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Here.
China Gives America a D
By PETER EDIDIN
SINCE 1977, the United States State Department has issued an annual global report card called the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
The document has long been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments, including
China's, which responds with a nettled review of its own, called "The Human Rights Record of the United States," the 2004 version of which was
recently released. (It is available in English at:
http://english.people.com.cn/200503/03/eng20050303_175406.html.)
China's assessment, unlike the sober State Department tome, is a frank indictment and draws a picture of America that approaches caricature. But that doesn't mean it won't buttress the negative image of the United States held by its critics around the world.
Excerpts follow, with the document's grammatical and other errors intact.
Life, Liberty and Security of Person
American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people's rights to life, liberty and security of person.
The United States has the biggest number of gun owners, and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day.
The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest.
According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to two million in 2000, a hike by six times. The number of convicted offenders may total more than six million if parolees and probationers are also counted.
Political Rights and Freedom
The United States claims to be "a paragon of democracy," but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices are common. Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money. The presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly $4 billion.
Campaign advertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies.
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Poverty, hunger and homelessness have haunted the world richest country.
Upper middle- and upper-class families that constitute the top 10 percent of the income distribution are prospering while many among the remaining 90 percent struggle to maintain their standard of living. According to the statistics released by the United States Census Bureau in 2004, the number of Americans in poverty has been climbing for three years. It rose by 1.3 million year on year in 2003 to 35.9 million.
Racial Discrimination
Racial discrimination has been deeply rooted in the United States, permeating into every aspects of society. The colored people are generally poor, with living condition much worse than the white. The death rate of illness, accident and murder among the black people is twice that of the white. The rate of being victim of murders for the black people is five times that of the white. The rate of being affected by AIDS for the black people is ten times that of the whites while the rate of being diagnosed by diabetes for the black people is twice that of the whites.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the United States received 29,000 complaints in 2003 of racial bias in the workplace
The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal, so the gap between black and white people is simply an insult to the founding essence of the United States.
After the Sept. 11 incident, the United States openly restricts the rights of citizens under the cloak of homeland security, and uses diverse means including wire tapping of phone conversations and secret investigations, checks on all secret files, and monitoring transfers of fund and cash flows to supervise activities of its citizens, in which, people of ethnic minority groups, foreigners and immigrants become main victims.
The Rights of Women and Children
The situation of American women and children was disturbing. The rates of women and children physically or sexually victimized were high. According to F.B.I. Crime Statistics, in 2003 the United States witnessed 93,233 cases of raping. The statistics also showed that every two minutes one woman was sexually assaulted and every six minutes one woman was raped.
Children were victims of sex crimes. Every year about 400,000 children in the U.S. were forced to engage in prostitution or other sexual dealings on the streets.
In recent years scandals about clergymen molesting children kept breaking out.
It is believed that from 1950 to 2002 more than 10,600 boys and girls were sexually abused by nearly 4,400 clergymen.
The Human Rights of Foreign Nationals
In 2004, United States Army service people were reported to have abused and insulted Iraqi prisoners of war, which stunned the whole world. The United States forces were blamed for their fierce and dirty treatments for these Iraqi P.O.W.'s. They made the P.O.W.'s naked by force, masking their heads with underwear (even women's underwear), locking up their necks with a belt, towing them over the ground, letting military dogs bite them, beating them with a whip, shocking them with electric batons, needling them sometimes and putting chemical fluids containing phosphorus on their wounds.
The United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Spain's Uprising newspaper on May 12, 2004, published a list of human rights infringement incidents committed by the United States troops, quoting two bloodthirsty sayings of two American generals, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" by Gen. Philip Sheridan, and "we should bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age" by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay.
A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the United States-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children. In addition, the United States troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-United States militants since the invasion. The American forces has so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent.
Despite tons of problems in its own human rights, the United States continues to stick to its belligerent stance, wantonly trample on the sovereignty of other countries and constantly stage tragedies of human rights infringement in the world.
Instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably, the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously.
And here.
What Set Loose the Voice of the People
By DEXTER FILKINS
BEIRUT, Lebanon — In memory, the two scenes are linked by their silence. Last week in downtown Beirut, Lebanese by the hundreds filed past the tomb of Rafik Hariri, the fallen national leader, each pausing to offer some unspoken tribute. The only audible sound was a murmured prayer for the dead.
In Baghdad two months before, Iraqis in similar numbers had waited in line outside a high school to cast their ballots. Mortar shells were exploding in the distance, yet hardly anyone uttered a sound.
Amid such overwhelming displays of popular will, it seemed that words were hardly necessary.
Only weeks apart and a few hundred miles away, the popular demonstrations in Lebanon and Iraq offer themselves up for such comparisons. Their proximity suggests a connection, possibly one of cause and effect, like the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989. As went Berlin, Prague and Bucharest; so goes Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo.
President Bush has asserted as much, arguing that the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the holding of elections in Iraq set loose the democratic idea and sent the tyrannies reeling. From a distance, Lebanon looks like a domino.
Up close, though, it seems like something far more complex. For a correspondent who has spent much of the past two years inside Iraq, arriving in the seaside capital of Beirut is a bracing and abrupt experience. For all the glories of election day, Iraq is still a grim and deadly place, where the traumas of the past 30 years are imprinted in the permanent frowns of ordinary Iraqis. Lebanon, by contrast, seems Iraq's sunny, breezy cousin, where young men arrive at demonstrations wearing blazers and hair gel, and the women high heels and navel rings. When the protest is finished, they drive off together in their BMW's.
How could Iraq have inspired this?
Chibli Mallat, a Beirut lawyer and opposition leader, has an answer. He believes that for years, Iraq stood as both a positive and malevolent symbol to others in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's survival following the Persian Gulf war in 1991, Mr. Mallat said, froze the status quo in the region for more than a decade. The Iraqi dictator's prolific human rights abuses had the perverse effect of making every other unelected leader in the Middle East look tame by comparison. The result, he said, was political stasis.
"Saddam's survival created an atmosphere where people literally got away with murder," Mr. Mallat said. "His removal became a precondition for change in the region."
When the Americans finally returned to topple Mr. Hussein two years ago, and, more important, when millions of Iraqis risked their lives to cast ballots in January, the country emerged as a symbol for change across the region.
"Suddenly, there was a demand for democracy," Mr. Mallat said.
Mr. Mallat's view, compelling though it is, is a minority one in Lebanon. Most Lebanese will tell you that Iraq had nothing to do with the popular upheaval now gripping the country, and not just because they opposed the American invasion of their Arab neighbor. Unlike Iraq, Lebanon has been a functioning democracy since 1990, when the civil war, which killed 100,000 people, finally came to an end. Lebanon's press is vibrant, with newspapers and television stations largely free to criticize the government in Arabic, English and French. While Iraq still requires billions of dollars to repair its crumbling public works, Lebanon, thanks in no small way to Mr. Hariri's efforts, has largely rebuilt itself.
Indeed, it is no accident that the main slogan of the Lebanese opposition is not "Democracy," but "Sovereignty, Independence and Freedom." The goal is to expel Syrian forces, who have been in Lebanon for 30 years.
At least to an outsider, the main difference between Iraq and Lebanon seems not just Iraq's inexperience with democracy, but its all too dreadful experience with terror. In Iraq, political discourse often seems stunted, if less by a lack of practice than by the lingering shadow of Mr. Hussein. In Lebanon, with some exceptions - like the subject of Syria and its Lebanese client, President Emile Lahoud - most citizens are well accustomed to speaking their minds. In the last few weeks, most of the remaining taboos have fallen away.
"We want the truth," said Naila Shukry, a biology student at Arab University in Beirut. "Someone has murdered our leader, and we want to know who is responsible."
The more extensive experience with democracy has allowed the Lebanese to develop a discourse that seems far more nuanced and sophisticated than the one practiced by their counterparts in Iraq, where people are still testing the rudiments of debate. In Iraq, elections began the democratic process; here, it has already been many years in the making.
When Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Hezbollah organization, addressed a rally of his supporters in downtown Beirut earlier this month, he stood in front of a Lebanese flag rather than the group's trademark banner, green and yellow with a fist and a Kalashnikov rifle. The change, seen on television, prompted a good deal of chatter in Lebanon's political classes about Mr. Nasrallah's intentions. Whatever he meant, such a political moment is inconceivable in Iraq today.
"Here we already have a democracy," said Mustafa Salha, a 40-year-old worker in a plastic factory who had come to visit Mr. Hariri's tomb. "Iraq didn't have anything to do with that."
Indeed, the goal of those taking to the streets in Lebanon has not so much been the beginning of democracy, but rather a better democracy than what they already have. The way to get that, most Lebanese seem to agree, is to expel the Syrian forces and by so doing end that country's overweening influence here. The Lebanese have tolerated that presence for years, buying into the notion that the Syrians brought them stability in exchange for their putting up with Syrian power to veto most important political decisions.
As their democracy matured, more and more Lebanese came to regard the Syrian presence as a rotten bargain. Last September, when the Syrian government engineered the extension of Mr. Lahoud's term, the discontent became acute.
Enter the government of the United States. In an echo of the ambivalence many Iraqis feel about the American presence in their country, many Lebanese are skeptical of American intentions. Not least among their reasons is what they regard as the acquiescence of the United States to the continuation of Syria's military presence here in 1990, in exchange for Syria's joining the coalition that was then being built to oust Mr. Hussein from Kuwait.
"The Syrians had a mandate from the United States" to keep their troops in Lebanon, said a former Lebanese minister who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
For many Lebanese, what made significant change possible in Lebanon was not the elections in Iraq, but the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which prompted the Bush administration to re-examine its reluctance to challenge the Syrian regime, as well as other Arab dictatorships that had backed terrorist groups. When the Lebanese began calling for a Syrian withdrawal, the Syrian government had to defy not just the Lebanese people, but the United States as well.
For that reason, more than a few Lebanese believe, President Bush's demands are proving decisive in driving the Syrians out. "This enthusiasm for democracy may not happen again," said Khalil Karam, professor of international relations at University of St. Joseph here, speaking of American foreign policy. "Without it, we could not stop Syria."
Back at Mr. Hariri's tomb, Mr. Salha, the factory worker, offered his own grudging invitation, if only to ensure that his homeland finally frees itself of Syrian domination.
"We are not against Bush," Mr. Salha said. "If he wants to make us safe and free, that's great. Let him do it."
China Gives America a D
By PETER EDIDIN
SINCE 1977, the United States State Department has issued an annual global report card called the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
The document has long been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments, including
China's, which responds with a nettled review of its own, called "The Human Rights Record of the United States," the 2004 version of which was
recently released. (It is available in English at:
http://english.people.com.cn/200503/03/eng20050303_175406.html.)
China's assessment, unlike the sober State Department tome, is a frank indictment and draws a picture of America that approaches caricature. But that doesn't mean it won't buttress the negative image of the United States held by its critics around the world.
Excerpts follow, with the document's grammatical and other errors intact.
Life, Liberty and Security of Person
American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people's rights to life, liberty and security of person.
The United States has the biggest number of gun owners, and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day.
The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest.
According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to two million in 2000, a hike by six times. The number of convicted offenders may total more than six million if parolees and probationers are also counted.
Political Rights and Freedom
The United States claims to be "a paragon of democracy," but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices are common. Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money. The presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly $4 billion.
Campaign advertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies.
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Poverty, hunger and homelessness have haunted the world richest country.
Upper middle- and upper-class families that constitute the top 10 percent of the income distribution are prospering while many among the remaining 90 percent struggle to maintain their standard of living. According to the statistics released by the United States Census Bureau in 2004, the number of Americans in poverty has been climbing for three years. It rose by 1.3 million year on year in 2003 to 35.9 million.
Racial Discrimination
Racial discrimination has been deeply rooted in the United States, permeating into every aspects of society. The colored people are generally poor, with living condition much worse than the white. The death rate of illness, accident and murder among the black people is twice that of the white. The rate of being victim of murders for the black people is five times that of the white. The rate of being affected by AIDS for the black people is ten times that of the whites while the rate of being diagnosed by diabetes for the black people is twice that of the whites.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the United States received 29,000 complaints in 2003 of racial bias in the workplace
The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal, so the gap between black and white people is simply an insult to the founding essence of the United States.
After the Sept. 11 incident, the United States openly restricts the rights of citizens under the cloak of homeland security, and uses diverse means including wire tapping of phone conversations and secret investigations, checks on all secret files, and monitoring transfers of fund and cash flows to supervise activities of its citizens, in which, people of ethnic minority groups, foreigners and immigrants become main victims.
The Rights of Women and Children
The situation of American women and children was disturbing. The rates of women and children physically or sexually victimized were high. According to F.B.I. Crime Statistics, in 2003 the United States witnessed 93,233 cases of raping. The statistics also showed that every two minutes one woman was sexually assaulted and every six minutes one woman was raped.
Children were victims of sex crimes. Every year about 400,000 children in the U.S. were forced to engage in prostitution or other sexual dealings on the streets.
In recent years scandals about clergymen molesting children kept breaking out.
It is believed that from 1950 to 2002 more than 10,600 boys and girls were sexually abused by nearly 4,400 clergymen.
The Human Rights of Foreign Nationals
In 2004, United States Army service people were reported to have abused and insulted Iraqi prisoners of war, which stunned the whole world. The United States forces were blamed for their fierce and dirty treatments for these Iraqi P.O.W.'s. They made the P.O.W.'s naked by force, masking their heads with underwear (even women's underwear), locking up their necks with a belt, towing them over the ground, letting military dogs bite them, beating them with a whip, shocking them with electric batons, needling them sometimes and putting chemical fluids containing phosphorus on their wounds.
The United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Spain's Uprising newspaper on May 12, 2004, published a list of human rights infringement incidents committed by the United States troops, quoting two bloodthirsty sayings of two American generals, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" by Gen. Philip Sheridan, and "we should bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age" by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay.
A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the United States-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children. In addition, the United States troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-United States militants since the invasion. The American forces has so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent.
Despite tons of problems in its own human rights, the United States continues to stick to its belligerent stance, wantonly trample on the sovereignty of other countries and constantly stage tragedies of human rights infringement in the world.
Instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably, the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously.
And here.
What Set Loose the Voice of the People
By DEXTER FILKINS
BEIRUT, Lebanon — In memory, the two scenes are linked by their silence. Last week in downtown Beirut, Lebanese by the hundreds filed past the tomb of Rafik Hariri, the fallen national leader, each pausing to offer some unspoken tribute. The only audible sound was a murmured prayer for the dead.
In Baghdad two months before, Iraqis in similar numbers had waited in line outside a high school to cast their ballots. Mortar shells were exploding in the distance, yet hardly anyone uttered a sound.
Amid such overwhelming displays of popular will, it seemed that words were hardly necessary.
Only weeks apart and a few hundred miles away, the popular demonstrations in Lebanon and Iraq offer themselves up for such comparisons. Their proximity suggests a connection, possibly one of cause and effect, like the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989. As went Berlin, Prague and Bucharest; so goes Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo.
President Bush has asserted as much, arguing that the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the holding of elections in Iraq set loose the democratic idea and sent the tyrannies reeling. From a distance, Lebanon looks like a domino.
Up close, though, it seems like something far more complex. For a correspondent who has spent much of the past two years inside Iraq, arriving in the seaside capital of Beirut is a bracing and abrupt experience. For all the glories of election day, Iraq is still a grim and deadly place, where the traumas of the past 30 years are imprinted in the permanent frowns of ordinary Iraqis. Lebanon, by contrast, seems Iraq's sunny, breezy cousin, where young men arrive at demonstrations wearing blazers and hair gel, and the women high heels and navel rings. When the protest is finished, they drive off together in their BMW's.
How could Iraq have inspired this?
Chibli Mallat, a Beirut lawyer and opposition leader, has an answer. He believes that for years, Iraq stood as both a positive and malevolent symbol to others in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's survival following the Persian Gulf war in 1991, Mr. Mallat said, froze the status quo in the region for more than a decade. The Iraqi dictator's prolific human rights abuses had the perverse effect of making every other unelected leader in the Middle East look tame by comparison. The result, he said, was political stasis.
"Saddam's survival created an atmosphere where people literally got away with murder," Mr. Mallat said. "His removal became a precondition for change in the region."
When the Americans finally returned to topple Mr. Hussein two years ago, and, more important, when millions of Iraqis risked their lives to cast ballots in January, the country emerged as a symbol for change across the region.
"Suddenly, there was a demand for democracy," Mr. Mallat said.
Mr. Mallat's view, compelling though it is, is a minority one in Lebanon. Most Lebanese will tell you that Iraq had nothing to do with the popular upheaval now gripping the country, and not just because they opposed the American invasion of their Arab neighbor. Unlike Iraq, Lebanon has been a functioning democracy since 1990, when the civil war, which killed 100,000 people, finally came to an end. Lebanon's press is vibrant, with newspapers and television stations largely free to criticize the government in Arabic, English and French. While Iraq still requires billions of dollars to repair its crumbling public works, Lebanon, thanks in no small way to Mr. Hariri's efforts, has largely rebuilt itself.
Indeed, it is no accident that the main slogan of the Lebanese opposition is not "Democracy," but "Sovereignty, Independence and Freedom." The goal is to expel Syrian forces, who have been in Lebanon for 30 years.
At least to an outsider, the main difference between Iraq and Lebanon seems not just Iraq's inexperience with democracy, but its all too dreadful experience with terror. In Iraq, political discourse often seems stunted, if less by a lack of practice than by the lingering shadow of Mr. Hussein. In Lebanon, with some exceptions - like the subject of Syria and its Lebanese client, President Emile Lahoud - most citizens are well accustomed to speaking their minds. In the last few weeks, most of the remaining taboos have fallen away.
"We want the truth," said Naila Shukry, a biology student at Arab University in Beirut. "Someone has murdered our leader, and we want to know who is responsible."
The more extensive experience with democracy has allowed the Lebanese to develop a discourse that seems far more nuanced and sophisticated than the one practiced by their counterparts in Iraq, where people are still testing the rudiments of debate. In Iraq, elections began the democratic process; here, it has already been many years in the making.
When Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Hezbollah organization, addressed a rally of his supporters in downtown Beirut earlier this month, he stood in front of a Lebanese flag rather than the group's trademark banner, green and yellow with a fist and a Kalashnikov rifle. The change, seen on television, prompted a good deal of chatter in Lebanon's political classes about Mr. Nasrallah's intentions. Whatever he meant, such a political moment is inconceivable in Iraq today.
"Here we already have a democracy," said Mustafa Salha, a 40-year-old worker in a plastic factory who had come to visit Mr. Hariri's tomb. "Iraq didn't have anything to do with that."
Indeed, the goal of those taking to the streets in Lebanon has not so much been the beginning of democracy, but rather a better democracy than what they already have. The way to get that, most Lebanese seem to agree, is to expel the Syrian forces and by so doing end that country's overweening influence here. The Lebanese have tolerated that presence for years, buying into the notion that the Syrians brought them stability in exchange for their putting up with Syrian power to veto most important political decisions.
As their democracy matured, more and more Lebanese came to regard the Syrian presence as a rotten bargain. Last September, when the Syrian government engineered the extension of Mr. Lahoud's term, the discontent became acute.
Enter the government of the United States. In an echo of the ambivalence many Iraqis feel about the American presence in their country, many Lebanese are skeptical of American intentions. Not least among their reasons is what they regard as the acquiescence of the United States to the continuation of Syria's military presence here in 1990, in exchange for Syria's joining the coalition that was then being built to oust Mr. Hussein from Kuwait.
"The Syrians had a mandate from the United States" to keep their troops in Lebanon, said a former Lebanese minister who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
For many Lebanese, what made significant change possible in Lebanon was not the elections in Iraq, but the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which prompted the Bush administration to re-examine its reluctance to challenge the Syrian regime, as well as other Arab dictatorships that had backed terrorist groups. When the Lebanese began calling for a Syrian withdrawal, the Syrian government had to defy not just the Lebanese people, but the United States as well.
For that reason, more than a few Lebanese believe, President Bush's demands are proving decisive in driving the Syrians out. "This enthusiasm for democracy may not happen again," said Khalil Karam, professor of international relations at University of St. Joseph here, speaking of American foreign policy. "Without it, we could not stop Syria."
Back at Mr. Hariri's tomb, Mr. Salha, the factory worker, offered his own grudging invitation, if only to ensure that his homeland finally frees itself of Syrian domination.
"We are not against Bush," Mr. Salha said. "If he wants to make us safe and free, that's great. Let him do it."
