The White House is striving to prove that the invasion is genocide after its president described it as such without sufficient legal proof
The White House press officers were shaken on Tuesday afternoon (early Wednesday morning in Spain) by the same shock they suffered two weeks ago, when their president, inflamed after a meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Poland, said that Putin did not could stay in power. An affirmation that stupefied all the countries allied with the United States when they understood that he was proposing to remove the Russian leader from the leadership of the Kremlin.
Clarified that this was not what it seemed, the White House has had to clarify before journalists the classification of “genocide” that Joe Biden gave three days ago to the Russian invasion. Above all, because the State Department admitted last week that it had not found evidence of a coordinated action of ethnic cleansing and the International Criminal Court has just begun its investigation, more focused on finding evidence of “war crimes” – such as the bombings in residential areas, the murders of civilians and rapes – than genocide, whose legal basis implies the existence of a structured plan to partially or totally wipe out a social group. Precisely, the Attorney General of the Court, Karim Khan, has visited Bucha and Borodyanka in the last two days, both scenes of massacres and massive destruction.
Among the genocides declared in the last century are the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jewish people committed by the Nazis; Cambodia, with two million killed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975; or the tremendous massacre in Rwanda in 1994, with a thousand dead, some of whom are still being exhumed today. And it was the US State Department that concluded last month that the Rohingya were subjected to cruel ethnic cleansing by the Burmese authorities between 2016 and 2017.
For this, the Americans have had to review hundreds of international reports from various organizations that investigated the crimes of the Army and the Police against this minority. Apart from the Holocaust, the US has classified as genocide the massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq and Darfur, in addition to the attacks by the Islamic State against the Yazidis and by China against the Uyghurs; the latter already under the Biden Administration.
“What you see on the ground”
The issue of verbal ‘blunders’ by the US president is not new. He has a reputation for being overly candid at times and expressing his opinions off script, even though some of them cause the bewilderment of other allied countries. To this is added the “indignation” that he suffers from the war, according to his collaborators.
The spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, specified this Thursday that Biden called the invasion “genocide” because he was talking about what he “is seeing on the ground”, despite the fact that the “legal process” to determine it “is still ongoing”. The president, like other leaders, “can express his views at any time,” she stressed. In fact, his statement yesterday obtained the support of his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, although others, such as Frenchman Emmanuel Macron, have disqualified it.
What is clear is that the White House is preparing to lend support to the claims of its president. A month ago, Biden took a qualitative leap by accusing Putin for the first time of being a “war criminal” and today there is an extensive investigative deployment to prove that, in fact, Russian troops have failed to comply with essential human rights standards. and international law for armed conflicts.
The State Department defended the genocide theory last night. “I’m going to predict that what President Biden called is what we’re ultimately likely to find when we’re able to put all of this evidence together,” said department number three Victoria Nuland. “Because what is happening on the ground is not an accident.”
#Bidens #Skids #Truths #Ukraine