China slams US human rights record
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| Mon, 03-01-2004 - 1:11pm |
BEIJING (AFP) - China has published a scathing attack on the human rights situation in the United States, retaliating for a similar report issued by Washington last week that accused Beijing of backsliding on its rights record.
Only days after slamming the US report as "interference in its internal affairs," the State Council, China's cabinet, countered with its own criticism.
Allegations of US atrocities in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan led the way.
"In recent years, the United States has practiced unilateralism on the international stage, wantonly engaged in military adventures, violently invaded the sovereignty of other nations and left the mark of rights violations everywhere," the 2003 US Rights Violation Record said.
"Since the United States initiated the war on Iraq, 16,000 Iraqis have been killed including 10,000 citizens," the report said.
With a 400 billion dollar defense budget, US defense spending is bigger than military expenditures of the rest of the world combined, while the United States is the world's biggest seller of arms.
It was responsible for more than 48 percent of all conventional weapons sales to the developing world in 2002, the report said.
Rights violations were not only restricted to the 364,000 soldiers Washington has based in more than 130 countries, the report said, but also occurred at home where the United States remains one of the world's most violent places to live.
"The United States leads the world in gun ownership, guns are everywhere and crimes involving guns are on the rise," it said.
Of the 15,980 murders committed in the United States in 2001, 63 percent involved guns, while 56 percent, or 16,586 people, who committed suicide in the US in 2000 used guns, it said.
The report also soundly blasted the US Patriot Act which has empowered the government to violate the rights and freedom of ordinary citizens, most notably American minorities, "in the name of national security and fighting terrorism," it said.
Despite routinely refusing to accept criticisms on rights abuses in China from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the Chinese report liberally used documentation by such groups on US rights violations.
"According to a Human Rights Watch report in September 2003, one fifth of men in US prisons faced violent and dangerous sexual encounters, while one in 10 were raped," the report said.
The report also cited Amnesty for evidence that police brutality in US jails led to the deaths of at least three prisoners in 2003.
The report further slammed US democratic politics as the politics of the rich and cited the 113 million dollars spent by George W. Bush's election campaign in 2000 and the projected 200 million dollars for this year's presidential elections.
It also blasted the US social welfare network and cited the growing numbers of poor and homeless people.
"The richest one percent of the US have wealth that is equal to the 40 percent of the poorest people in the country," it said.
"While the income of the richest one percent was only 7.5 percent of all income earned in 1979, it was 15.5 percent in 2000."
On Thursday China expressed "indignation" at the US report which alleged a worsening human rights situation in China in 2003.
The annual State Department report accused China's communist leaders of letting their human rights record slip as arrests of democracy activists and extrajudicial killings continued apace.
Also targeted were labour protesters, defense lawyers, journalists, house church members and "others seeking to take advantage of the space created by reforms", according to the US report.
The report also said a "harsh repression" of the Falungong spiritual group continued, that China's record in Tibet remained poor and that the government had used the war on terror to justify a crackdown against Muslim Uighurs.

Can't argue with #'s.
This is the same country that the US is exporting companies/jobs to.
OT Did you watch 60 Mins last night about the schools in Korea & their
No, I chose to watch an interview with George Soros on C-SPAN. The Korean attitude doesn't suprise me--Asians are very competitive. We are so ignorant of anti-American feelings abroad.
You can when the #'s are wrong. 10,000 civilians?? Gimme a break.
Recently I read the #'s are around 20,000 Iraqis that's civilian & military.
War may have killed 10,000 civilians, researchers say.
Friday June 13, 2003.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,976392,00.html
At least 5,000 civilians may have been killed during the invasion of Iraq, an independent research group has claimed. As more evidence is collated, it says, the figure could reach 10,000.
Iraq Body Count (IBC), a volunteer group of British and US academics and researchers, compiled statistics on civilian casualties from media reports and estimated that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians died in the conflict.
Its latest report compares those figures with 14 other counts, most of them taken in Iraq, which, it says, bear out its findings.
Researchers from several groups have visited hospitals and mortuaries in Iraq and interviewed relatives of the dead; some are conducting surveys in the main cities.
Three completed studies suggest that between 1,700 and 2,356 civilians died in the battle for Baghdad alone.
John Sloboda, professor of psychology at Keele University and an IBC report author, said the studies in Iraq backed up his group's figures. "One of the things we have been criticised for is quoting journalists who are quoting other people. But what we are now finding is that whenever the teams go into Iraq and do a detailed check of the data we had through the press, not only is our data accurate but often on the low side.
"The totality is now producing an unassailable sense that there were a hell of a lot of civilian deaths in Iraq."
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said he had not seen anything to substantiate the report's figures. "During the conflict we took great pains to minimise casualties among civilians. We targeted military. So it is very difficult for us to give any guidance or credence to a set of figures that suggest there was x number of civilian casualties."
IBC's total includes a figure of at least 3,240 civilian deaths published this week by the Associated Press news agency, which was based on a survey of 60 Iraqi hospitals from March 20 to April 20, when the fighting was declining. But many other bodies were either buried quickly in line with Islamic custom or lost under rubble.
Prof Sloboda said there was nothing in principle to stop a total count being made using forensic science methods similar to those used to calculate the death toll from the September 11 attack: it was a question of political will and resources.
He said even an incomplete record of civilian deaths was worth compiling, to assist in paying reparations and in assessing the claim before the war that there would be few civilian casualties.
Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a US defence department spokesman, said the Pentagon had not counted civilian deaths because its efforts had been focused on defeating enemy forces rather than aiming at civilians.
He said that under international law the US was not liable to pay compensation for "injuries or damage occurring during lawful combat operations".
The Iraqi authorities estimated that 2,278 civilians died in the 1991 Gulf war.
I didn't post the article for the accuracy of numbers, but just to point out that our actions can be view differently from ours. If we become focused on our POV, it could lead to another cold war in the future. Globalization is a trend that requires a perspective greater than nationalism.
I think that's the point. We count the number of Americans lost and mourn, but forget the body count of Iraqis. Whatever the number it is horrendous, and we complain about how brutal Saddam was.
I realize that the numbers were just a part of the article.