Last week the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, spoke in Sydney. He gave a passionate, wide-ranging talk, outlined the “rules of the game” for tyrannies around the world and a West that loves to collaborate with them:
The Bush administration, for example, seems to prefer promoting a narrow conception of democracy as a softer, fuzzier alternative to the embarrassing issue of human rights. Democracy is a metric by which the United States still measures up fairly well, but talk of human rights brings up such inconvenient topics as Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, water-boarding, rendition, military commissions, and the suspension of habeas corpus.
But by divorcing democracy from the international human rights standards that give it meaning, the administration sends the message that mere elections, regardless of the circumstances, are sufficient.
Its response in November to then-General Musharraf’s declaration of “emergency rule” in Pakistan was illustrative. Even after Musharraf’s effective coup and his detention of thousands of political opponents, President Bush said that Musharraf had somehow not “crossed the line”. Bush could hardly trumpet Musharraf’s human rights record, so he declared that Musharraf is “somebody who believes in democracy” and that Pakistan was “on the road to democracy”.
But if, unlike human rights law, “the road to democracy” permits locking up political opponents, dismissing independent judges, and silencing the independent press, it is easy to see why autocrats the world over are tempted to believe that they, too, might be eligible.
Roth is a voice of sanity.
I do notice that you are very involved with Human Rights issues Anthony, but you do need to distinguish between friend and foe. Many of the worst Human Rights excesses now take place under the rubric of defending someone’s human rights. Iraq is a prime example.
Kenneth Roth is the primary purveyor of Human Rights Propaganda on the Planet. One has to question the integrity of an Organisation that is itself solely made up of Naturalised Americans at Board Level, posits a universal Human Right regardless of whether someone wants that Human Right Acknowledged or not, and that promotes a regime of enforcement of those rights that is itself discriminatory – A third world peasant is more likely to be on receiving end of enforcement action to either protect his fundamental human rights, or punish an abuse of somebody’s human rights.
Something is either right or it is not. We don’t need selective enforcement of these rights to know that it right. Kenneth Roth is simply a highly paid propagandist for the Human Rights intervention lobby exploiting the goodwill of decent people everywhere to promote an agenda whose end result is the violent death of a Somali peasant using the fruits of the labour of exploited Mid-western American hillbillies.
Don’t fall into the trap of condemning Human Rights abuses everywhere simply because you oppose these abuses on principle. They will use these same principles to kill someone somewhere – even if they are only brainwashed Chinese peoples Army Cadres. That is essentially what the enforcement of ‘universal’ (they aren’t, they are essentially Western … no, they are not even western, they are essentially North American) Human Rights entails.
Don’t associate what you do, with the likes of a slimeball like Kenneth Roth.