A Hypocritical and Shameful Evaluation
BY ELSON CONCEPCIÓN PÉREZ

It smells of interference on every page. It has just been released in Washington and, as expected, it made the headlines in many newspapers around the world.

It is about a US official report which makes a hypocritical assessment of the treatment of human rights in 194 countries.

Of course, it doesn´t refer to those violations performed by the US army and CIA agents and even by those US governments in their attempt to impose their hegemonic system.

To clearly understand the report, let’s read the conclusions of the White House.

"Governments worldwide have continued violating human rights in 2009."

However, the US, as the country with the greatest record of human rights violations, doesn’t appear in the list.

Torture is one of the issues this report refers to, which seems to be a tasteless joke. There are still an alarming number of reports of torture, extrajudicial murders, and other human rights violations," reads the report labelled by the US government and signed by the US State Department.

However, it makes no reference to those tortures at the illegal Guantánamo Bay prisons, or in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Neither does it refer to the CIA secret flights supported by a few European governments. The text doesn´t mention the drowning techniques and others ordered by President Bush and vice president Cheney on those people falsely accused of being terrorists, according to the Washington version.

This report severely criticizes those armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo; however, there is no reference to the role of big western companies exploiting rich mineral reserves in that country and abroad.

Reading this text, it is amazing and inconceivable the opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan wars criticizing the attacks by the rebel forces. However, not an adjective or phrase refers to those thousands of so-called "collateral errors" performed by war pilots, which have destroyed entire families ; or those dead and maimed people as a result of pilotless aircraft, white phosphorus , among other techniques used by the US army toward other populations.

Another disgusting issue is that referring to those events in the Gaza strip, where more than 1,200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops. The report admits that this was a violation of human rights but, in an unusual way, it found "those Islamic groups controlling the Gaza strip," responsible for this.

The report mentions other countries, which are accused, with no ethics or sense of respect, by those "authorities" on human rights.

Once more the US administration maintains the right to evaluate others, when such a report came from the very epicentre of human rights violations.

Taken from Granma Daily