Britannia Radio

Human rights leaders get their priorities in order

Michael Posner - October 2009

And it came to pass that the venerable leaders of the world’s most important human rights organizations assembled for their annual conclave in Geneva.

As they sat down to their evening repast of Scottish smoked salmon and duck confit, their faces were drawn and troubled – and understandably so.

Their diligent teams of researchers and investigators had catalogued a long list of grievous human rights abuses, evidence of the persistent cruelty of man to man.

This high-minded gathering, men and women of unquestioned probity and integrity, had received disturbing reports on the atrocities committed in recent years by Russian forces in Chechnya, and later in Georgia, murdering scores of innocent civilians.

They had read the shocking accounts of genocide in Darfur, perpetrated by Janjaweed militias, agents of the Sudanese government – hundreds of thousands slaughtered indiscriminately. They had seen the disturbing film footage of Chinese army soldiers killing Muslim Uighur protesters in Xinjiang and in Tibet.

They were aware that the military junta in Myanmar had deployed troops to assault thousands of protesting monks and students. They knew that tribal warfare was being conducted in Somalia, an anarchic wasteland of gratuitous mayhem, where the death toll, again, climbed into the hundreds of thousands.

They bemoaned the tales of child soldiers – kidnapped, trained and coerced into warfare in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and several other countries. By some accounts, there were as many as 300,000 child soldiers fighting in various parts of the world, most of them under the age of 15.

Yet that was not all. These sober humanitarians, veritably the ethical and moral voice of the human race, knew only too well the heart-breaking stories of Pakistan villagers forced to flee – 1.7 million, according to the United Nations – the violence in Swat province, innocents caught up in the country’s deadly war against Al Qaeda militants.

They had closely monitored the continuing struggle in neighbouring Afghanistan between Taliban insurgents and a coalition of Western forces trying to stabilize the Afghan president’s tenuous hold on power.

They had followed the accounts of Iranian bloggers and Twitterers, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s special forces launched a brutal crackdown on those who dared to protest his landslide win in the 2009 national elections, and the intolerable constraints of a rigid theocratic state.

And they were scrupulous in gathering statistics on the daily toll of dead from suicide bombings, roadside ordinances and other acts of insurgency in strife-torn Iraq. The swelling archive of dossiers filled these pillars of the international community with concern.

But as they sipped their goblets of vintage French and German wines in Geneva, these brave men and women of conscience knew something else: that the aggregate suffering of all of these terrible wars, revolts, uprisings and protests paled in comparison to the single most pressing human rights issue of the day – indeed, of the century.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” began the distinguished chairman of the proceedings, as he took the dais. “We cannot hope to deal with all the abuses that have been documented. Therefore, we must prioritize, must we not, and direct our energies to confronting the most egregious, the most flagrant encroachments: those carried out by the Jews – or rather by the Israelis, though it amounts to the same thing – against their peace-loving neighbours, the peace loving Palestinians.

“All other infringements of fundamental human rights, pale beside that now being inflicted upon the peace-loving Palestinians.

“Please raise your hands if you agree that we humanitarians would be derelict in our duties as sentinels of civil liberty if we failed to speak the disturbing truth about the heinous acts perpetrated against the peace-loving Palestinians.”

And lo, like an obedient army saluting its commander, the delegates promptly raised their hands in unanimous agreement. “Yes, we know that a handful of peasants have complained about Russian fighter jets raining down missiles on towns and villages in Chechnya and Georgia,” the distinguished chairman continued.

“But can we turn a blind eye to the plight of peace-loving Palestinians, forced to undergo hours of humiliating inspection at Israeli army checkpoints, simply because one or two of them might want to visit a pizza parlour in Jerusalem or a discotheque in Tel Aviv with an unfashionable belt tied around their waist?