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Putting lipstick on a pig,
Zenawi style
Alemayehu G. Mariam I February 1,
2010
 Last
week, there was a great deal of teeth-gnashing, knuckle-cracking and
gut-wrenching by Ethiopia’s dictators over Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) 2010
report. The dictators belched out much sound and fury that signified nothing.
Their fury had to do with HRW’s conclusion that “Ethiopia is on a deteriorating
human rights trajectory as parliamentary elections approach in 2010.” In blunt
and unequivocal language, HRW whipsawed the dictators with the facts:
Broad patterns of government repression
have prevented the emergence of organized opposition in most of the country. In
December 2008, the government re-imprisoned opposition leader Birtukan Midekssa
for life after she made remarks that allegedly violated the terms of an earlier
pardon. In 2009 the government passed two pieces of legislation that codify
some of the worst aspects of the slide towards deeper repression and political
intolerance. A civil society law passed in January is one of the most
restrictive of its kind, and its provisions will make most independent
human rights work impossible. A new counterterrorism law passed in July
permits the government and security forces to prosecute political protesters
and non-violent expressions of dissent as acts of terrorism. Ordinary
citizens who criticize government policies or officials frequently face arrest
on trumped-up accusations of belonging to illegal “anti-peace” groups,
including armed opposition movements. Officials sometimes bring criminal
cases in a manner that appears to selectively target government critics…
The dictators bellyached about HRW’s
“unfairness” and bitterly complained about its malicious and willful blindness
to the great strides and democratic achievements they have made over the past
several years. “How could HRW overlook our prized Code of Conduct for Political
Parties negotiated by 65 political parties?” they lamented. How could they
disregard a “Code” that is so “impressive, transparent, free, fair, peaceful,
democratic, legitimate and acceptable to the voters”? To add insult to injury,
they even overlooked the appointment “by parliamentary acclamation” of a new
human rights commissioner. No matter. All HRW cares about is carping about the
“civil society and anti-terrorist laws” and fabricating stories about human
rights abuses in the Somali Regional State. Those cynical and contemptible
rascals have “no interest in, and no time for, any promising developments.”
After all, they are just stooges and mouthpieces of the evil Ethiopian
“dissident” Diaspora whose sole aim is to discredit the “democratic
achievements” of the dictatorship.
When candidate Barack Obama ran for the
U.S. presidency, he used a folksy idiom to describe John McCain’s pretensions as
a new force of change in Washington. “That's not change [McCain is talking
about]. That's just calling the same thing something different. But you know,
you can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a
piece of paper and call it change; it's still going to stink.”
Well, you can jazz up a bogus election
in a one-man, one-party dictatorship with a “Code of Conduct”, but to all the
world it is still a bogus election under a one-man, one-party dictatorship. You
can appoint lackeys to issue a whitewash human rights report on “allegations” of
abuse in the Ogaden and call it an objective inquiry commission report, but it
is still a whitewash. You can appoint a fox to guard the chicken coop and call
it safeguarding human rights, but the sly fox will not spare the chickens.
You can put lipstick on dictatorship to make it look like a pretty democracy,
but at the end of the day, it is still an ugly dictatorship!
Ethiopia’s dictators think we are all
damned fools. They want us to believe that a pig with lipstick is actually a
swan floating on a placid lake, or a butterfly fluttering in the rose garden or
even a lamb frolicking in the meadows. They think lipstick will make everything
look pretty. Put some lipstick on hyperinflation and you have one of the
“fastest developing economies in the world”. Put lipstick on power outages, and
the grids come alive with megawattage. Slap a little lipstick on famine, and
voila! Ethiopians are suffering from a slight case of “severe malnutrition”.
Adorn your atrocious human rights record by appointing a “human rights” chief,
and lo and behold, grievous government wrongs are transformed magically into
robust human rights protections. Slam your opposition in jail, smother the
independent press and criminalize civil society while applying dainty lipstick
to a mannequin of democracy. The point is, “You can wrap an old fish in a piece
of paper and call it ‘democracy’ but after 20 years it stinks to high heaven!”
Of course, all the sound and fury is a
calculated effort at misdirection. Instead of talking about the factual
allegations in the HRW report, the dictators want to make Human Rights Watch the
ISSUE. But HRW is one human rights organization that needs no lipstick to do its
work, or to cover it up. HRW’s investigators do not work on a commission. They
don’t get paid a dime for digging up mass graves in distant lands and conduct
complex forensic studies. They make no money walking the scorching deserts for
days and thumping the under brush in the tropical forests to interview remotely
located civilian victims of war crimes and human rights abuse. HRW does not work
for profit. They do their exceedingly difficult and dangerous work to prevent
human rights abuse and to hold states, armed groups and others accountable for
human rights violations. They receive their financial support largely from
individual donations and gifts. HRW never takes sides in any conflict. To do
their work, they do not make their own rules but use established international
human rights conventions, treaties, domestic laws and resolutions of world
bodies.
Vile accusations against HRW are not
new. All governments and groups stung by HRW’s factual reports squeal like a
stuck pig. They try to discredit HRW’s reports as methodologically flawed,
unsubstantiated, speculative, slanted, unfair, biased and so on. They try to
distract and misdirect public attention from the evidence of their criminality
in the reports by attacking HRW as an antagonistic and politically vindictive
organization. In the past few years, HRW has been vilified by those on opposite
ends of the same conflict. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have called HRW a “Zionist”
organization. The Israeli government has accused HRW of being “obsessed with
Israel” and dubbed them “supporters of terrorism.” But HRW is an organization
with the highest level of integrity. They will not back down from holding any
government accountable, including the U.S. In its latest report, HRW praised
President Obama for abolishing secret CIA prisons and banning all use of
torture, but they clobbered him ferociously for “adopting many of the Bush
administration's most misguided policies” including the policy of “indefinite
detention without charge” of “enemy combatants”.
There is no secret to HRW’s
investigative work. They conduct extensive interviews of alleged victims of
human rights abuse. They work with confidential informants in victims’
communities and gather evidence from others sources within a given country. They
talk to officials and top political leaders and analyze government reports and
any other relevant documentation and data. They conduct field investigations and
their experts conduct forensic studies, perform ballistics tests and examine
medical and autopsy reports. They always seek official permission to conduct
their investigations, but most governments generally refuse or ignore the
requests to enter their countries for such purposes. HRW has a rigorous system
of checking and cross-checking facts. Before publication, HRW always presents
its findings to the relevant governments for comment and feedback, and to
incorporate changes and make corrections where appropriate. Often, regimes and
governments remain silent and provide no feedback on the reports before
publication. Once the reports are made public, governments sensitive to
criticism unleash their spin-doctors to moan and groan about HRW in an attempt
to capture media attention and deflect public scrutiny from the evidence in the
reports that incriminate them.
“No one loves the messenger who brings
bad news.” But attacking the messenger does not make a lie out of the message,
just as putting lipstick on a pig does not make the pig a swan (perhaps a
vulture).
Support Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and other human rights organizations!
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Alemayehu G. Mariam, is a professor of
political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and an
attorney based in Los Angeles. He writes a regular blog on The
Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/ and his commentaries
appear regularly on Pambazuka News and New American Media.
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