'You can look back at this time and you can be very, very proud of what you have done',

Tony Bliar, flying into Basra to tell the troops they can be proud. (Dec. 2005)

'It's not that they're welcoming us because they're welcoming foreign troops, They're welcoming the fact of their liberation.'

Tony Bliar in April 2003

'The UK government has played a key role in developing the oil law, alongside the US government. There are serious questions regarding the appropriateness of the UK, as an occupation power, participating in policy discussions on the future of Iraq’s natural resources. While attempts have been made to describe the British role as “advice”, it is highly unlikely that Iraqi officials would treat it as neutral advice, to be taken or left, given the UK’s military position'

See this post for some of the details of the oil law, still being forced down the the Iraqi's throats. British citizens can - and should - urge their MP to sign EDM 1180, which 'calls on the Government to disclose to the House all representations it has made in relation to the oil law'. It appears they have been many.

Here are some of the more brazen attempts by the oil companies and the British government to bludgeon the Iraqis into submission:

• Passage of the law was made a condition of relief of the foreign debts accumulated by the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, during his wars, and through his personal enrichment. In November 2004, the Paris Club of wealthy creditor nations agreed to conditionally cancel 80% of Iraq’s debts to them in three stages: 30% immediately, 30% when Iraq entered into an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme, and 20% following a satisfactory review by the IMF after three years of the programme. Iraq entered an agreement with the IMF in December 2005. The conditions included the passage of a law opening Iraqi oil to foreign investment, by the end of 2006.
• Future Iraqi oil policy was further developed under the Coalition Provisional Authority. During that time, former executives of multinational oil companies were appointed as senior oil advisers. Two of these advisers were paid by the UK taxpayer, and reported to the UK authorities in Iraq.
• Six oil companies collectively appointed lobbyists, the International Tax & Investment Centre (ITIC), to push for Iraq to offer long-term oil production contracts known as production sharing agreements. ITIC was advised by officials of the FCO and HM Treasury on their strategy for influencing Iraqi decision-makers.
• ITIC’s primary lobbying document, entitled Petroleum and Iraq’s Future, was sent to the Iraqi Minister of Finance in late 2004 by the British Ambassador to Iraq. According to ITIC, he “formally” submitted it to the Minister, implying UK endorsement of its contents...
• Since the completion of the first draft of the oil law in July 2006, British officials in both Whitehall and Baghdad have actively worked on the law. It was first seen by British officials in July, eight months before it was seen by members of the Iraqi parliament, who first saw it in March 2007.

(emphasis mine)

In fact, if you subscribe to the human rights faith, only Nice people do Nasty things. There are no non-Nice people.

That is not meant (for once) to be a dig at the HRE (or the human rights) community. Really. If you believe in human rights, then it only makes sense if every individual, whatever they do or have done, is still fundamentally human; still has fundamentally human emotions, reactions, desires, regrets, intentions, hopes, fears, and little bursts of irritation, admiration, inspiration and frustration; still tries to do good for his or her immediate circle; and possibly tries to Do Good in a wider sense as well.

'Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.' So said someone who, in trying to do what he thought was right, did one of the nastiest things imaginable, with horrendous and irreparable consequences. And actually – I even believe he had persuaded himself it was the right thing to do. Certainly a lot of people I know (and respect) thought it was the 'right' thing to do at the time.

But where does all that get us? If everyone is Nice, and everyone tries to do what they think is right - and I think I believe that as well – and yet we end up with crimes against humanity, not to speak of lesser crimes: how should we react? Do we just shrug our shoulders and reckon that what will be, will be? Do we aim to be tolerant and see the humanity in the doers of Nastiness? Do we draw the line anywhere – and if so, where?

The safe answer is to say that we condemn anything - but nothing else - that violates human rights. And the fashionable answer is that we don't condemn the person, merely the act: we aim to understand the person, to give him or her a second chance, to be tolerant.

In theory, that is a noble answer. Maybe - in theory it is the 'right' answer. But there are problems:

1. 'Human rights' is a relatively arbitrary line (which anyway shifts). It is OK for pragmatic purposes to use this line (and essential in matters of international politics) but it does not advance the ethical argument. It merely gives us a line in the sand which we can use to hide behind (excuse the mixed metaphors). Don't we want to be braver than that, and think about where we would like it to be? Someone has 'decided' where it is at the moment, after all. We shall look pretty silly when it changes.

2. Where the human rights line is at the moment is almost bound to be inadequate - too far back - because it has been agreed primarily by pragmatist governments at a level, and in such a way, that it is far enough removed from normal practice as to be relatively harmless. To see that, you only have to look at the state of the world today and the things that still fall on the 'right' side of the human rights line (for the purposes of governments, anyway) - homelessness, lack of health care, control orders.

3. More to the point for the purposes of this question: where the human rights line is at the moment is inadequate as a guide to human behaviour because it is not intended to be a guide to human behaviour. It is intended to be a guide for governmental behaviour. We use it as a 'guide' for human behaviour because the ethical system that underlies it is sympathetic (and noble) to us. But the ethical system is both richer and stricter (I think) than the legal system it gave birth to. It must be.

1 - 3 above are about where the line should be, where it is now and what it is intended for. The hardest question - and the question HRE needs to address - is what we do in the realm that human rights is not intended for: in the realm of personal attitudes. Human rights are about behaviour, which may be a consequence of 'nasty' (or nice) attitudes. The realm that is troubling is precisely the realm of those attitudes.

2 more things, just to note:

1. I remember being surprised when I first started working in Russia that human rights activists were often at each others' throats. It seemed that if there was ever a group of people who should work together, who should be able to swallow (and tolerate) their differences - it ought to be human rights activists. I wondered - and wonder - whether HR activists (not only Russian ones) are actually some of the least 'tolerant' people; and I wonder if that is a coincidence. It is hard to be tolerant when you spend your working and resting hours looking at mutilated bodies or photographs of them, reading or listening to endless accounts of yet more brutal, sadistic, and inhumane acts.

2. I wonder if intolerance in HR activists is not only a fairly natural reaction to the world they tend to see, but also a necessary quality for the work they try to do. Tolerating torture doesn't get you very far in trying to put an end to it.

And then I wonder... whether the human rights and the human rights education communities need to be, should be so very far apart that what is valued in one community is despised in the other.

Oppose Tony Blair as Middle East Envoy

To: Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

We call on you, as President of the European Commission, to resist pressures from outside Europe to appoint Tony Blair as special envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the "Quartet". We have no confidence that Mr Blair will act impartially and we want to see a person appointed to this role who understands the rights and needs of everyone in the Middle East and who will work for a just and lasting peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign it here.

Just worth a try

Sometimes this world just seems too hard to understand. Too endlessly unjust. Too systematically, unceasingly unjust. Too endlessly rewarding of injustice.

Too hard to bear.

What would one want? For the unjust to suffer what they wreak on others? For Blair to have his children's limbs ripped off in front of his eyes? For Bush to watch his wife give birth to a deformed foetus, irradiated from single ghoulish eye to outsized toes with uranium shot from foreign tanks?

Of course not. But to see Blair given the first standing ovation Parliament has ever given a Prime Minister; to see the sycophantic press pack fall over themselves to write his ‘legacy’, his place in history next to Churchill and Lord Nelson; and to see him - this is what grates - in the role of ‘peacemaker’ in the Middle East, after all he has done to make war and wreak havoc there and all he has done to prolong and intensify the suffering of those who were only trying to lead their lives until he came along – that really grates.

And somehow, it grates even more, the thought that he might succeed. That through his bullying, duplicitous ways, backed up by US dollars or the threat of their withdrawal, backed up by the press pack who want only to shine in his glow, and backed up by British-made weapons hanging over the heads of anyone who dares to defy his line of ‘peace’ – he may just push through a compromise.

Why does that grate most of all? It shouldn’t: surely peace at any price is better than no peace. If a pushing, shoving, duplicitous and ambitious warmonger is the best way to ensure it – and I even wonder if it may be – then why complain.

The trouble is that then one wonders what on earth it’s really all about. Why on earth promote these gentle, caring, harm-free values if they only get you stamped on. Or shot up with uranium from a foreign tank.