India-Pakistan’s sabre-rattling a worry
TENSION between India and Pakistan is reaching dangerous levels. Any miscalculation could lead to a nuclear conflict.
India has 135 nuclear weapons and Pakistan 145. Assuming 25 nuclear weapons are used, the death toll could exceed 40 million.
Any nuclear conflict is a crime against humanity and a gross violation of international law. Nuclear war is an act of genocide.
According to the International Criminal Court, crimes against humanity are: “Waging war without justification. Holding prisoners without giving them due consideration, legal representation, or any rights. Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”
The former US Supreme Court Justice, who was chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials of Nazi leaders, uttered the following: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoners’ dock rather than the way to honours, we will have accomplished something towards making the peace more secure.”
We are witnessing genocide and wars across the globe. The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in articles 11 and 111 of the 1948 convention on the prevention of genocide.
It is often and truthfully said that war exposes the worst side of human nature. But even when outright, military warfare comes to an end, man’s inhumanity to man continues, humanity’s war on itself goes on, never-ending.
Governments conduct a scorchedearth policy.
All they care about are their own selfish desires, oblivious to the human wreckage they leave behind.
The misery of their victims is met with deaf ears, blind eyes and lying tongues. The violence continues, the brutality, the cruelty, the suffering. Pain has been given a voice.
Retribution has been given a body. Vengeance and death walk as one. War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing the wrong, and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.