Dear Amnesty International,

I strongly urge you to step back from your newly announced campaign to
release the 75 US agents in Cuba. Associated Press reported on July 30
that your researcher Paige Wilhite has stated that "They are prisoners
of conscience and the Cuban government has to release them immediately
and without conditions." To the contrary, they have broken Cuban laws
prohibiting funding from foreign governments, a law found in any
sovereign state, including democracies like the USA and Great Britain.

To people of conscience on the left, this well-orchestrated campaign to
isolate and punish Cuba economically is rather transparent. You have
joined groups such as Reporters Without Borders, whose animosity to
communism or state-owned media in 3rd world countries is driven more by
bottom line considerations than freedom of expression it would seem.
(42% of the budget of "Reporter Without Borders" is covered by the
Commission of the European Union, a body which is fanatically
pro-privatization.)

While Amnesty International has a rather preening posture about being
"above politics", it has shown a rather dismaying tendency in the past
to adapt to the foreign policy needs of the USA and Great Britain, where
it seems to enjoy the greatest support both socially and economically.

For example, when the Iraqi army was accused of ripping babies from
hospital incubators in December 1990, Amnesty International told the
Washington Post that "We heard rumors of these deaths as early as August
but only recently has there been substantial information on the extent
of the killings." Not only were you spreading disinformation hatched by
the infamous Hill & Knowlton public relations firm, you were helping to
launch the war against Iraq whose opening salvos relied on this lurid
fabrication.

Next you got involved in the Balkans--once again on behalf of US foreign
policy. When you sponsored a 25 city tour in the USA for Jadranka
Cigelj, Judith Miller (!) of the NY Times wrote glowingly about your
efforts to raise awareness about how the Serbs were using rape as a
political weapon--even quoting the wretched David Rieff, who has emerged
as a frontline spokesman for humanitarian imperialist interventions.

Unfortunately neither Judith Miller nor your public relations department
spelled out the exact character of Cigelj's activism around the rape
issue, nor her sordid political past. In "Fool's Crusade", Diana
Johnstone points out that "Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian
president Franjo Tudjman's ruling nationalist party, the Croatian
Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the
Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by
the same cryptofascist Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman. The
primary source for reports of rape in Bosnia was Cigelj's CIC and
associated women's groups, which sent 'piles of testimony to Western
women and to the press'".

She adds:

"The CIC benefited from a close connection with the 'International
Gesellschaft fur Menschenrechte' (International Association for Human
Rights, IGfM), a far right propaganda institute set up in 1981 as a
continuation of the Association of Russian Solidarists, an expatriate
group which worked for the Nazis and the Croatian fascist Ustashe regime
during World War II. In the 1980s, this organization led a propaganda
campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, accusing them of running
camps where opponents were tortured, raped, and murdered on a massive
scale."

Finally, an article by Paul De Rooij in the October 31, 2002 online
edition of Counterpunch titled "Amnesty International & Israel: Say it
isn't so!" (www.counterpunch.org/rooij1031.html)takes you to task for
trivializing Israeli violence and apolitical fence-sitting.

He writes:

"Reading AI's reports doesn't reveal why there is a conflict in the area
in the first place. The portrayal of violence is stripped of its
context, and historical references are minimal. The fact that
Palestinians have endured occupation, expulsion, and dispossession for
many decades, the explanation of why the conflict persists, is nowhere
highlighted in its reports. This posture eliminates the possibility of
taking sides, and AI doesn't automatically side with the oppressed
victims; instead, it assumes a warped sense of balance. It qualitatively
equates the violence perpetrated by the IOF with Palestinian resistance.
In attempting to be impartial, AI is oblivious to the history of ethnic
cleansing that is the root cause. Israeli violence is qualitatively
different than Palestinian violence; it is different than that found in
other conflicts because it aims to expel the native population."

Not that I would gainsay De Rooij's compelling argument, but I would
quibble with one characterization. Instead of describing AI as
"fence-sitting", I would regard you--at least in these instances--as
having fallen off the fence and into the lap of the US and British
foreign policy establishment.

Louis Proyect