Stardate 20030409.1814

(On Screen): International concern about human rights seems to be particularly susceptible to what I refer to as searching under the streetlight.

A cop finds a drunk man in a parking lot late at night, searching the ground under the only street light in that parking lot. He asks what the guy is doing, and the drunk replies that he dropped his carkeys and is looking for them. Asked where he was when he dropped the keys, the drunk waves towards a car in the darkness. Asked why he's searching under the street light, he says that if the keys are actually over in the darkness, he'd never find them anyway.

For instance, last year the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child spent a lot of time worrying about British parents spanking their children, while paying far less attention to the way that a lot of parents in Africa and SE Asia sell their children into slavery. Indeed, there is massive abuse of children all over the world; you'd be hard pressed to find a nation whose children are more well off and less abused than the UK.

Probably some of this is due to the fact that criticizing the British and other western nations is safer; we don't usually respond to criticism with bullets. Some of it is due to the fact that we have more open and transparent societies and thus discovery of abuses is easier. A lot of it is anti-Western bias; a manifestation of the general Tranzi tendency to assume that all powerful nations are sinful and all weak nations are virtuous.

It's happening again.

U.N. Security Council envoys encouraged private relief groups on Wednesday to act as human rights watchdogs once they gain access to Iraq, to ensure respect for civilians' rights during the U.S.-led occupation.

"The coalition forces that occupy Iraq must comply with international law. Nongovernmental organizations can be the eyes and ears of the council to ensure that international humanitarian law is respected," Mexican U.N. Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser said.

"We have encouraged them to provide all the information that is relevant to members of the Security Council so we can have their independent assessment of what is going on in Iraq," said Zinser, the council president for April.

To read this, you'd have the idea that Iraq was a peaceful and liberalized nation before the war, whose citizens are only now in peril because of the occupation by the US. If this kind of monitoring is such a great idea now, why wasn't it an even better idea back when the government of Iraq was routinely torturing and murdering its own people, and imprisoning its children? (Or torturing its children?)

Never fear, Amnesty International is on the case:

Yvonne Terlingen, the U.N. representative for Amnesty International, said her group urged the council "to assure that human rights monitors are established as quickly as possible, to keep it informed of what is going on the ground."

She also suggested creation of a commission of experts to look into past rights violations by the government of Saddam Hussein, no longer in control in Baghdad.

"We got a positive response from both coalition powers (the United States and Britain) with respect to the need that they felt that they had to uphold principles of international humanitarian law," Terlingen said.

In other words, the reason they're now willing to monitor human rights in Iraq is that they know that the US and UK actually care about such things. The ironic situation is that this kind of monitoring can only work in places where the governments in charge are not actually inclined to routinely violate human rights.

And why is it only now that there's any reason to formally investigate rights violations by Saddam's government? He's history; his abuses are also history. The best time to investigate those would have been as they were happening, in hopes of trying to prevent more of them.

It's pointless, anyway. There won't be any need for experts to try to dig out rare and obscure and esoteric cases of abuses by Saddam and the Baathists. Those abuses were so serious and so blatant and so widespread that any international reporter will be able to walk up to any randomly-chosen group of 10 Iraqis and ask, and will get an earful. There's going to be plenty of investigation AI's committed of experts. It's hard to see what such a group could possibly contribute now.

Of course, such a committee could conceivably actually make a difference if it were to investigate on-going human rights abuses in places like Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Iran, or North Korea. Notice that AI isn't asking for an equivalent expert investigation of them.

As regards the UN Security Council members whose envoys informally requested this monitoring, their purpose is even less defensible. (This wasn't a formal action by the Security Council.) They have showed no indication of cari