FIRESTORM FOR U.S. POLITICAL PRISONERS!

AFRICAN AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES & PLANNING
321 W. Antrim Drive P.O.Box 16102 Greenville, SC 29607
Thursday, September 14, 2010
Contact: Efia Nwangaza
Email: enjericho@aol.com
Tel: 1-864-901-8627

US Human Rights Report Touts African-American President, Attorney General, Secretaries of State, But Silent on Still Imprisoned Black COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era Political Prisoners and Ongoing political repression in the U.S.

The personal achievements of the current U.S. President, Attorney General, and past Secretaries of State of African descent, noted in the United States’ first Universal Periodic Review Report (US UPR, The Report) to the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, are unique to them. Many continue to hope that their success will become more than symbolic and that U.S. participation in the UPR process will have a transformative effect, resulting in actual and broader opportunities for all African Americans and other disenfranchised peoples of the United States and the world; despite its deeply flawed, self-serving submission.

The U.S. Report highlights the United States’ founding mythology and references the joint petition, “An Appeal to the World!,” presented, after great difficulty, by Dr. W.E. B. Du Bois (and Walter White, NAACP National Secretary), to an assistant of the first UN General Secretary, Norwegian politician, Trygve Lie, on October 23, 1947. It was at the height of the Palestine Partition debate. The petition was not presented to the General Assembly, but received worldwide recognition and support of UN nations. Among other things, it appealed to the UN, as a last resort, to call for an end to U.S. apartheid, Jim Crow segregation, and structural barriers, policies and practices preventing African Americans from full social, economic, cultural, and political rights as provided by the U.S. Constitution, statutes, and UN obligations; especially, the still prevailing violative electoral system based on African American, particularly male, criminalization and voter disenfranchisement.

Structural disenfranchisement operates today, despite the successful 1960’s U.S. Civil/Human Rights Movement referenced as “a model of civic engagement and political participation.” Sadly, like the U.S. Constitution, the 1965 Voting Rights Act still allows disenfranchisement and forced labor due to “criminal conviction,” an enforcement avoidance loop hole. The United States has a long history of racialized criminal laws designed to impose servitude and prevent political participation. They continue to evolve from the 1600’s Slave Codes, 1860’s Post-Civil War Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the 1960’s Modern Civil Rights Acts neutralized by “Law and Order” politics and hyper-criminal codes with draconian sentences and civic and social death of every form. Today’s hooks are the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs.”

Currently, African American males account for 35 percent of all Americans now barred from voting because of felony convictions. Two percent of all Americans, or 3.9 million, have lost the right to vote, compared with 13 percent of adult Black men. Note, while the incarcerated cannot vote, they are warehoused in prisons located in rural, predominately white localities and counted as residents, reminiscent of slavery when African Americans were counted as 3/5th human, for purposes of political representation and public funding.

As a result of this practice, of which Dr. Du Bois complained, the incarcerating locality is credited with increased representation and funding and the inmate’s community, to which he will return, remains under represented and underfunded. An opportunity for the Obama Administration to address the disproportionate levels of unemployment, inadequate housing, educational equity, and healthcare (not insurance) about which The Report claims dissatisfaction.

It is in this repressive environment, a longstanding tradition of resistance by African Americans, and the optimism born of successful global independence struggles that, like its contemporaries in India, Ghana, Kenya, Southern Africa, Cuba and elsewhere, internal resistance to U.S. apartheid escalated. It came from nearly all sectors of society. As a result, organizations dedicated variously to peaceful protests, passive resistance, direct action, insurrection and armed resistance emerged.

The Obama Administration referred to only one sector of the modern Civil/Human Rights campaign; the sector with which the government chose to negotiate when forced to negotiate. However, together, like the wings of a bird, all sectors combined to apply the varying degrees of pressure that precipitated the negotiations, the resulting laws The Report applauds, and the positions U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, and other elected and appointed African American office holders, as well as Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and traditionally marginalized members of U.S. society currently enjoy.

U.S. apartheid, in its various forms and degrees of repression, sparked robust internal resistance which was met with virulent official and quasi-official violence. The corresponding political aims of the militant members of the modern U.S. Civil/Human Rights campaign have been discounted, criminalized, and they still languish in U.S. prisons. They are survivors of the dually celebrated modern U. S. Civil Rights Movement and the Congressionally determined illegal COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era law enforcement vigilantism which included murder, mayhem, false charges and convictions, medical neglect, and continuing, interminable, retaliatory denial of parole and incarceration of 40 years and counting. They are as former UN Ambassador Andrew Young once noted, political prisoners in U.S. prisons.

Unlike the newly formed government of South Africa and states resolving major internal upheaval, no Truth and Reconciliation Commission nor the well deserved clemency awarded others has been offered to these stalwart human rights champions, political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiles, in and for the more than 40 years of progress the U.S. report celebrates. This is a violation of their and their communities’ human rights and the United States’ obligations under the UN Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the U.S. Constitution.

Along this same line, The Report fails to address the growing number of broadly defined laws, policies, and practices which suppress dissent and charitable contributions, require government reports and affirmations for bank accounts or property rentals. It is silent as to the increased number of persons incarcerated, isolated in custody, under surveillance, and organizations infiltrated, criminalized, and labeled “Terrorist,” under the guise of national security and “The War on Terror.”

Police still routinely make unfounded mass arrests and detentions to keep people off the streets and out of the eye of the media. There is the return of harassment and arrest of unembedded media, monitoring of social networks, and police-initiated violence at demonstrations, and use of so-called less-lethal weapons against peaceful protesters. These weapons—including chemical sprays, impact projectiles, and electroshock weapons, cattle-prods of the 1960s—are often associated with fatalities. This practice persists though condemned by several independent panels and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Ongoing and pervasive profiling throughout the United States on the basis of race, immigration status, national origin, religion or ethnicity, under the guise of fighting illegal immigration, drugs, and terrorism, have resulted in increased migrant deaths, mass incarceration, and use of torture against African Americans and other persons of color. Arizona’s SB 1070 has been instituted in several states, with modifications from recent court orders and in anticipation of Justice Department litigation. Law enforcement officers, throughout the country, who have engaged in torture and extracted confessions continue to escape prosecution while individuals who were tortured continue to be prosecuted or languish in prison based on the use of coerced confessions in their criminal cases.

The Government’s increasing disregard for the U.S. Constitution and its human rights obligations is further displayed in its treatment of Muslim, Arab and South Asian inmates. In 2006 and 2007, the Federal Bureau of Prisons secretly created the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a prison unit designed to hold “dangerous terrorists and other high-risk inmates, requiring heightened monitoring of external and internal communications.” Many such prisoners are sent to these isolation units for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, in retaliation for challenging poor treatment, or other rights violations; over two-thirds are Muslim, even though Muslims represent only 6 percent of the general federal prison population.

In 1996, the U.S. government established Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) to limit the communications of prisoners with an alleged reach and ability to commit violence. Now SAMs can be placed on anyone with a “proclivity for violence.” Without criminal conviction, contact and communication even with family members can be limited. SAMs are imposed disproportionately on Muslims “suspected of connections with terrorism” and is typical of terrorism suspect’s treatment in U.S. prisons and courts.

“All of these issues are of utmost concern to U.S. civil society organizations because the U.S government, State and Justice Departments especially, is liable for enforcement and protection of the rights and person of people in its borders and under its jurisdiction. Further, the U.S. holds itself out as the global leader in human rights and is accepted in many quarters as the operative standard thus influencing the treatment of people around the world. If U.S. civil society’s concerns are to be addressed and the hope placed in the Obama Administration properly laid, the U.S. government must take leadership in public human rights education and official enforcement. Then, U.S. participation in the UPR process will have a transformative effect, resulting in actual and broader opportunities for all African Americans and other disenfranchised peoples of the United States and the world; despite its deeply flawed, self-serving submission,” stated Efia Nwangaza, Director, African American Institute for Policy Studies & Planning.

The African American Institute, under the auspices of the US Human Right Network (http://www.ushrnetwork.org), is involved with the UN’s first Universal Periodic Review of the US, which is scheduled to take place in November 2010. The UPR assesses each country's adherence to its human rights obligations under the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), human rights treaties ratified by the country, its voluntary commitments, and applicable international law. During the review, the “national report” provided by the country under review, the reports of UN bodies, and reports from other “stakeholders” such as civil society and national human rights institutions, are considered by the UPR Working Group. African American Institute, Ida B. Wells Media Institute, and the October 22nd Coalition wrote a cluster report on POLITICAL REPRESSION: Continuum of Domestic Repression. Ms. Nwangaza also co-authored POLITICAL REPRESSION: Political Prisoners (COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era) stakeholder’s report.

FO: US Human Right Network go to: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/upr_reports .