CAIRO,
July 31 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In an interview Wednesday,
July 31, with the Egyptian TV morning show ‘Good Morning Egypt,’
U.N. human rights commissioner Mary Robinson said that the Israeli
occupation is the cause of all problems in the Middle East.
Robinson
further criticized the Israeli air-raid early Tuesday, July 23 on a
densely populated area in Gaza.
Israel
came under fire for its bloody air-raid early in which it used a
U.S.-built F-16 warplane to drop a one-ton bomb on a building in
densely-populated Gaza City, killing 18 civilians, eleven of them
children, including a two-month-old infant, and wounding 176.
Meanwhile,
the human rights commissioner told the British daily newspaper, the Guardian,
she was prevented from continuing in the job because of pressure from
the United States, which she has accused of neglecting human rights
during the war against terrorism.
"I
am not somebody just to walk away," Robinson said. "If I had
been hard-pressed, I would have stayed, [but] there seems to have been
strong resistance from just one country," she added.
Her
remarks came a week after U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan announced
her replacement by a veteran Brazilian diplomat described Tuesday,
July 30, as "somebody who doesn't run afoul of the big
powers."
Robinson,
57, a former Irish president and only the second person to hold the
post of high commissioner for human rights, has been a vocal critic of
the U.S. since September 11 - not least over Washington's decision
against granting prisoner of war status to the detainees at Guantanamo
Bay in Cuba.
"I
believe that the emphasis has been on the war on terrorism, and that
there has been a blurring of the edges and a lack of precision,"
Robinson said. "A lack of precision means a lack of
protection."
The
climate had become "much more difficult for human rights,"
she said.
According
to the Guardian, tension between the commissioner and the Bush
administration pre-date military action in Afghanistan, and turned
particularly rancorous over the world conference against racism in
Durban, South Africa, which almost collapsed under the weight of a
Syrian-led campaign for delegates to declare Israel a racist state.
But
this is the first time Robinson has blamed Annan's decision not to
extend her tenure on lobbying by Washington.
Her
replacement, Sergio Vieira de Mello, a career U.N. diplomat with a
background in humanitarian relief and peacekeeping, seems certain to
adopt a less outspoken style, the paper said.
"He's
a very diplomatic operator, somebody who doesn't run afoul of the big
powers," a U.N. official told the Guardian. "And
somebody who is very effective in that way up to now."
Asked
if Vieira de Mello was expected to avoid confrontation with the U.S.,
the official said: "The short answer is yes, and the long answer
is yes."
But
a spokesman for the secretary general said Annan had taken the
decision not to reappoint Robinson "independently".
"It's
not one state or one body of states saying this is what we want -
otherwise, frankly, you'd have a very different-looking U.N.," he
said
