January 14, 2005, 10:26 a.m.
Human Rights Watch can’t claim the high ground.
What we need is a global standard.I noticed that the sun rose again this morning, which means that New York-based Human Rights Watch, where people like Bianca Jagger and George Soros rub elbows and pass judgment on George W. Bush and other lesser souls, is once again denouncing the U.S. Reports the BBC, HRW has found the U.S. guilty of a "betrayal of human rights principles in the name of combating terrorism."
HRW says the US can no longer claim the moral high ground and lead by example.It cites coercive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib jail as particularly damaging.
The group, the largest US-based rights organisation, says the actions of the US in such detention centres have undermined Washington's credibility as a proponent of human rights and a leader of the war against terror.
"Its embrace of coercive interrogation [is] part of a broader betrayal of human rights principles in the name of combating terrorism," HRW says.
Of course, these complaints have been made many times before: For HRW, a morning without an anti-American pronouncement is like a day without whine. But they're being made again now because Abu Ghraib is in the news and Human Rights Watch wants to raise money. (Of course, the Abu Ghraib trials are big news not only in the U.S. but also throughout Europe, and especially in France — here's a chunk of Le Monde coverage.)
Is there any substance to HRW's complaints? Well, yes — you should not make terrorists stay up late listening to Ratt and you should not make Iraqi convicts get naked and then laugh at them. If you're an American soldier doing these kinds of things, you'll be punished, even as others also try to punish your fellow soldiers and your country.
But if HRW was sincerely interested in any "betrayal of human rights principles" it wouldn't be doing its gratuitous Yank-bash-for-cash thing for the millionth time. It would be over in Turtle Bay whipping Kofi Annan and the U.N., because wherever there are blue helmets, there's hell to pay. No place is this more true than in the U.N.'s biggest "humanitarian" mission, MUNOC, the fiasco in eastern Congo, where, as yet another BBC report notes, "UN peacekeepers working in DR Congo sexually abused girls as young as 13." Regular readers of this space will know the Bunia story by now: Crazed militias burn villages. U.N. sets up refugee camps. Militiamen rape girls in the camps while U.N. peacekeepers doze. U.N. peacekeepers do the same thing, but leave a tip. The U.N. investigates, wrings hands, issues statements expressing outrage. A year passes. Nothing changes.
As I said, this story has been covered here before, but every time I write about it, I get a pile of e-mails from people who think I'm making it up or something. Maybe I'm fixed on this because I have three young daughters whom I would never trust to the care of the U.N., and especially not to the supervision of Jean-Marie Guéhenno of France who was appointed by Kofi Annan as under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations and charged with running MUNOC. M. Guéhenno is very French in his sorrow, as the BBC suggests: "The rules of the UN are crystal clear," he told a reporter. "Any sex with under-18 years is against the UN rule and whenever we find that, this is just something that needs to be punished."
Such Gallic regret. Yes, something that needs to be punished. But how? M. Guéhenno is apologetic, but, he explains, it's out of his hands. As the report notes, "[MUNOC] can only repatriate soldiers responsible and call for them to be brought to justice at home."
Those who dislike America's role in Iraq never propose an alternative solution, except to let the U.N. take care of it all somehow. But haven't the Iraqis suffered enough? It would be kinder to return the country to Saddam than to give it to Annan. The apparent corruption of the U.N. is simply staggering.
That's certainly nothing new. In the early '90s, when I was reporting on the famine in Ethiopia and how the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization had mismanaged relief there, I was stunned by the pettiness behind so much U.N. misbehavior and the distressing level of venality among the organization's top officials.
The FAO was at the time (and perhaps still is, for all I know) the largest of the U.N.'s autonomous organizations, spending billions of dollars trying to end the world's hunger and meeting sudden crises through its World Food Program.
The FAO was given to a Lebanese named Edouard Saouma in 1975. He had run the FAO with a distinctive sense of style: When he stepped out of the open door of his limousine and entered the FAO offices, for example, his staffers were required to stand and salute. He liked to be called Your Excellency and he traveled regally, expecting fully to be treated as a head of state — H.R.H. the King of Groceries. At the time, Saouma's salary for his term was at least $1,200,000, including expenses. He controlled a multimillion-dollar fund, for which accounting was murky at best. His excess of hubris so mightily offended Western delegates that the Canadians mounted an effort to oust him when he stood for reelection to a third six-year term in 1987. According to the diplomatic sources I interviewed back then, Saouma was able to survive by simply doling out huge favors — paid for by the FAO's befogged fund — to disaffected voter nations.
But the real criticisms of Saouma centered on how his massive ego clogged the relief pipelines and prompted many donors to bypass the FAO completely. As I wrote at the time:
The fiasco that led to his attempted ouster occurred at the height of the Ethiopian famine of 1984, when 5,000,000 people were on the verge of starvation. Hunger was killing them off at the rate of about 2300 a day, and the Ethiopian government made an emergency appeal for aid. That request ran afoul of a long-simmering battle between Saouma and his colleague James Ingram, director of the World Food Program; their running squabbles have often crippled the UN's relief apparatus. A knowledgeable source in the FAO contends that Ingram inexplicably stalled for several days before granting a transfer of 30,000 tons of supplies, but then Saouma refused to sign off on the shipment. He was annoyed, explained the source, because an Ethiopian official had gone to his rival Ingram first. The battle raged for days and days as the death toll mounted. Finally, when Saouma's whims had been entertained and the Ethiopian official had been recalled by his government, the food was released. According to one high-ranking, 20-year veteran of the FAO, the price of his pique was more than 45,000 Ethiopian lives.
Edouard Saouma was never front-page news, of course. But he is well remembered. Every two years, the U.N. presents the Edouard Saouma Award to "national or regional institutions that have implemented with particular efficiency a project funded by the Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP) of FAO." Sometimes it goes to Cuba. Sometimes it goes to China. Everyone's a winner at the U.N.!
These events in eastern Congo — like the earlier events in Ethiopia and other places where the U.N. is at work — merit your attention, if only because organizations like Human Rights Watch don't give them nearly enough, shrugging them off with a press release at best. Abu Ghraib is on the front page around the world. MUNOC is less than a news obscurity — but only because American troops are not involved — and therefore there is no money to be raised by groups like HRW and no self-serving sanctimoniousness from the press. When I asked a journalist friend why this wasn't a bigger story, he said, simply, "Nobody cares about the U.N. in Africa."
Human Rights Watch may complain that the country now prosecuting its own soldiers for breaking the law is guilty of a "betrayal of human rights principles in the name of combating terrorism." But by making such a stupendously frivolous, rhetorical, bombastic charge against the U.S., while ignoring the routine atrocities committed by the U.N.'s army of rapists and crooks, organizations like Human Rights Watch can no longer claim the high ground and pretend to lead by example. They've reduced themselves to moral telemarketers. But in a way it's even worse: It's a betrayal of charity scams in the name of combating human-rights abuses.
ITEMS
Crawling to France. The president of the United States is going to go to Europe in February just after Valentine's Day to spread love and beg forgiveness from France and Germany — or, in Colin Powell's diplo-speak, to "mend things." Why this is in the best interests of the U.S. can be discussed later — and no doubt will be, and at length. But John Vinocur's excellent analysis in the International Herald Tribune is certainly the place to start your head-scratching. As Vinocur writes, "Against the backdrop of four years of the mantra-like specifics of Bush policies, no one I have talked to in Brussels or Washington since Christmas week has come up with a substantive explanation of what this trip is about." The French are at least buying the K-Y for the party, however: As the IHT also reports, Chirac is turning down the volume on his anti-American screeching.
Unpseakable Truth Numéro 1: France's neo-fascist demagogue, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has scandalized Le Monde and every other newspaper in France by saying the French weren't exactly miserable under the Nazis. This is certainly true if you weren't a French Jew: Virtually every postwar figure in France, save De Gaulle himself, endured the war peacefully in Vichy or in the occupied areas. Even as Jews were being sent to the camps by the French, famous socialists and Communists were working for the Germans, and not under duress, either — until the Stalin-Hitler pact was broken. In fact, the founder of Le Monde, Hubert Beuve-Méry, was a happy Vichy collaborator himself. John J. Miller and Mark Molesky's Our Oldest Enemy has details.
Adrift. The tsunami that struck Asia and killed thousands left those far away from the disaster struggling to find the meaning in it all. Although the headline in the Sunday Telegraph is moronic, the archbishop of Canterbury lived up to it, thinking maybe the tsunami might make us wonder if we should believe in God. This Episcopal goofiness drew a rebuke from Frank Johnson in The Spectator who wondered if the Sunday Telegraph piece should make us wonder if we should believe in Mr. Cantab. For a week or so, everyone who typed for a living was looking up Leibniz and Voltaire, getting Candide mostly right but Theodicy really wrong. In Le Point, Olivier Weber got to play the cynic (although the most remarkable French headline was on a now-lost Yahoo news item: "Three Frenchmen killed in tidal wave"). Paul Johnson, also in The Spectator, came up with a chirpy interpretation of the event, one that came close to my own view, which is that a horrifying event like this is how God gives us sensible, life-affirming advice: Do not live next to the volcano. Move the cottage back from the riverfront. No hotels on the beach, please. Wendy Doniger, overwriting in the TLS, got it wrongest, though, when she came up with this howler: "After the desperate scramble for survival, for shelter, water, food, after searching for the living and then searching for the dead, it is time to bury the dead and to grieve, and that is always a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson's phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully." Are you kidding me? If anything produces vast clouds of dim imprecision, it's a writer asked to write about sorrow. For a writer, to borrow Samuel Johnson's common sense, there's no such thing as good grief.
— Denis Boyles writes the EuroPress Review column for NRO.
