Colin Powell; shows his true colors.

[MinFaluMuhammad]

Colin Powell: "'Roundup the Usual Suspects!"
By Frederick B. Hudson
TBWT Reporter
Article Dated 6/7/2001

The scene: an accented French police officer reads a teletype report to all officers (over the radio) about the Tuesday, December 1, 1941 murder of two German couriers in Algeria and the theft of official important documents they were carrying:

To all officers: Two German couriers carrying important official documents murdered on train from Oran. Murderer and possible accomplices headed for Casablanca. Round up all suspicious characters and search them for stolen document. IMPORTANT.

During a round-up of suspects by police gendarmes in the city, the precarious situation of a collection of refugees (those in European clothing in Casablanca) is set up by a few short scenes:

· The open-air city market, a scene of intrigue, is teeming with black marketers, smugglers, thieves, spies, double agents and refugees who desperately seek to obtain tickets (exit visas) on the daily plane to neutral Lisbon.

· During a roundup by the French police, one fleeing civilian suspect with expired identification papers who refuses to halt is shot and dies clutching a resistance handbill bearing the Cross of Lorraine symbol - revealing his membership in the Free France Organization headed by Petain's arch rival, General Charles De Gaulle.

This series of scenes from the famous movie Casablanca is obviously the meat and potatoes in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s stew of foreign policy. After last Friday’s suicide bombing attack on a Tel Aviv seaside disco, which resulted in the death of 21 including the Palestine bomber, Powell joined Israeli Prime Minister in demanding that Yasser Arafat arrest suspected terrorists. Powell stated on network television programs that freed prisoners “ought to be rearrested” if they were charged with crimes but never “brought to the bar of justice.”

“They had been arrested at one point, so Mr. Arafat’s authorities must have thought they had done something wrong. And unless those charges were resolved one way or another, then it’s not clear why they should have been released,” said the first Afro-American Secretary of State—and the first to trace his own lineage back to a former colony of the English-speaking world—Jamaica.

This suggested round up of suspicious characters is not only insensitive to universal human rights but has a troubling resonance with the thinking of white lynch mobs.

The United Nations’ universal declaration of human rights (art. 1), adopted by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948, states that world citizens should have “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law; the right to an effective judicial remedy; freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention or exile; the right to a fair trial and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal; the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty.”

Powell’s suggested corral of released suspects has the air of a scapegoat lottery similar to one described by the British writer Shirley Jackson in which residents of a town arbitrarily select a resident to be stoned to death. The death of the innocent or at least unproven guilty one serves a purgative to the town’s sins.

The film, Rosewood, vividly showed the effect of unproved conviction upon a entire population when it depicted the true story of white anger vented upon a black community in the Midwest based upon an unproved allegation of rape by a white woman. A few years ago, a made for television movie A Murder in Boston, chronicled the arbitrary suspension of the civil rights of black males when a white chef who killed his wife described the assailant as a black man.

Secretary of State Powell’s call for the re-arrest of former suspects who may have simply been released for lack of evidence shows a profound insensitivity to the nature of the instinct to resist perceived Israeli oppression in Palestinians who have been described as the n______s of the Middle East. The father of last week’s suicide bomber stated that he hoped he had many sons to carry out the same act. The hostility against Israeli domination in the area is not organizational—it is individual, familial, and religious in origin and sustenance. Palestinians feel that the conditions of their containment in the settlements deprive them of a basic right promulgated in the United Nations’ human rights declaration—the right to a nationality.

The frustration the Palestinians feel provokes many organizational thrusts in the area—not unlike the proliferation of civil rights organizations during the ‘60’s in the U.S. Many Middle East analysts see Arafat as a man rushing to keep up with his people’s growing militancy and frustration.

Perhaps most troubling for Powell’s potential success as a diplomat in the Middle East is his failure to make the linkage with the current Arafat situation and the ousting of the United States from its seat of 47 years on the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Many Western columnists attributed the ouster of the U.S. from the Commission in part to an attempt to humiliate US for opposing commission's recent vote blaming Israel for war started by order of Yasser Arafat. One pundit urged Congress’ suspension of its final dues payment to UN until it gets detailed answers about what commercial or political advantages were gained by 14 nations that pledged to vote for US but did not. Oh, how narrow a view privilege brings.

The nations of the various voting blocs simply no longer stoop sufficiently in awe of the United States power to return the superpower to sit in judgment of other nations’ human rights violations. They receive input from organizations like Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog monitoring organization, which stated in a special report in June 1998 that “ Police abuse remains one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the United States. The excessive use of force by police officers, including unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal choking’s, and rough treatment, persists because overwhelming barriers to accountability make it possible for officers who commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their offenses.”

A New York Times writer made an even more salient point in the May 17 issue of the paper when she noted that, “in some ways, the global advance of democracy is part of the problem. In many more nations, public opinion matters, and television audiences can see -- and resent -- how their presidents are treated on visits to Washington or how Americans rank their concerns.” New York City Mayor Giuliani’s disrespectful snubbing of Arafat on a visit to New York is not the kind of treatment, which enhances a leader’s ability to influence his or her followers.

In an attempt to narrowly frame the issues and the emotions that have provoked cruel bloodletting on both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict, Colin Powell has forgotten the lessons taught by colonialism in Jamaica and Jim Crow in up and down South—civility and fair play go a long way towards dealing with people who at the end of a day must go home and face their people and their pride.