Among bilateral aid donors, the USA has led the way by bringing legislative amendments in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to link the provision of economic and military aid to human rights performance of aid-recipient governments (Apodaca, 2005). To this end, the USA Congress passed amendments in the 1970s to tie the allocation of aid to respect for human rights. The law dealing with the allocation of USA economic aid and human rights is known as
the Harkin Amendment and it prohibits the provision of economic aid to human rights violators. The amendment, Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which was signed into a law in 1974, states:
No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or de-grading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country (US Government, 2003, p. 59).
Similarly, a Congressional amendment, also known as the Humphrey-Cranston Amendment, was passed in 1974 that deals with the provision of USA military assistance and human rights. The amendment, known as Section 502B, stipulates:
Except under circumstances specified in this section, no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights (US Government, 2003, p. 230).
Thus, it is often argued that the USA took concrete steps in the form of these amendments which proclaim to cut off or restrict the provision of USA taxpayers’ money to human rights violators (Apodaca, 2005; Cmiel, 1999; Forsythe, 1987; Poe, 1991).
Since the introduction of the above Congressional amendments, there have been numerous studies that examined whether the USA has actually followed these policies. Most previous research indicates that due to its foreign policy compulsions, the USA has rarely implemented the legislation of cutting off aid to countries where there are well documented human rights abuses (Regan, 1995). In one of the first studies on the subject, Schoultz (1981) focused on the distribution of annual USA economic and military assistance to 23 Latin American countries in the 1970s. The author found that human rights did not play a significant role as “during the mid- 1970s United States aid was clearly distributed disproportionately to countries with repressive governments” (Schoultz, 1981, p. 167). Stohl, Carleton and Johnson (1984) examined the disbursement of USA economic and military assistance to 10 Latin American and 10 Asian and Middle Eastern countries (including Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt and Israel) during the regimes of President Nixon and President Ford. According to their findings, “under Presidents Nixon and Ford foreign assistance was directly related to levels of human rights violations, i.e. more aid flowed to regimes with higher levels of violation" (Stohl et al., 1984, p. 215). Similarly, during the tenures of President Carter and Regan, Carleton and Stohl (1985, p. 215) noted that there was mostly “a positive relationship between aid and human rights violations: the more abusive a state was, the more aid it received". They stated that "at no point during either administration does it appear from our analysis that human rights concerns
significantly influenced the distribution of United States foreign assistance, whether it be military or economic aid" (Carleton & Stohl, 1985, p. 218). In their most comprehensive study on the relationship between USA aid and human rights, Apodaca and Stohl (1999) have analysed USA aid to 140 countries from 1976 to 1995. Their study covers the tenures of President Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton and they found that “human rights concerns are not the only, nor the largest consideration” in the allocation of USA aid (1999, p. 193). The authors concluded that countries vital to USA foreign policy ambitions “receive aid regardless of their human rights records” (Apodaca & Stohl, 1999, p. 196). The overall existing evidence indicates that rather than punishing human rights violators, the USA has either ignored human rights abuses of the potential recipients (Blanton, 2000; Neier, 1996-1997; Poe, 1992) or allocated more economic and security assistance to strategic allies accused of gross human rights violations (Chomsky, 1978, 2003).
Focusing on historical as well as contemporary USA aid policies, the following analysis and discussion illustrate to what extent the USA has linked the provision of economic and military assistance to human rights performance of the four comparators. Table 4.5 and the corresponding Figure 4.6 shows the human rights record of Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey from 1976 to 2008. As discussed in Chapter Three, in the light of the Amnesty International (AI) and USA State Department annual reports, Freedom House (2010) codifies and ranks all countries on a scale of 1 to 5 on Political Terror Scale (PTS). This is the measurement of the personal integrity rights records of countries and it indicates to what extent the state or government violates physical integrity rights of its citizens by carrying out actions such as political imprisonment, disappearances, torture and extra-judicial killings (Gomez, 2007; Neumayer, 2003b). A score of 1 means that there is little or no violation of personal integrity rights while a score of 5 indicates gross human rights abuses including torture, political imprisonment, detention with or without trial, disappearances, brutality and political murder (McCan & Gibney, 1996). In terms of the PTS, the following ranking clearly shows that none of the comparators has a good record of human rights for most years. Rather than improving the human rights situation, the data reveals that the conditions have deteriorated since 1976. I will discuss each country one by one from the perspective of its human rights performance and whether it has any impacts on the availability and flow of USA aid.
Table 4.3: PTS averages of the comparators Year Egypt Israel Pakistan Turkey
1976 2 2.5 1 2.5 1977 2.5 2 3.5 2 1978 2.5 2.5 3 1.5 1979 2.5 1.5 3.5 2 1980 2 2 3 3.5 1981 3 2 3.5 3.5 1982 3 2 4 3.5 1983 3 2 3.5 3.5 1984 2.5 2.5 3 3 1985 2.5 2.5 3 3.5 1986 3 2.5 3 3.5 1987 2.5 2.5 3 3.5 1988 3 4 3 3.5 1989 3.5 4 3 3.5 1990 3 4 3.5 3.5 1991 3.5 4 3.5 4 1992 3 3.5 4 4.5 1993 4 3.5 3.5 4.5 1994 4 3.5 4 5 1995 4 3.5 4.5 4.5 1996 3.5 4 4 4 1997 4 3.5 3.5 3.5 1998 3 4 4 4 1999 3 4 4.5 4 2000 3 4 3.5 3.5 2001 3.5 4.5 4 4 2002 3.5 5 4 3.5 2003 3.5 4.5 4 3 2004 3.5 4.5 3.5 3 2005 3.5 4 4 3.5 2006 4 4 4 3.5 2007 3.5 4 4 4 2008 3.5 5 4 3.5
Political Terror Scale, based on Amnesty International and US State Department reports. Scales are from 1 (best) to 5 (worst).
Source: Author, based on Political Terror Scale (PTS) data from Freedom House (2010).
Egypt’s human rights performance and the disbursement of USA aid
The Freedom House data in Table 4.5 shows that like the other comparators, Egypt also has a dismal record concerning respect for human rights. From the Nasser era to the regime of recently ousted President Mubarak, there has rarely been a visible improvement in the human rights situation. Referring to the period of Nasser, Waterbury (1983) recalls that there were huge numbers of political arrests in the 1950s and 1960s. Groups like the Muslim Brethren (MB) and communists were the major targets as thousands of their members and representatives were arrested. In December 1968, more than 25,000 members of the MB were arrested in one day, most of them held in military jails (Waterbury, 1983). However, at that time the USA had no legislative amendments in place prohibiting the allocation of economic or military aid to human rights violators. Also, Egypt was in the communist bloc at that time and it was not a major recipient of USA aid. Therefore, the focus of this section will be on the period since the mid- 1970s when there was Congressional legislation tying USA aid to respect for human rights. Also, it was during these years that Egypt became a USA ally and hence one of the largest recipients of USA economic as well as military aid along with Israel.
Over the last four decades, Egypt has had two presidents - Anwar Sadat (1970-1981) and Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011) - and there were serious human rights violations during both the regimes. According to Waterbury (1983, p. 355), “Sadat imposed such severe restrictions on all forms of political activity that he seemed to have reverted to the Nasserist style he nominally abhorred”. In a massive wave of arrests that Sadat ordered in September 1981, noted men and women of
1 2 3 4 5 (PT S av erage) Years
Egypt Israel Pakistan Turkey
the elite, from the law, journalism, the universities as well as former ministers were arrested (Ajami, 1995). The Freedom House data shows that Egypt regularly scored more than four during these years, which is an indicator of worse human rights situation. On the other hand, it is evident from the USAID data in Table 4.1 that the USA was allocating about US $2 billion in economic aid and an equal amount in military assistance annually to Egypt during this period (See Appendix II for military aid). It shows the USA was not concerned with political freedom and human rights abuses in terms of the allocation of foreign assistance. Rather, it can be argued that the highhandedness of Sadat’s regime was an indirect appeasement of the US, as most of those arrested were Islamists opposing the government pro-USA policies.
More or less the same status of human rights violations continued during the Mubarak regime. Data in Table 4.5 shows that apart from three years in the mid-1980s, Egypt regularly scored more than three, indicating gross human rights violations. After the assassination of Sadat in 1981, a state of emergency was declared and since then the government kept on renewing it every year (Kienle, 2001). In 1994, the state of emergency was renewed for three years and the same decision was repeated in 1997 and then again in 2000. Highlighting the authoritarianism of the regime, Alterman (2000) points out that between 1989-1997, 17,000 Islamists were arrested and tried in military courts without charges.
In recent years, the situation further deteriorated particularly with the advent of the USA-led ‘war on terror’. Despite the fact that the government had promised in 2005 to end the state of emergency, President Mubarak renewed Law No. 162 of 1958 in May 2010 (Human Rights Watch, 2011). The AI (2008 ; 2009) annual reports highlight the current state of human rights violations in Egypt. These reports state that there are unfair trials before military and special emergency courts. They add that around 18,000 detainees, held on the orders of the interior ministry, are in prisons in degrading and inhumane conditions. The State Security Investigations (SSI) arrested those accused of membership in Islamic groups and also ‘disappeared’ young political activists for several days. The 2011 Human Rights Watch report narrates that the SSI officials seem to have ‘disappeared’ more political detainees in 2010 than in the previous years. Besides this, there are issues like lack of transparency in the judicial system, freedom of expression, violence against women and minority groups and unfair trials before military courts. It was reported that “the year 2010 saw increases in the number of trials of civilians before military courts and in reliance on special courts that do not meet fair trial standards” (Human Rights Watch, 2011, p. 517).
Despite serious human rights violations by Egyptian authorities, the USA has channeled substantial economic and security assistance to Egypt for decades. Although USA economic assistance to Egypt has been gradually declining since the mid-1980s, this is not because of the human rights. Regarding the USA attitude of turning a blind eye to human rights and other issues related to governance, Cook (2000) points out that the USA sees in Egypt only what it wants to see and ignores the rest. Referring to this double standard and selective approach,
Yefet-Avshalom and Roniger (2006) draw attention to the fact that the USA and Europe did not come out to the defence of those detainees who were tried in military courts under emergency laws but came to the support of Saad al-Din Ibrahim, a professor at American University of Cairo who was charged with defaming Egypt. The authors assert this issue once again proves the double standards in the Western view of human rights. In the case of close strategic allies, the USA overlooks all such issues and continues to extend its support in the form of foreign aid. The preceding discussion illustrates that the USA does not take into account issues related to human rights while allocating aid to its close allies such as Egypt.