Beyond rights: Human Security

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.