|
|
Tortured while in a
Zimbabwe jail, Tonderai Machiridza, a political
activist, died hours after this photo was taken. |
 "It
doesn’t matter whether members of our commission come from countries
that violate civil rights,” said Manfred Nowak, who passes for
an 'anti-torture envoy' with the UN and is one of the authors of a
report that recommends the closure of Guantanamo Bay on CNN’s ‘Your
World Today’ (2/16/06). This statement offers remarkable insight
into the aptitude and priorities of the United Nations while
chipping away at any conclusion that this is an objective body with
serious opinions.
At least four of the
countries on the UN Human Rights Commission – Cuba, Syria, Libya and
Zimbabwe – have appalling human rights records. Cuba and Syria, for
example, have both executed political prisoners and civil rights
advocates. None of the four can be classified as a democracy, and
only Zimbabwe has a constitution (a vestige from a prior life as
Rhodesia).
Libya, which
actually chaired the commission a couple of years ago, was
responsible for a series of international terrorist attacks in the
1980’s, which included shootings, hijackings, bombings, and the
downing of two passenger planes with 450 innocent people aboard.
Inside Libya thousands of people have disappeared in prisons after
being tried in so-called “People’s Courts.” Political dissidents
and prisoners of conscience have been routinely tortured and
executed.
Zimbabwe, for its
part, has a criminal history that stretches back to the early
1980’s, when the government engaged in a brutal ethnic cleansing
campaign in the Matabele region, murdering between 10,000 and 30,000
innocent people who were from the wrong tribe. The ruling ZANU-PF
party has gotten successively more barbaric in order to retain
power, most recently with crackdowns against political opponents and
independent journalists, in which hundreds have been jailed and
tortured
with impunity.
 The
ruling party and its president, Robert Mugabe, have been responsible
for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of political murders and the denial of
voting rights to millions of Zimbabweans. They have devastated the
country’s economy and pushed the people to famine with a racist and
deadly program of taking land and possessions away from white
farmers. And they've acted to prevent famine relief donations
from reaching opposition areas in order to punish the voters and
their families for not supporting ZANU-PF.
As a BBC documentary
exposed two years ago, Zimbabwe also operated government camps for
youth in which teenagers were raped, abused, and severely tortured.
Who in their right
mind would pretend that such countries are really in a position to
stand in judgment over the United States? What kind of organization
is it that would make the treatment of al-Qaeda terrorists of higher
importance than that of ordinary Africans?
As it is, such a
report recommending the closure of Guantanamo Bay does more damage
to the credibility of the UN than it does to the reputation of the
United States. The investigation was embarrassingly one-sided,
being based almost exclusively on interviews with former al-Qaeda
detainees, as if terrorists who see nothing wrong with blowing up
innocent human beings would somehow draw the line at embellishment.
The U.S. invited UN
investigators to Guantanamo Bay to interview guards and medical
staff, but the commission refused the offer on the principle that
current detainees were not available for direct questions.
(Apparently the investigators did not trust the impartiality of the
Red Cross, which would have acted as intermediary).
Wouldn’t we conclude
that the UN should be dissolved if we limited interviews for our
decision making to the many young girls and boys in the Congo that
were sexually molested by UN peacekeepers over the last several
years?
Of course, in this case we could
also take into consideration a very
a shameful record of bribery and corruption
by an organization that shuns accountability. Even worse, the
UN bestows
legitimacy on both the countries that sponsor terror and the world's
worst human rights abusers. It cannot even bring itself to condemn
more than 4,000 Islamic terror attacks that have occurred in just
the last four years.
One thing that the
UN Human Rights Commission hasn’t been able to document or
fabricate, however, is a single death at Guantanamo Bay - which is
quite extraordinary if torture is supposed to be so prolific that the
facility must be permanently shut down to protect the rights of mass
murderers. This is because the average detainee at Guantanamo
has more to eat than the vast majority of people living in the world
and better health care than even the average American.
 Meanwhile
28 people died in just a six month stretch in 2004 at Lindela, a
South African “detention center” that holds ordinary citizens of
Zimbabwe who tried to escape that country’s economic and human
rights disaster zone. The dead include men, women and children,
some of whom are thought to have died under torture, yet the United
Nations shows no interest in closing down that facility, even after
another 50 people died under abysmal conditions there last year.
This inane practice
of holding the United States to the harshest standards of negligence
while allowing other countries to get away with actual crimes which
are far worse not only distorts international opinion, but it denies
any incentive for reform on the part of the worst abusers of human
rights and civil liberties. As the world frivolously obsesses
over chic anti-Americanism du jour, billions of people live without
freedom and basic rights, while little if any pressure is applied to
their leaders.
The United Nations
has become a joke - nothing more than a bloated, pompous bureaucracy
filled with the sanctimonious and overpaid. But the damage
that it does everyday to the poor and downtrodden through a
thinly-disguised anti-Western agenda is no laughing matter. As
Manfred Nowak unintentionally demonstrates, there is no reason to take the UN seriously anymore, particularly when it would use its
resources and credibility to ensure the rights and comforts of
terrorists rather than the people living in deprivation and under
the lash of tyranny.
Go back to the List of Islamic Terrorist Attacks
|
