U.S. behavior said to weaken support for terror war
[Human Rights Watch seems to agree with me that the Bush administration's lack of respect for human rights and international treaties in their "crusade" is helping the other side.]
Joel Brinkley
The New York Times
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
WASHINGTON International support for the war on terrorism is weakening because of human rights abuses by the United States, Human Rights Watch said in a report published Tuesday.
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The report, the group's annual survey of human rights issues worldwide, cited the Bush administration's detention of enemy combatants without formal charge or access to lawyers, closed-door deportation hearings of terrorist suspects and its treatment of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, among other examples.
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"The United States is far from the worst human rights abuser," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, a private advocacy group. "But Washington has so much power today that when it flouts human rights standards it damages human rights causes worldwide."
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The White House declined to respond to a request for reaction to the report.
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The report also lists other countries who have slacked off on their commitment to human rights and asserts that, in many cases, they have used America's recent behavior as an excuse for such slacking. But the evidence cited for the main assertion - that support for the war on terrorism is slackening - is indirect at best.
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Tom Malinowski, a director in the group's Washington office, discussed last year's elections in Pakistan in which Pervez Musharraf won.
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"The radical anti-American party gained huge support in part, we assert, because Musharraf repressed the moderate center, and the United States did not call him on it," he said. The organization cites that example and others in support of its conclusion.
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"To fight terrorism, you need the support of the people in countries where terrorists live," Roth said. "Cozying up to oppressive governments is hardly a way to build those alliances."
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The report says: "From its rejection of the Geneva Conventions to its misuse of the 'enemy combatant' designation, from its threatened use of substandard military commissions to its misuse of immigration laws to deny criminal suspects their rights, Washington has waged war on terrorism as if human rights were not a constraint."
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What is more, the report adds, Washington said little about human rights abuses committed by its allies, including Russia, Israel and Malaysia.
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"The overriding message sent by these U.S. bilateral actions," the report says, "is that human rights are dispensable in the name of fighting terrorism."
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And the result, the report adds, has been to breed a "copycat phenomenon." "By waving the anti-terrorism banner, governments such as Uzbekistan seemed to feel that they had license to persecute religious dissenters, while governments such as Russia, Israel, and China seemed to feel freer to intensify repression in Chechnya, the West Bank, and Xinjiang."
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It concludes that "if the U.S. campaign against terrorism reinforces that repression, it risks breeding more terrorists as it alienates would-be allies in the fight against terrorism." |
