Human Rights Watch
Creating the pretext for U.S. intervention
By Heather
Cottin
The ruling class has never had much trouble with
hypocrisy. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of
Independence extolling the 18th century Enlightenment
doctrine of natural rights of "Life, liberty and happiness"
while he owned scores of slaves and defended the institution
of slavery.
Today, George Soros's Human Rights Watch upholds
Jefferson's legacy of deceit, murder and plunder for the
ruling class of the 21st century.
In 1975, "Helsinki Watch" was created to monitor what it
termed "human rights abuses." It was the main institution
that spread anti-Soviet propaganda. With the support of
financier George Soros, the organization grew into what is
now called Human Rights Watch.
Soros established the Open Society Institute in New York
City with the money he had made in investment exploits. His
company, the Quantum Group, was the most successful financial
fund in the world in its over 30 years of investment history.
Soros has operated "hedge funds," which create nothing but
produce superprofits for himself and his fellow
investors.
Working with Soros on the Human Rights Watch's Europe
Committee are former Assistant Secretary of State for
Intelligence and Research Morton Abram owitz, who was in the
Reagan and Bush administrations, and Paul Goble, a
commentator on Radio Free Europe--a major Cold War enterprise
funded by the U.S. Congress and the CIA.
According to the group's own Web site, Ken Roth, the
Director of HRW, "criticizes the United States for not
opposing China more in relation to its alleged human rights
abuses." Roth's record includes the creation of the Tibetan
Freedom Concert, a traveling propaganda project that toured
the U.S. with major rock musicians, urging young people to
support Tibet against China.
Against China and Yugoslavia
Roth has recently pressed for opposition to Chinese
control over its oil-rich western province of Xinjiang. With
the colonialist "divide and conquer" approach, Roth tries to
convince some of the Uighur national minority in Xinjiang
that the U.S./NATO intervention in Kosovo holds promise for
them.
Roth was also a major supporter of the B92 radio station
in Belgrade that backed the Oct. 5, 2000, coup that overthrew
Slobodan Milosevic.
Human Rights Watch leaders operate on the belief that the
United States may restructure any society, and calls this its
"civilizing mission." They write in their propaganda, "The
Soros Foundation network supports civil society" in any
number of nations.
But what do they mean by "civil society"? Career diplomat
Herbert Okun, on the Europe Committee of Human Rights Watch,
is connected to a bunch of State Department-linked
institutions, from USAID to the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral
Commission.
From 1990 to 1997 Okun was executive director of something
called the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, part of USAID,
"to help establish free market financial systems in former
communist countries." So civil society, to the Soros
Foundation and to Human Rights Watch, must include this sine
qua non of capitalism: a free market financial system.
Warren Zimmerman, U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia during the
destabilization and war, is another honcho in Human Rights
Watch. Now a professor of diplomacy at Columbia University
training future U.S. diplomats to view the world as he does,
Zimmerman is on the Carnegie Council on Ethics and
International Affairs.
In Zimmerman's Contemporary Diplomacy Course at Columbia,
students have to be ready to write about "dealing with NATO
expansion, raising the American profile in sub-Saharan
Africa, forging an American approach to Central Asia and its
energy wealth, and increasing interest in and support for
U.S. foreign policy among the American people."
A propaganda machine
Human Rights Watch bolsters the interventionism of U.S.
foreign policy with an aggressive association of government
departments, NGOs, academics, and foreign policy institutions
connected to the CIA and the U.S. State Department. But Human
Rights Watch has a specialized mission. It creates
propaganda, which helps do what Zimmerman's students must
learn: to create support at home for U.S. foreign policy.
There is barely a story in the Western press about "human
rights abuses" in any nation that does not include some
mention of a report from Human Rights Watch. Reports of such
"abuses" then back up State Department policy claims that the
U.S. intervenes for "humanitarian" purposes.
The Soros Foundation oversees a network called "Defending
Human Rights Worldwide," and has affiliates writing and
investigating conditions in Africa, the Amer icas, Asia,
Europe/ Central Asia, the Middle East/North Africa, and the
United States.
Siding with the oppressor
In Africa, HRW's first concern is with Zimbabwe's rich
farmers of European origin, who own on the average 20,000
acres of land. African liberation war veterans there have
squatted on these lands, prodding Robert Mugabe's government
to turn some of them over to the Africans. Zimbabwean farmers
average less than three acres and the population's average
income is $200, but HRW ignores these problems.
Human Rights Watch doesn't see food and the right to a
decent life for every individual on earth as a basic human
right.
Colombia certainly does have human rights problems. The
Colombian army and its paramilitary units--also known as
death squads--commit murder, bombing and the forced removal
of tens of thousands of Colombians with the support of the
U.S. military. The crimes are so obvious that HRW admits that
the Colombian military commits 80 percent of the human rights
violations--though even that is an underestimation.
But then HRW lauds President Andrés Pastrana and
his Armed Forces chiefs, claiming they "have made strong
statements against paramilitaries."
HRW saves the brunt of its criticism for the rebel army
FARC-EP, charging those who fight for the oppressed with
human rights crimes.
In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch calls for
"observers to monitor Israeli and Palestinian human rights
violations," putting an equal sign between the militarist
actions of the Israeli oppressors and the self-defense of
occupied Palestine.
Behind it all, capitalist
hatred of socialism
After seeing how HRW reacts toward the oppressed of the
Third World, especially those involved in revolutionary
struggle, it's easier to see HRW's anti-communism against
China and in Eastern Europe as the clear expression of the
capitalist class it represents.
Human Rights Watch on July 13 said that the selection of
Beijing for the 2008 Olympics would call for "corporations,
computer telecommunications, and media companies" to work for
the promotion of what HRW calls "full freedom of expression."
Of course this means expression that undermines socialism,
"anywhere in China."
"In China," said Sidney Jones, Asia Director of Human
Rights Watch, "the private sector is going to have to get
engaged."
In early July, Human Rights Watch justified the abduction
of Slobodan Milosevic, which they called "an historic
precedent with a sound basis in international law," though no
such legal justification existed for this act of
international kidnapping.
The Lukashenko government of Belarus in 1997 closed down
the Soros Foundation because of its opposition to
socialist-era institutions there. But Soros continues to fund
"grassroots organizing, education . . . with support going to
individuals with the potential to become leaders."
Human Rights Watch funds the Croatian Helsinki Committee
for Human Rights, founded in 1993 "to promote human rights in
Croatia." In 1995, Croatia and the U.S. government cooperated
on Operation Storm, which involved the ethnic cleansing of
300,000 Serbs from the Krajina region where they had been
living for over 600 years.
The Croatian Helsinki Committee was mum on this outrage.
All it did to offer support for the Roma people, who had also
been strategically cleansed from Croatia, was distribute
t-shirts with "I am a gypsy" inscribed upon them.
Human Rights Watch reports are quoted everywhere, in every
organ of the capitalist media. HRW "experts" give "testimony"
in Congress and its members teach in major universities.
HRW spokespeople give each other awards all over the
world. They proudly proclaim the right of the United States
to restructure any society. They affirm that U.S. society is
superior, and Washington has the right to intervene in
military, cultural and political arenas.
Human Rights Watch is the propaganda organ of globalism
and recolonization.
HRW recognizes no ethical values other than its own, and
it opposes any seizure of property from the rich and redis
tri bu tion to the poor as a violation of its idea of human
rights. In Soros's view, equality is not a human right. And
his view is the State Department and the CIA's view; it
reflects the foreign policy of both Democratic and Republican
parties.
Soros pays his piper to play his tunes, justifying the
role of the U.S. as the world's only super power. But other
major supporters of this insidiously powerful propaganda tool
include leading liberal philanthropic agents such as OXFAM,
the Mac Arthur Foundation, the Dr. Seuss Foun dation, Norman
Lear, the Plough shares Fund and the Guggenheim
Foundation.
Human Rights Watch is filling the strategic needs of the
international ruling class, but it is a sham, as anyone
observing its role of protecting the rich growing richer as
the poor grow poorer can clearly see.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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