Editorial Note
Kuala Lumpur, 5 Feb 2007
Below is the Reuters report of the Expose War Crimes, Criminalise War held in Kuala Lumpur.
The event was attended by more than 3000 participants and foreign delegates. It was also attended by local dignitaries including several of Malaysia’s top judges. Despite the importance of the event and the evidence presented on US war crimes, Western media coverage was scanty, to say the least.
Thousands of Malaysians are expected to visit the War Crimes Exhibit which contains documentary evidence of US sponsored war crimes. Thie exhibit will then be shown under the auspices of the Malaysian Ministry of Tourism in different cities throughout Malaysia
Michel Chossudovsky and Global Research Associate Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya participated in this important international event.
Bush, Blair, Howard attacked at summit
5th February 2007, 17:17 WST
About 2,000 peace activists applauded as the leaders of the United States, Britain and Australia were branded “fascist war criminals” at a conference in Malaysia.
The gathering featured gruesome exhibits of their alleged crimes.
Outspoken former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who hosted the conference in Kuala Lumpur, won a standing ovation after opening it with a call for the leaders to be tried by an unofficial tribunal for war crimes in Iraq.
“We should not hang Blair if the tribunal finds him guilty, but he should always carry the label ‘War Criminal, Killer of Children, Liar’,” said Mahathir in an hour-long speech illustrated by pictures of wounded children, deformed babies and tortured men.
“And so should Bush and the pocket Bush of the Bushland of Australia,” he said, referring to Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch ally in the US-led war on terror.
Mahathir, a controversial figure whose own government was accused of human rights abuses bordering on torture, has been leading a campaign to highlight what he calls the human rights abuses and hypocrisy of US-led forces fighting for democracy in the Middle East.
That campaign reached new heights of graphic intensity, with an exhibit of alleged war crimes by American forces and their allies over the decades, from Hiroshima to Iraq.
As Mahathir spoke in the main conference room, packed with students and legions of his supporters, tape-recorded screams of tortured men and orphaned babies echoed around the War Crimes Exhibition, a house of horrors on the floor below.
Visitors to the exhibition start by walking through a mock spray of white phosphorus, a chemical agent that burns flesh, before entering a torture chamber labelled “Torture methods used here were used on prisoners of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib”.
Here, figures of naked men were gagged and strapped upside down to a metal-framed bed. Another was strapped to a chair, his legs and arms bristling with nails driven into his flesh, while another was bombarded with loud, incessant disco music.
“Who would have imagined the cheerful music of Boney M could be used as an instrument of pain and torture?” a label said.
The exhibit also took visitors through the Vietnam War, including the My Lai massacre of civilians by American troops, then along a trail of mock blood through a scene representing the civilian casualties of Israel’s offensive in Lebanon last year.
Speakers at the conference include former US politician Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat, who has branded the war in Iraq as illegal, and former UN assistant secretary-general Hans von Sponeck, who took part in a similar attempt to set up an unofficial war crimes tribunal at a conference in Turkey in 2005.
It also features Ali Shalah, billed as the man famously pictured in a hood with electrodes attached to his fingers at Abu Ghraib, a US-run prison in Iraq, though the New York Times recently reported that he was not the man in the photo.
“Anyone who has looked at the (conference) program knows what this is all about,” a US embassy official said, declining to add any further comment.
REUTERS
