Opinion:

US Human Rights Report a face-saving strategy

by Jinasiri Pathirana

The ‘so-called’ Human Rights Report on Sri Lanka, a massive 200-page document, released by the US State Department refers to unlawful and politically motivated killings, assassinations, disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detention, corruption and discrimination against minorities, and several such other issues.

In other words, the US State Department gives us the message that our Government and we Sri Lankans are a set of criminals perpetrating all those crimes and that we should behave like them, who do not commit - nay, who have never ever heard about even - any of those atrocities.

Analysing the report, one would think that the US is holier than the holiest, where none of those offences take place and no American has ever been responsible for such acts within or outside the US. But is that the truth?

We do not say that Sri Lanka, confronted with terrorism for nearly 25 years now and subjected to planned international inferences, is a saint. But we are certainly not what the State Department calls us.

In the villages of Sri Lanka, we use an adage, which will help the future of the US State Department, if they could learn it. Our rural folks say ‘Some people do not see the rafter in their own eyes, but they see the little hair in the eye of the other person’.

Let us look at the US context of the very allegations they make against us. We also go by reliable reports we read about the US.

For example, take the case of one of the most respected medical journals of the world - the Western Medical Journal. It once said that well over 600,000 innocent children, women and men were killed by US soldiers in Iraq.

That was nearly a year ago. But now it is much more. In Sri Lanka, kinds if minor HR violations may have taken place. But that is within the shores of Sri Lanka itself to resolve its own problems, unlike the US aggression and devastation on Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq by US troops is considered by many HR experts as the biggest HR tragedy and the greatest humanitarian disaster in the modern world. It has later been reported that since the US invasion in 2003, over 660,000 Iraqis have died of which 99 percent were civilians.

The Los Angeles Times, however, reported the death toll exceeded one million. UNICEF revealed that about one million Iraqis were homeless and half of them were children.

Continued massacre

Jointly designed and conducted by researchers at the John Hopkins University, Columbia University (both in the US), and the Al-Mustansiriya University of Baghdad, a survey shows that the majority of the additional, unnatural deaths since the invasion of Iraq were caused by violence, while air strikes of the US and its coalition forces were the main factor for the violence-caused deaths.

They are continuing the massacre on the innocent civilians still, while preaching HR to Sri Lanka. Are they not the HR violations of the most disgraceful nature?

Let us take the case of Afghanistan, where US troops killed many hundreds of innocent civilians in the anti-terrorism war. The Washington Post (May, 2007) reported that 51 civilians were killed by US soldiers on one single week.

An HR group in Afghanistan reported that a UN Marine Unit fired indiscriminately at pedestrians, people in buses, cars and taxis along a 10-mile stretch road in Nangahar Province in March 2007, killing 12 civilians, including one infant and three elders and causing serious injuries to hundreds.

Altogether over 15,000 civilians were killed and what is worse is that hundreds of prisoners in Qala-i-Jhangifort were massacred by the US soldiers, and the attacks continue, still seeking to ‘prevent terrorism’, as if what the US troops perpetrate in Afghanistan is not absolute terrorism.

Racial (‘ethnic’ to us in Sri Lanka) discrimination is deeply rooted in the US, according to a report of the International Office of the China State Council released in 2005.

It answers the US HR Report on China, with China’s own report on the HR situation in the US, after an in-depth study about the HR conditions in the US. Black people and other minor groups live in the bottom line of the American Society, showing utter discrimination. Coloured people are generally poor.

The Guardian of Britain in 2004 said that the net assets of a white family were 15 times more than that of a family of African ancestry. The poverty rate among blacks was 24.3 percent where as that of whites was 8.2 percent.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans, racially discriminatory evacuations and discriminatory policies in the hurricane aftermath restricted the rights of the affected black people to vote, ability to participate in the rebuilding process and access to basic necessities.

Racial prejudice

Racial prejudice is ubiquitous in the field of judiciary in the US. The proportion of persons of coloured races being sentenced or being imprisoned is notably higher than whites.

The US Department of Justice report on November 2004 states that coloured races accounted for over 70 percent of prison inmates in the US. Blacks are seven times more likely than whites to be incarcerated, according to the Annual Report for 2007 released by the National Urban League of the US. Incidentally, the US has the world’s largest prison, as well as the highest inmate/population ratio.

This is proved by the statistics of the US Department of Justice, which says that the number of persons in the US prisons have increased by 500 percent over the past 30 years both of which are the virtues of HR, are being increasingly marginalized in the so-called paradise of freedom, disrespecting even the all famous Statue of Liberty.

It also revealed that the rates of women and children physically or sexually victimised were very high.

According to FBI Crime Statistics of 2003, the US witnessed 93,233 cases of rape - 63.2 in every 100,000 women fell victims.

Every year about 400,000 children in the US were forced to engage in prostitution or other sexual dealings on the streets. Women account for 51 percent of the US population, but only 86 women serve the 110th US Congress with 435 seats, and 16 women in the 100 member Senate.

In one example of child labour in a city in the US, over 300,000 children worked as hired labourers on commercial farms, frequently under dangerous and grueling conditions, working 12-hour a day, sometimes beginning at 3.00 or 4.00 am each day. They worked for little pay and risked pesticide poisoning, heat, illnesses, injuries and life-long disabilities.

Statistics of the US Department of Justice show some 100,000 to three million US children under the age of 18 are involved in prostitution. Another report of the FBI says that as high as 40 percent of the forced prostitution are minors.

According to the year 2006 report of the US Department of Agriculture, 12.63 million children were a part of the 35.5 million people who went hungry in that year in the US.

A survey by the United Nations on 21 rich countries of the world, clearly showed that although the US is among the world’s richest nations, it ranked only 20th in the overall well-being of the children.

In a country where HR is well protected and respected, crimes must always be on a low key. But in a total contrast, the FBI has reported that 1.41 million violent crimes have taken place nationwide in the US in 2006.

This is an increase of 1.9 percent over 2005 - another indicator that in the US, violation of HR is also annually on the increase.

According to FBI released crime statistics, one violent crime was committed every 22.2 seconds; a murder every 30.9 minutes; a rape every 5.7 minutes; a robbery every 1.2 minutes; and an aggravated assault every 36.6 seconds.

Amnesty International, in its report for the year 2000, states in no uncertain terms that the US leads the rest of the countries of the world in HR violations after 9/11 incidents.

It clearly indicates that trading HR for security reasons is not done by autocratic regimes, but by established democracies, and US is heading the list. The Report continues to tell us more about this self appointed HR Policeman. After 9/11, 1,200 foreigners were detained, some of them incommunicado.

Muslim detainees suffered physical and verbal abuse from guards and other inmates, while they were held in local jails to face cruel conditions of confinement, inadequate exercise and the wearing of shackles during contact visits. The Report emphasised the fact that anti-terrorist legislations of the US severely curtail HR and civil liberties.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is the largest HR organisation dedicated to protecting the HR of the people around the world. It is based in the US. In its report for the year 2001, HRW pointed out that as in the previous years, serious HR violations were most apparent in the criminal justice system of the US.

They included police brutality, discriminatory racial disparities in incarceration, abusive conditions of confinement and state-sponsored executions, even of juvenile offenders and the mentally handicapped, as major areas of HR violations.

Thousands harassed

HRW also reported that each year thousands of workers in the US are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimised by employers in reprisal for the exercise of their right to freedom of association.

Millions of workers, including farm workers, household domestic workers, and low level supervisors were expressly excluded from protection under the law guaranteeing the right of workers to organise.

This is indeed the condition today in regard to the status of workers in the US, the country which introduced to the world the concept of the Workers Day, which we call the May Day, through the workers in Chicago.

In a 465-page story published in July 2006, by the RAW, a coalition of 142 US based non-profit organisations and 32 professionals, the following passage drew the attention and the concern of many an HR expert around the world:

Although the US prides itself on being an advocate of HR, unfortunately the Bush administration’s slow response in submitting its own HR record is yet another example of how they ‘talk the talk’ but refuse to ‘walk the walk’.

The above is only a minute fraction of the long and most unethical history of the HR violations by the US Government, which claims itself to be the paragon of HR and Democracy.

It is high time for the US State Department to gather some courage and clear its own backyard congested with own HR problems, and put a stop to practicing double standards, and pointing the blood stained finger at the other countries of the world, whose HR records are excellent when compared with those of the US.