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The HRC has become the UN’s greatest failure.
From Nikki Haley’s speech:
UN was founded to promote peace and security based on justice, equal rights and the right to self determination, but there are many members whose leaders completely reject that purpose.
Dictators and authoritarian regimes have been allowed to control the agenda.
Human Rights Council is meant to be a place of conscience, but more often has provided cover and not condemnation for the world’s most inhumane regimes. It has changed from a place of conscience to a place of politics. It has focused on Israel while ignoring the misery inflicted by regimes in China, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Cuba. The UNHRC has become the UN’s greatest failure.
It has taken human dignity and reduced it to an instrument of international politics.
HRC’s membership contains some of the worst human rights violators. Cuba, China and Venezuela all have seats on the HRC
HRC membership – 62% of its members are not democracies.
Agenda Item 7 – devoted exclusively to the existence of Israel. This signifies the moral bankruptcy of the HRC.
In October 2017, Congo was elected to a seat on the HRC. Mass graves were being uncovered as they were being approved.
From December 2017, the people of Iran protested against the brutal regime and were beaten, arrested and killed. HRC said nothing.
Venezuela has continued to descend into dictatorship and brutality. HRC said nothing because Venezuela has a seat on the HRC.
The US has failed to get sufficient other countries to stand up, but the authoritarian regimes are happy with the status quo. A seat protects them and their allies from scrutiny. Russia, China, Egypt and Cuba resist any reform.
Reform was resisted by NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Pro-Human Rights countries decline to speak up in public about the failure of the HRC.
The US was the last piece of dignity to the HRC that consistently fails on Human Rights and that is why the US withdrew.
In spite of no longer being part of the UNHRC cabal, the US remains the single most significant contributor to promoting human rights on the planet and, by not giving a dime to the HRC, they do so without half of the overheads.
CHIMES COMMENT:
Why have so many people, particularly in the hegemonic elite, lost their minds over Trump? The guy gets lambasted on unsubstantiated claims and complaining about injustices that institutions such as as the UNHRC failure to address real abuses. It is long past the point where you can take a chance with strangers knowing that you actually like Trump.
I used to support Amnesty International, but not anymore and not for a long time. They turned me off when they opposed the execution of women but not of men. They took the same stand on circumcision. It exposed their hypocrisy for what it was – a pro-feminist charity.
UN Ambassador Nikki Haley denounces the United Nations Human Rights Council’s failure on human rights The HRC has become the UN’s greatest failure. From Nikki Haley’s speech: UN was founded to promote peace and security based on justice, equal rights and the right to self determination, but there are many members whose leaders completely reject that purpose.
Srebrenica - A Cry from the Grave - Full Documentary.
Srebrenica: A Cry from the Grave retells the story of the Srebrenica massacre in the summer of 1995 in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. After opening with a pre-war clip of the idyllic Srebrenica, the documentary combines first-hand accounts from survivors along with narrated testimonies from peacekeepers and government workers in order to gain an hour-by-hour picture of the events that enabled the massacre to occur.The Srebrenica massacre was executed by members of the Army of Republika Srpska, under the command of General Ratko Mladić, in an effort to purge the area of Bosniak males. It occurred in the last year of the Bosnian War and is widely regarded as worst European massacre since the events of World War II. The event was eventually declared to be a genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Remembering Srebrenica
Srebrenica Genocide
MySrebrenica
As bad as this was, it pales in comparison to war crimes the United States committed in Iraq, Afghanistan and, of course, Vietnam.
If Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were prosecuted for war crimes, in all likelihood the current situation in the Middle East and the United States wouldn't exist. There would be no Donald Trump, no alt-right, no blatant racism, no reality denial, no xenophobia, Islamophobia, no border wall, deportation threats, police violence, sexism, gender inequality, austerity, etc.
But it didn't work out that way, war criminals still remain free and justice remote.
The idea that progress in dealing with social issues is questionable. Progress means something that is sustained. In this light maybe some progress may have taken place between 1932 and 1965. While civil rights, voting rights, anti-poverty may have been enhanced during that time, they haven't been maintained. The austerity agenda is driving the culture for several decades.
History cannot be reversed however there is an election in the United States in November and the people of this country need to force its government to change directions or the horrors of the future could make those of the past inconsequential.
TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: The Real-Life Hero of Hotel Rwanda
6 PM CJSR FM-88.5 Edmonton www.cjsr.com
Thirteen years ago, reactionary forces in Rwanda executed a wide-ranging plan involving a months-long radio propaganda campaign, Western military training, blitzkrieg militia-strikes, Western diplomatic cover-fire and finally Western sanctuary. That plan and its horrifying results are known today as the Rwandan genocide.
While a final accounting of the death toll remains controversial, at minimum, the militias called the Interahamwe systematically slaughtered three-quarters of a million people in a matter of weeks. Most of the victims belonged to the Tutsi nationality, groomed by decades of Belgian occupation and divide-and-rule tactics to be the privileged and dominant group in Rwandan society. The militias belonged primarily to the Hutu nationality, those destined by Belgian dictatorship to be the doormats of occupation and post-colonial rule.
Such Belgian interference was mild compared to Belgium’s role in Congo, which around 1900 was the mass-murder of 8-10 million people. By the 1994 genocide, though, it may have been France and not Belgium intervening for mass-destruction: “Rwandan government officials claim that new proof of France’s role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide has emerged during the UN’s Rwanda court hearings. Not only was France training the genocidal militias prior to the genocide, the French government was even today providing perpetrators of the genocide a refuge.”
The United States played a different role, preventing the United Nations Security Council from employing the word “genocide” which would have mandated military intervention. As evidence gathers of French foreknowledge of the then-impending genocide, some analysts argue that had there been sufficient diplomatic pressure, combined with an earlier cut-off of French military and political support, the genocide might have been averted entirely.
But even today justice is being thwarted: “Aloys Mutabingwa, the Rwandan government’s envoy to the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)... said the French government had part of the responsibility for the 1994 genocide and for not letting the ICTR doing its job properly. [He said] that the ICTR’s ten-year investigations had produced ‘sufficient and credible evidence’ to try French government officials [for French] training [of] the Interahamwe militia.... [and it] was only because the ICTR wanted to avoid ‘a diplomatic incident’ that French officials had not been charged. [He also charged that] France keeps interfering with justice by providing a shelter for suspected genocide perpetrators.... These allegations against France are not new. In June last year, the European Court of Human Rights slammed the French judiciary for [taking an unreasonably] long time in proceeding against a Rwandan clergyman, who had been charged with genocide compliancy nine years before. The European court found that the French judiciary was not satisfying the ‘reasonable time’ requirement in the European Convention on Human Rights. [And] international human rights groups have criticised France for its seeming unwillingness to contribute to justice for Rwanda’s genocide victims. The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) claims that cases related to the Rwandan genocide had in general been met by ‘a certain coolness by French judiciary authorities.’”
Whatever France’s role in the genocide, and the UN’s in failing to prevent it, the horrors of Rwanda were directly committed by Rwandans against other Rwandans. And just as the worst villains were Rwandans, so were its greatest heroes. One such hero calls himself “an ordinary man.” That man is Paul Rusesabagina, depicted by Afrikan-American actor Don Cheadle in the recent feature film Hotel Rwanda.
Born in 1954, Paul Rusesabagina went on to study theology in Cameroon before studying hotel management in Europe. As a hotel manager in Kigali, Rwanda, during 100 days of genocide, he gave shelter to 1,268 people in the Mille Collines Hotel. He’s been compared to Oscar Schindler for his heroism under such great risk. Unlike some prominent people who survived the massacres with their sanity barely intact, Rusesabagina went on to become a businessman and he currently owns a transport company.
Now his broader mission is to prevent genocide in his homeland and anywhere else in the world. He also served as special consultant to Academy Award-nominated film Hotel Rwanda, and in 2005 established the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, which provides financial assistance to children and women affected by the genocides in Rwanda and across the continent. He’s published an autobiography from Penguin entitled An Ordinary Man.
Rusesabagina spoke before the California Commonwealth Club on March 14, 2007. The event was moderated by Sandeep Roy, editor of New American Media and host of Upfront on KALW FM.
