End human rights imperialism now | Stephen Kinzer | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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For those of us who used to consider ourselves part of the human rights movement but have lost the faith, the most intriguing piece of news in 2010 was the appointment of an eminent foreign policy mandarin, James Hoge, as board chairman of Human Rights Watch. Hoge has a huge task, and not simply because human rights violations around the world are so pervasive and egregious. Just as great a challenge is remaking the human rights movement itself. Founded by idealists who wanted to make the world a better place, it has in recent years become the vanguard of a new form of imperialism. Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don't conform to the tastes of upper west side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse! This has become the unspoken mantra of a movement that has lost its way. Human Rights Watch is hardly the only offender. There are a host of others, ranging from Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders to the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard and the pitifully misled "anti-genocide" movement. All promote an absolutist view of human rights permeated by modern western ideas that westerners mistakenly call "universal". In some cases, their work, far from saving lives, actually causes more death, more repression, more brutality and an absolute weakening of human rights. Yet, because of its global reach, now extended by an amazing gift of $100m from George Soros – which Hoge had a large part in arranging –Human Rights Watch sets a global standard. In its early days, emerging from the human rights clauses in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, it was the receptacle of the world's innocent but urgent goal of basic rights for all. Just as Human Rights Watch led the human rights community as it arose, it is now the poster child for a movement that has become a spear-carrier for the "exceptionalist" belief that the west has a providential right to intervene wherever in the world it wishes. For many years as a foreign correspondent, I not only worked alongside human rights advocates, but considered myself one of them. To defend the rights of those who have none was the reason I became a journalist in the first place. Now, I see the human rights movement as opposing human rights. The problem is its narrow, egocentric definition of what human rights are. Those who have traditionally run Human Rights Watch and other western-based groups that pursue comparable goals come from societies where crucial group rights – the right not to be murdered on the street, the right not to be raped by soldiers, the right to go to school, the right to clean water, the right not to starve – have long since been guaranteed. In their societies, it makes sense to defend secondary rights, like the right to form a radical newspaper or an extremist political party. But in many countries, there is a stark choice between one set of rights and the other. Human rights groups, bathed in the light of self-admiration and cultural superiority, too often make the wrong choice. The actions of human rights do-gooders is craziest in Darfur, where they show themselves not only dangerously naive but also unwilling to learn lessons from their past misjudgments. By their well-intentioned activism, they have given murderous rebel militias – not only in Darfur but around the world – the idea that even if they have no hope of military victory, they can mobilise useful idiots around the world to take up their cause, and thereby win in the court of public opinion what they cannot win on the battlefield. The best way to do this is to provoke massacres by the other side, which Darfur rebels have dome quite successfully and remorselessly. This mobilises well-meaning American celebrities and the human rights groups behind them. It also prolongs war and makes human rights groups accomplices to great crimes. This is a replay of the Biafra fiasco of the late 1960s. Remember? The world was supposed to mobilise to defend Biafran rebels and prevent the genocide that Nigeria would carry out if they were defeated. Global protests prolonged the war and caused countless deaths. When the Biafrans were finally defeated, though, the predicted genocide never happened. Fewer Biafrans would have starved to death if Biafran leaders had not calculated that more starvation would stir up support from human rights advocates in faraway countries. Rebels in Darfur have learned the value of mobilising western human rights groups to prolong wars, and this lesson is working gloriously for them. The place where I finally broke with my former human-rights comrades was Rwanda. The regime in power now is admired throughout Africa; 13 African heads of state attended President Paul Kagame's recent inauguration, as opposed to just one who came to the inauguration in neighbouring Burundi. The Rwandan regime has given more people a greater chance to break out of extreme poverty than almost any regime in modern African history – and this after a horrific slaughter in 1994 from which many outsiders assumed Rwanda would never recover. It is also a regime that forbids ethnic speech, ethnically-based political parties and ethnically-divisive news media – and uses these restrictions to enforce its permanence in power. By my standards, this authoritarian regime is the best thing that has happened to Rwanda since colonialists arrived a century ago. My own experience tells me that people in Rwanda are happy with it, thrilled at their future prospects, and not angry that there is not a wide enough range of newspapers or political parties. Human Rights Watch, however, portrays the Rwandan regime as brutally oppressive. Giving people jobs, electricity, and above all security is not considered a human rights achievement; limiting political speech and arresting violators is considered unpardonable. Human Rights Watch wants Rwandans to be able to speak freely about their ethnic hatreds, and to allow political parties connected with the defeated genocide army to campaign freely for power. It has come to this: all that is necessary for another genocide to happen in Rwanda is for the Rwandan government to follow the path recommended by Human Rights Watch. This is why the appointment of James Hoge, who took office in October, is so potentially important. The human rights movement lost its way by considering human rights in a vacuum, as if there are absolutes everywhere and white people in New York are best-equipped to decide what they are. Hoge, however, comes to his new job after nearly two decades as editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. He sees the world from a broad perspective, while the movement of which he is now a leader sees it narrowly. Human rights need to be considered in a political context. The question should not be whether a particular leader or regime violates western-conceived standards of human rights. Instead, it should be whether a leader or regime, in totality, is making life better or worse for ordinary people. When the global human rights movement emerged nearly half a century ago, no one could have imagined that it would one day be scorned as an enemy of human rights. Today, this movement desperately needs a period of reflection, deep self-examination and renewal. The ever-insightful historian Barbara Tuchman had it exactly right when she wrote a sentence that could be the motto of a chastened and reformed Human Rights Watch: Humanity may have common ground, but needs and aspirations vary according to circumstances.

I guess I agree to a certain extent with both camps. Sure tolerance is wonderful but if you're tolerating people who cut people into little pieces for praying incorrectly then sorry but ur doin it wrong. The groups committing/enabling these violations are indeed backwards, small-minded, clusterfuck excuses for societies whose traditions I'd quite happily see wiped out tomorrow.

On the other hand, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should intervene. Fuck 'em. THey made their bed, I'm not paying for UN peacekeepers to rush in and prevent them from lying in it.

And goodwill to all men!

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What was it that a humorist said? "Only a strongman regime can help us avoid a dictatorship"?

It's true that in places like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, with ethnic hatred festering never too far from the surface, a certain amount of "I'll smash the first fucker who dare raise his head" is not necessarily the greater evil.

OTOH, it's just as easy to use this as an excuse to smash whoever oppose you, no matter how justified the ground. See Nigeria and its Delta people. "Why, they're just terrorists, bent on ethnical hatred"...

Context is indeed paramount. As to Westerners being deluded... Well, dude, we indeed ARE the best and most achieved form of human society. Which is hardly great, given our shortcomings but there it is - Living in the West is still your best bet for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...

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Liberal racism at work: Africans don't have wars, they have 'genocides' – Telegraph Blogs

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When does war become genocide? When the protagonists are black people. That is the only conclusion one can draw from the unhinged claims that the Ivory Coast is on “the brink of genocide” following the disputed presidential elections and the stand-off between the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo and president-elect Alassane Ouattara. Unlike we in the West, Africans, it seems, never “fight wars”; they don’t “launch invasions”; they don’t have “political tensions”. They just commit genocides – barmy, inexplicable genocides, often with machetes, for no other reason than the fact that they like to kill people. Lots of people. Entire races of people if they can get away with it. The speed and casualness, the robotic thoughtlessness, with which the term “genocide” is applied to African conflicts is extraordinary. No matter how relatively small-scale the conflict is, no matter where it is taking place in Africa, it will quickly be stamped with the G-word, marking it out as a product of exterminatory bloodlust rather than politics. So the political clash in the Ivory Coast, which has not yet spilled over into large-scale violence, is already frantically talked up as a genocide-in-the-making. Ouattara’s envoy to the United Nations says his country is on “the brink of genocide”. The media, who love nothing more than getting a whiff of evil in the Dark Continent, have lapped it up, with headlines variously telling us that the Ivory Coast is on the “edge of”, the “precipice of” or is “close to” genocide. This echoes the discussion of the post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008. Kenya was likewise said to be on the “brink of genocide”, as forces loyal to Raila Odinga, who lost out in that disputed poll, carried out what was widely referred to as “ethnic cleansing”. In truth there was no genocide in Kenya. No community was wiped out. There was political violence. The more serious conflict in Liberia in 2003 also led to high-level handwringing about that country being “plunged into a Rwanda-style genocide”. The Sudanese government’s violent incursions into Darfur in 2004 and 2005 were described everywhere as “the first genocide of the twenty-first century”, despite the fact that both the UN and leading American experts disputed the use of that term and questioned the claim that 400,000 Darfurians had been killed by forces loyal to Khartoum. It seems the calamity of Rwanda has become the default script for understanding conflict in Africa. Every stand-off, every skirmish, every war is now labelled the “next Rwanda”. Amnesty International says we mustn’t let the Ivory Coast become “the sequel to Rwanda”, as if barbarism in Africa is as certain as Hollywood producing a new gory Saw movie every year. Profound local complexities are airbrushed out of history, as wars across an entire continent are madly depicted as symptoms of some kind of border-leaping African virus. These discussions reveal rather more about the warped Western imagination than they do about realities on the ground. Seemingly incapable of making sense of contemporary political conflict, observers reach for sensationalist, one-size-fits-all explanations instead. These conflicts are like pornography for Western misanthropes who see in every African stand-off the potential for Holocaust-style horrors. It’s a PC rehabilitation of the idea that there is a divide between the civilised West and uncivilised Africa – only today we use the more acceptable-sounding terminology of “genocide preventers” (us) and “genocidaires” (them) to establish our superiority over the dark-skinned barbarians

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At the height of the crackdown against the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Albert Camus warned French leftists not to allow political "expediency any precedence over regard for truth". The western left that ignored or, worse, justified the suffocation of Budapest, Camus thundered, "is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws". Today – with a century of catastrophic lapses in judgment in hindsight – too many western progressives are still trapped by the same "systematic relativism" that, in Camus's time as in ours, threatens no less than the "death of intelligence". Take historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer's recent intervention against what he calls "human rights imperialism". Restaging one of the illiberal left's favourite shibboleths, he argues that the modern human rights movement has become "the vanguard of a new form of imperialism". Human rights groups, Kinzer sneers, are "spear-carrier[s] for the 'exceptionalist' belief that the west has a providential right to intervene wherever in the world it wishes". Because it wields tremendous influence on the world stage, the human rights community should be closely examined to ensure compliance with its noble founding ideals. For example, the movement is reproached by many – and rightly so – for often subjecting free societies constitutionally committed to protecting citizens' rights to more exacting scrutiny than states genetically engineered for repression. But Kinzer's critique of groups such as Human Rights Watch is of an altogether different variety. Although couched in the rhetoric of a world-weary pragmatism, Kinzer's challenge to human rights groups comes from a place of fundamental, philosophical hostility. The community, Kinzer claims, is mistakenly "promot[ing] an absolutist view of human rights permeated by modern western ideas that westerners mistakenly call 'universal'." And worse, instead of focusing on "group rights", the human rights imperialists fetishise certain "secondary rights" such as free speech and political liberty. (Kinzer cleverly frames these as "the right to form a radical newspaper or an extremist political party".) When it comes to human rights in developing countries, Kinzer seems to be saying, individual rights are irrelevant. "The question should not be whether a particular leader or regime violates western-conceived standards of human rights," he says. "Instead, it should be whether a leader or regime, in totality, is making life better or worse for ordinary people." At first sight, Kinzer's argument might strike some as eminently reasonable. After all, who would want to promote extremist political parties at the expense of economic development benefiting impoverished nations? But recall the unassailable fact that in the long term, those nations that have denied their citizens individual liberty in the name of collective prosperity have far more often than not failed miserably at delivering the latter. (The North Korean, Cuban and Zimbabwean economic miracles are not just around the corner.) But it is Kinzer's extreme cultural relativism that makes his argument against the human rights community particularly troubling. For he is effectively implying that some people deserve fewer individual rights than others. There is no universal standard. And how dare the poor in underdeveloped and developing countries expect to speak their minds or fulfil their political aspirations – how egocentric of them to abdicate their historical destinies in favour of such narrow ends as reproductive rights and religious liberty. Kinzer is clearly aware of the fact he is treading on dangerous ground and playing with ideas with toxic pedigrees. Perhaps it is for this reason that he is compelled to attach the predicate "western" to every individual right. Yet one wonders how he accounts for the myriad indigenous movements from the heart of the "east" (whatever that means) calling for freedom of speech and assembly, gender equity, LGBT rights, and so on. Are Iran's Green and Sudan's Girifna movements human rights imperialists? And pro-democracy Bahraini bloggers and Tunisian cyberactivists too? Imagine what Kinzer's proposals would mean in practical terms. Can human rights activists be expected to ignore the plight of a woman being stoned in Iran for adultery or a journalist tortured in Mubarak's jails? ("Terribly sorry, but we wouldn't want to judge your oppressors by the meter of our culturally determined, imperialistic standards – tough!") And consider, too, the impact of this brand of relativism on the moral imagination of the left, which, at its very best, stood firm on the principle that people divided by geography, culture and language can empathise with and express solidarity with each other. If the isolationist, provincial left manages to convince us that the blessing of liberty is to be allocated randomly – along geographic lines and according to the accident of birth – will the heart still beat on the left?

Beware those who sneer at 'human rights imperialism' | Sohrab Ahmari | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The problem is that he still doesn't answer Kinzer's points really, but I still agree more with him.

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Well, that's all true, of course... Except for the tiny, minute, little detail that ethnic background is usually a major driving force of the african political landscape... So much so that often you cannot say, without ignoring the elephant in the room, that "party X, pissed off with losing elections, decided to blow a few things belonging to party Y" - Because party X is really just another tag name for a given ethny just as party Y is another tag for another ethny both of whom sharing an artificially, colonially invented, country...

Edit: That was for the previous article.

And sorry but you're not entirely clear. With whom do you agree more? Kinzer or Ahmari? Because I suspect both are right and, as mentioned, it's all about context. You cannot really state things in stone. So the NK economic miracle isn't around the corner? Maybe so but the Singapore one is...

The simple truth is that dictatorial set-up put a greater strain on the leaders' quality. In a democracy, even total assholes and idiots (GWB, Berlusconi etc) can't truly fuck things up. Well, they do but it's unlikely to turn in a matter of life and death for tens of millions. In a dictatorship, it totally is.

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True, but "ethnicity" is often just a synonym for interest groups. You want your guys in power not so much because they are the Natural Master Race as because they're more likely to favour your interests. It's not that much different from the rich voting Republican and the poor voting Democrat. (Certainly makes the poor Republican vote look bonkers).

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At least, that's along class lines (i.e. rational economic self-interest) rather than based on ethnicity, which has no rational logic behind it.

Furthermore, as you mentioned, if Republicans were only getting the rich vote, they'd never hold office. They do have popular support i.e. "poor" voting for them. OTOH, there are quite a few rich who are vocal supporter of the Dems. IIRC, it's the highly educated portion of the 'rich' that lean Dem...

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Voting for your own tribe is rational economic self-interest too.

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Yeah - once the logic of favouring your own tribe is accepted but that basis is illogical.

It's just a throw back to dark ages mentality where the local/regional group was your identity rather than your individual position within society...

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Well you work with the parties you've already got. The Dems and the Repubplicans both scam their electorates too, but people vote for one because they think it'll still be more advantageous for them than it will be to vote for the other.

The fact is you're more likely to get rich if your side is in power and the chance of you successfully starting up your own party is practically 0. When it happens in our society we're all "ah well, electoral sociology... Mancur Olson... dog whistle... blah". When it happens in a society full of black dudes we're all "backwards, genocidal savages".

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