That is GEORGE SOROS, main mover and funder behind the self styled “Human Rights Watch.” The US government is on a bipartisan campaign to label Russia a brutal imperialist country, blaming it for war crimes by Russia’s coming to the defense of its own national defense interests on its Southern border. And heading up its propaganda campaign is the so-called US based and funded human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, which has been bombarding the Western press with accusations against Russia that the country has supposedly been violating international ‘norms of civilized warfare’ in the recent fighting with Georgia.
These HRW accusations are that Russia has been using cluster bombs in the fighting and the one and only source for these claims seems to be Human Rights Watch. Why only they then? And why is this the Human Rights Watch’s focus and not the placing of US nuclear weapons systems in Poland to threaten Russia with a nuclear first strike? Is this just the first instance of such imbalance in commentaries and campaigns by Human Rights Watch, or is this an endemic style of theirs?
The short answer is that this is far from being the first time that Human Rights Watch has been on the front lines of propaganda warfare for the US government, as has been documented well in the past by many. Edward S. Herman for example, a co-thinker and coauthor with Noam Chomsky, wrote this about Human Rights Watch’s record in regard to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq….
‘But despite these and countless other constructive efforts (to avoid a war with Iraq), the organization has at critical times and in critical theaters thrown its support behind the U.S. government’s agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment. Since the early 1990s this tendency has been especially marked in the organization’s focus on and treatment of some of the major contests in which the U.S. government itself has been engaged—perhaps none more clearly than Iraq and the Balkans. Here, its deep bias is well-illustrated in a March 2002 op-ed by HRW’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, published in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Indict Saddam.”[7] The first thing to note about this commentary is its timing. It was published at a time when the United States and Britain were clearly planning an assault on Iraq with a “shock and awe” bombing campaign and ground invasion in violation of the UN Charter. But Roth doesn’t warn against launching an unprovoked war—though wars of aggression had been judged by the Nuremberg Tribunal to be the “supreme international crime” that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”[8] On the contrary, Roth’s focus was on Saddam’s crimes, and provided a valuable public relations gift to U.S. and British leaders, diverting attention from and putting an apologetic gloss on their prospective supreme international crime.’
This is part of a 35 page work tha Herman did in investigating Human Rights Watch’s connections with the US government and the entire publication is well worth reading. See Znet’s copy of Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party which was published back in February 2007.
Also of note is Michael Barker’s Hijacking Human Rights which like Herman’s much longer analysis, reviews the funding of Human Rights Watch and show how it is so well connected to the propaganda work they do for the US State Department and Pentagon. He focuses on the role of George Soros in creating today’s Human Rights Watch.
Both Barker and Herman (and his coauthors) study this funding of HRW and take it apart in detail and show its role in the structure of HRW’s work in pushing pro- US government propaganda to the press.
It is important for people to know more about Human Rights Watch because many people see ‘human rights’ or ‘united nations’ in a name and they think automatically that that is what these organizations are connected with serving. That is not always the case, no more so than that because the word ‘Christian’ is in a name automatically denotes that leaders of these groups have anything to do with true the ideals and beliefs of Christianity.
Unfortunately many liberals and radical types seem to be falling for it. Liberal web sites like Common Drreams and alternet are running these Human Rights Watch propaganda blasts as if they are somehow the real thing. With a record as bad as Human Rights Watch has with its continual connection of itself with paralleling US war drives, these Progressive folk really should be much more critical minded and less gullible than they are when it comes to reading the HRW material. Just follow the money trail…
My name is Theodore G. Karakostas and I am a writer with a special interest in the Greek Orthodox and other Christian populations living in Turkey and Turkish occupied Cyprus. I have been writing to Human Rights Watch for many years to inquire as to their lack of coverage of the Greek minority under Turkish rule, while they emphasize the large Muslim minority living in the Greek region of Western Thrace.
Some background is in order. There are today about 150,000 Muslims living in the Greek region of Thrace. The Turkish government has long insisted that they are being mistreated. The Muslim community has a large number of Mosques, in addition to the fact that their community receives affirmative action treatment to Greek Universities (which HRW admits) and is represented in the Greek Parliament.
In contrast, the Greeks of Constantinople (Istanbul) number less than 3,000. Earlier in the century there were over two million Greek Orthodox living throughout Asia Minor. At the signing of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923 there were 110,000 Greeks living in Turkey and 90,000 Muslims in Greece. As a result of decades of terror under Turkish rule which include harassment such as heavy taxation, deportations, government sponsored pogroms, and the discriminatory closing of the theological School run by the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate the Greek community is condemned to extinction.
In the occupied territories of Cyprus which Turkey brutally invaded in 1974, most Greeks have been ethnically cleansed. In 1996, two Greek Cypriot protesters were shot to death in cold blood. Between 1993 and 2007, there have been six attempts on the life of the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch by Turkish
extremists.
Human Rights Watch has not seen fit to take an interest in the plight of the Greek Christians in Turkey or Turkish occupied Cyprus. They have however taken an interest in the Muslims of Western Thrace. In 1998 and 1999, I was in correspondence with two individuals at Human Rights Watch who told me they did not have the resources to cover Cyprus or the Greek minority in Turkey. Neither of them told me they were both involved in the publication of a major report on the Muslims of Greece which was published in January 1999.
I have subsequently corresponded with several people at HRW asking them how much time and resources were spent documenting the Muslims of Thrace. Their responses were that it would be inappropriate to reveal this information! This is in my opinion an utterly bizarre response coming from a group ostensibly interested in human rights and which constantly calls on governments throughout the world to be more open.
My own experience with Human Rights Watch shows that it is a secretive organization with biases that when it has not completely ignored me, refused to answer any questions directly. The unequal coverage given toward minorities in Greece and Turkey indicates a clear cut case of bias on the part of Human Rights Watch.