Does the Human Rights Watch Report’s Flaws Reflect Only Methodological Problems or Something Else…?

By: Haimanot Lakew, Boston , MA              11/28/08

            Initially, after reading the Human Rights Watch’s report Collective Punishment, released on June 11, 2008, regarding the alleged abuses of the Ethiopian government on the Ogaden region, as an Ethiopian, I was puzzled. How could such atrocities, to the point of being accused of near-genocide, be allowed to occur under the current political leadership of Ethiopia, especially by its defense forces, in light of its contribution to regional peacekeeping in a number of countries, including Burundi, Liberia, Sudan and its impeccable record of observing the rules of engagement in terms of human rights during the war against Eritrea? Immediately, I felt that the Ethiopian government should respond to this allegation, especially due to the gravity of the report. Plus, my concern was intensified by the fact that the Human Rights Watch is an organization that has tremendous weight throughout the international community; its name alone has remarkable significance and power in influencing policy-makers throughout the western world. I understood that the burden of moral and political accountability on the part of the Ethiopian government was heavy and would have to be responded to as quickly as possible.

            So, the very fact that the Ethiopian government took the initiative in responding with the carefully researched and written report, Flawed Methodology, Unsubstantiated Allegations: The Results of an Investigation by the Government of Ethiopia into Allegations by Human Rights Watch on Human Rights in the Somali Regional State, in November, 2008, was in my opinion, a positive first step. This report, by and large, focused on exposing what it felt to be the faulty methodology behind the Human Rights Watch investigation and subsequent report. Paramount among these perceived flaws, according to this report, was that the Human Rights Watch investigators hardly ever set foot on Ethiopian soil, meaning that there was a lack of field work, since most investigations were done over the phone from locations like Djibouti and Kenya , which led to dependence on hearsay. Perhaps due to this faulty research, many of the names, locations, and conditions, of places were incorrect, as were many of the testimonies that were used as hard fact within the report, to the point where most of these appeared to be mere fictions as opposed to legitimate accounts of abuse and torture. As a result, one begins to wonder how such a renowned organization like the Human Rights Watch can commit such serious errors in its research in monitoring human rights violations around the world. Appropriately enough, the Ethiopian government by its very nature, chose to hone in on the flawed research methods used by the Human Rights Watch, finally urging the organization to reconsider its processes for future investigations. However, as a member and citizen of this world community, shouldn’t I go further to assess, to inquire, even to the point of speculation? Why should such gross errors of professional judgment, as well as the profound lack of professional ethical behavior on the part of staff members of the Human Rights Watch, be tolerated within the organization, never mind in the parties that they accuse? While contemplating within this framework, I came up with three major reasons why such reporting is only to be expected from the Human Rights Watch as long as these underlying factors aren’t immediately discussed.

            The first of these reasons is that as an agency, and like most developmental agencies, human rights groups, and international news agencies, etc, there is, what I call, contempt towards the entire continent of Africa . What I mean by this is that while the need for a human rights monitoring system is vital during this time, as well as the need for such developmental agencies to aid and for other international news agencies to bring objective and more balanced hard facts to the international community and thereby link Africa with the rest of the world and vice versa, what we see from all these international agencies, including the human rights watch groups, is a lack of effort to assemble the best resources for Africa, which would include the best educated staff members to be in the field, as well as the most experienced and most ethical staff. Time and time again, as demonstrated in the actions of these organizations, by assembling third-rate people to cover Africa, reserving the best staff members for more desirable locales in the Western world, there is a certain amount of contempt, leading to an overall attitude that one always knows what to expect from Africa, which in turn leads to the shoddy reporting and investigation that we have seen manifested in the June of 2008 Human Rights Watch report. To my readers, the last thing that I would want to be accused of is waving the African Nationalism Flag, because ultimately, no matter what happened, whether it was the ONLF which incited the gross human rights violations within its own community or the government, the fact is that this was our own Ethiopians’ fault and was most certainly not caused by the Human Rights Watch. However, the difference lies between someone coming from the outside world and merely monitoring, aiding, or bringing news and someone coming from the outside world with his/her own agenda designed to exacerbate the situation that they are coming into. In this respect, the racism of the colonialist era was the lesser of two evils; in other words, it was represented as an occupation force, set up there to impose its own rules and its own racist attitude. The current version of racism is far more subtle and sophisticated and is demonstrated in such actions as reserving one’s worst reporters and investigators to an area that one deems as meriting less quality of work.

            The second reason lies in the whole notion of clumping all the countries in Africa into one large mass that has the same history of violence, patterns of war, bad governance, human rights violations, etc. Thus, the most incompetent of leaders, Mugabe, is not only to be found in Zimbabwe , but also in the leadership in other parts of Africa as well.  By the same token, if there is ethnic cleansing in Darfur, then by all means, the same must be true in the Somali region of Ethiopia as well. This logic continues on and on throughout the entire continent. There is no effort or hard work on the part of such agencies as Human Rights Watch to find the important distinctions among these countries, since it’s far easier to think of Africa as one large country instead of as a continent of made up of many and diverse countries. It’s this logic which causes the report to stumble into the grave blunder of lumping Ethiopia into the mass of generalities that they choose to subscribe to Africa . With a little more research and an overview of Ethiopian History 101, Human Rights Watch could have discovered that the present Ethiopian government came to power as a liberation front, so in its present role as a government executing a counter-insurgency operation against the ONLF, it’s a simple fact that it gives a higher priority to the well-being of its citizens, which would mean that it would take care to focus solely on the military side of the ONLF and ultimately, it would have a strong commitment to solve problems through political means as opposed to a total military solution, unless it was absolutely forced to turn to this measure, as it was in the case of the ONLF. So, one wonders how Human Rights Watch failed to notice this unique historical precedence in Ethiopia which sets it apart from many other African nations, and even from its own past history.

            The third reason is that many of these international agencies and organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and in particular, the international human rights monitoring organizations and news agencies are infatuated with the highly romanticized idea of freedom fighters in a liberation front. Somehow, these mythical figures have become embedded in any example of so-called liberation efforts, no matter the real-life context of these so-called freedom heroes. A classic contemporary example of this is in The New York Times, a highly respected institution within the newspaper industry which has a firm moral ground against any and all terrorist activities around the world, and yet, which has a staff member who has fallen in love with the ONLF forces or “freedom fighters”, recreating their image so as to render them a legitimate political group with a reasonable socio-political agenda. So in short, there are still traces of the leftist political agenda within this organization, traces that must be re-examined in order to fully understand the scope of these unspoken liberal biases. There needs to be a new outlook to closely monitor the reaction towards these “liberation fronts”, since the phrase can often be deceptive and be manipulated for any number of causes and agendas. It is in discussing this need for a new outlook in addressing this dilemma and how to tackle the situation that Paul Collier brings up the following scenario in his book The Bottom Billion:

“Donations from diasporic communities have been one of the key sources of finance for rebel movements, so rebels have learned how to manipulate their public relations. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) attracted money from Irish Americans, not just money, either—apparently some of the guns used by the IRA came from the Boston police department (though the attacks of September 11, 2001, brought a stop to that one, once Americans realized what terrorism actually meant). The Tamil Tigers got money from Tamils in Canada ; the bomb killed or injured more than 1,400 people in Sri Lanka ’s capital city, Colombo , in 1996 was paid for from a Canadian bank account. Albanians across the European Union financed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a group that some European politicians actually mistook for a decent political movement until it got its chance to murder. The best-organized Diaspora movement of all was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. The Diaspora financed the war for thirty years, and in 1992 they won. Eritrea is now an independent country. But did the war really achieve liberation of the Eritrean people? In September 2001, after an unnecessary international war with Ethiopia , half the Eritrean cabinet wrote to the president, Isaias Afwerki, asking him to think again about his autocratic style of government. He thought about it and imprisoned them all. He then instituted mass conscription of Eritrean youth. Ethiopia demobilized, but not Eritre` . Eritrean youth may be in the army as much to protect the president from protest as to protect the country from Ethiopia . Many young Eritreans’ have left the country. As I write, the government is in the process of expelling international peace observers, presumably so that it can restart the war. Was such liberation really worth thirty years of civil war?” (22-23)

            While I write this article, I wonder which human rights group will perceive the current terrorist group in India , which has created havoc over the weekend in Bombay , as a “liberation front”. Which outside diasporic community is possibly financing this group?

            To conclude my brief reaction to and critique of the Human Rights Watch report, while it was legitimate for the Ethiopian government to solely focus on the research methods which led to the organization’s shortcomings in its findings and while highly appreciative of its desire to further engage with the Human Rights Watch and to “explore the possibilities of collaboration in the field”, it was my duty as a citizen of this world and as a person who is also very appreciative of the admirable mission of the Human Rights Watch’s work,  to further probe into the underlying reasons for these kinds of shortcomings and to offer up a new outlook and commitment in monitoring human rights violations around the world.