A gentle voice on human rights

A gentle voice on human rights

Endy M. Bayuni, The Jakarta Post/Oslo

He greets his guests from Indonesia at his office in flawless
Bahasa Indonesia, as if it is the language he speaks every day in
Oslo. He is a soft-spoken individual whose disposition seems at
odds with the complicated and harsh issues that he, and his
center, deal with: human rights violations.

But then, Knut Asplund is no ordinary human rights campaigner
and the Norwegian Center for Human Rights, of which he is an
associate, is not one of those run-of-the-mill NGOs that is
vocal, if not loud, in denouncing Indonesia's human rights
record.

Pak Knut, as he is affectionately called by his Indonesian
friends, prefers the softly-softly approach that is not
necessarily less effective than the frontal and abrasive method
preferred by most other human rights organizations.

Still, he politely avoided any comparison with the Western
human rights organizations that have been poking their noses into
Indonesia's rights records, and are thus better known to the
Indonesian public than his own center.

"They do their job," he says. "We do our share."

Here, from his office opposite the University of Oslo, Asplund
runs the Indonesian program with Christian Ranheim and Christina
Kloster.

Asplund and his team are not complete strangers to Indonesian
human rights or legal circles as visits to the country and
contact with people who matter have been par for the course in
their work.

Both articulate speakers of Bahasa Indonesia, the language
skills of Asplund and Kloster testify to their deep involvement
with this country.

The center's work in Indonesia has been substantial, but it
has somehow escaped media publicity. Perhaps this is because it
does not deliver press statements or regular reports passing
judgment on Indonesia's human rights record.

The Indonesian program is much more to do with building the
capacity of Indonesian institutions to ensure better protection
and observation of human rights.

One of its new activities, for example, is helping to
establish a library for human rights study centers in Indonesia.
Asplund and his team are also helping to draft a textbook on
human rights to be used in teaching undergraduates at law schools
in the country.

The center has organized human rights courses for law
professors, and arranged for selected Indonesians to undertake
master's degrees related to human rights issues at the University
of Oslo.

Human rights 'superpower'

The activities are not the sort of stuff that draws
controversy and thus media attention. Most journalists would
probably find them too dull to be newsworthy.

But they are important nevertheless in the realm of
Indonesia's human rights field, an area in which the nation, the
government in particular, continues to fall short.

For Norway, as it is with most other Scandinavian countries,
human rights has become a major foreign policy issue, at times
even the defining issue around which other aspects of bilateral
relations are built.

"Norway is trying to find its place in international
diplomacy, a niche," Asplund explains. "We want to become a sort
of humanitarian superpower."

And human rights is the obvious choice for a country
in which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded each year. Norway's
contribution to international peace includes the 1993 Oslo
Agreement between Israel and Palestine. Norway has also been
involved in the peace processes in Sri Lanka, the Southern
Philippines and in Aceh in 2002.

Asplund shrugs when asked whether he or his center has
powerful clout over the policy-making process of the Royal
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

But he admits that non-governmental organizations in
Scandinavian countries have a lot of political clout.

"It's a Scandinavian model of government. There is a close
relationship between civil society organizations and the
government. Perhaps even too close, so that we have often been
accused of being completely co-opted," he says, noting that
Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Store was formerly the
secretary-general of the Norwegian Red Cross.

The Indonesian program began in 2002 following the
establishment of the Human Rights Dialog between the Indonesian
and Norwegian governments. The human rights center was brought
into the picture to help facilitate and implement some of the
agreements that came out from the annual dialog.

Asplund, an anthropologist by training, applied for the job to
lead the Indonesian program because of his connection with
Indonesia. He wrote his master's degree thesis in 1995 on the
relation between Islam and traditional beliefs in the Riau
archipelago in 1995.

Hailing from a small village, as he put it "above the Arctic
Circle", he returned to Indonesia in 1999 as a member of the
independent observer for the East Timor ballot. He and Ranheim
were among the last to leave East Timor before violence erupted.

That unfortunate episode remains an unresolved issue as far as
the United Nations is concerned, particularly in the absence of
anyone in the Indonesian Military being made accountable for the
atrocities that took place in the wake of the UN-sponsored
ballot.

"It's hard to disagree with the United Nations," Asplund says.

But he acknowledges that there has been a change of attitude
on the part of Indonesia in recent years.

"There is a genuine effort to solve human rights problems," he
adds.

He underlines specifically the ratification of the UN Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights by the Indonesian government this year
as milestones for human rights in Indonesia.

"It's a statement of commitment," he said.

"There's a pronounced will to improve, and you find this
across the government. There is openness now, including in the
Indonesian Military."