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America's inhuman rights record

May 24, 2004 15:14 IST
By Arvind Lavakare

After the recent revelation of the horrors and humiliation inflicted by US soldiers on Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the American nation has lost whatever pretension it may have had for presenting to the world its state department's annual human rights report that includes everyone else but the US.

And if the US, the arrogant nation that it is, persists in compiling that report, every thinking media outfit must henceforth dump it into the waste paper basket.

The fact of the matter is that the Abu Ghraib episode is not the first of the miserable US track record on human rights. Below is a chronological summary of that record:

There's no need at all for its state department to give lessons on democracy and social justice to free India that, barring the aberration of the 1975 Emergency, has had a pluralist, liberal and humane constitutional mechanism that is unmatched in the rest of the world.

We have our failings, yes, but we don't need sermons from those who have the blood of slaves on their hands.

Arvind Lavakare

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