Human Rights Fueling War

February 03, 2012

by Barbara Nimri Aziz

Human Rights activists and their media friends seem shocked by revelations that Libyan rebel forces are torturing detainees in Libya.

Why? In a recent “Salon’ opinion article (The Human Rights ‘Success’ in Libya; www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30369.htm) Glen Greenwald reviews how invasions “… are almost always sold by appeal to human rights concerns”. And they do not stop. Greenwald describes how such abuses become part and parcel of a military campaign aimed to topple a ‘brutal’ leader. Anything they execute is justified by that heroic shared goal, even though those western backers themselves conveniently escape any association or responsibility with such abuses.

What we have recently been told about the behavior of Libyan forces towards the people they have captured —first migrant workers they rounded up, then the former regime supporters, and now, detained Libyans during and following the invasion-- should come as no surprise. Some may have gloated over the way the former Libya president was treated by his captors. There were few sympathizers for Gaddafi and no critics of the rebels’ method of meting out that piece of justice. Yet, surely this behavior was systematic of a savagery encouraged by their western supporters who themselves were engaged in what is only later found to be ‘indiscriminate killings’ during their much celebrated smart-bombing of Libya. The murders and abuse by Libyan ground forces was inarguably an expression ‘license to kill’ granted to the heroic rebels by their partners in the air.

In my blog of November 2, 2011 (www.RadioTahrir.org/blog) I expressed by disgust and shame over the license accorded Libyan ‘rebels’-- allies of our esteemed NATO bombers. Only now, conveniently, we hear evidence that suggests that the widely publicized attack on Moammar Gaddafi may not have been so unique an occurrence.

In his January 27 article in Salon, Greenwald compares celebratory claims made by the invaders of Iraq in 2003 with a 2011 report that “Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees”, and how Iraq is “becoming a budding police state”. Greenwald concludes “Ironically, those who are the loudest advocates for these wars and then prematurely celebrate the outcome (and themselves) bear significant responsibility for these subsequent abuses: by telling the world that the invasion was a success, it causes the aftermath — the most important part — to be neglected. There is nothing noble about invading and bombing a country into regime change”, he continues, “if what one ushers in is mass instability along with tyranny and abuse by a different regime: typically one that is much more sympathetic to the invading regime-changers.”  But, again, human righters win the day.

As righteous western leaders, their regional lackeys, and human rights documenters supply us with a steady account of human rights abuses in other ‘unpopular’ regimes in support of their selective ‘Arab Spring’ campaign, they are preparing us, the public, for their next noble adventure. All the good people of Europe and America, desperate to share their way of life and their subservience to Israel, ostensibly deeply sensitive to the suffering of Arab sisters and brothers, are ready to sanction yet another war.

Forget about the catastrophe and the abuses that will inevitably follow. We are a naïve, acquiescent and complicit  public.

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