Amnesty International Is Cheerleading For War

Amnesty International Advertisement
for the NATO summit in Chicago

So called human rights organizations are increasingly used as propaganda tools against the enemy du jour of western imperialism.

When Georgia attacked Russia peacekeepers in South-Ossetia resulting in a short and lost war Human Rights Watch misidentified cluster ammunition used during that war as Russian when it was, according to its own mine identification charts, indeed Georgian ammunition which had been purchased from Israel. Human Rights Watch continued to push the false claim even weeks after it had been proven wrong. When the French wanted to attack Libya Amnesty International's French director falsly claimed that Gaddhafi was using black mercenaries. Such claims later resulted in violent atrocities by the Libyan rebels against all black people. Human Rights Watch lamented about Syria putting mines on its borders against weapon smuggling. It claimed that such mines are internationally banned which they are not. But it did not say a word when Israel mined its border with Syria to prevent Syrian refugees from coming in. The partisanship of these organizations has now reached a new level with Amnesty International openly calling for NATO to prolong the war on Afghanistan. Amnesty's new slogan: "NATO: Keep the progress going!" - What progress? Amnesty International is cheerleading the war ostensibly for "Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan". In that it is joining Laura Bush on the neo-conned Washington Post opinion pages.

But as Sonali Kolhatkar, founder of the Afghan Women's Mission (AWM) and Mariam Rawi of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) wrote a while ago on AlterNet:

Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children. Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan. [...] Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women's rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté.

John Vincent: Amnesty International, George Clooney and the Bidding of Empire