Cuban refugees are considered political and are accepted immediately into the US, while Haitian refugees are termed economic and are refused entry.

If you look at the records, many Haitians who are refused asylum in the US because they aren't considered to be political refugees are found a few days later hacked to pieces in the streets of Haiti.

There were a couple of interesting leaks from the INS [the Immigration and Naturalization Service]. One was from an INS officer who'd been working in our embassy in Port-au-Prince. In an interview with Dennis Bernstein of KPFA [a listener-supported radio station in Berkeley CA], he described in detail how they weren't even making the most perfunctory efforts to check the credentials of people who were applying for political asylum.

At about the same time, a document was leaked from the US interests section in Havana (which reviews applications for asylum in the US) in which they complain that they can't find genuine political asylum cases. The applicants they get can't really claim any serious persecution. At most they claim various kinds of harassment, which aren't enough to qualify them. So -- there are the two cases, side by side.

I should mention that the US Justice Department has just made a slight change in US law which makes our violation of international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even more grotesque. Now Haitian refugees who, by some miracle, reach US territorial waters can be shipped back. That's never been allowed before. I doubt that many other countries allow that.

Nicaragua

You recall the uproar in the 1980s about how the Sandinistas were abusing the Miskito Indians on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. president Reagan, in his inimitable, understated style, said it was "a campaign of virtual genocide." UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was a bit more restrained; she called it the "most massive human rights violation in Central America." What's happening now with the Miskitos?

Reagan and Kirkpatrick were talking about an incident in which, according to Americas Watch, several dozen Miskitos were killed and a lot of people were forcefully moved in a rather ugly way in the course of the contra war. The US terrorist forces were moving into the area and this was the Sandinista's reaction.

It was certainly an atrocity, but it's not even visible compared to the ones Jeane Kirkpatrick was celebrating in the neighboring countries at the time --and in Nicaragua, where the overwhelming mass of the atrocities were committed by the so-called "freedom fighters."

What's happening to the Miskitos now? When I was in Nicaragua in October 1993, church sources -- the Christian Evangelical Church, primarily, which works in the Atlantic coast -- were reporting that 100,000 Miskitos were starving to death as a result of the policies we were imposing on Nicaragua. Not a word about it in the media here. (More recently, it did get some slight reporting.)

People here are worrying about the fact that one typical consequence of US victories in the Third World is that the countries where we win immediately become big centers for drug flow. There are good reasons for that -- it's part of the market system we impose on them.

Nicaragua has become a major drug transshipment center. A lot of the drugs go through the Atlantic coast, now that Nicaragua's whole governmental system has collapsed. Drug transhipment areas usually breed major drug epidemics, and there's one among the Miskitos, primarily among the men who dive for lobsters and other shellfish.

Both in Nicaragua and Honduras, these Miskito Indian divers are compelled by economic circumstances to do very deep diving without equipment. Their brains get smashed and they quickly die. In order to try to maintain their work rate, the divers stuff themselves with cocaine. It helps them bear the pain.

There's concern about drugs here, so that story got into the press. But of course nobody cares much about the working conditions. After all, it's a standard free-market technique. You've got plenty of superfluous people, so you make them work under horrendous conditions; when they die, you just bring in others.

China

Let's talk about human rights in one of our major trading partners --China.

During the Asia Pacific summit in Seattle [in November, 1993], Clinton announced that we'd be sending more high-tech equipment to China. This was in violation of a ban that was imposed to punish China for its involvement in nuclear and missile proliferation. The executive branch decided to "reinterpret" the ban, so we could send China nuclear generators, sophisticated satellites and supercomputers.

Right in the midst of that summit, a little tiny report appeared in the papers. In booming Kwangdong province, the economic miracle of China, 81 women were burned to death because they were locked into a factory. A couple of weeks later, 60 workers were killed in a Hong Kong-owned factory. China's Labor Ministry reported that 11,000 workers had been killed in industrial accidents just in the first eight months of 1993 -- twice as many as in the preceding year.

These sort of practices never enter the human rights debate, but there's been a big hullabaloo about the use of prison labor -- front-page stories in the Times. What's the difference? Very simple. Because prison labor is state enterprise, it doesn't contribute to private profit. In fact, it undermines private profit, because it competes with private industry. But locking women into factories where they burn to death contributes to private profit.

So prison labor is a human rights violation, but there's no right not to be burned to death. We have to maximize profit. From that principle, everything follows.

Russia

Radio listener: I'd like to ask about US support for Yeltsin vs. democracy in Russia.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 908