One of HRW's own is a torture victim
Apparently, one of Human Rights Watch's own researchers was himself a victim of torture:
Human Rights Watch on Thursday issued a first-person account of the incarceration and torture in Bangladesh of one of its consultants -- an outspoken human rights advocate, journalist and blogger.A copy of that report can be found here, and HRW's official press release here.
"The Torture of Tasneem Khalil: How the Bangladesh Military Abuses Its Power Under the State of Emergency," recounts Khalil's 22-hour incarceration last May in the southern Asian country.
Khalil was blindfolded and taken at gunpoint from his home in front of his wife and infant child, according to the account. He was beaten and threatened during the ordeal, retold in the 39-page report.
HRW might be a bit disappointed at the apathy of the world's reaction; there's simply not much buzz. I haven't seen the name Tasneem Khalil or even the nation of Bangladesh mentioned much in the press in the US and Europe. Even a google search on him mostly brings up obscure and/or outdated information. The reason? Likely because the media can't blame his torture on the United States!
And if HRW is upset over that, they might find that they themselves are partially to blame.
By focusing so heavily on the United States, they distract from many real issues around the world. Take a look at their home page, for example. To the left you will see "Info by Country", divided up into these continents:
"Africa", "Americas", "Asia", "Europe/Central Asia", "Middle East/N. Africa", "United States".Notice one anomaly in that list? To HRW, the United States, as a country, has such a massive reputation for human rights violations that it's treated like it's an entire "continent" by itself! If you click on the links, you find that the United States alone has 78 pages of documents (most condemning it for one human rights violation or another), far, far more than any other single country. By comparison, all the nations of the entire North Africa/Middle East roundup have only 83 and only 106 for the entire Asian Continent (to which Bangladesh belongs)!
If you would like people to actually notice things that happen outside the USA, maybe you ought to start publicizing them a bit more, and not only when it serves your own interests. Just a suggestion.
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2 comments:
Of course you will find more complaints against America - the more open a country is, the more people will know about human rights abuses and report them. Duh.
To dinoman-
That's undoubtedly true, although I'm at a loss why relatively open societies like Turkey, India, Russia and Mexico have far fewer HRW complaints than the USA (since people flee from these countries to America, then it can't be all bad).
And even for publicly available information, there is a great discrepency. Go to their web site and search for the words "death penalty", and guess which nation is at the top of the list? Guess which nation gets more mentions than any other by far? The good ol' USA! This is in spite of the fact that countries like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia execute far more people than the US. According to Amnesty International, in 2006 China officially executed more than 1,000 people (and possibly many more unofficially) while the United States was only 53.
Yet to HRW, the USA is still the biggest villian on the block.
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