By Robert Fantina, World BEYOND War, March 16, 2026
An address of March 16, 2026, to the World Muslim Congress & Kashmir Institute of International Relations on the sidelines of the UNHRC 61st session.
Thank you. I am honored to be part of this distinguished panel today.
There have been many periods in modern history when the right to self-determination has been violated, sometimes leading to major, catastrophic wars. That is only one reason why this right must be protected for everyone, and restored to those to whom it is currently denied.
Tragically, there does not seem to be much interest within the international community in protecting this basic human right: India’s violation of this right is blatant in its treatment of Kashmir, and the United States, one of those least interested in self-determination, has a long history of violating this right, up to and including the present time.
We will look at some distant and recent history of the U.S.’s violations of this basic right, in the context of the Middle East only. This is not by any means an exhaustive accounting of the U.S. violations of human rights in that part of the world, or even of its violations of this particular right. But it will set the stage for my later comments on how this right is being violated today, and how that violation is a dangerous sign of things possibly to come.
On January 8, 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress, and presented fourteen points, a statement of basic principles outlining the goals of the post-war global environment. Point Twelve reads, in part, as follows:
“The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development….”
These lofty goals, of course, could not be expected to stand in the way of U.S. strategic interests; the idea of the ‘opportunity of autonomous development – self-determination – and human rights are all well and good, as long as they don’t in any way inconvenience the United States. Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was deeply troubled by the idea of self-determination. “In his private notes he wrote that it was loaded with dynamite, might breed disorder, discontent and rebellion. His neat, logical mind saw it leading the President into strange contradictions. ‘Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed?’ he asked himself.”
Now we will look at some information from the twenty-first century.
In 2003, the United States, with a small contingent of soldiers from a very limited number of other countries, invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. This led that country to the brink of civil war, killed an estimated 2,000,000 people, and destabilized Iraq for years. Anger and hostility towards the U.S. throughout not only the Middle East, but the entire world, increased. The stated reason for the war – that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction that threatened the entire world – turned out to be false.
Two years later, in 2005, elections were held in Palestine and, in voting that the international community said was free and fair, Hamas was victorious in the Gaza Strip. The U.S. government was not pleased. Hillary Clinton, at that time a candidate for senator in New York, and later Secretary of State, said this after the Hamas victory: “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” So much for self-determination.
In January of this year, the U.S. invaded Venezuela and kidnapped that country’s president. Nicolas Maduro was elected in 2024, although international observers had concerns about the election, and the country has had a variety of problems. So the U.S., under President Donald Trump, decided it was in Venezuela’s best interest (and, of course, the United States’s) to kidnap him and install a president of Trump’s choosing. Eventually, elections might be allowed, but the ‘Hillary Clinton model’ of free and fair elections – pre-determining the outcome so it pleases the U.S. government – will probably be followed.
So fresh off his so-called ‘victory’ in Venezuela, Trump decided that it was now the Iranians who needed the benefit of his great wisdom, to deprive them of their right to self-determination. We must remember that in 1953, the U.S., displeased with the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who wanted to assure that the Iranian people were benefiting properly from the sale of Iranian oil, overthrew the government and installed the much more friendly-to-the-U.S. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The Shah brutally oppressed the people of Iran for over 25 years, but that didn’t matter to the U.S., since he did Washington’s bidding. In 1978, the people of Iran rose up, overthrew the Shah and established the Islamic Republic of Iran. This was extremely displeasing to the U.S.: the new government wouldn’t approve U.S. and Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and was restrictive about its oil policies, wanting to assure that oil revenues benefited Iranians, and not U.S. oligarchs. So the U.S. did what it could to demonize Iran: ‘human-rights violations’, U.S. government officials said, ignoring the U.S.’s many, many human-rights violations domestically and internationally; ‘political prisoners in terrible conditions’ those same officials decried, as they conveniently overlook that fact that only four countries on the planet have a higher rate of incarceration than the U.S., and Iran isn’t one of them; Iran isn’t even close, and U.S. prison conditions are among the worst in the world. But, they say, women have to cover their hair! Right, in the U.S., women don’t need to cover their hair, but they also don’t make the same salaries as men in the same positions; which is more repressive?
But what is any of that when the mighty U.S. says a regime must be changed? So Trump, while negotiating with the Iranian government about its nuclear program, decided that the best way to further negotiations was to bomb the people, starting with a girls’ school. And as part of what he calls the ‘liberation’ of the people of Iran – liberation they neither need nor want – he said that the U.S. should have a say in who the new Iranian leader is, following his assassination of the Ayatollah which, just by the way, is a blatant violation of international law. So the U.S. determining the new leader of Iran can hardly be seen as ‘self-determination’.
Now, let us look at how these historical facts might help to see what comes next. On the rare occasions that the U.S. has been successful in bringing about ‘regime change’ it has been to the absolute detriment of the people of the target nation. Iran in 1953, as I mentioned a moment ago; Guatemala in 1954, when the democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenze was overthrown by the U.S.; Chile in 1973, when the democratically-elected leader Salvator Allende was overthrown and the brutal Augusto Pinochet was installed; Palestine, as I mentioned; Laos, Ghana, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Uruguay, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Argentina, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Colombia, Venezuela – the list of nations whose governments the U.S. has overthrown is almost endless. And of course, the U.S. supports India in its lie that the Kashmir ‘situation’ is an internal concern only.
And what have those overthrows brought to the people of those victim nations? Poverty, repression, fear, disappearances, executions without due process, and a myriad of other human-rights violations.
The people of any nation are in the best situation to determine what is best for themselves and the rest of the people in that nation. Certainly there will be disagreements; not everyone’s wishes and desires can be satisfied, but when they can’t be, it is up to the people of those nations, with their elected leaders, to negotiate the best possible solution. It is not the role of the leaders of any other nation, whose intentions toward the people of the target nation are never their best interests, to interfere.
The right of self-determination, being deprived as I speak from so many people in the world, must be re-enshrined as a key pillar of international law. If one nation is deprived of it, then which nation will be next? If anyone is at risk of losing this right, then we are all at risk of losing this right. We ignore this risk at our peril.
Thank you.
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