Re: AUT: UKHelsinki Human Rights Group report on Ukraine elections

["Michael Pugliese" <michael098762001@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1362333,00.html
PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes

David Aaronovitch
Tuesday November 30, 2004
The Guardian

Whenever, as this past week, eastern Europe is on the news, so too is a
man called John Laughland. Last Sunday he was playing Ukrainian expert on
the BBC's The World This Weekend, the day before he was here in the
Guardian defending the Ukrainian election "result", and at the beginning
of the month he was writing for the Spectator - also on Ukraine.

Laughland's great strength is that he sees what no one else in the west
seems to. Where reporters in Kiev, including the Guardian's own Nick
Paton-Walsh, encounter a genuine democracy movement, Laughland comes
across "neo-Nazis" (Guardian), or "druggy skinheads from Lvov"
(Spectator). And where most observers report serious and specific
instances of electoral fraud and malpractice on the part of the supporters
of the current prime minister, Laughland complains only of a systematic
bias against (the presumably innocent) Mr Yanukovich.

A quick trawl establishes this to be the Laughland pattern over the past
few years and concerning several countries. Laughland has variously
queried the idea that human rights are a problem in Belarus, or that the
Serbs behaved so very savagely in Kosovo. He has defended Slobodan
Milosevic, criticised the International Tribunal in the Hague and
generally argued that the problem in countries normally associated with
human rights abuses is, in fact, the intervention of western agencies.

It was the British Helsinki Human Rights Group hat that he was wearing
last Sunday. On its website the BHHRG - of which Laughland is a trustee -
describes itself as a non-governmental organisation which monitors human
rights in the 57 member states of the Organisation for Security and
Co-operation in Europe. Laughland is listed as a trustee, the historian
Mark Almond (to be found writing about the Ukraine in last week's New
Statesman) is its chairman.

Founded in 1992, the BHHRG sends observers to elections and writes reports
which - along Laughlandish lines - almost invariably dispute the accounts
given by better known human rights organisations. This stance has led to
the BHHRG being criticised by the International Helsinki Federation for
Human Rights (established in 1976) as preferring "the role [is to take] PR
flak for a new breed of authoritarian rulers in Europe" to the business of
actually monitoring abuses.

So what on earth is going on here? I know nothing about BHHRG's finances,
but the ideological trail is fascinating. Take the co-founder of the
group, Christine Stone. She was a lawyer before she helped set up BHHRG.
Since then she has "written for a number of publications including the
Spectator and Wall Street Journal on eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union".

This information comes from a US website called Antiwar.com where, for a
while, Stone had a regular Thursday column. But Antiwar.com was not a
leftwing site opposing the Iraq war. It was a rightwing site set up to
oppose the Kosovo intervention in 1999. Its "editorial director" was a man
called Justin Raimondo who was active in the small US Libertarian party
before joining the Republican party. In the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections
he supported the campaigns of Pat Buchanan, the far-right isolationist
candidate.

Raimondo is also an "adjunct scholar" with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
This is a libertarian think-tank in Auburn, Alabama, founded by one Lew
Rockwell, who describes himself as "an opponent of the central state, its
wars and its socialism". A contributor to Rockwell's own site is Daniel
McAdams, who is - in his own words "honoured to be associated" with the
British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

Trail 2. Laughland is also European Director of the European Foundation
(patron, Mrs M Thatcher), which - judging by its website - seems to spend
most of its time and energy sending out pamphlets by arch-Europhobe Bill
Cash. A synopsis of one of Laughland's own books, however, notes his
argument that, "Post-national structures ... and supranational
organisations such as the European Union - are ... corrosive of liberal
values (and) the author shows the ideology as a crucial core of Nazi
economic and political thinking."

Beginning to get the picture now? Trail 3 leads us to Sanders Research
Associates, a "risk consultancy" for which Laughland is, according to
their website, "a regular contributor" and to which companies can
subscribe for information and advice. The "principal" is a Chris Sanders.
The kind of steer Sanders gives his customers can be adduced from this
report on the morning of the US presidential election. "We will be very
surprised," he wrote, "if on Wednesday John Kerry has not won a clear
majority of electoral college votes and that his supporters are not
nursing substantial post vote celebration hangovers, if not still drinking
the champagne."

Lots of people got that one wrong, and some blamed their own judgment. Not
Sanders. "Our bet," he says following the results, "is that we will soon
be adding an investigation into the biggest vote fraud in history.'"

Sanders, it seems, is not beyond the odd bit of conspiracising. In a
bulletin from June 2002 he also has something to suggest about the Twin
Towers atrocity. "It was obvious then, and it is obvious now," he writes,
"that something besides the brilliance of a band of terrorists or the
incompetence of America's security apparatus was responsible for the
disaster of 9/11." But he doesn't tell us what that "something" was.

Sanders on America and Laughland on Ukraine, however, are not the most
amazing features of Sanders Research Associates. That distinction belongs
to the report on Rwanda written for Sanders by a Canadian lawyer named
Chris Black. Black is the only person I have ever seen putting the word
genocide in quotation marks when applied to Rwanda. Rwanda, you see, was
all the US's fault, and wasn't carried out by Hutus in any case. It was
all got up to justify US intervention in the region. He condemns the
"demonising (of) the Hutu leadership".

Since 2000 Black has been the lead counsel representing General Augustin
Ndindiliyimana, chief of staff of the Rwandan gendarmerie, at the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He is also chair of the legal
committee for the international committee for the defence of Slobodan
Milosevic. Last year (though not for Sanders) Black went on a delegation
to North Korea. The report he wrote on his return is full of references to
happy peasants, committed soldiers and delightful guides. The North Korean
system, he suggested, being "participatory", was in many ways more
democratic than parliamentary systems in the west.

This is weird company. And what we seem to have in Laughland and his
associates is a group of right-wing anti-state libertarians and
isolationists, suspicious of any foreign entanglements, who have somehow
morphed into apologists for the worst regimes and most appalling dictators
on the planet.

And where does it all end up? A couple of weeks ago Sanders commended to
his clients "John Laughland's series of articles [showing that] the attack
on Iraq is just the southern offensive of a larger campaign to tighten the
noose on Russia." And he continued, "What is less well understood are the
risks that the unravelling political compact in Israel poses for the
United States and Great Britain, whose political processes, intelligence
services, military, media and financial establishments are so thoroughly
enmeshed with Israel's."

Read that last sentence again and then ask yourself: in what way are
Britain's media and financial interests "thoroughly enmeshed" with
Israel's?

--
Michael Pugliese


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