The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIBYA AND IRAQ” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S8221-S8222 on July 15, 2004.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIBYA AND IRAQ
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I bring to my colleagues' attention a thoughtful op-ed article published in the July 13 Washington Post by Mona Eltahawy, a London-based Arab journalist.
The article raises an important question about a double standard on human rights between Libya and Iraq. The United States overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime because he was a brutal dictator, but we embrace Libya's Qadhafi despite the fact that he is a brutal dictator.
About the double standard Ms. Eltahawy wrote: ``In the absence of weapons of mass destruction, and with images of Hussein on trial for war crimes, they have been pushing the ``removal of a brutal dictator'' excuse for the invasion. How do they square this with their astonishing rush to embrace another ruthless dictator? Qadhafi's behavior of late has been uncomfortably close to brutal.''
Libya remains, according to the CIA World Factbook, ``in fact, a military dictatorship'' under Colonel Qadhafi. His government
``continued to commit numerous, serious abuses,'' including arbitrary arrest and detention, and restrictions of ``freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and religion,'' according to the February 2004 State Department Human Rights Report. Violence and discrimination against women are serious problems as well.
A recent visit by Amnesty International to Libya found that ``a pattern of human rights violations continues, often justified under the new rhetoric of the `war on terror.' '' Amnesty International's findings include ``laws which criminalize the peaceful exercise of freedom of expression and association, leading to the imprisonment of prisoners of conscience; prolonged detention without access to the outside world, which facilitates torture; and unfair trials, in particular before the people's court which tries political cases. Torture and ill-treatment continues to be widely reported, its main use being to extract `confessions.' ''
The Qadhafi regime also continues to intrude in the affairs of other African nations, despite Secretary Powell's call in February 2004 that Libya ``cease to be destabilizing, cease to fund despotic regimes, and cease to cause trouble.'' According to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns, Libya was involved as recently as February in sowing instability throughout Africa. ``There have been problems . . . in Zimbabwe. There have been problems . . . in Liberia and elsewhere,'' he said. ``We continue to have concerns'' in the Central African Republic, he also said.
In the Central African Republic, Libyan troops were reportedly directly involved in 2001 in halting an army revolt against the president. A year later, Libya and the Republic agreed on a 99- year treaty giving Libya the right to exploit the oil, uranium and other resources of the republic.
In Zimbabwe, Libya has often assisted President Robert Mugabe, including supplies of urgently needed oil. In Liberia, Libya has been a major provider of arms and supplies to Charles Taylor.
The Libyan Government is responsible for the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Some 270 innocent people lost their lives in the bombing, including 189 Americans. Until September 11, the Pan Am bombing killed more American civilians than any other terrorist atrocity in our history. Officially, the Libyan government has accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials in the atrocity, but Qadhafi denied his nation's involvement in the bombing, according to a CNN report on December 23, 2004 summarizing an interview by its State Department correspondent Andrea Koppel with him.
In taking steps to resume relations, the administration presumably believes that Libya has made a firm decision to abandon terrorism and become a responsible member of the international community. However, Qadhafi persists in the type of rhetoric he has displayed in the past. In Brussels, he recently threatened to return to the ``days of explosive belts'' if provoked by Western ``evil.'' We've recently seen allegations of a purported assassination plot hatched by Qadhafi against the crown prince of Saudi Arabia following a dispute at the Arab League summit in March.
President Bush has spoken frequently about democracy and human rights. In November 2003, at the National Endowment for Democracy's 20th anniversary celebration, he said that ``sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe--because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.''
It is surprising that the administration would so quickly strengthen relations with a dictator who is responsible for the mass murder of innocent Americans, opposes democracy, persecutes his own people, and continues to cause instability in Africa.
Mona Eltahawy's important op-ed article raises many of these questions, and I ask unanimous consent that it may be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Warming Up to a Dictator
(By Mona Eltahawy)
When the United States ended a 24-year chill and restored diplomatic relations with Libya on June 28, the first person I thought of was Baha Omary Kikhia. I interviewed her in Cairo more than 10 years ago during one of her many trips to the region to find out what happened to her husband, former Libyan foreign minister turned dissident Mansour Kikhia.
His case has too easily been lost in the lexicon of bloodier and larger crimes committed by the Libyans, such as the 1988 Pan Am bombing, which killed 270 people. But Moammar Gaddafi has been brutal to Libyans, too, and his various eccentricities should not blind us to the police state he has presided over since he assumed power in a September 1969 coup.
He may travel with Kalashnikov-armed female bodyguards, he may pitch tents at home and abroad for talks with officials, and he may pen such ``classics'' as the short story collection ``The Village, the Village, the Earth, the Earth and the Suicide of the Astronaut,'' but none of these quirks should distract us from his abysmal human rights record. Arbitrary arrests, a muzzled press, a ban on political parties and the squandering of Libya's oil wealth have never been laughing matters for Libyans.
And we should not forget Mansour Kikhia, who disappeared in Cairo in December 1993 while attending a meeting of an Arab human rights organization he had helped found. Kikhia had defected to the United States in 1980 and was a U.S. resident who was four months away from receiving citizenship when he went to Egypt. A four-year CIA investigation found in 1997 that Egyptian agents turned over Kikhia--who had asked for Egyptian security protection while in Cairo--to agents of Gaddafi's regime, who spirited the dissident to Libya, where he was executed and buried in the Libyan desert.
My interview with his wife, a U.S. citizen, left me painfully saddened for her and her family and particularly distressed that someone could just disappear in the city that I called home. I could not forget her during an assignment in Tripoli in 1996, when a Libyan government minder shadowed me at every turn and an official with the ministry of information asked me why we were so critical of Libya in the copy we filed at the Reuters news agency. And I will not forget her now, or the many others who have suffered from Gaddafi's regime, just because he is able to say the things he knows the Americans and British want to hear.
Gaddafi, claiming he had seen the light, accepted responsibility last year for the Pan Am bombing, agreeing to pay compensation to the victims' families (I wonder whether he has paid compensation to Baha Omary Kikhia) and to dismantle his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. If that last bit sounds familiar, it should. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair want us to think that Gaddafi's conversion on the road to Washington and London was due to the fear that he would end up in the same jail cell as Saddam Hussein. (Gaddafi's daughter Aicha, a law professor, has joined Hussein's defense team.)
With no weapons on mass destruction to justify a war against a country that never threatened them, Bush and Blair are determined to hold on to their theory that the ``war on terrorism'' and the invasion of Iraq would bring rogue states in line. But it's an old argument they're making. In the absence of weapons of mass destruction, and with images of Hussein on trial for war crimes, they have been pushing the
``removal of a brutal dictator'' excuse for the invasion of Iraq. How do they square this with their astonishing rush to embrace another ruthless dictator?
Gaddafi's behavior of late has been uncomfortably close to brutal. In May--a mere two months after a historical visit to Tripoli by Blair, who was accompanied by executives of British businesses eager to cash in--a Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad for deliberately infecting some 400 children with HIV. The medics had always protested their innocence and said they had been tortured by the police, with daily beatings, sexual assault and electric shocks.
Expert witnesses called in for their defense included one of the team that discovered the AIDS virus, who said this was an epidemic caused by poor hygiene at the hospital, not by any international conspiracy. Isn't Bulgaria a member of the
``Coalition of the Willing''?
Here's the topper. As Libya was engaged in secret negotiations to resume relations with the United States and Britain, Gaddafi tore into Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at an emergency Arab League summit in March 2003, assailing the kingdom's close relationship with the United States. When the Saudi de facto leader insulted Gaddafi back and walked out, the Libyan leader apparently hatched a plot to assassinate him. Isn't that dangerously close to state-sponsored terrorism?
Speaking at Whitehall Palace in London last year, President Bush acknowledged that the United States and Britain had not always been on the right side of democracy when it came to the Middle East. ``Your nation and mine in the past have been willing to make a bargain to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability,'' Bush said, addressing Blair.
It's not difficult to imagine that just such a bargain, along with some good old-fashioned military and oil contracts thrown in, is the driving force behind the resumption of ties with Libya.
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