Het Falend Terrorismebeleid

Patrick Baudouin is een jurist en ere-voorzitter van de Fédération Internationale des ligues des Droits de l'Homme (FIDH). Truthout heeft een interessant artikel van hem in het Franse dagblad Liberation vertaald waarin hij niet alleen stelt dat de maatregelen tegen terrorisme de staat buitensporig veel macht geeft, maar dat: 'Even more serious than these measures, the anti-terrorist struggle has served as a pretext for scandalous practices. In contempt of all human rights principles and international conventions, the American authorities, invoking the unheard of concept of "enemy combatant" or "illegal combatant," have authorized themselves to hold hundreds of prisoners in the sadly famous camp at Guantanamo for periods of unlimited detention. Torture was practiced at Abu Ghraib, and recourse to abusive treatment has become expressly recommended. Planes chartered by the CIA use European airports to transport terrorism suspects to secret detention centers implanted in various countries, where, globalization obliging, the most brutal methods of interrogation and incarceration are practiced. And even in Great Britain, an innocent man whose behavior appeared vaguely suspicious was shot down on a London subway platform, without the incident arousing particular emotion or even a very serious apology. All these avatars of the sweeping war against terrorism raise numerous questions, as much with regard to effectiveness as to legitimacy. Certainly, the terrorism that blindly aims at civilian populations and displays itself almost daily on our television screens can only arouse revulsion and condemnation. Certainly, security and life constitute the citizen's essential rights, and states have the right and the duty to take appropriate measures to assure citizens protection against terrorism. But one must be truly blind not to see that the increase in anti-terrorist practices and measures over the last five years has in no way arrested terrorism, which, on the contrary, never stops developing. This totally unsurprising observation was, moreover, perfectly predictable. Terrorism is not deterred by the strengthening of repression: It's not because he risks twenty years of prison instead of ten that a terrorist will renounce the performance of his act. As for the serious human rights violations committed at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, they only succeed in intensifying hatred of the United States and the countries that support it and in producing new suicide bombers' vocations. In this sense, it may be said that George Bush is bin Laden's best ally. Other perverse effects of the "Global War against Terrorism" are manifold in trivializing abuses of power from Chechnya to Palestine, but one may especially evoke the revival made by many authoritarian states, which, under cover of contributing to the anti-terrorist fight, have adopted repressive legislation, used in fact to muzzle opponents and human rights defenders. When regimes despised by their own people a re involved, the only way out becomes extremism, which itself generates terrorism.' Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122605H.shtml Of: http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=346972