Cockburn, Alexander. "The decay of 'human rights." The Nation 264.15 (21 April 1997). 9-10.

Abstract: Alex de Waal of the African Rights organization traces the progress of human rights, from the 'mass popular' movements of the 1960s to the beginning of professional organizations in the 1970s. De Waal believes that a reinvented professionalism is now needed in human rights.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 The Nation Company L.P.

I've complained about him often enough, but since David Remnick wrote a fine piece about Isaac Babel in The New York Review of Books for April 10 I had better give him credit for it, not least for a couple of piercing remarks from Babel: "a simile must be as precise as a slide rule and as natural as the smell of dill"; and to his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova (whose memoir, At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel, Remnick was reviewing), in gratitude when she got rid of a bunch of journalists trying to interview him, "Go wash your feet, I'll drink the bathwater." This goes one better than the exalted tribute my friend Pierre Sprey once heard in a jazz club in Washington, D.C., as a patron gazed admiringly at a spectacularly beautiful woman. "Man, it would be a privilege to drink her bathwater."

And while I'm dishing out the compliments, I must with profound regret report that I found myself nodding in agreement with an article by John Judis on campaign finance reform, recently published in The American Prospect. Judis made the sound point that it's unrealistic to posit some squeaky-lean system of uncorrupted electoral financing, virgo intacta amid the slime and corruption of the overall polity.

The Decay of `Human Rights'

"It is embarrassing," Alex de Waal wrote in an intelligent and important article in the Times Literary Supplement for February 21, "to be a professional human-rights activist in Africa." De Waal, who is co-director with Rakiya Omaar of the London-based organization African Rights, makes the point that the watershed for human rights activism in Africa came with the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis in 1994: "Writing in a recent issue of Index on Censorship, Caroline Moorehead and Ursula Owen urge those committed to human rights to think again. Television covered the Rwandese genocide in `real time' and gruesome detail, but the world did nothing except watch. `The assumption,' they write, `has been that if people knew enough ... if the information reached the right people, then action was bound to follow. That is turning out to be false.' Yet, to most human-rights organizations, Rwanda is just another challenge, implying that they should try harder."

De Waal makes a distinction between what he calls "primary movements" and the professional human rights organizations that came into being in the mid-seventies. The primary movements of the previous decade -- the U.S. civil rights movement and the women's movement, for example -- were "mass popular movements dedicated to the struggle for democratic rights," pursuing specific political principles.

The 1975 Helsinki Accords, which committed Eastern bloc countries to respect for basic human rights, engendered what de Waal calls the archetypal second-generation human rights organization: Helsinki Watch, put together by publishers, lawyers and some civil rights veterans. "It concentrated on using the media and lobbying politicians; money came from wealthy foundations, such as Ford. The profession of human-rights activism was created, marrying legalism with journalism and political lobbying, short-cutting the erstwhile belief that it was necessary to build a mass political constituency. `Human rights' became a career. high-profile, risk-free and commanding a professional salary."

The prime strategy of the human rights pros was, in the words of Aryeh Neier, founder of Human Rights Watch, "mobilizing shame." It's a mobilization that has been yielding diminishing returns, as the jaunts of Al Gore and Newt Gingrich to China have most recently demonstrated. Of course, "human rights" had a lot more resonance in Washington in the years of the cold war, often successfully corralled in the interests of the state.

De Waal points out that between the onset of political liberalization in 1990 and the genocide of 1994, Rwanda had "an exemplary human-rights community." There were no less than seven indigenous human rights nongovernmental organizations, with allies and patrons overseas, which reported closely on the mounting waves of massacres and murders. In January 1993 these N.G.O.s invited an International Commission of Inquiry, which named some of the perpetrators. The N.G.O.s even predicted monstrous atrocities unless something was done to curb and punish these perpetrators. "But," de Waal writer. "there was no primary movement that could underpin the activists' agenda, no political establishment ready to listen to their critique and act on it, and no international organizations ready to take the measures and risks necessary to protect them."

And then, on April 6, 1994, the Hutus began their final solution, butchering the Tutsis and also all critics. The U.N. took to its heels. In probably its most shameful act to date the Clinton Administration did worse than nothing, putting up Secretary of State Warren Christopher and his subordinates to say do "acts of genocide may have occurred and need to be investigated," which meant that the United States was able to evade its obligations as laid Mn by the 1994 Genocide Convention. The Hutus' only mistake was to encounter defeat by the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Thus the first indisputable genocide since that same 1949 Convention aroused no international revulsion powerful enough to compel intervention. This, after almost twenty years of professional human rights campaigning. "Arguably," de Waal charges, "one reason is the existence of specialist human-rights institutions: responsibility for responding was seen to be theirs, not all of humanity's." Human rights activism has been routinized, and as de waal points out, the U.N. and most human rights N.G.O.s "have devoted more resources to documenting the revenge killings of Tutsi soldiers and shortcomings of the new government that they have spent in investigating the worst crime against humanity to have occurred since their creation and in bringing the killers to justice. Expressions of outrage at bad prison conditions have been more consistent than outrage at genocide."

So we have human rights as "business as usual," in which genocide becomes pigeonholed as "past abuses," and thus minimized, in contrast to "current abuses," about which the human rights pros can raise their stink. The genocide is gently waved away in the name of "reconciliation," while some human rights pros suggest that there has somehow been a "double genocide," with blame attaching to both sides. Worse yet, de Waal claims, some Rwandan human-rights activists applauded in the West have been exposed as sympathizers with -- and in one case actually a participant in -- the 1994 slaughters, but have been "protected by colleagues and employers ... [in a] blatant abuse of human-rights discourse and the privileged position of human-rights NGOs for regressive political ends.... Overall, the unfortunate reality is that human-rights activism in post-genocide Rwanda has done more to encourage impunity for genocidal criminals than to bring those responsible to justice."

In their assessment in Index on Censorship, Moorehead and Owen made the judgment on the performance of human rights organizations that "in any other field of human endeavour, such results as are being seen today for such an enormous quantum of effort would not be tolerated." De Waal remarks with justice that a reinvention of human rights professionalism is in order. He also says that "contesting, or gaining, state power can be the most effective way to advance human rights" and that recognition of this fact means "abandoning the human-rights NGO as the privileged vehicle for achieving human rights." I re-read this sentence on April 1 after seeing a photograph in the newspaper of Laurent Kabila addressing his rebel troops in Kisangani. Back when Kabila was campaigning with Che Guevara in the Congo in the mid-sixties, de Waal's observation about the seizure of state power would have been regarded as self-evident to the point of being trite. The wheel turns. Let's see now whether -- as the nightmare of the past thirty years in Zaire seems about to recede -- the professional human rights organizations in the West can refute another accusation, that at least some of the time they have been a mere extension of state power and exertion of sate power by indirect means.

1040 and Out

I wonder if the crowd who did themselves in at that house in Rancho Santa Fe completed their tax returns before launching off on their rendezvous with the spaceship behind Hale-Bopp. Perhaps that's what tipped them over the edge, or maybe in some imaginary dialogue with an I.R.S. assessor they argued that since they were translating to another spiritual plane they were not actually responsible for any obligations to the U.S. Treasury incurred by a grosser entity inhabiting the physical envelope at an earlier time. Awful to get to the spaceship and find an I.R.S. man waiting inside the airlock.

Many newspapers stressed the "perversions" of Christian gospel promoted by the group's leader, Marshall Applewhite. What do they think St. Paul did to the words and notions of the Nazarene? It was Christian doctrine that doubtless made Applewhite into a closet case so tormented that he had himself castrated. Some early Christians did the same, though surely at far less expense.

Fatwa Against Hitchens

Not Christopher but his brother, Peter. At the time of a memorial for Jessica Mitford in London last February, P. Hitchens, a mad-dog right-winger, showered vulgar abuse on poor Docca's memory in The Express. He wasn't the only one either. Decca's sister Diana, widow of the Fascist Oswald Mosley, said she wouldn't be going to the memorial celebration at the Lyric Theatre because "she means just absolutely nothing to me at all. Not because she's a Communist but simply because she's a rather boring person, really." The one thing you can't say about Decca is that she was boring.

After P. Hitchens's onslaught Decca's son, Benjamin Treuhaft, promulgated his fatwa, duly recorded in London's Evening Standard: "Hitchens had better not show up on the streets of San Francisco lest he find himself whacked solidly upside his smarmy English head. My mother may have been a traitor to her class, but that does not mean Hitchens can accuse her of complicity in all the mayhem ever done in the name of communism. The party my mother belonged to fought racism and police brutality. Her sister Unity's Nazis, lesser offenders in the eyes of Peter Hitchens, slaughtered millions of Jews in the name of Aryanism. What fun it will be to see Hitchens's face after I slap it for him."

Tough Talk From Tom

For those who have never read Thomas Malthus, English economist and demographer, here's the unvarnished stuff, from the little-known fifth edition of his Essay on the Principle Population (1817), published by John Murray. I thank Ron Arnold of Wise Use for it.

It is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase of population must be limited by it, at least after the food has once been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the death of grown persons.... To act consistently, therefore, we should facilitate ... the operations of nature in producing this mortality.... Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases, and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.... The necessary mortality must come, in some form or other, and the extirpation of one disease will only be the signal for the birth of another perhaps more fatal. We cannot lower the waters of nursery by pressing them down in different places, which must necessarily
make them rise somewhere else, the only way in which we can hope
to effect our purpose is by drawing them off.