Three months after voting against Cuba at the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Britain has been condemned by the United Nations for its own human rights record. This further exposes the Geneva Commission’s condemnation of Cuba as a hypocritical and politically motivated attack on Cuban socialism, as HELEN YAFFE reports.
The Czech Republic presented the resolution to the Commission in April, against a backdrop of activity from the Miami right-wing who warned that six-year-old Elian Gonzales would suffer child abuse, torture and communist brainwashing if returned to Cuba. Despite evidence that US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally revised the Czech’s draft resolution and that US pressure was applied to small and indebted nations, only 21 countries supported the resolution, which was passed by just three votes with 14 countries abstaining.
US anti-Cuban manoeuvres at the Human Rights Commission began during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, in response to Cuban condemnation of human rights violations carried out under the CIA-backed Pinochet regime in Chile, apartheid in South Africa, and CIA-funded military governments in El Salvador and Guatemala.
The Human Rights Commission has never passed a resolution against a developed country. Cuban Foreign Minister Perez Roque has pointed out that four draft resolutions on the violation of human rights in Israeli-occupied Arab territory had been approved by a majority of votes, but were opposed by the United States. Three further resolutions on the right to food, against the use of economic blockades as coercive measures and against the use of state territory to recruit and train mercenaries were also approved by a majority and voted out by the USA (Granma International, 30 April). It is clear that the Commission works as an instrument of US and European political oligarchy.
The European Union signed up to the US agenda in Geneva. An agreement over the Helms-Burton Act which penalises third parties trading with Cuba means European capitalists are exempt from US acts of economic retaliation when they invest in Cuba, as long as their governments back the political assault on Cuba.
So what human rights does Cuba violate? In terms of education, healthcare and access to culture, Cuba is comparable to the richest countries in the world. The Human Rights Commission condemned Cuba not for lacking basic human provisions, but the ‘liberal democratic’ freedoms that preoccupy the middle class majority in the imperialist nations: freedom of speech, political association and most importantly, the freedom of ‘market forces’.
As Fidel Castro pointed out in an interview in June, talk of freedom of expression and thought ‘can never be reconciled with a brutal economic and social capitalist system’ that leaves two thirds of the world living in absolute poverty.
‘People used to talk about apartheid in South Africa; today we could talk about apartheid all over the world, where over four billion people are deprived of the most basic rights of all human beings: the right to life, to health, to education, to clean drinking water, to food, to housing, to employment, to hope for their future and the future of their children.’
These basic human rights do not exclude other liberal freedoms, but they must precede them.
Poor people in the wealthy nations also live without these basic human rights. For example, life expectancy in Canada is 75 years, but the native Inuit people live to only 58 years, 17 years shorter than their white colonisers. In Britain one in three children is born into poverty and 22% of the population is functionally illiterate.
Amnesty International’s 2000 report and the Human Development Report 2000 reveal that systematic violations of human rights exist in those countries that condemned Cuba, whether assessed on a liberal democratic or a basic human needs principle. The Human Rights Commission resolution condemning Cuba was at best hypocritical, and at worst a punitive political attack against Cuban socialism and its opposition to neo-liberalism.
Chile
At this year’s May Day celebrations in Havana, Gladys Marin, the first Chilean to accuse General Pinochet of murder in court, condemned her government for supporting the vote against Cuba and said: ‘We will never forget the solidarity you gave in defence of the human rights of thousands of Chileans who were imprisoned, tortured, burned, exiled illegally detained, “disappeared” or executed during 17 years of dictatorship.’
Last year, while the British government provided a safe house for the murderer General Pinochet, ‘liberal democracy’ in Chile continued the tradition of state repression:
Homosexuality will remain a crime until at least December 2000.
Human Rights campaigners received death threats and demonstrations were crushed with excessive police force.
There were hundreds of reports of ill-treatment and torture of prisoners, especially political prisoners. Amnesty reports: ‘Inmates were reportedly thrown to the ground, beaten with fists and rifle butts, and doused with water and tear gas. There were at least two who were tortured with an electric prod and some others had their heads forced under water; all were handcuffed at the time.’
Between 1989-1994, 15% of the population of Chile lived on $1 a day, and the richest 20% of the population owned 17 times that of the poorest 20%.
Argentina
In 1999, there were more than 80 recorded killings by police in dubious circumstances.
Despite death threats, human rights defenders continue to speak out against state repression and demanded justice for the 30,000 disappeared, including children, the 15,000 executions, 1.5 million exiles and the thousands thrown into prisons during the Argentine government of 1976-1983.
An Argentinian child is three times more likely to die before the age of five than a Cuban child.
The environmental cost of Argentina embracing globalisation has been high, leaving 70% of the land affected by soil degradation, or desertification.
Hebe de Bonafini, from the human rights organisation, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, told the Havana May Day rally: ‘In my country human rights are violated every day, workers are beaten, people die of hunger, murders are ruthlessly committed, prisons are concentration camps. What human rights is our government speaking of when it condemns Cuba?’
El Salvador
El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the hemisphere: 150 per 100,000 inhabitants, greater than during the war in the 1980s.
Poverty affects 60% of the population and there are just 91 doctors for every 100,000 inhabitants, compared to Cuba’s 518 doctors per 100,000.
Amnesty International states that in 1999: ‘Members of the police were responsible for human rights violations, including ill-treatment of detainees, reportedly leading to deaths in custody in some casesÉa presidential election was held in March with an abstention rate of 60% ÉThere were allegations of corruption regarding the use of aid received after natural disasters, such as Hurricane MitchÉSeveral gay men were reportedly killed or shot at.’
During the 1980s, the government of El Salvador was responsible for the deaths of 30,000 people. Hundreds of children disappeared in the course of military operations during the armed conflict; many others were taken away from their parents. Meanwhile, the El Salvadorean government received US logistical support and training worth $1 million per day.
Guatemala
In the face of a significant increase of crime last year, there were 90 lynchings of suspected petty criminals, some carried out by security forces. Amnesty reports that security forces used ‘high crime rates as a pretext to harass, intimidate, torture and extrajudicially execute political opponents and to obstruct human rights monitors and others inquiring into past violations.’
In July 1999, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography declared that these continue to be major problems in Guatemala. Violence against women is also a grave problem.
In February, the Historical Classification Commission published its investigation about 42,000 victims of human rights violations during the civil conflict. It blamed the military for 93% of the atrocities; 83% of victims were indigenous people targeted by the army’s counter-insurgency campaign. The CIA was instrumental in the genocide. Documents released last year confirm that, since the 1960s, US governments had formulated, encouraged and helped implement a counter-insurgency strategy which relied on ‘death squads’ to eliminate suspected subversives.
General Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemalan leader during the army’s counter-insurgency campaign in the early 1980s, was elected to Congress as President.
In Latin America as a whole the number of people classed as poor has increased by 20 million in just two years and nearly 50,000 children survive by their own means (Granma International, 21 May). In Brazil, Columbia and Guatemala, street children are murdered with impunity. Meanwhile, Cuban children are in a privileged position, according to the Executive Director of UNICEF, Carol Bellamy.
Britain
In1998, a complaint about the activities of British police in Ireland was lodged with the UN Committee Against Torture. To date nothing has been done. In 1997, a UN report said police officers in Northern Ireland engaged in ‘activities which constitute intimidation, harassment and hindrance’ of lawyers.
An Amnesty International report published in May warns that Britain’s new Terrorism Act will ‘either directly contravene international human rights treatiesÉor may result in human rights violations’. Another special Amnesty report details deaths in custody, mostly involving black or ethnic minority people, and the lack of police accountability for these deaths. In the year ending March 1999, 65 people died in police custody in England and Wales alone, several in disputed circumstances. Amnesty ‘has identified a pattern of deaths in custody as a result of law enforcement officials use of restraint techniques which has led to “positional asphyxia”‘. There is a serious failure to investigate these killings and to prosecute police officers responsible.
United States
Throughout last year, Amnesty campaigned against human rights violations in the USA, focusing on the death penalty, police brutality, prison and jail conditions and the treatment of refugees.
More prisoners were executed in 1999 than in any year since 1951.
‘Many of the unarmed suspects shot by police were members of ethnic minority groups, some were shot while fleeing the scenes of minor crimes or during routine traffic stops’, reports Amnesty, adding that victims also included mentally or emotionally disturbed individuals. Examples include the fatal shooting by Los Angeles police of Felix Valenzuela, aged 16, who was unarmed, naked and already wounded and the assault of Abner Louima who was beaten and kicked by an officer who then thrust a broken stick into his rectum, causing serious injury to his intestine and bladder.
Prisoners were subject to physical and sexual abuse in prisons including the abusive use of electro-shock weapons which led to the death of several inmates. In March 1999, a judge ruled that ‘extreme deprivations and repressive conditions of confinement’ in segregation units in Texas prisons violated the US constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Children were held in adult prisons and juniors under 18 were sentenced to death, in violation of international treaties. In 1999, eight death row prisoners were released with evidence of wrongful conviction. Since 1974, 84 death row inmates have been found innocent on appeal.
The number of women in US prisons tripled in just ten years. Restraints are systematically used on sick or pregnant women, there is inadequate medical care and sexual abuse from male staff. In September 1999, 40 prison staff were under investigation for sexual misconduct in several women’s prisons in the state of California alone.
Over half the prison population, male and female, is black, although black people in the US constitute just 12% of the population. The US justice system has always been racist. US lawyer Leonard Weinglass was quoted in Granma International as stating that of 18,000 executions carried out in 200 years of US history, only 38 were white convicts. Weinglass defends Mumia Abu Jamal, the former Black Panther who was given a death sentence 17 years ago in an overtly racist and politically motivated case. His lawyers have proven 29 violations of his constitutional rights.
It is cheaper to imprison poor blacks in the US than to educate them. Since 1996, the US government has invested more in prisons than it has in education. With 25% of the world’s prison population in its cells, 2 million people, it is clear why the US prison industry is worth more than $1.1 billion. Prisoners constitute a huge cheap labour force for private companies that pay prison workers just 23 cents an hour.
Unemployment among black Americans is 43% and black people make up 48% of the homeless population in the US. The life expectancy of a black person in Harlem is just 40.
There are nine million immigrants in the US, 43% of them have no medical insurance, even though half of them have full time work. In the southern states, Mexicans are the new slave labourers. They sleep in warehouses, are paid a pittance and are subject to beatings and detention by special forces that award bounties for the capture of immigrants.
While the US blows steam condemning Cuba’s one-party system, in the last US election voter turnout was just 36%. Less than a quarter of the electorate actually voted Bill Clinton into presidency.
All this is in addition to imperialism’s violations of human rights overseas. For example, every month 3,000 Iraqis die of hunger as a direct result of the UN blockade and the relentless bombing of infrastructure by the US and Britain. A special Amnesty report details human rights abuses committed during the US-led NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia.
The Geneva Commission voted to defend the rights of the imperialists and exploiters, not the rights of the oppressed and hungry who constitute the vast majority around the world.
