As I've explained in my first post on this topic, the trouble with the nomination of Tomasz Malinowski to the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Rights and Labor isn't in his persona as such; he's a smart, dedicated and affable person who is highly regarded by his colleagues in the field and has experience in both government and the non-profit sector that makes him well qualified.
Rather, the issue is the outsized role of the powerful Human Rights Watch around the world; its proximity to the Obama Administration; and its troubling diversion to a form of leftism or "neo-progressivism," far from its liberal roots, that has minimized and even enabled some of the worst forms of tyranny in our time -- not only authoritarian states but abusive non-state actors, particularly terrorists.
So here's a sample of Malinowski's writings -- which as a body of work is rather scant, actually, given his prominent insider's lobbying position (I imagine he spent more time talking to people in person or online than in the public media) -- and work out your own thoughts.
RUSSIA
I first opposed Malinowski in direct email discussions back in 2009 on his support of Obama's "reset" and the "engagement" with Putin in an ill-conceived and fake "civil society forum" organized by the Kremlin in Moscow during the first Putin-Obama summit (BTW, a Soros-funded exercise). These were all bad ideas as many have come to see. I was especially alarmed when two weeks after this Kumbaya, HRW's consultant on Chechnya, Natalya Estemirova was murdered by forces said to be related to the autocratic Ramzan Kadyrov, president of the Chechen Republic. It was the only time in the history of HRW that I recall someone so close to HRW reporting being murdered; HRW's Russian researcher had stayed in the home of Estemirova the night before her kidnapping and death. I felt this was about as clear an indication of what weakness and capitulation to Putin gets you -- nowhere, without protection against his worst henchmen. I -- and others -- felt this was a five-alarm fire that should have led to a huge campaign and even the closure of the office and evacuation of the staff -- it didn't. Instead, there was more engagement with Russia.
"The Russian people have now brought about the biggest reset of them all," gushed Malinowski on December 15, 2011 in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on European Affairs and that should tell some of you what the problem is. Now, in 2013, where even a dead man is put on trial and thousands of HRW's counterparts in Russia are raided and even closed (and HRW itself is searched!), it should be clear what's up. The Russian people aren't "re-setting" right now; the "re-loading" some of the outspoken ones are doing involve sacks of stones, as some of them are arrested and sent to forced labour -- or their suitcases as they flee into Western exile.
Malinowski acknowledged continued problems in 2011, but then counseled nuanced appraisals:
That’s not to say that Russia today is what it was during the days of the Soviet Union. Russians enjoy vastly more freedoms in their personal lives than they did then. They can own property. They can travel throughout the country and abroad. They can inform and express themselves more or less freely through the internet. Opposition parties struggle, but do exist. There are still newspapers critical of the government. Some of the forms of democracy are still respected, including semi-competitive elections. But the substance of democracy – the checking and balancing of authority that make governments answer to people – has gradually evaporated.
You know, I'd have to pick on this because I don't feel the freedoms are so vast!They can't own property if they do anything remotely political with it; just as Khodorkovsky or Navalny did. They are not free on the Internet; they are far more watched than Americans imagine they are watched by the NSA. Opposition parties can't get registered, unless you count some that not only express their loyalty but are sure to sacrifice some leaders for hostile probes and threats of jailing. Semi-competitive elections? You mean like the coronation of Putin or getting elected mayor of Yaroslavl against the United Russia machine -- and then arrested after machinations by your opponent? This isn't just evaporation of checks and balances; this is never having the condensation of democracy really in the first place, because powers were never separated.
Like so many progs, Tom has fallen for that "dual power" thing that the tandem had going for awhile:
Under President Medvedev, some reforms were carried out, such as the decriminalization of libel, improvements to the criminal code, and somewhat greater openness to domestic and international scrutiny of government policies. But there was no notable improvement in respect for civil and political rights.
Er, decriminalization of libel? But that wasn't a tactic that Putin used much against the media or critics. Instead, he uses economic cases, such as with Navalny, or fake violence cases as with the Bolotnaya 6, or just forced more independent publications to close, as with Publicpost.ru Given that new legislation has gone into effect to curb the speech of LGBT advocates; punishing alleged "extremists" and disallowing the hurting of the feelings of religious believers, you don't need criminal libel to get rid of a lot of speech in Russia. There wasn't ever greater openness. If you can write about it on Facebook but not do it, well, the thrill wears off quickly. More international scrutiny? What?! Hasn't Malinowski followed the efforts of Russia to destroy the human rights mechanisms of OSCE and the UN?!
Then, there's this horror:
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled over 185 times that the Russian government and its proxies were responsible for extrajudicial executions, torture, and enforced disappearances in Chechnya; in none of these cases have those responsible been brought to justice.
No one has been brought to justice for the murders of three activists in Chechnya in 2009 – Natalya Estemirova, Zarema Saidulaeva, and Alik Dzhabrailov.
If these kinds of cases -- even endorsed by the ECHR -- were happening in other countries HRW was more enthralled with (Israel, the US), we'd never hear the end of it. It would be on the front page every day. It would be in a thousand wire services. And that's what I mean - it's not. It's buried in testimony. The box is ticked off. But it is never central to the organization's work.
I don't know what it is about Russia that inspires people to go on about the nature of the Russian soul. Can you recall any other HRW testimony that talked about the inherent nature of the people as being antithetical to democracy? It would be unthinkable to say that about any Arab country for HRW; they'd never say it about African or Latin American countries about which they do reports. Yet Malinowski feels free to indulge in this stereotyping about Russia:
Many people have therefore wondered why most Russians seemed so passive in the face of such injustice and indignity. It was often said that Russians were somehow historically apathetic or apolitical or simply cynical and resigned. Or that they had simply been bought off by the greater prosperity that came to them, courtesy of Russia’s energy exports, during the Putin era.
Now pay attention to this, because it's not only a theory for Russia, but the neo-progressive theory for the world and one we will see this Administration try to enact out in its next years:
The absence of popular resistance to repression is rarely a sign of true apathy; more often, people choose not to resist because their governments work hard to make resistance futile. This has been the Russian government’s strategy (just as it was the strategy of the Egyptian government under Mubarak) – to persuade people that if they challenge the state, they will stand alone and surely lose, and thus endanger themselves for nothing.
But beneath the surface in such societies, a different kind of resistance can gradually erode the legitimacy of a state. People share their disgust with their families, co-workers, and friends. They lose respect for their leaders and greet their pronouncements with ridicule. Children of the elite confront their parents and ask how they can be part of such a lie. Members of the elite project confidence to the outside world, but often recognize, privately, that they are not telling the truth, and sometimes feel doubt and even shame as a result. Under such circumstances, a single spark can ignite unstoppable movements for change and cause a seemingly powerful state’s authority to crumble.
Oh, they do, do they? The children of Russian oligarchs I see are all at Oxford or buying ranches in Virginia or at the watering holes of the rich and famous in Europe -- not challenging their corrupt parents. They sneer at dissidents. I don't see any elites privately portraying doubts; they are ruling the roost. Somehow I think it's giong to take more than a single spark to get the sort of massive resistance Malinowski is fantasizing (it's a long-cherished dream of the left that the masses are going to rise up and bring about a Better World). Meanwhile, when the Egyptian people revolted against the democratically-elected Islamists, and people "shared their disgust," it didn't fit for HRW. The appeal of 15 human rights groups in Egypt that in fact supported the military return to order because it stopped the massive abuse of human rights went unnoticed, while the same groups' calls on the military to stop its abuses later were amplified.
Certainly rebellion has no hope if the US never speaks up; if it maintains private diplomacy, as it has with Russia and Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, and if condemnation of the crackdowns never happens from the White House and never, ever appears on whitehouse.gov but is shunted off to other less-visible web sites or doesn't exist. And there could never be any hope when the advice this insider former State Department official Malinowski was giving to his old colleagues and soon-to-be new colleagues was just to wait and see how it would turn out:
During the period between now and the presidential election, scheduled for March 4 next year, we will see if the protests continue to grow, and if so, how the state will respond. A critical question will be whether the government allows a credible, independent investigation of allegations of vote rigging during the Duma elections. Of course, no one can know now what will happen. The Russian state is still strong. Civil society is still rather weak. Putin and his security apparatus may lash out in ways that increase the degree of repression in Russia in the short term. We have already seen some signs of that – the government has pressed online social networks to censor calls for demonstrations, and prosecutors have questioned executives of networks that have refused to do so.
Okay, now we know -- and really, we couldn't have guessed before?! No investigation was held into vote-rigging -- surprise, surprise! Putin and his security apparatus did lash out -- who'd have thunk it! Executives of networks refused to do so at first but then, well, disappeared, like Pavel Durov, the head of Vkontakte vanished from Twitter in April. Malinowski is oblivious of the obvious future downturns:
But many of their old tactics – whether arresting protest leaders, or blaming the West – not only are not working, but are backfiring.
They are? For reals? In fact, Putin successfully used just these tactics because Obama said nothing when he arrested people , and did nothing when NGOs were raided and the USAID was kicked out. Even while bowing totally to Putin's will, the West still got blamed.
Says Malinowski:
What should US do? Obama and Congress should speak "calmly but firmly and publicly" against abuses.
Second, the United States should apply targeted pressure against those elements of the Russian security apparatus that have tortured and killed the very individuals who are trying to make the government accountable. This is what Senator Cardin’s legislation – the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act – seeks to do. It is not designed to sanction Russia or the Russian government or to interrupt any diplomatic or economic cooperation between the United States and Russia. It targets individuals inside Russia who are reasonably and objectively suspected of having committed terrible crimes – such as extrajudicial executions and torture – and whom the Russian government cannot legitimately embrace or seek to protect. It says that such people should not be allowed to travel to the United States or to pass their money through U.S. banks – something that the U.S. government has a legitimate interest in preventing.
Especially if joined by the European Union, such measures would help to isolate and disadvantage these elements in Russia vis a vis other members of the elite who are more open to reform and respectful of dissent.
Targeted visa and financial restrictions would also help to cut off the escape valve enjoyed by many of the worst human rights violators in Russia – their ability to convert power into wealth and then to spend and store that wealth from New York to London to the French Riviera.
If push comes to shove, it will be risky for the Russian government to defend the targets of this legislation, or to denounce international action against them, or to use such action as a pretext to end cooperation with the West that advances Russia’s national interests.
This is a good example of the wishful thinking of the human rights community that turns into a kind of virtual world that keeps getting promoted despite reality and then itself becomes a dangerous buffer to effective action. Push did come to shove, and Russia not only defended the Magnitsky List; they gave the prosecutors responsible for his death even promotions and promised them impunity and protection; they didn't risk a thing by denouncing international action but only split the West -- as people like the head of Carnegie Europe abundantly illustrated with his condemnation of the Magnitsky Act as mere Congressional bluster; indeed Putin precisely used the Magnitsky List to stop foreign adoptions and launch an unprecedented campaign against NGOs. How could Malinowski be so wrong about so many things in Russia?!
Because his entire mindset about Russia was wrong to start with; he believed you could reason with "reformers" like Medvedev there; he believed people could be strong against the oppressive state; he believed that symbolic actions would be treated as mere symbols despite their determination to "send a message".
Does this represent a "learning curve" and can we expect Malinowski to be tougher on Russia when he comes into the setting of the State Department? Of course not; his thinking his bad through and through on Russia, steeped in both the "progressive" and "neo-progressive" lines on Moscow, and it will not get better in the Obama setting, but only worse. Malinowski never wrote any rueful "I was wrong" post after that hearing -- and no fair saying that no one has a crystal ball. You would not require ESP to understand that elections under Putin would fail, and he would ruthlessly suppress dissent.
But not in Tom Malinowski's virtual world. That's one of the key reasons Obama is picking him; they will be utter soul mates on this issue.
CHINA
As with the other country situations I'm flagging here, it's difficult to try to capture the problem of Human Rights Watch -- and other liberal human rights groups like Human Rights Watch on China, because of course they have done reports, they have taken up cases, they have checked off the boxes.
But on the big, symbolic situations, they have stumbled. No other case makes that more vivid that the case of Chen Guangchen, the blind activist who made a dramatic escape from China by holding up the summit of Hillary Clinton with Chinese leaders, after he was cajoled into leaving the safety of the US Embassy, whose refuge he had painfully found. US officials who persuaded him to leave the safety of the Embassy on the strength of hope in China's good will to let him go for study abroad then left Chen alone in a hospital where he fell into Chinese custody. Finally -- after Congressional hearings by Rep. Chris Smith during which he was piped in by cell phone from Beijing pleading for support -- and lots of media coverage he was eventually allowed to leave for the US and take up residence at NYU.
Michael Posner, a long time engager of China with his own theories, during his time leading another organization Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), of working quietly with moderates and low-impact NGOs involved in the rule of law, was nowhere to be found on the Chen case. He just never talked. No one consulted him. He was never covered in the media. HRW never asked him publicly to get on the case or criticized the handling of the protracted affair. HRW quietly supported both Koh, with whom they had long-term relations, and Posner, their colleague in the Human Rights Leadership Group and various joint actions over the years.
Worse, neither HRW or HRF or any other group except some Chinese exiles took to task Harold Koh, the State Department's legal advisor, who had held Chen's hand while he was at the Embassy -- but then let it go, convincing him to go to the hospital without any US escort or watcher. It's good this precarious story ended well, but it might not have and this was not the State Department's finest hour. Never during this period did HRW apply any heat. If anything, they praised the handling of the high-profile incident.
This painfully awfully piece in the New York Times -- like one that was even worse in the Washington Post by Max Fisher back in the day -- lets us know how duplicitious the neo-progressives have become -- with its dubious claims of Chen, a strong-minded and brave person "losing his way" or "stumbling" or becoming "confused" because of all the "competing agendas". They can't envision a rights campaigner who could live and work among them yet hold a politically-incorrect view on abortion -- a view he did not particularly wish to campaign on. They couldn't envision crossing the aisle and talking to born-agains or Christian right-wing groups for the sake of the higher cause of human rights -- to even talk to such groups or concede their interests was to commit human rights blasphemy. They certainly couldn't envision it when they applauded NYU's "engagement" with its campus in China.
When Obama decided to "engage" the Chinese, in typical frustrating fashion, Malinowski seemed to grasp what was at stake even as he set the bar low for failure:
Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said it's important for Obama to "lay down a marker" in his conversations with Hu, even if doing so "does not help you win the contest of ideas all by itself."
"This is the first time in several decades that we have seen a great power that stands for and promotes an alternative vision of how states should relate to their people, and that poses a threat not just to political dissidents inside China but to a whole set of values and norms that underpin the international system the United States helped build," Malinowski said.
But despite those qualms, once again Malinowski was on hand to reassure us that reformers were waiting in the wings, that all would be well, particularly through the automagical balm of economic advancement through technology:
Malinowski and others are recommending that Obama seek ways to directly engage the Chinese public on the importance of civil liberties, not only as human rights but also as something important to China as it works to build an innovating economy and educated population to sustain it.
How do you "directly engage" the Chinese public when the government blocks the Internet?
LIBYA
Okay, so you don't think Russia is that important nor is Malinowski's role in bilatting it up with Russian bureaucrats going to move the needle even if he grows more tough? Sure. So let's look at Libya. Malinowski/HRW got that wrong too, for the same reasons of bad thinking that underestimates terrorism, over-estates reforms, and overplays the American role.
I call it "reverse American exceptionalism". Hawks and conservatives think America's the best in the world because it has the most powerful army or the most gadgets or the most foreign bases or whatever and think America is number one on every score. Leftists and liberals and progs think America is the worst -- worse than Russia or China or Iran or Sudan even! -- because they have bad cases of myopia or astigmatism, with the log in their own eye being their obsession with the sins of their own country to the exclusion of reason and sanity about the great evils in the wider world.
In this "reverse exceptionalism," progs believe that America is still fixable, however, and fixable by them; then once America is "good," why, it will rule as if it were Camelot and everything will be fine. If you just get America to stop funding Israel, for example, as Andrew Sullivan wrongly believes, why, the entire Arab world will cease hating us, Israeli hawks won't be able to push settlements, Palestinians will suddenly be peaceful and cooperative and all will be right with the world. If you believe in that, you believe in the tooth fairy. And Tom does, and puts his baby eye teeth under the pillow every night, even though the tooth fairy never gives him a dime.
With "reverse exceptionalism," HRW imagines the reformed United States lurching around the Middle East and now suddenly having friends where it had enemies merely by turning on or off the aid spigot.
I remember back when I read Malinowski on Libya a few years ago -- he wrote several times for The New Republic, I rolled my eyes. What was he smoking? What were they thinking? My God, this was Qaddafi for God's sake. HRW lost their way cuddling with Qaddafi's son. They thought he was a Gorbachev. The Jerusalem Post was among those who took HRW to task for this crazy blunder -- the spectacle of a watchdog group waltzing around in Tripoli with thugs like this pretending they were having an impact:
In 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), visited Libya, where she claimed to have discovered a “Tripoli spring,” led by Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. In two articles, she praised him for creating an “expanded space for discussion and debate.”
As a top official of a prominent human rights watchdog, Whitson’s endorsement gave credibility to this fictitious reform movement. Two years later, and weeks after the rebellion began and the Gaddafi regime had killed hundreds, if not thousands, Whitson belatedly reversed course, and in a February 24 Los Angeles Times op-ed acknowledged the façade of Saif’s human rights “reforms.”
But before that happened, boy was it hard to get HRW to admit it had done something appallingly wrong during those two years.
Tom on Libya was troubling, to say the least. This passage from his article is worth quoting in full just so that you can start to see the patterns of the bad thinking -- it plays out exactly as it did with Russia, only with higher stakes and more lives to lose:To date, the National Transitional Council in Libya has defied conventional expectations about how a rebel movement should behave. It has broadcast non-stop radio and TV messages explaining to its supporters the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and recently sent a mass text message to its supporters reading: “Remember when you capture anyone from Qaddafi, that he is a Libyan like you. His dignity is your dignity, because we are both Libyan, and his family is your family, and his honor is your honor.” The NTC leader, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, declared last week, “The future will not be a bed of roses. I call on all Libyans to act with responsibility and not to take justice into their own hands … treating prisoners of war well and kindly. We all have a right to live with dignity in this nation.” Jalil even offered to submit himself for trial as a former member of Qaddafi’s government.
Meanwhile, places where tribal support for Qaddafi ran strong, like his hometown Sirte, and the southern desert town of Sabha, must be incorporated into the new Libya. A more inclusive transitional government must be organized, and inevitable tensions between rebels who took part in the assault on Tripoli, and those who wished they had, must be held in check.
The central challenge in all this is that the high-minded leaders in Benghazi have never fully controlled the independent-minded fighters now streaming into Libya’s capital. In Benghazi itself, it has taken them months to consolidate under a unified command all the armed groups that arose at the start of Libya’s revolt. And even there, they have not fully succeeded, as the still unsolved killing of their defense minister suggested.
That said, the Libyan experience does teach us something about the inherent fragility of oppressive regimes, and about the danger of basing foreign policy on the assumption that they will last. On the night the opposition entered Tripoli, a friend in the Obama administration emailed me this line from Gandhi: “There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it—always.” I thought: No respectable foreign policy analyst would be caught dead quoting such a line at a Washington think tank meeting. But as an explanation of what has happened in Libya, and might happen in Syria and plenty of other places where the stirrings of revolt are not yet apparent, it was a more precise and realistic statement than most commentary I have heard in the last few months. Tyrants rule by force and by fear. Force and fear produce obedience in the short term, but ultimately revulsion and resistance. Resistance can be broken, as it was during Iran’s Green Revolution. But the violence required to do so generates even more revulsion and resistance, until, eventually, force and fear are overcome
All of this is especially galling to remember now in light of the killing of our ambassador and diplomats in Benghazi. Er, the only problem was that the high-minded leaders didn't control their, um, independent-minded fighters? Really? So independent-minded they go to work for Al Qaeda as the local franchise -- or wait, were really part of Al Qaeda, welcomed by Qaddfi all along? How can you be so deliberately naive about a country you visited? And...inclusiveness of Qaddafi's people who were busy jailing and killing others? That's really necessary? That's really what a human rights group should say?
And then this smarmy quotable quote about tyrants. Sure, we all believe this; I've said the same thing myself many a time. But it's one thing to say this as a true-believer human rights activist as a well-meaning press release for a report; it's another to keep pretending this is going to happen any day now or soon enough and recommend it as policy to states, and not acknowledge -- and tell the truth -- that it really isn't happening now nor likely will it happen any time soon.
Tyranny hasn't been broken in Iran or Syria or for that matter Russia or China. For years on end. After a certain amount of time and broken lives, you have to call it: this will not be changing, and we need to work on deterrence, on isolation, on draining away legitimacy, on sustenance and solidarity with oppositions and civil societies -- and stop hand-holding and having transition-to-democracy seminars with thugs. You don't have to have a humanitarian intervention let alone a war to adopt such a rigorous and critical stance and to keep up the monitoring and the advocacy pressure to extract concessions and ultimately strengthen movements for change rather than reward the perestroika liberals who are in the way of change. You can just stop pretending the leopard will change his spots and build up other relationships. When all else fails, you can simply not confer legitimacy. Tyrants crave legitimacy. That's why I suggest that simple but powerfully resonating gestures like just not going to the G20 to show disdain for various bad policies are the way to go rather than doing things like taking part in Kremlin civil society snuggles; that's why I say that you don't play the political game of blessing Obama's reset and waltzing with Putin, you stay home -- or you go to the dissidents' alternative meeting and hold a press conference.
And it means you stop babbling about "inclusivity" with people who are not only not liberal democrats but actively suppressing the rights of others as an institution. Withholding or promising aid to force sharing of power or separation of power seems like a pretty rough road, but it is seldom tried. It should be. The line in Washington is that it can be tried now. The wonderment is that it wasn't tried back in the day when it would have made a difference in the outcome of Morsi's government -- maybe (I'm not going to pretend that any enterprise of the Muslim Brotherhood was going to turn out well, even garbage- collection precisely because of the refusal to concede separation of church and state.)
Tom thinks that if you rebel against tyrants, and they crack down and kill you, why, the revulsion over your murder will eventually stir another round of protest as your neighbours protest. Except, sometimes they are cowed into silence for ever, or for a long time...
And...what is HRW doing trying to devise plans for how rebels can be included or what the actions and configurations of a government should be?! Why aren't they just monitoring and reporting on human rights violations and calling it a day? Since when does HRW make democracy ratings and prescriptions like Freedom House or policy proposals like the International Crisis Group?
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Reams have been written criticizing HRW's positions on Israel, notably on the issues of Jenin, the Goldstone report, the Gaza attacks -- and I can't hope to do it justice here.
For me, the positions are best illustrated with anecdotes. Remember the scandal about HRW fund-raising in Saudi Arabia by invoking their critical work on Israel? They edge-cased and word-saladed this out the wazoo -- Ken, as a lawyer and a prosecutor is excellent at that sort of thing. Yes, astoundingly, HRW had the poor judgement to send their staff to Saudi Arabia to fundraise with wealthy Saudi princes by nodding and winking and telling them that they had trouble raising money to work on Israel/Palestine in the US because some Jewish funders had abandoned them over their critical positions on Israel and they worked in a climate of hostility. Ken Roth spun the story when it came out. It took Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic to tackle him and wrestle him to the ground on this awful thing. Who remembers this now?
Sarah Leah Whitson is the latest in a long line of Middle East Watch staff who basically take the side of the BDS movement; who use the term "Nakbah" to describe events in Palestine; who endlessly and self-righteously bash Israel as if they alone in the world were doing this and were victimized for their lonely crusade. It's sick.
Once I happened to run into a high-ranking HRW person in the lady's room at the Waldorf Astoria at one of those big fund-raising dinners. I started talking about the shocking experiences I had seeing the antisemitism at the Durban World Conference Against Racism but this person brushed my concerns aside and began telling me haughtily about a meeting that HRW had already stage-managed at the Ethical Cultural Center to "deal with" the Durban issue and allegations of HRW's inaction (bad behaviour) there. There were apparently a few people in the audience who got up at the meeting and asked some hard questions, but they were "dealt with".
"Oh," the staff person said to me as we washed our hands and waited for the lady to give us a fluffy towel. "We call them Big Jews with Big Views. We dealt with them."
I stumbled in shock. That's how they talk? That's what they call people? Even their donors? Yes, that's how they talk.
There's lots written on the HRW problem with Israel/Palestine -- the obsessiveness can be conveyed with another incident. Once at a meeting with ambassadors at the UN, an HRW rep became nearly hysterical trying to convince them that they should somehow force the Security Council to insist on the acceptance of the Goldstone report although it was a report to the UN Human Rights Council. Naturally this overriding of existing structures and procedures and rules wouldn't fly. But the person was insistent, and when HRW wants something, it gets its way. After the meeting, I asked this person if they could raise a problem I had with Amnesty International at an upcoming meeting -- AI had a new procedure requiring that relatives approve the designation of the status of "prisoner of conscience" to such prisoners (POC's are nearly defunct in AI's work these days) but in some countries this was preventing the cases from being processed as the regimes would intimidate the relatives so they'd be afraid of asking for the status. The HRW staffer said he'd consider raising it, but then I had to do a favour in return:
"What's that?" I asked in curiosity, as there was little I could do for the all-powerful HRW.
"Get the Jews off our back," I was told vehemently, as if this was a public service that all right-thinking human rightsniks, however modest in influence, should be tackling. "Get them to understand we are reasonable, that our concerns are legitimate." But it wasn't normal, that obsessiveness and that hysteria, and it was skewed -- on Jenin, on Durban, on Goldstone, on many things. The sense of victimhood that people inside the all-powerful HRW feel about the backlash to their bad views on Israel seems counterintuitive, given their aggressive proseltyzing, yet it's the case -- they are Tragically Misunderstood Artists.
This is why founding leader of HRW, Robert Bernstein, left the organization. I whole-heartedly agree with him. Somehow, his op-ed piece is construed (in deliberately tendentious fashion, and above all by HRW staff) to be something that urges people to give Israel a pass, or not apply universal standards to it because it's special. But that's ridiculous, because Israel already has the laser-like obsessive scrutiny of the entire leftist universe 24/7/12/365, the entire liberal human rights movement, the entire range of sincere and insincere actors at the UN, and hardly needs more scrutiny.
Bernstein meant something else; a choosing of priorities based on where the gravest violations were -- to really apply universal standards and then go where the worst abuses of them were actually found -- in the rest of the Arab world. It's not about somehow calling for "no scrutiny" or "no criticism" but realizing the *context* of the world with many other actors and *balancing out* the obsessiveness to some other severe areas of concern. HRW vigorously fights any charge of imbalance by pointing to some 10-page report they've done on a country, as if this balances the hundreds they've done just on Israel/Palestine and the endless agitation they've done very visibly in the press. They think any attempt at balance is a cop-out or even betrayal. There is no reasoning with them.
So Bob Bernstein went on to found his own organization, Advancing Human Rights and simply decided to stop trying to get HRW to turn around its huge helm on their obsessions, but to get to work on the issues that need addressing himself. He supported Cyberdissidents, the web site supporting Arab bloggers and human rights activists and prisoners of conscience, who were way head of the curve on the Arab Spring and continue to be so. He supported related projects that went to where the violations were. Good!
What goes on here is not only "reverse exceptionalism" about America; it's "reverse exceptionalism" about Israel. HRW and other organizations with liberals and "progressives," and particularly Jewish "progressives" want badly to be the ones to influence Israel's government precisely because they feel it *is" influenceable. It is a democracy under the rule of law and amenable to change. They want to be the ones to force that change -- and furthermore, they think that if it changes by their lights, all will be well with the world. The Palestinians will withdraw their hostile actions; the world's terrorists will lay down their bombs as they will have nothing to fight about any more.
ISLAMISTS AND DEMOCRACY
If you don't have your ear to the ground to hear what HRW leaders are saying privately about Egypt, or you don't have the stamina to try to pick up signals out of the endless Twitter stream, you can go read the New York Review of Books to see this earlier exchange between Ken Roth and other HRW leaders and a leftist feminist writer, Meredith Tax, who has taken on the challenge of opposing the religious right at home and abroad and is fearless about including Islamists in this critique.
Says Tax:
In your Introduction to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2012, “Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights,” you urge support for the newly elected governments that have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Tunisia and Egypt. In your desire to “constructively engage” with the new governments, you ask states to stop supporting autocrats. But you are not a state; you are the head of an international human rights organization whose role is to report on human rights violations, an honorable and necessary task that your essay largely neglects.
I couldn't have said it better myself: you are not a state. Yet Human Rights Watch, with its vast network of embassy-like offices, press saturation and influence in the corridors of power, is like a state -- a Wired State. It's just no fun endlessly being a barking watchdog, and never getting to really influence things and so now it does behave with more "nuances," counseling "engagement" with the new autocrats. Ugh.
Roth and others respond:
In the introduction to Human Rights Watch’s most recent World Report, released on January 22, Kenneth Roth wrote that Western governments cannot credibly maintain a commitment to democracy if they reject electoral results when an Islamic party does well. That was the hypocritical stance of the West when, for example, it acquiesced in the Algerian military’s interruption of free elections that the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win and then in the brutal suppression of that party in the early 1990s, or when President George W. Bush cut short his “democracy agenda” after Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and the Muslim Brotherhood did better than expected in Egyptian parliamentary elections in 2005.
Read the whole exchange there and subsequently and struggle to understand how a human rights group came to feel beholden to oppressive Islamists who routinely and as a matter of deep principle violate rights, particularly women's rights and free speech -- and also feel that they alone had to bear the burden of proving the West had no double standards regarding elections.
It's particularly ironic when you think of how much disdain HRW has had over the years for monitoring elections and how much cynicism it had in particular for the OSCE; HRW doesn't do elections, it only exploits them as advocacy events.
I could continue this post endlessly on other country cases -- Nigeria, where so many HRW reports covered the Nigerian state's excessive use of force or assassination of Islamists, but had so much less to say about the Christan and moderate Muslim victims of the Islamists -- it just didn't fit the paradigm. Or the troubling report on Mexico that complained about the Mexican police's brutality, without examining the thousands of cases of people murdered by drug lords. This is what happens when you monitor human rights treaties that are meant to obligate states, and not exactly non-state actors, and become obsessed with how to make states better and neglect the elements of what makes states -- people and their movements. You could have said something about the Muslim Brotherhood 20 or 30 years ago; it was clear then as now what it would become. But that would mean breaking the 11th commandment about not criticizing other groups in society, as bad as they might be, and sticking to the agenda of pressuring states.
Except that's not what Human Rights Watch and the larger human rights movement has become; the movement's flagship group now politicizes its work routinely and decides what groups make up states you could work with and what strategies and approaches should be used to encourage fledgling democratic states -- including silence on their sins. Is it any wonder the world's leading human rights voice has produced the candidate for the world's leading human-rights advocating state - it had long ago become like an embassy.
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