WIKILEAKS, PRESS FREEDOM AND WESTERN HYPOCRISY

It is as if we were all dead and gone into a different world. We are not sure whether it is a dream or it is happening for real. A journalist stumbles upon information that he considers to be a matter of public interest. He publishes them, and all hell breaks loose.

Mr. Julian Assange, the hero or villain in this saga (depending on where one stands) is being made to pay a heavy price for thinking that the Western countries really mean it when they claim that they are committed to press freedom. All that he has done is to publish information that the United States of America does not like. And yet we have, all the time, been made to believe that the US is the embodiment of all the fundamental human rights in the UN Charter, including freedom of the press.

Soon after his Wikileaks organisation published embarrassing information about US activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US got Sweden to press crafted and trumped-up charges of rape against Mr Assange. Following that, Wikileaks has been publishing information from cables sent from US embassies around some 250 countries around the world. The reaction of the US has been to come down on Mr. Assange like a ton of bricks.

His bank account in Switzerland has been closed. His MasterCard and Visa facilities have been withdrawn, Pay Pal, the internet payment company which facilitates donations to Wikileaks, has stopped providing him with the facility. An international manhunt then began, using the Swedish claim of rape as the excuse. His website has been knocked out by a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial-of Service). This is a process to make a computer resource unavailable to its users.

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate has called for Mr. Assange to “be hunted down just like al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has called for him to be arrested for treason. Bill O'Reilly, a US political commentator has called for him to be executed. The Australian government has threatened to cancel his passport and are also investigating whether they (Australia) could find any criminal charges against him. When last week, Mr. Assange was arrested in London to face extradition charges, the US Secretary of Defence, Mr. Robert Gates, called it “good news”.

Just imagine if anything remotely similar had happened in Iran or China, or Zimbabwe: the US and the western countries would have awarded the leaker the Nobel Price. The irony of all this is that, just last week, the western countries, who are chasing Mr. Assange for embarrassing the US, were awarding the Nobel Price to a Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who has been imprisoned in China for inciting subversion. The same Mr. Liu Xiaobo is considered by the West as a "very prominent human rights defender”. Double standards have never been so exhibited.

So the Chinese subversionist gets a Nobel Peace Price from the West while the same West hounds Mr. Assange for trying to exercise press freedom. If Mr. Assange were Chinese, every western country would have been screaming for his release. What level of hypocrisy can beat this one?

The west is so consumed by its warped sense of self-righteousness that they are incapable of appreciating the bad message that they are sending to everyone else in the world. They are virtually saying that the standards that they set for others should not apply to them.

If this had happened in Zimbabwe, we would by now have heard the shrieking Human Rights Watch, the Amnesty International, Avocats Sans Frontier, the Carter Centre, Centre for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, International Federation for Human Rights, the Advocacy Project, and all the other hundred-plus so-called human rights groups hitting hard and competing to cry foul. Now all of them are dead silent, just looking on. If Zimbabwe had then said that the so-called victim of human rights was being tried for some criminal offence and not for their political activities, no one would believe the Zimbabwean government.

If it had been in Zimbabwe, the West would have quickly herded the members of Southern Africa Development Coordination Committee (SADCC) into a meeting for an anti-Mugabe declaration, then the AU would follow with expression of concern, then the US would raise it in the Security Council; and everywhere, there would have been a cacophony of cries of “human rights abuses in Zimbabwe”. Human Rights Watch would have been screaming. Even our own Daily Graphic would have protested. Now that the boot is on the other foot, it is all quiet on the Western Front. All the Human Rights bodies have lost their voices, now that they are needed to fight for Mr Assange. They are all quiet as if the paramount has farted.

If this had been in Iran, there would have been hell to pay. The US would be threatening a military attack, while the pliable UN Security Council would be issuing resolutions and threatening sanctions. These organisations are fast becoming a joke.

Just imagine if this happened in any of the following countries: Russia, Serbia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Burma, and Viet Nam where they try to assert themselves against western hegemony. The BBC would have been heard with their smug commentaries and news reporting. Fox News and CNN would have been heard bawling. Now that it is the USA is doing this to Mr. Assange, where are defenders of human rights? Where are they?

If this had happened in Ghana under President Mills, the NPP would have boycotted Parliament amidst yells of “press freedom is under attack!” Now the NPP is as quiet as if cold water has been poured over them.

Why shouldn't everyone be judged by the same standard? We either support human rights or we don't; there is no middle way! Such double standards should not be allowed to stand. If they are, then every dictator in the world would feel justified to oppress its people ignore the hypocritical stands of the west.

In this case of Mr. Assange, we should remember what the western world has always been telling us about justifying attack on press freedom under the pretext of national security. This has been better expressed by the son of the German newspaper Der Spiegel. Jakob Augstein wrote on 3rd December: "Any journalist whose first reaction to the Wikileaks data is to talk about national security, or even worse, the security of the western world, is not doing their job — and damaging press freedom to boot." Well stated, Jakob.

In whatever way one looks at this Julian Assange's case, the west is setting a bad example; they are behaving badly, and they have to be told so.