UK, for example, not to upgrade its Trident nuclear capability, and the The Secretary-General’s five point proposal on nuclear disarmament mentions neither this issue nor Israel’s undeclared nuclear programme. 

As for international justice, as represented by ICC it is, in Tyler Durden’s words,  a noble ideal but a flawed institution. Those who might not normally agree with John Bolton will be startled to learn that he predicted back in 1998 that the ICC would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.  The ICC has failed to bring the likes of Bush, Blair, Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy to trial for their open warring on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and their scarcely concealed warmongering in Syria, with the result that ICC cases against personnel from the former Yugoslavia give the appearance of bullying weaker countries rather than seeking justice.

While the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency may do more good than harm, the same can not be said for many of the UN’s other institutions, and their very existence needs to be questioned and reevaluated.