Sichan Siv
This just in from Reuters:
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Sudan won an uncontested election Tuesday to the United Nations’ main human rights watchdog, prompting the United States to walk out because of alleged ethnic cleansing in the country’s Darfur region.
Alleged, eh?
Sudan’s envoy immediately shot back that the U.S. delegation was “shedding crocodile tears,” and he accused the United States of turning a blind eye as Iraqi prisoners were mistreated and civilians were harmed in battle. …
Sichan Siv, the U.S. delegate to the council, accused Sudan of having no right to sit on the rights commission because of ethnic cleansing in Darfur where the government is accused of backing Arab militia in pillaging black Africa villages, raping and killing.
“The United States will not participate in this absurdity,” Siv said. “Our delegation will absent itself from the meeting rather than lend support to Sudan’s candidacy,” he said before briefly walking out of council chambers.
He had done the same a year ago when Cuba won a seat on the commission.
Sudan’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Omar Bashir Mohamed Manis, said the United States had no right to accuse anyone of human rights violations, after allegations of abuses in Iraq including mistreatment of Iraqis held in U.S.-run prisons
Images of the Iraqi prisoners “are fresh in the minds of all justice-loving people around the world,” he said.
The U.S. military is conducting an investigation into the prisoner abuse scandal after news reports and photos broadcast by CBS last week showed Iraqis stripped naked and tormented by U.S. captors.
Manis also referred to Iraqi civilian casualties during a recent siege in Falluja. “This (U.S.) delegation is turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the American forces against the innocent civilian population in Iraq, including women and children,” he said,
The world is in a bad state when abuses by American soldiers in Iraq, which will be thoroughly investigated and punished, are seriously offered as worse than jihad genocide and slavery in Sudan, which was never a concern of the Khartoum government. Here is just one of thousands of examples.