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[casi] Re: A last minute plea to CASI members--pls edorse and send CASI



--- nagy <nagy@gwu.edu> wrote:
> Dear Alun et al.,
>
>   I am comming to the conclusion that the deal
> struck with the devil by AI and
> many of their ilk, is to attack the proximate cause
> of torture and other
> attrocities, but underplay the underlying causes
> such as the lust for looting
> the world and full specral dominance by empires such
> as  the U.S.

AI and Human Rights Watch (and others like them) are
highly fragmented organisations. Attempting to draw
conclusions about an entire organisation because of
its handling of a few situations is not wise.
While I agree that they have not reported some clear
violations of human rights, the people working there
are willing to risk their lives to obtain information
that is probably going to be ignored.
An excellent example would be HRW in Northern Uganda,
where the so-called "Lord's Resistance Army" are
responsible for the abduction, killing, enslavery,
rape and forcible military recruitment of over 25000
children (no matter how badly off you think you are,
somebody always has it worse - unless you were a
10-year old child abducted by the LRA). UNICEF refuses
to maintain an office in Northern Uganda because it is
too dangerous! (600,000 children live there)
It's not reported AT ALL in the media - we have a very
selective conscience.
I am therefore not willing to declare the whole
organisation to have "struck a deal with the devil"
with anything to do with human rights.
In fact, to be quite frank, in many situations they
release so much information it can endanger
humanitarian services, like in Southern Sudan where
the SPLA recently took offense to an article and
refused access to camps until humanitarian agencies
signed a silly contract, which they couldn't sign. The
number of people who have died/will die as a result of
this is large.

Alun Harford

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