Tom Malinowski, HRW's Washington Advocacy Director, testifies before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on International Relations regarding the State Department's June report, "Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: the U.S. Record 2002-2003." Malinowski calls particular attention to "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur, Sudan, and the scandal stemming from the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
Testimony by Tom Malinowski, Washington Advocacy Director
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations
Mr. Chairman:
Thank you for holding this hearing and for inviting Human Rights Watch to comment on the State Department’s annual report on supporting democracy and human rights around the world.
Having an effective and principled American strategy to promote democratic freedoms around the world has never been more important to America’s national security. Indeed, I strongly believe that promoting human rights is central to America’s central national security imperative of defeating terror, for three reasons.
First, the aims of Al Qaeda and its allies are advanced by the actions of repressive regimes in the Muslim world, which stretches from Africa to the Middle East to Central, South and Southeast Asia. The terrorists’ primary aim, we should remember, is to turn the hearts and minds of the people of this region against their governments and against the West, and to seize upon that anger to transform the region politically. When governments in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan shut down political dissent, lock up non-violent dissidents, torture opponents, abuse the rule of law, and deny their people fair justice, they are contributing to the radicalization of their people, thus playing right into the hands of terrorist movements. And when ordinary people in the region associate the United States with their repressive governments, Al Qaeda’s aim of painting the United States as the enemy is also advanced.
Second, in the long run, the only viable alternative to the rise of violent, extremist movements in this region is the development of moderate, non-violent political movements that represent their peoples’ aspirations, speaking out for economic progress and better schools and against corruption and arbitrary rule. But such movements can only exist under democratic conditions, when people are free to think, speak, write and worship without fear, when they can form political organizations, and when their rights are protected by independent courts.
Without a doubt, more radical organizations can also exploit democratic freedoms to express their views, and they will be part of the political landscape as societies in the Middle East become more open. But as for terrorists, they do not need human rights to do what they do. They have thrived in the most repressive societies in the world. It is the people who don’t use violence who need democratic freedoms to survive.
Third, promoting human rights and democracy is important because America’s moral authority partly depends on it. American power in the world is more likely to be respected when it is harnessed to goals that are universally shared. People around the world are more likely to aid the United States in the fight against terrorism and other important goals if they believe the United States is also interested in defending their rights and aspirations. When America is seen to be compromising the values it has long preached, its credibility and influence are diminished.
The value of this State Department report is that it allows us to evaluate what the United States government is actually doing – and not doing -- to promote democracy and human rights in its relationships with governments around the world. It helps the Congress and the American people hold the State Department accountable for its efforts and their results, or lack thereof. It also tells people around the world that American diplomats do often take these issues seriously (something the diplomats themselves don’t always like to advertise!) Unfortunately, this report, like the annual State Department human rights reports, is not always translated into key foreign languages and distributed or posted on U.S. web sites in the countries it covers. Congress should insist on the widest possible dissemination and provide the funding to make that possible.
Last year, the State Department published the first of these new annual reports on democracy and human rights promotion. In my testimony to this Committee, I raised a number of concerns about the flaws of that report. The Department has addressed many of those concerns in this year’s report – it is a far more comprehensive, honest and useful account of how the United States is advancing these interests around the world.
I commend Assistant Secretary Craner and his team for their dedication in producing the report, and more important, in doing the work that the report describes. I will not take up your time today commenting in any detail about its contents.
Instead, I hope we can focus on some larger questions today. Is the United States responding to the greatest human rights challenges of our time? Is the United States maintaining its standing and authority as a champion of democracy and the rule of law around the world? The day-to-day work of American diplomats and aid providers in missions around the world is vital. But ultimately, the answers to these bigger questions will determine how America’s record and that of the Bush administration will be judged.
I believe that right now, the answers depend above all on how the United States responds to two immediate crises.
The first is a human rights crisis of the highest order – the emergency in Darfur, Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of lives will be lost unless the United States and the international community mount a proper response to stop and reverse ethnic cleansing. Here, the Bush administration has been deeply and seriously engaged. It is trying to do the right thing, though clearly much more still needs to be done.
The second is a crisis of credibility, a crisis of confidence in America’s ability to lead the struggle for human rights around the world by example. This crisis was brought on by decisions made by the Bush administration to place some of its conduct of the war on terror beyond the reach of law, and it was deepened profoundly by the prison abuse scandal. Here, it is not yet clear if the administration is prepared to do what it must to repair the damage to America’s moral authority in the world.
Let me speak about both of these crises in turn.
With respect to Darfur, it’s clear that the catastrophe there is entirely man-made. It is the result of a campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Sudanese government and by government-supported Arab militias known as the Janjaweed against the civilian populations of the African Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups.
Government forces have overseen and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians, including women and children, burning and bombing of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by these three African ethnic groups. The government and its Janjaweed allies have killed thousands of civilians, often in cold blood, and raped women. These crimes are frequently accompanied by ethnic slurs directed at the victims, calling them “black” and “slaves” and “ugly.” The government and its Janjaweed allies have destroyed villages, water sources (wells, irrigation) and food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population. Satellite imagery released by the United States demonstrates that villages belonging to the three targeted African ethnic groups have been systematically destroyed even as Arab communities nearby are left untouched.
These attacks have driven more than one million civilians, mostly farmers, into camps and settlements in Darfur where they live on the edge of survival, hostage to continuing Janjaweed abuses. The U.S. Agency for International Development has estimated that 350,000 people may die in Darfur in the next few months if help does not reach them. (The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 will die in the next month alone, unless there is an emergency military airlift of medical supplies to Darfur—in which case the death toll can be “brought down” to 3,000.)
In response, the United States and the international community helped to mediate a cease-fire agreement on April 8 between the Sudanese government and the two rebel groups in Darfur in which the government agreed to “neutralize” the Janjaweed. The Sudanese President Omar El Bashir announced on June 18 that the Sudanese security forces would be “mobilized” to “disarm” the Janjaweed. But no such thing has occurred. The one million people displaced from their homes and farms are still being persecuted by the people who displaced them. The Janjaweed continue to loot, rape and kill in the displaced camps. Women and girls are raped by both government soldiers and Janjaweed, especially if they venture out of the camps for food or medicine. Backed by the government, the militias have launched assaults across the Sudanese border with Chad, threatening to turn this catastrophe into an international conflict.
The cease fire agreement also resulted in the deployment of some 120 lightly armed monitors under the auspices of the African Union. These monitors, who are not yet fully deployed, are hardly capable of covering a region that is the size of France, much less of protecting civilians. Last week, the monitors reportedly told Secretary of State Powell that they had not substantiated any cease fire violations in over a month. Yet both the government and the rebels have alleged on many occasions that the other has violated the ceasefire, and numerous attacks on villages have been noted by the U.N. and other relief organizations.
There has been a lot of debate the last few weeks about whether to call what is happening in Darfur genocide. The problem is that the guardians of the international definition of genocide may not be satisfied until there is enough time to gather enough evidence, at which point it will be too late.
But if we know that hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, we should not care if the experts call it genocide or not. We already know what we need to know to decide to act. We know that innocent lives are being lost. We know who is doing it. And we know exactly what will happen if we do not act. Ten years from now, we will be gathering to remember the anniversary of Darfur, just as we recently remembered the anniversary of Rwanda. Journalists will write retrospectives. Government officials will express regret. We will all wonder why we didn’t do more. And we will all pledge to do more the next time. It would be far better if we agreed now that Darfur is the “next time” and that this is the test of our moral commitment to stop atrocities when we can before it’s too late.
What, then, should be done? The first step should be to define a clear goal, and work backwards from that.
This crisis will be resolved only if the atrocities stop, the Janjaweed militias are disarmed and disbanded and removed or withdrawn from the areas they have occupied, and the displaced civilians can voluntarily go home in dignity and security. We can demand that the Sudanese government do these things, including that it start protecting the civilians it has been attacking. But realistically, the Sudanese government is not going to stop its deliberate campaign until it is compelled to do so by effective international pressure, including targeted sanctions. And realistically, there is not going to be security for civilians to return home unless it is provided by some kind of international force. And realistically, neither of these things is likely to gain international support without a strong resolution, or series of resolutions, by the U.N. Security Council.
The Bush administration has taken a number of admirable steps towards that kind of solution. It has made clear that it wants to see ethnic cleansing reversed. It has identified the names of Janjaweed commanders responsible for crimes and told Sudanese government officials it is investigating their role as well. Secretary Powell has traveled to Darfur to call international attention to the crisis. The administration is putting forward a Security Council resolution, under the Council’s Chapter VII enforcement powers, and pressing somewhat reluctant allies to support it.
The draft resolution, however, may still be too weak to influence the Sudanese government. It imposes sanctions, including a travel ban and arms embargo, on the Janjaweed militia and their leaders, but not on the Sudanese military commanders who have armed and directed the killers on the ground, and who might actually be hurt by a ban on travel overseas. It does not clearly call for the voluntary return of the displaced to their homes in secure conditions. It does not call for additional measures against Sudan or authorize the deployment of international troops if its demands are not met. A strong resolution would do all those things, and that is what the United States should seek.
In short, Mr. Chairman, we can hope that the Sudanese government will take on its own the steps necessary to end this catastrophe, but we would be foolish to expect it. And that means, if we are serious about saving lives in Darfur, that the international community must be prepared to do what the Sudanese government will not. If that requires the deployment of international protective forces, the United States should be prepared to call for that and to back such a deployment financially and logistically. I urge the Congress to make clear to the administration that it will support such an effort.
Mr. Chairman, let me also say a few words about the second crisis I mentioned at the outset – the crisis of credibility the United States faces in promoting human rights around the world.
The State Department report we are examining today describes what the United States is doing to convince governments around the world not to abuse human rights, even if they are doing so in the name of national security. It describes how, from Uzbekistan to Egypt to China, America urges other countries not to engage in torture and not to lock people up without trial or charge, even when they say they are doing so to protect themselves from violence. Last week in Turkey, President Bush delivered another strong speech about the need for governments in the Arab world to embrace democratic reform and to respect the rule of law, even those governments that are most threatened by terrorism.
It should go without saying, however, that the United States cannot promote these values effectively if it is not seen as consistently applying them to itself.
The images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison obviously did enormous damage to America’s image as a champion of human rights and the rule of law around the world. But the images themselves are not the biggest problem. No one expects America to be perfect. Everyone knows that even democratic societies produce soldiers and prison guards who do terrible things. If that’s all that happened here, we could solve this problem merely by punishing a few bad people. But that’s not all that happened here – there were policy decisions made by this administration that will set back the fight against torture around the world by fifty years if they are not repudiated and reversed.
First, we know that in 2002, the CIA whether it could use certain highly coercive techniques against detainees in its custody, and that the Justice Department responded with an authoritative opinion: that the President, pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief, can authorize even outright torture of prisoners. We have seen numerous reports, which have not been denied, that the CIA used a technique known as “water-boarding” in which detainees heads’ are submerged underwater so they think they will drown. This technique, known as the “submarine” to victims of torture in places like Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Pinochet’s Chile, has long been condemned by the United States.
If we believe that the President of the United States can authorize such things in war time, then we have to accept that Saddam Hussein and every other world leader can do the same thing. The next time a dictator uses this excuse to justify the torture of his opponents, or of American prisoners of war, what will the United States say?
Second, we know that the Justice Department decided that torture requires the infliction of pain so severe that it is "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” This definition, which flies in the face of U.S. military doctrine and international law, would permit virtually every abuse we saw in those photos in Abu Ghraib. The next time a foreign government “merely” beats prisoners, or straps electrodes to their limbs without the “intent” of actually electrocuting them to death, all they will have to do is quote the U.S. Justice Department to argue that it’s not torture. And that is tragic.
Third, we know that the Defense Department authorized for a time in Guantanamo the use of techniques such as “forced standing,” stripping detainees naked, and threatening them with dogs. Similar techniques, including sleep deprivation, exposure to hot and cold, and placing prisoners in painful “stress positions” were approved by military commanders in Iraq. Based on our own Human Rights Watch investigations, numerous press reports and the reports of the International Committee for the Red Cross, we know that these techniques were used by U.S. forces throughout Afghanistan and Iraq. They clearly contributed to deaths in custody and to the abuses in Abu Ghraib.
Such so called “stress and duress” techniques may sound innocuous. But as anyone who has worked with torture victims knows, they are the stock in trade of brutal regimes around the world. For example, the Washington Times recently reported that “[s]ome of the most feared forms of torture cited” by survivors of the North Korean gulag “were surprisingly mundane: Guards would force inmates to stand perfectly still for hours at a time, or make them perform exhausting repetitive exercises such as standing up and sitting down until they collapsed from fatigue.”
Binding prisoners in painful positions is a torture technique widely used in countries such as China and Burma, and repeatedly condemned by the United States. Stripping Muslim prisoners nude to humiliate them was a common practice of the Soviet military when it occupied Afghanistan. As for sleep deprivation, consider former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s account of experiencing it in a Soviet prison in the 1940s:
“In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget....Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it ... I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them – if they signed -- uninterrupted sleep!”
These techniques were invented in the dungeons of the world’s most brutal regimes for one purpose – to inflict pain and humiliation without leaving physical scars. The State Department rightly continues to urge other countries not to engage in this kind of torture. But how can it credibly do so if the United States is seen to employ it, too?
Finally, we know that the CIA and the Defense Department deliberately hid detainees from the International Committee for the Red Cross, in hopes that such isolation would aid interrogation. The Defense Department acknowledges this was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, yet Secretary Rumsfeld continues to defend it in at least one key case, for reasons he, surreally, has acknowledged he cannot explain. The next time the United States demands Red Cross access to an American POW or to a foreign detention center where torture is suspected, what will it say when this is thrown back in its face?
For these reasons, Mr. Chairman, the abused prisoners in Iraq were far from the only victims of this scandal. Some of the biggest victims are the many good people enduring torture in brutal prisons in places like Burma and China and Zimbabwe and Egypt who look to the United States to be their champion. For the United States can’t be an effective champion for these people so long as it’s echoing the arguments of theirs torturers.
And I can tell you from my organizations contacts with human rights activists in these places, that the prison abuse as well as controversies over the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects has had a devastating impact on America’s image. Abusive governments around the world are gloating about it. And American diplomats are indeed beginning to censor themselves. We have seen that in Malaysia, for example, where political detainees have often been imprisoned without charged and abused in detention, and U.S. embassy officials have candidly told us that they can say little about it.
I recognize that President Bush has pledged that he is against torture and that the U.S. will obey the laws against torture. I welcome the fact that the White House has begun to distance itself from the Justice Department’s efforts to find a legal justification for torture. But given the amount of damage that has been done, that is not enough.
The administration should be absolutely clear that the United States will no longer apply to any detainee anywhere in the world methods of interrogation that violate the international prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. It should be clear that it is no longer employing so called “stress and duress” techniques, which are designed to inflict pain and humiliation on detainees. It should reaffirm the basic rule enshrined in the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Interrogation Manual: that the United States will not take any actions against any detainee that would be considered unlawful if perpetrated by the enemy against an American prisoner.
The administration should also provide the International Committee on the Red Cross access to all detainees in U.S. custody or control everywhere in the world, and open prison facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan to local and international human rights organizations. And it should be open to a truly independent investigation of the prison abuse scandal.
It should, in other words, demand of itself exactly what it rightly demands of others in this and other State Department reports.
The Congress also has an important role to play. Senators Durbin and McCain, for example, cosponsored an amendment to the Defense Department Authorization bill last month reaffirming America’s legal obligation to treat all detainees consistent with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, and requiring the Defense Department to issue interrogation guidelines consistent with that commitment. The amendment was approved, with Senator Warner’s support, by the Senate, and I urge the House to accept it in conference. Congress should continue its investigation of the prison abuse scandal, insisting that the administration provide whatever information is needed to aid that investigation.
The stakes here are huge, Mr. Chairman. For the United States does have a special role to play in the world – and that role is based not just on America’s power, but on the power of America’s example.
We need the moral clarity that is provided by these State Department reports and by the efforts of the President and the State Department to condemn human rights abuses throughout the year. But the United States needs to project more than moral clarity – it must maintain moral authority to promote a more humane and democratic world. That requires consistent leadership abroad and a sterling example at home.
