27 February 2004	Friday	06 Muharram 1425

WASHINGTON: Releasing its annual 'Country Reports' on human rights practices around the world on Wednesday, the US State Department claimed Afghanistan and Iraq as two major breakthroughs in an otherwise bleak human rights picture.

In an introductory overview, the report singled out several countries for poorer performances during 2003, including China, North Korea, Burma, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Russia.

Rights groups praised the report as generally fair and comprehensive, but stressed that the administration of President George W. Bush was failing to take it seriously in formulating policy.

"The content of this report has little correspondence with the administration's foreign policy," said William Schulz, executive director of the US chapter of Amnesty International (AIUSA).

"Indeed, the US is increasingly guilty of a 'sincerity gap', overlooking abuses by allies and justifying action against foes by post-facto reference to human rights. In response, many foreign governments will choose to blunt criticism of their abuses by increasing cooperation with the US war on terror, rather than by improving human rights."

Neil Hicks, international director for Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) agreed, insisting the report will fuel charges that the administration is being hypocritical.

"On the one hand it's calling more vocally for other states to improve human rights," he said, "and at the same time it's backsliding in terms of its own record on human rights at home, and making alliances with states that the report makes clear are serious human rights violators - all in the name of the war on terrorism."

Anticipating the criticism, the report made a special point of denying that it was more tolerant of authoritarian allies in the war on terrorism. "Not surprisingly, some authoritarian governments from the Middle East to Central Asia to China have attempted to justify old repression by cloaking it as part of the new war on terror," it said.

"American policymakers rejected and rebuked, often publicly, such attempts to label those peacefully expressing their thoughts and beliefs as 'terrorists'."

The latest edition of the reports, which were first mandated by Congress in 1976, covers the human rights situation in almost 200 countries in 2003, and stretches well over 2,500 pages in length.

The reports are widely considered the world's single-most comprehensive source for human rights conditions. They are based on information collected by international and local non- governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as on the local press and reporting by US diplomats.

While the country reports avoid comparing the rights practices of different states, the introduction to the document, authored by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Lorne Craner, often singles out specific nations for praise or blame.

In this year's edition, it highlighted what it claimed were advances in both Afghanistan - notably its production of a "moderate" constitution by the country's Loya Jirga, or assembly of notables, early last month - and in Iraq, whose "liberation by coalition forces in April ended years of grave human rights violations by (former president) Saddam Hussein's regime."

But in blaming continuing violence and insecurity in Afghanistan on the Taliban and drug traffickers, the introduction failed to mention the role played by regional and factional warlords who, until recently, received US backing.

"That's a rather important omission," noted Tom Malinowski, who heads the Washington office of the Human Rights Watch (HRW). Similarly, the Iraq report simply confines itself to a recitation of abuses committed during Hussein's regime and ignores abuses committed by US-led coalition forces or their Iraqi allies since they attacked and occupied Baghdad last March.

On the negative side of the ledger, the introduction accused China of "backsliding on key human rights issues" during 2002, particularly with respect to its treatment of Muslim Uighurs, Tibet and Hong Kong.

It accused North Korea, with which Washington is currently engaged in multilateral negotiations over the country's alleged nuclear programmes, as "one of the world's most inhumane regimes," and noted that Burma's "extremely poor human rights record worsened in 2003" with the attack on opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters.

In Cuba, abuses "worsened dramatically" with the sentencing of 75 dissidents to prison terms averaging 20 years, while Zimbabwe's government "continued to conduct a concerted campaign of violence, repression and intimidation," said the report.

On Russia, the State Department accused the government of President Vladimir Putin of staging unfair elections in Chechnya and for parliament, and of exerting pressure on the media, the opposition and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in ways that "weakened civil society and raised questions about the rule of law."

The HRW's Malinowski told IPS that the bluntness of the remarks about Russia came as "something of a surprise" to him. As to the other former Soviet states, particularly in the Caucasus and Central Asia, some improvements were noted in creating space for civil society, but the overall picture, with the exception of Georgia, remained bleak.

Fraudulent elections and harassment and repression of opposition figures remained the norm throughout the region, according to the State Department. Georgia, where Washington helped negotiate the resignation of former President Eduard Shevardnadze, making way for Jan 4 elections won by US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, was the one bright spot, it added. Coincidentally, Saakashvili held his first meeting with Bush in the White House shortly before the report was released.-Dawn/The InterPress News Service.