Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs is a weekly column covering the world’s major human rights-related happenings. It is written by regular WPR contributor Juliette Terzieff. DETAINEES APPEAR ON IRANIAN TELEVISION — Two detained Iranian-Americans appeared on Iranian television Wednesday and Thursday evenings in a program apparently aimed at building a case they had traveled to Iran to foment regime change. Haleh Esfandiari, head of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Middle East Program, and Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant for the Open Society Institute, were seen on the program “In the Name of Democracy” speaking in heavily edited [...]
Did you feel the earth shake after President George W. Bush took to the podium on Monday and announced he would work to propel the Mideast peace process by calling an international meeting this fall? No? That’s because the proposal was simply not earth-shaking. The call, made gravely, in a speech filled with heady talk of pivotal choices, and peace, and decency and hope, does not amount to a grand strategy for reaching an Arab-Israeli agreement. Instead, Washington’s proposal represents one tactical piece in the very limited, focused, and trouble-filled plan to prop up the unpopular government of Mahmoud Abbas, [...]
HIRED GUNS IN IRAQ — Two years ago, the United Nations set up the U.N. Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, hoping to discourage the use of private armies, and to push more nations to sign the 1989 U.N. Mercenary Convention. Mercenaries in the classic definition of proxy fighters are not very much in evidence these days, but the United Nations has broadened the term to include hired guns for protection — and that business is booming. Some 48,000 foreign civilians are employed as security guards in Iraq alone, where they provide protection for government officials, businessmen, journalists, industrial [...]
