Friday, June 03, 2005
The 'gulag of our times'
Killing the Messenger
and Ignoring the Message
This week, two aid workers from Medècins
sans Frontières (MSF), an international
humanitarian organization that provides emergency medical assistance
around the globe, were arrested in
Paul Foreman, the head of MSF Holland, was arrested on Monday in response to a report his agency released
in March that said 500 rapes had occurred in Darfur
over a four month period. MSF Holland, whose doctors are working
in the Darfur region of
On Tuesday, a second MSF worker was arrested—Vince Hoedt,
the
The arrest of humanitarian workers responsible for documenting atrocities
is a proverbial case of ‘killing the messenger’ when the
message makes the powers-that-be look bad.
Politically motivated attacks on international humanitarian organizations
are not confined to non-Western governments that lack the moniker
of ‘democracy’, though.
An interesting parallel this week arose when the Bush administration
ganged up to verbally lambaste Amnesty International’s 2005 report that condemned the
lackluster human rights record by the United States in current years
at its detention facilities, such as Guantanamo Bay.
In releasing the report last week, the director of Amnesty International
(AI), Irene
Khan, said, “Guantanamo has become the gulag our times,
entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse
to the law.
“If
“According to US official sources there could be over 100 ghost
detainees held by the
“AI is calling on the US Administration to ‘close
Bush fired back this Tuesday during a press conference where he was asked about the AI report.
“I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd.
It's an absurd allegation. The
Bush’s remarks were followed up by further attacks on AI by
Vice-President
Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
It’s a poetic coincidence that the Bush administration’s
attack on AI occurred the same week as the Sudanese government’s
actions against MSF. In a democratic nation like the
Non-governmental organizations like AI and MSF are crucial checks
to governmental abuse of power. Such abuses, unfortunately, are
not simply confined to ‘non-democratic’ governments. It
is time for the Bush administration to stop hiding behind its rhetoric
and reverse the erosion of human rights it has perpetuated in its
putative ‘war on terror.’ The Bush administration is blinded
by its ends-justifies-the-means mentality and would do
more for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ around the
world if it recognized the concepts as more than words and actually
held them up as standards to live by.
As AI said in response to Bush’s attack, "If President
Bush and his administration are serious about freedom and human
dignity they should recommit to the rule of law and human rights."
Amnesty International continues
to call on the US administration to:
- end all secret and incommunicado detentions;
- grant the International Committee of the Red Cross full access to all detainees including those held in secret locations;
- ensure recourse to the law for all detainees;
- establish a full independent commission of inquiry into all allegations of torture, ill-treatment, arbitrary detentions and ‘disappearances’;
- bring to justice anyone responsible for authorizing or committing human rights violations
Until this is done, Bush’s claim to ‘transparency’ is but an empty hortatory device that lacks substance and credibility.
- Adam