Losing Friends and Allies
A Human Rights Watch report takes the United States to task for human rights abuses. An interview with the organization’s director
By Karen Fragala
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
msnbc.com
Jan. 18 — In the days following September 11, sympathy and support for the United Staes flooded in from around the globe—even old nemeses like Cuba and Libya weighed in with condolences. But a new report issued by Human Rights Watch, says the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other controversies have caused global support for the war on terror to deteriorate sharply. In particular, the Human Rights Watch report cites the U.S. military policy of detaining suspects indefinitely without charging them or providing access to counsel.
THE HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH report will gain attention at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum next week in Davos, Switzerland, where global leaders meet to strategize about solutions to the world’s biggest problems. The theme this year: restoring the public’s trust in social institutions. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch will be a speaker at the forum. He spoke to Newsweek’s Karen Fragala about the report and his expectations for Davos.
Newsweek: In times of war or after events like on September 11, is a certain amount of compromise on civil liberties necessary, both on behalf of governments and the people, in the interest of security?
Kenneth Roth
Kenneth Roth: There is a tendency to look at rights and security as if it were a zero-sum-game, that greater security requires fewer rights. One of the important points we were trying to make with our report is that it’s dangerous to look at the problem that way. The Bush administration’s failure to pay adequate attention to human rights is hurting the war on terrorism by driving away the allies the United States needs to effectively defeat terrorism. The United States, as powerful as it is, cannot defeat terrorism alone. It needs the support in the countries where terrorism resides because they’re the people who have to cooperate with law-enforcement, they’re the ones who have to be on the front line of dissuading would-be terrorists. And if they see the United States backing oppressive governments, they are going to be much less likely to cooperate. We are going to drive them into the hands of the terrorists rather than enlist them in a fight.
In countries such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, the Unites States has been criticized for not speaking up against the regimes in certain cases, but as you said, we do need the cooperation of those governments. How can the United States retain these valuable relationships without condoning unjust behavior?
The key is to not allow military cooperation to become a reason for being an apologist for a government’s abuses. And Pakistan is a perfect example of that. Rather than the Bush administration saying that this is a military alliance of necessity, but we are going to be strong proponents of a return to democratic rule in Pakistan, President Bush, when he was asked about [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf’s new five-year, self-appointed term, the increasing militarization of Pakistani society, the creation of a national security council that would trump civilian institutions, he dismissed all this, and said that he is tight with us on the war on terrorism, and that’s what matters to us. That’s disastrous. It signals to the Pakistani people that President Bush is indifferent to their plight.
The terror war is unlike any prolonged fight the United States has waged in the past; it’s not against a particular nation, but rather a war on individual groups. Do the guidelines and definitions in the Geneva Convention need to be re-worked given this different style of conflict?
I think that the Geneva Conventions are largely adequate for dealing with the war on terror. The problem is the Bush administration has just refused to apply them. The Geneva Conventions do not impose a significant restraint on the effective combatant of terror. To give you an example, with respect to the Guantanamo detainees, the Geneva conventions require that a competent tribunal be established to decide who is a prisoner of war and who isn’t. The likely result is that the Taliban detainees, who are basically low-level Afghan soldiers, would be found to be prisoners of war. The real Al Qaeda operatives would not be. There would be no impediment toward prosecuting anyone who was involved in war crimes or terrorism. There would be no restriction on interrogation, short of the ones that exist now—you can’t torture people anyway, but you can question them about anything you want. So the Bush administration is saying is that we’re going to ignore human right for our purposes, but we want the terrorists to respect human rights. To be smart in fighting terrorism, he needs to be scrupulous in upholding the law that explains what’s wrong with terrorism, and he hasn’t done that.
What additional privileges would be afforded prisoners who are designated as POWs?
Under the rule of war, you have to repatriate POWs when the war is over, and let the home country deal with them. And the war with Afghanistan is over. It’s been over since Hamid Karzai went into power. There is no longer legal justification to be holding the Taliban detainees. Al Qaeda [prisoners] are obviously a different matter. There is an ongoing war against Al Qaeda.
Why is the Bush administration digging its heels in about the POW designation—is there any sort of justification for this?
They seem to have some kind of emotional reaction, that we don’t want to dignify the terrorists by saying that the Geneva Convention applies to them. But you can’t really have it both ways. You can’t declare war on Al Qaeda, and then not apply the laws that apply in war. When we talk to the White House about this, the officials strain and groan to try to justify the unjustifiable and end up saying, well the president decided this. So , let’s dispense with logic, let’s dispense with legal thinking, and we’ll just defer to the guy who happens to be in the Oval Office who is in no sense an expert on these issues.
Can it be argued that the U.S. Department of Justice has reason to exercise caution in revealing the names of detainees for security purposes, to avoid future terror acts by their supporters—in other words hijacking an airplane to get them set free?
The argument that detainees need to be held incommunicado because somehow they’re going to send secret, predetermined messages to their co-conspirators has been brought to such an absurd extreme. To give you an example, Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber, is at best a low-level Al Qaeda operative who has been sitting in prison now for eight months or something. The Bush administration is opposing efforts by his lawyers to see him on the grounds that some secret signal might be sent out. It’s almost absurd to think that eight months later that there is any kind of signal that is going to have any kind of operative effect at this stage. That’s the rationale that the Bush administration is putting forward, and when they do that, they utterly discredit the government. It makes it seem that they are just denying people their rights for its own sake without any reasonable legitimacy. And that’s what gets the rest of the world perturbed. They say, ‘What is the United States doing enlisting us to fight terror, when they are so willing to rip up the basic legal rights that explain what is wrong with terrorism?’
What would it take to rehabilitate the U.S. record on human rights, and what would it take to regain the respect needed to hold other countries to a higher standard?
We said explicitly [in the 2003 report] that we’re not focusing on the Unites States because it is the worst offender—far from it— we are focusing on the United States because it is then most influential. And when the United States breaches human-rights standards, it encourages a copy-cat phenomenon every place else. We say with tremendous regret that the United States is so willing to compromise human rights because historically the United States has been an important leader in promoting human rights around the world. So if we lose the United States as a strong voice for human rights, the human rights worldwide cause is lost. With this in mind, we want to highlight to the administration the ramifications of its neglect of human rights. Not only in terms of the damage it’s doing to the campaign against terrorism, but also the damage it’s doing to the human rights cause in general. I don’t think this is an irreversible problem, but it is an acute problem. And what it’s going to take is for President Bush himself to reaffirm the importance of human rights essential to the war on terrorism.
How do you think the U.S. government representatives such as John Ashcroft will be received at Davos? Will they be held accountable for the issues raised in your report?
Obviously, you’re always going to find resentment of a super power, but in the countries that really matter in fighting terror—Indonesia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey—their attitudes toward the United States have plummeted. Part of it is because of U.S. policy toward Israel, and part of it is U.S. indifference to human rights and the perception that the United States is siding with oppressive governments in the region at the expense of the people. It is a problem that Washington needs to address, not just for some idealistic reasons, but for very pragmatic reasons in defeating terrorism.
To what extent are there economic solutions that can assist in gaining the favor of people in countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia?
Obviously, commercial investment and the production of jobs are all useful things to do, but they will never substitute for concerted efforts to overcome repressive regimes. It won’t be enough for the Unites States to say ‘;well we’re helping to make you a richer society, but we’re still going to side with the oppressive government.’ That won’t do a thing in winning friends and allies. |
