The tragedy of American human rights abuse
According to a recent Washington Post report, the Pentagon justifies its action by pointing to the permission it gives to the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) to meet with the prisoners. But the ICRC maintains that such access on the condition of reporting its findings only to the authorities holding the prisoners does not make any great sense. The UN investigators also demanded access to the secret black sites -- the detention centres for terrorism suspects that the US maintains in Eastern Europe. It is unlikely that the prisoners in those facilities ever received even a Red Cross visit, since Washington does not acknowledge that they exist.
The UN Human Rights Commission sought access to Guantanamo since soon after the US base in Cuba began receiving prisoners from the Afghan war in January 2002. The commission said it repeated its request earlier this year because it had some reliable reports that the prisoners had been tortured. Washington grudgingly responded that three UN investigations could come but they would not be permitted to meet privately with the prisoners. The investigators understandably refused to go through what would have been a sham exercise.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. More than 500 detainees are still being held at Guantanamo. Just nine have charged with any crime. In addition to suspicion about US treatment of the detainees, the Pentagon's stone-walling would only reinforce those suspicions, raising anxiety in concerned quarters. It would also erode Washington's ability in future to enlist the UN against other nations' human right abuses. It is particularly disappointing that the US which has consistently declared its commitment to the principles of independence and objectivity of fact finding mechanisms, was not in a position to accept these terms when it itself was involved. Reaffirming those principles by giving the investigators full access would allow the US to begin moving back towards the moral high ground it has to so negligently abandoned.
In the meantime, even more disturbing are the reports that the CIA has run secret prisons in Easter Europe to interrogate terrorist suspects in clandestine manner without disclosing their locations. The fact, when brought to light, produced outrage in the international community. The European Commission announced that it would investigate whether Poland and Rumania have allowed the CIA to run secret detention and interrogation centres on their soil. Europe's leading human rights organisation, the Council of Europe, said that it would open an investigation into the reports.
The UN Human Rights Commission and its special rapporteurs on torture have already been pressing the US government to disclose the existence of any secret detention center. The concern of the international community is obvious. The United States has for years promoted respect for due process and human rights in Eastern Europe, yet more recently the US may have been taking shortcuts in precisely those areas as a matter of expediency.
Notwithstanding strong denials by East European countries, even CIA internment practices would also be considered illegal under the laws of all the new democracies in Eastern Europe. In every Eastern European democracy now the detainees have right to lawyer and to mount a defence against allegations of offence. Under the EU treaty the voting right of EU members could be suspended for the breach of fundamental principles such as respect for human rights.
In the first phase of post-communist era, new constitutions were passed outlawing secret detention and torture. In fact, it was at US urging that prisons in Eastern Europe have been made more human and livable, and it was again through US persuasion that the East Europeans signed the European Convention on Human Rights and other anti-torture conventions. Indeed, the US has spent millions to promote this kind of reform. For East Europeans, the value the US places on the individual freedom and human rights had been a beacon, which is however about to be extinguished after the scandals connected with denial of Geneva Convention rights.
It may be a complex business to apply Geneva Convention rights to al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations as the conventions are predicated on wars between the nations. However it still does not justify illegal and groundless arrests and incarceration. Because the international covenants on human rights categorically forbid arbitrary arrest and detention without legal justification and declares in no uncertain terms that every individual is entitled to be accorded basic human rights. There is simply no excuse for concealing the very existence of prisoners.
Following the furore over prisoner abuse, the US Senate has passed anti-torture legislation that outlaws prisoner abuse and there is also a move towards investigating the issue of secret detention centres. The Bush administration has to decide quickly how it intends to treat the detainees legally. Further inaction on its part will seriously damage the principles of democracy that Americans have always taken pride in.
Every since the Iraq war the terrorist acts have now spread from Europe to Egypt to Indonesia to Jordan -- and have been taking complex dimension rendering them more difficult to fight. But no matter how tough it gets to fight terrorism, America does not have the option of pulling down the flag of freedom that it has been upholding since its creation. But by abusing fundamental human rights, the Bush administration is doing just that and courting defeat by yielding the moral high ground to its adversaries. How can the US preach democracy and human rights by trampling upon the human rights of its prisoners in the concentration camps of Guantanamo and other facilities secretly established in friendly countries?
The atrocities and inhuman physical abuse of helpless prisoners of Abu Ghraib have been vividly recorded in photographs and video tapes made by none other than the perpetrators of the crimes themselves. This tell-tale evidence of human right abuses has gone into the record of history as a black spot on the Bush administration.
At the time of invading Iraq, the US had accused Saddam Hussain, among other things, of using chemical weapons against the country's Kurdish civilians. Now it has came to light that the US troops used incendiary white phosphorus in their 2004 offensive against the insurgents in Fallujah -- a thickly-populated Iraqi town. An Italian documentary titled "The Hidden Massacre" included gruesome images of the victims of the fierce fighting in the town in November 2004.
The Americans recaptured the town in fighting that destroyed the 60 per cent of the buildings and decimated its population with the inhuman use of white phosphorus against its civilians. White phosphorus use against civilians was banned by a protocol signed by the US in 1983. The film brought back to memory the Vietnam era spectacle of Napalm-hit women and children fleeing their burning villages. But the images of the white phosphorus victims were even more ghastly as the effects of white phosphorus are even more terrible.
After an attempt of a cover-up of white phosphorus use in Falujah, the Bush administration has recently made an embarrassing public reversal, pointing out, however, that the white phosphorus was used directly against Iraqi insurgents. Notwithstanding President Bush's staunch defence of US interrogation methods as "within the law," the reports as to the burning alive of two terror suspects in Afghanistan came in only recently. This no way to win hearts and minds or to wage a war for democracy and humans rights.