Human Rights Improve Globally, State Dept. Says

Despite atrocities “bordering on genocide” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and bloody ethnic conflicts raging from Africa to the former Soviet republics, the State Department reported Tuesday that the worldwide human rights situation improved somewhat last year.

“The human rights observance trend line was, on balance, positive,” Patricia Diaz Dennis, assistant secretary of state for human rights, told reporters after issuing the 1,950-page report covering 189 countries.

Publication of the report, usually issued around Feb. 1, was speeded up this year so it could be issued before President Bush leaves office. As usual, information in the report was drawn from U.S. embassies around the world.

No effort was made to rank countries. But the report left little doubt that the situation in Bosnia and the rest of the crumbled Yugoslav federation was the worst in the world. It said the Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing”--the ejection of non-Serbs from Serb-controlled areas--”dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times.”

The report said that all sides in the Bosnian fighting have been guilty of gross human rights abuses, but “the atrocities of the Croats and Bosnian Muslims pale in comparison to the sheer scale and calculated cruelty of the killings and other abuses committed by Serbian and Bosnian Serbian forces against Bosnian Muslims.”

The report said that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic bears much of the responsibility for the atrocities.

The department also condemned Iraq, where it said the “abysmal record on human rights continued without improvement in 1992.”

It said that conditions in Haiti last year were deplorable, although marginally better than in 1991 after the bloody September coup that ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Conditions in China, the report said, remain repressive with hundreds or perhaps thousands of political prisoners. Dennis said there was “no fundamental change” in Beijing’s human rights situation last year.

She also said that in several of the new nations carved out after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “democratic transition has stalled.”

In previous years, the department has been accused of highlighting human rights violations of countries that have strained relations with Washington, while glossing over abuses in friendly nations. There probably are grounds for such criticism again this year, but the report was critical of several American allies, including Israel and Turkey.

The report said that in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli security forces killed 158 Palestinians last year, at least 45 of them by undercover troops disguised as Arabs. At the same time, 182 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians. Israeli authorities said that at least 13 Israelis were killed by Arab nationalists.

In Turkey, the report said, the number of political murders increased in 1992, including August police raids against leftist groups that “led to a chain of extrajudicial executions.” It also said that “pervasive and credible reports of torture continue throughout Turkey.”