Red Cross accuses U.S. of hiding detainees
A WORRIED International Red Cross yesterday expressed fears that United States officials are holding terror suspects secretly in locations across the world.
The alert came on a day the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged America to channel its energies more to fighting HIV/AIDS than terror.
The Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare require the U.S. to give the Red Cross access to prisoners of war and other detainees.
''We have access to people detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, but in our understanding, there are people that are detained outside these places for which we haven't received notification or access," said Antonella Notari, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The U.S. says it is co-operating with the organisation and has allowed Red Cross delegates access to thousands of prisoners, including former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
But Notari told The Associated Press that some suspects reported as arrested by the FBI on its Web site, or identified in media reports, were unaccounted for.
"Some of these people who have been reported to be arrested never showed up in any of the places of detention run by the U.S. where we visit," Notari said.
The U.S. government has not officially responded to a Red Cross demand for notification of all detainees, including those held in undisclosed locations, she added.
That request was made by ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger in January during a visit to Washington that featured meetings with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
"So far, we haven't had a satisfactory reply", Notari said.
An Army report on the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison found that military police there routinely held persons brought to them by other Government Agencies without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention.''
On at least one occasion they moved these ghost detainees'' around the prisons to hide them from a visiting Red Cross delegation, the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said. He described the action as deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
In an interview in yesterday's edition of the German business daily Handelsblatt, Kellenberger defended the Red Cross policy of refusing to comment publicly on the conditions that it finds in places of detention, preferring to negotiate directly with the authorities.
The International Red Cross came under criticism for not speaking out about the abuse at Abu Ghraib until it was revealed in the media.
Certain people had the impression that our repeated, confidential approaches to the U.S. authorities were falling flat,'' Kellenberger said.
But impressions can be wrong. When we visited Abu Ghraib in January 2004, we found improvements compared with October 2003, and when we visited in March it was better than in January.''
The ICRC has, however, spoken out on its concerns over the continued detention without trial of prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.
"I made it clear in January that we were not happy with the improvements,'' Kellenberger said.
"The most recent visit has just finished. We must now study the findings.''
To Annan, the threat of terrorism pales into insignificance when compared with the AIDS scourge.
Terrorism could kill thousands but "here we have an epidemic that is killing millions", Annan said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
But U.S. President George W. Bush's adviser on the disease said that America was already by far the biggest contributor to anti-AIDS campaigns.
Annan, who is attending the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, said the U.S. was spending huge amounts to tackle terrorism and weapons of mass destruction but had failed to deliver on its promises to combat the spread of the disease.
He expressed disappointment that some of the $15 billion earmarked by Bush to tackle HIV/AIDS was not yet going to the global fund - the body set up to raise money for AIDS programmes.
"The global fund is ready to go. If individual governments begin to set up their own initiatives, they start from scratch, it takes longer, the money that they hold will not be spent for a long time," he said.
Annan said he had hoped the U.S. could at least contribute $1 billion a year through the global fund, with the EU putting in another $1 billion.
With additional resources raised elsewhere, "the fund could have assured and sustained support through the next five years or so," Annan said.
The world body's scribe said he believed Bush was concerned about the impact of AIDS, but added that it was now time to step forward and commit resources to that fight.
"We really do need leadership. America has a natural leadership capacity because of its resources, because of its size," he said.
Annan appealed to governments around the world to show "international solidarity" by pooling their efforts.
But Dr Anthony Fauci, President Bush's senior adviser on AIDS, said the U.S. decision to distribute money through its own AIDS prevention programmes reflected initial concern on how the global fund would be managed.
"At the time the global fund was starting to get rolling, there was a concern on the part of the United States that if they put in this massive amount of money, $15 billion, they wanted to have much more of a direct say in how it was spent," Fauci said.
As the conference continued yesterday, protesters, demanding more access to cheaper anti-AIDS drugs interrupted several speakers including a French government minister and a representative of a major drugs company, Pfizer.
Brandishing mock body bags, they chanted, "Break the patents, treat the people."
Activists criticise industrialised nations for failing to contribute enough money and blame pharmaceutical companies for the high cost of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs.
But Pfizer chief executive Hank McKinnell said the protection of patents drove innovation, by ensuring companies would earn profits on important inventions.
The scale of the AIDS crisis has been highlighted in a report by UNICEF, which says that between 2001 and 2003, the number of children orphaned by AIDS worldwide rose from 11.5 million to 15 million.
The worst hit region is sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly four million children have lost one or both parents to the disease since 2000. By 2010, more than 18 million youngsters would have been orphaned.
These numbers are so large they have the potential to undermine the stability of countries, UNICEF's executive director Carol Bellamy warned.
"Unless society is really mobilised to take these children in, to try and support them so that they become productive adults, you really are talking about the whole stability of societies being threatened," she said.`
