SEVIM DAGDELEN, [now in D.C.] sevim.dagdelen@bundestag.de, @SevimDagdelen
Dagdelen is a member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, and is on the foreign affairs committee. She speaks tonight at Busboys and Poets in D.C. She is the author of a book on NATO.
She spoke at a rally outside the White House on Monday. She said: “At its Washington summit, NATO intends to make its strategy of escalation and expansion global. Ever more weapons deliveries to Ukraine are planned; the danger of direct involvement in the war is rising; and the NATO-isation of Asia is now getting underway officially.” See speech: “Popular Sovereignty instead of Vassal Loyalty to the U.S.!”
She also gave the keynote speech “Global NATO: Expansion and Escalation” at the No to NATO, Yes to Peace summit this past weekend.
She said: “Never accept a person’s or an organization’s self-image at face value. … First is the central myth of a NATO organized as a defense community committed to international law: a NATO that is a community of constitutional states upholding the law, allowing international law to rule its actions so that it exists for no other purpose but to defend the territory of its members.
“Yet if we interrogate NATO’s actual policies, what do we find?
“In 1999, NATO itself conducted a war of aggression, in breach of international law, against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO’s war crimes included the bombing of a television station in Belgrade and an allegedly accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy which killed three Chinese journalists.
In 2011, NATO attacked Libya. It misused a UN Security Council resolution to fight a war for regime change, one result of which was that part of the country came under the rule of Islamists; Libya on the whole was plunged into a state of appalling misery, and even suffered the return of slavery.
“In Afghanistan, NATO involved itself from 2003 in a war far from Alliance territory, only to hand power, 20 years later, to the Taliban — whose overthrow had been the invasion’s stated objective. That 20-year war in Afghanistan was marked by numerous war crimes — such as the October 2015 U.S. airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz — which, needless to say, went unpunished.
“NATO has assumed the musketeers’ motto: all for one and one for all. This means in practice that the deeds of individual NATO members must also be ascribed to the organization itself. Brown University puts the death toll of U.S. wars in the Middle East over the last 20 years alone at 4.5 million people — wars, like that in Iraq, based on lies and which were nothing but egregious violations of international law.
“NATO’s self-image as a community for defense in adherence to international law simply does not match reality. We must rather draw the opposite conclusion.
“NATO is a community of illegality and of the violators of international law who, either separately or as an organization, conduct wars of aggression on a politically opportunistic basis.”