Posted on 09/22/2004 7:22:04 AM PDT by dead
LONDON, Sep 21 (IPS) - The first visit by an Amnesty International team to Darfur over the last several days showed that the U.S. human rights record has weakened its case to intervene in a human rights crisis elsewhere.
''It has made it much harder for the U.S. to take on its self-described role as human rights leader,'' executive director for Amnesty International U.S. Bill Schulz told IPS.
Schulz, who returned from a visit to Darfur Tuesday as a member of an Amnesty team said the visit showed that ''the U.S. loses an effective voice as a moral force in the world because of a blotched record of its own''.
He said that in about a third of all conversations with Sudanese government officials, they had brought up one or other element of the U.S. human rights record.
The U.S. record had been raised by officials to ''justify their own ill-advised practices'', Schulz told media representatives earlier. But this showed that ''if you commit human rights abuses yourself, you hand fodder to others to justify their deviations''.
Sudanese officials had raised issues such as the detentions in Guantanamo Bay and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Schulz said.
The United States now needs to prove its credentials by doing more than passing resolutions and threatening sanctions, he said. It needs to provide hundreds of millions of dollars so that 1.2 million people can be helped to return to safety and rebuild their lives.
This is not the first shadow over human rights caste by the United States.
''The so-called war on terror, the way it is being implemented by restricting civil liberties has had an enormous impact on our work and that of human rights organisations,'' Amnesty International director-general Irene Khan told IPS.
Sudan is not the first country to say that its record is no worse than what the United States is doing, Khan said. ''We've heard this from many countries, in Asia, in Africa.''
On the other hand the United States is not the only government to apply double standards to human rights, Khan said. ''The Sudan government wants to make this an easy let-out, but they have to stand by their own record.''
The Amnesty delegation says Darfur presented a picture of distress of people whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed, denial of responsibility by the Sudanese government, and disappointment at the slow progress to resolve the crisis.
In ways it could be getting worse. ''This situation has now continued for a long period,'' Khan told IPS. People in camps are getting only about 45 percent of their food needs, and so ''people are getting hungrier and hungrier, and their resistance is wearying down''.
The problem is not so much in the pipeline as in the logistics of reaching the food to people. ''In an area without an inch of tarmac where even an airfield is just sand, feeding 1.2 million people in camps is going to be a humanitarian nightmare.''
Tensions are building up within camps, she said. ''Men cannot venture out of camps and in the confinement anger is building up,'' she said. In a couple of cases officials providing humanitarian relief had been attacked.
Abandonment of homes meant that nomadic groups had moved into some areas, and the demographic pattern was changing as a result, she said, leading to more tension.
''There is a practical crisis about to explode into a catastrophe,'' Khan said. ''People are still being raped and killed and pushed out of their villages.''
The Amnesty team reported that officials continue to deny any government responsibility for the violence.
One minister had said simply that Muslim men do not rape, Khan said. He had suggested that stories of rape could have arisen because the Arabic word for rape sounds like another that means 'forced robbery'. One official said the West had picked up on the 'Janaweed' because the word was musical and easy to say.
The government had shown reports on television of action taken, Khan said. But many of these turned out to be common criminal cases such as embezzlement. Of the two rape cases cited, one was a case of adultery, and in the second there was an acquittal.
Just before they departed, Sudanese officials gave the Amnesty team another list of cases where they claimed action had been taken. Amnesty members said these claims have not been verified.
(END/2004)
A little about the doctor:
Dr. William F. Schulz was appointed Executive Director of Amnesty International (USA) in March 1994. An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, he came to Amnesty after serving for fifteen years with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), the last eight (1985-93) as President of the Association.
Dr. Schulz has served on the boards of People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Communitarian Network and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, among others.
Throughout his career he has been outspoken in his opposition to the death penalty and his support for women's rights, gay and lesbian rights and racial justice, having organized, participated in demonstrations and written extensively on behalf of all four causes.
And this from Publisher’s Weekly about his latest book, Tainted Legacy:
Abusive interrogations, suspension of habeas corpus, secret tribunals: these are the kinds of human rights violations we associate with totalitarian governments abroad. But, according to Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, these violations have become common in the U.S. since it began its war on terror. Schulz is supremely well placed to argue for the importance of respecting human rights while we fight terror-indeed, he asserts, respecting human rights "both at home and abroad, actually makes terrorism less likely to succeed." European countries, for instance, have refused to extradite terror suspects to the U.S. because they might face the death penalty here.
liberation = genocide? What is this dink smoking?
In Sudan, they nail babies to trees while their mothers watch, they sell their people as slaves to rich arabs, they level villages to take oil fields and this is somehow the equivalent of Guantanamo? And Abu Gharib?
Of course it is, but we can send a few hundred million dollars to make it right.
A rhetorical question: Who in their right mind would give a flying fig what this nitwit thinks or says?
rddb
You have to be joking!!! Genocide absolutely in NO WAY compares to the detention of possible combatants or the stupid, immature pranks of a handful of soldiers.
The UN is failing on the Sudanese issue, just as they failed on the Iraq issue.
BTW, what has Kerry had to say about Sudan? Surely his African-American wife Teh-RAY-zuh must be concerned about what is going on there?
If IA is so up in arms about America's human rights record, why do IA or like-minded orgs demand the US intervene in bad places to support human rights?
IA=AI
Um, which = Amnesty Interntional.
So, lunch then?
That guy has all the leftie credentials you'd need to become head of an NGO, including leadership in the Church Of Nuclear Disarmament, otherwise known as the Unitarians.
Despots are always going to attack the records of those who call them to account.
It made more sense in Goering's case. To compare detention of combatants and thetreatment, albeit humiliating, of terrorists in Abu Gharib with what is ocurring daily in and around Darfur is the height of cultural and moral relativism.
At his defense goering could point to Hamburg and Dresden, and even the bombings of france prior to D Day which took some 100,000 French lives. Here the Amnesty people are equating dog collars wit hmurder on grand scales. Unfortunately there can be no arguing with these people since the average attention span of a western adult is not long enough to successfully explain the differences between Darfur and Gitmo.
Got as far as 'Abu-Ghraib' and hung up. Panties on the head=genocide. These people are idiots.
Amnesty International U.S can go staright to hell; they're nothing more than another PETA organization.
Hey, AI -- KMA!
Where and who does the money go too?
Amnesty International and the UN, naturally.
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