People in Glass Houses.

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis

Monday May 10, 2004 21:04

by Righteous Pragmatist

Arab leaders "outrage" at abuse of prisoners.

Arabs who express outrage over America's treatment of Iraqi prisoners should re-examine their own brutal tactics.

Revulsion at the revelations of prisoner abuse by American forces in Iraq has spread faster than hot sand in the dry desert wind. No one has expressed the outrage with more horror than the American people. No one, that is, except the leaders of the Arab world.

Both Americans and Arabs are fully justified in their disgust. Yet the reactions of some Arab leaders might qualify as humorous if the deeds of the jailers were not so sickening and their consequences so disastrous. Indeed, some of those expressing shock and horror at the very thought of prisoner mistreatment are governments whose use of torture is routine in countries where human rights organizations have repeatedly reported the torture of prisoners is "endemic" and "widespread."

Should the United States be held to a higher standard? You bet. This is one case where the double standard is justified because the United States entered Iraq on a mission deliberately hued with high moral goals.

And yet when dictatorships that have stayed in power for decades declare themselves shocked - shocked! - at the mere idea that a prisoner might be mistreated, there is little question that the outrage is little more than a hollow pantomime. The charade by these suddenly incensed regimes follows a familiar script: Find someone outside the regime to blame and turn the populations' attention away from the problems at home, thereby turning domestic rage away from the oppressive regime.

Throughout the Arab world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and Syria - countries where a call for democracy can land you in jail - government officials and regime-controlled newspapers have spoken of their deep disgust at what they have seen.
Amr Mousa, the secretary-general of the Arab League and former foreign minister of Egypt, declared his "shock and disgust" at the "shameful images" of the naked prisoners. Shock and disgust somehow eluded him during his many years of service to a dictatorship that tortures opponents of the regime, according to reports of major international human rights organizations. Some of the people subjected to detention and brutal beatings last year, as documented by Human Rights Watch and others, were opponents of the war in Iraq.
Perhaps it was the Iraqi victims' nakedness that, as we are repeatedly told, has brought so much consternation to the sensitivities of the Arab people. To be sure, there are cultural differences between the Arab world and the West: According to Human Rights Watch, for example, homosexual men have been entrapped, arrested and tortured by Egyptian security forces.

Syrian government newspapers also expressed horror at the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. This from a country with a decades-old dictatorship that has killed thousands upon thousands of its citizens and where, just three months ago, a local group reported that political prisoners in government custody suffer unspeakable treatment that often leads to serious injury or death.

At the United Nations, condemnation of the Iraqi prisoner abuses came from none other than the Arab-dominated government of Sudan, a genocidal regime that has made killing its own citizens state policy, slaughtering Christians in the South and aiding in massacres of non-Arab Muslims in the West.

Torture of prisoners is hardly shocking in many Arab countries, no matter what leaders with a newfound love for human rights now proclaim. In fact, the same governments that today so deeply feel the suffering of Iraqi prisoners found little to complain about in the grotesque abuses of Saddam Hussein's regime. The techniques that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in mass graves and kept torture chambers stained with human blood did not cause much consternation among Arab leaders.

We hold Western democracies to humanitarian and democratic principles, as we should. But regimes that use torture as a normal part of their efforts to keep their stranglehold in power, as do many in the Middle East, are highlighting their own violations by speaking out against the outrages at Abu Ghraib.

They should speak up, surely. And later, when the storm over Iraq quiets, they should examine their words as closely as their own people will.