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.