Politics of Human Rights: The UN, US, and Sudan

We all know that the United States has placed certain trade restrictions on Sudan. Yet gum arabic is exempted, and it is the number one export of Sudan. Coca-Cola and the other major soft drink conglomerates need gum arabic. So what do we do? We proudly proclaim that we've got sanctions on Sudan, but we exempt gum arabic. -- Rep. Cynthia McKinney

No one should do business with thugs. But if they control a product we can't seem to live without, the market will find a way to get it to our shelves and newsstands. -- Rep. Bob Menendez, whose district has two major gum arabic processing plants

President Bush's national security adviser said on Sunday it was ``an outrage'' the United States was ejected from the U.N. Human Rights Committee while Sudan remained a member. -- Rice Calls U.N. Rights Panel Loss 'An Outrage', Reuters, 06 May 2001

A very precise outrage abounds in official Washington. Angry politicians stalk the halls of Congress, muttering darkly about the United Nations. The cause of so much official scorn? The US has been voted off the UN's Human Rights Commission (HRC) for the first time since 1947. But it's not clear what Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and the Congress are angriest about -- the US being voted off the Commission, or Sudan having been voted on it.

``The sad thing is not for the United States,'' Condoleezza Rice told the ``Fox News Sunday'' program. ``The sad thing is that the country that has been the beacon for those fleeing tyranny for 200 years is not on this commission, and Sudan is on this commission. It's very bad for those people who are suffering under tyranny around the world, and it is an outrage.'' (Reuters)

In other words, the ``sad thing is not for the United States,'' it's for the United States. What Rice asks us to believe is that the US's removal from the UN HRC isn't problematic for the cause of human rights in the US (which is true, though not in the sense she means), but that it, plus the presence of Sudan, is problematic for ``those people who are suffering under tyranny around the world'' -- a curious set of claims that we must submit to criticism.

Rice's ``beacon'' metaphor is an interesting one. Powerful lights can hurt or help. They are examples of what the Greek philosopher Plato would have called a pharmakon, something that can equally be a poison or a cure, depending on how it's used and by whom. When a big, powerful light is used to illuminate a dangerous night path or to reveal the bogeyman lurking in the shadows, it's a help, a cure, a ``beacon''. But when it's used to illuminate a perimeter within which the desperate and the weak are held hostage to the powerful, as in every concentration camp and gulag ever constructed, it's a harm and a poison. For far too many of the desperate people of the world, the US has been a gulag's klieg light, shining on those trying to escape, lighting the way of their captors to retake them; certainly it's not been a helpful ``beacon'' for Haitian boat refugees or Chinese prison laborers or Central American trade unionists or Turkish Kurds or the East Timorese or the Kosovars or ... -- the list is long.

Not only does Rice unwittingly betray the fundamental hypocrisy of American talk about human rights abroad (to say nothing of the desperate hypocrisy of the US hectoring others about human rights while regularly executing children and retarded people -- practices that the rest of the world finds rightfully abhorrent), she also exemplifies the other fundamental mood of America's participation in international affairs: a petulant refusal to be judged by the standards with which it judges others.

Rice implies that our removal won't count against human rights domestically because, well, this is America, the ``beacon'' of human rights around the world, and we don't have human rights violations of our own. In truth, our removal won't count against human rights here because, as is historically clear, the UN's influence in the US is so insignificant as to be indistinguishable from, say, none at all. The US has as little concern for the UN as it has for human rights in Sudan. Whether or not its citizens realize it, the US is, among the world's industrialized democracies, the place where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is least well-known or practiced or enshrined in law. And we're also a place where concern for human rights abroad takes a very definitive backseat to commerce, trade, and, as Condoleeza Rice's favorite hand puppet, President Bush, likes to say, "our strategic interests".

And it isn't just Condoleeza Rice who's ability to sort rank ideology from the truth is suspiciously malfunctioning. The corporate media can always be relied upon to give aid and comfort to its governmental buddies, as when the Reuters reporter says that

The United States, whether through inadequate lobbying or because of unpopular global policies, last week failed to win a seat on the commission for the first time since it helped found the human rights body in 1947.(Reuters)

Such convenient circumspection rankles and exhibits a degree of sycophancy about which surmising the most offensive party -- the one who gives it or the one who receives -- is difficult. Why must the US -- recall: ``the country that has been the beacon for those fleeing tyranny for 200 years'' -- why must we lobby to stay on the HRC at all? Is there some dire cabal, comprised of Austria, Finland, and Sweden, that conspires against the US?

The truth lies in the other direction. The US consistently pursues policies around the world which flaunt even the most basic concern for human rights. To name only the most obvious recent examples, one must mention Clinton's illegal, immoral bombing of Sudan's sole medicines factory; the despicably grimy US position on pharmaceuticals and AIDS -- which Mark Gevisser has called, in South Africa, the ``new apartheid''; our unilateral determination to initiate and then escalate an unconventional arms race with ballistic missile defense; our contemptuous and stupid and irrational scuttling of the Kyoto global warming treaty; our rank, apparently safe for all time, as the leading exporter of military hardware around the world; our 25 year obstruction of any implementation of world consensus on the Palestinian question, and so on. It's a fantastical understatement to say only that the US pursues unpopular policies.

U.S. officials said the United States had received more than 40 assurances of support, enough to win a seat on the commission, but only 29 of those countries came through.

It lost out to three members of the European Union -- Austria, France and Sweden -- while Sudan and Libya, two governments widely accused of human rights abuses on the U.S. list of sponsors of ``terrorism,'' won seats in regional groups. (Reuters)

We were lobbying and still got the boot. Those other countries -- probably the ones that aren't ``beacons'' of human rights -- abandoned us; might it be possible for good reason? And it seems that Sudan is filling a regional slot, which we couldn't have filled in any event. Whether we were removed from the HRC fairly or not has nothing to do whatever with Sudan or Libya. The constant references to Sudan are meant to direct our attention away from where it properly belongs, namely, on what the US does and what it fails to do in the world -- and why.

But Rice rejected criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill who blamed the embarrassing defeat on the White House.

`It's very sad that people, particularly on the Hill, would decide to blame America for this,'' she said. ``Obviously, the United States has been too strong on the human rights agenda.'' (Reuters)

Not to be outdone by the media's frenzied, gymnastical sucking up, Rice rushes to ice the cake before letting it cool. While the rest of the world seems to labor under the mass, shared delusion that the US is, when not actively violating them, a regular hindrance to human rights, Rice assures us that it's obvious that the blameless US ``has been too strong on the human rights agenda''. That may be obvious to Rice, but it isn't obvious to me. It's far more obvious that the US has too strongly obstructed the realization of a human rights agenda.

``I suspect that this was a backlash of those who don't like being judged, that perhaps the United States has been a little too active on the human rights commission. We were very active in this most recent round, and maybe it will be easier now for human rights abusers to escape scrutiny.''(Reuters)

As for the unwillingness of others to be judged by the US, one can either side with Rice or with the rest of the world (with the exception, perhaps, of our junior partner, the UK). The historical record is clear. As Madeleine Albright said, the US acts multilaterally when it can, but unilaterally when it must; which, on issues of human rights, is often.

Whether or not Sudan belongs on the UN's HRC -- and its inability to end its very old slave trade, in which coastal Arabic Sudanese enslave inland Christian and animist Sudanese (and others), suggests that it does not -- the United States clearly does not. As a privileged American citizen, my first responsibility is to draw moral conclusions about my country, not about Sudan, which is better left to the UN -- which may not be as tough on Sudan as guilty American politicians may demand but is vastly and consistently more engaged in Sudan and in Africa -- and its African neighbors.

So I say, with regard to the US and the UN's HRC, goodbye and good riddance.

Update: House Votes to Withhold UN Dues

In a Republican-led snit, the House voted today, 10 May, to withhold $244,000,000 in UN dues until the US is restored to the HRC. What's the lesson here? If you have enough money and enough guns, you can afford to subvert democratic processes by blackmailing the UN until you get your way. Which only raises the question: what were the House Republicans pouting about when Ted Turner, a private citizen, paid nearly $35,000,000 of the nearly $1,000,000,000 the US owed the UN in dues?