Our Democracy and Human Rights are HIGH! [Archives:2001/16/Focus]

Crystals
By: Mohamed Kadry
As I recall, at the beginning of the nineties, reports that had been issued by the US Department of State’s Human Right described Yemen as a country where human rights are absent and citizens are oppressed. To my surprise, ten years later, the same department has started to praise Yemen and mention how Yemenis enjoy semi-full human rights!
What has happened here to make the situation turn up-side-down? What sort of human rights have been developed to make it sufficient enough for, the US government to change their reports factual contents? Is it a matter of mood or interests? Is it an issue that international politics has to do with, or mutual political manipulation between Yemen and the USA, the country which, I have no doubt, is putting pressure on all of the world-wide organizations?
Let’s remind the US that prisons in Yemen still use middle aged systems. Let’s mention that Yemen remains a country where law is nothing but lines drawn on papers while ‘money’ is the real judge and citizens are crying daily for their lost humanity and rights only to live in the least satisfactory and humiliating living conditions. Let’s make clear to the US that a wide sector of citizens in the southern and eastern governorates remain helpless. Unable to restore their rights represented in their nationalized, or rather stripped states. Let’s not forget that Yemeni police-stations are places of horror to ordinary citizens, rather that departments of justice and fairness!
To substantiate the reports describing us as upholders of human rights, are wrong I need to compile a whole stack of registers, and tons of sheets. But even if I succeed to do so, our pens would certainly be tired!

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