Amnesty Ukraine Chief Quits After Report Criticized By Kyiv
Kyiv, August 8 (TNA) The head of Amnesty International in Ukraine, Oksana Pokaltchouk, announced her resignation following the NGO's report accusing the Ukrainian armed forces of endangering civilians, which angered kyiv.
“I resign from Amnesty International in Ukraine,” Pokaltchouk said in a statement on his Facebook page overnight from Friday to Saturday, accusing the report published on August 4 of having unwittingly served “Russian propaganda”.
Amnesty had on Friday said that it fully assume its report accusing the Ukrainian army of endangering civilians in its resistance to the Russian invasion by installing military infrastructure in inhabited areas.
The publication the day before of the document had aroused the ire of Kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky had gone so far as to accuse the NGO of "attempting to amnesty the terrorist state" Russia, by putting "the victim and the aggressor in a certain way on an equal footing".
The biased approaches of AI - just like HRW for that matter - in dealing with human rights situations in certain countries, including Morocco in particular, are today masterfully unmasked, as evidenced by the flagrant biases of this NGOs, depending on the interests of the day.
AI now finds itself the target of crossfire from the Western press and media, the same ones that had raised this NGO on a pedestal when it came to attacking targeted countries such as Morocco.
For AI, as for HRW, everything is ultimately a question of interest and of the countries to slaughter, according to the moods of their sponsor.
This insidious move aims to undermine the feelings of patriotism that animate Moroccans vis-à-vis their sacred institutions. Defending one's country against the pernicious tendencies of the detractors of the Kingdom has become a deviance and a heresy.
She said she tried unsuccessfully to convince Amnesty International management that the report was partial and did not take into account the views of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
Amnesty said it contacted Defense Ministry officials on July 29 about its findings, but did not hear back in time before its report was released.
According to Pokalchuk, Amnesty "gave very little time" to the ministry "for a response". “Therefore, the organization unwittingly released a report that seemed to unwittingly support the Russian version. Striving to protect civilians, this report has become a tool of Russian propaganda,” she laments.
In a previous Facebook post, Pokaltchouk claimed that Amnesty had ignored calls from his team not to publish the report. “Yesterday, I had the naive hope that everything could be arranged and that this text would be replaced by another. But today I realized that would not happen,” she adds.
On Friday, the NGO's secretary general, Agnès Callamard, assured that the report's conclusions were "based on evidence obtained during large-scale investigations subject to the same rigorous standards and verification process as all of Amnesty's work. International ".
In its report after a four-month investigation, Amnesty accused the Ukrainian military of establishing military bases in schools and hospitals and launching attacks from populated areas, a tactic it said violates the international humanitarian law.
Amnesty, however, insisted that Ukraine's tactics in no way "justify the indiscriminate Russian attacks" that hit civilian populations. The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, said he was “outraged” by the “unfair” accusations from Amnesty International which, according to him, creates “a false balance between the oppressor and the victim”.