US President George W. Bush in his typical style criticized China for its human rights violations in the presence of President Hu Jintao and other senior Chinese officials. He did this while opening the new US Embassy buildings in Beijing early this month. Bush was there as a guest invited by China to participate in the opening ceremony of the 29th Olympics.
The US president, like every other world leader, has the right to criticize human rights violations in any part of the world but, given what he is doing in his own country, Bush was sure to invite the charge of hypocrisy. Indeed this is what he did.
It is no secret that one out of every 100 adults in the US was behind bars in 2007. According to a report published by the Pew Research Center, the number of prisoners in the US rose by 25,000 last year bringing the total to 2.3 million. The report also hinted at the social discrimination being practiced at legal institutions. Members of minority communities, particularly Afro-Americans, accounted for a disproportionately large number of the prison population. While one out of every 15 was an Afro-American, the whites were only one out of 106. The Hispanic prisoners were one in 36.
One wonders how could President Bush play the role of a champion of human rights in China while he legalizes the worst imaginable methods of torture at US detention centers and authorizes the continuation of torture camps in Guantanamo Bay and other clandestine centers elsewhere. No rights organization or study group has the precise number of innocent women and children being bombed in cold blood in Iraq and Afghanistan by US pilots. The policy seems to be that if you can’t kill those who resist your occupation, kill as many civilians as possible and call them insurgents or terrorists.
The US military authorities in Iraq admitted recently that they set free more than 10,000 Iraqi prisoners in 2008 against 9,000 last year. Some 21,000, including children and women, still remained in various prisons in Iraq. They have been chained in cages less than the size of a telephone booth.
The scant regard for human rights at the higher levels of US administration was evident when a presidential adviser recently declared that no prisoner in the Guantanamo gulag would be released even if a US court found him to be innocent.
Ever since Beijing was declared as the venue for the 29th Olympiad, the US media launched a prolonged and protracted campaign against China accusing it of systematically violating human rights and suppressing internal protests. The rest of the Western press followed suit and went on predicting that Beijing would host the worst Olympics in its history. But every fair-minded observer has commended this year’s event as the best-organized Olympics after the Games were launched in 1896.
Olympics have been a symbol of human unity and cooperation above political, ideological, religious and racial differences. This is something Bush does not know or won’t admit.
