Robert Charvin (Former member of the international secretariat of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers)
In a few days, in Dakar, progressive and communist forces will meet to demonstrate their desire to impose, if possible, the maintenance of peace in international society, while today, the West, which has changed a lot in a few decades, wants to be a force today not democratic, but first and foremost a security force, eager to intervene practically in all the internal affairs of all the countries that disturb it, and I think that this is an extremely dangerous development. I would like to take three examples, that of the United States, France and Israel. If we look at the history of the United States in recent decades, we see that there has been an increase in interference, interventions in the internal affairs of different countries, with in addition recourse to armed force and with an overthrow of national authorities.
I am thinking of Iraq, for example, which is not only the overthrow of a regime belonging to the United Nations and therefore having to benefit from the sovereign equality of States, which was overthrown with the execution decided outside of judicial reality by the Americans, since Saddam Hussein was hanged, which is not a very educational lesson for democracy in the world. This came after the Vietnam War, of course, and after many other conflicts, up until recently, up to the very ambiguous support of the United States for Israel, which on the one hand applauds the interventions of the Israeli army, for example for the execution of the representatives of the Lebanese as a duty of justice, as an almost judicial execution, and on the other hand calls on the United Nations, possibly with a certain discretion but with a certain perseverance, to process the fire and the existence of two Palestinian States. France, for its part, in this practice, in this Atlanticist style logic, let us remember Libya not long ago, which with the support of the United States, Great Britain and NATO, liquidated the origin of Libyan and socialist Jamaica Jamahiriya, to end twelve years later in generalized chaos and nothing has been restored in this country which was the most advanced in Africa.
Let us also think of all the interference that has multiplied in recent years and is still multiplying in black Africa, with the progressive and positive reactions of the States that have formed a confederation of the Sahel today, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. And then let us also look at Israel’s policy, which has reached new heights with the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, with the thousand deaths that have already been reached in Lebanon, but also the interference and the occasional bombings in Syria, against Syria, Iran and others, with at the same time the invocation, paradoxically, of a United Nations resolution that implies an imposition on Lebanon that would satisfy Israel’s interests, while there are at least 50 resolutions that the United Nations has adopted that are not binding on Israel because Israel simply refuses to apply them and there is no power in the world today that enforces them. It is important to know that today, and this is the lawyer speaking, with the latest resolutions from the Security Council and another from the General Assembly for this period of 2024, all the States of the world today are legally obliged to intervene to interpose themselves between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza.
All the states today that do not intervene, and that is practically most of the states in the world, are today complicit in war crimes committed by Israel. And if we were to follow this reasoning through to its conclusion, that would mean that most of the heads of state in the world today should be brought before the International Criminal Court for non-intervention, for solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The French no longer have colonies, but many of them still have the memory of colonial domination in their heads and I think they will have a lot of trouble getting rid of it. And consequently, for the French, I think for all the peoples who have benefited from a colonial system, this would also be true for the Japanese for example, there is this attitude that remains of contempt, indifference, hostility and supremacism towards the former colonized peoples when they should all ask them for forgiveness. For example, very few French people today are Africanists, very few young French people know the history of pre-colonial Africa, very few know, and this is even more serious, the colonial history of France in Africa and very few today know those who were able to bring high-level critical thinking to Africa.
And I think that we can recall in this regard Amilcar Cabral who was certainly one of the particularly important African thinkers in the progressive movement and who made a contribution to Marxist thought in particular that deserves to be known more often, to be disseminated. Some Africanists make some efforts here and there, but there is a kind of ignorance of this thought, as there is also ignorance of a more limited but still very rich thought of Sankara and others. But I believe that Amilcar Cabral is one of those who are particularly respectable in the ideological domain.
I wanted to pay tribute to his memory on this occasion and hope that beyond my little person, other French people will think of him on the occasion of the Dakar meeting.