On November 16, 1998, the then former dictator Pinochet was arrested in London at the request of judge Baltasar Garzón. The arrest of a Chilean defendant by a Spaniard in the United Kingdom represented an unprecedented application of the principle of universality of human rights. Months earlier, the Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court (ICC), which came into force in 2002. On the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup, when Lula attacked the ICC, Human Rights Minister Silvio Almeida sided with the president through complicit silence.
Lula and Almeida are human rights deniers, but the former despises them for geopolitical reasons while the latter rejects them for ideological reasons. The president’s reasons, while pathetic, fall into the superficial sphere of opportunism. The Minister’s reasons have deep roots and therefore violate the core of the culture of human rights.
Months before taking office, Almeida published an insightful article. The text dedicated to the invasion of Ukraine managed to avoid holding Putin accountable in 613 words. In it, the “complexity of what is happening” is cited in order to attribute the “conflict” to “capitalist expansionism” and the “destructive logic of the commodity” (read: USA), while neglecting “Manichean considerations”. Collective, diffuse, widespread guilt: “All governments are aware of the horrors they promote.”
However, the ideological substrate of the article can be found elsewhere: a quote from 1950 by the Martinican Aimé Cesaire, who was still a member of the French Communist Party and admired Stalin. According to Cesaire, the outrage against Nazism, which was the source of the 1948 Universal Declaration, arose not from the “crime against man, but against the white man,” since there was no fundamental difference between Hitler’s extermination machine and the European “colonialist “give processes”.
Césaire wrote for 66 years. Almeida chose the lower flight of the Martinican. The passage is part of the farreaching tradition of contemporary soft antiSemitism, which does not actually deny the Holocaust, but relativizes it. But the careful selection makes sense: the minister’s goal is to portray the culture of human rights as pure hypocrisy of white Westerners.
Cesaire and Almeida’s identity narrative has a thousand and one purposes, including protecting Stalin in the case of the former and protecting Putin in the case of the latter. Above all, it is about questioning the universal nature of human rights and supporting a doctrine based on the divide between “whites and nonwhites”. Hence the hostility towards both the Universal Declaration and the International Criminal Court, its main fruit.
“All people may rely on the rights and freedoms proclaimed in this Declaration, without distinction of race, color, sex, language or religion…” Article 2 of the Universal Declaration, adopted before the fall of the colonial empires, shows this Extent of civilization’s response to the Holocaust.
The Rome Statute emerged from the rejection of the Rwandan genocide (1994) and the Srebrenica massacre (1995), events that are incomprehensible in light of the identity doctrine. “Racial cleansing” was the driving force behind both. In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbian military destroyed thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians. In the African country, the Hutu dictatorship ordered the extermination of more than half a million Tutsis. “Whites against whites” and “blacks against blacks”? Racist exterminism does not need differences in skin color.
Putin’s crime that provoked the ICC arrest warrant is of the same nature. The deportation of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia is intended to Russify them, a step in the project to destroy Ukraine as a nation. Denier Almeida doesn’t see this as a scandal: “Whites against whites,” that’s fine.