from The Guardian: Terror crackdown 'encourages repression'

[barbara100 at jps.net]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,634772,00.html

Terror crackdown 'encourages repression' 

Human rights warning over response to September 11 

Richard Norton-Taylor 
Thursday January 17, 2002 
The Guardian 

America's response to the September 11 attacks is encouraging its allies to pursue repressive policies which will fuel terrorism rather than defeat it, a leading human rights group warned yesterday. 

Dictators "need do nothing more than photocopy" measures introduced by the Bush administration, whose ability to criticise abuses in other countries was thus deeply compromised, said the New York-based Human Rights Watch in a devastating 660-page report. 
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Saudi Arabia, the report noted, imposes strict limits on civil society, severely discriminates against women, and systematically suppresses dissent. Yet western governments have purchased Saudi oil and solicited Saudi contracts while maintaining a "shameful silence" towards Saudi abuses. They have created a political landscape in which the only alternative to supporting authoritarian rule is risking their overthrow by radical opponents. 

"If the west continues to accept repression as the best defence against radical politics, it will undermine the human rights culture that is needed in the long run to defeat terrorism," Human Rights Watch said. 

"In Saudi Arabia and other countries where Osama bin Laden strikes a chord of resentment, governments prohibit political debate," Mr Roth added. "As the option of peaceful political change is closed off, the voices of non-violent dissent are frequently upstaged by advocates of violent opposition." 

After September 11, governments adopted a "cynical strategy", successfully taking advantage of the attacks by touting their own internal struggles as battles against terrorism, the report noted. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, embraced this rhetoric to defend his government's brutal campaign in Chechnya, it said. China's foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, did the same to defend his government's response to political agitation in Xinjiang province. 

The Egyptian prime minister, Atif Abeid, brushed off criticism of torture and summary military trials, saying the west should "think of Egypt's own fight against terror as their new model". Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, repeatedly referred to Yasser Arafat as "our Bin Laden". 
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Such opportunism worked in Israel and Russia, and also central Asia, notably in Uzbekistan, a new and essential US ally and a dictatorship which ruthlessly suppresses opposition from Muslims. Elsewhere, particularly in Africa, violent abuse against civilians was virtually ignored by the US except insofar as a link could be found with al-Qaida. 
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Meanwhile, the September 11 attacks did nothing to alter Washington's resistance to international human rights law. The Bush administration refuses to ratify leading human rights treaties, including those covering women's rights, children's rights, economic, social, and cultural rights, and the international criminal court. Significantly, the US still has not ratified the first additional protocol of 1977 to the Geneva Convention, which covers the use of air power, Washington's "primary warfare tool". 

This resistance to accountability, the report added, gave the US the latitude to continue using cluster bombs in Afghanistan, imprecise weapons which caused a quarter of bombing-related deaths in Yugoslavia during the 1999 Kosovo war.  


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