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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Head of Amnesty Ukraine quits over rights report |
| 2022-08-07 |
| [Al Ahram] Amnesty sparked outrage in Ukraine when it released a report on Thursday accusing the military of endangering civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas. "If you don't live in a country invaded by occupiers who are tearing it to pieces, you probably don't understand what it's like to condemn an army of defenders," Amnesty's Oksana Pokalchuk said on social media, announcing her resignation late Friday. "And there are no words in any language that can convey this to someone who has not experienced this pain." Pokalchuk said she had tried to warn Amnesty's big shotship that the report was one-sided and failed to take into account the position of Ukraine's defence ministry, but she was ignored. "As a result, the organization unintentionally put out a statement that sounded like support for Russian narratives. Striving to protect civilians, this research instead became a tool of Russian propaganda." Amnesty listed incidents in which Ukrainian forces appeared to have exposed civilians to danger in 19 towns and villages in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. "We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas," Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard said. "Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law." Ukraine's government pushed back hard, with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba branding the allegations "unfair" and Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov calling the report a "perversion". President Volodymyr Zelensky said the rights group had tried to "amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #7 AI has been an arm of Russia since the Cold War. |
| Posted by: Sheba Slaique6398 2022-08-07 20:59 |
| #6 Kind of like firing artillery from right next to a nuke plant and storing your equipment and ammo inside it. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2022-08-07 17:58 |
| #5 She didn't actually say the Ukrainian war crimes were fake. She just said "It's OK when we do it." |
| Posted by: Tiny Jeater6933 2022-08-07 12:46 |
| #4 The next step is to discard their uniforms and try to look like civilians themselves. |
| Posted by: Jatle Sinatra9653 2022-08-07 11:41 |
| #3 Kurtz: "They train young men to drop fire on people, but they won't let them write "fuck" on their airplanes, because it's 'obscene'." |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2022-08-07 08:37 |
| #2 ..or for that matter the Taliban et al in Afghanistan where you were more than happy to blame the Americans for responding. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-08-07 08:31 |
| #1 ..endangering civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas. AI has no problem with the Paleos doing that in Gaza, why should you have a problem? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-08-07 08:30 |