Advocates fear Sept. 11 signals death of rights era
LINDA DIEBEL
STAFF WRITER
These are dark days for human rights. So bleak we could be witnessing, as some
suggest, the death of the human rights era, as everything falls away before the
war on terrorism. This year, Michael Ignatieff, human rights professor at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government, sounded the alarm. "Since the end of the Cold War,
human rights has become the dominant moral vocabulary in foreign affairs," he
wrote. "The question after Sept. 11 is whether the era of human rights has come
and gone."
Ignatieff argues that the benchmark of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the
terrorist bombings has become which assets, including "bases, intelligence and
diplomatic leverage" a country can bring to bear against Al Qaeda. Nothing else
counts, and certainly not a particular government's record on human rights. Sadly,
Ignatieff's assessment appears to be true. Ask human rights leaders which issues
merit public concern and they cite, among many others, atrocities in Colombia,
Burundi and Haiti, repression by Russian forces in Chechnya, and Chinese strikes
against the Muslim population in the western province of Xinjiang. They talk about
hunger, disease, infant mortality and such grim statistics as the U.K.-based Save
The Children's findings that poverty claims the lives of 30,000 children every
day. They talk about an AIDS epidemic that infects an estimated 42 million worldwide
and, in a macabre twist, worsens famines in southern Africa because people are
dying instead of planting seeds and tilling the soil.
But these stories often don't even make the news. Instead, the media largely reflect
the priorities of the world's most powerful nation. And, in the United States
these days, there is only one pressing policy issue. "Everything is seen through
the prism of the war on terrorism," says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human
Rights Watch, based in Washington and respected for its gritty, hands-on research.
"The phenomenon of Iraq is part and parcel of that. Human rights issues are not
only being neglected, they are being actively subordinated." Roth says that includes
abuses incurred during Russian military manoeuvres in Chechnya, Chinese crackdowns
on so-called "splittists" among ethnic Uighurs and authoritarian excesses in the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These countries have U.N. Security Council votes or other
geopolitical prizes important to a U.S. administration primed to go to war against
Iraq's Saddam Hussein, apparently early in the new year.
"We're not hearing a lot about repression in Chechnya these days," says Roth.
"The government is busy trying to curry favour with certaincountries in order
to form alliances against Iraq. It's virtually impossible to get anyone's attention
on their human rights abuses." One little-noticed Human Rights Watch report, for
example, documented recent torture, disappearances and extra-judicial executions
in Chechnya, where the Russian government cites "terrorism" to justify repressive
campaigns
against the largely Muslim population. In 2001, 60 people, dead of gunshot wounds,
their hands tied, were found in a mass grave in the village of Dachny, near a
Russian army base. At least 13 of the dead were last seen alive when they were
taken by Russian security forces. Roth talks about "forgotten countries" like
the Democratic Republic of Congo, which rarely makes headlines despite an estimated
2.5 million deaths in four years of civil war. Or neighbouring Burundi, where
Roth
cites "the genuine threat of renewed genocide" in another civil war that has turned
half a million children into refugees over nine years.
Writing for the New York Times, Ignatieff argued that the threat is worse than
during the Cold War era when the importance of countering Soviet and Chinese imperialism
"trumped concern for the abuses of authoritarian governments in the Western camp."
A series of "Dirty Wars" claimed thousands of lives across the
hemisphere, in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala
and El Salvador - all allies of the West, and therefore immune to criticism from
Washington. A counter-argument can be made, of course, that things have always
been bad, that humankind is slow to address injustice, easily diverted and enthralled
- from afar - by the drama of war. And this upcoming war, in its own morbid way,
promises to be particularly entertaining. The Pentagon's promised media accessibility
likely means video-game quality footage to be aired nightly in a seemingly surreal
semblance of war, a reality-TV competitor to Survivor.
But it is worse now, insists Alex Neve, director of Amnesty International Canada.
Not only is the situation critical internationally, there is a particularly chilling
human dimension at home. "The government argues that if you want to live in a
secure world, you are going to have to give up human rights," he says. "And large
segments of the population are accepting that you can't have both. People are
showing a willingness to give up on their own rights. "And so," he asks, "if you
are living in a world where people believe their own rights aren't so important,
how can they care about the rights of their neighbours or about someone halfway
around the world?"
Neve says rights have been whittled away, both in the United States and Canada,
by new security laws that increase the powers of law enforcement, ease restrictions
on wire-tapping and electronic surveillance and curtail immigrant rights. At the
international level, he says governments use the threat of terrorism to "intensify
patterns
of persecution" that existed long before Sept. 11. "They are able to easily disguise
long-standing campaigns to go after political opponents or attack an ethnic or
religious minority. Suddenly, they gain a new sense of legitimacy by injecting
the notion that they are fighting terrorism."
Neve points to blood-soaked Colombia where President Alvaro Uribe claims to be
fighting terrorism by intensifying military conflicts in which civilians, as always
in Colombia, pay the dearest price. Adding to the deadly mix is the recent decision
by the U.S. Congress to lift restrictions on military aid to Colombia. Neve says
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe also has become "adept at using the language of fighting
terrorism" to justify attacks on his political enemies, including the minority
white population he calls "enemies of the people."
At the United Nations in September, U.S. President George W. Bush played the human
rights card, describing Saddam's "extremely grave violations" and using information
long cited by rights agencies. But consider the irony in human rights being touted
among the reasons for this war, given what has happened in other places where
the United States intervened in recent years. Remember Panama? The unofficial
civilian death toll from the 1989 invasion to oust former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega
stands at 4,000. In Haiti, a planned U.S. military invasion in 1994 became a peaceful
takeover when government leaders essentially accepted a buyout. Much was promised
to the people of Haiti but, almost a decade later, the World Bank found an "overwhelming
majority of (the population) living in deplorable conditions of extreme poverty."
Then, there's Nicaragua, the now-forgotten country that once dominated the U.S.
foreign agenda to the point that then-president
Ronald Reagan denounced its "communist tyranny" and his officials illegally armed
Nicaraguan rebels. Eventually, the government fell, as Washington wanted, though
not by arms. What happened? Nicaragua continues to be poor, with widespread malnutrition.
Twenty per cent of its children under 5 are chronically malnourished or "stunted,"
as poverty reports put it. "Hurricane Mitch did not significantly change Nicaragua's
overall poverty profile," says a recent World Bank report on the 1998 hurricane.
"Hurricane Mitch had a terrible human impact as 3,000 persons died and 870,000
were displaced, at least temporarily. Nevertheless, post- Mitch poverty levels
broadly remained the same at the national, urban and rural levels." That's how
bad it is in Nicaragua. Even a hurricane that can flop a country around like a
dishrag can't do much in the way of long-term damage.
"We've always faced dramatic challenges," says Amnesty International's Neve. "But
what Sept. 11 has brought us is a challenge to the notion that human rights must
be central to the international order. That's where we have to take our firmest
stand ever." It's Ignatieff's argument as well. He says the rights movement
itself is at risk. "In the Reagan years, the movement merely risked being unpopular.
In the Bush era, it risks irrelevance," he wrote for the New York Times.
Perhaps it has begun. Recently, Roth snagged a meeting with Paul Wolfowitz, deputy
defence secretary and a significant player in the Bush administration. He was
part of the Pentagon strategy group for the Gulf War under Bush's father in 1991
and now belongs to the inner circle planning the second round in the war to depose
Saddam. The meeting offered a precious opportunity for Roth to hammer home his
agency's dossier of human rights violations among U.S. allies. Or he could have
focused on the nightmares of Haiti, Colombia or a host of other countries. Instead,
he talked mainly about fears of an impending civilian human rights crisis in a
war with Iraq. The Pentagon wants to talk about Iraq. He also raised continuing
security concerns about Afghanistan where, more than a year after the U.S.-led
campaign to topple the Taliban, warlords still control much of the country. The
meeting tells the story. Human Rights Watch is one of world's most influential
voices for human rights. And yet, in a meeting initiated by its director, the
agenda is tacitly dictated by Wolfowitz, and it's no secret what's on his mind.
Perhaps that's being too hard on
Roth. He's on the front lines. He chooses his moments. There will be others and,
besides, he believes the Bush team is coming around. "They listen to us," he says,
"because they are beginning to understand the war on terrorism is being hurt by
indifference to human rights." Maybe so.
But then, what does human rights mean to the Pentagon? In Afghanistan last year,
it meant dropping food packages during bombing runs. Only problem was ? and this
is not some sicko Saturday Night Live skit - it dropped yellow food packages that
perfectly matched cluster bombs wrapped in the same bright yellow, with little
white umbrellas especially attractive to children. Human Rights Watch urged the
Pentagon to stop dropping 450-kilogram cluster bombs, each containing 202
bomblets the size of grenades that turn into individual anti-personnel devices
of splintering steel upon impact. The Pentagon listened. It ordered warplanes
to drop flyers with pictures in the appropriate language showing the difference
between a food packet and a cluster bomb. And it changed the colour of the food
packages to blue.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited