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Jean Ziegler's Campaign Against America

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Jean Ziegler's Campaign Against America JEAN ZIEGLER’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST AMERICA A Study of the Anti-American Bias of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Table of Contents Key Findings...................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction....................................................................................................................... 3 Our Study .......................................................................................................................... 3 Conclusions........................................................................................................................ 4 Recommendations............................................................................................................. 7 Table: A Comparison of Jean Ziegler’s Treatment of the United States and Food Emergency Countries.............................................................................................. 8 Selected Quotes from Jean Ziegler.................................................................................. 9 Bibliography of Jean Ziegler’s Statements................................................................... 11 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................... 13 About UN Watch............................................................................................................. 13 United Nations Watch 1, rue de Varembe Case postale 191 1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland Tel: 41 22 734 1472 Fax: 41 22 734 1613 www.unwatch.org October 2005 Key Findings • Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, is abusing his mandate to further his extreme anti-American political agenda at the expense of addressing the world’s food emergencies. He should be removed and replaced with an individual who will impartially, objectively and non- selectively carry out the mandate. • During the first four years of his mandate, Jean Ziegler publicly criticized the United States on 34 occasions. Yet he never spoke out for the hungry or criticized any party in 15 of 17 countries deemed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization to have a man-made food emergency. And of the 2 food emergency countries that he did criticize, he only did so once with respect to one (Ethiopia) and three times with respect to the other (Sudan). (Food emergencies ignored: Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Eritrea, Guinea, Haiti, Liberia, Russian Federation (Chechnya), Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda) • Jean Ziegler frequently appends a food-related pretext to his personal political positions in order to justify employing the prestige of his U.N. office. Thus, his political opposition to U.S. military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq — matters entirely outside his competence as Special Rapporteur — over time evolved into alleged violations of the right to food. • Jean Ziegler almost never criticizes any government other than the U.S. and Israel. When he does, he suddenly dons the gloves of ginger U.N. diplomacy. Hence the Sudanese atrocities in Darfur for Ziegler are merely a cause for “concern,” the role of the Khartoum regime in atrocities only “alleged.” By contrast, the United States is an “imperialist dictatorship” responsible for all the world’s misery, President Bush is “the Pinochet who sits in the White House,” the U.S. is committing “genocide” in Cuba, and Israel commits “state terror” and “war crimes” with the U.S.’s blessing. Mr. Ziegler has never used such denunciations against the government of Sudan, or any other country. • Jean Ziegler has repeatedly condemned the U.S. embargo of Cuba as a “flagrant” violation of the right to food and of international law. Yet Cuba has never, during the period of Mr. Ziegler’s mandate, appeared on the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Emergency list. To support the vital work of UN Watch, please click here to contribute. 2 Introduction This report addresses a pattern and practice of anti-American bias by Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, that undermines the credibility of the U.N. human rights apparatus and neglects the world’s hungry. In October 2004, we issued a study, Blind to Burundi, demonstrating that Mr. Ziegler has used his position to further his own political agenda at the expense of addressing the world’s food emergencies. There, we focused on his abuse of mandate to disproportionately criticize one of his favorite political targets, Israel. Mr. Ziegler’s other favorite targets are corporations, international financial institutions, and the United States. This paper examines Mr. Ziegler’s abuse of his U.N. mandate on food in order to target the United States under various pretexts. During the first four years of his mandate, Mr. Ziegler publicly criticized the United States on 34 occasions — mostly for its alleged policies or actions vis-à-vis Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and its purported control of the international financial institutions and thereby the world economy. By contrast, during the same time period, he never spoke out for the hungry or criticized any party in 15 of 17 countries deemed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to have a man-made food emergency. And, of the 2 food emergency countries of which he was critical, he only did so once with respect to one (Ethiopia), and three times with respect to the other (Sudan). The Special Rapporteur for food is mandated to work toward eradicating the scourge of hunger. Because food problems exist in many countries, the Special Rapporteur must allocate his limited time and resources according to some logical criteria. Yet Mr. Ziegler has failed to respect any objective criteria whatsoever. Instead, he has consistently abused his U.N. position to single out and demonize particular countries — the United States and Israel — to advance his own extreme political views, rather than to advance the right to food. Our Study Our conclusions are based on an examination of Mr. Ziegler’s statements between September 2000 and December 2004, from three different sources: (1) U.N. press release archives, as found on the U.N.’s electronically-searchable website. These contain every U.N. press release issued by Mr. Ziegler, as well as official summaries of Mr. Ziegler’s statements and reports from diverse U.N. events and conferences; (2) Documents placed by Mr. Ziegler on his own website (www.righttofood.org); and (3) Statements made by Mr. Ziegler to the French- and English-language media, as found on a search of the comprehensive Nexis international news database. 3 By searching these databases and reviewing the retrieved articles, we found 34 statements during the relevant period in which Mr. Ziegler was critical of the United States.1 Because Mr. Ziegler’s mandate is to speak out against hunger in the world, we then compared Mr. Ziegler’s treatment of the United States with his treatment of countries listed on the FAO’s Food Emergencies list. From the 35 countries on the May 2004 list, we selected a sample of 17 countries. We chose these countries because for all of them, the FAO attributed the food emergency to some human action (e.g., war), rather than a natural disaster, so criticism of one or another party was possible. By searching the sources discussed above, we found that during the relevant period, of the 17 countries with man-made food emergencies, Mr. Ziegler criticized the government or another party in only two, Ethiopia and Sudan. We found one instance of criticism related to Ethiopia, and three instances related to Sudan. By comparison, as mentioned above, there were 34 instances during the same time period in which Mr. Ziegler criticized the United States.2 Conclusions Under international law, U.N. independent human rights experts are obliged to act with impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity.3 Mr. Ziegler has repeatedly flouted these standards. He has neglected the world’s real food emergencies, where millions are dying from starvation, in order to focus on his favorite political targets, one of which is the United States.4 Mr. Ziegler is a former Swiss Socialist party politician who in 1989 — shortly after Libya bombed Pan Am flight 103, killing 270 people from 21 countries, including 189 Americans — helped to found the Moammar Khadaffi Human Rights Prize.5 Mr. Ziegler himself was then awarded the prize in 2002.6 In 2004, he was a contributor to the inaugural issue of L’Empire (“The Empire”), Europe’s first magazine dedicated to anti- Americanism, providing an article criticizing American imperialism and the war on terror. 7 In both the article and his 2005 book, L’Empire de la Honte (“The Empire of Shame”), Mr. Ziegler used his U.N. Special Rapporteur title. Mr. Ziegler frequently takes one of his personal, preexisting political positions that does not concern food and appends to it a food-related pretext, in order to justify employing 1 See Selected Quotes from Jean Ziegler and Bibliography of Jean Ziegler’s Statements, pp. 9 – 12 infra. 2 See Table: A Comparison of Jean Ziegler’s Treatment of the United States and Food Emergency Countries, p. 8 infra. 3 General Assembly Resolution 48/141 of 20 December 1993. 4 We are not the first to raise this complaint. In 2004, the United States requested that the Commission on Human Rights reprimand Mr. Ziegler for his “irresponsible and unfounded statements and
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