Whose business is it to stop human rights violations?

Whose business is it to stop human rights violations?

By John Phillips

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Suppose you are walking down the street and you see an adult beating up his child. Or you witness hoodlums in a store harassing the store owner until some "protection' money is handed over. Or you see a student give another violent student a large knife. What do you do?

The answer for many people is that they would intervene to prevent these bullies and gangsters from carrying out their deeds. Now suppose that the situation is such that these thugs are not people but government police or soldiers and their victims are citizens.

Now, what would you do?

"Well, it isn't any of our business."

Unfortunately, this is the answer for many people.

And those who try to intervene on behalf of those unfortunate enough to be mistreated by their own governments are labeled as subversives, and other governments that intervene are regarded neo-imperialists.

Of course, many of those complaining are Western governments who have their own history of human rights abuses or have perpetuated the abuse of foreign citizens in colonial or Cold War times.

The standard response to criticism about human rights violations is for the offending government to rub the noses of their critics in the "night soil" of their own past abuses and further accuse them of meddling in internal affairs and usurping sovereignty.

But, the question that never seems to get answered is whose business is it if a country abuses its own citizens?

Putting aside the issue of the individuals and internal organizations concerned with human rights abuse who are themselves often the target of abuse as in Nigeria, the question remains as to whether foreign governments or international organizations have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign country. And, to state the problem in reverse, how can the rest of the world blithely go about becoming interdependent when not everyone plays by the same rules? That is, whose business is it?

Despite roots in political philosophy evolved over a long period of time in many different places such as ancient Greece, the idea that individuals in every society have certain basic human rights which no government has a right to take away achieved its prominence in the last half century after the defeat of Fascism.

Nonetheless, the current view of human rights was perhaps best expressed in the 18th century American Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."

These powerful words and the ideas behind them have led to the transformation of the way people think about their governments, resulting in many institutions of oppression disappearing. This includes divine monarchies, colonialism, slavery, fascism and apartheid. Even some kinds of dictatorship such as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" are largely anathemas in the current world, in which democracy, justice, and perhaps individual rights are the ideal.

Unfortunately, human rights abuse, oppression, denial of basic human necessities, and systematic abuse of minorities, women and children, continue unabated and, in fact, if anything they seem accelerated and intensified. In the 20th century neither numbers nor nationality have meaning: a million dead Cambodians, or Rwandans, or just a few thousand ethnically cleansed Bosnians on all sides.

No matter who is involved or what the numbers are, the reason for these deaths is substantially the result of a "sovereign" government exercising its sovereignty to abuse its own relatively helpless citizens as well as those of other countries. In most cases, the people who according to Jefferson should have "altered or abolished" their governments because of the abuse of power were powerless to do so and could not have consented to these abuses.

But, the world has consistently stood by and watched it happen, or people buried their heads in the sand and pretended they did not know until it was entirely too late, or worse yet sold weapons to these governments so that they might kill more efficiently. And these abuses continue to happen everyday and in almost every region of the world to a greater or lesser degree.

This then is the reason why few governments are willing to tackle the issue of human rights abuses in other countries, except through the somewhat dubious means of "denying them most favored nation trading status" or throwing them out of their "clubs" like the Commonwealth response to Nigeria recently.

Pointing fingers and calling someone names has little or no effect except to incite the outraged indignation of the abuser government crying foul because their internal affairs were interfered with. So, murderous regimes are "constructively engaged" as in Serbia, Myanmar, and China.

Unfortunately, this still leaves us with a rather bitter taste of bile in our mouth since the murderous actions of so many governments are forgotten in the exchange of words and counter accusations. Worse yet, if a major power country such as Russia or China become involved in human rights abuses, any sanctions imposed on them by one country are quickly circumvented and made meaningless by the actions of another.

Thus, we have business as usual and semi-apologies being issued to China for presuming to criticize them for Tiananmen Square, Tibet and nuclear testing, while the Russians attend NATO and World Trade Organization cocktail parties at the same time as they are battering Chechnya or supplying arms to Bosnian Serbs.

Even the actions of the UN as the supposed world governing body and the U.S. as the only superpower are suspect. The UN only seems willing to intervene in human rights abuses if there is no chance that anyone will vigorously object. Why was the UN seemingly silent on the abuses in Bosnia until politics forced its hand just recently?

Then again, where was the U.S. in its own sphere of influence, Latin America, when military dictatorships ruled with terror, torture, and termination?

All too often, the answer is that the U.S. and the UN were either actively currying favor by supporting terrorist regimes or they were turning a blind eye to them.

So, in the absence of any legitimate moral and legal authority in the world to stop human rights abuses the questions remain: Whose business is it anyway?

But even more importantly, how will we stop these abuses once and for all?

The writer is an education consultant living in Yogyakarta.