Washington: The Accuser Without Clean Hands
By Tom Somah, The Sherbro Islander
Washington has banned imports from 43 Chinese companies, citing forced labour and abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities. Beijing answered within days, restricting six American entities and opening a national security investigation into imported American software and office equipment. On paper, a human rights dispute. In practice, a contest for leverage wearing the costume of virtue.
Both economies need each other; the dependence simply runs in different currencies. China is woven deep into American supply chains, while America retains the technological and financial high ground. Washington is wary of Chinese advancement precisely because Chinese manufacturing has become too capable in technologies Washington considers sensitive. Yet China remains a principal supplier of the industrial equipment on which American factories depend.
Abuses against minority peoples must be condemned wherever they occur: in China, in America, anywhere. Nothing here excuses Beijing. But a sharper question remains. What entitles one government to punish another in the name of universal human rights when its own record remains unsettled?
A state does not need a spotless history before it can right a wrong. But there is a difference between condemning an abuse and appointing oneself its unblemished prosecutor.
On that count, America has a case to answer.
Let us begin with slavery. Millions of Africans were carried across the Atlantic, and generations of the enslaved were forced to build wealth they would never touch. The catastrophe did not end at emancipation. The profits of bondage flowed into agriculture, shipping, finance and insurance, and segregation carried the inequality forward into laws whose consequences remain visible on any American street today. Congress has debated reparations for decades and passed nothing. A country still arguing over whether even to study the debt owed to the descendants of its slaves should deliver its lectures on human rights more quietly and with a sense of remembrance.
The machinery of American power did not retire with abolition. It changed tools.
In 1953, the CIA helped topple Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran; the record sits in Washington's own declassified files.
Then the modern wars. Iraq was invaded in 2003 to seize weapons that did not exist. Brown University's Costs of War project counts the dead of Iraq and Syria in the hundreds of thousands; one count alone recorded at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians killed by violence between 2003 and 2013. Libya followed in 2011, when NATO, Washington's lap dog, helped bring down Gaddafi and left behind a fractured country in which the United Nations, toothless as ever, later documented African migrants being sold in open slave markets. In Afghanistan, twenty years of war ended with the Taliban restored, Afghan assets frozen, the banking system paralysed, and millions of children hungry through no act of their own.
And Gaza. The United States remains Israel's principal armourer and diplomatic shield while UN agencies count the dead, the displaced and the starving. Washington speaks of self-defence and strategic purpose. But when American weapons are present at a catastrophe of this scale, America has blood on its hands.
Iran completes the picture. Sanctions aimed at Tehran's rulers land instead on the vulnerable: pensioners, women, and children. Humanitarian exemptions exist on paper. Even permitted medicine becomes hard to buy. This is why Washington's bleating about human rights in a trade war rings so hollow. So hypocritical.
Washington's selectivity betrays the game. China is punished for alleged abuses while governments with equally contested records are embraced as strategic partners. So the simpler question must be asked: is American moral fibre deployed most fiercely where it happens to serve strategic interests? Principle for adversaries; pardon for partners.
Seriousness about human rights would begin at home. Washington would confront slavery honestly, account for the dead of its wars, and measure what its sanctions do to civilians who never made the policies now punishing them.
China's minorities deserve better than to serve as ammunition in a trade war. So do the descendants of enslaved Africans, the dead of Baghdad, Tripoli and Kabul, the civilians of Gaza, the embargoed people of Cuba, and ordinary Iranians living under policies built on fabrication for the best part of forty years.
Human rights invoked only against an adversary are not principles. They are weapons. The powerful do not always accuse one another because they want to end suffering. Sometimes, accusation is simply how the struggle for power continues and how Washington's unipolar ambition wears the mask of mercy.