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‘Dear US, let he who is without sin cast the first stone’


Published : 01 Oct 2021 08:47 PM | Updated : 03 Oct 2021 04:35 PM

As the world is still grappling with the colossal mess that the United States has left behind in Afghanistan, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of US House of Representatives has recently taken the time to hold a virtual briefing on alleged cases of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh. The discussions throughout the event lamented a ‘lack of accountability’ in Bangladesh’s security forces and the overly enthusiastic attendees also called for sanctions on Bangladesh and the elimination of Bangladesh’s elite forces from UN Peacekeeping Missions.

Throwing fabricated allegations at countries to keep them in line and obsequious to US authority is not a new strategy. Countries that are more inclined to practice independent policy choices (that do not necessarily conform to US and its allies' interests) often find themselves at the receiving end of such moral lessons. However, at the backdrop of the Afghanistan abyss, the whipping of Haitian migrants by US Border Patrol Agents and the warmongering AUKUS deal, the didactic tone of these ‘agents of morality’ has never sounded so hollow.

The US continues to impart its ‘moral lessons’ as its disastrous record of human rights violations grows bigger by the day. Throughout the Cold War, the US showed its near-perfect skills at overthrowing democratically elected governments. A Washington Post investigation into some of clandestine operations of the US between 1949 and 2000 found out that most of such operations were designed to overthrow democratically elected governments overseas. Two years after the then Iranian premier Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, in March 1953, Allen Welsh Dulles, the then Director of CIA, wrote a chilling memo to President Eisenhower, “…the elimination of Mossadegh by assassination or otherwise might precipitate decisive events". Five and a half months later, Mosaadegh found himself ousted in a coup and under house arrest. When Guatemalan president JacoboÁrbenz's land reform initiatives threatened the interests of US-based United Fruit Company, Arbenz was quickly ousted by a US-orchestrated coup. Patrice Lumumba of Congo in 1960 and Joao Goulart of Brazil in 1964 also met a tragic end as a result of US covert actions. The elimination of Salvador Allende, the democratic president of Chile was particularly brutal.

It is no secret that persistent, systematic, and large-scale violations of human rights have been plaguing the human rights scenarios in the US. From January 1 to September 4, 2021, there have been 30,134 deaths from gun violence in the US. Gun violence killed one child every two hours and 36 minutes in the US in 2019. All these happened while the gun lobby made the fat pockets of US policymakers even fatter. This is a direct threat to the most basic of all human rights- the right to life. The beauty of US democracy is apparently painted red with the blood of the fallen innocents.

The brutal death of George Floyd shows the world how deep racial discrimination and hatred runs in the US. The policy of over-incarceration targeting non-white races is as old as the modern US. Adults of African American origin are almost six times more likely to get incarcerated by the Police, compared to Caucasian adults. Such disparities have been termed as a ‘vestige of slavery and racial segregation by a UN Special Rapporteur. The way the US treats immigrants has also been a mess. This is the country that separated children from their parents and put them in cages as they crossed the border to seek asylum and avoid persecution in their country of origin. The overwhelming vilification of Muslims and other minority groups is not new.

How serious is the US about human rights? The fact that human rights are nowhere in the US priority list is evident in the Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban. Despite promoting itself as a savior of liberal values in the war-ravaged country, the US did not even care to insert women’s rights and other human rights agenda in the Agreement, an agreement that marked the beginning of the normalization and mainstreaming of these hardliners in global politics.

Throughout the War on Terror, the US ‘outsourced its dirty works’ to foreign countries in a bid to look good to the American people and the world. According to a report from the Cost of War project of Brown University, the U.S. spent an estimated $8 trillion on the global war on terror and has killed more than 900,000 people. Such a heavy toll on human lives and the economy did not eliminate terrorism, rather it produced more and more brutal terror outfits each year. It is time for the world to come to the inevitable realization that the self-proclaimed saviour and global police lack the legitimacy to lecture and lend a hand to world problems.

- Shaikh Shahrukh Farhan is a young policy thinker of Bangladesh