GENEVA, March 12: A leading US rights group accused the United States on Wednesday of seeing itself above human rights law and hinted this could put its own troops at risk in any conflict with Iraq.
US treatment of Taliban and alleged Al Qaeda fighters held in the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba and elsewhere was a “disaster” because of a refusal to give at least the Taliban the status of prisoners of war, Human Rights Watch said.
Washington had also maintained a “stunning silence” on accusations that its forces were using interrogation techniques in Afghanistan that violated international conventions even if they fell short of outright torture, the US group’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, said.
“There is a view that is increasingly dominant in Washington that the United States should be above international law,” he told a news conference.
While government spokesmen denied torture was used, there had been no detailed rebuttal of reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post of “stress and duress” techniques such as suspending prisoners from ceilings, kicking them or keeping them in painful positions, Mr Roth said.
“This is either torture or it is so close to torture that it is cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment. Either way it is flatly prohibited by the torture convention,” he said.
“Our fear is that this is going to be read as a green light to torture,” the rights activist added.
Roth said the US refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war to the Taliban did not “bode well for prisoners of any kind who might emerge out of the Iraqi war”.
“Standards...which the United States bent over backwards to respect in the Gulf war, the Korean war and the Vietnam war now have been jettisoned and (this) increases risks for prisoners of all kinds in a potential Iraq war,” he said.
CRISIS OF CREDIBILITY: Washington says the Taliban are not covered by the Geneva Convention because they were not regular soldiers, but it says its treatment of them conforms to international law.
The US rights group also warned that the UN Human Rights Commission, which begins its annual session in Geneva on Monday, faced a “crisis of credibility” because of the increasing number of countries with poor rights records sitting on the 53-state body.
Libya, which has frequently been accused of widespread abuses, will preside over the six-week meeting after African countries, whose turn it was to appoint the chairman, refused to bow to pressure from the United States and others and choose another country.
Human Rights Watch urged the United States to bring motions critical of both China and Russia before the Commission, but said it feared Washington would be wary of creating further diplomatic tensions at a time when both countries oppose its policy on Iraq.
‘DANGEROUS FANATIC’: Nigerian Noble laureate Wole Soyinka on Wednesday described US President George Bush as a “dangerous fanatic” and called on the world to support the United Nations.
“We must embrace the burden of bringing authority back to where it naturally belongs ... the United Nations,” the renowned writer told guests at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs.
Mr Soyinka, a 68-year-old activist who won literature’s highest honour in 1986, said: “The present occupant of the White House is one of the most dangerous fanatics ever to bestride the earth.”
In a lecture on the dangers of fanaticism in general, and especially of religious extremism in politics, he said Bush would be revealed as being “blinded by a Messianic fervour.”
“George Bush Junior, like his running mate Osama bin Laden, serves as an illustration of the many contradictory notes in the spawning ground of evangelical extremism,” he said, comparing the US leader to his sworn enemy, the head of the al-Qaeda terror network.
Soyinka’s remarks were cheered by the mainly Nigerian audience, invited to the event by the Daily Independent newspaper to hear a lecture on the problems facing Nigeria in the build-up to next month’s key national elections.
The US consul general in Lagos, Robyn Hinson-Jones, was a guest of honour at the event.
Nigeria is due to hold legislative elections on April 12 and presidential and state gubernatorial polls on April 19, the first such votes since the country’s return to civilian rule in 1999.
Soyinka said that Nigeria’s former military rulers and their supporters still dominate the political scene and had become an arrogant, self-perpetuating elite.
While there are some candidates from outside the ruling clique on the ballot, he said, they have little chance of breaking through this year.
“They’ve got to start working so that at the next elections there is a credible candidate with a credible chance,” he said, adding jokingly: “And on that note I’d invite you all to join my party.” —Reuters/AFP
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.