Archive October 1, 2025

“There were 1, 319 deaths in the week ending September 18; since August 16, 4, 338 people have been admitted to the city’s hospitals, of which 972 have died. Since August 1st, the police Corpse Disposal Squad and the two non-official agencies have removed corpses of starving people from the streets and hospitals.

– September 23, 1943, The Statesman

A man-made famine that claimed thousands of lives each week in Bengal in September 1943. India entered World War II in 1939 as a military, export, and credit-giving country as a strategic theater in the Allied offensive against Japan, still ruled by British colonial rule. The colonial government imposed a modified “scorched earth” policy in parts of Madras, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and Assam in 1942, mandating that the army halt food stocks and halt transportation routes by road, rail, river, and sea. Millions of civilians were left without food as a result of the policy, which was purportedly intended to restrict Japanese access to resources.

Secretary of State for India Leo Amery pleaded with Bengal’s war cabinet, which is located more than 5, 000 miles away in London, to send 500, 000 tons of grain to save the country’s starving people. Less than a quarter of the request was given to the cabinet, which rejected the appeal. Amery later observed that “the Cabinet generally handled the matter on India’s part.” Within a few years, there will be three million more deaths from starvation and famine-related epidemics.

Despite censorship rules prohibiting “casual references to incidents calculated to arouse horror or alarm,” The Statesman, an English-language newspaper in India, published the above-quoted editorial. Instead, the colonial government promoted positive stories that stressed relief efforts and promoted the concept of a long-standing “beggar problem.” While concealing the magnitude of famine and portraying British rule as benevolent, this narrative naturalized hunger as an inevitable feature of poverty. Later, Ian Stephens, the then-editor of The Statesman, recalled that officials had used “starvation” in Bengal fatalities reports to replace it with “sick destitutes.” The distinction was more complicated by the fact that being “sick destitute” implied misfortune and forces beyond human control, whereas being starved implied both a victim and intended recipient.

Although some media outlets, like The Statesman, attempted to accurately report on the famine both in India and Britain, the journalists’ efforts did not have any significant legal repercussions. The authors of post-war international law themselves used food restrictions and poverty as tools for colonial and military dominance, which was not incidental. They were therefore unwilling to make a weapon that they themselves had used illegal. According to academics Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk, Britain and France were favoring blockades as a “potentially negative material intervention with low public visibility and high pay-off as a war-fighting strategy” in the 20th century. International law has a lot to do with the lack of compassion for starvation as a tool of violence, which affects how it is still treated.

It’s still difficult to bring charges despite international law’s clear prohibition of intentionally starving civilians as a means of combat. The Geneva Conventions’ 1977 Additional Protocols forbid the use of civilian starvation as a means of combat. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Rome Statute expands its definition of a war crime that can be prosecuted. Why does the crime of starvation continue to be so challenging despite this clarity?

Starvation cases present unique legal challenges. Different from bombing or massacres, starvation operates. It moves slowly, dissipates, and frequently hides behind policies. Instead of ignoring shortages or failing to protect supply chains, the prosecution must establish the intent. The picture is muddy by sieges, sanctions, and blockades, which are defended as “legitimate” military measures. It’s notoriously challenging to hold individuals accountable for such structural violence.

But there is no justification for difficulty. As the recent upheaval in Gaza demonstrates, starvation causes destruction on a scale comparable to conventional weapons. It destroys societies, leaving behind long-lasting scars in both the physical, psychological, and economic systems. Its structural nature, which allows it to operate invisibly, over time, and under the pretext of a policy, is precisely why it needs to be prosecuted, not ignored.

Starvation has been viewed as a side effect of war for too long. It was a deliberate strategy that was banned for decades but hardly ever enforced. Powerful actors will continue to use hunger as a weapon against civilians with impunity as long as courts and prosecutors don’t recognize it as a crime.

The first step is to properly name it, and the second is to prosecute it.

United States President Donald Trump has released his 20-point “peace plan” for the Palestinian territory, which features himself as the head of a “Board of Peace” that will act as a transitional government in the enclave, just as you anticipated the prospects for the future of the Gaza Strip would start to look grim. This from the man who has been actively supporting and assisting Israel’s genocide against Palestinians since he assumed former US President Joe Biden’s office in January.

That’s not all, though. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is reportedly playing a significant governing role in the proposed transformation of Gaza, is also on board for the “Board of Peace.” In a region that is already well aware of the phenomenon, importing a Sir Tony Blair from the United Kingdom to oversee a population of Palestinians smacks rather harshly of colonialism.

Despite this, George W. Bush’s buddy and then-chief of the so-called war on terror, George W. Bush, who was in charge of the region’s notorious performance in the 2003 conflict with Iraq, and Blair himself, are already well-known in the region. Blair led the UK to a war that ended with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, earning him a deserved reputation as a war criminal after making up his mind about the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, he is not a man who should always appear on a “Board of Peace.”

And while Bush would eventually retire to a quiet life of painting portraits of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, made a name for himself as the one who could never get rid of, and while doing so, earned a pretty penny.

Blair left his position as prime minister in 2007 and was reincarnated as the Middle East envoy for the “Quartet” of international powers, which purport to work on the Israeli-Palestine conflict on an ongoing basis.

However, the appointment of an envoy with close ties to Israel, the unquestionable aggressor of the “conflict,” also effectively eliminated any progress in the “peace” movement.

Additionally, Blair’s diplomatic activities conveniently overlapped with a number of lucrative business ventures in the region, starting with JP Morgan as a part-time senior adviser in 2008 and moving to the US investment bank. Blair was reportedly paid more than $1 million annually for the latter position.

No one knew which Tony Blair they were seeing when Blair stepped down as Quartet envoy, whether it was Tony Blair the patron of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation or Tony Blair the principal of the consulting firm Tony Blair Associates, as Francis Beckett, said in a statement released in 2016 from Al Jazeera.

But they still pay off, after all. The point of conflicts of interest.

Award-winning journalist Jonathan Cook noted in a 2013 article for the Journal of Palestine Studies that Blair had little to show for his “achievements” as Quartet representative, but that “trumpet one in particular: his success in securing radio frequencies from Israel in 2009 to enable the establishment of a second Palestinian cell phone operator, Wataniya Mobile, in the West Bank.”

However, there was a catch. According to Cook, Israel gave the frequencies away in exchange for a resolution from the Palestinian leadership to drop the Israeli-led war crimes at the UN that occurred during the Israeli-led Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, which in December 2008 killed about 1,400 Palestinians in just 22 days.

What are you aware of? In addition to Wataniya, JP Morgan and other companies were all attracted to the West Bank’s potential to make a significant profit from the opening of the airwaves.

There are undoubtedly many opportunities for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to completely alter the world in order to screw up the Palestinians, which is hardly exaggeration to say that Blair will try to capitalize on his upcoming governorship of Gaza.

The “many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas… crafted by well-meaning international groups,” according to Trump’s 20-point plan, are among his main points, omitted, which magically lead to “hope for future Gaza.” After all, why should Palestinians care about having a state and not having Israel repeatedly massacre them when they can benefit from capitalism and foreign investor tyranny?

And Blair may be the face of that oppression, whose association with the Middle East’s massacre of civilians has not prevented him from being once more tapped as a regional peacemaker.

Apart from Trump and the Israelis, Blair has plenty of fans. For instance, Thomas Friedman, a fellow Orientalist and Iraq war cheerleader and former New York Times foreign affairs columnist, once praised Blair as “one of the most significant British prime ministers ever” for choosing to “throw in Britain’s lot with President Bush on the Iraq war,” defying “the overwhelming antiwar sentiment of his own party, as well as public opinion in Britain in general.”

Friedman’s admiration for Blair’s anti-democratic stoicism seemed to be dying: “He had no real support group to turn to.” Even his wife’s involvement in the Iraq War is unknown. (I am aware of the emotion!) “

Perhaps his wife should advise him to pursue painting in place of waiting for Blair and other international war criminals as Gaza’s fate continues to hang in the balance.