CHINESE EXECUTIONS SHOULD BE CONDEMNED

China has a perverse way of marking United Nations' International
Anti-Drug Day -- it executed 28 drug dealers and sentenced 78 more to
die. But that's just the beginning: it even forced the eventual
victims to stage dress rehearsals of the executions. As outrageous as
that is, the even bigger outrage is that the rest of the world has
been muted in its condemnation of such a blatant abuse of human rights.

In China, humiliation and terror are official operating procedure. Yet
the policy has never attracted the howls of outrage that an isolated
American failure at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison did, and still does.

Surely the Chinese decision to rehearse the executions first -- police
trooped the prisoners out a few days early, forced them to their
knees, and practised holding pistols to the backs of their heads, just
to make sure they got it right -- is as cruel and inhumane as anything
the U.S. did in Iraq.

UN officials describe the Chinese executions as "a really sad
approach," but don't want to criticize China more harshly for fear
that they won't be able to open a UN drug-control office there. Such
cowardice shows the folly of entrusting key foreign policy decisions
to the UN, where China has a veto at the Security Council and
obviously holds political influence over the UN's timid
bureaucracy.

Despite the UN's value in some areas, it certainly isn't the sole
repository of international legitimacy.