State Instability and Human Rights Abuses

The Contemporary World and Ongoing Challenges HIST 1301 | History State Instability and Human Rights Abuses Numerous migrants reaching the southern border of the United States are escaping political and economic unrest in their countries of origin. This trend dates back several decades. For instance, thousands of Salvadorans, particularly during and after the El Salvador Civil War, have immigrated to the United States every year. The United States, which concerned that extreme leftist factions in El Salvador were destabilising the nation and taking it in a path against U.S. Cold conflict objectives, sponsored a military coup that started that conflict in 1979. The United States had sought to restore stability to El Salvador by providing financial backing, military training, and intelligence sharing for the coup, but the reverse happened. Many in El Salvador organised rallies and acts of resistance because they believed the military regime was unconstitutional. In response, the military reacted violently as well, attacking protestors fatally in 1980, for example. In the countryside, there existed right-wing paramilitary groups known as "death squads" that engaged in combat with left-wing guerrilla groups, carrying out acts of violence like as killings and massacres. Many fled the nation as it fell into turmoil, seeking safety in the United States. About 2.5 million immigrants live here as of right now. Human rights violations and an upsurge in migration to the United States have also resulted from a similar pattern of civil conflict and instability in other countries of Central America. For instance, during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), many Guatemalans were the victims of abuses of their human rights. Among these was a government-led campaign of murder and terrorism against ethnic Mayans and peasants who were thought to be aiding Marxist guerrilla organisations. Since the 1960s, destabilisation has also occurred in Nicaragua. Up until the late 1970s, the Somoza family regime was opposed by leftist guerrilla groups. The Sandinistas, one of the main Marxist factions, then came to power in 1979. The Sandinistas were socialists who, in a matter of months, established diplomatic ties and then accepted financial and military support from the Soviet Union. The United States was frightened by this move and decided to back opposition to the Sandinista administration, which fueled more bloodshed and numerous violations of human rights on both sides.While there has been less violence in Central America in recent decades, it still exists in other places. The United States has accused Venezuela, which has been essentially a one-party state since 2007, of several violations of human rights. These include killings, incarceration, torture, and government-sponsored armed organisations that use force against demonstrators. Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Cuba, and Ecuador's government have all been accused of similar things. During Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973–1990), the Chilean government violated the rights of its citizens on several occasions. These included abusing leftist political opponents sexually and torturing and killing them. Human rights organisations assert that after Pinochet's passing, violations persist, especially targeting Indigenous communities and LGBTQ+ individuals. In most of Africa, authoritarian governments continue to violate human rights in comparable ways. About 800,000 people lost their lives in Rwanda between April and July 1994 when an estimated 200,000 members of the Hutu majority attempted to exterminate the minority Tutsi population and any Hutus who attempted to defend them. Numerous human rights breaches have also resulted from armed conflicts in nations including Somalia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia. Terrorist Islamic groups have killed people on purpose and massacred civilians in several nations. These include the assaults carried out in the past several years that have claimed hundreds of lives, including those by Boko Haram, the Islamic State in West Africa, and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. These nations' governments have retaliated by committing crimes of their own. For instance, in 2021, fourteen people were killed when government forces in the Central African Republic raided a mosque. African governments have a history of using force to quell anti-government demonstrations. For instance, in 2021, government troops in the tiny nation of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), in southern Africa, broke up a pro-democracy demonstration, killing eighty and injured over two hundred. Many more people who opposed Mswati III's government in Eswatini were taken into custody. fifty-three individuals died in Sudan that year as a result of similar measures against demonstrators. Furthermore, protesters, whistleblowers, and journalists who have questioned government policies have faced lengthy prison terms or even death as a result of various government atrocities throughout the continent. Asia's Burma and China provide as examples of how strong racial and religious biases against minorities can lead to abuses of human rights. The Rohingya community, a Muslim minority residing in mostly Buddhist Myanmar, has endured decades of subjugation, culminating in their formal denial of citizenship in 1982. They have historically been at risk of violence since they are a small minority and are viewed with distrust by the majority of Buddhists. When violence against the Rohingya increased sharply in 2017, almost 700,000 of them fled to Bangladesh, a neighbouring country. There were still about a million Rohingya people residing in sizable camps for refugees as of 2022. The treatment of China's Uyghur ethnic group is another instance of state-sponsored maltreatment. Located in northwest Xinjiang, the Uyghurs are an ethnic group of Turkic descent, predominantly Muslim, and number roughly eleven million. They have been suppressed by the Chinese government for decades on the grounds that many of them have radical notions of creating their own Islamic state, which China sees as a danger to its sovereignty. Chinese strategy has been to crush separatist groups and force the Uyghurs to more fully adapt their religious beliefs to the nationalist narrative of the state. China has been rounding up hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and putting them in what it refers to as vocational training centres since at least 2017. Human rights organisations, however, have characterised these as reeducation camps with the goal of forcing the Uyghurs to convert from Islam to Chinese citizenship. The state controls information and denies that abuse takes place in the several camps, therefore very little is known about them. When there is instability or when nations support discrimination against minorities, women and girls are frequently the ones who suffer the most harm. Women from both the Rohingya and Uyghur communities have reported experiences of sexual assault committed by or with implicit governmental consent. The raid on a Nigerian high school by the Islamic terrorist organisation Boko Haram in 2014, which resulted in the kidnapping of 276 mainly Christian female students—many of whom were forced into marriages with Boko Haram members or sold into sexual slavery—was denounced by the international community. The survivors have spoken of torture, beatings, and sexual attacks. Although First Lady Michelle Obama and others brought attention to this tragedy worldwide, there have been numerous kidnappings of a similar nature that have gone unreported internationally for years. In Afghanistan, women's conditions are very bad. Almost all of the formerly safeguarded civil rights for women and girls have been reversed by the Taliban after they retook control of the nation in August 2021 after the withdrawal of the American soldiers. Afghan women are not allowed to have access to civil rights, healthcare, education, or the freedom to associate, travel, or express themselves freely. When they are outside, they have to cover their whole body, and security personnel check them frequently to make sure they are appropriately dressed and with a male relative. Many Afghan women have found it difficult to make enough money to support themselves or their family as they formerly did since there are now restrictions on the kinds of employment they may have.