[DEBATE] : (Fwd) SA in the UN: anti-Human Rights under guiseof anti-West

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On Nov 19, 2007 12:42 AM, Russell Grinker <grinker at mweb.co.za> wrote:
> In the context of regular use of 'human rights' issues as a pretext for
> western trampling all over national sovereignty rights, don't you think
> there's any problem with just going along with hypocritical western concerns
> for & resolutions on human rights? Wouldn't playing along with the West on
> this effectively mean joining in a broader 'Humanitarian Coalition of the
> Willing'?  If you want a good example of where this sort of unprincipled
> politics leads, just look at where it got the Kurds when they cooperated
> with the US against Saddam Husain because he was their mutual enemy.
>
> Should it not be a principle that we deal with our 'own' problems at home/in
> Africa and don't opportunistically try to use every second Western move as a
> lever in our local struggles?
>
> By the way, I notice that SA also gets slated by these people for not
> sufficiently sympathising with western concerns over Cuba's terrible human
> rights record.

The article complains of SA "helping to remove all United Nations
scrutiny of human rights abuses
in Belarus and Cuba -- the 'worst rights abusers in Europe and the
Americas'" in June.  Since when has Cuba become the "worst rights
abuser" in the Americas? ?? ???

Anyway, SA, like Brazil, India, and China, is not any old country in
the South.  It's a regional hegemon, and it is invited to become, and
sometimes acts like, a subordinate member of the G20 collective empire
(as Shawn Hattingh recently noted), though apparently still exercising
a residual NAM policy with regard to the empire's anticommunist policy
to Cuba and other instances like it.  SA's foreign policy requires
special scrutiny in this respect, but not from the POV of UN Watch!
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>