West Overlooks Rights Abuses to Pursue Trade, Group Says

The world’s major powers have virtually abdicated responsibility for promoting or defending human rights in favor of pursuing their own economic interests, the private group Human Rights Watch reported Wednesday.

The New York-based organization said the United States and other major nations are missing historic opportunities to promote justice, end human rights abuses and prosecute violators from Russia to the Middle East and from China to Bosnia.

“This year it has become clear [that] the major Western governments are deflecting pressure to promote human rights in favor of dubious long-term strategies that would supposedly, some day in the future, guarantee respect for basic civil and political rights,” Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch executive director, said in an interview.

The organization, which issues an annual report evaluating efforts around the world to deal with human rights abuses, castigates Western governments for not hunting down some of the worst human rights abusers, notably leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, and for not creating a meaningful international system of justice.

“This is the first time since Nuremberg that we had a chance to bring genocidal killers to justice,” Roth said. “That opportunity was wasted because President Clinton wouldn’t make the case to the American people that it was necessary for U.S. troops to assume some risks in arresting indicted war criminals.”

Among the major powers, deferral of human rights is now widely being “dressed up” as policy and the language of human rights is becoming “a cover for their abandonment,” the 1997 report charges.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Clinton administration cites as a foreign policy success, the report charges that Washington certified “severely compromised” elections held in September and allowed Bosnian Serb leaders accused of masterminding genocide against Bosnian Muslims to remain at large.

In the Middle East, Washington has been silent in the face of allegations that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s forces have tortured and arbitrarily detained Islamic militants and other opponents of negotiations with Israel, the report says.