Human rights, anti-corruption must be linked: Sociologist
MANILA (JP): Human rights activists, particularly in Southeast Asia, have yet to link their campaigns with anticorruption awareness, a sociologist said.
Malaysian Syed Husein Alatas, known in Indonesia for his translated book titled Sosiologi Korupsi, said yesterday that rights advocates have failed to clearly see the relation between corruption and human rights violations.
Alatas was one of the speakers of a two-day conference on human rights, democracy and development, with focus on Southeast Asia and European values.
"No corrupt government supports human rights...no corrupt government wants change," Alatas said in the talks organized by the Germany-based Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-government organization.
Authorities in such governments "do not want to step down and play according to the games," Alatas said.
"You can never solve the human rights problem until you solve the corruption problem," he said. Both issues must be campaigned simultaneously, he said.
As long as corruption is tolerated, the raising of human rights issue is "not genuine" and functions only to embarrass governments, he said. Authorities who hate criticism suppress the press because of the need to have the resources to stay in power, he added.
Corruption affects far more people such as in the form of food scarcity and the effect it has on public health, while arrests and subsequent torture, for instance, are among the effects of corrupt authorities.
He told about 40 participants mainly from seven Southeast Asian countries that activists have yet to learn "from the simple farmer, who thinks every minute of the pest which is about to destroy his crop".
Corruption, he said, "is the pest which could destroy the crop of human rights".
The failure to link human rights to corruption among authorities, "is like asking gangsters to enforce law and order," he told The Jakarta Post.
The 68-year-old professor at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia was talking on drawing from lessons in history and beliefs held by Asians, to socialize human rights which have become values in society -- "not the values of the rulers".
History needs to be studied and the facts distributed by human rights advocates, he said. While corruption may be culturally embedded in the region, few people know from history that it is not condoned.
"For instance, how many Moslems know that some of the close friends of the Prophet Mohammad were punished because of corruption?" he said.
The campaign for both anticorruption awareness and human rights would be more supported if people in the region could relate to experiences in Asian history, Alatas said.
An effective campaign must come from within, as outside pressure would not create enough public anger, he added. There is no need to wait for pressure such as from the World Trade Organization or the World Bank, for instance, as this would not foster human rights.
In the later session on democracy and development, Marzuki Darusman of the National Commission on Human Rights, referred to "the rampant prevalence of unbridled corruption as a demoralizing consequence of political disempowerment".
"The paralysis to effect meaningful corrective political action against the abuse of public trust is today a gross democratic deficiency," Marzuki said. (anr)