'Arrest Kissinger': War Criminal to Talk at Nobel Peace Forum

By teleSUR

08 December 16

 

A petition asks why Norway is still punishing Edward Snowden for leaking revealing security documents while letting a war criminal scot free.

housands are demanding Henry Kissinger’s arrest in Norway after the Nobel Peace Prize Committee announced the former U.S. Secretary of State and alleged war criminal will deliver a speech on peace.

Nobel Peace Prize Watch partnered with progressive group RootsAction to launch a petition Tuesday for the arrest of Kissinger, who “is complicit or a main actor in many violations of the Genocide Convention and of the Geneva Conventions,” says the petition, already signed by over 5,000.

Kissinger himself was awarded the prize in 1973 alongside his Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, for negotiating a cease-fire between the countries, which was ultimately ignored.

Duc Tho rejected the prize, stating that peace had not yet been established, and that the U.S. was in violation of the Paris Peace Accord. After collecting his own prize, Kissinger continued to bomb North Vietnamese capital Saigon, and by the end of 1975 more than 3 million Vietnamese, two-thirds of them civilians, were killed.

“If Kissinger will enjoy automatic impunity it stands out in shameful contrast with denying protection to whistleblower Edward Snowden for a stay of two days to receive the Ossietzky prize from Norwegian PEN,” wrote Jan Oberg of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. “Can Norway really have offered protection to one who has committed the most serious international crimes and at the same time denied it to one who has exposed grave crimes against the U.S. Constitution?”

Kissinger was also behind Operation Condor, the U.S.-orchestrated campaign of murder, torture, and disappearances in Latin America. Most notably, he provided pivotal support to the military coup that ousted Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and extended massive U.S. support to Argentina’s right-wing military, which in March of 1976 launched the “Dirty War,” a massacre against leftists that left as many as 30,000 dead and disappeared.

In Cambodia, Kissinger's carpet-bombing led directly to the takeover of Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Documents released in 2014 revealed that in 1976, Kissinger also planned to launch airstrikes against Havana, strike ports and military installations in Cuba and send Marine battalions to the U.S. Naval Base at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.

The committee also invited former National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski, who unrepentantly bolstered Islamic fighters to take down the Soviet Union, to speak at the same Oslo conference.

The Nobel Peace Prize has often propped up architects of war. It was once awarded to Elihu Root, who brutally repressed the Philippines’ independence movement and Barack Obama, whose use of drones has killed thousands of innocents. This year, the award was given to Juan Manuel Santos, who served as Colombia’s defense minister when high-ranking military commanders routinely executed civilians in efforts to inflate body counts in exchange for recognition and military promotions.