Wroclaw / Poland 4/18/2022
In the German edition of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche I read the article: Good war crimes, bad war crimes.
Good war crimes, bad war crimes, does that exist? Yes, because war is raging, and people like to use double standards. While it’s easy for western journalists to get praise and credit for reporting on Russian war crimes, Wikileaks founder and investigative journalist Julian Assange is still languishing in solitary confinement in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the United States.
In the US, Assange faces a show trial, a sentence of 175 years in prison and a death sentence in installments. Assange’s crime: He reported the wrong war crimes. About the war crimes of “the good guys” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wikileaks was the first platform to report on “Collateral Murder” in Iraq, a US Army helicopter attack on civilians and reporters.
Assange’s aim was to make wars more difficult through radical transparency. According to the motto: If wars start with lies, they can be ended with the truth.
Any war must face massive public opposition. Yes, the war in Ukraine will not solve any problems. However, I want to emphasize the word “any”. Because here we have a big problem with an objective view of the political and humanitarian situation. The victims of the war in Ukraine are undoubtedly a human tragedy and must be condemned in the strongest terms. Any human being killed intentionally or accidentally, regardless of the language they use, is a needless and tragic death.
Even in a situation in which such a unilateral media judgment, contrary to the obvious facts, burdens one side of the conflict. I ask: was the death of almost a million people in the Iraq war in 2003 less culpable than the victims in Ukraine? What about those killed during the illegal invasions of Afghanistan, Libya or Syria? Was the death of civilians in these countries any less tragic? It is also worth remembering the war crimes in Vietnam or the Polpot regime in Cambodia.
The author of the article: Marek Wojcik