[Peace-discuss] Somebody Else's Atrocities

[C. G. Estabrook]

In his penetrating study "Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co- 
Opted Human Rights," international affairs scholar James Peck  
observes, "In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are  
always committed by somebody else, never us" – whoever "us" is.

Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let's  
keep to the past few weeks.

On May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek  
birthplace of the ancient games. A few days before, virtually  
unnoticed, the government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the  
International Olympic Committee expressing the "profound concerns of  
the Government and people of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to  
accept the Dow Chemical Company as a global partner sponsoring the  
Olympic Movement."

Dow provided the chemicals that Washington used from 1961 onward to  
destroy crops and forests in South Vietnam, drenching the country with  
Agent Orange.

These poisons contain dioxin, one of the most lethal carcinogens  
known, affecting millions of Vietnamese and many U.S. soldiers. To  
this day in Vietnam, aborted fetuses and deformed infants are very  
likely the effects of these crimes – though, in light of Washington's  
refusal to investigate, we have only the studies of Vietnamese  
scientists and independent analysts.

Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India,  
the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous  
1984 Bhopal gas leak, one of history's worst industrial disasters,  
which killed thousands and injured more than half a million.

Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken  
over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February,  
Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative  
agency Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the  
victims and prosecution of those responsible.

Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine  
assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004.

Women and children were permitted to escape if they could. After  
several weeks of bombing, the attack opened with a carefully planned  
war crime: invasion of the Fallujah General Hospital, where patients  
and staff were ordered to the floor, their hands tied. Soon the bonds  
were loosened; the compound was secure.

The official justification was that the hospital was reporting  
civilian casualties, and therefore was considered a propaganda weapon.

Much of the city was left in "smoking ruins," the press reported while  
the Marines sought out insurgents in their "warrens." The invaders  
barred entry to the Red Crescent relief organization. Absent an  
official inquiry, the scale of the crimes is unknown.

If the Fallujah events are reminiscent of the events that took place  
in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, now again in the news with the  
genocide trial of Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic,  
there's a good reason. An honest comparison would be instructive, but  
there's no fear of that: One is an atrocity, the other not, by  
definition.

As in Vietnam, independent investigators are reporting long-term  
effects of the Fallujah assault.

Medical researchers have found dramatic increases in infant mortality,  
cancer and leukemia, even higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium  
levels in hair and soil samples are far beyond comparable cases.

One of the rare investigators from the invading countries is Dr.  
Kypros Nicolaides, director of the fetal-medicine research center at  
London's King's College Hospital. "I'm sure the Americans used weapons  
that caused these deformities," Nicolaides says.

The lingering effects of a vastly greater nonatrocity were reported  
last month by U.S. law professor James Anaya, the U.N. rapporteur on  
the rights of indigenous peoples.

Anaya dared to tread on forbidden territory by investigating the  
shocking conditions among the remnants of the Native American  
population in the U.S. – "poverty, poor health conditions, lack of  
attainment of formal education (and) social ills at rates that far  
exceed those of other segments of the American population," Anaya  
reported. No member of Congress was willing to meet him. Press  
coverage was minimal.

Dissidents have been much in the news after the dramatic rescue of the  
blind Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.

"The international commotion," Samuel Moyn wrote in The New York Times  
last month, "aroused memories of earlier dissidents like Andrei D.  
Sakharov and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of  
another age who first made 'international human rights' a rallying cry  
for activists across the globe and a high-profile item on Western  
governments' agendas."

Moyn is the author of "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History,"  
released in 2010. In The New York Times Book Review, Belinda Cooper  
questioned Moyn's tracing the contemporary prominence of these ideals  
to "(President Jimmy) Carter's abortive steps to inject human rights  
into foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki accords with the Soviet  
Union," focusing on abuses in the Soviet sphere. She finds Moyn's  
thesis unpersuasive because "an alternative history to his own is far  
too easy to construct."

True enough: The obvious alternative is the one that James Peck  
provides, which the mainstream can hardly consider, though the  
relevant facts are strikingly clear and known at least to scholarship.

Thus in the "Cambridge History of the Cold War," John Coatsworth  
recalls that from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of  
political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent  
political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the  
Soviet Union and its East European satellites." But being  
nonatrocities, these crimes, substantially traceable to U.S.  
intervention, didn't inspire a human-rights crusade.

Also inspired by the Chen rescue, New York Times columnist Bill Keller  
writes that "Dissidents are heroic," but they can be "irritants to  
American diplomats who have important business to transact with  
countries that don't share our values." Keller criticizes Washington  
for sometimes failing to live up to our values with prompt action when  
others commit crimes.

There is no shortage of heroic dissidents within the domains of U.S.  
influence and power, but they are as invisible as the Latin American  
victims. Looking almost at random around the world, we find Abdulhadi  
al-Khawaja, co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an  
Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, now facing death in  
prison from a long hunger strike.

And Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, the elderly Korean priest who was severely  
injured while holding mass as part of the protest against the  
construction of a U.S. naval base on Jeju Island, named an Island of  
Peace, now occupied by security forces for the first time since the  
1948 massacres by the U.S.-imposed South Korean government.

And Turkish scholar Ismail Besikci, facing trial again for defending  
the rights of Kurds. He already has spent much of his life in prison  
on the same charge, including the 1990s, when the Clinton  
administration was providing Turkey with huge quantities of military  
aid – at a time when the Turkish military perpetrated some of the  
period's worst atrocities.

But these instances are all nonexistent, on standard principles, along  
with others too numerous to mention. [Noam Chomsky]