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Rights and Wrongs Around the World
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10633 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
3,284 Words |
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Warren Strobel
Warren Strobel is chief State Department correspondent for the
Washington Times and covers international affairs. |
The end of the Cold War in 1989 brought with it the hope that a new era of respect for political freedom and other rights had dawned. These hopes have been borne out in some places.
But in many others, human rights abuses have multiplied as the ribbons of U.S.-Soviet rivalry came undone from around timeless ethnic hatreds and from nation-states, such as Somalia and Zaire.
The United States has found itself grappling with a wider range of violations than ever before, and often they seem more difficult to treat.
The advent of CNN-style instant reporting has increased pressure on policymakers to act; the demise of the Soviet threat has removed one reason not to.
Rep. Tom Lantos (D-California), at a hearing of his House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that oversees human rights policy, said that "the human rights issue, in a world which is becoming increasingly more brutal, will have to become one of the key determinants . . . of U.S. policy."
The congressional hearing was notable for the breadth of issues it raised on a tour d'horizon of the world's wrongs: suppression of Christianity in Saudi Arabia; prison labor in China; slavery in Mauritania; and newer concerns, such as abuses specific to women and governmental retaliation against environmental activists.
"We are confronted with a human rights disaster," says Pierre Sane, the new secretary-general of Amnesty International. "There is no place in the world now where human rights are safe."
But he adds that this is partly due to rapid worldwide communications and to the enhanced power of private human rights organizations.
"Ethnic cleansing is not new. What is new is the speed of information," he says. "No dictator can kill in silence or in the dark."
Abuses
Any attempt to catalog the worst human rights abusers around the globe is bound to be part subjective, depending on whether one is shocked more by the starving masses, the ethnic cleansing, or the political suppression of communist or noncommunist regimes. During the Cold War, bitter U.S. domestic debates turned on
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