Human Rights Watch Tours Riot-Torn Areas in L.A. : Injustice: The group, which monitors abuses in countries around the world, spent time talking with community activists and sharing experiences.

Traveling through South Los Angeles in a chartered bus, Father Freud Jean viewed a landscape that seemed all too familiar, even though he had never visited the city before.

As the “tour guide” pointed out scars that still linger from the spring unrest--vacant fields where stores once stood and burned-out buildings--Jean found a point of convergence between his homeland and Los Angeles.

“In Haiti we could easily understand the outrage,” Jean said, “. . . (because of) the kind of abuse, the kind of violations people are suffering.”

So, it seemed, could many others who traveled with him.

Jean, a Catholic priest, was one of 11 human rights monitors brought to Los Angeles by Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based human rights organization that investigates and monitors abuse in countries around the world. Each year the group honors individuals who have committed their lives to the struggle for human rights, said Ellen Lutz, director of the California office of the organization.

In past years monitors have spent their time in New York and Washington, D.C., but because of the verdict in the Rodney G. King beating case and the civil unrest that followed, this year’s tour included a four-day stay in Los Angeles. Monitors spent the time talking with community activists and hearing about “our own civil rights abuses in this city and the people who are facing them,” Lutz said.

Traveling on a chartered bus Friday, the group made a visit to the offices of Community Youth Gang Services in South Los Angeles, had lunch with members of the Korean-American community in Koreatown and spoke with workers at CARECEN, the Central American Refugee Center in the Pico-Union area.

“We wanted them to meet the people who are involved with human rights here,” said Mike Farell, former actor and a member of Human Rights Watch.

“We wanted them to meet the people who understand about police repression, who understand about injustice.”

At each stop along the way there were statements of support and encouragement, but the theme that echoed from Hyde Park to Pico-Union was sameness: the sameness of their struggle, the sameness of their pain, the sameness of their hopes for change.

At the offices of the Community Youth Gang Services, African-American and Latino community members talked about their battles for jobs, health care, proper education and fair treatment by law enforcement officials--all of which are included in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. The declaration is considered the minimum standard for rights of all people.

Members of the international group recounted the struggles in their homelands. Yousif Rahim Rasheed, a Kurdish lawyer from Iraq, told of the massacre of Kurds in Iraq. Adem Demacy, a journalist from Yugoslavia, described state-sponsored abuse of Albanians.

“It’s no different than what happens here in a silent way,” said Ed Turley, director of the South Los Angeles office of Community Youth Gang Services after listening to the accounts. “(Here) it’s a silent genocide.”

Martin O’Brien, from Northern Island, described how his government used the King beating and the verdict to defend its own system in which there are no jury trials and “defendants’ rights have been abolished.”

“People in power were saying this is what the American system gets you with all its rights,” O’Brien told the group. “It doesn’t get you justice. They were using it to attack groups like ours.”

Lutz and other Human Rights Watch members said they are aware that many in the United States are accustomed to hearing the nation described as a champion of human rights, but several actions taken by the government recently, such as the deportation of Haitians and the treatment of Latinos at the border, have been in violation of international human rights law.

Their group’s visits to cities like Los Angeles call attention to human rights issues and U.S. government “hypocrisy,” members of the group said.

“It forces us to face up to the fact that some of the abuses that take place in the United States are the same kinds of abuses that we condemn in other countries,” Lutz said.