Annotation of
Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly (September, 2009).
Does Obama believes in human rights? By Bret Stephens. The Wall Street Journal. October 19, 2009.
~ The Editors
Next month will be the first anniversary of President Barack Obama in the White House. The United States President was elected largely for his promise of change. His message inspired many people around the world, who believed that Obama’s leadership would bring the kind of change that they were hoping for. There was an international expectation for a new logic of international engagement in which human rights would play an important role. In his recent acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, Norway, President Obama emphasized once again his commitment for a more humane world: “We are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.”
This Roundtable evaluates President Obama’s human rights policy and asks whether his actions in this field are moving toward the direction of justice or not. In other words, is there any change in human rights policy that “we can believe in”? This month centerpieces—Obama’s first speech at the United Nations and Bret Stephens critique on current human rights policies—serve as a general background for the panelists to initiate a discussion on the progress and challenges ahead for the Obama administration.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama underscored the necessity to start a new era of global cooperation based on a multilateral approach, respect for international law, and renewed commitment to join human rights regimes through the UN Human Rights Council. He mentioned some of the actions taken by his administration to reestablish a human rights policy. “[o]n my first day in office, I prohibited -- without exception or equivocation -- the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law. Every nation must know: America will live its values, and we will lead by example.”
Obama’s speech at the UN has moved a long way from his predecessor, George W. Bush, helping the United States to recover its legitimacy at the international level. However, as our panelists have pointed out, if the United States wants to lead by example on human rights issues, it is not enough to be better than the former president. Rather, the United States needs to build on concrete actions to effectively serve the “common interests of human beings.” However, as the recent visit of Barack Obama to China illustrates, the delicate balance between human rights interests and other foreign policy goals is not an easy task; they more often than not tend to be in conflict with each other.
How can President Obama meet human rights challenges? Our contributors provide a number of recommendations to the current American administration; we would like to highlight two:
First, credibility. A government can not promote democracy abroad if it is not respecting democracy at home. Respecting civil and political rights on counterterrorism activities is seen as a priority on this area. The United States will not be able to urge other governments to observe human rights without leading with the example.
Second, match rhetoric with reality. Claiming an international commitment to human rights without deeds undermines Obama’s leadership at the international level. “But without such action, Obama’s words will just leave us feeling empty since faith without works is dead.” Actions matters as President Obama himself acknowledge in his Nobel Prize speech.
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
December 2009: Obama’s Human Rights Policy
Annotation of
Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly (September, 2009).
Does Obama believes in human rights? By Bret Stephens. The Wall Street Journal. October 19, 2009.
~ The Editors
Hope over Experience?
by Cath Collins, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
“The option for genuine multilateralism, for leading the way in accepting the binding nature of international law and refusing to invoke the veto option whenever national interests are trimmed, is always there. But the US has consistently refused to take it. This is where Obama could make a difference(…)"
Writing about US human rights policy from the outside is always a disconcerting experience. All bets are off, and all assumptions are turned on their head. Assumptions from the South looking North are that, rhetoric aside, US interests rarely if ever feature human rights protection and promotion in first place. What’s more, they have very frequently featured the opposite: dirty tricks, torture and rendition were sadly familiar to students of Latin American history long before Guantanamo. The Clinton years went some way towards reining in the more blatant contradictions of the 1980s, but they also set in train the easy and often misused equation between US style democracy and rights that paved the way for “preventive” regime change under Bush. US invocations of freedom have always, in other words, been selective even within its shores and often seem quite irreconcilable with the reality of its actions beyond them.
Read in this key, the objections raised by Bret Stephens to Obama’s lukewarm, or selective, human rights performance in office come under the heading of non-surprises. US economic interests have taken first place? Rhetoric has not been matched by reality? It’s more difficult to govern than to make promises? None of this is unexpected, unless perhaps you were one of the many who projected onto Obama the long-postponed realization of the (North) American Dream. The illusions were not restricted to US shores: the Nobel Prize committee shared the precipitate enthusiasm.
Most of what Obama has and has not done is quite explicable if you stick to what politicians really do—and are supposed to do. As he himself points out in his speech to the UN, his job is not to save humanity from itself but to represent US interests on the world stage. So when Stephens castigates the policy of “engagement” with Burma, he may well be right to do so. But his reasoning—that the military junta will only try to turn all US overtures to their own advantage—is somewhat flawed. All states, everywhere, seek to maximize their advantage on the world stage. The job of international regimes is to tame or redefine national interest(s), showing how the sum of individual choices is not always mutual advantage.
If US aims really stretched beyond individual messianism to pursuit of the common interest—as defined by all—the US would not seek to bend others to its ever-changing will. The option for genuine multilateralism, for leading the way in accepting the binding nature of international law and refusing to invoke the veto option whenever national interests are trimmed, is always there. But the US has consistently refused to take it. This is where Obama could make a difference, but it’s unlikely that even Democrats, let alone Republicans, will let him. The US wants, first and foremost, to keep control and be seen to be keeping control. The “Free Tibet” and “Save Darfur” bumper stickers in one sense only perpetuate the myth that Tibet is ours to free, Darfur ours to save.
The Chinese know better: they will sit out US self-belief in the solid conviction that the next century is theirs. Roosevelt’s post-war conclusion that the US had learned to be “citizens of the world” seems precipitate when viewed from here. Few if any in the US would agree that China should call the shots on the world stage. But what is so different? The US has done so for as long as it was able. The “winner takes all” logic that served the US so well when it was winning will work to its disadvantage once in decline. If the strongest, wealthiest, most vigorous state is free to shape the world in its own image, moral content is irrelevant. If no state is free to do that, then we need to see the emerging outlines of the common moral framework, and a demonstration from the current “front runners” that they really believe it is for all.
Cath Collins has been associate lecturer in politics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), before which she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has lived and worked as a youth and community organizer in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and the UK.
Change We Can Believe In?
by Katherine Hite, Vassar College
"But it’s very hard not to be dismayed by some of the continuities from the Bush to the Obama administration (…). When it comes to US-Latin America relations, such decisions include: professing support for progressive immigration reform while expanding regressive anti-immigration measures; claiming a commitment to human rights and democratic engagement while facilitating increased military control over domestic affairs in the region; and voicing a desire for a multilateral approach to Latin American affairs while patently undermining such an approach."
We were warned to temper our high hopes for a bold new Obama era of human rights. After all, President Obama would have “a lot on his plate”: a serious economic crisis, high unemployment, over forty million people without health insurance, “two wars,” global volatility. But it’s very hard not to be dismayed by some of the continuities from the Bush to the Obama administration, as well as by some Janus-faced policy decisions with damning human rights implications. When it comes to US-Latin America relations, such decisions include: professing support for progressive immigration reform while expanding regressive anti-immigration measures; claiming a commitment to human rights and democratic engagement while facilitating increased military control over domestic affairs in the region; and voicing a desire for a multilateral approach to Latin American affairs while patently undermining such an approach.
So many of us were euphoric about Obama’s victory. After several years of a presidency that not only broke international human rights law but seemed proud to do so, it certainly felt like we had nowhere to go but up. And indeed, within his first days in office, Obama announced the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention center within a year; he ordered the CIA to close secret long-term detention facilities; and he re-criminalized the CIA’s use of extreme torture techniques. As Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly reflects, the President’s discourse emphasizes global commonality, a new and respectful engagement, and both tacit and explicit recognition of US complicity with conflict and violence. In his speech, Obama announced that the US has joined the Human Rights Council. The fact that the US was not on the Council until now speaks volumes to the pathetic lows the US had reached.
Echoing this spirit of taking responsibility for the violence, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and President Obama himself all recognized during their visits to Mexico several months ago that US-originated gun-running, coupled with the ongoing high US demand for drugs, bring deadly consequences for Mexico. Yet the administration has continued the Bush administration approach of concentrating on drug supply and dedicating the vast majority of US-Mexico aid to the Mexican military, while a very small percentage targets judicial aid and other civilian protections efforts. The Merida Initiative to Combat Illicit Narcotics and Reduce Organized Crime exemplifies this approach. While the US congress threatened to withhold allocating a percentage of the Merida funding due to human rights concerns regarding the Mexican military, the Obama administration successfully allayed such concerns, claiming sufficient human rights progress was being made. This is in spite of the fact that while at least two thousand complaints of human rights violations have been brought against the military in the past three years, only one Mexican soldier has been convicted of human rights violations.
On the immigration and US-Mexico border front, there is similar cause for concern. As someone who is clearly quite familiar with racial profiling, Obama was expected to eliminate the controversial 287(g) program, which has allowed local law enforcement agencies the power to act as federal immigration agents. The most notorious abuser of this authority is Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has targeted hundreds of Latinos and immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. The subject of several ACLU lawsuits representing victims of racial profiling, Arpaio is now being investigated by the Justice Department and has theoretically been reigned in.
But Arpaio has become a right-wing populist folk hero and a leading GOP contender in the Arizona governor’s race. Obama administration officials, particularly former Arizona governor-turned-Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, have both expanded local police powers connected to profiling and publically refused to denounce Arpaio. This belies a claimed commitment to humane immigration reform. Such spin and double talk have made Obama all the more vulnerable to extreme anti-immigration leaders like Arpaio.
The Administration’s stated commitment to human rights and a new multilateralism were severely undermined by the October 2009 military base agreement between the US and Colombia. This ten-year agreement allows increased access by the US military to seven of Colombia’s military bases. The Obama administration chose to privilege a policy toward Colombia that emphasizes military aid and mercenary action over human rights and civilian governance. A commitment to a human rights agenda would have included protections for human rights defenders, judges, grassroots indigenous, Afro-Colombian rights movements, and others. Colombia faces a human rights crisis in which the country is second only to Sudan in terms of the numbers of internally displaced persons, and the situation for the rural poor is grave.
The US-Colombia base agreement angered much of the region, which took Obama at his word regarding favoring regional over bilateral security agreements. It has also signaled a carry-over from the Bush administration to cede greater foreign policy decision-making to the Defense Department at the expense of the State Department.
We can only hope that with the very recent appointment of Arturo Valenzuela as Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, this balance of power within the US executive will begin to shift. Yet in his first visible role regarding the region, Valenzuela has defended an Obama administration position that recognizes the outcome of the November 30th elections in Honduras. This essentially legitimizes the military coup d’etat of June 28th that unseated democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. What began as a US response condemning the coup and advocating a multi-lateral approach to resolving the situation became a lukewarm acceptance of the de facto regime, a position that has disappointed the vast majority of our allies in the region. In a country where historically the US has been the major power broker, it is virtually impossible to read the current US position toward Honduras as anything other than a sacrifice of democratic principles and the country’s poor majority to favor the Honduran ruling class and their US political and corporate allies. Unfortunately, this resonates with collective memories of US-Latin America relations that are all too long and deep.
Katherine Hite is a professor of political science and director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She is the author of When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000), co-editor (with Paola Cesarini) of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), and most recently has authored several articles on the politics of memory, commemoration, and human rights in Latin America and Spain.
Webpage: http://politicalscience.vassar.edu/bio_hite.html
From Inspiring Hope to Taking Action: Obama and Human Rights
by Stephen James, La Trobe University
"While President George H. Bush spoke of a new world order, and his ‘misunderestimated’ son mangled the English language at countless press conferences, with Barack Obama the USA now has a talented orator as a president. There is a new word order. But does the new and skilful rhetoric match the reality when it comes to human rights?"
While President George H. Bush spoke of a new world order, and his “misunderestimated” son mangled the English language at countless press conferences, with Barack Obama the USA now has a talented orator as a president. There is a new word order. But does the new and skilful rhetoric match the reality when it comes to human rights?
The human rights record of the Bush administration has rightly been described by Human Rights Watch (Kenneth Roth, “Taking Back the Initiative from the Human Rights Spoilers” in Human Rights Watch World Report 2009) as “disastrous.” In contrast, Obama’s inaugural speech to the UN General Assembly contained some encouraging signs for human rights and human security: the acceptance of interdependence and multilateralism (at least for some matters); the emphasis on health, food and water security; and the attention to the rights of women and children. It is a refreshing change from the Republican obsession with freedom of speech, democratization and religious freedoms in China (important though these are). But there were some blind spots as well. To say that divisions between North and South “make no sense in an interconnected world” gives scant comfort to the billions suffering extreme deprivation. Moreover, “balanced and sustained” economic growth does not ensure equitable growth, distribution and human development, as evidenced by a number of UNDP reports and the work of Caroline Thomas. While the efforts to combat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and polio are crucial, many people die from readily preventable diarrheal conditions. Likewise, regarding food security, how do we explain that there is an abundance of food in the world but people starve because they cannot afford access to it? If the USA and other developed nations were to open their markets to products from the South, and to reduce subsidies, this would at least make the “free” trade system a little fairer, but it would not deal with the significant ways that international financial institutions and neo-liberalism can retard the wheels of progress concerning human dignity and security.
As Roth (above) has noted, if the USA wants to lead on human rights it can best do so by example. The better it behaves at home and abroad, the more vigorous and less shamefaced it can be in criticizing the human rights records of other nation-states and in building constructive coalitions in favor of the people harmed by violations. Here is how, according to Human Rights Watch, the USA can improve its human rights record:
sign and ratify relevant treaties, such as those on economic and social rights, landmines, cluster bombs, women, children and the International Criminal Court;
hold human rights violators accountable;
avoid complicity with, or indifference to, the human rights violations of other countries, even strategic allies (including Pakistan, Ethiopia, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and China);
observe the rule of law, constitutionalism and civil and political rights in its
counterterrorism activities;
improve social and economic rights and reduce racial inequalities at home; and
avoid double standards and exceptionalism with regard to human rights
Were the USA to embark on this course, it might confidently join with others “to serve the common interests of human beings.” But without such action, Obama’s words will just leave us feeling empty since faith without works is dead.
Dr. Stephen James is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University where he edits the international journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge). He holds Arts and Law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins andDevelopment (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007) and has taught law, politics, history and philosophy at various universities in Australia. He is presently working on a book exploring aspects of the right to an adequate standard of living. Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/dialogue/staff.html
The Statesman’s Dilemma: Peace or Justice? Or Neither?
by Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut
"What advice then to give President Obama regarding this difficult balance? I would suggest three modest steps: first, do what you can where you can and disregard universal consistency; second, link your criticism of human rights violations with the traditions and efforts of the people in a given country who are themselves fighting for change; finally, to the greatest extent possible, link our relations with this country with progress on human rights."
Just as I sat down to comment on President Obama and human rights, I glanced today’s (November 19, 2009) The New York Times and found several opinion essays—careful in fact, thoughtful in tone, reasonable in argument—critical of Obama’s approach during his recent visit to China toward Chinese human rights violations (mainly concerning Tibet but including also imprisoned lawyers, internet censorship, and persecution of Falun Gong.) The essayists considered various tactics for exerting American pressure on China regarding human rights. Common to all of them was a tone of rueful admiration for the political and diplomatic skill with which China fended off human rights criticism; indeed, such measures have been more or less successfully applied to a range of countries. For one example, this year Chinese pressure had some success regarding the composition of the program (which had China as its focus) of Germany’s annual Frankfurt Book Fair.
Seen from this perspective, the President’s tactics in China were foreshadowed by his speech at the United Nations. Human rights were clearly not at the center of Obama’s agenda there, although perhaps the UN General Assembly is not the best place to enunciate such concerns. He did point to early actions by his administration, such as the ban on torture and the pledged early closing of the prison at Guantanamo, and generally stood up for human rights principles. But strikingly, his major reference to actions promoting human rights instrumentalized them as needed for achieving the four main goals he had set forth earlier in the speech. He listed four main tasks confronting the world community: reduce then ban nuclear weapons; general peacekeeping, including the fight against al-Qaeda; the challenge of climate change; economic problems. Clearly, this is not a president for whom human rights advocacy is a very high priority. Why is this so? You will not find a meaningful answer to this question in the sneering and superficial attack by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. After listing what he sees as cowardly responses to human rights violations in China, Iran, Sudan, and Burma (Myanmar), he declares, “It…takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that ‘interferes’ with America’s purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them.”
Well, yes, these are unpopular regimes. Our government has denounced them and in some cases called them names for many years, but with what result? In President George W. Bush’s first term, his then-Secretary of State, Colin Powell, branded Sudanese actions in Darfur as genocide. A decade later, has the genocide stopped? If Stephens is calling for more symbolic acts, then he might tell us why he expects them to be more successful now than in the past. If not, what actions does he (and do other, less hostile critics) propose? Who will call for American or NATO armed intervention in the countries listed above?
The central issue here is the one that underlies so many policy conundrums when it comes to implementing human rights in a complicated world of many interests, competing needs, and limitations of power: the choice between what may be called peace or justice. By “peace” I refer to restoring regimes of law after oppressive rule, abating both domestic, social, and ethnic, as well as international conflict, and enlisting a wide range of communities in such matters as dealing with global warming. By “justice” I mean calling violators of human rights to account, setting a standard to which states (and non-state actors) should adhere, realizing social, economic and political rights through concerted action, by outside powers where the local population is powerless. Consider again the four priorities Obama listed at the UN. Which of them is unimportant? In which cases can we make progress without the cooperation of regimes that are human rights violators? How difficult it can be to translate the balance between these goals into specific actions was demonstrated in summer 2009 by the inconclusive UN debate regarding the “responsibility to protect.” Who shall decide where and when protection is needed? Who shall provide the power to make protection real? Who will bear the cost in lives and goods to enforce protection in the face of resistance? What advice then to give President Obama regarding this difficult balance? I would suggest three modest steps: First, do what you can where you can and disregard universal consistency; second, link your criticism of human rights violations with the traditions and efforts of the people in a given country who are themselves fighting for change; finally, to the greatest extent possible, link our relations with this country with progress on human rights.
Professor Henry Krisch (Political Science emeritus, University of Connecticut) taught political science at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University for almost forty years. He has specialized in Soviet and German, especially East German, politics, and more recently in international human rights issues. At the University of Connecticut, Krisch was Director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, co-chaired the academic program committee for the Dodd Year (1995-96) on "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Since 1999, he has been a member of the Gladstein Human Rights Committee. His publications include German Politics under Soviet Occupation (1974), The German Democratic Republic: Search for Identity (1985), Politics and Culture in the GDR (1989), Politics in Germany [co-authored] (2009), and “George Soros,” in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (2009).
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
November 2009: Human Rights in Peru
Annotation of
Healing the Past, Protecting the Future. By Alejandro Toledo. Americas Quarterly. July 13, 2009.
~ The Editors
In this month’s centerpiece, “Healing the Past, Protecting the Future,” the former President of Peru (2001-2006), Alejandro Toledo, discusses the role of his government in addressing the human rights abuses committed by the Peruvian state and the armed opposition groups during the internal armed conflict that lasted over twenty years between 1980 and 2000. “When I became president of Peru in 2001, one of the first items on my agenda was restoring the democratic institutions that had suffered from a steady deterioration during the previous decade. Moreover, our country needed a full accounting of the atrocities that had occurred in previous decades.”
It was under Toledo’s administration that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was constituted to provide a democratic and institutional setting in order to examine, for the first time in two decades, the human rights violations committed by both the rebel groups, Shining Path and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, as well as the state of Peru. “It was a harrowing document, and it was of unquestionable historic importance not only for our country, but for the entire world. It revealed, for the first time, the structural causes of amerciless violence that led to more than 70,000 deaths or disappearances at the hands of subversive organizations or state agents who acted without regard to our legal institutions.”
One of the main findings of the Commission was that the violence perpetrated by the armed opposition groups and State officials aimed at the most vulnerable sectors of the Peruvian society, namely, the indigenous and peasant communities, who had limited economic resources and lower education levels than the national average. Furthermore, the TRC finds that the severe racial, social and gender discrimination that exists in Peru contributed to the silence and inaction of the powerful Peruvian groups despite the killing of thousands of Peruvian men and women. “For many reasons, some of which probably have to do with my own ethnic and social origins, I am among those who believe that knowledge of the historic truth helps to achieve national reconciliation, which in turn can truly become an engine for development and integration. To see and recognize ourselves in the same mirror as a society helps us to acknowledge our diversity and to respect our legitimate differences. In Peru, a country of contrasts, we are all different; but at the same time, we are one.”
Yet, as indicated by the contributors, post-conflict situations require the consolidation of democratic institutions and the expansion of civil, economic and social rights to all citizens regardless of societal identity. Peru is still in an arduous struggle toward generating a more just, representative, inclusive and equitable form of government for all its citizens. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a significant step towards that direction. It does not only document the extent of human rights abuses, but it also points out clearly to the idea that persistent social, racial and gender discrimination could fuel future mass atrocities and gross human rights violations. The Peruvian TRC was also a key landmark in opening the space for future trials in search for justice, as illustrated by the recent conviction of former President Alberto Fujimori. As one of our contributors highlights: “Let the fitful, volatile but persistent truth and justice process of Peru serve as a powerful global precedent.”
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
The Hidden Costs of Terror
by Cath Collins, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
“Torture, disappearance and rendition carried out in the name of a “war on terror” is now being exposed, repudiated and punished in the South. Will the North ever follow suit?”
In this month’s featured article, former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) gives a thoughtful and insightful account of how post-atrocity accounting and reconstruction feels ‘from the top’. What can an incoming head of state possibly do or say that will redress and repair the social and human costs of decades of violence? What about the centuries of injustice and inequality that fuelled the flames? In fact Toledo did perhaps as much as he could, and more than many thought he would be able to, in recognising and beginning to address the ethnic, class, and institutional faultlines that tore Peru apart between 1980 and 2000.
While no administration is perfect, Toledo’s underwrote the valiant and painstaking work of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as it picked its way through the wreckage of almost 70,000 lost lives. Importantly, the Commission’s report apportioned blame in a country that had grown used to skirting around both the truth and its consequences. In this way, the groundwork for the recent landmark trial and imprisonment of former autocrat Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was also laid. Fujimori’s 2008 trial and 2009 conviction made history: the first American head of state ever to be held to account by his own people for corruption and crimes against humanity.
Toledo is right to draw attention to the importance of the InterAmerican Commission and Court on Human Rights: it was an early ruling from them that spurred Peruvian judges to reject attempts at domestic self amnesty. The ruling found an echo with other judiciaries in the region too. These days, at least in the southern part of the continent, the ideal that there should be ‘no safe haven’ for torturers is finally being made a reality. The northern part of the Americas could perhaps take note and learn lessons. Torture, disappearance and rendition carried out in the name of a ‘war on terror’ is now being exposed, repudiated and punished in the South. Will the north ever follow suit?
The parallels are more exact than the US and its allies would find comfortable. The ‘war’ against Shining Path guerrillas in Peru was finally won by conventional police work, not by massive ‘homeland security’ operations. (Shining Path ideologue and founder Abimael Guzmán was traced to a Lima hideout and arrested by civilian detectives following regular, patient, surveillance procedures.) Attempts to make a propaganda coup out of his downfall, putting him on public view in a striped convict suit in a makeshift cage, only created a backlash recruitment drive and escalation of action from increasingly fanatical followers. Is any of this sounding ominously familiar?
The promise of zero tolerance (read: ‘scorched-earth’ tactics, ending violence by escalating it), helped sweep Fujimori to power in the first place and later led a substantial portion of Peru’s population to collude enthusiastically in its own repression. Fujimori systematically dismantled Peru’s never-robust checks and balances, introducing hand-picked, anonymous judges to hand out life sentences in closed proceedings. He closed down Congress altogether, a move which went down particularly well with a public dazzled by the promise of a strong leader who would save them from amorphous, ever-present danger. In the end it was money scandals, more than moral outrage, that caused Fujimori’s downfall. The public was left to contemplate the dilapidated remnants of Peru’s democratic political fabric.
The maxim that we often don’t value what we have until it’s taken away couldn’t be more apposite. And unless we think ourselves somehow inherently smarter, luckier or less accident-prone than the Peruvian nation, Peru’s trajectory should help us remember the value of constitutional freedoms, international legal regimes, and all the other limits to what states can do in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.
Cath Collins has been associate lecturer in politics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), before which she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has lived and worked as a youth and community organizer in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and the UK.
The Peruvian Precedent
by Katherine Hite, Vassar College
"The trade-off between truth and justice has not born out, however, and today hundreds of Chilean military human rights cases have been legally processed, and many human rights violators are behind bars. The Guatemalan generals are certainly not out of the woods. Peru has also powerfully defied this logic, best illustrated by the conviction of former president Alberto Fujimori. Let the fitful, volatile but persistent truth and justice process of Peru serve as a powerful global precedent"
In the early days of September 2009, former Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) president Salomón Lerner received a series of sick anonymous messages: “We will do to you what we did to your dogs.” Lerner’s two pet dogs had been fatally poisoned. The poisoning and the death threats against Lerner joined other vicious retaliations, including continuous attacks on another powerful human rights symbol, Lika Mutal’s “The Eye that Cries,” a sculpture in Lima that mourns the tens of thousands of Peruvian victims of internal armed conflict. In a twisted way, the poisoning, death threats, and attacks show that Peruvian human rights work is successfully striking a nerve.
The TRC’s task was complicated. Systematic human rights violations took place under
three democratically-elected presidents from distinct political parties and alliances (Fernando Belaúnde from 1980-1985, Alan García from 1985-1990, and Alberto Fujimori from 1990-2000), each confronted with a powerful and extremely violent guerrilla movement, the Shining Path. Both state security forces and guerrilla combatants committed massive abuses, and the vast majority of the atrocities took place in the highlands against the indigenous. In addition, local and regional indigenous communities organized self-defense committees—at times in collaboration with state security forces, but often not—who fought the Shining Path and killed suspected Shining Path militants and collaborators. Other indigenous joined the Shining Path. The TRC thus faced the formidable task of investigating a range of cases in which local and national elected politicians were implicated in repression and denial, and in which members of the indigenous communities collaborated in the killings. In addition, the commission was charged not only with investigating the abuses during the major internal armed conflict (1980-1993), but also with documenting president Fujimori’s increasing abuse of power after militarily defeating the guerrilla movement (1993-2000).
Influenced in part by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Peruvian TRC conceptualized its mission as one of promoting reconciliation through extensive documentation and analysis of two decades of violent conflict; close attention to communities that had been the most directly affected by the conflict; nationally televised public hearings (though unlike the South African process, no one was amnestiable); and detailed recommendations of the institutional reforms deemed necessary to facilitate reconciliation and prevent future conflict. To demonstrate their commitment to investigating abuses in the highlands, truth commissioners bore witness to several mass exhumations.
The Peruvian commission produced a nine-volume report that addressed the range of perpetrators and facilitators of violence at the national, regional and local levels, from state security forces to elected local and national officials, political parties, vigilante groups, and guerrillas—all implicated, according to the TRC, to one degree or another in the violence. The report challenged Peru’s largely urban middle class to address the structural marginalization of the countryside and, inherently, the racist general character toward indigenous populations.
Death threats aside, few Peruvian politicians celebrated the work of the TRC in the way former president Alejandro Toledo ‘s “Healing the Past, Protecting the Future” would encourage. Those on the Right denounced the TRC for condemning the military abuses, which the Right claimed saved the country from the Shining Path. Politicians on the Left questioned the framing of the report as one in which the security forces were only reacting to a growing guerrilla threat while established political party leaders across the spectrum failed the country. In addition, commentators both Left and Right have raised questions about how the TRC calculated the numbers of dead, claiming the figure of 69,000 was too high.
In spite of the intense criticism of the TRC, the Peruvian report has proved a catalyst for ongoing dialogue, fueled by educational institutions, an active press, and a range of non-governmental organizations that include both vibrant human rights advocacy groups and think tanks. To accompany the report, the TRC also mounted a sophisticated, evocative photo exhibit that has traveled both within the country and abroad. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Lerner are leading a new commission to establish a memory museum in which the photographic exhibit will be the centerpiece.
Calls for truth commissions around the globe have proliferated. The Brazilian government has now decided the time has come for an official truth commission to investigate the 1964-85 dictatorship. In the most recent round of negotiations to reinstate democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya to his office, negotiators have included a truth commission to investigate the events that led to deposing him. And on March 4, 2009, US Senator Patrick Leahy chaired a panel exploring the possibility of establishing a truth commission on the national security policies of the previous US administration “so that we might learn from past errors.” Leahy claimed, “We can’t turn the page unless we first read the page.” Critics immediately denounced Leahy’s call for a truth commission as a “witch hunt,” somehow placing upstanding former US administration officials “at the same level as apartheid or Argentinian juntas.”
One can read these various calls for truth commissions cynically. Conventional wisdom once held that truth commissions were the next best thing to honest to goodness criminal investigations, that given the correlation of forces governing most transitions from human rights violating regimes to democratizing ones, there was an unfortunate but necessary trade-off between official acknowledgment of past atrocities, on the one hand, and putting still powerful past violators in jail, on the other. Echoing this logic sometime during the mid-1990s, a Guatemalan general said that his military would allow a truth commission in his country as long as it followed the Chilean model—truth, no trials. Indeed, like human rights memorials, or small compensation checks to families of the dead and disappeared, truth commissions are in good part symbolic political mechanisms to recognize past wrongs, toward a “never again.” Truth symbols are important but they fall far short of due process.
The trade-off between truth and justice has not born out, however, and today hundreds of Chilean military human rights cases have been legally processed, and many human rights violators are behind bars. The Guatemalan generals are certainly not out of the woods. Peru has also powerfully defied this logic, best illustrated by the conviction of former president Alberto Fujimori. Let the fitful, volatile but persistent truth and justice process of Peru serve as a powerful global precedent.
Katherine Hite is a professor of political science and director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She is the author of When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000), co-editor (with Paola Cesarini) of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), and most recently has authored several articles on the politics of memory, commemoration, and human rights in Latin America and Spain.Webpage: http://politicalscience.vassar.edu/bio_hite.html
From Atrocities to Security: A Parable from Peru
by Stephen James, La Trobe University
"As with many cases of human rights violations, the victims in Peru were dehumanized before they were abused (…) To combat dehumanization, societies must re-humanize the vulnerable and the persecuted, including the victims of human rights violations. Truth commissions have a vital role to play in this re-humanization: they give a forum to victims, validating their testimony and providing them with some catharsis, vindication, reparation and compensation.”
I have no expertise on the domestic politics of Peru, but I know that its often violent past shares much with its Latin American neighbours. Though not a practice confined to this region, I also know that events in the region have made notorious the chilling euphemism “disappearances.”
Since 1994, the UN has endorsed the ideal of “human security,” which emerged from critiques of simplistic, growth-oriented development and realist conceptions of national security (see further the work of scholars such as S. Neil McFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong). The grim accounts of gross human rights violations, corruption, impunity and authoritarianism in Peru (see, for example, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Amnesty International’s response in 2004:) provide an appalling inventory of many of the ways that international human rights and humanitarian law can be violated: torture, massacres, genocide, sexual violence and slavery, the use of child soldiers, displacement, discrimination of all kinds, extrajudicial executions, forced sterilizations, coercive and illiberal anti-terrorism legislation, abuses by the police, army and intelligence services, disappearances, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and mistreatment of the poor and indigenous peoples.
Since this history is a negation of human security and dignity it can only be reversed by embracing democracy, the rule of law, economic security and what might be termed humanization. While there is sure to be a vast literature on Peru’s truth commission, in itself and comparatively—that addresses the usual concerns over the balance between the aims of retributive (or deontological) and restorative justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, redemption, peacebuilding, deterrence, commemoration and reconstruction—in the following I concentrate on reconstruction.
In an interview for Foreign Policy in 2008, Toledo said that “It is not sufficient to be elected democratically. The hardest thing is to govern democratically.” This is a wise insight. Peru should aspire, as should other countries, not to have a hollow democracy chained to the ballot box, crucial though elections are, but to create a liberal, social and constitutionalist democracy. It is sometimes thought that the liberal (I mean in the rights-oriented sense) is incompatible with the social. But this is not true. Liberals like John Stuart Mill, and the founders of the United States of America, were right to guard against the dangers of the dictatorship of the majority and its potential to endanger the welfare of groups and individuals. There is nothing wrong with constraining majorities in this constitutionalist sense. However, the state need not be the enemy if it acts with the public welfare (remember Cicero’s exhortation) as its priority. If it does so, the concerns of traditional national security and the “newer” conceptions of human security can be reconciled. Given the pioneering role of Latin America in promoting social democratic rights, for example in the Bogota Declaration of the 1940s, such reconciliation is fitting.
Second, Peru needs to identify with greater precision, and then institutionalize, the core aspects of the rule of law. The principles of the rule of law prescribe an inelastic minimum standard for legality, one familiar to students of the common law. Laws should, for example, be prospective, transparent, democratic, in accordance with constitutional process and substance, reasonably coherent and interpreted and reviewed by a tenured, impartial judiciary. Peru’s judiciary has often been at the mercy of the military and the executive and thus susceptible to undue influence. The separation of powers did not exist.
Third, as Toledo has recognized (for example, in June this year in an address at UCLA), economic security is vital. Without it, economic growth and development do not deliver wealth equitably. The very concept of human development built on the insights of economists who recognized the potentially misleading nature of GDP and per capita income as barometers of social justice, an adequate standard of living and a dignified life. Moreover, connections between poverty and civil and international strife are clear. Indeed Peru’s Truth Commission recognized the links between inadequate education, poverty, inequality and violence: the majority of victims were peasants, many poor and poorly educated people in rural areas were recruited by the Shining Path and their low status meant that many privileged Peruvians turned a blind eye to their plight.
This brings me to my final point. As with many cases of human rights violations, the victims in Peru were dehumanized before they were abused. This is evident not only in the violations committed against peasants and indigenous peoples but in the sexual violence towards women, and in assaults on gay, lesbian and transgender persons. Additionally, systematic discrimination helps to maintain the poverty of the worst-off and reinforces the stigma that attaches to them. To combat dehumanization, societies must re-humanize the vulnerable and the persecuted, including the victims of human rights violations. Truth commissions have a vital role to play in this re-humanization: they give a forum to victims, validating their testimony and providing them with some catharsis, vindication, reparation and compensation.
To say that the struggle of Peru will be an arduous one is an understatement. Only recently the former president of the Truth Commission, Dr Salomón Lerner Febres, has been harassed and intimidated by its opponents; they even killed his dogs as a warning of what he might suffer. Such cruelty reflects the kind of dehumanization I have been discussing. Let us hope that, as Toledo said, there has been “enough death” and that Peru can move steadily from atrocities to security.
Dr. Stephen James is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University where he edits the international journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge). He holds Arts and Law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins andDevelopment (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007) and has taught law, politics, history and philosophy at various universities in Australia. He is presently working on a book exploring aspects of the right to an adequate standard of living. Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/dialogue/staff.html
The Limits of Executive Action for Human Rights
by Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut
“Since 2006, Toledo has found a useful perch in academic and NGO institutions in this country, such as working with the Carter Center on election monitoring. It would have been interesting to hear his views on how his outlook on these matters has been shaped by his American experiences— and how his Peruvian and Indio life may have lead him to see the weaknesses of the American approach to human rights."
Between 2001 and 2006 Alejandro Toledo served as President of Peru. He entered office committed to, in his words, “restoring the democratic institutions that had suffered from a steady deterioration during the previous decade,” (that is, during the rule of former President Alberto Fujimori). Moreover, he took up the task of providing Peruvian society with “a full accounting of the atrocities that had occurred in previous decades.” This personal commitment to re-establishing a functioning democracy based on the rule of law, a commitment based in part on his participation in the anti-Fujimori demonstrations, lead him to seek an honest accounting of past human rights abuses as a basis for a transition from decades of violent guerrilla warfare and government repression to a functioning democracy.
In this, Toledo followed a path familiar to other transitions to democracy such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Upon taking office, Toledo appointed a commission of scholars, clergy, leaders of civic organizations and former government (including military) officials. The formal submission of the TRC’s report in 2003 was invested with heavy public symbolism. Previously, Toledo had already performed another of those customary rituals of transitional justice, the public apology. Further acts of public symbolism followed, including a commemoration of murdered journalists.
In thus making human rights a basic element in the consolidation of Peruvian democracy, Toledo could build on existing institutions: a human rights commission and especially an active judiciary. However, his institutional heritage is questionable. Whether or not he runs for the presidency in 2011, his Peru Posible party fared poorly in recent congressional elections. Both Toledo and his successor (current President Alan Garcia) have been accused of (but escaped formal prosecution for) corruption or electoral fraud. Although the Peruvian courts continue to hear cases of human rights abuses from the decades between 1980 and 2000, the work of human rights advocates, including the TRC, has been subject to political attack. While some members of the Catholic clergy have been active in human rights work, others, especially those associated with the Opus Dei order, have strongly opposed further investigations.
Although Toledo has linked his human rights commitment to his Indio background, such developments as the upsurge in protests by indigene inhabitants of the Amazonian districts of Peru, some of which have been accompanied by violence, find no place in the article reviewed here. Yet these controversies raise important issues of human rights, such as group rights, cultural diversity, economic rights, and Peru’s possible status as (in Valerie Sperling’s term) an “altered state” with those accountable for human rights abuses beyond the reach of domestic jurisdictions. In the light of his assertion that his visit, with TRC members, to Lucanamarca, a remote Andean town (the scene of an atrocity perpetrated by the Shining Path guerillas) “represented a journey to a world rarely visited or even acknowledged by our elites,” this omission is indeed puzzling.
Nor does he explore the vexing issue of upholding human rights in an era of violent conflict, as that which raged between the Peruvian government, the “Maoist” Senderistas of the Shining Path, as well as the Tupac Amaro organization. Reparations and apologies are laudable, indeed necessary, but such policies from the standard human rights menu do not address the issue of political and ethnic reintegration. “Forgive, and never again!” he cried out in Lucanamarca— but who is to forgive whom? How will Peruvian society develop to prevent these conflicts from emerging again?
His comments on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are cursory at best. These bodies do have an extensive record in helping to correct human rights abuses; it is certainly to Toledo’s credit that he accepted the Court’s judgment against Peru, although the crimes involved took place prior to his administration. Indeed, it should be said that Toledo’s efforts on behalf of human rights seem to have been more extensive, more politically risky, and with more of a legacy, than this article presents.
Since 2006, Toledo has found a useful perch in academic and NGO institutions in this country, such as working with the Carter Center on election monitoring. It would have been interesting to hear his views on how his outlook on these matters has been shaped by his American experiences— and how his Peruvian and Indio life may have lead him to see the weaknesses of the American approach to human rights.
Professor Henry Krisch (Political Science emeritus, University of Connecticut) taught political science at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University for almost forty years. He has specialized in Soviet and German, especially East German, politics, and more recently in international human rights issues. At the University of Connecticut, Krisch was Director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, co-chaired the academic program committee for the Dodd Year (1995-96) on "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Since 1999, he has been a member of the Gladstein Human Rights Committee. His publications include German Politics under Soviet Occupation (1974), The German Democratic Republic: Search for Identity (1985), Politics and Culture in the GDR (1989), Politics in Germany [co-authored] (2009), and “George Soros,” in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (2009).
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
October 2009: Women’s Human Rights
Annotation of
The Women’s Crusade. By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The New York Times Magazine. August 17, 2009.
~ The Editors
An Annotation
Women’s Human Rights
This month’s roundtable centerpiece by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn focuses on the various challenges faced by women and girls in developing countries, with a special emphasis on how enhancing their rights could strengthen political and economic development within their societies. The authors emphasize that the continued patterns of injustice against women are at the center of the contemporary human rights agenda not only due to its immediate political and economic urgency, but also as a moral concern.
“In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20 th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.”
The statistics on the plight of women worldwide give a clear picture of persistent patterns of violence, poverty, denial of freedoms, as well as the lack of economic autonomy that women have historically suffered. “It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.”
Kristof and WuDunn identify education as one of the key means to improve gender equality and economic development locally. “In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.”
Our panelists this month take this article further, by indicating that there is a need to look at women’s rights as a global phenomenon and not just as a struggle within the developing world. Furthermore, apart from improving women’s educational capacities individually, it is fundamental to evaluate the structural conditions causing disparities among nations and the impact of global economic forces on women. According to our contributors, it is essential to recognize that women around the world face transnational patterns of abuse linked to the broader failure of the global economic order and the international political structure to secure their rights and meet their needs.
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
"The Female Entrepreneur"?
by Cath Collins, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
“This article begs at least as many questions as it raises, but to my mind the falsest note it strikes has to do with the argument that women’s status as a legitimate development priority is not inherent. Rather, they are a convenient vehicle for targeting because they are responsible, family-centred—self-sacrificing, therefore—and, even better, potential capitalists too.”
I read the “Women’s Crusade” article that forms the centrepiece of this month’s roundtable with initial interest, gradually turning to a vague sense of disquiet spiced with occasional disbelief. After a few more readings, I tried highlighting the passages that bothered me and stringing them together. Countries “riven by fundamentalism”— that’s presumably the Islamic variety, rather than the Christian variant which holds such sway in the US. The suggestion that “everyone from the World Bank to the US [...] Chiefs of Staff to [...] CARE” now thinks that women are the answer to global extremism hides too many questionable assumptions to list: for now, I’ll stick with the one that implies those three actors complete the fullest possible range of alternative views.
Basically, the aspects of the article that grated on me have to do with its US-centeredness, not just in the casual and potentially defensible sense of offering North American referents for a predominantly North American readership. Good journalism invites empathy; outstanding journalism does so by helping the reader step into the world of the written-about. This journalism does something different: it reads otherness through the codes of the already-familiar, forcing the strange and potentially challenging into the twin moulds of hopelessly exotic (and faintly distasteful), on the one hand, and folksy “we’re all the same at heart-ness,” on the other. The point is more serious than a simple stylistic quibble: presumably Kristof and WuDun have a much better and more professional handle that I do on the best ways to reach their target readership. But aside from the medium, how about the message? The message here has a faintly illiberal tinge, best exemplified in the fact that its central redemptive offer is the seductive power of the (North) American dream. The story’s heroines after all include Tererai Trent, remarkable principally because her maximum aspiration in life turned out to be a US education. Which, of course—and because this is a heart warming story—she achieved.
The article blithely assures us that Tererai, once she has completed the highly sought after PhD education she is now embarked upon, will be returning to her village to selflessly share the fruits of First World insights with her less fortunate sisters. The reality, as the article’s authors really ought to know, is quite different. The brain drain from South to North, in these days of highly competitive, individualizing “value-added” education, is an established phenomenon. So too is the fact that the occasional bootstrap tale adds to, rather than altering, the fundamentally elite nature of this kind of unnatural selection. Individual success and “bettering oneself” may not, say stories of this kind, be the exclusive preserve of the already-privileged few. But they do continue to be the fastest way to the top of the ladder. The ladder, what is more, leans against a pyramid. The kind of individual, go-getter economic success that the article admiringly reports for another of its heroines, Lahore micro-entrepreneur Saima Muhammad, can never by its nature be for anything more than a tiny minority. But the article ducks the big structural questions about whether competitive mini-capitalism really offers the way for whole communities—indeed, a whole gender—to transform their situation for the better.
Saima’s success, after all, leads her to become a respected neighborhood institution and even, as she herself acknowledges, a money-lender. Her standing in her family and community skyrockets, but not because anyone, least of all her mother-in-law, has felt moved to recognize her intrinsic worth. No, Saima’s new respectability is based on her status as breadwinner—and could, presumably, be reversed if things start to go badly on the small business front. Meanwhile, we are not told whether Saima plans to share her good fortune with other women. Does the neighborhood money lender give preferential rates? Does she see herself as a link in a chain of challenge and transformation of unjust structures, or does she simply see a way out for herself and her family?
This article begs at least as many questions as it raises, but to my mind the falsest note it strikes has to do with the argument that women’s status as a legitimate development priority is not inherent. Rather, they are a convenient vehicle for targeting because they are responsible, family-centred—self-sacrificing, therefore—and, even better, potential capitalists too.
Cath Collins has been associate lecturer in politics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), before which she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has lived and worked as a youth and community organizer in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and the UK.
Violence in the House
by Katherine Hite, Vassar College
"If we are to imagine that another world for women is possible, we need to globalize the atrocities, which mean a fair share of self-implication, confronting our own dirty laundry, putting our house in order as we lecture about what must be done elsewhere."
There was something particularly haunting in reading this Kristof and WuDunn piece during the week’s major US headlines: a girl in California had been imprisoned for eighteen years in the home of a man who kidnapped and raped her, fathered her children, and employed her in his small enterprise—a business card design and printing agency. Business clients interviewed for the story appeared completely taken aback. Clients had always found the now twenty-nine-year-old Jaycee Dugard “professional, polite, and responsive” as well as “creative and talented in her work.” Others expressed similar shock, recounting that Ms. Dugard “was always smiling.” Ms. Dugard’s kidnapper and rapist was also the father of her two daughters, whom neighbors said were “‘well-mannered,’ like normal girls, who loved Hannah Montana.”
The story of Jaycee Dugard captured intense US attention for a week, and television talk news continues to debate its many disturbing dimensions—the psyche of the perpetrator as well as the victim, the way in which the legal system released the perpetrator years ago for previous sexual abuse offenses, the complicity of the perpetrator’s wife, the blindness of the neighbors. What proves unusual about the story, however, is not that Ms. Dugard was missing or raped, but that the atrocious acts were carried out by a non-relative or family acquaintance. According to the US Justice Department, in a typical year, approximately 797,500 US children (younger than eighteen) go missing, an average of 2,185 a day. Only a fraction is attributable to someone unfamiliar to the young person.
In the United States, 15 percent of sexual assault and rape victims are under the age of twelve, like Jaycee Dugard. Another 29 percent are between the ages of 12 and 17. And one in six women (17.7 million American women) has been a victim of serious sexual assault.
In my quick search for the details surrounding the story of Jaycee Dugard, the day’s (September 12 th) CNN videos that appeared in rows on my computer screen included the story of Annie Le, a missing Yale graduate student (now dead); Haleigh Cummings, a missing five-year-old girl in Florida; and Karen Wright, a missing middle-aged California hairstylist whose husband is the chief suspect. The missing girls and women cross US geography, class, and race.
It thus simply boggles the mind that in this article, Kristof and WuDunn dissociate human rights violations against US women from those around the globe. Why do the authors tell these stories and not others? Give me a woman in Pakistan beaten by her husband and I’ll give you a woman in Tennessee murdered by her husband, a US soldier, on September 8 th, or a woman who was shot and killed by her UC-Irvine graduate student estranged husband on September 13 th. We have a term for this: “intimate violence.”
Perhaps it would not have been so egregious a dissociation had Kristof and WuDunn used less patronizing language about the women who constitute their subjects, writing, for example, of an Indian woman with “chocolate skin, black hair, and gleaming white teeth— and a lovely smile” here, of a “round-faced” Pakistani woman there. The article is chock-full of characterizations of women that reproduce the degradation the authors are purporting to describe. The classic “othering,” the patronizing tone, irreparably distracts the reader from the very important denunciation of violence against women throughout the globe, as well as the valuable work of organizations like the Global Fund for Women.
Indeed, why the very title, “Crusade”? What is this meant to evoke? Religious righteousness? A simple story of good and evil? West and the rest? If we are to imagine that another world for women is possible, we need to globalize the atrocities, which mean a fair share of self-implication, confronting our own dirty laundry, putting our house in order as we lecture about what must be done elsewhere. I would like to see Kristof and WuDunn now take on one of the latest issues to surface in the US health care reform debate: it turns out that in at least eight US states, injuries suffered from wife-beating are classified as a pre-existing condition that allows insurers to discriminate against or deny women their benefits. Then we might have a conversation about what US actions like the occupation and devastation of Iraq or the bombing of wedding parties in Afghanistan or Pakistan mean for women trying to hold up half the sky.
Katherine Hite is a professor of political science and director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She is the author of When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000), co-editor (with Paola Cesarini) of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), and most recently has authored several articles on the politics of memory, commemoration, and human rights in Latin America and Spain.Webpage: http://politicalscience.vassar.edu/bio_hite.html
A Few Drops of Oil Will Not be Enough
by Stephen James, La Trobe University
"...but a focus on the individual capacities and self-reliance of women who can by their own imagination, creativity, energy and efforts turn their families and communities around through entrepreneurship is a rather romantic account. While our hearts are warmed by such inspirational stories they are exceptional stories: most women in their shoes do not overcome the extraordinary odds stacked against them."
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn provide a rich description of the various kinds of violence, deprivation, depredation and exploitation that women experience on a vast scale in the developing world. They write of sex trafficking, acid attacks, “bride burning,” enslavement, spousal beatings, unequal healthcare (something the USA still struggles with), insufficient food, gendered abortions and infant and maternal mortality. They are right to identify the education of women and girls as part of the solution to the widespread “gendercide.” However, their approach focuses too much on the capacity, indeed the virtue or heroism, of individual women. It does not take adequate account of systemic factors, as many IR, peace and development scholars have done.
Kristof and WuDunn claim that “the best hope for fighting global poverty” is to educate women. The poorest families in the world are even castigated for their spending habits—their profligacy that leaves them without the means to educate wives and daughters. This is a bit much coming from writers from the developed world where there is such extraordinary overconsumption and waste. The “dirty little secret of global poverty,” I would suggest, is not the spending habits of the poor but the systemic dimensions of the world economy. Why is it that transnational corporations (TNCs) operating in the developing world pay their employees so little, that the working conditions there are not comparable to those in the developed world? The authors referred to the World Bank, yet there was no mention of the savage effects of neoliberal structural adjustment programs on the very areas the authors identify as priorities for women’s wellbeing: health, education, labor conditions, and, I would add, social welfare.
What are the causes of the disparities between the developed and developing world? These cannot be explored in this short reflection, but a focus on the individual capacities and self-reliance of women who can by their own imagination, creativity, energy and efforts turn their families and communities around through entrepreneurship is a rather romantic account. While our hearts are warmed by such inspirational stories they are exceptional stories: most women in their shoes do not overcome the extraordinary odds stacked against them. Can the education of women overcome poor terms of trade, developing world debt, government corruption, civil and other wars, pandemics, genocides and sexually motivated violence? While Eleanor Roosevelt said that human rights need to start close to home, and was a fervent supporter of education, she also recognized, as did many other drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that war, racism, sexism, poverty and hunger affect what we now term “human security”; and that a focus on women, the family and the individual is not enough. We must attend to the national, regional, international and global levels as well.
In addition to the UDHR’s endorsement of the equal human rights and dignity of women and men, two provisions of it (and comparable provisions in the 1966 economic and social rights treaty) are especially important to the prospects for women. One is Article 25. It elaborates a human right to an adequate standard of living, one that guarantees everyone adequate health, housing, food and clothing—that is a form of “security” (apparently, according to historian Johannes Morsink, the reference was meant to be to “social security,” and a clerical omission is the reason for the present wording). The other is the very ambitious Article 28 that refers to the right to a world in which all of the UDHR’s human rights can be fulfilled. These articles cannot be realized on the basis of the individual enterprise of women, increased preventive healthcare or education. They can only be realized through the combination of a regulated market, a humane state and a reordering of the priorities of the developed world, not only in terms of consumption, but also regarding the terms of trade, the behavior of TNCs and the conduct of foreign policy. When considering the wastefulness of the poorest families we might also consider the wastefulness of the trillions of dollars spent on arms races, militarization and unwise wars compared with the miniscule proportion of GDP that developed countries devote to foreign aid.
Education is a great thing. No doubt it opens the minds of women and creates opportunities for those who can obtain it. But successful education depends upon capacities, opportunities (for example, the reduced need for women and girls to work) and resources. Kristof and WuDunn conclude that we need dispense only “a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world.” But this assumes that there are no systemic problems, that the crankshaft is sound, as good as any in the developed world. Unfortunately this is not true: a complete overhaul rather than a little lubrication is needed.
Dr. Stephen James is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University where he edits the international journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge). He holds Arts and Law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins and Development (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007) and has taught law, politics, history and philosophy at various universities in Australia. He is presently working on a book exploring aspects of the right to an adequate standard of living. Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/dialogue/staff.html
From Outrage to Action
by Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut
“The resistance of political authority, economic privilege and gender-based power and customs will be difficult to overcome. Long term gains will require immediate political costs. Who will pay them? What strategies will provide economic and political tools on a large scale? What ideas will reconcile emerging women’s rights with embedded patriarchic privilege?"
Kristof and WuDunn provide a vivid panoramic view of problems faced by women (primarily in the “developing” world), what has been done and what more could be done to help them achieve dignity and autonomy in their lives, and how vindication of their rights could contribute to the broader social development of their societies. In this they provide us with important insights into how human rights might be effectively proclaimed and successfully implemented. In reviewing their considerable contributions, I shall also suggest some limitations on both their analysis and their policy recommendations.
First, as suggested above, they properly link such human rights concerns as lack of simple justice in the face of horrifying brutality with wider concerns of economic, social and cultural development. They demonstrate the importance of active media concern in raising such issues to a level of effective public concern. Furthermore, they detail the efforts of “interveners,” sometimes locals, often NGO outsiders, in seeding the social landscape with hopeful sprouts of change. The authors themselves provide a short list of relatively inexpensive but potentially life changing steps that could be undertaken. Their account, surprisingly so in the face of the misery and brutality they have witnessed, is a hopeful call to energetic action. One wants to cheer them on and, with some cautions in mind, one should.
The authors’ linking of traditional political human rights with economic and social issues reflects a healthy intellectual trend in the study of human rights and moves us away from sterile debates as to the relative importance of political versus socioeconomic rights. Economic advancement empowers people, especially women, in ways that lead to greater political efficacy; both these gains help individuals (again, especially women) escape a restrictive and sometimes degrading social environment.
Good enough: who would object to keeping girls in school by helping them manage menstruation, or to subsidizing salt iodization? But the limitations of this neo-modernization analysis are evident if we automatically expect improvements in the status of women because of growing economic power and a general rise in the prosperity of their societies. In our Western world—prosperous, democratic, and seemingly devoted to gender equity—women often find meaningful advancement at home and at work politically and socially difficult.
This article contributes to the analysis of the media’s role in turning denial of human rights into a public issue. Kristof and WuDunn are refreshingly candid about their own slow awakening as to what constitutes “news”; they have made women’s concerns more visible and politically relevant. If, as they write, “I n this century… the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe...” will become a major issue, their own work will help make it so. Here it is important to bear in mind the “Cassandra effect.” Surely it is better to bring abuses to light than not, yet crimes in Bosnia or Rwanda, or the current Indian “bride burning,” were not exactly secret. Will today’s Cassandras move political leaders to greater effect than in Troy? That would require a change in the political calculations of political elites; the gradual percolation of human rights ideas into political and scholarly discourse may help. The Obama administration’s actions thus far seem positive, but it is still early in the game. (Recall that the US government has had an Assistant Secretary of State dealing with human rights issues since the Carter administration.) It is not a hopeful sign that so much of the progress Kristof and WuDunn detail is the work of NGOs rather than of governments.
It is precisely this question of political will for large-scale, transnational political action that haunts this hopeful article. We read of a handful of remarkable women who, with timely outside help, have broken free from deprivation and humiliation. Are these exemplary stories misleading? Is not the great mass of women excluded from the help a few women received? Are they (like most people everywhere) lacking in the extraordinary strength of will and character they displayed? As Kristof and WuDunn’s data (readily available to anyone wishing to act) shows, there are millions yet in chains for the few who have fought their way free.
Kristof and WuDunn have service in placing the conditions of women at the center of our concerns and have thereby enriched human rights analysis. But caution is in order. The resistance of political authority, economic privilege and gender-based power and customs will be difficult to overcome. Long term gains will require immediate political costs. Who will pay them? What strategies will provide economic and political tools on a large scale? What ideas will reconcile emerging women’s rights with embedded patriarchic privilege?
The authors’ often heroic personal involvement in their reporting—who will have forgotten the video on the New York Times web site of Kristof pounding on the door of a Pakistani brothel?—has yet not had large scale results in terms of changed policies. To be fair, the authors do not claim such achievements, but the lack of effect on the authorities, especially local police, shows the limitations of even the most provocative journalism. Kristof and WuDunn might reply that working with women will affect changes from below that will change attitudes in communities otherwise resistant to change in mores decreed from a distant capital. Fair enough— but slow work.
Professor Henry Krisch (Political Science emeritus, University of Connecticut) taught political science at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University for almost forty years. He has specialized in Soviet and German, especially East German, politics, and more recently in international human rights issues. At the University of Connecticut, Krisch was Director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, co-chaired the academic program committee for the Dodd Year (1995-96) on "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Since 1999, he has been a member of the Gladstein Human Rights Committee. His publications include German Politics under Soviet Occupation (1974), The German Democratic Republic: Search for Identity (1985), Politics and Culture in the GDR (1989), Politics in Germany [co-authored] (2009), and “George Soros,” in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (2009).
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
September 2009: Democratic Republic of Congo: Humanitarian Crisis and the International Community
Annotation of
The Rape of the Congo. By Adam Hochschild. The New York Review of Books. August 13, 2009.
~ The Editors
Democratic Republic of Congo: Humanitarian Crisis and the International Community
Among the largest countries in Africa and with vast economic resources, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been one of the worst humanitarian emergencies to unfold in Africa in the past decades. The civil war in Congo has claimed millions of lives, either as a direct result of fighting, widespread violence, disease or malnutrition. Violence has been used indiscriminately against civilians, particularly on women and girls that have been victims of sexual violence in a context where rape is used by all the warring factions as a tool to spread terror.
What turns a wealthy country into one of the poorest, most corrupted, dangerous, and ungoverned states in the planet? Adam Hochschild, in this month's centerpiece “The Rape of Congo,” underscores several features explaining the brutality and the origins of a conflict with complex p olitical, economic, and regional dimensions that have been exacerbated by a long history of civil wars and political corruption. “Four problems, above all, drive Congo's unrelenting bloodshed. One is long-standing antagonism between certain ethnic groups. A second is the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the two million or so people who flowed across Congo's porous border in its aftermath: Hutu killers, innocent Hutu who feared retribution, and a mainly Tutsi army in pursuit, bent on vengeance. The third is a vast wealth in natural resources—gold, tungsten, diamonds, coltan (a key ingredient of computer chips), copper, and more—that gives ethnic warlords and their backers, especially Rwanda and Uganda, an additional incentive to fight. And, finally, this is the largest nation on earth—more than 65 million people in an area roughly as big as the United States east of the Mississippi—that has hardly any functioning national government.”
What can be done? The international community has been involved in the Congolese conflict fundamentally through the UN peacekeeping force (MONUC), a mission with more than 17,000 troops and military observers that have been deployed in the country for almost ten years. The results, however, are far from optimistic. “Far better equipped and disciplined than the Congolese army, these troops have kept a bad situation from getting worse. Yet it is hopeless to expect so few soldiers to provide protection for most civilians in such a vast country. ‘How many troops would it really take to stop all the fighting here?' I ask one UN official, out of his office. ‘Oh, about 250, 000,' he replies.”
Apart from the UN presence and some international NGOs working in the field, very few collective international efforts have been taken to address the current humanitarian crisis, and even less has been done to help building a functional state that provides the minimal guarantees for its citizens. The international community has chosen to remain largely silent towards the ongoing tragedy in Congo. This roundtable offers some recommendations to strengthen international involvement in this African country, with special emphasis on international human rights law and the economic dimensions of the conflict.
These issues and others are considered in this month's Roundtable.
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