Executive director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth. (photo: Reuters)
Human
Rights Watch: The Empire's Human Rights Group
By Joe Emersberger, teleSUR
10 February 16
Human Rights Watch's latest World Report is filled with imperial
assumptions and misinformation.
In
its 2016 World report, Human Rights Watch shows how deeply it shares the U.S.
government’s concern about its declining influence in Latin America.
Executive
director Ken Roth does not see the U.S. and its EU allies as the most abusive
and dangerous states in the world - something the ongoing destruction of
Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan should make clear to anyone. In Latin America,
hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to U.S. backed coups and
“counterinsurgency” in the past half century – all motivated by the U.S.
government’s efforts to maintain a dominant role in the region. Last year,
brushing aside millions of victims, Roth proclaimed the
United States to be “the most powerful proponent of human rights.” He conceded
that the United States has “faults,” and added that the world is “rightly
suspicious of the U.S. government’s agenda, so Human Rights Watch is careful to
maintain our independence from U.S. foreign policy.” In fact, it exerts
negligible effort to be independent as showed by its response to a petition signed by over 100 scholars
and activists (including a few Nobel Laureates).
In an
essay that introduces the World Report, Roth harshly criticizes the U.S.
government and other powerful states, stating “a polarizing us-versus-them
rhetoric has moved from the political fringe to the mainstream. Blatant
Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees have become the currency of
an increasingly assertive politics of intolerance.”
This
is true and it’s to his credit that he wrote it. Human Rights Watch – like much
of U.S. corporate media – is a liberal institution. Like the liberal end of the
corporate media, it can point to criticism that is aimed at it from the left
and right to falsely claim that it is free of political bias. But the liberal
faction of the U.S. establishment has at least as much blood on its hands as
the right. The CIA, for example, is despised in Latin America for excellent reasons,
and it also has long recruited U.S. liberals very effectively. The renowned
feminist Gloria Steinem was a CIA agent.
She was impressed and relieved to find so many “enlightened” Kennedy era
liberals in the CIA (watch the video clip provided here). A former CIA analyst
named Miguel Díaz sat on a Human Right Watch advisory committee from 2003 to
2011 and then returned to work for the U.S. government as an “interlocutor
between the intelligence community and non-government experts.” Other examples
of a “revolving door” between Human Rights Watch and the Western establishment
were provided in that petition I mentioned.
The
shared assumptions between HRW and the liberal faction of the U.S.
establishment are more important than the shared personnel. Roth deplores some
of the abuses of world’s most powerful states in his World Report essay, but
still describes them as the “strongest traditional allies of the human rights
cause.” He fears that “as Western powers violate rights in addressing refugees
or terrorism, their ability to uphold the broader set of rights is
compromised.” It is up to western powers, in Roth’s view, to straighten out the
rest of the world, but if those powers become too conspicuously bigoted and
ruthless at home, he worries their influence may be easier to resist abroad.
Roth devotes pages to his concern that nongovernmental organizations are being
deprived of their “right to seek funding abroad when domestic sources are
unavailable.” He sees western funded NGOs as essential to strengthening
democracy in poor countries.
Roth
defines “autocrats” in his piece as not simply dictators who have “dispensed
with any pretense of democratic rule,” but also governments that maintain a
“facade of democracy” and restrict or regulate foreign funding of NGOs. Roth
calls out three Latin American governments in his essay with the clear
intention of smearing them with the “autocrat” label: Ecuador, Venezuela,
Bolivia – all left wing governments who have to contend with the threat of
coups backed by Washington. Ecuador defeated a coup attempt in 2010, Bolivia in
2008, Venezuela in 2002. The last one was briefly successful and the U.S. State
Department’s Office of Inspector General stated that the Bush administration
had "provided training, institution building, and other support to
individuals and organizations understood to be actively involved.”
It’s
obvious, just relying on Human Rights Watch’s World Report alone, that
Colombia, Mexico and Honduras - all close U.S. allies whom Roth did not mention
in his essay – have vastly worse human rights records than the three Latin
American countries he singled out. Colombia is truly in a class by itself,
surpassed only by its patron, the United States. The World Report summary for
Colombia says that “as of May 2015, the Attorney General’s Office was
investigating more than 3,700 unlawful killings allegedly committed by state
agents between 2002 and 2008.” Colombia also has “the world’s second largest
population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) after Syria” – 6.8 million
people. Colombia’s civil war was winding down before Bill Clinton’s “Plan
Colombia” pushed it into its worst period, as Dan Kovalik recently pointed out.
The
organization’s attacks on Venezuela and Ecuador have often focused on alleged
limitations on “freedom of expression.” The World Report largely sticks to that
line of attack on Ecuador and goes on at length depicting government critics as
leaving in fear, facing unreasonable media regulations, and having minimal
access to an audience. In reality, Ecuador’s media, which I have mentioned
before (here and here), gives ample voice to
very aggressive government critics. The World Report summary for Venezuela is
even more dishonest. It states, “While criticism of the government is
articulated in some newspapers and on some websites and radio stations, fear of
government reprisals has made self-censorship a serious problem” – as if there
were no TV broadcasters which are able to air criticism of government. During
the height of violent anti-government protests in February of 2014, government
critics appeared on the largest private networks (Venevision and Televen) to
accuse the government of murder, repression and theft. Given Roth’s claim that
foreign funds for NGOs are crucial to democracy in developing countries because
government critics would otherwise be voiceless, Human Rights Watch’s lies and
distortions about the media in these countries become easy to understand.
If
foreign funded NGOs offered a path toward a vibrant democracy, then Haiti would
be a democratic utopia by now. Instead, Haiti is the ultimate cautionary tale,
a lesson in how foreign funded NGOs can help crush sovereignty and democracy. The World
Report’s section on Haiti evades mentioning the U.S. perpetrated coup in 2004
that set the stage for Haiti’s current political crisis.
That coup was consolidated by U.N. troops (MINUSTAH) whom have been in Haiti
ever since and whom Human Rights Watch cynically credits with efforts to
“strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.” The World Report does not
denounce the U.N. for dismissing its responsivity for a cholera epidemic that
killed 10,000 people, nor does it mention, much less deplore, that the Obama administration urged U.S.
courts to dismiss a case against MINUSTAH brought by numerous victims.
As
usual, while finding much to say about “freedom of expression” and
“self-censorship” elsewhere, Human Rights Watch’s World Report is completely
silent about the corporate media’s role in stifling public debate in the United
States. However, if you really see western states as the “strongest traditional
allies of the human rights cause,” then you are probably as much a victim of
the West’s propaganda system as a contributor to it.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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