An admission of guilt

It is not often that we hear high-ranking Washington officials pleading mea culpa. But U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did just that during an address to university students in Atlanta when she accepted Washington's collective guilt for having supported Latin American dictators in the past.

Other countries, especially Third World nations, condemned by Washington for their human rights records, have countered by accusing the United States of adopting double standards. While pressing for the improvement of human rights by some countries, Washington has, at the same time, backed autocrats in Latin America and elsewhere, whose own records on the subject have been equally bad, if not perceptibly worse.

These countercharges have often been dismissed as excuses offered by Third World nations for not bettering human rights in their own countries. Now Ms. Albright's confession that the United States made "terrible mistakes" by backing Latin dictators serves as sufficient corroboration, if such proof was ever needed.

The usually tough and outspoken Ms. Albright was far from justifying Washington's foreign policy errors when she offered a rationale for the course the U.S. chartered in its own backyard. In the name of anti-communism, the U.S. had backed right-wing dictators in Latin America, one of them being Chile's Augusto Pinochet, now detained in London awaiting the settlement of an extradition application against him. At least we have had one highly placed official admit to terrible policy mistakes.

Unfortunately such mistakes have been made at enormous cost both in terms of lives and the nurturing of democracy. It is difficult for the United States to atone verbally for these mistakes without sounding hypocritical. If Washington is to be taken seriously, it must at least release quickly all documents and reports relating to the times so that even at this late stage, dictators like Augusto Pinochet who have committed crimes against humanity might be brought to justice, somewhere, somehow.

-- The Hong Kong Standard