Editor, I WISH to react to Stephen Kinzer’s article, “Are human rights activists today’s warmongers?”, published in The New Times on May 28. The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Many human rights organisations may originally have started off with humanitarian goals (and that is not always the case), but with time and having convinced themselves they needed to scale up their capacity to influence policy-makers and to shape opinion in the interest of those for whom they believed to be working, many of them became seduced with the idea of themselves becoming power-brokers. This Faustian bargain ended up corrupting them to the extent that if they continued to talk about their initial mission, their dedication to that ideal had become no more than only a marketing tool, having themselves become part and parcel of the power establishment. And as Lord Acton put it so well, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We see the confirmation of that adage in Human Rights Watch and its long-time supremo Kenneth Roth who, with millions of dollars from dyed-in-the-wool hedge fund robber barons in his organisation’s coffers, and his daily interaction with global movers and shakers, wouldn’t know human rights if they jumped up and hit him in the face. His only abiding interest now, is how to amass more and more power and make him a global power-broker. Human rights are only the handle with which he beguiles and seeks to hood-winkle. It is even a better scam in that he needn’t have to be elected but can allow himself to attack elected officials from around the world without having himself to demonstrate how he would deal with knotty social problems that mere elected government officials have to grapple with on a daily basis. He can, in other words, just criticise and his business — of which he is the undisputed CEO — continues to rake in the lucre to even more glory for its dictatorial boss. Mwene Kalinda, Rwanda
