IV. INDULGING IN RACIAL DISCRIMINATION EXACERBATES SOCIAL INJUSTICE
The "virus" of deeply-entrenched racism in the United States is spreading along with the novel coronavirus, with anti-Asian hate crimes happening frequently, discrimination against Muslim communities increasing steadily, and racial persecution of indigenous populations still remaining, which has led to an even widening racial economic divide and growing racial inequality.
Asian Americans face increasingly severe discrimination and violent attacks. As a result of U.S. politicians' manipulation over racial issue, the number of attacks targeting Asian Americans has drastically increased. According to a report published on Nov. 18, 2021 by the national coalition Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate, from March 19, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021, a total of 10,370 hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander people were reported to the organization, and a majority of the incidents took place in spaces open to the public like public streets and businesses.
Statistics released by the New York Police Department on Dec. 8, 2021 showed that anti-Asian hate crimes in the city rose by 361 percent from that of 2020. According to a report of The Washington Post on April 22, 2021, a Pew Research Center survey found that 81 percent of Asian adults said violence against the group was rising. The New York Times commented that "no vaccine for racism." It said that Asian New Yorkers live in fear of attacks, and the psychological effects of anti-Asian violence have scarred Asian communities in the United States. U.S. broadcaster NPR reported on Oct. 22, 2021 that one in four Asian Americans feared that members of their household would be attacked or threatened because of their race or ethnicity.
On March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, a white male, launched gun attacks at three Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, killing eight people. Six of them are Asian women.
The deadly shooting epitomizes an escalation of discrimination and violent attacks against Asian-Americans in the country in recent years, sparking unprecedented anger and fear. Thousands of Asians and people of other ethic groups took to the streets in massive "Stop Asian Hate" rallies and marches.
On Jan. 28, 2021, an 84-year-old man from Thailand was deliberately knocked down to the ground and then died in San Francisco.
On April 23, 2021, Ma Yaopan, a 61-year-old Chinese man, was attacked from behind and fell to the ground on a street in New York. He then was repeatedly kicked in the head, which caused facial fractures. After eight months in a coma, he eventually died in hospital.
On Nov. 17, 2021, three Chinese high school students were violently assaulted on a subway train on their way home from school in Philadelphia. "It was clear that they were picked on because they were Asian," said a local police officer.
On April 3, 2021, a report of The New York Times documented more than 110 anti-Asian incidents in the past year with clear evidence of racial hatred. "Over the last year, in an unrelenting series of episodes with clear racial animus, people of Asian descent have been pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs. Homes and businesses have been vandalized," said the report. That was just a tip of the iceberg of racist attacks on Asians in the United States.
BBC reported on July 22, 2021 that being regarded as a "permanent alien" is a painful experience shared by many Asian Americans, and under the combined effect of xenophobia and anti-communism, the U.S. government has been suspicious of Chinese scientists for more than half a century.
Since the implementation of the so-called "China Initiative" in November 2018, Chinese scientists have frequently been subjected to gratuitous harassment, monitoring and crackdown by the U.S. government. Vile and absurd acts of the U.S. law enforcement authorities have been constantly exposed by the media.
The New York Times on Nov. 29, 2021 reported on its website that about 2,000 academics at institutions including Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University have signed an open letter, expressing concerns that the initiative unduly targets researchers of Chinese descent.
The Yale Daily News reported on Dec. 9, 2021 that nearly 100 Yale professors have jointly published an open letter condemning the China Initiative, saying that it is invasive and discriminatory, disproportionately targets researchers of Chinese origin, and poses threats to scientific inquiry and academic freedom. They called for an end to the initiative.
According to an investigation by MIT Technology Review, a majority of cases under the initiative have had charges dismissed or are largely inactive.
Several Asian-American civil rights groups in the United States said that investigation against Chinese under the initiative would lead to "discrimination and stigmatization."
Xi Xiaoxing, a Chinese scientist victimized by the initiative, said the current situation of scientists of Chinese origin is similar to that of Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps during World War II, almost like a return to the McCarthy era.
On July 28, 2021, Foreign Affairs published an article titled Rivalry Without Racism on its website, saying that "U.S. foreign-policy makers' consistent overexaggeration of China's threat to the United States" is a vital element of the recent surge in anti-Asian incidents. Demonizing China leads to the demonization of Asians in the country, and "until policymakers stop using China as a punching bag for all of the United States' woes, Asian Americans will continue to be at risk," said the article.
Discrimination and attacks against Muslims are on the rise. Bloomberg reported on Sept. 9, 2021 that over the past two decades since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, discrimination against Muslim Americans has surged.
The Associated Press reported on Sept. 9, 2021 that a poll found 53 percent of Americans have unfavorable views toward Islam.
In a 2021 report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it receives more complaints of bullying and Islamophobic rhetoric every year. A report published by the council's California chapter on Oct. 28, 2021 showed that more than half of the students surveyed across California said they do not feel safe at school because they are bullied for their Muslim heritage. That's the highest percentage the California chapter has documented since the survey started in 2013.
A survey released on Oct. 29, 2021 by the Othering and Belonging Institute in University of California, Berkeley, found that 67.5 percent of the Muslim participants had experienced Islamophobia-related harms and that 93.7 percent of the respondents said they had been impacted by Islamophobia emotionally or physically.
The aborigines have long suffered cruel racial persecution. The United States has a long and dark history of violating the rights of indigenous people, including Indians, who have experienced bloody massacres, brutal expulsions and cultural genocide.
An article titled "The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides" published on the website of Foreign Policy on Oct. 11, 2021 noted that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, more than 350 indigenous boarding schools were funded by the U.S. government, which aimed to culturally assimilate indigenous children by forcibly separating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities.
Until the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of indigenous children had been uprooted from their homes and many had been abused to death in those boarding schools where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were forcibly suppressed.
The United States is not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people, said the article.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Navajo Nation, the Cherokee Nation, the Sioux Nation and other Native Americans have struggled with disease and poverty, which, however, has all been systematically ignored. The Navajo Nation, which stretches across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, was once among the areas with the highest rates of COVID-19 infection across the country.
The Guardian reported on April 24, 2020 that early data indicated dramatically disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death of Native Americans. Among about 80 percent of U.S. state health departments that have released some racial demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus, almost half of them did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label "other." "We are a small population of people because of genocide," said Abigail Echo-Hawk, chief research officer of Seattle Indian Health Board. "If you eliminate us in the data, we don't exist."
Russian news network RT reported on Jan. 8, 2022 that since the 1950s, among more than 1,000 clandestine nuclear tests the U.S. government has conducted, 928 took place on lands of the Shoshone Aboriginal tribe, leaving 620,000 tons of radioactive dust. The amount of radioactive dust is nearly 48 times that of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. According to Ian Zabarte of the Shoshone Nation, more than 1,000 people of the Shoshone Aboriginal tribe have died directly from the nuclear explosion, and many people have consequently suffered from cancer.
The economic divide between races continues to widen. There has been a long-term and systematic economic inequality between ethnic minority groups and the white population in the United States, which is manifested in various aspects such as employment and entrepreneurship, wages, and financial loans.
USA Today reported on April 7, 2021 that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 48 percent of the Asian community's estimated 615,000 unemployed were without work for six months-plus through the first quarter of 2021. The figure surpassed the portion of long-term unemployed among jobless workers of other ethnic groups.
Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in Los Angeles, said that Asians in the United States have been racialized, steered toward jobs and industries like catering, laundries and domestic work, nursing and personal care, which are devalued, underpaid and impacted hardest during the pandemic.
On July 30, 2021, USA Today reported on its website that a new Gallup poll showed that 59 percent Americans do not believe racial minorities have equal job opportunities.
The Hill reported on its website on Sept. 11, 2021 that 27 percent of minority-owned small businesses remained closed, much higher than White-owned small businesses. White-owned startups are seven times more likely to obtain loans than Black-owned ones during their founding year. Throughout the pandemic, businesses owned by people of color did not receive equitable access to federal aid, being hit harder economically.
CNN reported on July 15, 2021 that around 17 percent of African American households lack basic financial services compared to 3 percent of white households.
On Dec. 15, 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on its website that despite representing 19 percent of the U.S. population, Hispanic families hold just 2 percent of the nation's total wealth. The median net worth of white families is more than five times greater than Hispanic families.
Structural flaws in its system have led to increasing racial inequality in the United States. On Nov. 22, 2021, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes said at the end of a 14-day visit to the United States that when it comes to human rights and minorities, the United States is a nation "where support for slavery led to one of the world's most brutal civil wars, where racial segregation persisted late into the 20th century, and where indigenous peoples' experiences have for centuries been one of dispossession, brutality and even genocide."
With a legal system that is structurally set up to advantage and forgive those who are wealthier, while penalizing those who are poorer, particularly minorities, minorities such as African Americans and Latino Americans in particular are crushed into a generational cycle of poverty, de Varennes said.
V. CREATING A MIGRANT CRISIS AGAINST HUMANITY
The U.S. government has often interfered in other countries' internal affairs by wielding the club of "human rights." However, the policy of separating migrant children from their families has severely endangered the migrants' lives, dignity, freedom and other human rights. The migrant and refugee crisis has even been used as an instrument for American partisan attacks and political strife. Constant government policy changes and police brutality adds to the sufferings of the migrants who have already been subject to extended custody, cruel torture, forced labor and many other inhumane treatments.
Asylum seekers are subject to police brutality. In 2021, the humanitarian crisis continued to intensify as the southern border of the United States saw an increasing inflow of migrants, and border enforcement officers used increasingly violent means to expel or prevent asylum seekers from entering the country.
Data released by U.S. Border Patrol shows that in fiscal year 2021, as many as 557 migrants died on the southern border of the United States, more than double the previous fiscal year, hitting the highest number since records began in 1998. Media reports say this does not reflect the dire situation on the U.S. southern border and "the real number of migrant deaths may be greater."
The USA Today website reported on Nov. 29, 2021 that from January to November 2021, there have been more than 7,647 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults against asylum seekers.
In September 2021, more than 15,000 asylum seekers from Haiti crowded under a bridge in the Texas border town of Del Rio, sleeping in squalid tents or dirt in the sweltering heat, and surrounded by trash under dire living conditions. U.S. border patrol authorities brutalized the asylum seekers, with patrols on horseback, brandishing horsewhips and charging towards the crowds to expel them into the river. The footage of the scene immediately sparked outrage when they were released.
CNN commented that this scene is reminiscent of the dark era in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves. The New York Times commented that "there were the outrageous images of agents on horseback herding the migrants like cattle" and the U.S. government in general always seems to say the right things on racial issues, but too often their deeds come up short when measured against their talk.
Facing a flood of criticism, the U.S. government soon forcibly deported thousands of asylum seekers back to Haiti, most of whom had not lived there for nearly a decade since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
On Oct. 25, 2021, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent issued a statement, condemning the systematic and mass deportation of Haitian refugees and migrants by the United States without assessing the individuals' situation was a violation of international law, "the mass deportations seemingly continue a history of racialized exclusion of Black Haitian migrants and refugees at U.S. ports of entry."
Dissatisfied with the U.S. government's inhumane handling of Haitian migrants and refugees, Daniel Footie, the U.S. special envoy for Haiti, resigned in anger after just two months in office.
Immigrant children face prolonged detention and abuse. "And while Biden has officially ended Trump's policy of 'family separation,' his use of Title 42 has created family separation 2.0," USA Today website reported on Nov. 29, 2021. It forced many minors to separate from their parents.
"There are more than 5,000 unaccompanied children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody," CNN reported on April 23, 2021. Many of them have been staying in custody for longer than the 72-hour limit set by federal law, it added.
"A stash of redacted documents released to the human rights group (Human Rights Watch) after six years of legal tussles uncover more than 160 cases of misconduct and abuse by leading government agencies, notably Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Border Patrol," The Guardian reported on Oct. 11, 2021. "The papers record events between 2016 and 2021 that range from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions."
Conditions in private detention facilities where migrants are held are poor. Most of the detention facilities in the United States are built and operated by private companies. In order to reduce operating costs and maximize profits, private companies generally build in accordance with the minimum standards contracted with the government, resulting in poor detention facilities and a harsh internal environment. A lack of supervision has led to chaotic management of the detention facilities and repeated violations of human rights, while detainees suffered varying degrees of physical and mental health damage.
U.S. authorities detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the Mexico border during the 2021 fiscal year that ended in September.
Among them, up to 80 percent are held in private detention facilities, including 45,000 children.
"Conditions were deteriorating inside the 'emergency intake' shelter erected in the harsh desert of Fort Bliss (Texas)," reported the El Paso Times on June 25, 2021.
"There were nearly 5,000 children there, and some 1,500 children are still being held at the troubled site, where conditions in 'jam-packed' tents resembled 'a stockyard,' were 'traumatizing' and risky for the children's health and safety, according to half a dozen current and former workers, volunteers and civil servants, as well as internal emails obtained by the El Paso Times.
Many immigrants are victims of human trafficking and forced labor in the United States. Tighter U.S. immigration policies, combined with weak supervision at home, have exacerbated human smuggling and labor trafficking targeting immigrants.
A report by AP on Dec. 10, 2021 said that for years, immigrants who smuggled into the U.S. have been forced to work long hours on farms, living in filthy, overcrowded trailers, lacking food and clean drinking water, and facing threats of violence from regulators. The workers' IDs and travel documents were withheld, which limits their ability to seek help to escape their predicament.
A human trafficking indictment released on Nov. 22, 2021 on the website of U.S. Department of Justice documents that dozens of workers from Mexico and Central American countries have been smuggled to farms in the southern part of the state of Georgia, where they were illegally imprisoned under inhumane conditions as contract agricultural laborers, becoming victims of U.S. modern-day slavery.
After being cheated into farms with the promise of an hourly salary of 12 U.S. dollars, they were required to dig onions with their bare hands, paid 20 cents for each bucket harvested, and threatened with guns and violence to keep them in line. At least two of the workers died as a result of workplace conditions and one suffered from multiple sexual assault.
The New York Times website reported on Nov. 11, 2021 that hundreds of workers from India were lured to New Jersey, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles etc. with the promise of fair pay and good hours, but instead they had nearly no time off from work that was grueling and frequently dangerous, moving stones that weighed several tons and facing health risks from exposure to harmful dust and chemicals. The workers were confined to their living quarters and had their passports confiscated, and were also threatened with retaliation, said the report.
Exclusion of immigrants becomes more and more extreme. The immigration policy, that is wavering, inconsistent and often disregards human rights, is the main cause of border crisis and immigrants' tragedy. The situation reflects that the policy is deeply affected by extreme xenophobia. According to an article published by Washington Post on Aug. 22 last year, with domestic debates in the U.S. over immigration increasingly driven by racialized resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment and entangled with domestic political battles, U.S. policymakers are more inclined to use techniques like force and coercion when resettling refugees. According to another article on Washington Post published on Oct. 20 last year, more than 1.7 million immigrants were detained by the U.S. Border Patrol along the southern border during the 2021 fiscal year, soaring to the highest level since 1986. The U.S. government hopes to deter illegal border crossing through tough law enforcement, which has made it more difficult for illegal immigrants to enter the country, resulting in them being forced to cross more dangerous areas. The situation in turn creates a larger humanitarian crisis.
VI. ABUSE OF FORCE AND SANCTIONS VIOLATES HUMAN RIGHTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES
The U.S. has always pursued hegemonism, unilateralism and interventionism. The country frequently uses force, resulting in a large number of civilian casualties. Its abusive use of unilateral sanctions has caused humanitarian crises, challenging justice with hegemony, trampling on righteousness with self-interest, and wantonly violating human rights in other countries. It has become the biggest obstacle and destroyer of the sound development of the international human rights cause.
The website of USA Today commented on Aug. 26, 2021 that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was a total disaster. Tragedies like the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Vietnam show that Washington has a history of ignoring basic humanitarianism for its own selfish ends.
In the chaos at Kabul airport, a U.S. C-17 transport plane forcibly took off regardless of the safety of Afghan civilians, with someone crushed to death in wheel well while the plane retracting landing gear, and others falling to their deaths from the air.
Even in the last minutes of the frantic evacuation, U.S. army's air strikes caused heavy civilian casualties. However, the U.S. Defense Department publicly said that no U.S. military personnel would be punished for the deaths of civilians in drone strikes.
The U.S. war on terror has killed millions of people. Since the 21st century, the United States has launched a series of global foreign military operations in the name of anti-terrorism, resulting in nearly one million deaths. The website of USA Today reported on Feb. 25, 2021 that the so-called anti-terrorism war launched by the United States in the past 20 years has claimed the lives of more than 929,000 people, according to the "costs of war" study by Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs of Brown University. The 20-year U.S. military operations in Afghanistan have killed 174,000 people, including more than 30,000 civilians, and injured more than 60,000 people. The New York Times reported on Dec. 18, 2021 that investigation found that more than 50,000 U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan were reckless and poorly targeted, killing tens of thousands of civilians. The military has been concealing the number of casualties, and the actual number of civilian deaths is much higher than the military's published figures. The most obvious case is the U.S. airstrike on the Syrian hamlet of Tokhar in 2016. The military claimed that about seven to 24 civilians "intermixed with the fighters" might have died, but the U.S. military actually attacked private houses and more than 120 innocent civilians were killed.
The ongoing war and instability have made nearly a third of the Afghan population refugees. A total of 3.5 million Afghans have been displaced by the conflict, and nearly 23 million face extreme hunger, including 3.2 million children under the age of five. When the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, it immediately froze billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves at the Afghan central Bank, causing the Afghan economy to be on the brink of collapse and making life worse for the people. According to an assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program which was released November 2021, only 5 percent of Afghans receive enough food on a daily basis. The New York Times reported that U.S. national defense contractors were the real winners in the "war on terror" and that the United States' 20 years in Afghanistan "really built not a country but more than 500 military bases and the personal wealth of those who supplied them." Only about 12 percent of the reconstruction aid the United States provided from 2020 to 2021 actually went to the Afghan government, with most of the rest going to American companies like Lewis Berger. The Gulf Today website of the United Arab Emirates published an article titled "How the United States Destroyed Iraq" on Dec. 19, 2021, saying that inadequate food supply and inflation have left Iraqis chronically hungry. As a result of the damage to power plants and water treatment facilities caused by U.S. bombings, the number of people suffering from diarrhoeal diseases was four times higher than pre-war level. The lack of medicine and medical equipment has left Iraq's health system in crisis, with the poor, children, widows, the elderly and other most vulnerable groups suffering the most.
Unilateral sanctions affect negatively people of other countries. Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on Human Rights, highlighted the sanctions' devastating impact on all of Venezuela's population, as well as on their enjoyment of human rights. The U.S. sanctions on Iran's oil sector have resulted in Iran's inability to import sufficient medical supplies, affecting the Iranians' right to life and health. The U.S. embargoes against Syria have severely affected the Syrian people's enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights. On June 23, 2021, the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution for the 29th consecutive year to call on the United States to end embargo on Cuba and start dialogue to improve bilateral ties with the country. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said the United States continues to impose the embargo and sanctions against Cuba in the face of COVID-19, causing huge losses to the Cuban economy and society, and the Cuban people are suffering from the harm caused by this extremely inhumane act. Economic embargo is a massive, flagrant and unacceptable violation of the human rights of the Cuban people and "like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills, it must stop," he added.
The Guantanamo Bay prison has been the scene of repeated torture scandals. On Feb. 23, 2021, a group of 16 UN experts said many of the remaining detainees are vulnerable and now elderly individuals whose physical and mental integrity has been compromised by unending deprivation of freedom and related physical and psychological torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The experts, including the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, are part of the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. CBS News reported on Oct. 29, 2021 that the United States still holds 39 people at Guantanamo Bay. Majid Khan, a former detainee there, publicly revealed for the first time the torture he suffered, including being beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted, starved, and deprived of sleep. "I thought I was going to die," he said, "I would beg them to stop." He said he was suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning.
The independent panel of experts on human rights appointed by the UN Human Rights Council issued a statement on Jan. 10, 2022, saying that two decades of practicing arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment violates international human right laws, and is a "stain on the U.S. government's commitment to the rule of law." Despite forceful, repeated and unequivocal condemnation of the operation of this horrific detention and prison complex, the United States continues to detain persons many of whom have never been charged with any crime, the experts said. The experts urged the U.S. to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. They also called for reparations to be made for tortured and arbitrarily detained prisoners, and for those who authorized and engaged in torture to be held accountable, as required under international law. ■
