Category Archives: Thoughts from the Interns

Human Rights Internet and China

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Lulu Peng is a graduate student in the Communications Department at the University of Connecticut.  She interned at the Archives & Special Collections in the fall of 2014.  Her project utilized her skills in Mandarin Chinese to identify and describe content on China in the Laurie S. Wiseberg and Harry Scoble Human Rights Internet Collection.

The Collection is so extensive and to some extent, invaluable in that it records the human rights predicament and movements in different corners of the world. The correspondence, flyers, reports and publications altogether sketch a unique part of the human rights history. These materials, dating back to the late 70s, 80s and the early 90s, demonstrate each aspect of human rights struggle, against death penalty, extrajudicial execution, violence towards minorities, gender inequalities and so on. It is intriguing to observe the encounter of the essentially obscure history and the honest pieces that compose it, as shown in the letters written by the former Vice President of Taiwan, Lu Hsiu-lien to Laurie Wiseberg, and the letters to the Human Rights Internet (HRI) concerning the June Fourth Incident in Beijing 1989, for instance.

-Lulu Peng

Correspondance, Box 61Correspondance Box 61

Foreshadowed warnings and Unlikely Alliances

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American foreign policy in the Middle East has long been characterized by uneasy alliances with unlikely partners.  For the last decade, our partners in the region have provided important support to American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, as the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq come to a close many academics are beginning to question whether certain alliances have been as helpful as many believe. In particular, American support for Saudi Arabia has been unwavering since the 2001 attacks despite the majority of the hijackers’ involved being Saudi nationals.  When compared with the human rights record of Saudi Arabia in basic legal proceedings one begins to question why American foreign policy personnel believe this relationship is beneficial for American image abroad.

In 1996 there was a terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers, a popular apartment building used by foreign military personnel in Khobar Saudi Arabia. Nineteen of those killed were American airmen. In response to this an open letter was written by Chandra Muzaffar (1996), Lessons from the blast: Opposition to US Alliance is strong within the kingdoms middle class.  The letter is very concise but provides an extreme amount of foresight into the future problems with United States involvement in the region. Firstly, it points out that the King of Saudi Arabia is considered the custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and because US policy seems to dictate much of the royal families’ actions many are beginning to view the United States as ‘the custodian of the custodian’. Information obtained from the 9/11 Commission report has indicated that many of the hijackers from Saudi Arabia were indeed middle class well- educated persons.

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Sugar and Strife: the Dominican Republic and Caribbean Policies in the 20th Century

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United States intervention across the South American continent largely took the form of an ideological proxy war with the Soviet Union. While these military and political conflicts varied in intensity and scope, it could be argued that U.S. engagement was never for the sake of any direct threat to national security. The same, however, cannot be said for the policies employed for the island nations of the Caribbean. While the government had the luxury of forming policy thousands of miles away, the internal affairs of nations such as Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the U.S. coast, were of large import. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had made the security concerns of the Caribbean more salient to both the American public and actors in Washington D.C.

The island nation of Cuba has long been a geopolitical thorn in the side of the United States. As a Spanish colony, Cuba represented a threat to the established “Monroe Doctrine” of western supremacy, and even as Spanish influence waned the American government sought to control the nation through economic and political actions. Following the Revolution of 1959, Fidel Castro assumed power, relations between the two nations deteriorated as his Regime aligned itself with the Soviet Union. In return for economic aid and political support, the island became a strategic position for Soviet military resources, with the Cuban army often acting as a paramilitary group in the proxy wars in South America that I have focused on in my previous posts. U.S. policies regarding Cuba underscored the need for intervention across the Caribbean in order to protect regional security interests.

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U.S. Operations in Bolivia: A Paradox of Policy

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As was the case with the majority of the geopolitical proxy wars of the mid- to late-20th century, the case study of U.S. operations in Latin America throughout the cold war largely resemble neo-colonialism. This was the argument employed by Lawrence Whitehead (1969), a renowned scholar of Latin American democratization, who identified U.S.-Bolivian relations as a pure example of such; where the U.S. suborned the local regimes to protect its economic, ideological and national security interests through material aid. Such aid was used to keep sympathetic regimes in power and, further, the threat of curtailing this aid was a well-used manipulative tool that allowed the U.S. to bring regimes to heel.

In the particular instance of Bolivia, the economic and political factors underpinning U.S. operations were two-fold. For one, the nation was home to a considerable quantity of exportable tin that came to surpass silver as its most valuable commodity during World War II. However, it was the political turmoil that gripped Bolivia in the wake of the war that made it of significant concern to the U.S. government. Following a disputed election in 1951, in which the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) was denied victory, the group launched a successful revolution in April 1952. A large motivator of this was the abject socioeconomic conditions to be found in Bolivia after generations of laissez-faire government policies and exploitative capitalism. The severe inability for the MNR to combat these issues was seen as an opening for the spread of socialism, thus Bolivia became embroiled in the Cold War power dynamics of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Continue reading →

Differing Views on Zionism

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This week’s blog post will mainly focus on differing views of Zionism from within Israel and critics abroad. By contemporary standards, discussing the roots of Zionist ideology is rarely mentioned in the press. Furthermore, many politicians fear discourse that would anger Israeli leaders because US involvement in the region has grown in the past decade. Republicans and Democrats alike have long endorsed Israel, our ally, as a bastion of democracy and freedom in the Middle East.  The first piece examined for this week’s post was The Zionist State and Jewish Identity: a critique produced by the Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee Abroad (1973). This provides a critique of the ideological, cultural, and psychological aspects of Political Zionism. All articles have been written by Israelis who have been struggling against Zionism. image 4

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U.S. Political Leadership & El Salvadorian Policy

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Michael Piersall is a senior undergraduate student in Political Science and Human Rights minor. In his blog series, he will study materials available in the Dodd Research Center’s collections to explore American Political Leadership with regards to Cold War activities in Latin America.

As a Political Science major, my academic focus often centers on the decision making process behind government action. As an “American-ist” more specifically, my interest lies in the deliberation and processes of the federal institutions that comprise the United States government. This semester, I have been given the privilege to examine materials in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center that relate to U.S. governmental actions precipitated by its political hegemony, specifically in Latin America. While these materials are in no way restricted from public access, I deem this a privilege because I am, above all else, a current-affairs wonk; I prefer analyzing events through their perception in contemporary contexts than an isometric historical glance that one can find on, for instance, Wikipedia. Further, my academic orientation towards Human Rights, specifically political and economic rights has provided a lens for additional analysis of the international consequences of U.S. actions.

To that end, I have spent the last few weeks reviewing several documents from the Human Rights Collections that pertain to the U.S. covert operations of the late-1970’s and 1980’s in El Salvador. This assertion of U.S. hegemony is an example of its late 20th Century brand of foreign intervention. Beginning under President Carter, and dramatically expanded under Reagan, this incursion into the domestic affairs took the form of economic, political, and covert wars. Robert Armstrong and Phillip Wheaton, left-leaning journalists for Solidarity Publications, define the two political camps advocating for intervention in El Salvador as either the “Militarists”, bureaucrats in the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and other such institutions, and the “Reformists” in offices such as Agency for International Development or the quasi-public American Institute for Free Labor Development, which was created in concert with the AFL-CIO and the funding of the U.S. federal government.

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Beyond Arms: Mercenaries and Foreign Involvement in the Middle East during the 1970’s

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      I am a senior Political Science Major, with minors in history and human rights. I initially chose my internship with the Dodd Archives because of its unique holdings. Most famously, the Nuremburg Trial Papers have been examined by many scholars for the fundamental groundwork they laid for human rights advocates. As one of the youngest members of the millennial generation and one of the last children to remember watching the 9/11 attacks on television I feel a certain draw towards researching the Middle East. Furthermore, my involvement with the human rights program at the university has given me a distinctive outlook on international foreign involvement in the Middle East. The Arab Spring began while I was in my first year of undergraduate studies, and has continued to make headlines since. As a historian and political scientist I have noticed that the American population seems to have a short-term memory when it comes to American involvement abroad. I will attempt to remedy this phenomenon through my posts by concentrating on linking historical to contemporary international involvement in the region.

The Arms Trade of the Middle East: A Primer, by Howard H. Frederick

The Arms Trade of the Middle East: A Primer, by Howard H. Frederick

         Towards the end of the 1970’s the Middle East was going through a transformative period. This transformation was facilitated principally by the unrestricted and indiscriminate selling of weapons from the United States and NATO allies and USSR into the region. The Arms Trade of the Middle East: A Primer, by Howard H. Frederick published in 1977 extensively details the arms trade between Western and Soviet regimes to the authoritarian monarchs of the Middle East.

        The underlying problem with the arms trade outlined by Frederick in the periodical is the military industrial complex in place during the Cold War produced a need for selling American weapons around the world to benefit domestic defense contractors. One candid figure quoted by Frederick estimated the sale of one jet fighter earns back more dollars than the sale of one thousand automobiles. However, once weapons are sold to allies or enemies alike they become commodities on the world market. The following excerpt illustrates the totalizing system of the global commodity arms exchange:

Jordan sold American fighter aircraft and defense systems as well as British tanks to South Africa. British arms bought in New Zealand are being used by Irish Republican Army against British soldiers. US arms left over from Vietnam were sold at a Bangkok auction to a French dealer who in turn sold them to the rightist militias in Lebanon. US arms sold to Israel were used by Lebanese rightwing militias.

        -Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 1976

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The 2009 Metanoia: PREVENT Violence Against Women

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This post is the first of a series  which will be written by interns working with the Human Rights Collections here at the Dodd Research Center.

 

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About 40 years ago, a concept meaning ‘change of attitude,’ was first introduced to the body of the University of Connecticut: Metanoia.  Nine years later, in 1979, a day of Metanoia was called by the University students in the name of “Violence in the Community.”  It was a conscientious response of the community to both the brutal sexual assault of a graduate student and incidents of racist violence on campus.

After experiencing multiple sexual assaults in the community last year, students, once again, called for the Metanoia. It is not just another chance to learn more about violence against women, but to critically reflect on; actively engage in dialogue about; and ultimately to prevent it. Since the 1979 Metanoia, many meaningful programs and services have been created in our community to intervene violence against women. As we look back on past thirty years, intervention alone is not enough. The 2009 Metanoia challenges us as a community to delve into and prevent violence against women.

To echo the purpose of the 2009 Metanoia, a subject guide on human rights publications and unpublished manuscript mateirals on violence against women at the Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections at the Dodd Research Center will soon be available for teaching and learning on the UConn Libraries website. I will also create a weekly blog post to update my discoveries on relevant materials.

The 2009 Metanoia will be held on the week of October 4th. It includes keynote speakers, panel discussions, in-class activities, arts, poetry, films, student co-curricular activities, and more, in collaboration with all UConn regional campuses, the Schools of Social Work, Law, and Medicine.

For more information, please visit www.metanoia.uconn.edu.

Hoin
Human Rights Intern