The good:
Govts should pay for cartoon protest: UN
Iran, Syria and other governments that failed to protect foreign embassies from mobs protesting over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed should pay for the damage, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.
The cartoons’ publication in a Danish newspaper have triggered widespread protests across the Muslim world including violent attacks on Western diplomatic offices in a number of countries.
“The government has a responsibility to prevent these things from happening. They should have stopped it, not just in Syria or Iran but all around,” Annan said.
“Not having stopped it, I hope they will pick up the bill for the destruction that has been caused to all the foreign countries,” he told CNN.
“They should be prepared to pay for the damage done to Danish, Norwegian and the other embassies concerned.”
The bad:
UN report calls for closure of Guantánamo
A UN inquiry into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has called on Washington to shut down the prison, and says treatment of detainees in some cases amounts to torture, UN officials said yesterday.
The report also disputes the Bush administration’s legal arguments for the prison, which was sited at the navy base in Cuba with the purpose of remaining outside the purview of the US courts, and says there has been insufficient legal process to decide whether detainees continued to pose a threat to the US.
The report, prepared by five envoys from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and due for release tomorrow, is bound to deepen international criticism of the detention centre. Drafts of the report were leaked to the Los Angeles Times and the Telegraph newspapers, but UN envoys refused to comment yesterday.
During an 18-month investigation, the envoys interviewed freed prisoners, lawyers and doctors to collect information on the detainees, who have been held for the last four years without access to US judicial oversight. The envoys did not have access to the 500 prisoners who are still being held at the detention centre.
“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government,” Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys, told the LA Times. “There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture.”
The report lists techniques in use at Guantánamo that are banned under the UN’s convention against torture, including prolonged periods of isolation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and humiliation, including forced shaving. [Note: humilition equals torture. Go figure.]
The UN report also focuses on a relatively new area of concern in Guantánamo – the resort to violent force-feeding to end a hunger strike by inmates. [Note: certainly a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Imagine the outcry had they been allowed to starve. I say fine — let ’em starve.]
And the ugly:
Bush agrees to work with U.N. on international force for Darfur
In a move that ultimately could lead to the deployment of U.S. troops to Africa, President Bush on Monday agreed to work with the United Nations on the creation of a new international force to stop ethnic killings in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Although Bush made no commitments on a possible role for U.S. troops, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he favors American participation in the peacekeeping mission. Bush and Annan sidestepped that issue during a White House meeting that focused on the mechanics of creating a peacekeeping force.
“When the planning is done and we come up with detailed requirements, then each government will have to indicate what they will offer and what they will do,” Annan told CNN after the meeting. “I hope that the U.S. and other governments with capacity will pull together and work with us in putting the forces on the ground.”
Annan said that international troops offer the best hope for ending the violence that’s claimed as many as 200,000 lives and left nearly 2 million people homeless. Peacekeeping troops from neighboring African countries have been unable to stop marauding militias that operate with support from the Sudanese government.
The campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing, orchestrated by Sudanese Arabs, targets Darfur’s African population. Humanitarian groups say the violence rivals the slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s.
Bush and other administration officials have shown little enthusiasm for putting U.S. troops in the middle of the ethnic strife, but they haven’t ruled it out. Bush, who has called the killings in Darfur genocide, didn’t even mention plans for an international force in brief remarks to reporters after his meeting with Annan.
He said only that they had “a good discussion” about the problem.
A State Department spokesman said that any discussion of sending U.S. troops to Africa is premature until the United Nations comes up with a more complete plan for an international force. The Pentagon is ready to send experts to U.N. headquarters in New York to help plan the peacekeeping mission and ensure that it has a large African component.
“It’s really premature to speculate about what the needs would be in terms of logistics, in terms of airlift, in terms of actual troops. And it’s certainly in that regard premature to speculate on what the U.S. contribution might be,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
One note about the ugly factor here: it is certainly an understatement to say the Sudanese situation is already quite ugly. Any U.S. military involvement only increases the potential for “Americanizing” the bloody mess.