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Mozambique: Human Rights - An Exercise in State Department Hypocrisy
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
OPINION
13 March 2008
Posted to the web 13 March 2008
Paul Fauvet
Maputo
The US State Department published its annual report on human rights this week, full of the omissions we have come to expect.
Turn to the chapter on Cuba, for example. We are told what a nasty place Cuba is, how it is a totalitarian dictatorship, and in particular how prisons in Cuba "continue to be harsh and life-threatening".
One of the largest prisons in Cuba is at a place called Guantanamo Bay. It contains hundreds of prisoners, snatched illegally from all over the world, held without charge or trial, with no idea of when or if they will ever be released. Surely this gross and persistent abuse of human rights merits a prominent place in any report by a body that purports to be concerned about human rights?
I scanned the chapter on Cuba, looking for any mention of Guantanamo Bay - and could find none. For this prison is not run by Cubans. It is not Cubans who pick up alleged terrorists from Afghanistan and elsewhere and dump them in a judicial black hole. Guantanamo Bay is an American prison, run on a corner of Cuban territory occupied by the United States against the will of the Cuban government.
A real defender of human rights, Amnesty International, earlier this year described Guantanamo Bay as "a symbol of injustice and abuse. Secret detentions, torture, rendition and indefinite detention without charge flout basic human rights principles and jeopardize rather than promote security".
But not a whisper of this is allowed into the US State Department reports. In those reports, the United States' own human rights abuses are always exempt from criticism. They are not acknowledged to exist - the United States is the one country in the world which has no chapter in the report.
US forces operating abroad are likewise exempt from criticism. So there is no mention of abuses committed by US troops in Iraq, just as in 2004, when the rest of the world was appalled by the photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of these scenes of torture could be found in the State Department report for that year.
Indeed, you would never guess from the State Department's chapter on Iraq that there are any US troops in the country at all. They are not mentioned - although there are couple of coy references to something called the "Multi-National Force-Iraq" (MNF-I).
When we turn to the chapter on Mozambique, we find several egregious factual errors. Quite the worst of these is the claim that Nyimpine Chissano, businessman son of former President Joaquim Chissano, was "joint moral author" of the assassination of the country's foremost investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, in 2000.
Has the US State Department taken upon itself the right to put Mozambican citizens on trial and find them guilty? For no Mozambican court ever found Chissano guilty of "joint moral authorship" of the assassination.
That was the accusation against Chissano - but he died, in November 2007, before the case reached court. The disgraceful lethargy of the Mozambican judicial system meant that the Mozambican public never had the chance to find out, through an open trial, if there was any substance to the allegations against Chissano, and Chissano himself never had the opportunity to clear his name.
The State Department (or the diplomats in the US embassy in Maputo who doubtless compiled the Mozambique section of the report) have not even bothered to read the Mozambican constitution. The report states "The law grants citizenship to the foreign-born wife of a male citizen but not to the foreign-born husband of a female citizen".
This did indeed use to be the case, but the law has been changed. The Constitution passed by parliament in 2004 states (in article 26) "Any foreign man or woman, unless stateless, who has been married to a Mozambican woman or man for at least five years acquires Mozambican nationality as long as he/she a) declares a wish to acquire Mozambican nationality and b) fulfils the requirements and offers the guarantees fixed by law".
Thus while it may still require running through a fair amount of red tape to acquire Mozambican nationality by marriage, there is no longer any barrier merely because of one's sex.
A serious allegation, made repeatedly in the report, is that the judiciary is "heavily influenced by the ruling party". No source whatsoever is given for this claim, and the report does not provide a single example of such influence.
But it is not difficult to guess what the source is - it is last year's report. And the source for the claim then, was the report of the year before, and so on. For this is just one of those allegations that crops up year after year, and is mindlessly repeated, with the compilers of the report taking the attitude "if we said it last year, it must be true".
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It must be admitted, however, that the State Department has cleaned up its act somewhat. Earlier in the decade, whole paragraphs were lazily lifted from one year's report into the next's. That practice, at least, has gone.
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I am an American,and I am ashamed of the hypocrisy that exists in many areas of my country. We have the capacity to help the world become a more humane and livable place, but I have seen even university students prioritize greed and ambition as important attributes. Although my fellow students may not agree, their goal of success includes these qualities. It seems that any behavior is able to be justified when money and power are the goal,just ask young business students! (It's very sad indeed.) These attitudes have shocking and alarming to me... [Read Full Text]
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