Of Pots And Shiny New Kettles

Violence is once again flaring in Lhasa as Tibetans struggle against the Chinese occupation of their country. According to this NY Times article, at least 10 people have been killed as the Chinese clamp down on this tiny nation as part of the run-up to the Beijing Olympics this summer. It is unlikely that the US will do more than register a mild protest of the Chinese action, primarily because the most recent State Department Report on Human Rights dropped China from the list of the top ten worst human rights abusers.

Don't think the rest of the world didn't notice the omission or the irony of the timing of the State Department report. Germany's Die Tageszeitung published an editorial on March 12,2008 on the issue.

We get two news items from the US on the same day concerning human rights. The first report: China is no longer on the list of the top ten human rights abusers in the report issued by the US State Department on human rights. Report number two: the Democrats in the House of Representatives failed in their effort to forbid the practice of waterboarding. President George W. Bush vetoed the bill and thereby allowed the CIA to torture with impunity.

Together the two reports underscore the contradictory nature of the US government with respect to human rights. The US State Department has been issuing its report on human rights abuses throughout the world since 1977. Now the US considers the marginal gains in China, such as the review of death sentences by the Supreme Court, so significant that they outweigh the continued repression, censorship, torture, reeducation camps and forced labor. This assessment sends the wrong signal at the wrong time. With this report the US is playing into the hands of the Chinese government, which is trying to burnish its image ahead of the Olympic Games in the summer without making any substantive changes in its policies. It certainly was not necessary for Washington to remove an important tool for keeping up the pressure on China until the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

While it is the height of chutzpah for a nation which admits to engaging in "intensive interrogation techniques," that damnable euphemism for torture, and "rendition," another damnable euphemism for kidnapping, and runs prison camps in other nations so it doesn't have to abide by its own Constitution and laws, to issue anything like a "Human Rights Report," the US continues to do so annually. This year, the Bush Administration quite cynically dropped all pretense to the report's original purpose, that of pressuring countries to stop the horrific abuses of their own people. Instead, it used the report for a bargaining chip with a nation it wants support from at the UN and in the rest of the world.

So China will get a free pass for its brutality in Tibet. It will have its lovely Olympics and an official US delegation will appear at the glorious opening of that event. And the death toll in Lhasa will rise.

311 days.