Amnesty International has slammed the Bush administration for removing China from the list of human rights violators amid unrest in Tibet.

Last Tuesday the US State Department dropped China from its list of the world's worst human rights violators, keeping Iran, North Korea, and Syria still on the list.

The Tibet crackdown is a "big embarrassment for Bush, coming just a couple of days after the State Department decision to delist China as a top human rights violator," said T. Kumar, Amnesty International's Washington-based Asia-Pacific advocacy director.

US State Department's report on human rights also treats some of America's friends with considerably softer gloves. Colombia, Egypt, and Pakistan figure among those cases, rights activists say.

The Bush administration is looking for ways to improve cooperation with Beijing on such issues as North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs and the Darfur conflict in Sudan.

“Clearly the Bush administration has been very, very leery of dealing with the Chinese on the human rights issue," said John Tkacik, a former China expert in the State Department, who feels Washington's Asia policy has been skewed by heavy US reliance on China to end North Korea's nuclear weapons drive.

"So if your only priority is North Korean nuclear weapons, you subordinate everything else to what China wants and that's unfortunately what seems to have happened here," he said.

China said that 10 people had been burnt to death during the Saturday's violence, which followed three days of monk-led protests on the anniversary of a 1959 uprising that was suppressed and during which exiles said that thousands of Tibetans died.

SG/RE