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--- 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 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk