by joe eskenazi
staff writer
It was Capt. Renault of “Casablanca” who uttered the memorable phrase “Round up the usual suspects.” Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak has often opted to surreptitiously toss in the grim addition “and torture them.”
On a recent trip to Egypt, Ken Roth tore into Mubarak over the latest round of torture and incarceration and the 7,000 political prisoners rotting in Egyptian jails.
“Without batting an eyelash, he said. ‘But that’s what Bush does,’” Roth said during his recent trip to San Francisco.
You don’t have to be the executive director of Human Rights Watch to extrapolate that the Bush administration’s brazen adoption of torture, disregard for the Geneva Conventions and transformation of the terms “enemy combatants” and “Guantanamo Bay” into worldwide buzzwords has given a host of dictators a cheap excuse to dust off the thumbscrews.
Roth, however, is the executive director of Human Rights Watch. And he feels it’s far worse than that.
The Bush administration “has chosen to fight terror not from the moral high ground, but by flouting some of the most basic human rights principles around,” said Roth, the son of a Holocaust refugee who was spurred to enter human rights work by a lifetime of tales of how Third Reich Germany treated its Jews.
As a result of U.S. policy, terrorist organizations have been handed the recruiting boon of a lifetime. Roth notes that it’s beyond hypocritical for terrorists to lambaste the Bush administration for torture and civilian deaths. Then again, he quips, “I guess people don’t expect the same principled consistency from terrorists that they do from the Bush administration.”
Roth and Human Rights Watch came under a firestorm of criticism during Israel’s 2006 war for criticizing Israel for the high number of Lebanese civilian deaths. A tall, thin man with a disarmingly serious expression, Roth cracks a wan smile recalling the invective of Alan Dershowitz and photographs of himself in New York Sun editorials he describes as “target-sized.”
More recently, however, the criticism has come from the other side.
While Hezbollah repeatedly claimed it has fired missiles and rockets only at Israeli military targets and as reprisals for Israeli attacks, a recently concluded Human Rights Watch investigation “refuted entirely” those claims — and Hezbollah didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“We found that while sometimes Hezbollah was aiming at military targets, very frequently they were firing at villages where there was no military target around at all and just trying to kill civilians. We tried to hold a press conference in Beirut [last August], but Hezbollah went crazy,” he recalled.
“They accused one of our researchers, Ricky Goldstein, of being a cousin of Baruch Goldstein,” the Jewish fanatic who gunned down 29 Arabs at the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994. (They are not related).
“We had to pull him out of the country,” Roth recalled. “They called us a Zionist organization and urged their minions to mass outside the hotel where we had our press conference. The hotel was terrified and shut down the press conference.”
While Hezbollah went out of its way to target civilians, Roth believes Israel did not. Nevertheless, Israel ended up targeting civilians anyway by creating free-fire zones that rendered every target a military one.
While Israel’s top military officials assured Roth that the decision to declare certain villages free of civilians and 100 percent military targets was based on “secret evidence,” Roth said Israel’s evidence needs to be processed differently.
“I hope this is a lesson on how the evidentiary threshold on how to set a target as military rather than civilian is too low,” he said.
In contrast to the Lebanese response, Roth feels the Israelis were willing to accept the criticism. “To their credit, they issued a public statement saying that it’s a very serious report and they’ll look at it very closely,” he said.
“Unlike some of the cheaper defenders of Israel in this country, they did not resort to name-calling and cheap diversionary arguments.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California