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American Human Right Situation Seen from Cincinnati Incident
A Pulitzer emergency news winner, the photo, taken by AP correspondent Alan Diaz shows how the armed personnel of US Federal Investigation Bureau who broke into the home of the relatives of a Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, and forcibly took him away. This picture clearly tells people what sort of attitude was taken by American armed personnel toward human rights.
American Human Right Situation Seen from Cincinnati IncidentOn April 16, Cincinnati City of Ohio in the United States announced lifting the four-day curfew but not ending the state of emergency in order to prepare for any contingency. The incident of a white policeman shot a black man to death plunged the city into mammoth racial riots. That is another human right tragedy caused by racial discrimination, which has not only shaken the Americas, but has aroused the concern of international public opinion.
On April 7, a 19-year-old black youth Timothy Thomas was traced and arrested by a white police officer. When the unarmed young man tried to run away, the police officer shot him head. Later, according to materials provided by the police, the black youth had committed no serious offence, he was only suspected of performing 14 acts against the law, including driving without license and failing to tie his safety belt.
After the occurrence of this case of treating human life with utter disregard, residents of Cincinnati city were filled with vehement indignation, protest demonstrations were later evolved into citywide racial violence conflicts. The city government was forced to announce the entry into a state of emergency from April 12 and impose a curfew of indefinite duration. It is reported that more than 60 people were injured in the violence conflict and several hundred people were arrested by the police. US President Bush had to meddle in the matter himself and asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to consider working out a plan for bringing Cincinnati city back to normal order.
As a matter of fact, the incident of white policeman gunning a black youth is only "a corner in the ice-capped mountain" of the racial problem long existing in the United States, the racial violence conflict arising therefrom is by no means accidental, nor is it an isolated event, but is a bad result from the American racial discrimination. It once again shows that racial discrimination is deeply rooted in the United States.
Racial discrimination in the United State has a profound historical root cause. Beginning from the transport of the first group of African blacks to the Americas in 1619, the black people had been discriminated against and tragically enslaved. Although amendment to Article 13 of the US Federal Constitution in 1865 announced the abrogation of the slave system, which, however, had not disappeared in the United States, some states even did not proclaim abrogation of the slave system until March 1995. To this date, the black people are still greatly harmed by racial discrimination and experience the bitterness of racial hatred to the fullest extent.
Over the past nearly 40 years, dozens of major scandals of racial discrimination have occurred in the United States, of which the most notorious one was the incident that Martin Luther King, leader of the civil right movement of the black people, which led to the black people's riot that swept 125 cities across the country. After the beginning of the 1990s, racial discrimination, instead of being mitigated, has become increasingly fierce. In April 1992, the event of white police beating up a black driver in Los Angeles sparked the most serious riot unheard of in American history, in which 59 people were killed, 2,300 others wounded; In October 1996, the killing of a black driver by a white policeman in Florida state again triggered disturbance resulting in the injury of 15 people; In February 1999, black man Amadou Diallo was fired 41 shots by four white policemen, but the murderer was acquitted of a crime, again sparking a wave of protests.
In the United States, the minority people, especially the black people, regarded as the "third world in this First World", are at the bottom of society. De facto racial segregation can be found everywhere in the United States. A report carried in Washington Post on February 3, last year said that even in big American cities, there were only few residential quarters that had completely eliminated racial segregation. In the entire 1990s, the real earnings of US high-income families grew by 15 percent on average, while there was little change in the conditions of minority ethnic families. Nearly 2 million aborigines American Indians lived on the streets of various large American cities, 40 percent of them did not have food for two to three days a week, they were the poorest people in this most affluent country on earth.
The blacks and other minority peoples are always the second-class citizens in the United States, they are subjected to different degrees of discrimination in political, economic, educational and social security fields. The black people make up 13 percent of the total population of the United States, but they hold only 5 percent of the jobs appointed through election at various levels. In the largest top 500 US enterprises, no black people serve as chief executive or president, and in the large investment corporations in Wall Street, black people serving as ranking staff are very rare. .In addition, there is notable difference between the white and the black in terms of education level, employment rate and average wage. The unemployment rate of the blacks is two times that of the whites. The black people and other colored race, whose living conditions are very poor, almost get no housing subsidies or house-purchasing loans from the government.
Racial discrimination is also very serious in the American judicial field. Among the over 2 million prisoners put in jail in various states, 47 percent are blacks, 16 percent are Latin American descendants. In the 200-odd-year-old history of the United States, 18,000 people were sentenced to death, only 38 of them, or 0.2 percent, are white people, furthermore, not a white person has been sentenced to death for raping black women. According to an investigation report released by the United Nations, in the United States, among those committed the same crime, the blacks and the colored races are often given punishment two to three times heavier than that meted out to the whites. At the same time, the American blacks have all along been living under a legal system lacking fairness. The police misuse violence to infringe upon human rights, it is common occurrence, such as illegal punishment of the blacks, frame-up charges and illegal and forcible detention.
It is this country, which is full of racial discrimination, and which has seen the right of subsistence of the blacks and other colored races being trampled underfoot, that has since 1976 published country reports on human rights year after year, at first it accused 82 countries one by one, later accusations were expanded to cover more than 190 countries and regions. Driven by the mindset of hegemonism, the United States adopts a double standards on the question of human rights. It invariably carries two rulers, one for measuring itself, and another for measuring others, it willfully distorts the human right situation of other countries, accuses them by framing up charges, while it turns a blind eye to, or pretends ignorance of, its just too bad human right situation. The United States used machine-guns, flame sprayers and tanks to wipe out the headquarters of the David cult, while it indiscriminately accused China of lawfully banning the cult of "Falun Gong" which has caused the deaths of more than 1,000 people. The overwhelming majority of the countries that were subject to the US unwarranted charges demand that the United States first conduct self-examination and improve its own human right situation, and refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries under the pretext of "human rights standing above sovereignty" and in the garb of human right judge".
It is thus clear that in publishing country human right reports each year and tabling motions which confuse public opinion in the United Nations and slander the human right situations of other countries, the United States aims to cover up its very bad human right situation, and curb the international community's condemnation of incidents of US infringement on human rights; at the same time it also aims to use the big stick of human rights to push for its hegemonism and power politics; it even uses "humanitarian interference" as a pretense to wantonly trample upon the human right and sovereignty of other countries. The clumsy performance of the "human right guardian" can no longer deceive the world people of today.
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