First-World Ties to Distant Abuses

Three decades before police beatings became internationally publicized symbols of abuse, Amnesty International was sending volunteers around the globe to see how governments were living up to the human rights principles they agreed to at a 1948 United Nations conference.

The information published by Amnesty over the years has seldom gripped the American conscience, largely because at a casual glance it may seem to concern distant countries with little connection to us. But the First World, as the organization’s newly released 1996 report states, is often significantly involved in Third World problems.

Amnesty’s report details, for example, how Turkey has launched rocket attacks on Kurdish separatists with U.S.-supplied helicopters. Whatever one thinks of the struggle between the Turks and that nation’s Kurdish minority, moral issues may be unavoidable when it comes to arming combatants, even if, as in this case, the arms provider and the recipient are NATO allies.

As always, Amnesty does not shy away from detailing the failings of the countries in which many of its members are based. The United States comes in for special censure in this year’s report for Alabama’s use of prison chain gangs. Alabama reversed itself and banned the practice permanently on June 19, the day after Amnesty’s report was released. The organization cannot be directly credited for the decision, but neither could state officials have been oblivious to the letters, pointing out the prohibition of chain gangs under U.N. Rule 33, that Amnesty members sent to newspapers like the Montgomery Advertiser.

Emphasizing that progress was made in some parts of the world in 1995, Amnesty points to positive steps like the South African government’s decision to establish a commission to investigate the country’s human rights abuses over the last 30 years.

That much more progress is needed is brought home by a report released last week by Physicians for Human Rights, a group unrelated to Amnesty but equally dedicated to social justice. Detailing assaults on health care workers in Bosnia, the report documents an infamous incident in which Bosnian Serb mortar and sniper fire was directed at ambulances; it also notes that refusal of passage for medical supplies forced a surgical team in Srebrenica to perform 100 amputations without anesthesia during an eight-month period.

The tragedy of last year’s human rights abuses is perhaps most palpable in the photos appearing throughout the Amnesty International report. They include images of a Tibetan monk staring from behind a table covered with torture implements he smuggled out of a Chinese prison and a 12-year-old Afghan boy holding an AK-47 assault rifle amid the rubble that was Kabul.