RIGHTS: US Spotlights Rights Problems of China, “Rogue States”

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 26 1999 (IPS) - China, Cuba and Serbia – among many other countries – experienced major setbacks in human rights during 1998, while old and new armed conflicts in Africa and Afghanistan killed and displaced thousands of innocent civilians, according to the U.S. State Departemtn’s annual human rights report.

The 1998 report, released here Friday, was particularly tough on China – despite U.S. efforts to forge “strategic” ties by . President Bill Clinton when he visited there last July.

The Beijing government’s human rights record “deteriorated sharply at the end of the 1998 with a crackdown against organized political opposition,” the report said. It also charged that China continued to act against unapproved churches and intensified its repressive actions in Tibet and against Muslims in Xinjiang.

On the other hand, the report, which covers human rights conditions in 193 countries, noted positive human-rights trends in Nigeria, South Korea, and Indonesia, where changes in government have opened the way for greater freedoms and democratisation.

The report expressed concern, however, about trends in Russia, Belarus and several former Soviet Central Asian states where elections have been manipulated and democratic activists have come under threat.

This year’s report, the latest in an annual series published by the State Department over the last 22 years, featured an introduction and overview stressing the importance of going beyond elections in building societies that respect human rights.

Written by the new assistant secretary of state for human rights, Harold Koh, it called for the creation of a “culture of democracy” which includes respect for political dissent, a strong civil society, the rule of law, vibrant political institutions, an independent media, mechananisms to protect minorities, and full respect for women’s and workers’ rights, as well as elections.

The report, which routinely exceeds 1200 pages in length, is widely praised by independent human rights groups for its comprehensiveness and accuracy. It is used by Congress as a guide for decisions about foreign aid, military sales, and trade preferences.

At the same time, human rights groups have complained that Washington too often ignores the report’s contents when important commercial and strategic interests are at stake.

“If the good news is the generally high quality of the Country Reports as a document of record, the bad news is that, for all too many countries, it is the only occasion on which human rights concerns are highlighted by the U.S. government,” noted Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch.

Brody also complained about a “creeping selectivity” in the report’s 20-page overview, particularly its focus on specific countries – like Iraq, Syria and Libya in the Middle East, Cuba in Latin America, Sudan in Africa, and North Korea in East Asia – with which Washington has poor or hostile relations.

By comparison, the authoritarian and repressive governments in the Caspian region, whose energy resources are of major interest to Washington, were treated much less harshly.

Brody noted that the report ignored two of the most important human-rights events of 1998: the creation of an International Criminal Court (ICC) and the arrest of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Britain.

“Unfortunately, U.S. opposition to the new court and its silence on the arrest of Gen. Pinochet would have made such a discourse awkward,” he said.

The State Department’s report was especially tough on Serbia where the rights situation “deteriorated sharply in 1998.”

It noted in particular repressive measures taken by President Slobodan Milosevic against dissent and his “brutal crackdown on civilians and separatist insurgents in Kosovo.”

By the end of the year, according to the report, some 2,000 people have been killed and 180,000 displaced, “the vast majority of whom were unarmed ethnic Albanian civilians.”

In Asia, the report highlighted continuing repression against the civilian opposition in military-ruled Burma, “the brutally repressive measures to silence dissent” in famine-struck North Korea, and the crackdown against political opposition and religious minorities in China.

On Latin America, the report’s introduction focussed on Cuba, where “despite (Pope John Paul II’s) visit early in 1998, the government of Fidel Castro continued to exercise control over all aspects of Cuban life and to suppress ruthlessly all forms of political dissent.”

The introduction also mentioned Colombia “where longstanding and widespread internal armed conflict and rampant violence …persisted.” The main participants, according to the report, were “government security forces, paramilitary groups, guerrillas, and narcotics traffickers.”

The report also criticised Colombia’s criminal justice system, as it does Peru’s where it saids the judicial system is “inefficient, often corrupt, and easily manipulated by the executive branch.”

In Africa, the report accused the government of Equatorial Guinea of “committing serious and systematic human rights abuses” to retain power. Sudan was charged with “suppressing all forms of political and religious dissent,” and using a range of abuses, including summary executions and disappearances.

Elsewhere in Africa, the report found “a disturbing trend toward the widespread abuse of civilians trapped in conflict,” including the use of deliberate efforts to “wreak havoc and inflict terror” – a pattern, it went on, found most clearly in Sierra Leone last year “where rebel forces killed and maimed with extraordinary cruelty.”

Grave abuses against civilians were also committed by both sides in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, it said.

In South Asia, the report strongly denounced Afghanistan’s Taliban forces for the massacre of “hundreds of persons” after the capture of Mazar-I Sharif and what it called “perhaps the most severe abuse of women’s human rights in the world.”

In a special section on religious persecution, the report stressed the intolerance of Sudan’s government for animists, Christians and even some fellow-Muslims; the plight of Egypt’s six million Coptic Christians who “face both occasional violent assaults by extremists and legal and societal discrimination,” and Saudi Arabia’s Shia Muslim community which also faces widespread discrimination.

It also expressed concern about Hindu-Muslim tensions and violence against Christians in India, Shia-Sunni violence and the persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan; and officialy sanctioned discrimination against minority faiths in Iran.

There was concern too overthe situation of minority religions in Indonesia and the report noted sexual violence primarily against Chinese women and girls during last May’s riots – and the failure so far of Jakarta to investigate those cases.

The report scored the government for using “excessive force” against protestors and others in East Timor and Irian Jaya, where, however, it noted that minorities have been able to express themselves more freely since President Soeharto’s ouster.

In Turkey, the report said, “government officials continued to intimidate, indict, and imprison independent voices for ideas they expressed in public forums.”

It also noted the “campaign against Islamists and pro-Kurdish activists” in which the powerful military publicly identified “reactionaries” and “separatists” as the principal threats to Turkey’s national security.