VI. On infringement upon human rights of other nations
In recent years, the United States has been practicing unilateralism in the
international arena, indulging itself in military aggression around the world,
brutal violation of sovereign rights of other nations. Its image has been
tarnished by numerous misdeeds of human rights infringement in other countries.
The United States tops the world in terms of military expenditure, and is the
largest exporter of arms. Its military spendings for the 2004 fiscal year
reaches US$400.5 billion, exceeding the total amount of defence budgets of all
other countries in the world in summation. The New York Times reported on
September 25, 2003, that the United States export of conventional arms accounted
for 45.5 per cent of the world's arms trade volume in 2002, ranking the first in
the world. And according to a Capitol report, the United States sold US$8.6
billion worth of conventional arms to the developing nations, or 48.6 per cent
of all the arms procured by the developing world in 2002.
The United States has been active in sabre-rattling and launching wars. It is
the No 1 in terms of gross violation of other countries' sovereign rights and
other people's human rights. The United States has resorted to the use of force
against other countries 40 times since 1990s. Well-known US journalist and
writer William Blum said in his recent book "Rouge State: A Guide to the World's
Only Superpower" that since 1945, the United States has attempted to overthrow
more than 40 foreign governments, suppressed over 30 national movements, in
which millions of people have lost their precious lives and many more people
been plunged into misery and despair.
In March 2003, without authorization by the United Nations, the United States
unilaterally waged a large-scale war on Iraq based on its claim that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In its wanton and indiscriminate
bombing of Iraq, many bombs of the US army were dropped on residential areas,
shopping malls and civilian vehicles.
According to an article carried by Britain's Independent newspaper in January
2004 titled "George W. Bush and the real state of the Union," in the war on Iraq
by then, more than 16,000 Iraqis had been killed, of which 10,000 were civilians
(See the edition of Britain's Independent on January. 20, 2004). On April 2,
2003, the US armed forces attacked a Baghdad maternity hospital installed by the
Red Crescent, a local market and other adjacent buildings for civilian use,
claiming a lot of human lives and injured at least 25 people. Five cars were
bombed and drivers were burned to death inside their cars (See the edition of
San Diego Union-Tribune, US on August 5, 2003).
Based on a report by Britain's Independent newspaper on February 8, 2004,
more than 13,000 civilians, many of them women and children,have been killed so
far by the US army and its allied forces in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the
wake of September 11 incident in 2001, "making the continuing conflicts the most
deadly wars for non-combatants waged by the West since the Viet Nam War more
than 30 years ago." Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to former US
President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, said "it is a serious matter when the
world's Number One superpower undertakes a war claiming a causus belli that
turns out to have been false." (Washington Post on February 2, 2004).
Depleted uranium (DU) shells and cluster bombs were used recklessly during
wars in violation of international laws. In December 2003, the Human Rights
Watch disclosed in a report that the 13,000 cluster bombs US troops used in Iraq
contained nearly 2 million bomblets, which have caused causalities of over 1,000
people. The "dub" cluster bombs that did not blast on the spot continued to
menace the lives of innocent people. The US troops also used large quantities of
depleted uranium shells during their military operations in Iraq. The quantity
and residue of pollutants from these bombs far exceeded those of the Gulf War in
1991. Through a spokesman for the Central Command, the Pentagon acknowledged
that ammunition containing depleted uranium was used during the Iraq war.
Indeed, Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project,
former professor of environmental science and onetime US army colonel, said
after the Iraq War that the willful use of DU bombs to contaminate any other
nation and bring harms to the people and their environment is a crime against
humanity (See Spain's Uprising newspaper on June 2, 2003).
Another investigation report said that in the Iraqi capital Baghdad alone,
numerous places were found to have the amount of radioactive materials that
exceeded the normal level by 1,000 times. The US troops also used "Mark-77"
napalm, a kind of bomb banned by the United Nations, in Iraq, which negatively
impacted on environment there. On July 7, 2003, Dato'Param Cumaraswamy of the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights, openly voiced his shock at the fact
that the US Government did not abide by international human rights rules and
humanism in its counter-terrorism military actions. (UN Rights Expert "Alarmed"
over United States Implementation of Military Order, United Nations Press
Release, July 7, 2003, www.un.org)
The United States put behind bars 3,000 Taliban and al-Qaida inmates in
Afghanistan, 680 alleged die-hard al-Qaida elements from 40-odd countries in
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and an undefined number of prisoners in the US army base
on Diego Garcia island on the India Ocean leased from Britain. All these
prisoners locked up by the US were not indicted officially (Britain's
Independent newspaper on June 26, 2004). The New York Times quoted a
high-ranking official from the US Department of Defence on February 13, 2003 as
saying that the United States planned to jail most of the prisoners currently in
Guantanamo for a long time or indefinitely. The US Government said the detainees
in Guantanamo were not "prisoners of war" and therefore not subjected to the
protection of the Geneva Conventions.
"The main concern for us is the US authorities ... have effectively placed
them beyond the law," said Amanda Williamson, spokeswoman for the Washington
office of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross. (Overseas
Chinese newspaper in US, October 11, 2003). A report entitled People the Law
Forgot, carried on the British Guardian in December 2003, depicted the plight of
the 600-odd foreigners detained by the US in Guantanamo Bay. These people had
been detained in Guantanamo Bay since January 2002, where they were tortured
both mentally and physically (Britain's Guardian newspaper on December 3, 2003).
The detainees were given only one minute a week for taking showers and only
through a hunger strike did they win the weekly five-minute shower time and the
weekly ten-minute break for physical exercises. At a clandestine interrogation
centre of the US troops in Bagram of Afghanistan, prisoners were even more
tortured. They were forced to stand or kneel down for hours in varied awkward
positions while wearing hoods over their heads or coloured glasses. Exposed to
strong light 24 hours a day, they could not go to sleep (Britain's Independent
newspaper on June 26, 2003).
The US is the nation with the most troops stationed overseas, about 364,000
troops in over 130 countries and regions. The violations of human rights against
local people frequently occurred. In 2003, the US military authority received 88
reports about "misbehaviour" of its overseas troops. On May 25, 2003, a soldier
of the US Marine Corps in Okinawa of Japan wounded and raped a 19-year-old
Japanese girl. The soldier was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. In
the past dozen years, such cases occurred frequently in Okinawa and up to 100 US
soldiers have been reported of committing crimes. On February 7, 2004,
Australian police detained three soldiers of the US Marine Corps suspected of
committing sexual harassment of two Australian women.
In September 2003, three officers and soldiers from the US Kitty Hawk
aircraft carrier robbed and seriously wounded a taxi driver in Kanagawa-Ken of
Japan. The three officers and soldiers were sentenced to four years in prison.
In October 2002, a female engineer in Baghdad of Iraq was handcuffed and made to
stand in the scorching sun for one hour because she refused to be snuffed at by
police dogs as she was taking a copy of Alcoran with her. The case sparked
large-scale protest and demonstration in Iraq.
For a long time, the US State Department has been
publishing "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" every year. It presumes
to be the "Judge of Human Rights in the World" and, regardless of the
differences and disparities among different countries in politics, economy,
history, culture and social development and strong opposition from other
countries, denounces other countries unreasonably for their human rights status
in compliance with its own ideology, value and human rights model. Meanwhile, it
has turned a blind eye to its own human rights problems. This fully exposes the
dual standards of the US on human rights and its hegemonism. The human rights
record of the US is absolutely not in accord with its position as a world power,
which constitutes a strong irony against its self-granted title of a big power
in human rights. The United States should take its own human rights problems
seriously, reflect on its erroneous position and behaviour on human rights, and
stop its unpopular interference with other countries' internal affairs under the
pretext of promoting human rights.
