US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee is but the latest move by the Bush Administration to contain the ever-widening scandal and national shame over the mistreatment by US troops of Iraqi prisoners. The crisis has eclipsed discussions of whether the US could have prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center. It has once again spotlighted the issue of human rights on the world stage.
Of late, the nomenclature of terrorism, extremism and fundamentalism has been affixed to the Muslims. It is not to say that these do not exist in Muslim societies. But to depict the fringe as a norm is a distortion of reality and a fabrication of the truth. This was the position taken by Prince Charles in England a decade back. This agenda-driven and one-sided depiction of the Muslim world is yet to be successfully countered.
Muslims who have gone abroad and do well in the West have not put their priority into making their mark in thinking professions. For example, within a few years, the size of the Muslim population in America should exceed 1crore (10 millions). Proportionately, however, Muslim presence is stunningly non-existent in the arena of media, law, government and academia. Largely because of this, the foes of Islam have a relatively free ride.
In Macedonia, seven innocent Pakistanis were lured and then murdered in a staged encounter at the behest of Macedonia Interior Minister so as to supposedly appease US policy-makers on Macedonia’s seeming compliance in the so-called war against terrorism. In Thailand, 118 teenage Muslims were slaughtered by Thai troops - 32 of them inside a historic mosque. In Iraq, Anglo-American troops sadistically relished tormenting Iraqi prisoners. In Palestine, the wheelchair-bound paraplegic leader Sheikh Yassin was brutally assassinated by Israeli forces.
Not to be left behind, Putin’s Russian forces regularly molest Chechen women and slay Chechen civilians. Indian soldiers continue to inflict horrors in the vale of Kashmir. Yet, when Muslim issues are discussed, the label of terrorism is quickly affixed and, in juxtaposition, the Israel situation, for example, is framed in the context of human rights.
Who monopolizes and manipulates the media is often determinative and dispositive of how issues are defined and how the parameters of the debate and discussions are demarcated.
Simply put, the philosophy of the neo-con cabal (mostly pro-Israeli) which encircles President Bush and drives his thinking is this: power supersedes international law; power prevails; and law legitimizes the prevailing power. In other words, might makes right. But power is sometimes circumscribed by the imperatives of human decency. Pharaonic hubris creates its own dynamic of resistance.
Western duality, Israel intransigence and the ineptness of Muslim elites are some of the causes behind the impotent rage which provides ideological fuel to radicalism. As long as the existing polarization continues, human rights shall remain more of a divisive politicized factor than a non-partisan humanitarian cause.
The elements of poverty, hunger, joblessness create their own dynamic of terror, the last being a key cause of suicide among the youth, especially so, in Pakistan. Also, there is the terror of the resource-less common citizen who lives in fear of his dignity being affronted with disdain.
Fifty-five years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948. To date, its provisions are honored more in their breach even by the paladins of human rights in the West. In 1995, Europe witnessed the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the UN safe haven of Srebrenica while the blue-helmeted Dutch troops of the UN scurried for cover like frightened rabbits. Ten years ago in Rwanda, 800,000 Tutsis were killed by the Hutus in 100 days in a genocidal slaughter with the UN, in effect, an indifferent bystander.
Man’s inhumanity to man shall remain a constant despite the ruthlessly changing world of the 21st century - and so, too, perhaps the striving for human rights.
