Off the Fence

Human Rights Award Degraded after Honoring Putin

Not since Yasir Arafat was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 has the reputation of a human rights award been so besmirched.

In early July, news leaked that a German nonprofit organization, Quadriga, would bestow its annual honor—given to “role Models for Germany”—to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yes, that Vladimir Putin, the man who, in his 11 years ruling Russia, has presided over the country’s slide into authoritarianism, a withering of the rule of law, and a foreign policy of aggression toward its neighbors.

For anyone who has visited Oslo—a city of quiet streets and quiet people—that a horrific massacre on the scale of what took place there last Friday would occur is, for lack of a better word, unbelievable. Oslo is a city where the Slottet, the palace of Norway’s royal family, lays open to Karl Johans Gate, the city’s main avenue, with nary a police officer in sight. Contrast this lackadaisical approach to safety with the massive, armed presence around any government building in Washington, and you get a sense of the feeling which Norwegians had about their “idyllic country that basked in wealth, equality and beauty,” in the words of Anthony Browne.

The most important consequence of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of American soldiers and CIA operatives yesterday is the tremendous symbolic effect it will have in strengthening the credibility of American power. For nearly a decade, it appeared that the greatest military force the world has ever known—what with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers deployed around the world, predator drone strikes, and global network of undercover intelligence agents—was unable to kill or capture a 54-year-old diabetic hiding in a cave (or, as it turns out, a Pakistani mansion). This agonizing inability to render justice to the fiend who had masterminded the murder of thousands of Americans, destroyed the World Trade Center, forced a massive hole in the Pentagon, and whose global terrorist organization had brought misery and death to so many of his co-religionists, seemed to confirm that we were, in bin Laden’s taunting words, a “weak horse.”

When CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted by a mob on the streets of Cairo in February, Israeli-American journalist Nir Rosen had a characteristically crude response. “Yes yes its wrong what happened to her,” he wrote on the social networking site Twitter. “Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.”

The root of Rosen’s rage was his belief that Logan (and, apparently, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who was also attacked) was overly deferential to the American government. Specifically, he faulted her for defending General Stanley McChrystal, the former American commander in Afghanistan who was forced to step down last year after Rolling Stone published disparaging remarks his staff had made about officials in the Obama administration. “Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger,” Rosen wrote.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argues that the campaign against Muammar Qaddafi represents the height of hypocrisy. Because the United States is abstaining from taking military action against other regimes in the region that are also using force to quell domestic uprisings—namely, Bahrain and Yemen—“all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms” are bunk. The war in Libya “isn’t about justice,” Robinson says, “it’s about power.” Far from arising out of some neoconservative impulse to spread democracy, he argues, the military action against the Libyan regime is rather an example of “realism.”

Three weeks into Libya’s civil war, debate is raging over what, if any, military action the United States should take to help end the 42-year reign of Muammar el-Qaddafi. Much of the opposition to American intervention is based on tactical concerns. Echoing the dissuasive congressional testimony of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who outlined the costs of enforcing a no-fly zone over the country, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that intervention “would be a potentially costly distraction for the U.S. military.” In the halls of power, however, the crux of resistance appears to be based on doubts over the very legitimacy of American interference.

Gregory Scoblete of the RealClearWorld blog believes he’s discovered a contradiction in my writing. Last week, I posted in this space about a recent Brookings Institution survey that found a sharp rise in Arab support for the Iranian nuclear program. The cause of this newfound fervor in the Arab world for a Persian nuke is that it would be seen, rightly, as a finger in the eye of the West. Of all the reasons to be insouciant, never mind enthusiastic, about Iran getting the bomb, this has to be the most puerile and cynical. As I had argued in the past, there are many things that are popular in the Arab street that are fundamentally irrational and illiberal and that no American government could in good faith support as a policy matter merely because Arabs think we should, and the Brookings poll validates that contention.

I’ve belatedly watched the 2009 documentary Mugabe and the White African, a harrowing perspective on the campaign of terror that Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has unleashed upon his people. The film tells the story of a white family, led by its patriarch Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth, fighting to keep their farm from the clutches of Mugabe’s land redistribution policy. Enacted in 2000, the scheme has resulted in astronomical inflation, the utter collapse of the country’s once-prosperous commercial agriculture sector (which has made most Zimbabweans dependent on international food aid), and the creation of some 2 million refugees. Early on, Freeth asks whether it is possible for a white man to be considered an African, and it is this question, among others, that fuel the film.

A new poll finds that a majority of Arabs support Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. This doesn’t jibe with “elite” Arab opinion — that of the sort found in the palaces of Arab capitals — which considers a nuclear-equipped, revolutionary Shiite regime a major destabilizing force. (That privately-held view was inadvertently divulged earlier this summer when the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States essentially came out in support of a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.) Most interesting is that the percentage of Arabs in favor of a nuclear Iran has doubled in the past year, in defiance of the Obama administration’s campaign to rally the world in favor of tougher sanctions on the regime.

In December 2001, the Independent’sRobert Fisk earned international infamy when he filed a dispatch from Afghanistan about a group of young Afghan men and boys who nearly beat him to death. “In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk,” he wrote. “Or any other Westerner I could find.” A more fitting example of the Western foreign correspondent “gone native” — recognizable by ample amounts of self-loathing and patronization toward dark-skinned people — could not be found. The article, “My Beating by Refugees is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury of this Filthy War,” inspired the Internet phenomenon of “Fisking,” the painstaking deconstruction of a news article or column, sentence by sentence, with biting and caustic commentary.

Last Sunday marked World Refugee Day, which annually highlights the plight of the over 30 million people forced to flee their homes due to war, famine, or ethnic strife. This year, the event could not have occurred at a more fitting time. Over the past two weeks, an estimated 400,000 citizens of Kyrgyzstan have fled their homes in the wake of riots between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the country’s south. According to many Uzbeks, Kyrgyz troops burned their passports, effectively preventing them from taking part in a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Sunday. The violence, which has left some 2,000 people dead, is some of the worst to have hit the former Soviet Union since its breakup two decades ago. Indeed, the very fate of Kyrgyzstan’s tenuous provisional government — which assumed nominal control of the country following the violent ouster of President Kurmanbeck Bakiyev in April, the aftermath of which I covered — hangs in the balance.

There’s an important geopolitical lesson to be learned in the tumultuous events taking place now in Kyrgyzstan. Last Friday, the interim president of Kyrgyzstan, Roza Otunbayeva, appealed to Russia for help. The southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad were in the throes of deadly violence between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, the worst since 1990 when 300 people died, and it took thousands of Soviet troops several weeks to calm things down. Today, the official death toll stands at nearly 200 , but many more are feared to have perished, and thousands have been injured. Last Friday, Otunbayeva declared a state of emergency and admitted that the government had completely lost control of the southern part of the country. That region — a stronghold of former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev — has been unstable since protestors violently ousted him from power in April (Bakiyev initially fled to his southern stronghold, and is now in exile in Belarus).