[News] No humanitarian case for Iraq war, says rights group

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No humanitarian case for Iraq war, says rights group

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=485143&host=3&dir=508



By Kim Sengupta




27 January 2004

The United States and Britain had no justification for invading Iraq either 
on the grounds of alleged threats from illicit weapons and terrorism, or as 
a humanitarian mission, an international civil rights group said yesterday.

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has left 
President George Bush and Tony Blair claiming that the invasion was on 
humanitarian grounds, said a hard-hitting annual report of Human Rights 
Watch. It said that the West had done nothing when Saddam massacred Kurds 
and Shias in the past, and there was no evidence of any continuing mass 
killings at the start of the war in March 2003.

The report claimed that the US and British occupation forces had "sidelined 
human rights... as a matter of secondary importance. The rule of law has 
not arrived and Iraq is still beset by the legacy of human rights abuses of 
the former government, as well as new ones that have emerged under the 
occupation." The reasons given for war by Mr Bush and Mr Blair - WMD and 
Saddam's alleged links with international terrorism - hadnot been proved, 
said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the organisation.

He pointed to recent statements by David Kay, the departing head of the 
Iraq Survey Group, that WMD were unlikey to be discovered, and said it was 
unlikely that the Hutton report into the death of David Kelly would say 
anything different. The document praised the American and British forces 
for striving to minimise civilian casualties during the air campaign, and 
also for being much more careful in the use of cluster bombs than in 
previous conflicts. It condemned the Iraqi resistance for indiscriminately 
bombing public areas.

The report maintained that it was "irrelevant" that the US had "unclean 
hands" in its support for Saddam in the past, or that there were other 
countries which suffered worse internal repression. Neither were good 
enough arguments against military intervention on proper humanitarian grounds.

However, Human Rights Watch said the US-British attack on Iraq failed to 
qualify on a number of grounds normally used as a test of justified 
humanitarian military action.

There were no mass killings going on; war was not the only option - legal, 
economic and political measures could have been taken; there was no 
evidence that humanitarian purpose was the main one for launching the 
invasion; the attack did not have the backing of the United Nations or any 
other multinational body, and the situation in the country has not got better.

Mr Roth said: "The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a 
humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair ... such 
interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing 
slaughter. They shouldn't be used to address atrocities that were ignored 
in the past.

"Humanitarianism, even understood broadly as a concern for the welfare of 
people, was at best a subsidiary motive for the invasion of Iraq."

He said: "Over time, the principal justifications originally given for the 
Iraq war lost much of their force. More than seven months after the 
declared end of major hostilities, weapons of mass destruction have not 
been found. No significant pre-war link between Saddam Hussein and 
international terrorism has been discovered. The difficulty of establishing 
stable institutions in Iraq is making the country an increasingly unlikely 
staging ground for promoting democracy in the Middle East."

Human Rights Watch criticises the US and Britain for not sending in more 
troops after the invasion. This, says the report, might have prevented the 
anarchy after the fall of Saddam's regime. Mr Roth said the Pentagon had 
acted as if it believed that the Iraqis would welcome the soldiers with 
open arms.

Human Rights Watch is a mainstream body with support across the political 
spectrum. It does not have a policy of opposing military action.


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