Libyan Officials Threaten to Use ‘Human Shields’

 

The warning came a day after Britain’s top general was quoted as saying that NATO would have to broaden its bombing campaign to include infrastructure targets in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from “clinging to power.”

Barely 36 hours after The Sunday Telegraph in London published its interview with Gen. Sir David Richards, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, foreign reporters in Tripoli were summoned to a news conference at which Libyan telecommunication officials announced that they would deploy human shields.

The use of human shields was a major feature of Iraq’s response to Western threats of military force after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Hussein had Western businessmen taken to oil installations and other potential targets around Baghdad, but most were released under diplomatic pressure before the brief war that ousted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991.

The most explicit warning that human shields could be used in Libya came from Mohammed Almaremi, the chief of one of Libya’s two cellphone companies, both controlled by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and, until the rebel uprising, his expected political heir.

Mr. Almaremi said that 20,000 employees of Libyana, one of the companies, would disperse to telecommunications sites along with 20,000 members of their families, to remain there as long as the bombing continued.

“We will be human shields to face any aggression,” he said.

Mohammed ben Ayad, head of the Libyan telecommunications authority, said NATO attacks had already destroyed large parts of the country’s telecommunications network, disrupting hospitals, schools and other civilian enterprises.

Mr. Ayad said the network, one of the most advanced in the Arab world, had already suffered more than $1 billion in damage from NATO raids. In a PowerPoint display, he pinpointed areas that had taken the heaviest hits, including several in and near Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, on the Mediterranean coast.

“From now on, employees and their families will act as human armor to protect these locations,” one slide said in English.

Some of the anger that Qaddafi loyalists have directed at the West since NATO began its airstrikes in March has drawn on a belief that Colonel Qaddafi made major efforts to prove himself a friend of the West in the past decade. He abandoned Libya’s programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and opened the country to a rush of Western investment in oil, telecommunications and other sectors.

That turning toward the West came after the Libyan leader saw how quickly the American-led invasion force toppled Mr. Hussein in 2003. But now, with the United States, Britain, France and other NATO countries backing Libya’s rebels and demanding that Colonel Qaddafi quit, officials say the leader feels that his turn to the West has been rewarded by Western betrayal.

The threat to use human shields comes after a week of some of the heaviest airstrikes of the campaign. One attack was aimed at an underground command complex in Colonel Qaddafi’s compound in south-central Tripoli, with a volley of bombs aimed at the warren of tunnels and bunkers. Colonel Qaddafi surfaced a day later with an audio message broadcast on Libyan state television defying NATO and saying that he was “in a place where you can’t get me.”

Shortly before dusk on Monday, a new round of airstrikes hit the compound, but Libyan officials, often keen to take reporters to bombing sites, gave no details of what had been struck, or of any casualties.

Along with public statements of outrage about the airstrikes, there have been growing signs that they are wearing down the government’s ability to fight the war. With no air defenses, it has resorted to a propaganda campaign aimed at establishing that NATO has killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed or damaged civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, libraries, homes and guesthouses.

The campaign has faltered, with the government’s tours of the sites of airstrikes in Tripoli failing to show convincingly that there have been any significant numbers of civilian casualties. That failure has fed a growing sense of frustration among officials, who have seemed determined to convey that NATO is engaged, not in a campaign to degrade the Qaddafi government’s fighting ability, but in willful brutality against ordinary Libyans.

 

U.S. Envoy Sees ‘Backsliding’ Of Human Rights in China

BEIJING — The chief United States representative to human rights discussions with China offered a cheerless portrait of those talks after their conclusion on Thursday, saying the United States was worried by “a serious backsliding” of freedoms in China and at loggerheads with Beijing officials over many aspects of the issue.

“Our disagreements are profound,” the envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Michael H. Posner, said at a news conference at the United States Embassy here in Beijing, even as he expressed optimism that China’s rights situation would improve over time.

In the two days of talks this week, however, Mr. Posner indicated that Chinese officials offered few if any concrete responses to American queries about the conditions of the human rights and legal activists who have been seized or imprisoned by Chinese authorities. And he said that the talks, while “respectful in tone,” were colored with new seriousness on both sides by the perception that disagreements between the nations had widened.

“I don’t think anybody stood up and said, ‘Oh yeah, things have gotten worse,’ except me,” he said. But, he added, “there’s no question that the atmosphere is different, because the facts are different.”

Since the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October, Chinese authorities have detained, imprisoned or harassed hundreds of critics, lawyers, bloggers, writers and other gadflies deemed a threat to the state’s security. The pace of detentions and harassment accelerated markedly this spring after pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East prompted an anonymous online campaign for a “jasmine revolution” in China.

In the discussions, Mr. Posner said, American officials raised special concerns about a growing crackdown on lawyers who defend human rights advocates and dissidents. They included Teng Biao, a lawyer and professor who has not been heard from since he vanished in February; Chen Guangcheng, a blind self-taught lawyer and civil rights activist who has been under house arrest since September; and Gao Zhisheng, an internationally recognized rights lawyer who vanished last April shortly after having been freed from a previous confinement.

The officials also asked the Chinese for information on Ai Weiwei, the artist and social critic who has not been seen since he was seized this month, and Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, an artist and poet who has been held incommunicado in the couple’s apartment since her husband was named a Nobel laureate. And they asked about Xue Feng, an American geologist sentenced to eight years in prison last July on charges of stealing state secrets after he bought a database on China’s oil industry.

Mr. Posner did not detail the Chinese response to each case, but his description of the government’s answer to queries about Mr. Ai appeared to be the norm. “On that case,” he said, “we certainly did not get an answer that satisfies. There was no sense, no sense of comfort from the response or the language.”

The annual human rights dialogue, a staple of the diplomatic relationship, has long been irritating to the Chinese. This year’s meeting, held shortly after the State Department issued its annual evaluation of human rights in China and other nations, was preceded by broadsides in the Chinese news media recounting flaws in the United States’ human rights record. At the Foreign Ministry’s briefing on Thursday, a spokesman, Hong Lei, accused Washington of using human rights “as a pretext for meddling in China’s internal affairs.”

Mr. Posner rejected that on Thursday, and he said that while the United States’ record was imperfect, the government allowed critics of all stripes to attack its flaws and crusade for change without fear of retaliation. “Those people are not at risk,” he said. “We allow these things, and frankly, they make us stronger.”

 

Nigerian Human Rights Group: At Least 500 Killed in Post-Election Violence

。 Scott Stearns | Dakar ?April 24, 2011

A soldier searches a car in Kaduna, Nigeria, April 21, 2011

A Nigerian human rights group announced Sunday that at least 500 people were killed in violence that followed last week's election of President Goodluck Jonathan. Relief officials say more than 65,000 people have been displaced.

The Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria says most of the deaths occurred in northern states where Muslim supporters of defeated presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari attacked churches, homes and police stations, sparking reprisal attacks by Christians.

Nigerian authorities are refusing to release details of the violence, fearing that it could lead to more rioting ahead of gubernatorial elections this week.

Nigeria's Emergency Management Agency says Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi, Adamawa, Niger and Katsina states were the hardest hit.? Director General Mohammed Sani Sidi says his agency is helping more than 21,000 displaced civilians in Kano and nearly 10,000 displaced civilians in Zaria as well as people at more than 100 camps for displaced civilians in Kaduna.

"The intervention is continuing.? We are not going to stop until we get this relief material across to all the victims that have been affected.? We are doing everything possible in collaboration with the Nigerian army who have been very, very active and supportive in providing us with security cover," he said.

Sidi says the distribution of relief supplies has been slowed by the difficulty of finding drivers who are willing to enter areas where there has been violence.

In addition to displaced civilians in the north, Sidi says there are people who are originally from the north and are now living in the south who have taken refugee with security forces following the violence. "Most especially in Anambra and Imo, we have people from northern origin who, out of panic, on their own have decided to move to either military barracks or police barracks for safety for fear of reprisal attacks.? Those people also we have been able to reach out to them and provide some kind of relief material to them," he said.

With more than 65,000 civilians displaced nationwide, Sidi says the only real answer is finishing this series of elections with peaceful state-wide voting to restore order. "What we are trying to achieve is to make sure that peace is maintained and restored in all these places so that people can go back to their various houses and the continue with their normal lives," he said.

Twenty-six of Nigeria's 36 states are scheduled to hold state-wide elections on Tuesday.? Voting in Kaduna and Bauchi has been delayed until Thursday.? Electoral commission chief Attahiru Jega says he hopes that will allow for the "further cooling of tempers and for the security situation in those states to continue to improve."

 

Tension Precedes U.S.-China Meeting on Human Rights

According to a statement issued by the State Department, the two sides are to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Beijing for what has become a regular springtime meeting on human rights.

But the statement was highly unusual for several reasons, not least because Washington made the announcement for a meeting to be held in Beijing — which runs counter to diplomatic protocol — and because it was made just days before the event.

Indeed, the Chinese government confirmed the meeting late Friday only after repeated calls to the Foreign Ministry. A day earlier, a ministry spokesman said details still had to be “discussed and arranged.”

“Objectively speaking, the announcement is being made at the last minute,” said Joshua Rosenzweig of the Dui Hua Foundation, a rights group in Hong Kong. “It’s also interesting that the U.S. is making it unilaterally and that they’re using this language.”

The American announcement bluntly says that the talks will focus on “the recent negative trend of forced disappearances, extralegal detentions and arrests and convictions” — highly unusual in such a statement and most likely reflecting Washington’s growing frustration with the human rights situation in China.

China is in the midst of a crackdown on dissent in which dozens of lawyers and activists have been rounded up. Some have been detained for brief questioning; others have disappeared for months without a trace.

The most prominent is Ai Weiwei, an artist and critic detained this month when trying to board a flight to Hong Kong. The immediate catalyst for the crackdown seems to have been a call by dissidents for Chinese to emulate the “jasmine” revolutions of North Africa. Even though few people heeded the calls to protest, the government has reacted strongly.

Western human rights analysts say the clampdown shows the limits of government-to-government human rights dialogue. Besides the United States, other countries and the European Union have similar sessions, which usually take place in private once a year. Typically, Western countries bring up problems or lists of detained dissidents, and China responds by saying that it is a country ruled by laws, and that those people violated the law.

“Having the meeting now that so many human rights activists are missing puts the spotlight on the fact that these kinds of meetings are toothless,” said Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “It’s a talk shop more than anything else.”