KIM JONG NAM ANOTHER NOTCH IN THE LIST OF POLITICAL KILLINGS

Kim Jong Nam the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was assassinated at a crowded airport in Malaysia in broad daylight on February 13.

According to the autopsy report the North Korean leader’s brother was assassinated using a lethal nerve agent which the United Nations has described as a weapon of mass destruction. Malaysian police investigating the crime charge a group of North Koreans including the Second Secretary of the North Korean embassy is suspected of being behind the attack. What is frightening is the fact that leaders of states authorise the use of poisons described as a weapons of mass destruction in public spaces endangering thousands of innocents.

If the conclusions of the Malaysian investigation show this to be true the persons behind the attack need to be held accountable. They need to be tried before an international court of justice and made examples of. The countries of this world need to use the courts of international justice to emphasise that abhorrent crimes will not be tolerated and that no one is above the law. In other words war crimes, crimes against humanity and the use of weapons of mass destruction have no place in society.

The leadership of North Korea has on earlier occasions too used assassination and terrorism indiscriminately not only against its own citizens, but against the leadership and people of other countries as well. An example being the attempted assassination of South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan in 1983 in Rangoon. Twenty-one people were killed in the attack, including the foreign minister, minister of power resource, economic planning minister, the deputy prime minister, and minister for commerce and industry. Forty-six others were also injured.

On November 29, 1987, North Korean agents exploded a bomb on Korean Airlines Flight 858, killing all 115 on board -an attempt to destabilize the South Korean government and to frighten away participants to the Olympic Games to be held in Seoul the following summer… Sadly the North Korean leadership is not alone in using assassination, attempted assassination and large-scale killings as tools to achieve political ends.

Russian defector Alexander Litvineko was poisoned by Russian agents using polonium-210 (a critical component of early nuclear bombs) in London on November 1, 2006. The state of Israel has a history of using mass murder to achieve political goals… the attack and killings at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948 where around 254 Palestinians were brutally killed by Israeli gangs led by no less a person than a former Israeli prime minister stands out.

The US continues to use these self-same tools in pursuit of its own political agendas, ambitions and in support of its business interests eg. 1954 in Guatemala via a CIA organized-coup the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown because it expropriated lands of the United Fruit Company under a land reform programme. In 1953 Mohammad Mosaddegh head of a democratically elected government of Iran was overthrown in a coup d’état aided by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the UK’S secret service.

The Church Committee Report -a US Senate Select Committee report headed by Senator Frank Church- revealed it had substantiated eight attempts by the CIA to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro between 1960 – 1965.

The list is unending…

The United Nations (UN) the intergovernmental organization set up in the aftermath of World War II to promote international co-operation and to prevent conflict, is failing in its task. One of the main reason for its failure has been that the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US), have created an exclusive club whose powers are unchecked. Unlike the General Assembly, the UN Security Council does not have international representation, but its rulings are binding. The UNSC only addresses the strategic interests and political motives of the UN’S permanent members, especially in humanitarian interventions -like protecting the oil-rich Kuwaitis in 1991 but ignoring resource-poor Rwandans in 1997.

This is one of the main reasons the UN is today unable to live up to its mandate of preventing conflict.