[Marxism] Chile,others challenge US role as judge of human rights

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Who is America to judge?
By Mark Weisbrot
The Guardian
March 11, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/11/state-departm
ent-human-rights

The US state department's annual human rights report got an unusual amount
of criticism this year. This time the centre-left coalition government of
Chile was notable in joining other countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela and
China - who have had more rocky relations with Washington - in questioning
the moral authority of the US government's judging other countries' human
rights practices.

It's a reasonable question, and the fact that more democratic governments
are asking it may signal a tipping point. Clearly a state that is
responsible for such high-profile torture and abuses as took place at Abu
Ghraib and Guanátnamo, that regularly killed civilians in Afghanistan and
Iraq and that reserved for itself the right to kidnap people and send them
to prisons in other countries to be tortured ("extraordinary rendition") has
a credibility problem on human rights issues.

Although President Barack Obama has pledged to close down the prison at
Guantánamo and outlaw torture by US officials, he has so far decided not to
abolish the practice of "extraordinary rendition", and is escalating the war
in Afghanistan. But this tipping point may go beyond any differences - and
they are quite significant - between the current administration and its
predecessor.

In the past, Washington was able to position itself as an important judge of
human rights practices despite being complicit or directly participating in
some of the worst, large-scale human rights atrocities of the post-second
world war era - in Vietnam, Indonesia, Central America and other places.
This makes no sense from a strictly logical point of view, but it could
persist primarily because the United States was judged not on how it treated
persons outside its borders but within them.

Internally, the United States has had a relatively well-developed system of
the rule of law, trial by jury, an independent judiciary and other
constitutional guarantees (although these did not extend to
African-Americans in most of the southern United States prior to the 1960s
civil rights reforms).

Washington was able to contrast these conditions with those of its main
adversary during the cold war - the Soviet Union. The powerful influence of
the United States over the international media helped ensure that this was
the primary framework under which human rights were presented to most of the
world.

The Bush administration's shredding of the constitution at home and overt
support for human rights abuses abroad has fostered not only a change in
image but perhaps the standards by which "the judge" will henceforth be
judged.

One example may help illustrate the point: China has for several years
responded to the state department's human rights report by publishing its
own report on the United States. It includes a catalogue of social ills in
the United States, including crime, prison and police abuse, racial and
gender discrimination, poverty and inequality. But the last section is
titled "On the violation of human rights in other nations".

The argument is that the abuse of people in other countries - including the
more than one million people who have been killed as a result of America's
illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq - must now be taken into account
when evaluating the human rights record of the United States.

With this criterion included, a country such as China - which does not have
a free press, democratic elections or other guarantees that western
democracies treasure - can claim that it is as qualified to judge the United
States on human rights as vice versa.

US-based human rights organisations will undoubtedly see the erosion of
Washington's credibility on these issues as a loss - and understandably so,
since the United States is still a powerful country, and they hope to use
this power to pressure other countries on human rights issues. But they too
should be careful to avoid the kind of politicisation that has earned
notoriety for the state department's annual report - which clearly
discriminates between allies and adversary countries in its evaluations.

The case of the recent Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela illustrates
the dangers of this spillover of the politicisation of human rights from the
US government to Washington-based non-governmental organisations. More than
100 scholars and academics wrote a letter complaining about the report,
arguing that it did not meet "minimal standards of scholarship,
impartiality, accuracy or credibility".

For example, the report alleges that the Venezuelan government discriminates
against political opponents in the provision of government services. But as
evidence for this charge it provides only one alleged incident involving one
person, in programmes that serve many millions of Venezuelans. Human Rights
Watch responded with a defence of its report, but the exchange of letters
indicates that HRW would have been better off acknowledging the report's
errors and prejudice, and taking corrective measures.

Independence from Washington will be increasingly important for
international human rights organisations going forward if they don't want to
suffer the same loss of international legitimacy on human rights that the US
government has. Amnesty International's report last month calling for an
arms embargo on both Israel and Hamas following Israel's assault on Gaza -
emphasising that the Obama administration should "immediately suspend US
military aid to Israel" until "there is no longer a substantial risk that
such equipment will be used for serious violations of international
humanitarian law and human rights abuses" - is a positive example.

The report's statement that "Israel's military intervention in the Gaza
Strip has been equipped to a large extent by US-supplied weapons, munitions
and military equipment paid for with US taxpayers' money" undoubtedly didn't
win friends in the US government. But this is the kind of independent
advocacy that strengthens the international credibility of human rights
groups, and it is badly needed.

=========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Havana, Cuba
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews+



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