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Scrapbook Human Rights, U.N. Wrongs The United Nations has been front and center since April 9, when U.S.-led coalition military forces took control of Baghdad and effectively ended one of the...
...Western newspapers publish reports from inside the infamous "White Lion" prison in the southern city of Basra, where for decades victims of the toppled regime were hung from ceiling hooks and tortured with hot irons, cigarettes, boiling water, pliers, and baths of acid...
...and British forces will "act strictly within the rules" regarding prisoners of war and that they will otherwise accept their responsibilities as an "occupying power...
...Western television networks broadcast film from Abu Ghraib prison, where crowds have begun gathering at recently discovered mass graves, now being exhumed so that relatives can inspect the decomposed corpses in hopes of identifying their loved ones...
...Human Rights Commission approves a resolution urging U.N...
...Speaking to a closing session of the U.N...
...Human Rights Commission passes yet another resolution of censure against Israel, but declines to take any action on the epic human rights violations by Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe or on the recent wave of political arrests and executions by Fidel Castro's government in Cuba...
...Marines discover and free 123 prisoners, some of them women, from deep underground bunkers at the Baath party's Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Askariya torture facility west of Baghdad...
...All the prisoners are emaciated and some have survived by eating scabs off their sores...
...Included in the archive are the before-and-after torture-session photographs Baath officials appear to have routinely recorded...
...The U.N...
...high commissioner for human rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, announces himself "deeply disturbed" over civilian deaths and injuries resulting from the U.S.-led coalition war of liberation...
...mission in New York, and some two dozen others remain active at U.N...
...Things have been plenty busy in Geneva, Switzerland, too, where the U.N...
...April 24 Digging continues at Abu Ghraib prison as a newly formed Iraqi human rights group, the Committee of Free Prisoners, begins allowing public access to millions of documents recovered from Saddam's General Security Directorate, documents meticulously recording the torture and murder of tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of people...
...In the future, Annan concludes, wars like this one should be avoided...
...Human Rights Commission has been wrapping up its annual six-week confab...
...Meantime, the commission approves a resolution expressing "deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism" and authorizing an inquiry into "the situation of Muslim and Arab peoples" with "special reference" to attacks against their persons and properties "in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001...
...agencies in Geneva and Vienna...
...Wrongs The United Nations has been front and center since April 9, when U.S.-led coalition military forces took control of Baghdad and effectively ended one of the bloodiest tyrannies in recorded human history...
...And how has the "international community," there assembled, taken note of the Baath party human rights atrocities now being uncovered on a near-daily basis...
...At U.N...
...headquarters in New York, of course, Secretary General Kofi Annan and his diplo-functionaries have been frantically attempting to reinsert themselves into the postwar Iraqi picture, claiming a unique mandate of legitimacy from the "international community" to administer the country they did absolutely nothing to help free...
...April 23 Western newspapers publish reports from inside Al Hakemiya, a Baath party secret-police interrogation center in Baghdad, where surgical units apparently harvested organs from the bodies of murdered torture victims...
...April 15 U.S...
...the world will be "safer" in a system "governed by the international rule of law and principles set out in the United Nations Charter...
...To underscore the point, the Commission formally rebukes (but does not name) one particular democracy-exporting nation for its planned use of military tribunals as a means to bring terrorism and war-crime suspects to justice...
...The U.N...
...April 14 Western newspapers publish reports from inside suburban Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam's largest, where thousands of people were tortured and murdered: forced to sit on glass bottles until their intestines were perforated, their lips and ears and tongues amputated with box cutters, and so forth...
...Annan says "I hope" that U.S...
...In Geneva, the U.N...
...Secretary General Kofi Annan reiterates his regret over the coalition's "decision to go to war without specific authorization by the Security Council...
...Let's have a peek at the commission's recent agenda: April 9 Crowds of Iraqis celebrate and pull down a statue of Saddam as Baghdad falls...
...Also, Western newspapers report— and Kofi Annan's spokesman con-firms—that the United Nations continues to recognize Baath party diplomats as the only properly credentialed representatives of Iraq...
...The U.N...
...April 16 Western newspapers publish reports on the thousands of documents British troops have recovered from Basra's "Mother of All Battles Branch" of Saddam's Baath party, documents detailing a decades-long and hair-raising program of systematic terror against Shiite locals...
...There is "no one model of democracy," the commission concludes, and "therefore we must not seek to export any particular model of democracy...
...The Commission officially declares itself in agreement with Annan, approving a resolution identifying "peace" as a fundamental precondition for human rights and calling upon member states to renounce the use of force against other member states "irrespective of their political, economic, or social systems...
...Human Rights Commission approves three separate resolutions condemning Israel for the "gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law" involved in its "policy of liquidation" against Palestinians and Syrians in the Golan Heights, which policy the commission calls an "offense against humanity...
...Vieira de Mello tells the BBC that "war is always too high a price" to pay for freedom, that coalition forces are guilty of "serious breaches to the Geneva Convention," breaches that his agency will investigate if, "as I hope we will be able to," his staffers are allowed to return to Iraq...
...Human Rights Commission annual assembly in Geneva, U.N...
...More than a dozen such diplomats remain officially accredited at Iraq's U.N...
...member states to respect "the rich and diverse nature of the community of the world's democracies" while "bearing in mind that each society and every context has its own indigenous and relevant democratic institutional traditions...
Vol. 8 • May 2003 • No. 33
