Political Prisoners Event Shows U.S. Government’s Weaponization of Human Rights
Dissidents in U.S.-allied countries and U.S. political prisoners are ignored while people who try to destabilize their own countries are promoted as heroes
[Source: ned.org]
Originally published at CovertAction Magazine
Gonzalo Lira was a Chilean journalist who was arrested in Ukraine in May 2023 for “producing and publishing material that tried to justify the ongoing Russian invasion,” which is illegal under Ukrainian law.
After violating the terms of his bail following his release, Mr. Lira was rearrested and died in prison, supposedly of pneumonia, on January 12, 2024.
Lira fits the classic definition of a political prisoner who was detained for promoting an anti-war viewpoint.
Rwandan professor and YouTuber Aimable Karasira Uzaramba fits the same classic definition.
He was arrested by Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame’s goon squad in 2021 for “undermining the officially recognized narrative of the 1994 Rwandan genocide,” the same accusation that cost him a teaching position at the University of Rwanda.[1]
Karasira has alleged that he was beaten, tortured and denied medical care by Nyarugenge Prison authorities, with his trial having been repeatedly delayed.
Predictably, neither Lira nor Karasira’s stories were publicized by the U.S. State Department on international political prisoners’ day on October 30.
The reason is not hard to discern: Ukraine is a U.S. proxy that has received billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. to fight the Russians and has been presented as a model democracy nobly confronting Russian autocracy.
Rwanda is also a proxy of the U.S. whose ruler Paul Kagame has helped open up the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to exploitation by U.S.-based multi-national corporations through repeated genocidal invasions.
As part of its #Without Just Cause campaign, the State Department supported a conference on political prisoners on October 30 conducted by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot specializing in regime change propaganda, in collaboration with Freedom House, a “human rights” NGO.
The conference spotlighted the plight of political prisoners primarily in countries that the U.S. government has targeted for regime change along with prisoners who hold right-wing, neo-colonialist worldviews.
Leftist political prisoners were excluded along with political prisoners targeted by U.S. client states like Israel, which holds thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its jails, many of whom have been subjected to sadistic forms of torture comparable to Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay.
In his opening address at the conference, NED Director Damon Wilson expressed horror at the high number of political prisoners in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and terrible prison conditions in Venezuela’s El Helicoide prison. (Venezuela is a socialist country whose government the U.S. has tried in vain to overthrow for years.)
Dr. Dafna H. Rand, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, followed Wilson’s remarks by trying to focus moral outrage on political prisoners in Iran, China, Belarus and Cuba where, Rand said, many of the political prisoners were under the age of 35.[2]
The main panel at the NED conference featured Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was recently released in a prisoner exchange after being sentenced in Russia to 25 years in prison for sedition.
A pallbearer at John McCain’s funeral, Kara-Murza lobbied for economic warfare (sanctions) on his own country with billionaire con man William F. Browder, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in absentia in Russia for carrying out large scale tax evasion and fraud.[3]
In the late 1990s, Kara-Murza served as an adviser to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, who was involved in corrupt privatization schemes that enabled the looting of Russia by foreign capitalists.
Vladimir and his wife Evgenia, who also spoke at the NED event, are associated with the Free Russia Foundation, which has been accused of being a front for Western intelligence agencies’ efforts to destabilize Russia and promote regime change under the guise of democracy promotion.[4]
Vladimir’s co-panelist, Hisham Kassem, a newspaper publisher jailed for sedition in Egypt, conveyed a colonialist mentality when he lamented the failure of the George W. Bush administration—with which he said he worked closely—to abandon its “freedom agenda,” thus leaving the Middle East to the control of family dynasties and dictators.[5]
The chair of Kara-Murza and Kassem’s panel was Berta Valle, the spouse of Félix Maradiaga, whom the NED depicts as a political prisoner in Nicaragua forced to flee the country.
However, Maradiaga served as Secretary General of the Ministry of Defense under the reactionary regime of Enrique Bolaños,[6] and was pictured with armed goons of the Viper criminal network that terrorized Managua during a 2018 U.S.-backed coup attempt on Nicaragua’s left-leaning leader Daniel Ortega.
Writing in The Grayzone, journalist Ben Norton characterized Maradiaga as a “U.S. government-backed regime-change activist” who “played a crucial role leading the violent 2018 coup attempt.”
The decision by the NED to feature the people that it did reflects its neo-conservative agenda and weaponization of human rights.
Recently, the NED appointed notorious neo-conservative war hawk Victoria Nuland, a key architect of the U.S.’s disastrous Ukraine policy, to its Board of Directors.
Kara-Murza in his talk predictably fulminated against Russian President Vladimir Putin while claiming that there were more political prisoners now than during the late 1980s’ last years of Soviet rule.
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, followed him by heaping praise on Ronald Reagan and accusing Russia of using Wagner Group soldiers to quash what she considered peaceful protests following Venezuela’s July elections won by socialist Nicolás Maduro.
The allegation about the Wagner Group, promoted originally by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, has never actually been verified.
A Reuters report used only one named source, Yevgeny Shabayev, head of a Cossack paramilitary organization, who had a reputation as a “fake veteran” and “liar.” He posted a different version of the story he told Reuters on his Facebook page while telling a Russian media outlet that mercenaries allegedly based in Venezuela had nothing to do with the Wagner Group.
Evgenia’s spreading of CIA-style disinformation makes clear the political agenda underlying the NED’s “political prisoner” conference, which was to mobilize public opinion in support of military and regime-change operations directed against Russia and other countries like China, Venezuela and Cuba.
The Kara-Murzas are staunch supporters of the Ukraine War but refuse to mention that there is a higher proportion of political prisoners in Ukraine today than in Russia.
Mainstream publications have reported on widescale sweep operations carried out by Ukraine’s CIA-trained security services (SBU) and overcrowding in Ukraine’s prisons.
The Associated Press reported in April 2022 that nearly 400 people in the northeastern city of Kharkiv alone had been detained under “anti-collaboration” laws enacted by Ukraine’s parliament and signed by Zelensky after Russia’s February 24 invasion.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has spotlighted the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a Ukrainian Trotskyist and political prisoner under Zelensky’s government, which has canceled elections and banned 12 opposition parties.
WSWS writer David North wrote that the SBU’s “unscrupulous and Gestapo-like methods are common knowledge in Ukraine.”
These methods are not common knowledge in the U.S., however, because organizations like the NED, in collaboration with a compliant media and academic establishment, obscure the truth.
If the U.S. State Department and NED truly cared about human rights, they would spotlight the case of Syrotiuk and other Ukrainian dissidents alongside Russian ones.
The “political prisoners” the NED and State Department herald often turn out to be criminals who belong in prison or traitors that sponsored insurrections far worse in scale than January 6.
One of the best-known former political prisoners in the world today is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
A conference of people genuinely committed to the plight of political prisoners would invite Assange and his brother Gabriel Shipton to speak about Julian’s persecution by U.S. government leaders who were humiliated by his publication of documents that exposed their involvement in war crimes.
The NED would never do this, of course, because WikiLeaks documents exposed their own hypocrisy and complicity in human rights atrocities they claim to want to combat.
Prosecutors accused Karasira of saying that the genocide was not planned—a crime under the genocide law—but that it was an act of self-defense by the Hutu government in response to the 1990 invasion by the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), according to news reports and court documents. This position is one accepted by many reputable international scholars of the Rwandan conflict and genocide, including CovertAction Magazine’s managing editor and the author of this article. ↑
Rand, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, left out that many of the Cuban “political prisoners” received funding from the NED and other U.S. agencies and plotted an insurrection against the Cuban government that was backed by the U.S. ↑
Kara Murza’s father was a prominent supporter of Boris Yeltsin in the post-Soviet 1990s. ↑
In October 2017, Kara-Murza authored an article in the NED’s Journal of Democracy comparing Putin to Mussolini, claiming falsely that the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 in a coup d’état, and advocating for a color revolution in Russia modeled after ones supported by Western intelligence agencies in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Kara-Murza contrasted Boris Yeltsin favorably with Putin, claiming that Yeltsin presided over “competitive elections” when Yeltsin won 1996 elections only because of massive U.S. interference. Further, Kara-Murza ignores Yeltsin’s storming of the Russian parliament in October 1993. ↑
Among other things, this analysis obscured that the U.S. has empowered dictatorships in the Middle East over generations that provided it access to the region’s oil. ↑
A wealthy critic of the Sandinistas going back to the 1980s, Bolaños liberalized Nicaragua’s economy and signed the disastrous 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the U.S. that favored U.S. multi-national corporations and decimated local Nicaraguan industries, similar to its counterpart, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Maradiaga was a Yale World Fellow and has a Master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School.
They're not even pretending to be for human rights. These efforts are solely about the protecting right to remain hegemon.