If that sounds promising — as in, maybe the UN is finally zeroing in on Cuba’s gross violations of human rights — think again. The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council has just picked a new chairman for its Advisory Committee, an 18-member body of “experts” who come together as a “think tank” to help guide the Council’s work. This being the UN, naturally they picked a Cuban.
And no, this UN-anointed mentor of human rights is by no stretch a Cuban dissident. He’s 73-year-old Miguel Alfonso Martinez, a former Cuban diplomat and former spokesman for Havana’s foreign ministry. His expertise in human rights includes running interference at the UN for the regime of Saddam Hussein after the Halabja Massacre. Reporters San Frontieres records that faced with “the images of the bodies of five thousand Kurdish women, children and old men lying on the ground in this ghostly area drenched with nerve gas,” Alfonso Martinez’s move at the old UN Human Rights Commission was to co-sponsor a “no action” motion.
Under the umbrella of the UN Human Rights Council, Cuba is also currently serving as rapporteur for the committee now preparing a nasty reprise of the anti-Israel, anti-U.S. 2001 Durban conference — which got so ugly that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell pulled out the U.S. delegation. The preparatory committee for Durban II, scheduled for next year, is chaired by Libya’s Najat Al-Hajjaji (who in 2003 chaired the UN Human Rights Commission) and features such star planners as Russia and Iran.
Recall that this is the work of the new, “reformed” UN Human Rights Council, set up to replace the old, utterly discredited Human Rights Commission. This was advertised by the UN at the time as one of the crown jewels of Kofi Annan’s final round of “reforms,” and hailed in a UN press release as an “historic” achievement, approved in the General Assembly by an overwhelming vote of 170 for, and only four against (those four holdouts being the U.S., then represented by Ambassador John Bolton; and Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau).
If you can stomach any more of this stuff, the stalwart, Geneva-based UN Watch has recently put out a report, “The Right to Name and Shame,” evaluating the performance of former UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, who just stepped down after four years as the diva of this UN human rights choir. UN Watch goes to great lengths to be fair, and gives Arbour credit for her criticisms of a few of the world’s worst regimes, including Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan. But Arbour, while also criticizing the U.S., and lambasting Israel, “was silent, or spoke out no more than once, on systematic human rights abuses committed by China and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council, and on those committed by Egypt, a powerful player at the UN.”
There’s more, much more, including some illuminating tables in the report. But here’s the money quote: “Most troubling of all, Arbour published no statements at all for victims of 153 countries, including many with human rights situations that range from poor to appalling, such as Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burkina Faso, North Korea, Gabon, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Vietnam and Yemen.”
Wow. Nothing at all on North Korea. Nothing on Saudi Arabia. Nothing on Syria. Nothing on Libya. Oh, and according to the tables in the report, nothing on Cuba, either. Which, with its new chair on the Advisory Committee, brings us back to where we tuned in to this latest episode of Your UN at Work: The Human Rights Council.
Looks like Obama could be running into some serious celebrity backlash. Gwyneth Paltrow, resident in London, stars in an internet video ad exhorting expat Americans around the globe to get out those absentee ballots and vote, vote, vote – for Obama. Check it out, as detailed in the U.K.’s Telegraph online, but don’t stop with the article and video, look at the 300+ comments so far. If this is rigged, someone’s done quite a job; and if it isn’t, Gwyneth, give it a rest. To quote from one: “My Brit brothers and sisters… Keep her.” To quote another: “He is not the Messiah” — (One more reason in these revelatory times to dust off Monty Python’s Life of Brian — “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”)
“If North Korea were to end up with a nuclear weapon, it would be very destabilizing and very troubling for all of us.”
– President Bush, July 30, 2008, Interview with China Central Television (Yes, this week he really said that)
“If” –?? What is Bush talking about? That ship has sailed. That train has left the station. That bomb is out of the bag.
North Korea already has a nuclear weapon, and more likely it has a number of them. According to the Bush administration’s own State Department, North Korea in 2003 was ranting away about bolstering its “nuclear deterrent force.” In 2005, North Korea declared it had “manufactured nuclear weapons,” declared itself a “nuclear weapons state,” and in 2006 tested a “nuclear explosive device” (which, in non-diplomatic English, we call a nuclear bomb).
Surely Bush knows all that. So why, in this interview released Wednesday by the White House, would he utter this bizarre rewrite of reality?
Part of the answer might be that this interview — in which Bush mainly discussed his excitement about going to the Olympics in Beijing – was already such a triple-helping of diplomatic mush that it was easy to conflate North Korea (which has the bomb) with Iran (which is racing to get it). Asked about the former, Bush gave the potted response for the latter.
But there’s a bigger problem here, which encompasses both North Korea and Iran, and slops into plenty of other places as well. Bush was simply speaking the language of “soft power,” which his second-term team has been whispering into his ear for the past three years. In this approach to the prospect of malign, terror-loving governments (and their terrorist pals) acquiring weapons of mass destruction, there is no more “axis of evil,” no more “dead or alive,” no more “with us or against us,” no more “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
Instead, there is the lingo of Secretary of State Condi Rice; or special envoy to the Six-Party Talks, Chris Hill; the jargon of the Annapolis conference and the ever-proliferating UN resolutions. America now speaks with the voice of a fretful nanny, scolding a naughty child even as she stuffs his pockets with sweets. Or – in the holistic spirit of this eco-era – carrots.
In these realms, what matters is “stability” and “process.” You don’t confront threats, or defeat enemies. Instead, you express your “disappointment” and “concern” over “destabilizing” and “troubling” developments… such as their missile tests, rapidly advancing nuclear weapons programs, or the test explosion of a nuclear bomb device. If North Korea turns out to have been building a secret nuclear reactor in Syria with no clear purpose other than to crank out plutonium for weapons, you don’t immediately congratulate the Israelis for their courage in destroying it, and move swiftly to punish the proliferators. Instead, you let the story age quietly in the White House fridge for a couple of months, and then issue a statement that the reactor was “not intended for peaceful purposes,” and — here comes the penalty — you are “seriously concerned” (which is, of course, much more ferocious than being “concerned,” but not “seriously” so).
And if you must bring up such ideas as freedom and democracy, you go out of your way not to offend those who actively deprive their people of these abstractions. Thus, in this same interview with Chinese state TV, Bush explains that he is going to the Olympics in Beijing because “It’s much more likely a Chinese leader will listen to my concerns if he knows I respect the people of China.” Again, what is Bush talking about? He’ll be paying his respects to China’s dictator-in-chief, President Hu Jintao (in this interview, he already did: “I respect the man a lot”). Meantime, Hu’s secret police are busy censoring the internet and sweeping up democrat dissidents, lest the people of China interfere with the Olympic festivities.
And on all these soft fronts, after all the carrots, sticks and diplo-babble, the Bush administration is stuck in the mud. That may seem less and less relevant, as he prepares to leave office in less than six months. But in some of the worst hotspots, the world is moving fast right now — and not in a good direction. North Korea has been raking in cash, aid and political concessions; but apart from shutting down the aging Yongbyon reactor (again), there’s no sign that Kim Jong Il has surrendered an ounce of plutonium, or given up his uranium enrichment projects, or abandoned or even begun to disclose his proliferation networks. In Iran, the centrifuges are spinning, and Ahmadinejad is thumbing his nose — a model for fellow despots.
As for the interview Bush gave this week to the state-controlled CCTV of the People’s Republic of China, I can think of a number of reactions it might reasonably inspire, but respect is not on the list.
There is, of course, one important arena in which Bush, to his great credit, has not gone soft; in which he has stuck by his original promise and principles: Iraq. That, as it happens, is where America is now winning.
