Dangerous priorities

With Darfur high on her agenda, Amnesty International's Secretary-General Irene Khan was in Egypt this week. She spoke to Amira Howeidy about double standards and the horrors of the war on terror

---

Khan photo: Sherif Sonbol

Five years ago, the London-based Amnesty International human rights organisation appointed Irene Khan as its first Muslim, Asian and female secretary-general. This landmark change at the helm of the world's largest human rights organisation coincided with the 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, the subsequent ramifications of which Amnesty's first "Muslim" secretary-general had to carefully steer through. These included the dangerous repercussions of the "war on terror", as well as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rise of Islamophobia worldwide.

Khan's first visit to Egypt as secretary-general coincided with the fifth anniversary of 9/11. But as she sat on the sofa of her room at the Nile Hilton at the end of her hectic one-day stop, Khan seemed to have just one issue in mind: the two- year old conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan.

It was for this issue that Khan met both Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary-general, and Egypt's assistant minister for foreign affairs. Khan was urging Arab governments and friends of Sudan -- like Egypt -- to become more involved in resolving what she described as the "massive human rights problem" in Darfur. "The Arab League needs, as a friend of Sudan, to be able to sit down with Sudan and with the UN and the African Union, to come up with an arrangement which will help resolve the human rights problem on the ground," she told Al-Ahram Weekly.

Prior to her visit, Amnesty had pursued its campaign for sending UN peace- keeping forces to Darfur as per UN Security Council Resolution 1706, which the Sudanese government vehemently opposes. While Egypt opposes sending UN peace-keeping forces into Darfur against the Sudanese government's will, independent observers have been more critical of the entire principle of foreign troops in north Sudan, which they say poses a threat to Egypt's national security at its southern borders, and close to Nile water sources.

"I tell those people to look at the situation in Lebanon where the Arab League and Arab countries have actually supported the UN playing a role in southern Lebanon to solve a problem," Khan said. With strong Arab calls for a greater UN role in Lebanon and the Palestinian occupied territories, she asked, why is a UN presence in Darfur viewed as an obstructive rather than constructive role? This, she argued, leads to "allegations of double standards. I think the dilemma here is: it's not enough to say we don't want the UN, it's too dangerous. I can understand their concerns about that, but then what are the alternatives?"

Accusations of double standards, however, go both ways. While the Darfur crisis is only two years old, and foreign military presence risks further partitioning an already divided Sudan, many observers view the international community's fixation on Darfur -- and indifference towards the 56-year-old Palestinian problem -- as indicative of double standards as well. So why is Amnesty playing along?

Failure to tackle Darfur, said Khan, "feeds those constituencies in the international community who want to say, first let's solve the human rights problem in Darfur, and until then we can't look at anything else... It's not a question of balancing one or the other. The occupied territories have slipped off the international political agenda, and there needs to be much more focus, but then there are also killings in Darfur."

Khan said she would like to visit Gaza and the West Bank sometime this year, to "raise awareness about the gravity of the situation. The situation in Iraq, Lebanon and Darfur have pushed the occupied territories off the front pages; pushed it off the agenda of the international community."

There is very little faith in the international community after nothing was done to stop Israel from killing over a thousand civilians and destroying the infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza; Amnesty's position on the war -- equating both sides, Hizbullah and Israel, as violators of international humanitarian law (IHL) -- has generated question marks regarding the organisation's politics. Critics here said it was unfair to evaluate what happened in Lebanon and Palestine based on principles of the IHL, because one side -- the Arabs -- have been the continuous targets of Israeli violations of IHL and a series of UN resolutions over the past 50 years.

"This is why," said Khan, "it's very important to have a comprehensive international independent enquiry. It's through that process that you can deal with all the concerns... We have called on both sides to respect IHL. The Geneva Conventions don't only apply to one party in war; it applies to everyone who is party to the conflict. Reciprocity is not the issue."

Does that mean that, ideally, Hizbullah should have done nothing while Israel destroyed Lebanon? "Ideally is not to focus on Hizbullah," she said, "but on the international community that remained silent. Even the Arab League didn't have its first meeting until early August. That is where the responsibility has to rest." In her opinion, "the UN secretary-general has the authority to open a commission of enquiry; there should be one, and there should be a report, and there should be recommendations."

But were there just too many "shoulds" preventing that from ever happening? "I think it will happen if governments don't sit on their butts, and move and do things," Khan snapped.

Her meeting in Cairo with Egypt's interior minister was the first between an Amnesty secretary- general and the top official in Egypt's security apparatus. Although she approached the topic rather cautiously, using the most diplomatic of language, Khan finally described the situation here as "very serious. We have long had concerns about secret detentions, disappearances, arbitrary detention of political prisoners, torture, and ill-treatment issues of trial by the emergency security court, and so on." But she saw a "window of opportunity" in government plans to replace the 25-year-old emergency law with counter-terrorism laws. "Now, whether that will lead to something depends on the political will of the government of Egypt."

And yet anti-terrorism laws and the global "war on terror" haunt Amnesty five years after 9/11. "We have seen an increase in xenophobia; we have seen an increase in Islamophobia, an increase in discrimination against Asians and Arabs. We have seen real fear; we have seen the politics of fear being generated at a time when we need to engage with these communities to be able to address the issue of radicalisation of youth."

Being a Muslim, she said, allowed her to understand the pressure that Muslim communities were feeling. But, she adds, "I think we need to be very conscious of the overall rise in attacks against communities because of their identity. In Europe, we've actually seen a rise in anti- Semitism, much more significantly now since the World War II. We've seen the growth of fundamentalist Christian thinking in the US. We've seen the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and so on."

People today, Khan said, are less secure than they were before; "the security strategy is clearly not working. And in many cases, it's not working because governments' counter-terrorism theory seems to be that you have to sacrifice your liberty in order to get your security. And sacrificing your liberty, meanwhile, is actually leading to more insecurity. And I think we're living in a much more dangerous world than we were five years ago."

What is really scary, she said, is that there have been no attempts, on the fifth anniversary of 9/ 11, by governments like the US that have a counter-terrorism strategy in place, to actually -- and honestly -- review whether or not it's been effective.