In late May in Kramatorsk, the administrative capital of the war-torn Donetsk oblast in Ukraine, an angry fight is developing in the shared kitchen of the Hotel Gut.
Donatella Rovera, a 50-year-old Amnesty International staffer who just came (with a small entourage) to produce a report on war crimes, is at the center of the group.
She had fallen out spectacularly with a group of Western journalists who are covering events 20 miles distant on the front lines. They are concerned about the precise nature of the’report’ that Rovera, an Islingtonian with fiery hair, would produce.
Members of Hotel Gut’s resident Press corps are convinced that she intends to use Amnesty’s pulpit to suggest that the real villains in this ugly conflict are not only Vladimir Putin’s invading army, which is raping and pillaging its way across the region, but also the Ukrainian troops attempting to stop them.
Why so? Well, Rovera continues to bemoan the fact that Ukrainian forces are seeking sanctuary from continuous bombardments at a nearby abandoned college building. She seems to believe that this endangers people and so constitutes a war crime. Others disagree.
The voices begin to rise.
Tom Mutch, a New Zealand war journalist who was present in the May fight, remembers that she repeatedly stated that placing forces in a civilian area breaches international humanitarian standards. “This is just not the case. But when others attempted to explain why, she refused to acknowledge that she may be mistaken.
Strangely, Rovera maintained that the Geneva Convention requires Ukraine to shift its forces from metropolitan centers (which Russia is attempting to capture) to surrounding “forested regions.”
Caleb Larson, a U.S. journalist, said, “She seemed to have no understanding of how combat works or how rules are enforced.” “This is not the 18th century, when armies would meet on an open plain and face one another.” I could not imagine someone from Amnesty would release such information. As hostilities increased, according to Larson, Rovera exhibited “the most amazing ego” along with great ignorance, at one point seeming to mistake the sound of mortar fire for that of heavy artillery. ‘ She then began lecturing the security personnel of a journalistic organization, who had served in the French Foreign Legion and Royal Marines, on how she was more informed since she had traveled to more war zones than they had. It was quite condescending.
Neil Hauer, a third witness from Canada, decided that Rovera traveled to Donetsk with the goal of writing a report critical of Ukraine.
According to him, it was evident from their chats that she had an agenda. It was really a sight to witness. Unreproducible levels of disdain, conceit, and arrogance’
Two months later, these worries have been fully realized. Amnesty released the conclusions of Rovera’s visit to Kramatorsk in a “extended press release” with much hoopla on August 4.
It made the startling accusation that Ukraine knowingly placed people in danger by building bases and operating military systems in densely populated residential areas, including schools and hospitals.
The disreputable paper, which in essence accused a government attempting to fight an invading army of using civilians as human shields, said that such military tactics “break international humanitarian law.”
Further, Ukraine was accused of neglecting to evacuate citizens from several metropolitan locations.
The allegations seem to be false in a number of fundamental factual matters. Nonetheless, its vile anti-Western posturing was unsurprisingly applauded to the rafters by the Kremlin, with diplomats waving the report at a United Nations conference and the Russian Mission in Geneva suggesting on Twitter that the ‘findings’ justified the bombing of cities.
They added, “When a civilian residence is exploited for military reasons, it becomes a lawful target for a precision attack.”
Amnesty is receiving widespread requests to withdraw the report and provide an apology, so it’s no surprise that a massive political controversy is already escalating.
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, accused the human rights organization of seeking to “transfer blame to the victim,” while the foreign minister of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba, said that Rovera’s study “distorts facts and bolsters Russia’s misinformation operations.”
In the meantime, the head of Amnesty’s Ukraine branch, Oksana Pokalchuk, has resigned in disgust, accusing senior management of an abject failure to take ‘proper steps to protect the interests of the people for whom the organization works and the entire human rights movement’ and describing the report as a ‘tool for Russian propaganda’
Protests have occurred at Amnesty’s headquarters in Prague, while at least sixty members have quit in Norway. The Canadian branch released a statement last night stating that the report’s writers “failed on several fronts.”
Per Wastberg, who co-founded Swedish Amnesty in 1963 and was a member of the Nobel literature committee, has also quit, stating, “I have been a member for nearly six decades.” Due to Amnesty’s views supporting the war in Ukraine, I am terminating a long and successful partnership with regret.’
Multiple legal experts have argued that the core assumption of Amnesty’s study, namely that Ukraine violates international law, is factually inaccurate.
According to an addition to the Geneva Convention from 1977, they note, participants to a war are required to protect civilians. Nevertheless, the statute says that they are only required to comply “to the greatest degree conceivable” given the wartime circumstances.
Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, is one of the authorities that cite this significant fact. Last week, he said that Amnesty’s study “demonstrates a lack of comprehension of the rules of armed conflict.”
Marc Garlasco, a United Nations war crimes investigator specializing in mitigating civilian suffering, tells me Amnesty “got the law wrong” and explains: “Ukraine is allowed to station soldiers in places it is defending, particularly in urban combat.” There is no universal restriction. [Amnesty International] has committed a grave mistake.
Dmytro Koval, a legal expert from Truth Hounds, a non-governmental organization that investigates war crimes, says, ‘International law really provides a variety of possibilities for the placement of military personnel in urban areas. Clearly, this report will encourage the Russian military to launch attacks on civilian targets. It will result in the death of people.’ And so on.
Amnesty did not answer to the Daily Mail’s request for a response to these and other accusations, as well as identification of the precise statute it thought Ukraine to have violated.
In reality, it seems unable to locate a legal expert to back its position. A spokeswoman said, “Our study focused not on the frontlines or urban conflict, but rather on sites kilometers distant from the fighting where the military had alternate alternatives.”
The organization’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, is busy shooting the messenger despite demands for her resignation.
She published a statement in which she arrogantly accused’social media mobs and trolls’ of harming the work of Amnesty.
It is an unusual and extremely disrespectful way to characterize the several legal experts who have deemed the report shoddy and erroneous, as well as the perfectly honorable Amnesty supporters and staff who are quitting in protest.
However, this is not the first time in recent months that Callamard’s organization has defended the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian dissident who is arguably the world’s most famous political prisoner, was stripped of his status as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in February, following a coordinated campaign by pro-Russian trolls pointing out that he had made racist and homophobic remarks in the past.
It took Amnesty three months to conduct a bashful U-turn.
According to several commentators, the Navalny incident highlighted how wokeness and cancel culture are eroding liberal institutions in the present day. To others, it revealed the Kremlin’s ongoing capacity to weaponize the useful fools of the Left, who run Amnesty and almost every other organization of its kind today. So how did we get here? What caused a once-respected champion of human rights to become a propagandist for Vladimir Putin?
In reality, this catastrophe has been in the works for decades. For Amnesty’s slide into what one critic termed “moral bankruptcy” last week can be traced back to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Peter Benenson, a London lawyer, reportedly created the organization in 1961 to aid “prisoners of conscience” after reading a Sunday newspaper article about two Portuguese students who had been imprisoned for seven years for lifting a glass to freedom.
He intended to establish a network of letter-writers who would flood governments with requests on behalf of those imprisoned or mistreated due to their political or religious beliefs.
Amnesty, whose emblem was a candle encircled by barbed wire because “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” soon established chapters throughout the globe. Local chapters were supposed to sponsor three political prisoners, one from a NATO member, one from a nation in the Warsaw Pact, and one from the Third World.
However, the end of the Cold War resulted in a huge fall in the number of imprisoned dissidents, and Amnesty, like many other non-profit organizations, spent the Blair period attempting to fill the void by supporting a diverse variety of broader concerns. Many of which have absolutely nothing to do with its initial mandate. All were socialists.
In the twenty-first century, for instance, it started advocating against the death penalty and in favor of abortion. In 2011, Amnesty International also declared war on poverty. It supported the legalization of prostitution in 2015 (to the dismay of anti-trafficking campaigners, including actress Meryl Streep).
Today, it lobbies on an assortment of trendy topics, including climate change, the weapons business, police brutality, corporal punishment, and the expulsion of migrants.
Its yearly report on human rights crimes throughout the globe now shows a peculiar, though maybe cruelly inevitable, animosity towards the West. It devotes three pages to documenting human rights breaches in the United Kingdom, but just two pages to the situation in North Korea, perhaps the most restrictive government in the world. The United States receives six pages, while the head-choppers of Saudi Arabia get just four and socialist Cuba receives only two.
The Amnesty brand is nevertheless very profitable, with 10 million supporters yearly contributing £300 million to its coffers. In the most recent year for which data is available, it had 544 workers, including 288 in the United Kingdom, with 158 earning more than £60,000 and 17 earning six-figure wages. The secretary general got $223,791 in compensation.
The United Kingdom’s top posts have been held by the Left for decades. Kate Allen, a former Labour councillor and Ken Livingstone’s companion for twenty years, served as its director from 2000 until last year.
And sometimes, Amnesty’s uncritical acceptance of Leftist causes has resulted in severe PR issues. In 2010, Amnesty terminated Gita Sahgal, the director of its women’s rights section, after she criticized the organization’s support for Cage, an Islamist advocacy group established by Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner she termed “Britain’s most prominent Taliban supporter.” In recent years, Amnesty International’s support for Julian Assange has been criticized (a man accused of rape).
Meanwhile, others were upset by a weird PR statement published in reaction to limitations on abortion in the U.S. earlier this year, which claimed: ‘Not only women may get pregnant. It is women, girls, and the millions of others who are capable of becoming pregnant.’
Perhaps its most problematic area of activity has been the Middle East, where it has been regularly accused of Corbyn-like antisemitism due to its apparent hatred against Israel.
Jewish Human Rights Watch produced a 200-page study in 2019 that accused it of a “obsession” with Israel that was “obviously motivated by an unnatural prejudice, intense animosity, and antisemitism.”
The report was released after Amnesty erroneously accused Israel of launching rockets at a Palestinian human rights organization (in fact, it had been accidentally hit by Islamic militants).
The document detailed the social media activity of employees working in the region and argued that Amnesty’s 2002 abolition of a long-standing rule prohibiting staff from working in their home countries meant that the organization’s ranks were now dominated by activists, many of whom were hopelessly biased.
In this regard, it was shown that Amnesty’s “researcher” on Lebanon, Sahar Mandour, had lately tweeted, “F*** Israel; long live Palestine!”
Elsewhere, Amnesty’s ‘communications manager’ for the Middle East, Nadine Moawad, demanded ‘the complete dissolution of the Israeli State,’ and a former Amnesty’research consultant,’ Hind Khoudary, circulated a tweet praising Islamic militants as’martyrs,’ stating ‘there is nothing better than to enter paradise with a machine gun on your shoulder.’
In 2012, then-campaigns manager Kristyan Benedict tweeted about three Jewish MPs: “Louise Ellman, Robert Halfon, and Luciana Berger stroll into a pub. Each orders a round of B52s [long-range bomber planes] #Gaza.”
Although the position was generally seen as anti-Semitic, he was later elevated to crisis response manager.
In a study published six months ago, Amnesty International once again courted controversy by labeling Israel a “apartheid state.” As was the case with the group’s more recent work on Ukraine, several of its own employees deemed the paper to be replete with inaccuracies.
A local executive director, Molly Malekar, characterized it as a “blow in the stomach,” while a senior colleague, Yariv Mohar, was “shocked and enraged” by it.
Now, of course, Amnesty, the ostensible champion of human rights, is accused of releasing similarly poor and reckless work that enhances Vladimir Putin’s reputation, a guy whose soldiers are actively committing genocide.
A few weeks ago, while debate flared over allegations of Ukrainian ‘war crimes,’ the aforementioned Donatella Rovera featured as a ‘expert witness’ in a CBS broadcast in which it was erroneously said that just 30 percent of Western-donated weaponry were reaching the front lines.
She lamented, “We have no means of knowing where these weapons go.” In actuality, the 30% number was inaccurate, and the broadcaster was obliged to retract it.
A couple of weeks earlier, Rovera tweeted a line that could have been lifted from the Kremlin’s PR playbook — not to mention that of hard-Left extremists Stop The War — in which he complained that “taxpayers in Europe, the United States, and other countries” are now “paying hundreds of billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid while western companies profit.”
Again, Mr. Putin was undoubtedly approvingly nodding his head. Thus, a once-noble organization established to counter the excesses of totalitarian nations has been reduced to parroting their perverted rhetoric.