Amnesty International's pro-occupation ad on a Chicago bus shelter (Amnesty International)
MOST PEOPLE associate Amnesty International with challenging torture,
protesting the death penalty and agitating for the liberation of
political prisoners. On top of these important campaigns, Amnesty has
over the last decade opposed the Iraq war and demanded the closure of
America's concentration camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
So antiwar activists in Chicago were shocked during last May's NATO
Summit to find that Amnesty International USA had plastered city bus
stops with ads declaring: "Human Rights for Women and Girls in
Afghanistan: NATO, Keep the Progress Going!"
Worse still, Amnesty USA put on a "shadow summit" of its own during
the NATO meeting, featuring Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's notorious
secretary of state, who will be forever remembered for her chilling
response to a question on
60 Minutes about sanctions imposed on
Iraq in the 1990s. Correspondent Lesley Stahl asked, "We have heard that
a half million children have died. I mean that's more children than
died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright
responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think
the price is worth it."
With a veritable war criminal as one of its star speakers, Amnesty
USA's shadow summit launched a campaign that, for all intents and
purposes, called for the extension of NATO's "good works" in
Afghanistan. Its speakers and promotional materials recycled George
Bush's "feminist" justification of the invasion and occupation--that
NATO would liberate women from Taliban rule.
Amnesty USA claimed in "An open letter to Presidents Obama and Karzai":
"Today, three million girls go to school, compared to virtually none
under the Taliban. Women make up 20 percent of the university graduates.
Maternal mortality and infant mortality have declined. Ten percent of
all judges and prosecutors are women, compared to none under the Taliban
regime. This is what we mean by progress: the gains women have struggle
to achieve over the past decade."
Compare that to
NATO's own propaganda:
"In the ten years of our partnership, the lives of Afghan men, women
and children have improved significantly in terms of security,
education, health care, economic opportunity and assurance of rights and
freedoms. There is more to be done, but we are resolved to work
together to preserve the substantial progress we have made during the
past decade."
There is barely any difference at all.
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The Truth about Women Under NATO Occupation
Such claims are laughable. The NATO occupation of Afghanistan has involved a reign of terror against
all
the people of the country, meting out repression, blowing up wedding
parties and propping up puppet President Hamid Karzai and his corrupt
warlord regime.
Even the
New York Times admits there has been next to no development.
A Times editorial reports:
"According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan's
roughly $15.7 billion gross domestic product comes from international
military and development aid and spending in the country by foreign
troops."
Any claims from U.S. or NATO officials about improving conditions for
Afghans should be met with the deep suspicion. In the most recent
exposure of their lies about development, a congressional investigation
revealed that the U.S.-funded Dawood Hospital trapped its patients in
"Auschwitz-like conditions."
As Democracy Now! reported:
Army whistleblowers revealed photographs taken in 2010 which show
severely neglected, starving patients at Dawood Hospital, considered the
crown jewel of the Afghan medical system, where the country's military
personnel are treated. The photos show severely emaciated patients, some
suffering from gangrene and maggot-infested wounds.
Conditions for women in Afghanistan are no exception to this general
pattern. Neither NATO nor the Karzai regime has advanced women's
rights--Karzai signed legislation giving husbands the power to coerce
sex and withhold food from their wives.
As
Sonali Kolhatkar, founder of the Afghan Women's Mission, and Mariam
Rawi, of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, wrote:
Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not
allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights.
They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced
into marriages, often as children. Today, women in the vast majority of
Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable
difference: they are surrounded by war.
After over a decade of military occupation, the average life
expectancy for Afghan women is 51 years of age. The country ranks last
in both maternal and infant mortality. UNICEF reports that 68 percent of
children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition.
Since Barack Obama's surge, conditions for women have gotten
dramatically worse, not better. "The conflict outside their doorsteps,"
write Kolhatkar and Rawi, "endangers their lives and those of their
families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public,
and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes."
That's why Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament,
argues that the only good thing the U.S. and NATO can do is get out of
her country.
In a statement to the demonstration against the NATO summit, she declared:
We have many problems in Afghanistan--fundamentalism, warlords, the
Taliban. But we will have a better chance to solve them if we have our
self-determination, our freedom, our independence. NATO's bombs will
never deliver democracy and justice to Afghanistan or any other country.
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Damage Control
After Amnesty USA's poster and shadow summit were subjected to widespread criticism, the organization
issued a clarifying statement on its website
entitled "We Get It." It conceded that its poster was confusing,
especially when thousands of protesters were preparing to protest NATO's
occupation of Afghanistan.
But it's not at all clear that Amnesty USA
does get it.
The organization claims, "We're not calling for NATO to remain in the
country." But in its supposed retraction, it reiterates all the myths
about women's advancement under the NATO occupation, and it demands that
NATO implement a peace process and post-war settlement in the interests
of advancing women's equality. Expecting NATO to play a feminist role
in peace talks is like hoping for a pyromaniac to suddenly become a
firefighter.
Amnesty USA's statement was merely a public relations ploy to deflect
attention from what its poster revealed in a political Freudian
slip--that Amnesty supports NATO's occupation in the hopes that the
military alliance of the world's most powerful governments ill play a
progressive role in Afghanistan.
The truth is that while Amnesty USA has continued its progressive work in some areas--including
issuing an important report critical of the NATO war in Libya and human rights violations in its aftermath--it
seems to be tailoring its international human rights campaigns to fit
the foreign policy agenda of the Obama administration.
To take one example, Amnesty USA was once unrelenting in its
criticism of the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo, where select prisoners
of the "war on terror" are detained. Amnesty's former Secretary General
Irene Khan called it the "gulag of our times" and described the U.S. as
an "unrivaled political, military and economic hyper-power" that "thumbs
its nose at the rule of law and human rights."
But at a fundraising event in July,
Code-Pink co-founder Jodie Evans challenged
what she claimed was a retreat from work to close Guantánamo. Backed by
a delegation of antiwar activists, Evans declared, "I have stood with
Amnesty for 10 years now to demand an end to torture and Guantánamo, and
I hear you have let go the staff working on that project, which is
tragic."
At its general meeting this March in Denver, Amnesty USA featured
U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford. Ford worked previously under
former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte during the most brutal
period of the American occupation of Iraq.
Negroponte first came to prominence during Washington's dirty wars in
Central America in the 1980s, backing the rise of right-wing death
squads against left-wing forces in the region. In Iraq, Negroponte and
Ford's office served the same purpose, implementing the so-called
"Salvador Option" of backing sectarian paramilitaries to repress the
Iraqi resistance. Their work helped trigger the civil war in Iraq.
Anyone who cares about justice supports the wholly legitimate
struggle against Bashir al-Assad and his brutal regime. But Ford, in his
brief term as ambassador before he was recalled, was accused of trying
to develop quisling forces to serve as U.S. puppets in a post-Assad
Syria--something that seems in keeping with his record in Iraq and with
U.S. government aims in Syria. Nevertheless, Amnesty turned over a prime
speaking spot at its meeting to this mouthpiece for Washington's
imperial policy.
Amnesty USA's campaign for a global arms trade treaty to restrict the sale of small weaponry raises the same questions.
As Brendan O'Neill, editor of the Spiked website, wrote:
The demand for a treaty that would prevent Western countries from
selling their guns to basket-case nations overseas sounds radical. But
in truth, what Amnesty is calling for is the concentration of weaponry
in the hands of the powerful, allegedly trustworthy nations, and also
for those nations to play the role of global governors of war and peace
by granting the flow of weapons to some nations, but not to others.
There's nothing remotely radical in begging Washington and its mates in
the West to decide who may and may not fight wars.
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A Coup at Amnesty USA
So what happened at Amnesty USA?
The organization has been under fire from the U.S. political
establishment, especially for its harsh criticisms of the Guantánamo
prison camp.
The Wall Street Journal denounced Amnesty reports on Guantánamo as "pro al-Qaeda propaganda."
As the Washington Post ranted in an editorial,
"Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for
Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate
criticism of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations
on closed societies."
But Amnesty and its leaders have also been courted by the Obama
administration, which set out to present a human rights façade to cover
the U.S. government's foreign policy agenda.
This combination of pressure and seduction had an impact at Amnesty
USA directly. In January 2012, the group's board of directors appointed
Suzanne Nossel--fresh from serving in Hillary Clinton's State
Department--as the organization's new executive director.
Nossel is responsible for accelerating a shift already in motion at
Amnesty before her appointment. She has used the cover of a budgetary
crisis to implement a new strategic plan that has reoriented the
organization in closer alignment with the U.S. empire, closed many of
its offices, and laid off some of its best and most critical staff.
Nossel is a product of the business and political establishment. She
graduated from Harvard University Law School, where she edited the
Harvard Human Rights Journal.
Upon graduation, she has served in corporate boardrooms, U.S. State
Department and the headquarters of human rights organizations.
In the corporate world, Nossel was an executive at the media
conglomerate Bertelsmann, the consulting firm and renowned CEO factory
McKinsey & Company and none other than the
Wall Street Journal, archenemy of Amnesty's campaign against Guantanamo.
In the Washington bureaucracy, Nossel worked for the Clinton
administration as an assistant to UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who
manipulated concerns about human rights to justify the U.S. war in
Kosovo in 1999. Far from defending human rights, the war led to the
largest wave of ethnic cleansing in the history of the conflict.
When the Democrats lost the White House in 2000, Nossel took
fellowships at key think-tanks for liberal imperialism, including the
Council on Foreign Relations.
In their history of the Council, titled Imperial Brain Trust,
Laurence Shoup and William Minter describe the organization as playing
"a key part in molding United States foreign policy. In the Council, the
leading sectors of big business get together with the corporate world's
academic experts to work out a general framework for foreign policy."
Nossel has also worked in the NGO world as the Chief Operating
Officer at Human Rights Watch (HRW), which set an example for other
human rights organization to become apologists for imperialism. For
example, HRW legitimized the U.S.-orchestrated coup against Haiti's
democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Peter
Hallward documents in his book
Damming the Flood how HRW
exaggerated human rights abuses under Aristide beyond all recognition.
Thus, he argues, the group gave "moral justification for imminent regime
change."
Nossel is an unabashed supporter of U.S. hegemony over the world,
neoliberal economics and Zionism, all cloaked in the mantle of human
rights.
In a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs,
she coined the term "Smart Power," which has been taken by Hillary
Clinton as the watchword of the Obama administration's foreign policy.
Nossel put forward "Smart Power" as an alternative to Bush's neocon
hawks, who isolated the U.S. from its historic allies. Instead of
relying on the unilateral deployment of the military, Nossel argued that
the U.S. must use its whole arsenal of weapons, from diplomacy to trade
pressure to the war machine, as "the best long-term guarantee of United
States security against terrorism and other threats."
Naturally, she was overjoyed to hear that Obama's new Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton had adopted "Smart Power" as a motto. Nossel
gushed that Clinton "was fundamentally optimistic. She's saying that by
using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American
decline can be reversed. She'll make Smart Power cool." Obama appointed
Nossel to a State Department post where she joined the cabal of
"humanitarian interventionists," including Samantha Power, Susan Rice
and Hillary Clinton herself.
So it should shock no one that Nossel sees human rights not as a goal in itself, but as a means to assert American hegemony.
In a 2008 article in Dissent,
she argued, "The more the United States can join and mobilize others to
send similar messages, take common positions, and mount coordinated
pressure, the more influence Washington will have."
Nowhere was Nossel's subordination of human rights to U.S. imperial
interests more clear than in her work at the United Nations--where she
made it her mission to ward off any criticism of Israel and its ongoing
dispossession and oppression of Palestinians.
In testimony to Congress in 2011, for example, Nossel claimed that the UN Human Rights Council:
remains far from the institution that it needs to be, particularly with
regard to its biased treatment of Israel. By joining the Council and
becoming its most prominent, most assertive voice, we are beginning to
influence the direction and conduct of this body...Palestinians and
others seek to use UN forums to put pressure on and isolate Israel. This
is simply unacceptable and the Administration has been clear on this
point. At every turn, we have rejected efforts to single out Israel and
have taken steps to bolster its status in Geneva.
Nossel has even expressed sympathy for Israel's threats to launch a
pre-emptive military strike against Iran's alleged nuclear facilities.
In a 2006 article,
she declared, "[T]he international community will put diplomacy and
other forms of peaceful response to the Iranian threat to the test. If
those efforts fail, Israel may have to put the question of preemptive
war back on the center stage."
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NGOs, Corporate Funding and Imperialism
While Nossel has played a decisive role in Amnesty USA's
degeneration, the roots of its collusion with imperialism are part of a
broader pattern among mainstream human rights organizations. Many of the
most prominent of them have developed closer ties with the powers they
are perceived as challenging.
In his book
The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley documents how NGOs
like Doctors Without Borders have abandoned their traditional
humanitarian stance of neutrality in conflicts and even called for
imperial intervention to "save lives." Thus, he argues, organizations
"that were established to alleviate human suffering could, on occasion,
be given the task of making the case for war."
There are two key reasons for this transformation. First, NGOs rely
on donations to function, and much of it comes from corporate-connected
bodies such as the Ford Foundation or George Soros' Open Society
Foundations. NGOs are thus shackled by golden manacles to the system and
its priorities.
As a result, humanitarian organizations are more and more integrated
into the liberal establishment. At best, they document abuses and
problems, not to empower the exploited and oppressed to transform the
system, but to attempt to morally influence the ruling class and its
state to adopt better policies.
Thus, the mainstream NGOs have grown intertwined with the imperial
rulers and their states. The clearest expression of this cozy
relationship is the revolving door between the bureaucracies of
corporations, the state and the leadership of NGOs. Nossel's
transformation from corporate executive to State Department bureaucrat
and executive director of a humanitarian NGO is increasingly the norm,
not the exception.
This development coincides with the use of "humanitarianism" as a
justification for the projection of U.S. military power in the post-Cold
War world. None other than former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Gen. Colin Powell himself exposed the incestuous relationship between
mainstream NGOs and U.S. militarism when
he declared that NGOs were "a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team."
For this reason, Amnesty USA's recent shift into a partisan for American empire didn't come out of the blue.
Francis Boyle, who served on Amnesty USA's board in the 1980s and early 1990s,
told Covert Action Quarterly
that the organization has long been more enthusiastic about exposing
human rights violations among the targets of U.S. imperialism. If, on
the other hand, it is:
dealing with violations of human rights by the United States,
Britain, Israel, then it's like pulling teeth to get them to really do
something on the situation. They might, very reluctantly and after an
enormous amount of internal fighting and battles and pressures, you name
it. But you know, it's not like the official enemies list.
Boyle also contends that Amnesty USA has played a role in pushing
Amnesty International, which receives about 20 percent of its funding
from its U.S. chapter, in the direction of imperial partisanship. The
worst example of this is Amnesty's collusion with the U.S. in justifying
the first Gulf War in 1991.
Amnesty played a key role in promoting the story that Iraqi soldiers
were removing Kuwaiti infants from incubators, letting them die and
sending the machines back to Baghdad. The Bush Sr. administration
trumpeted the allegation to provide cover for a war that was obviously
about maintaining U.S. dominion over the Middle East and its strategic
oil reserves.
But the incubator story was a hoax--nothing of the sort ever
happened. And when the truth came out, Amnesty refused to retract the
story. "Absolutely nothing happened," Boyle states. "There was never an
investigation, there was total stonewalling coming out of London. They
refused ever to admit that they did anything wrong. There has never been
an explanation, there has never been an apology."
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A Campaign for Reform at Amnesty
Recognizing the depth of the rot at Amnesty USA, more than 100
long-term volunteers for the organization have launched a campaign to
stop Nossel from further undermining the group's mission.
In a petition addressed to the executive director,
they call for "an immediate moratorium...on the implementation of the
Strategic Plan and the staff changes recently announced."
On a Facebook page created to press Nossel to listen to an
increasingly disgruntled membership, Marcia Lieberman, a leader of
Amnesty in Providence, R.I., wrote:
We asked you, respectfully, to listen, but you closed your ears. We
asked you, respectfully, for a short pause to allow real engagement with
the membership, but you raced ahead and forced your plan through. You
could not have chosen better, had you determined to eliminate the
wisest, most experienced, most valuable members of our staff. You
destroyed the institutional memory of this organization you have so
decisively taken over.
After the debacle of the shadow summit in Chicago and amid growing discontent among Amnesty USA staff and membership,
Code Pink launched a petition campaign
whose initial signatories include Col. Ann Wright and Medea Benjamin.
They encourage Amnesty USA's "board members to call for Suzanne Nossel's
resignation; her loyalty to powerful government players can only be a
hindrance to the true work and mission of Amnesty."
Opponents of war and injustice should support such efforts. But at
the same time, the left must see the compromised nature of the NGO model
of organizing. At times, NGOs can play a role in various movements, as
Amnesty USA has. But because of their integration with the liberal
establishment, they can't challenge the system and its priorities.
The disaster of Amnesty's support for the occupation of Afghanistan
provides the perfect evidence for why the new left we need to build must
break with the NGO model and organize grassroots democratic
organizations that can lead a struggle against the system.
