From: Tsegai Emmanuel (emmanuelt40@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 04 2010 - 12:41:30 EDT
*Clinton says steel vise crushing global activists*
July 3rd, 2010
By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer
KRAKOW, Poland – Intolerant governments across the globe are “slowly
crushing” activist and advocacy groups that play an essential role in the
development of democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
said Saturday.
She cited a broad range of countries where “the walls are closing in” on
civic organizations such as unions, religious groups, rights advocates and
other nongovernmental organizations that press for social change and shine a
light on governments’ shortcomings.
Among those she named were Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Ethiopia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.
“Some of the countries engaging in these behaviors still claim to be
democracies,” Clinton said at an international conference on the promotion
of democracy and human rights. “Democracies don’t fear their own people.
They recognize that citizens must be free to come together, to advocate and
agitate.”
Before an audience of several hundred senior government officials, Clinton
recalled Winston Churchill’s warning 60 years ago at Fulton, Mo., that an
iron curtain was descending across Europe. She noted that with the collapse
of the Soviet Union, that curtain no longer remains.
“But we must be wary of the steel vise in which governments around the world
are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit,” she said. Social
activists, Clinton said, are being harassed, censored, cut off from funding,
arrested, prosecuted or killed.
Clinton’s speech came at the opening of a 10th anniversary celebration of
the founding of the Community of Democracies, which has 16 members and is
meant to forge international consensus on ways to support and promote
democracy.
She recommended that the organization set up an independent means of
monitoring repressive measures against social advocacy groups, and that the
U.N. Human Rights Council do more to protect civil society. She announced
that the U.S. would contributed $2 million to support the work of embattled
nongovernmental groups.
Poland was a fitting setting for Clinton’s address. The country escaped from
decades of totalitarianism in the downfall of the Soviet Union and the
collapse of communism across Eastern Europe in the early 1990s — thanks
largely to the efforts of the Polish labor movement, Solidarity — whose
founder, Lech Walesa, was in the audience for the speech. Poland was holding
a presidential runoff election Sunday.
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----