HRW: West chose dictators over people

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has lashed out at Western governments for their supporting autocratic rulers in the Arab world, despite the politicians’ repressive methods of governance.

Many Western governments “have allowed their ties with repressive allies to temper their support for human rights in the Arab Spring protests,” said the New York-based rights group in its 2012 annual report, which was released in the Egyptian capital Cairo on Sunday.

A wave of anti-government popular uprisings that promptly became known as Islamic Awakening has been underway in the Middle East and North Africa since late 2010. The protests have managed to overthrow some age-old dictatorships in the region.

Commenting on the need to back these protests, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth noted that revolutionaries “deserve strong international support to realize their rights and to build genuine democracies. Loyalty to autocratic friends shouldn’t stand in the way of siding with democratic reformers.”

The HRW official criticized the Western governments’ biased stance towards the Islamic revolutions, which, according to the rights group, is usually justified by the states’ claim to be trying to maintain ‘stability’ in the region.

The Arab revolutions have seen once-suppressed Islamic groups rising on the political scene.

Islamic parties are ‘genuinely popular’ in the Arab world, Roth added, warning that “ignoring that popularity would violate democratic principles.”

“Being a political Islamic government should not be a reason to turn a government into a pariah,” he noted.

Since the outset of Islamic Awakening, Western powers, including the US and UK, have spared no effort to keep their despotic allies in the Arab world in power by adopting policies aimed at thwarting the revolutions.

“The West backed an array of autocrats as long as they, in turn, supported Western interests,” Roth said.