The Hindu Business Line : Supremacist streak

AT a joint media meet, after saying `sorry' to King Abdullah of Jordan on the savage treatment of Iraqi prisoners by units of the US Army, the US President, Mr George Bush, was "equally sorry that people seeing those pictures did not understand the true nature and heart of America." The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, too has glossed over the abhorrent cruelties of the US troops, and the emerging accounts of the horrific torture inflicted by British troops, as isolated aberrations untypical of American or British character. Both have applied the balm on the outraged conscience of the world by asserting that only a minuscule number of depraved individuals have indulged in these despicable acts. Would that it were so!

As would be evident to any student of history, there had always been a white supremacist streak in Western nations. The stink and stigma of excruciating human rights abuses in their treatment of the native Indian tribes, the blacks and the colonial subjects extended right up to the latter part of the 20th century. Even as late as in mid-1960s, when I visited the native Indian `reservations' in the US, they looked more like ghettos or concentration camps, the inmates being subjected to indignities and deprivations. I had given a report on my observations to the US Congress at the time. The under-privileged of both countries are yet to recover fully from the terrors of the hooded and racist Ku Klux Klan and the lynching mobs in the US and their analogues in the UK.

That apart, even in respect of the unfolding horrors in Iraq, both Mr Bush and Mr Blair have spoken too soon. Only a week ago, Mr Bush gloated that Saddam Hussein's overthrow meant that "there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq".

Thanks to the depredations of the occupying army, as The San Francisco Chronicle points out, "there are now pictures of mass graves in a soccer field in Fallujah, of torture at the hands of US captors and... videos... of rape and murder." The Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, has himself warned that the worst is yet to come.

"There are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence towards prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane...It is going to get a good deal more terrible, I am afraid."

Which means that the evil is more widespread than is feared. An independent international body should probe into it instead of the matter being left entirely to the US.

B. S. Raghavan