Journalists and HRW got Libya Wrong

Omri Ceren, writing yesterday at the Commentary blog, told how Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson was all agog back in 2009 about how things in Libya were getting better. Her article appeared in Foreign Policy, and is now behind a paywall. Apparently, however, it contained the following paragraph:

What Fathi al-Jahmi died for is starting to spread in the country. For the first time in memory, change is in the air in Libya. The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate [and] proposals for legislative reform… I left more than one meeting stunned at the sudden openness of ordinary citizens, who criticized the government and challenged the status quo with newfound frankness. A group of journalists we met with in Tripoli complained about censorship… [b]ut that hadn’t stopped their newspapers… Quryna, one of two new semi private newspapers in Tripoli, features page after page of editorials criticizing bureaucratic misconduct and corruption… The spirit of reform, however slowly, has spread to the bureaucracy as well… the real impetus for the transformation rests squarely with a quasi-governmental organization, the Qaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development.

At about the same time, Libyan expatriate Mohamed Eljahmi, whose borther Fathi had recently died, wrote an anguished column about his death and the indifference of the American government, but also about Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:

It's not just politicians who should reflect on how they handled Fathi's case. My brother's death should give prominent human rights organizations pause. For nearly a year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hesitated to advocate publicly for Fathi's case, because they feared their case workers might lose access to Libyan visas.
Only on the day of Fathi's death did Human Rights Watch issue a press release that announced what we had known for two months: That Fathi appeared frail and emaciated, could barely speak and could not lift his arms or head. When the researchers asked him on April 25 and 26 if he was free to leave prison, he said no. When they asked him if he wanted to go home, he said yes.
It's not just politicians who should reflect on how they handled Fathi's case. My brother's death should give prominent human rights organizations pause. For nearly a year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hesitated to advocate publicly for Fathi's case, because they feared their case workers might lose access to Libyan visas.
Only on the day of Fathi's death did Human Rights Watch issue a press release that announced what we had known for two months: That Fathi appeared frail and emaciated, could barely speak and could not lift his arms or head. When the researchers asked him on April 25 and 26 if he was free to leave prison, he said no. When they asked him if he wanted to go home, he said yes.
Perhaps because they still fear antagonizing Gaddafi, in their May 21 statement Human Rights Watch didn't call for an independent investigation and stopped short of holding the Libyan regime responsible for Fathi's death.
Amnesty International also compromised. They moved an April 2009 demonstration originally slated to occur in front of Libya's U.N. mission to the U.S. mission instead so as not to antagonize Gaddafi. For the same reason, they ignored pleas for a public statement about Fathi's deterioration. While an Amnesty delegation was in Libya when Fathi died, the Libyan regime refused it permission to travel to Libya's second largest city.
Experience has shown me that country researchers in marquee human rights organizations are vulnerable to the regime's manipulation. Sarah Leah Whitson is one of the Human Rights Watch researchers who last saw Fathi before he was rushed to Jordan. She wrote an article for Foreign Policy upon her return from Libya, where she described efforts by the Gaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development, which is headed by the Libyan leader's son, Saif al-Islam, as a "spring." The organization is actively menacing my brother's family. Some family members continue to endure interrogation, denial of citizenship papers and passports, round the clock surveillance and threats of rape and physical liquidation.
Not all organizations compromised their principles. Physicians for Human Rights didn't compromise with the Gaddafi regime and called for an independent medical investigation after Fathi's death. One day, when free media penetrates Libya, my brother's friends and admirers will learn how the American Jewish Committee sought to rally world leaders to Fathi's cause.

When the American Jewish Committee is more active than Human Rights Watch in trying to save the life of an Arab human rights activist being killed by his government, you know the world is a strange place.

Anyways, all that was long ago, in 2009. Now it's 2011, and people look at Libya differently than they used to. Or rather, uninformed people do - journalists at CNN, Reuters, the Washington Post, Financial Times, the New York Times and others. Michael Totten, on the other hand, got it right all along. Omri has done the research for us, in an absolutely devastating post which should be taught at all journalism schools the world over, but never will be.

Maybe that's why Michael Totten was the only one who got it right; he didn't go to journalism school. Nor did he train as a human rights activist.