Human Rights Abuses in Mideast

The war that has broken out in the Middle East is said by some of our leaders to have been declared in defense of the victims of human rights abuse. Many would question the truth of this claim, and would say that human rights violations have been used as part of a well-orchestrated war propaganda strategy. To imply, as Alexander Cockburn does in his article, “Sifting for the Truth on Both Sides” (Column Left, Commentary, Jan. 17), that Amnesty International has fed into this propaganda by writing a “tale” and a “myth” about babies murdered in Kuwait is scurrilous. The truth must not become a casualty of either political manipulation or ill-informed journalism.

“The facts are clear,” says President Bush in a letter to U.S. college newspapers about the invasion of Iraq. In the letter, he quotes from Amnesty International’s December report on occupied Kuwait and paints a black-and-white picture of good versus evil. Yet, Amnesty International has reported on the unspeakable brutality of the Iraqi government for more than a decade, and even a few months before the August invasion it had testified about these abuses before the Senate, but neither George Bush nor his Administration was willing to fully condemn the Iraqi government. Not only have they been selective on Iraq, but the virtual silence on abuses by the governments of Turkey, Israel, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is the kind of selectivity that men and women on the torture slab or wrongfully imprisoned in those countries could well do without.

Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Me.) has decried the misuse of Amnesty’s report by President Bush, and many others in Congress have spoken out against the highly selective use of Amnesty’s material by his Administration.

Sometimes the facts may not be crystal clear, as in the case of the events that have occurred inside occupied Kuwait. No one will ever be able to spell out, in every detail, the horrendous suffering that was unleashed on the Kuwaiti people. Those of us whose task it is to report on a situation of massive killings and torture know that we need many sources and a lot of cross-checking to begin to get an accurate picture. Sometimes it is painfully slow; the gruesome events of August/September/October had, in our case, to wait until December to be described in detail.

Cockburn says that the story of the mass murder of babies by Iraqi troops in Kuwait is untrue. Amnesty has compelling evidence from several sources of the mass killing of babies in Kuwait city.

For Cockburn to suggest that AI is adding to “the lies that, in this crisis, are already shoulder-deep,” is contemptible. The Iraqi government has been a gross violator of human rights for the past decade, and it continues to be so in Kuwait. The Mideastern coalition partners in Desert Storm, as well as other Mideastern governments, have been responsible for gross violations of human rights in their own countries or occupied lands. The U.S. government has a moral responsibility to seek to apply the rule of law to friend and foe alike. It does not do so; it is selective.

Amnesty International has documented the abuses against all people in the Middle East, whether they are special friends of the U.S. or not. Certain details can always be further clarified, but let the record stand clear that those who refuse to be selective, who document the plight of all, have the weight of truth on their side. And when the politics of the day move on to other issues, it is that truth which will continue to burn, until no torturer or executioner can hide from its light.

JOHN G. HEALEY, Executive Director

Amnesty International

Los Angeles