Human Rights Watch is one of the most active watchdog agencies in the world. It grew from the 1978 Helsinki Watch effort aimed at monitoring human-rights abuses in the former Soviet Union and now systematically investigates human-rights violations in 70 countries. The New York-based Human Rights Watch, which accepts no government funds, collects its budget from foundations and individual contributors. The Tribune talked with Executive Director Kenneth Roth about the group’s suggestions for President Bush.
Q: What message would you send to President Bush and his new administration about human rights?
A: One of the biggest challenges facing the Bush administration will be finding ways to continue to support the global movement toward justice for the worst human-rights offenders. The right wing represented by Sen. Jesse Helms has declared war on the international criminal court in the naive hope that somehow, this historic institution will be stopped. Despite that, it will be up and running by next year, once 60 governments ratify the treaty. Sen. Helms’ desire to exempt Americans from the reach of the court has been roundly rejected by even our closest allies as a mockery of justice. The U.S. does have a legitimate concern in avoiding unwarranted prosecutions of Americans, but the best way to achieve that is to continue to engage with the court to influence its culture and to make sure that the many procedural safeguards are conscientiously applied. But that will require Bush to stand up and say we will continue to work with this court and help it achieve the important ideals that it presents rather than declaring a frontal attack on this important institution of justice.
Q: What should the administration’s position be on the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague?
A: The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal will ultimately be deemed a failure if the most culpable war crimes suspects are not arrested or surrendered for trial. It is within the capacity of NATO to arrest Radovan Karadzic, who continues to sleep night after night under the noses of NATO troops in Bosnia. I hope Bush will provide the necessary leadership to seize this war crimes suspect promptly. Arresting the two other leading figures is more complicated, because both [former Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic are in Serbia. The new Yugoslav government has been given a brief honeymoon while it tries to consolidate power, but now that parliamentary elections are completed, it is time to strongly encourage [Yugoslav President Vojislav] Kostunica to surrender these two leading war crimes suspects for trial. They presided over the genocide in Srebrenica and the massacres in Kosovo. The idea of a trial in Serbia is an inadequate alternative because the Milosevic and Mladic victims were not Serbs. They were Bosnians and Kosovars, and the Serbian judiciary does not have anywhere near the confidence needed among the victim populations to assure a fair trial.
Q: Should the United States play an active role in these investigations and in the trials?
A: We are very worried by the signals given by some members of the Bush administration that they want to divorce themselves from the Balkans. To leave now, either militarily or politically, would waste the massive investment that has been made to try to put [the region] on a more stable footing. The tribunal had sufficient evidence to indict Milosevic in Kosovo, where he was commander in chief. Still, it has not indicted him in the Bosnia case because Western intelligence agencies have not provided the evidence in a way in which it can be used. We would encourage the Bush administration to cooperate with the tribunal by handing over all evidence demonstrating Milosevic’s command and control over troops that committed such terrible atrocities in Bosnia.
Q: Is lack of Western support impeding these investigations?
A: It certainly makes sense to indict Milosevic for the full range of his crimes, not only the ethnic slaughter in Kosovo, but also genocide in Bosnia. But they have been handicapped by Western failure to provide the intelligence information needed to link Milosevic to the atrocities in Bosnia and show how he was able to maintain his control through clandestine means. It is not needed to help describe the nature of his crimes. There are many survivors and family members who can describe these atrocities in sickening detail. What is needed is help in demonstrating that the buck stopped on Milosevic’s desk in Belgrade, which it did, by all indications.
Q: Should Bush link human-rights issues with global trade issues?
A: One of the major decisions facing the Bush administration is the degree to which it will uphold human rights as part of the global economy. There are huge benefits that many people have derived from globalization. But the process of increased global trade and investment is in jeopardy because of the leading powers’ unwillingness to ensure that global commerce takes place on a playing field that is leveled by a basic respect for human rights. There remains a competitive advantage to be gained through repression. And that has sparked much of the resistance to globalization. Bush needs to ensure that global trade takes place in the context of such rights; freedom of association, freedom from discrimination, from forced labor and from child labor. These core labor rights have been embraced but not incorporated into the regulation of the global economy in any enforceable way. As a candidate, Bush expressed reluctance to condition future trade agreements on respect for these basic rights. That is a shortsighted strategy that will undermine the global economy.
Q: What are the human-rights hot spots for the Bush administration?
A: Let me highlight four broad areas. First, it needs to do a better job than the Clinton administration of integrating human rights into its policy toward China and Russia. The Clinton administration was rhetorically strong on human rights but weak in practice toward China. It was never willing to make anything of importance to ride on the Chinese government’s treatment of its people. Human rights got worse as a result. With respect to Russia, the U.S. government closed its eyes to summary execution, widespread torture and indiscriminate warfare that Russian troops practiced in Chechnya. That was never used to protect people in Russia from the most violent abuses. On a separate issue, the White House should develop a more consistent policy about avoiding military assistance to highly abusive military forces. This is coming to the fore in Colombia. Then-President Clinton waved human-rights conditions applied by Congress to the $1.3 billion in military assistance. The message sent was that fighting drug trafficking or the insurgency was more important to the U.S. than making sure that that war was not waged through the widespread slaughter of civilians. There was not a big difference between the Clinton policy toward Colombia and the Reagan policy toward El Salvador. Though Reagan lied about developments in El Salvador, the Clinton State Department refused to lie under Madeleine Albright. It said that human-rights conditions for aid had not been met. Then Clinton waived those conditions and sent the aid anyway. That shortsighted policy leaves the U.S. funding mass murderers and should not be tolerated by the Bush administration.
In less severe forms, similar issues are coming up with proposed helicopter sales to Turkey. Will those be conditioned on an end to torture of Kurdish insurgents in the southeast, and in Uzbekistan, where the government, in the name of being a front-line state, is systematically torturing pious Muslims and sending them to prison for 20-year terms on trumped-up charges? These are practices the U.S. should not be underwriting to the provision of military aid and I hope President Bush makes that absolutely clear. Embargoes on Iraq and Cuba need readjustment. With Iraq, the embargo is both too much and too little. It is too much in that it is stifling the civilian economy and leading to widespread suffering by the Iraqi people, and too little in that it does not monitor all imports into Iraq, only imports purchased through the oil-for-food program. This leaves a gaping loophole through which military goods can enter the country. What is needed are more stringent efforts to prevent military goods from entering the country from any direction, but a substantial loosening of restrictions so ordinary Iraqis can begin to lead more normal lives. On Cuba, the embargo has become counterproductive, and perhaps Bush, as in the case of Richard Nixon in China, will be better placed to stand up to the right wing of his party and say it is time for a more effective policy. The embargo seriously constrains the kind of `people-to-people’ diplomacy that was most effective in ending repression in the Soviet bloc. And it has antagonized our obvious allies in Europe and elsewhere who might have helped us stand up to ongoing severe repression in Cuba but are so outraged by the embargo’s indiscriminate effect on ordinary Cubans that they refused to join the U.S. in addressing Cuban human-rights violations.
Q: Are there human-rights issues the administration should address on the home front?
A: At minimum, the U.S. should ratify the major human-rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, Women’s Rights Convention or Convention on Rights of the Child. But it also means taking steps to address human-rights problems in the U.S.
For example, sufficient questions have been raised about the arbitrariness and unreliability of the death penalty that it is time for at least a national moratorium to see whether these procedural problems can be remedied. Despite Bush’s troublesome record in Texas, he could take the lead by imposing a moratorium on federal executions. Second, police brutality remains a serious problem in the United States. The Clinton administration took some useful steps by establishing practices that would help ensure that abusive police officers are held accountable by their superiors, and these steps were implemented in several cases through pattern and practice, investigations or lawsuits, consent decrees or revised practice.
The best thing the Bush administration could do would be to insist on these same conditions being applied across the board as a condition of receiving federal law-enforcement assistance. Nothing would more quickly ensure that every major municipality establish serious procedures than making it clear that federal aid depends on those procedures being put into place. We also clearly need to address conditions in U.S. prisons. The one issue I highlight in particular is the sexual abuse of prisoners, often with the tacit consent of prison officers.
There is also a need to address the racial disparity in imprisonment that has resulted from the war on drugs. Through a variety of biases that have entered the system, African-American males are imprisoned at a rate that is shockingly larger than that of white males. Illinois has the worst disproportion in the nation. It is clear to me that white Americans would never tolerate the current preference for incarceration over treatment if they were being imprisoned at the same appalling rate that black males face custody.
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An edited transcript
