CYBERNOTES
50 Years Ago...
As things now stand, the leaders of an underdeveloped
country will normally deal with 16, 18 and often more
than 20 different agencies coming at them purveying various kinds of assistance. … We have tended to close our eyes to the administrative burden which we place on the governments of the less
developed countries by proliferating the independent agencies we create
to ‘help’ them.
— Harlan Cleveland, dean of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship
and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and co-editor of “The Art of
Overseasmanship,” from testimony before the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations excerpted in the FSJ, May 1959.
tice of “segregating human rights issues into a dead-end ‘dialogue of the
deaf’” while cooperating on other, preferred matters. Amnesty International
called on Clinton to “repair the damage” caused by her statement (www.
latimes.com/news/nationworld/
world/asia/la-fg-clinton-china
21-2009feb21,0, 542695.story).
Human rights diplomacy will likely
be put to the test elsewhere. The
Obama administration has moved to
end the four-year-old hiatus in relations
with Syria. A series of congressional
delegations visited the country recently, and Syrian Ambassador Imad
Moustapha met with top diplomats at
the State Department on Feb. 26 — a
day after the department’s report containing “withering criticism” of Syria’s
human rights record came out (www.
washingtonpost.com).
The report received brickbats from
the usual quarters. But although
China’s official response to the report
was “caustic,” the International Herald
Tribune’s Michael Wines observes, it
was not significantly different from the
reaction to last year’s report, and Xin-hua’s statement repeated, sometimes
word for word, its 2008 response to the
report ( www.iht.com/articles/2009/
02/26/asia/ china.php).
Sharp responses from Bolivia and
Venezuela were not a surprise. The
Venezuelan Foreign Ministry declared
the report to be “false, interventionist
and of malicious intent,” adding that it
lacks legitimacy because the U.S. government itself has a “dismal human”
rights record ( www.venezuelanaly
sis.com/news/4251).
More significant, however, as Mark
Weisbrot explains in a guardian.co.uk
post on March 11, the center-left government of Chile joined the usual suspects this year in questioning the moral
authority of the U.S. government’s
judging other countries’ human rights
practices ( www.guardian.co.uk/com
mentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/1
1/state-department-human-rights).
On Feb. 26, Chilean government
spokesman Francisco Vidal acknowledged deteriorating prison conditions
in Chile, but added sharply: “We do
not have a Guantanamo (prison camp).
Democracy does not accept a Guantanamo” ( www.valparaisotimes.cl/
content/view/480/388/). ■
— Susan Brady Maitra,
Senior Editor
