Beyond rights: Human Security

By Juwono Sudarsono

JAKARTA (JP): This coming Dec. 10 countless seminars, panel discussions and symposia will be held by UN associations, non- governmental organizations, research centers and other concerned civic groups to review the state of human rights in many countries and across various cultures. There will be predictable heated discussions between those who insist on "non-derogable" standards of civil and political rights and those who prefer the social, economic and cultural emphasis of "right to development" principles. Precious few will recall that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of Dec. 10, 1948, calls for a "balanced" approach incorporating all five elements.

The exigencies of the Cold War pushed aside the imperative for the balanced approach. The United States and its allies hijacked the concept of human rights to focus primarily, if not exclusively on civil and political rights. Civil liberties and political freedom became the thrust of the West's propaganda against the Soviet Union and its communist allies, since it was in these areas that Leninist-Stalinist and Maoist regimes distinctly lacked. At the same time, the West conveniently shrouded its own failings in the social, economic and cultural fields: social discrimination, unemployment and cultural bias against the deprived and the underclass.

Throughout the 1950s and 1970s the farcical aspects of Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union degenerated into full-scale mutual bashing, magnified through the use of television. The United States and its allies elevated selected Soviet dissidents into political darlings of the media establishment and conveniently made them part of a money-spinning industry. The Soviet Union focused its attention on the plight of American blacks, the homeless and the long lines of unemployed in America's cities. Film clips about the ills of capitalism were widely distributed throughout Asia and Africa.

The breakup of the Soviet Union and growing economic competition from emerging economies refocused the West's attention on civil and political rights in Asia and the Pacific. Business and union leaders in America, whose treatment of their own workforce are never exemplary, unashamedly manipulated human rights issues to advocate, through their congressmen, punitive measures against countries whose export performances were eroding their home market share.

Senators, congressmen and cabinet officers dutifully made their rounds of visits to "voice their concern" to governments in East Asia even as in their own constituencies the socio-economic underpinnings of basic rights were far from satisfactory.

Particularly active were politicians and lobbyists who had special interests in the textile, garment, footwear and toy industries. In the 1970s, South Korea and Taiwan were favorite targets. Since the late 1980s, China, India and several Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) economies have come high on the list. Also most favored nation status and generalized system of preferences facilities have been called into question.

In place of Soviet dissidents, attention was focused on a new set of "most favored dissidents", particularly those adversely affected by land and labor disputes or those in the center of political controversies: Tibet in China, East Timor in Indonesia, Kashmir in India.

For obvious strategic reasons, notably absent from the list of concerns were human rights conditions in the oil-rich kingdoms and emirates of the Gulf area, which have not even pretended to adopt any civil and political rights to speak of. The 1991 Gulf War exposed the hypocrisy of the West: oil was far more important than human rights. Also conveniently underplayed were the lack of civil and political liberties in the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe, despite their formal espousal of "democracy". The use of tanks to suppress opposition in Moscow in October 1993 was dismissed as an unfortunate aberration.

The mainstream press of the West contributes to this distortion. No journalist traveling with a visiting president or prime minister of an industrialized country can resist filing a report on some aspect -- any aspect -- that has a "human rights" angle on a developing country, no matter what social and economic difficulties that developing country faces.

The privilege and conceit of those who have to show their concern lead them to write the obligatory editorial, file the 800-word feature column or do the vivid 30 second television feed on a labor dispute, a street demonstration or an embassy sit-in.

Human interest, drama and local color are conveniently packaged into a single "newsworthy" story, a radio report, or a television newsclip. Even locally based foreign journalists find it difficult to resist inserting the obligatory caveat: any favorable slant that a developing country may accrue in the wider context of social and economic development has to be juxtaposed with liberal references to a "repressive political atmosphere" or "a controlled press". The anecdotal long quote from a fiery dissident makes far better copy than a rebuttal from a government official.

Developing countries -- especially those whose export performances bite into interest groups in industrialized nations -- are boxed into a no-win situation. Both objective conditions (demographic pressures leading to low labor wages, interminable land disputes) and subjective situations (venal businessmen unwilling to spread their profits more equitably, poorly paid and trigger-happy security authorities) accentuate these civil and political rights issues onto the front pages. There is simply no way that these issues can be resolved "once and for all" or "in the immediate future" as an American journalist recently queried President Soeharto in Bogor with respect to East Timor.

What should and can leaders in developing countries do in face of such adverse circumstances? The easy way is to lash out into the well-trodden historical blame game. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia relished in angrily hitting back that the West had no business in lecturing them about human rights, given its colonial and imperial record in Africa. Lee Kuan Yew in the 1970s retorted that he was not in the business of governing Singapore in order "to massage the egos of liberals in the West". Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia recently accused the West of using human rights issues as renewed attempts at neo- colonialism.

The contemporary human rights debate between developed and developing countries has it roots in colonial times. More than 65 years ago, a young Indonesian nationalist leader named Sukarno defied the judges of the Netherlands Indies district court in Bandung by cynically remarking that Dutch colonials were far more generous in spending guilders to feed their pet dogs than they were to fork out a pittance for a hungry native Indonesian.

Not much has changed in the way of attitudes over the past 65 years. In the West, concern about the plight of the spotted owl or the otter often gets better play in the press than the Tutsis, the Bosnian Moslems, or the East Timorese. Human rights sermons -- and scams -- including the insidious notion that "civil and political rights must be pre-conditions to economic development" will continue to be part of the never ending corruption of humanitarian concerns.

For many in the West, human rights issues have become an integral part of a lucrative "conscience industry" involving hundreds of politicians, lobbyists, rights groups and media celebrities. After all, at any given time and at any given place in the developing world, there is bound to be some kind of human rights infringement that can be played to the consciences of many audiences. Given the frustrations over economic recession and restructuring in much of the West, what better way than to use human rights concerns as part of a campaign to seek external political scapegoats?

There is now an urgent need to go beyond human rights. The 1994 United Nations' Human Development Program's Human Development Report advocates Human Security, a concept whose time has truly come. Human Security is a universal concept and is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations as well as poor: Unemployment, drugs, crime, pollution, as well as conventional human rights concerns. Their intensity may differ, but all these threats to human security are rising worldwide.

Human security issues are also interdependent. The consequences of famine, drug trafficking, ethnic disputes and social disintegration are regional and global, affecting the northern rich as well as the southern poor. Moreover, human security is easier through early prevention than later intervention; a few billion dollars in primary health care and family planning can help contain a deadly disease affecting hundreds of thousands of the deprived. The right to physically survive is as sacrosanct as the right to express political freedom. Finally, human security is people-centered, concerned with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise their choices, how much access they can get to social and market opportunities and whether they live in conflict or peace.

Human security reaffirms the balanced approach of the original aims of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is a concept that needs to be appreciated by all: governments, NGOs, business, academia. It exposes the tiresome holier-than-thou attitudes conceived during the Cold War and continued today as part of contemporary trade disputes between North and South. Best of all, it provides release from the insufferable reciprocal sermoning and mutual propaganda bashing between rich and poor nations or the endless but tiresome debates about the merits of "Universal" as against "Asian" values. Human security reminds us of the hard reality that there can never be a perfect score of human rights in any country under any political system at any level of economic and industrial development.

Juwono Sudarsono is professor of International Relations at the University of Indonesia.