This Is the Best Chance Yet to Stop the US War on Yemen. Where Are the Major Human Rights Orgs?

By Sarah Lazare, In These Times

08 March 18

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are declining to take a formal position against the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen.

uman Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the most powerful human rights organizations in the world, are declining to endorse a new political push to end U.S. participation in the catastrophic Saudi-led war on Yemen.

The groups are taking no position on the bill, S.J.Res.54, even as it gains political momentum and a groundswell of grassroots backing from About Face: Veterans Against the War, Just Foreign Policy, United for Peace and Justice, Oxfam America, Indivisible and other organizations.

Announced on February 28 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the bill invokes the 1973 War Powers Resolution to force the Senate to hold a vote on withdrawing the U.S. military from the unauthorized war. While the legislation carves out an exception for forces “engaged in operations directed at al Qaeda or associated forces,” advocates say it nonetheless presents the best chance yet to withdraw U.S. support from a devastating intervention.

For almost three years, the U.S. military has provided arms, intelligence and refueling support for a Saudi-led bombing campaign that has targeted Yemen’s hospitals, weddings, schools and residential areas—killing thousands of civilians. A Saudi-led naval blockade—abetted by U.S. vessels—has cut off vital food and medical shipments, wreaking havoc on the country’s medical system and unleashing a famine and cholera outbreak.

Yet, Robyn Shepherd, media relations manager for Amnesty International USA, tells In These Times that the organization is not weighing in on whether this war should continue because, as a matter of policy, the organization does not take stances on wars. “[W]e don’t take a position on whether or not a state should go to war/take action in the first place,” she explains over email. “We just say IF that’s a thing you want to do, that you comply with international laws and take all necessary care to avoid civilian casualties.”

Andrea Prasow, Deputy Washington Director for Human Rights Watch, tells In These Times, “We don’t take a position on the legality of armed conflicts,” explaining that the group only comments on “the legality of actions conducted in an armed conflict.” However, Prasow says, “there have been extremely rare occasions where we call for humanitarian intervention.” She was unable to immediately identify any specific instances.

The groups are declining to officially support the new legislative effort, even after documenting, in harrowing detail, the U.S.-backed coalition’s brutal attacks on Yemeni civilians, including the cluster bombing of residential areas and lethal targeting of factories and farms. In light of these atrocities, the groups have called for a halt to arms shipments—with Amnesty supporting an embargo—as well as an end to human rights violations and investigations into attacks on civilians. But their demands fall short of calling for an end to the military intervention that is ultimately driving these abuses.

While the organizations’ policy not to weigh in on whether or not wars should be waged may be technically consistent, both groups have effectively thrown their weight behind the U.S. foreign policy status quo at critical junctures.

Neither organization took a formal position opposing the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In December 2002, Human Rights Watch wrote a policy paper stating, “While Human Rights Watch has long advocated the prosecution of Saddam Hussein and others for crimes against the Iraqi people and others, it takes no position on the advisability or legitimacy of the use of force against Iraq or the goal of removing Saddam Hussein.”

But in March 2011, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, published a piece on the organization’s website praising NATO for “authorizing military force to protect civilians from Muammar al-Qaddafi's wrath.” And in February 2011, as NATO was preparing to intervene in Libya, Amnesty International called on the UN Security Council to take steps toward referring al-Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court—a move that was widely understood to be a precursor to his ouster.

Both organizations would later go on to document the African slave markets that spread across Libya following the NATO intervention—without acknowledging their organizations’ roles in building political support for the bombing campaign that paved the way for this horrific development.

For several years, Roth has taken to social media and the Human Rights Watch website to strongly insinuate—but not outright say—that he supports a No Fly Zone in Syria, which is backed by a wing of the Washington establishment and would amount to an act of war escalation.

Shireen Al-Adeimi, who is organizing independently to build support for the Sanders and Lee bill, tells In These Times that it is morally unacceptable for leading human rights groups to refuse to take a position on wars, arguing that the new legislation presents the best opportunity to curb U.S. support for the intervention since the narrow failure of a June 2017 legislative effort to stop arming the Saudi-led assault.

“I'm really surprised to hear these groups declined,” says Al-Adeimi, who grew up in Yemen and now lives in Cambridge. “Since the beginning, they sent their investigators to Yemen, and we’ve seen powerful footage come out of Yemen. They’ve focused on war and intervention and the effect of bombs from the U.S. and U.K. Now that there's a real opportunity to end intervention via this bill, it's surprising they aren't taking a position.”

Prasow argues, “By not taking a position on the legality of the overall conflict, we believe our work, which is neutral, will also be seen as neutral by all parties of the conflict.”

Shepherd points out that—despite not taking a position—Amnesty International is doing behind-the-scenes work related to the new bill, including participating in Senate briefings to ensure that lawmakers are aware of the human rights violations that the United States has perpetrated so far.

She says Amnesty International’s position is that the United States should not support the coalition as long as human rights violations continue, and that “Congress should investigate any U.S. role in contributing to the crisis either indirectly—through the funding of the Saudi coalition, or directly—through the use of unlawful killings through drone strikes.” However, Shepherd notes, “That’s different than saying there should or should not be no military intervention whatsoever, and we can weigh in on how military actions are conducted once they’re carried out.”

Yet, Al-Adeimi says this rhetorical positioning “misses the major point. You have a country bombing another sovereign country, and it has no right to do so. You can’t pick and choose which violations you're going to amplify without getting at the root cause.”

“We don't need more documentation for the sake of documentation,” Al-Adeimi continues. “What people who are starving and dying every day need is an end to the war—real action. Look, you documented. Now what?”

Feminists Have Slowly Shifted Power. There's No Going Back

By Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK

08 March 18

The #TimesUp and #MeToo movements are a revolution that could not have taken place without decades of quiet, painstaking groundwork

his International Women’s Day comes five months after the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long campaign of misogynist punishments of women first broke, and with them more things broke. Excuses broke. Silence was broken. The respectable appearance of a lot of institutions broke. You could say a dam broke, and a wall of women’s stories came spilling forth – which has happened before, but never the way that this round has. This time around, women didn’t just tell the stories of being attacked and abused; they named names, and abusers and attackers lost jobs and reputations and businesses and careers. They named names, and it mattered; people listened; their testimony had consequences. Because there’s a big difference between being able to say something and having it heard and respected. Consequences are often the difference.

Something had shifted. What’s often overlooked is that it had shifted beforehand so that this could happen. Something invisible had made it possible for these highly visible upheavals and transformations. People often position revolution and incrementalism as opposites, but if a revolution is something that changes things suddenly, incrementalism often lays the groundwork that makes it possible. Something happens suddenly, and that’s mistaken for something happening out of the blue. But out of the blue usually means out of the things that most people were not paying attention to, out of the slow work done by somebody or many somebodies out of the limelight for months or years or decades.

Same-sex marriage arrived suddenly in the US when the supreme court legalised it nationwide, except that many states had already legalised it, and that came about as the result of the valiant work of countless non-straight people and their allies, making visible that not everyone is straight, making it important that everyone get rights, making queer people themselves believe they deserved and could win those rights. And it happened because the test case in California went before what appeared to be a conservative judge – federal judge Vaughn Walker, appointed by George Herbert Walker Bush – who had been in the closet himself at the time of his appointment, but was gay, and whose own attitudes toward his orientation must have evolved as the culture around him evolved. He found in favour of marriage equality and set up the case to be clear and thorough when it reached the supreme court. When judges rule on what seems self-evident common sense – be it Brown versus Board of Education or marriage equality – it often seems that way because of slow incremental changes in societal norms and beliefs. The judge gets the public finale, but the shift comes from the cumulative effect of tiny gestures and shifts.

This #TimesUp/#MeToo moment is no different; it is a revolt for which we have been preparing for decades, or perhaps it’s the point at which a long, slow, mostly quiet process suddenly became fast and loud. Part of the work was done over the past five years, more of it over the past 50. We have had a tremendous upheaval over the past few years – at the end of 2014, I wrote in these pages: “I have been waiting all my life for what this year has brought.” What this wave brought is recognition that each act of gender violence is part of an epidemic. It’s brought a (partial) end to treating these acts as isolated incidents, as the victim’s fault, as the result of mental illness or other aberrations. It’s meant a more widespread willingness to recognise that such violence is extraordinarily common and has an enormous impact, and arises from values, privileges and attitudes built into the culture.

It’s a shift that’s often happened before, for other rights issues, as something long tolerated is finally recognised as intolerable, which means that the people for whom it was not a problem finally recognise the suffering of those for whom it was. This shift from tolerated to intolerable is often the result of a power shift in who decides, or a shift in what stories dominate, or in whose story gets told, or believed. It’s a subtle shift in who matters that precedes dramatic change.

In this case, by 2012, a new generation of young women was not going to be intimidated by either shame or bureaucracy from talking about campus rape and, more than that, organising against it. Social media gave women a capacity to form a sort of Greek chorus when a story about gender violence erupted. We burned down a lot of the excuses that sought to diminish the impact of gender violence, as we apparently have at last with gun violence in the US. We are still working on getting some slow learners to recognise that workplace harassment is not a “few bad apples” problem; that removing some particularly egregious abusers from the scenes of their abuse doesn’t resolve a problem that arises from deeply held beliefs about who has the right to do what and who should just put up with it.

But even the “we” has changed and I believe that that is central to why so much else has changed. Who determines what stories get told, who gets believed, whose words have weight, who’s in charge has changed. (Black Lives Matter was another movement to shift what is visible, whose version is heard, who matters.) We have not lost the proponents of the old worldview, in which men’s lives matter more and their words have more credibility, but we have gained people who don’t operate by those rules. Feminists have slowly, steadily gained power – and by feminists I mean everyone of whatever gender who thinks first that women deserve full equality and second that systematic misogyny remains a grave problem.

And that’s where we can look to the long, slow work of feminism to put women in positions of power, in concert with the related work to change the racial makeup of who holds power. Who decided what stories mattered? Journalist Sharon Waxman says that when she was at the New York Times she tried to tell the truth about Weinstein in 2004, only to be dismissed by her male editor, who didn’t understand why that aspect of the story mattered. We know that Ronan Farrow started his own investigation of Weinstein under the auspices of NBC, which declined to pursue it (some suspected because it shed too much light on their in-house super-harasser, Today Show co-host Matt Lauer), so he took his story to the New Yorker. Farrow is, of course, not a woman; the shift is not only women in positions of power but anyone who believes that women deserve equality in access to power, credibility and justice. We need to continue putting people in charge of the courts, the media, the laws, the economy, the schools, who have understanding and empathy for those who are not white, not straight, not rich or otherwise advantaged, not native-born, not male. Who believe in equal justice and equal value.

This insurrectionary moment is already subsiding, but things will not be what they were. A friend recently told me about a major media outlet where women report that after some harassers were fired, people are feeling more confident, inspired and creative. We have had too many stories about men who don’t feel comfortable because things are changing, rather than women who feel more comfortable than they ever have before, for the same reason.

We are going to return to a phase in which change happens slowly and subtly enough that it is invisible to most people, though not to the people who take the long view and those who drive the change or who benefit from one small change in their home or workplace or relationship. And then the slow changes will reach a point at which there will be another rupture.