Sputnik discussed this with George Szamuely, Senior Fellow at the Global Policy Institute of London Metropolitan University.
Sputnik: What are your thoughts on this Amnesty report? The report highlights many of the issues that are happening in various countries, but offered no solution to them, why?
George Szamuely: The human rights brigade, the two main organizations that are the leaders of the human rights brigade, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, they're in the business of demonizing certain states and dressing this up in all this fancy human rights language, all the talk about war crimes, tribunals and bringing people to justice and so on, but essentially, it's always a very one-sided view, it's always the certain official enemies that are condemned, presented in a way which [supports the notion that] the international community must bring these people to justice. Let's take a look at something like Syria, in the case of Amnesty International, to be fair, it's more balanced in its approach to Syria than Human Rights Watch. It lists the crimes of ISIS [Daesh] and Jabhat al-Nusra, and it lists the crimes of the Syrian government, which is different from Human Rights Watch, which only lists the crimes of the Syrian government. Nonetheless, the very fact of presenting it in some kind of a balanced way, this [reflects] the most obvious point, which is that the most fundamental human right of all is the right to live in peace and security, so there could be no symmetry between what ISIS does and what the government in Damascus does, because the government in Damascus is the sovereign, legal government of Syria and it's in the business of protecting the rights and life, and liberty of the citizens of Syria. So to present it as some kind of symmetry that Jabhat al-Nusra did this, the Syrian government did that and it's all so terrible and they're wringing their hands, there's no symmetry.
Sputnik: The report focuses a lot on migration, the so-called hostile attitude Western countries have [towards] accepting migrants, why didn't it address the conflicts that are forcing these migrants to flee, what do you think?
George Szamuely: That's part of this human rights agenda, in which they somehow deem migration as good in itself, and somehow being wary of accepting migrants is a sign of racism or intolerance and so on. Of course, migration isn't good in itself - countries being a little reluctant to accept hundreds of thousands of people who are likely to be extremely difficult to assimilate. The liberal globalist agenda is to say, oh well, let's bring in as many migrants as possible largely as a source of cheap labor.
Sputnik: Amnesty's report also criticizes the Syrian government and Russia for bombing Eastern Ghouta; why didn't the report mention the terrorists in Eastern Ghouta using civilians as shields, and who were responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in Damascus, for example?
George Szamuely: That's a very good point. Here is this, supposedly, human rights organization that simply unquestionably accepts the premise that somehow the people who are holding Eastern Ghouta hostage, and before that Aleppo, were opposition figures - they're rebels -, as the democratic opposition rather than who they really are, which is, they're terrorists. So what the Syrian government is doing is essentially trying to liberate its own country from the grip of terrorists, and terrorists of a particularly vicious kind, extreme jihadists. To present it as somehow this is just the government fighting the rebels is completely misleading and therefore the report, which is presented in this form, really serves no purpose at all, rather than to feed into the narrative that is being pushed by, particularly, the United States but also by its Western European allies: that the Syrian government is just bombing and attacking civilians for no reason whatsoever, just because it's a barbaric regime. I think that is very unfortunate that the human rights brigade provides us with this kind of material, just to feed into this US narrative.
Sputnik: Following accusations the Kremlin rebuked by saying that the countries supporting terrorists are responsible for the situation in Eastern Ghouta, what's your thoughts on that?
George Szamuely: The people who are in charge of Eastern Ghouta are Jabhat al-Nusra, which is simply an offshoot of Al-Qaida, the Al-Qaida people who attacked the United States on 9/11. So, therefore, the Syrian government is entirely within its right to liberate its territory from the grip of these kinds of terrorists. They're only focusing on the alleged atrocities committed by the Syrian government, which just misses the point, which is that the Syrian government is entirely within its right, and it will be irresponsible if they didn't act this way.
Comment: See also: