By STEVEN R. HURST
WASHINGTON (AP) – Advocates fear the Obama administration may be putting the human rights issue on the back burner to focus instead on coping with the global economic crisis and national security.
President Barack Obama sought the moral high ground on human rights with his early order to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and declaration that the United States would never again torture prisoners.
Those moves — which won nearly unanimous international praise — were made soon after Obama took office. He sought to repair the U.S. image abroad, correcting what he believed were mistaken Bush administration policies that had left the United States on the diplomatic outs with much of the world, even with some traditional allies.
But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dulled the luster, rights advocates say, when she said during a trip to Asia that the administration — while still deeply concerned about human rights in China — could not let that interfere with cooperation with Beijing on the worldwide economic crisis and the fight to ease global climate change.
“We fear she may be setting this tone as a signal to the rest of the world that human rights are not going to be one of the main issues for the administration,” said T. Kumar, Amnesty International advocacy director for Asia. “Trade and security should not be promoted at the expense of human rights.” [Hillary Clinton will turn out to be worse than Jendayi Frazer for Africa. Let’s not forget that the Rwanda genocide occurred under her husband’s watch.]
Clinton pushed back Thursday after a Washington meeting with China’s foreign minister, noting she and Yang Jiechi had a significant engagement on human rights and the situation in Tibet.
“Human rights is part of our comprehensive dialogue” with China, she said. “It doesn’t take a front seat, a back seat or a middle seat. It is part of the broad range of issues that we are discussing.”
Beyond China, however, there is a considerable list of Obama positions that have raised doubts about how far the new president will shift from the policies of his predecessor.
_The administration has filed a legal brief that echoed Bush in maintaining that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights and arguing that enemy combatants held at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention.
_Government lawyers continued to invoke the state secrets law in a federal court case that involves the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, in which U.S. operatives seized foreign suspects and handed them over to other countries for questioning. The law blocks the release of evidence the government deems secret and potentially harmful to U.S. security.
_The administration is feeling out Uzbekistan, which has one of the worst human rights records among the former Soviet republics, about using an air base to provide supplies and troops to Afghanistan. The move became necessary after neighboring Kyrgyzstan declared it was canceling the U.S. lease for a base in that Central Asian country.
_Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently greatly scaled back expectations in Afghanistan, declaring the United States was not going to be able to leave behind anything close to a western-style democracy. The U.S. rationale for its seven-year engagement in the country rested partly on having driven the Taliban from power. The Islamic fundamentalists ran a brutal regime that was particularly harsh in its treatment of women. The administration has recently said it was ready to reach out to Taliban members who are willing to work with the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
Those and other human rights issues trouble advocates, but they emphasize Clinton’s very public remarks regarding China.
“Part of her challenge diplomatically is going to be able to work on many fronts,” said Amnesty International’s Curt Goering. “The United States cannot be credible on any issue unless it remains credible on human rights.”
He said Amnesty does not deny the need for pragmatism, but insists the United States must at the same time “signal it is serious about human rights.”
Kumar, likewise, acknowledged the pragmatism argument but said Clinton could have delivered her message in closed-door meetings with the Chinese. He said her public comments on human rights were bound to inspire serious questions about U.S. intentions under Obama.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was asked this week about comments by the Dalai Lama, the revered leader of Tibetan Buddhists who fled to exile as Tibet’s 1959 uprising against Chinese rule collapsed. The Dalai Lama said Tibetans were living in “hell on earth” because of Chinese repression.
“The United States respects the territorial integrity of China and considers Tibet to be part of China,” Gibbs said. “At the same time, we’re concerned about the human rights situation in Tibet.”
Gibbs noted that Washington believes the Chinese government increased cultural and religious repression in Tibetan areas last year, and urged Beijing to engage in further negotiations with the exiled leader.
“We believe that substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives that makes progress and brings about solutions to long standing issues is the best way to achieve true and lasting stability in Tibet,” Gibbs said, in a muted response to the perennial and fundamental human rights sore point.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood also rebutted the criticism in response to a Washington Post editorial that said Clinton “continues to devalue and undermine the U.S. diplomatic tradition of human rights advocacy.”
Wood said: “She realizes you have to sit down with, for example, her Chinese counterpart and make these points on human rights. But she also knows that’s not necessarily going to get you what you want at the end of the day, so you’ve got to find new and creative ways to influence the human rights situation in China and that’s what she’s trying to do.”
Obama and Clinton will likely face even stiffer criticism as they move forward with a policy designed to repair U.S. standing globally. They are trying to show world leaders that Washington is once again determined to engage the world through diplomacy rather than what critics saw as the Bush administration’s tendency to rely on diktat.
The mission appears to be especially delicate when it comes to human rights, an issue that stands to block linkage with a number of countries unless the administration finds a way to finesse it by maintaining Washington’s historic standards while not using them as a blunt instrument.