HRW and moral equivalence

I've always treated Human Rights Watch skeptically (for reasons I've noted elsewhere), and now Robert Bernstein, the founder of HRW and its chairman from 1978 to 1998, explains why that was a good idea:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

How helpful of Bernstein to state outright that HRW has historically observed a double standard between "the democratic and nondemocratic worlds" in order to avoid the nagging problem of "moral equivalence" (translating: HRW has mainly focused its attention on official enemies—whose democratic credentials are always suspect, regardless of their electoral practices—because it rejected the ludicrous notion that crimes committed by our side are just as bad as crimes committed by their side).  This is no surprise given that HRW started out as Helsinki Watch, which was basically an unofficial organ of the U.S. government (like the National Endowment for Democracy) dedicated to highlighting human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and its satellites.

In many ways HRW continues to act as the outsourced human rights division of the State Department, as in their execrable 2008 report on Venezuela, which tracked U.S. policy so closely it may as well have been written by the Bush administration.  But they've shown some signs of improvement in recent years, particularly with regard to Israel—refuting Israeli propaganda about Hezbollah using human shields in Lebanon, for example, and criticizing the U.S. for blocking investigation and prosecution of Israel's crimes in Gaza.  It's this slowly increasing tendency toward "moral equivalence"—i.e., a single universal standard for human rights—that pissed off Bernstein so much that he felt compelled to attack HRW publicly (and he's definitely not alone in that).

Hopefully HRW will ignore the attacks and keep moving closer to the heretical notion of moral equivalence, but until they get there you'll just have to judge them on a case-by-case basis.  A good rule of thumb (which applies much more broadly as well): pay attention to them if they're contradicting U.S. policy, and ignore them if they're not.

Comments

[Donald Johnson]

Actually, the irony is that Bernstein is slandering both himself and HRW--he was part of Americas Watch and Americas Watch did a very good job covering the massive human rights violations in El Salvador and Guatemala. I have a book they put out back then called "With Friends Like These" and it goes into great detail about the contrast between the horrific reality in those countries and the claims put out by the Reagan Administration. They also point out the crimes of the contras in Nicaragua, as well as the fact that Sandinista repression was nowhere near as bloody as what our allies in El Salvador and Guatemala were doing. In fact, it was the Reagan people and their press acolytes who wrote the sorts of attacks on Amnesty International and Americas Watch that Bernstein writes here. It's mindboggling to see him adopt the rhetoric of his critics from the early 1980s'. It's the same level of betrayal of principle that you see in Christopher Hitchens if you compare what he wrote in the 80's with what he became after 9/11.

[Donald Johnson]

As evidence of Bernstein's decline, here's a link to a passage in a book I found the other day. I was looking up Bernstein's past--I didn't remember him. (I remember Aryeh Neier, but not Bernstein.) I was expecting to find that he had only been linked to Helsinki Watch, but if you read this you'll find out he used to be on the side of the angels with respect to Latin America and also Turkey. He sounds just like Neier does in talking about the same period. I should also dig up Neier's book and see what he says about Bernstein. Anyway, he was either lying about his real feelings then (which makes no sense)or he has done a Christopher Hitchens because his idol Israel has been criticized just like any other thuggish regime.

link

Hope the link works. I've had trouble linking to google searches in books before.

[John Caruso]

It's true that Americas Watch did good work in Latin America, though their criticism cut both ways. HRW in its various stages of development has always been uneven, but when it errs it usually errs on the side of U.S. policy (in the text you cited, Bernstein said that HRW was "much more involved with the U.S. government" than Amnesty). For example, they were basically doing the State Department's PR work for it during the attack on Yugoslavia. That's why I say you have to take them on a case-by-case basis, even within a given region.

Also, I think they see themselves not just as an American organization but as a liberal American organization, so they lean toward Democratic administrations. I've been curious to see if their improvement over the past few years was mainly opposition to Bush, or if it will last now that a Democrat's in charge (and the signs are mixed so far).

It's definitely ironic for an ostensible human rights advocate to openly embrace a term that was most closely associated with Jeane Kirkpatrick in the 80's, though I don't think it's inconsistent with what HRW was doing then (and even now Bernstein says that they "recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses").

[Donald Johnson]

I agree with most of that--I just think it's ironic that Americas Watch did good work and was subjected to exactly the same criticisms that Bernstein uses against them now.

My own suspicions about HRW in the 90's were over their comparative lack of coverage on the sanctions on Iraq. They did do a good job writing a report on the Gulf War, pointing out that the bombing was in part aimed at civilian infrastructure, to lay the groundwork for making the postwar sanctions that much more devastating. And they wrote one or two criticisms of the sanctions later. But not nearly enough.

[Xihuitl]

Really? Natan Sharanksy? What a joke. http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery03102005.html

[Jenny]

I'd agree that their Israel reporting is a step up from what there was previously: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/01/limits-of-humanitarianism.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09072006.html

And finally, speaking of Helenski:

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/14804