After reading the misinformation that
Human Rights Watch is spreading about Hugo Chavez and his government in Venezuela, I became suspicious of their motives. It turns out that while they do some good things, they are not always on the up and up to say the least. Human Rights Watch was formed by the US government itself, and is not unbiased. It has been used as a PR staging ground to justify US interventionism before. But don't take my word for it:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Human_Rights_WatchBackground
HRW was set up by the United States government to monitor human rights in Eastern Europe following the signature of the Helsinki Accords. Initially, the group was called Helsinki Watch (NB: there is a British group with the same name – specializes in monitoring elections…). The United States used Helsinki Watch for propaganda purposes, and to amplify the "human rights" contradictions in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In this it was singularly successful, and it led to the broadening of HRW to cover additional regions. HRW-Americas, etc. and it also spun off the Index on Censorship, the latter to monitor abuses of "freedom of the press". HRW may claim that it is independent and nongovernmental, but its origins indicate that these properties were absent.
http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0003220.htmlHuman Rights Watch operates a number of discriminatory exclusions, to maintain its American character, and that in turn reduces internal criticism of its limited perspective. Although it publishes material in foreign languages to promote its views, the organisation itself is English-only. More seriously, HRW discriminates on grounds of nationality. Non-Americans are systematically excluded at board level - unless they have emigrated to the United States. HRW also recruits its employees in the United States, in English. The backgrounds of the Committee members (below) indicate that HRW recruits it decision-makers from the upper class, and upper-middle class. Look at their professions: there are none from middle-income occupations, let alone any poor illegal immigrants, or Somali peasants.
Human Rights Watch can therefore claim no ethical superiority. It is itself involved in practices it condemns elsewhere, such as discrimination in employment, and exclusion from social structures. It can also claim no neutrality. An organisation which will not allow a Serb or Somali to be a board member, can give no neutral assessment of a Serbian or Somali state. It would probably be impossible for this all-American, English-only, elite organisation, to be anything else but paternalistic and arrogant. To the people who run HRW, the non-western world consists of a list of atrocities, and via the media they communicate that attitude to the American public. It can only dehumanise African, Asians, Arabs and eastern Europeans. Combined with a tendency to see the rest of the world as an enemy, that will contribute to new abuses and continuing civilian deaths, during America's crusades.
It's complacency in covering up the Jenin massacre.
Yet even after the UN disbanded the fact-finding team and dropped any implementation of its resolution, the US was faced with a political problem. It was beyond dispute that the Palestinian refugees in the densely populated cinder block housing in the center of Jenin had been attacked with tanks and missiles and their hones then bulldozed into rubble. And there was still the stench of the charge that Israeli troops had committed “massacres” in Jenin and in other camps. This is where another arm of US policy comes in.
Enter Human Rights Watch
On the very day that the UN Secretary General moved to disband the fact-finding team, it was hardly treated as news. All the corporate media were conveniently running banner headlines stating that “no massacre had taken place in Jenin”. They gave as the objective authority for this finding the organization Human Rights Watch.
This let the IOF and the US – which was author of the Security Council resolution and primary supporter of Israel – off the hook. In fact, the Human Rights Watch report identifies 52 Palestinians killed during the Israeli operation and devotes 42 pages to describing a whole series of “possible” war crimes and violations of international law that the Israeli forces committed. But all this is buried in a report on their web site that few will ever see.
The story that CNN, BBC, AP, AFP, network TV, news magazines and all the other corporate media reported globally in bold headlines and sound bites was that a Human Rights Watch investigation had confirmed “No Jenin massacre.” As CNN reported on May 3rd: “Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Israeli troops massacred Palestinian civilians in Jenin, said Peter Bouckaert, senior researcher for the group and a member of the investigative team.” This was the news in a sound bite. It was reinforced in countless articles.
Graffiti found on the walls of Jenin : “Sharon, you only make us stronger.”
The news reports were based on an interview which Peter Bouckaert gave to the Washington Post on April 26, live from Jenin as he released the report. His words exactly echoed Colin Powell’s statement the week before and Israel’s position. In the news coverage this sounded like it was the finding of an “official” inquiry, with no further investigation needed. This was not the first time HRW has stepped in to reinforce US policy with a veneer of apparently unbiased non-governmental judgment.
Who is Human Rights Watch and how were they able to gain access to Jenin for an inquiry at the very time that Israel was denying entry to a delegation chosen by the UN Security Council? Human Rights Watch was supposedly created to monitor “human rights abuses” worldwide. In reality, it is an institution that has acted at every turn to reinforce the policies of the United States and justify its “humanitarian interventions.” It is composed almost entirely of US citizens and its board includes multimillionaires, former U.S government officials and mainstream academics.
http://www.tamilnation.org/humanrights/hrw.htmUnder President Clinton, Human Rights Watch was the most influential pro-intervention lobby: its 'anti-atrocity crusade' helped drive the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Under Bush it lost influence to the neoconservatives, who have their own crusades, and it is unlikely to regain that influence in his second term. But the 'two interventionisms' are not so different anyway: Human Rights Watch is founded on belief in the superiority of American values. It has close links to the US foreign policy elite, and to other interventionist and expansionist lobbies.
On this last site, you can view the big donors to HRW. Many may be well intentioned, but other donors make it look suspicious, including the neo-liberal/neo-conservative group Council on Foreign Relations. This may explain their misleading exaggeration of "abuses of power" in Venezuela under Chavez.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
