Ahmedinejad's rant and what it means

The footage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad haranguing a Geneva assembly hall is already becoming the iconic image of the latest international conference on racism. His speech sent Western diplomats scurrying for the exits in an effort to disassociate themselves from denials of the Holocaust. The immediate question is how far the United States overreacts to this unfortunate, but isolated, incident. The larger issue for Washington is how to navigate the terrain of international human rights that the Obama Administration says it wants to reclaim.

A lot of hard diplomatic work went into making sure that this week’s Geneva conference on racism did not go off the rails. More than seven years ago, the genuine accomplishments of a previous UN conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, sank into obscurity after some non-governmental organizations made anti-Semitic statements, and the international media could seemingly focus on nothing else. Early negotiations on this round did not look promising, either, and the Bush Administration effectively dropped out months ago in protest.

But wonder of wonders, the document that has been agreed in Geneva isn’t half bad. It contains no reference to Israel or the Middle East and rejects the dangerous concept that religions, as opposed to individuals, can be defamed or have their rights violated (a provision that many Islamic countries were backing). The document also reaffirms the tragedy of the Holocaust and condemns anti-Semitism.

So, now that it has won virtually all the concessions that it was seeking, what should the US do? Having refused on the basis of concrete objections to participate, Washington can hardly keep refusing to participate once those objections are met. Or can it?

Enter Mr. Ahmedinejad, a Midas with a radioactive touch. His anti-Israel comments actually received precious little support in the hall, and did not succeed in changing a single comma in the conference’s final document. The Norwegian Foreign Minister got it right when he urged conference participants to “not accept that the odd man out hijacks the collective efforts of the many.” And yet White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insisted that Ahmedinejad’s speech has showed that the Administration “made the right decision to not go forward with attendance.”

Right-wing bloggers are eagerly linking this latest dust-up to US participation at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where repressive governments are trying to keep a focus on Israel, not least in order to keep the focus off themselves. A deplorable development indeed. But is it an argument for the United States to disengage, or to re-engage? Diplomats from countries with very poor human rights records grow bolder in direct proportion to the waning of diplomatic energy from governments who are serious about human rights protection.

Barack Obama has vowed to break that cycle and become full participants at the United Nations. Renouncing torture and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay within a year were critical first steps toward engagement, and they have made it likely that the US will win a seat on the Human Rights Council again next month. If Obama is serious (and intellectually consistent) the US government should endorse the conference’s final document. Twenty-two of the countries who walked out of the Iranian president’s speech have already done so. That would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is making human rights policy on the merits -- and not letting Mahmoud Ahmedinejad do it for them.

Prosecuting for Torture: A Little Help from the NYTimes

Hosannas to the New York Times today for giving American policy-makers a huge shove in the direction of a Torture Commission. The Sunday op-ed page devotes a giant piece of real estate to journalist Mark Danner for a recapitulation, with pointed commentary, of the heretofore-secret interviews that Red Cross officials conducted with “high-value detainees” at Guantanamo. The information soberly recounted in these memos leaves no doubt that US government officials committed multiple and grievous acts of torture.

This piece testifies bracingly to the enduring relevance of the American newspaper – and of the New York Times in particular.

We read a lot about the demise of newspapers today – including, poignantly, in the New York Times itself this week. But where else but a newspaper could this information come to light? Let’s examine the options.

Radio couldn’t break this story – there’s no “actuality,” no-one to interview. The Red Cross has strict rules about confidentiality and wouldn’t go on the record for a piece like this (God knows how Danner squeezed the documents out of them); the detainees themselves are inaccessible; and the government officials responsible for the torture are not, I’m guessing, giving interviews.

Ditto TV. No pictures. Television has struggled with this for some time; waterboarding is too creepy, and too staged, to be broadcast. Even Brian Ross of ABC, the TV reporter who has most consistently followed the torture issue (including, not helpfully, to argue that waterboarding works), had trouble illustrating his pieces on the subject.

The internet can help Danner’s piece achieve some prominence, and I hope it does. But how viral is torture? The social media sites are too busy trafficking in cute videos of dogs singing “I love you” (my 13-year-old loved it). If Danner’s piece were originally published in a blog or an online magazine, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. With all due respect to bloggers, nobody out there is pulling in the right audience -- neither in terms of seniority in policy-making, nor in concentratedness, by which I mean that everyone who's anyone on the torture issue will see this piece.

So we’re left with newspapers. And how many of them are there, with any heft or reach? Aside from the NYT, only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have real national exposure. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page would not run such a piece for ideological reasons. I’d like to think Don Graham would use his newspaper to crusade against torture, and certainly the Washington Post editorialized early and well against its use. But the entire Post op-ed page also came out strongly in favor of the war in Iraq and the paper has never really expiated that error, or the general sense that it is wrapped a little too tightly around the decaying corpse of Bush’s “war on terror.”

The NYTimes supported the war in Iraq too, of course, but it also issued a major mea culpa for the real deficiencies in its reporting on the issue. And in recent years, its editorials have been among the strongest calls in the country for accountability for the Bush Adminsitration’s crimes. One senses a real quest to make up for earlier credulity (like burying its first Abu Ghraib story on page A15).

Lord knows, there's still plenty to criticize in the Times' coverage on a variety of subjects. But if you want to see senior Bush Administration officials investigated and prosecuted for torture, then you've got to be thankful, today, that the NYTimes still has clout.

Old Hands, New Voice

This piece was written for the Columbia Journalism Review, as though from the perspective of 2014: looking back and describing How Journalism Got Saved.

NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down their foreign bureaus altogether. The Ameri¬can TV networks had basically shrunk their international presence to London. Covering the Iraq war had nearly bank¬rupted foreign-news budgets, and by then, the American public had lost interest in the Iraq war. Or indeed in foreign news at all, a lot of the time. It was tough being the most expensive and least read story in the queue. Like a faded diva in a ratty mink stole (“Oh, this old thing? I bought it on assignment covering Brezhnev”), foreign correspondents slunk from the stage, costly and unwanted.

Yet even then you could have spied a few positive trends. First, the basic cost of international fact-gathering and dis¬tribution had fallen precipitously. Cameras and recorders were absurdly cheap and the means of transmission cheaper still. (Marx might have called it a revolution in the means of production.) Then, too, it was finally dawning on everyone that the United States was rapidly growing more interna¬tional by almost every measure: the percentage of American businesses with interests overseas (and what was “American” business anymore anyway?), the percentage of the Ameri¬can population born in another country, the percentage of Starbucks customers buying the “World Music” CD at the cash register. You still couldn’t sell People magazine at the newsstand with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni on the cover, maybe, but international news was locating an audience. Why were the bbc and The Economist moving into a market here if one didn’t exist?

A disproportionate number of media executives back in 2009 had been foreign correspondents in their glory days, of course, but even they had to admit that those days hadn’t nec¬essarily been all that glorious. No one could quite remember Walter Cronkite’s last story about Burundi, back in the days when the American media were supposedly doing such a boffo job covering the world. And everyone had to admit that it was a lot easier finding out something about Burundi in 2009 than it had been back in, say, 1963. A lot of world news went uncovered, and unread, even in the glory days.

Fortunately, foreign correspondents were not alone. Alongside them on beats from Chechnya to Congo to the mountains of Nepal, an army of human-rights investigators, academic researchers, aid workers, and country experts of various kinds were also out there gathering facts. They didn’t get interviews with the prime minister very often, and they didn’t always feel it necessary to quote the bri¬gade commander insisting his men had nothing to do with that massacre in that village. But sometimes they had more expertise than the journalists who stole their insights, lifted their research, and quoted them in paragraph seventeen. The Internet, meanwhile, changed the game.

For thirty years, Human Rights Watch had been sending its researchers on missions around the world to investigate and report on issues of serious human-rights abuse. Those researchers had been churning out worthy reports couched in dense legalese—more like case files, intended for a special¬ist audience (the National Security Council expert on Central Asia, say, or the UN peacekeeping staff ) than reportage meant for the general public. But hrw started giving the press a run for its money in 2009, hiring experienced journalists for a new multimedia unit whose job it was, essentially, to report on the work of hrw. By early 2009, some sixty thousand pages were being viewed on the organization’s Web site every day. That traffic compelled hrw to speak in terms the public could understand. If the journalists weren’t going to cover those stories, then hrw, like other nongovernmental organizations, would have to do so itself. The organization had dozens of investigators covering more than seventy countries—more than the foreign correspondent corps of either The New York Times or The Washington Post. It lacked the journalistic muscle to turn its research into digestible information prod¬ucts—until grants from private donors gave it the means to attract experienced professionals from an industry that no longer valued them.

Now war photographers who could no longer snag an assignment from Time or Newsweek went on mission with hrw researchers. They shot video as well, and handed it over to a team of editors back at the Empire State Building in New York. Staff researchers were issued high-quality audio recorders to use when interviewing survivors of human-rights abuse, and former radio reporters assembled the audio files into powerful testimonials. The new hrw Web site (hrw.org) modeled itself on the bbc, with four prominent multimedia stories on the homepage and a clickable list, organized by geography and topic, with the latest information on human rights from dozens of countries. The day after the presidential inauguration saw homepage news on Obama’s decision to halt the military commission hearings at Guantánamo Bay (where hrw had two staffers at the proceedings); an Israel-Gaza pack¬age including a q&a on the complex issues of civilian casual¬ties and international humanitarian law, an audio interview with hrw’s researcher on the ground, and a lengthy briefing paper on the humanitarian situation in Gaza; and a piece on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. The audience for this material went beyond hrw’s own Web site. Because the mainstream media wouldn’t pick up whole stories edited and distributed by an advocacy group, hrw also made it available in disaggregated form. Radio reporters could pull a quote off the site and stitch it into their own stories. TV producers could use video shot by hrw in the field, mix it with a little stock footage or some wire shots, and create a for-eign-news piece from the field without ever leaving midtown Manhattan. And media companies were getting less choosy about where they got their stories from, anyway. For sure, the price was right: hrw gave its content away for free.

But it isn’t journalism! cried the stalwart defenders of the sacred flame. And they were right. But it wasn’t exactly a video news release sneaked onto local TV news by the Bush White House, either. The origins of Human Rights Watch’s material were clearly marked, not least because it wanted the publicity.

The idea caught fire. Within several months, other nonprofit research groups saw the value in producing their own digestible information products—dare not call it journalism!—and before long, they banded together to create economies of scale. Rather than replicating multimedia capability across a number of ngos, they formed a consortium to report on the work of them all. This news service leveraged the expertise within the nonprofit sphere to feed the mainstream media with high-quality international content, to inform the public about what was happening in the world, and to cycle multimedia content back to the ngos themselves, for use on their own sites or with their own donors. A board of overseers watched over the journalistic integrity of the product. And an open forum on the service’s Web site meant that no ngo could purvey a false or inflated storyline without the possibility of public challenge.

In 2014, just as in 2009, the public continues to hold the media in low esteem, right down there with businessmen and politicians. The nongovernmental sector, meanwhile, still enjoys higher approval ratings than any of them. What we learned is that readers don’t trust the information less because it doesn’t come from the mainstream media. They trust it more.

Remembering Alison Des Forges

No one else in the world combined the credibility of having written a definitive, 800-page history of the Rwandan genocide with the willingness to challenge the current Rwandan government for its abuses. Researching and writing about the genocide was far from easy, of course. But this work made Alison a hero to many people (as the tribute pages at www.hrw.org attest). By contrast, her work on the abuses being committed by the Rwandan government today made her something of a skunk at a global garden party. Rwandan president Paul Kagame remains personally popular in the West and many thoughtful people , perhaps motivated by their horror at the genocide, have helped to airbrush his ugly human rights record. On the very day she died, Alison was quoted extensively in the Washington Post, casting doubt on the Rwandan government’s thin rationale for invading eastern Congo yet again. Who will have the authority, the bravery, and the store of unimpeachable knowledge, to hold Kigali to account in quite the way that Alison did?

What made her famous, what made her beloved, was her tireless work on the genocide. What made her a model human rights activist was her insistence that basic standards of human decency are immutable and apply to everyone. At the time she died, the Rwandan government had banned her from the country. That’s so sad. But it also contains, in some way, the really inspirational message of her work.

Speaking A Thousand Words

At Human Rights Watch, where I work, we see a lot of difficult pictures and read a lot of tragic reports, every day. But this image really sticks with me; I can’t shake it. I think it’s the proximity of the boot and the face. The boot recalls for me every Communist dictator, every rebel warlord, every brutal cop – every injustice that drove me into this business in the first place. And the face – the face is what keeps me here, the rictus of fear in his expression.

I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.

Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.

Plucky Little Georgia

Foreign correspondents, a cynical tribe, call them “plucky little” stories: plucky little Denmark, saving all those Jews; plucky little Sarajevo, surviving the siege of the Serbs; plucky little Hong Kong, being eaten by the Communist monster. A big bad neighbor, a small population, a steely will.

The latest installment in the “plucky little” series is Georgia, a Caucasus nation of 5 million people which fought a war with Russia in August 2008 and survived, sort of, to tell the tale.
Western audiences mostly hear the tale as the Georgian government tells it. Staffed by young, smart, Anglophone advisors, the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili has excellent connections to the international media, the global community of non-government organizations, and the highest political circles in Washington and Europe. As these plucky kids tell it, the Russians resent Saakashvili because he’s democratic, uncorrupt, and eager to join NATO, and they have long harbored a desire to unseat him. Last August they provoked Georgia into war with South Ossetia, and then seized the moment to roll over an internationally recognized border, supposedly to “protect” the South Ossetians but really to overthrow the Georgian government.

Saakashvili is still in power and the Russians stopped short of Tbilisi. But not very short. In conversation, government ministers are likely to mention more than once that Russian troops are just a half an hour from the Georgian capital (if your presidential motorcade drives awfully fast). The threat is palpable.

Geographical realities support this version of the narrative. The territory of South Ossetia, where the war was fought, remains largely closed to outsiders because the Russians control it, and don’t want international monitors messing around in it. That makes it hard to assess the damage caused by Georgian forces during the war. But Georgia is wide open, so it’s easy to see the pitiable results of Russia’s incursion. Along the road to South Ossetia stand rows and rows of newly-built houses, sad little Georgian Levittowns, where thousands of people displaced by the war have been resettled. This is no tent city of refugees. These people are here to stay.

They are ethnic Georgians who were burned out of their homes by marauding South Ossetian militias in mid-August last year. Most of them lost everything they owned, and some of them lost friends and family members who were executed by the South Ossetians while Russian soldiers looked on. These are war crimes. Because they were part of a widespread and systematic effort to chase ethnic Georgians from their homes, a tribunal might rule them crimes against humanity. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is said to be examining the case, although he’s launched no formal investigation. Russia, as the de facto occupying power in South Ossetia at the time, had a responsibility to maintain order and prevent such crimes from taking place. Instead, in many cases Human Rights Watch found, they abetted them.

After war comes accounting. The Georgian government used indiscriminate and disproportionate force in its attacks on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, firing Soviet-era GRAD rockets in districts where civilians were still cowering in basements. It also used cluster munitions, a weapon that 96 nations have signed a treaty to ban. The Georgian media have no access to victims of Georgian bombing, and television does not report news unfavorable to the Georgian government anyway. Local non-governmental organizations evince more independence, but the population who suffered under Georgian bombardment are locked behind a new, de facto border that Russian troops patrol.

That makes it the responsibility of Georgia’s international partners, particularly the governments of Europe and the United States, to insist that Georgia provide a full accounting for how it fought the war. Who gave the command to attack Tskhinvali with GRAD rockets, and what did they know about the presence of civilians in the city at the time? Failing to take appropriate care to protect civilians in war is a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime that requires prosecution.

Such an accounting will be difficult for President Sakaashvili to undertake because the fact is, he lost the war. His enthusiastic and hawkish backers in Washington may have made him feel stronger than he really was. He told me he was on the phone with his military commanders ten times a day during those tense days in August, which is understandable. But if he was ordering them to rain death down on the South Ossetian capital, then it will be awkward for any investigation to follow the trail all the way to the commander who’s most responsible.

Investigating war crimes in Georgia runs counter to the “plucky little” narrative that has so dominated international coverage of the war. But the willingness to openly examine its own record will do more to secure Georgia’s future than NATO membership. The United States and the Europeans are unlikely to go to war with Russia over Georgia. But they must continue to defend, for audiences in Georgia and Russia as well as at home, what democratic values really stand for, and for the basic principle that serious crimes cannot go unaddressed.

Laura Bush on Human Rights? Oh, please

On Wednesday, December 10, Laura Bush will address the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sigh. Mrs. Bush may have made occasional, anodyne comments about human rights, but she has certainly demonstrated no significant leadership in this domain over the course of her husband's eight years in office -- eight of the most damaging years to American human rights policy in the postwar period. What was CFR thinking? Since one First Lady helped draft the UDHR, let's invite another one to talk about it? But Laura Bush ain't no Eleanor Roosevelt.

The lack of a serious speaker on this important topic, and on this important day, suggests a real flaw in the Council's own analysis of the role human rights plays in international affairs today. Why not organize an event about how non-governmental organizations just helped bring into being the most significant arms control treaty in a decade -- the ban on cluster munitions being signed in Oslo this week? Several foreign ministers and senior ambassadors have publicly credited the human rights movement for generating the critical momentum, the expertise, and the intellectual leadership behind this new piece of international law. That's one of the most interesting transformations in US foreign policy in the last 60 years, thanks in part to the vibrancy of the ideas enunciated in the Universal Declaration itself -- foreign policy is no longer the exclusive preserve of men in governments. Or their wives, for chrissakes.