reply by
truth
4/13/2002 (12:16) |
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hmmm ok let us read more for same reporter!!!
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REPRESSION REPORT: Antiterror campaign called cloak of abuse
Group assails global revoking of liberties
January 17, 2002
BY EVELYN LEOPOLD
REUTERS
UNITED NATIONS - A leading human rights group said Wednesday the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism often is used by nations as an excuse to revoke civil liberties, whether in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Russia or even in Europe.
And new restrictions in the United States, such as the proposed military tribunals for suspected terrorists, could compromise Washington's ability to criticize rights abuses in other nations, Human Rights Watch said in its annual 670-page report covering 66 nations.
'Defeating terrorism is going to require undermining the ends-justify-the-means amorality of terrorism and the only way to do that is to reaffirm human rights as particular suspects are pursued,' said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based group.
'Otherwise, you may end up capturing a particular terrorist but you reaffirm the logic of terrorism -- the view that anything goes in the name of a cause,' he said. 'For too many countries, the antiterror mantra has provided a new reason to ignore human rights.'
Declaring the Sept. 11 attacks antithetical to human rights values, the report said too many governments substituted expediency for a firm commitment to human rights, closed channels for dissent and thus encouraged radical groups.
In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch said there was a 'shameful silence' by the United States and other Western nations of abuses by a corrupt government in Saudi Arabia, home of Osama bin Laden and many of his followers, as well as in Egypt, where patterns of repression seem to promise stability.
'They leave people with the desperate choice of tolerating the status quo, exile or violence,' it said.
Thus Saudi Arabia and Egypt can credibly portray themselves as bulwarks against extremism because the political center has been systemically silenced, the report said.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States, several governments touted their own domestic struggles as fights against terrorism, the report contended.
In Russia, Human Rights Watch accused President Vladimir Putin of embracing the antiterrorist rhetoric to defend his government's brutal campaign in Chechnya and the West downplaying earlier criticism of Russian abuses.
China took a similar position to defend its response to political agitation in Xinjiang province.
Egypt brushed off criticism of torture and military trials as equivalent to giving terrorists human rights, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon repeatedly referred to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as 'our bin Laden' and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe justified a crackdown on journalists as an attack on supporters of terrorism.
Uzbekistan's government was singled out in the report as particularly repressive and an illustration of the West's selectivity on human rights. The country has no political parties and no independent media. Muslims caught praying outside the government-controlled mosque are tortured.
But as a country bordering Afghanistan, and with its own Al Qaeda-linked rebel movement, Uzbekistan was an obvious potential ally of the United States. It also has been kept off the State Department list of countries that repress religious freedom, the report said.
In Europe, Human Rights Watch said, too many countries stepped up anti-immigrant rhetoric and further restricted the rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the name of fighting terrorism.
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