No one else in the world combined the credibility of having written a definitive, 800-page history of the Rwandan genocide with the willingness to challenge the current Rwandan government for its abuses. Researching and writing about the genocide was far from easy, of course. But this work made Alison a hero to many people (as the tribute pages at www.hrw.org attest). By contrast, her work on the abuses being committed by the Rwandan government today made her something of a skunk at a global garden party. Rwandan president Paul Kagame remains personally popular in the West and many thoughtful people , perhaps motivated by their horror at the genocide, have helped to airbrush his ugly human rights record. On the very day she died, Alison was quoted extensively in the Washington Post, casting doubt on the Rwandan government’s thin rationale for invading eastern Congo yet again. Who will have the authority, the bravery, and the store of unimpeachable knowledge, to hold Kigali to account in quite the way that Alison did?
What made her famous, what made her beloved, was her tireless work on the genocide. What made her a model human rights activist was her insistence that basic standards of human decency are immutable and apply to everyone. At the time she died, the Rwandan government had banned her from the country. That’s so sad. But it also contains, in some way, the really inspirational message of her work.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Speaking A Thousand Words
At Human Rights Watch, where I work, we see a lot of difficult pictures and read a lot of tragic reports, every day. But this image really sticks with me; I can’t shake it. I think it’s the proximity of the boot and the face. The boot recalls for me every Communist dictator, every rebel warlord, every brutal cop – every injustice that drove me into this business in the first place. And the face – the face is what keeps me here, the rictus of fear in his expression.
I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.
Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.
I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.
Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Plucky Little Georgia
Foreign correspondents, a cynical tribe, call them “plucky little” stories: plucky little Denmark, saving all those Jews; plucky little Sarajevo, surviving the siege of the Serbs; plucky little Hong Kong, being eaten by the Communist monster. A big bad neighbor, a small population, a steely will.
The latest installment in the “plucky little” series is Georgia, a Caucasus nation of 5 million people which fought a war with Russia in August 2008 and survived, sort of, to tell the tale.
Western audiences mostly hear the tale as the Georgian government tells it. Staffed by young, smart, Anglophone advisors, the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili has excellent connections to the international media, the global community of non-government organizations, and the highest political circles in Washington and Europe. As these plucky kids tell it, the Russians resent Saakashvili because he’s democratic, uncorrupt, and eager to join NATO, and they have long harbored a desire to unseat him. Last August they provoked Georgia into war with South Ossetia, and then seized the moment to roll over an internationally recognized border, supposedly to “protect” the South Ossetians but really to overthrow the Georgian government.
Saakashvili is still in power and the Russians stopped short of Tbilisi. But not very short. In conversation, government ministers are likely to mention more than once that Russian troops are just a half an hour from the Georgian capital (if your presidential motorcade drives awfully fast). The threat is palpable.
Geographical realities support this version of the narrative. The territory of South Ossetia, where the war was fought, remains largely closed to outsiders because the Russians control it, and don’t want international monitors messing around in it. That makes it hard to assess the damage caused by Georgian forces during the war. But Georgia is wide open, so it’s easy to see the pitiable results of Russia’s incursion. Along the road to South Ossetia stand rows and rows of newly-built houses, sad little Georgian Levittowns, where thousands of people displaced by the war have been resettled. This is no tent city of refugees. These people are here to stay.
They are ethnic Georgians who were burned out of their homes by marauding South Ossetian militias in mid-August last year. Most of them lost everything they owned, and some of them lost friends and family members who were executed by the South Ossetians while Russian soldiers looked on. These are war crimes. Because they were part of a widespread and systematic effort to chase ethnic Georgians from their homes, a tribunal might rule them crimes against humanity. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is said to be examining the case, although he’s launched no formal investigation. Russia, as the de facto occupying power in South Ossetia at the time, had a responsibility to maintain order and prevent such crimes from taking place. Instead, in many cases Human Rights Watch found, they abetted them.
After war comes accounting. The Georgian government used indiscriminate and disproportionate force in its attacks on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, firing Soviet-era GRAD rockets in districts where civilians were still cowering in basements. It also used cluster munitions, a weapon that 96 nations have signed a treaty to ban. The Georgian media have no access to victims of Georgian bombing, and television does not report news unfavorable to the Georgian government anyway. Local non-governmental organizations evince more independence, but the population who suffered under Georgian bombardment are locked behind a new, de facto border that Russian troops patrol.
That makes it the responsibility of Georgia’s international partners, particularly the governments of Europe and the United States, to insist that Georgia provide a full accounting for how it fought the war. Who gave the command to attack Tskhinvali with GRAD rockets, and what did they know about the presence of civilians in the city at the time? Failing to take appropriate care to protect civilians in war is a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime that requires prosecution.
Such an accounting will be difficult for President Sakaashvili to undertake because the fact is, he lost the war. His enthusiastic and hawkish backers in Washington may have made him feel stronger than he really was. He told me he was on the phone with his military commanders ten times a day during those tense days in August, which is understandable. But if he was ordering them to rain death down on the South Ossetian capital, then it will be awkward for any investigation to follow the trail all the way to the commander who’s most responsible.
Investigating war crimes in Georgia runs counter to the “plucky little” narrative that has so dominated international coverage of the war. But the willingness to openly examine its own record will do more to secure Georgia’s future than NATO membership. The United States and the Europeans are unlikely to go to war with Russia over Georgia. But they must continue to defend, for audiences in Georgia and Russia as well as at home, what democratic values really stand for, and for the basic principle that serious crimes cannot go unaddressed.
The latest installment in the “plucky little” series is Georgia, a Caucasus nation of 5 million people which fought a war with Russia in August 2008 and survived, sort of, to tell the tale.
Western audiences mostly hear the tale as the Georgian government tells it. Staffed by young, smart, Anglophone advisors, the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili has excellent connections to the international media, the global community of non-government organizations, and the highest political circles in Washington and Europe. As these plucky kids tell it, the Russians resent Saakashvili because he’s democratic, uncorrupt, and eager to join NATO, and they have long harbored a desire to unseat him. Last August they provoked Georgia into war with South Ossetia, and then seized the moment to roll over an internationally recognized border, supposedly to “protect” the South Ossetians but really to overthrow the Georgian government.
Saakashvili is still in power and the Russians stopped short of Tbilisi. But not very short. In conversation, government ministers are likely to mention more than once that Russian troops are just a half an hour from the Georgian capital (if your presidential motorcade drives awfully fast). The threat is palpable.
Geographical realities support this version of the narrative. The territory of South Ossetia, where the war was fought, remains largely closed to outsiders because the Russians control it, and don’t want international monitors messing around in it. That makes it hard to assess the damage caused by Georgian forces during the war. But Georgia is wide open, so it’s easy to see the pitiable results of Russia’s incursion. Along the road to South Ossetia stand rows and rows of newly-built houses, sad little Georgian Levittowns, where thousands of people displaced by the war have been resettled. This is no tent city of refugees. These people are here to stay.
They are ethnic Georgians who were burned out of their homes by marauding South Ossetian militias in mid-August last year. Most of them lost everything they owned, and some of them lost friends and family members who were executed by the South Ossetians while Russian soldiers looked on. These are war crimes. Because they were part of a widespread and systematic effort to chase ethnic Georgians from their homes, a tribunal might rule them crimes against humanity. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is said to be examining the case, although he’s launched no formal investigation. Russia, as the de facto occupying power in South Ossetia at the time, had a responsibility to maintain order and prevent such crimes from taking place. Instead, in many cases Human Rights Watch found, they abetted them.
After war comes accounting. The Georgian government used indiscriminate and disproportionate force in its attacks on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, firing Soviet-era GRAD rockets in districts where civilians were still cowering in basements. It also used cluster munitions, a weapon that 96 nations have signed a treaty to ban. The Georgian media have no access to victims of Georgian bombing, and television does not report news unfavorable to the Georgian government anyway. Local non-governmental organizations evince more independence, but the population who suffered under Georgian bombardment are locked behind a new, de facto border that Russian troops patrol.
That makes it the responsibility of Georgia’s international partners, particularly the governments of Europe and the United States, to insist that Georgia provide a full accounting for how it fought the war. Who gave the command to attack Tskhinvali with GRAD rockets, and what did they know about the presence of civilians in the city at the time? Failing to take appropriate care to protect civilians in war is a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime that requires prosecution.
Such an accounting will be difficult for President Sakaashvili to undertake because the fact is, he lost the war. His enthusiastic and hawkish backers in Washington may have made him feel stronger than he really was. He told me he was on the phone with his military commanders ten times a day during those tense days in August, which is understandable. But if he was ordering them to rain death down on the South Ossetian capital, then it will be awkward for any investigation to follow the trail all the way to the commander who’s most responsible.
Investigating war crimes in Georgia runs counter to the “plucky little” narrative that has so dominated international coverage of the war. But the willingness to openly examine its own record will do more to secure Georgia’s future than NATO membership. The United States and the Europeans are unlikely to go to war with Russia over Georgia. But they must continue to defend, for audiences in Georgia and Russia as well as at home, what democratic values really stand for, and for the basic principle that serious crimes cannot go unaddressed.
Laura Bush on Human Rights? Oh, please
On Wednesday, December 10, Laura Bush will address the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sigh. Mrs. Bush may have made occasional, anodyne comments about human rights, but she has certainly demonstrated no significant leadership in this domain over the course of her husband's eight years in office -- eight of the most damaging years to American human rights policy in the postwar period. What was CFR thinking? Since one First Lady helped draft the UDHR, let's invite another one to talk about it? But Laura Bush ain't no Eleanor Roosevelt.
The lack of a serious speaker on this important topic, and on this important day, suggests a real flaw in the Council's own analysis of the role human rights plays in international affairs today. Why not organize an event about how non-governmental organizations just helped bring into being the most significant arms control treaty in a decade -- the ban on cluster munitions being signed in Oslo this week? Several foreign ministers and senior ambassadors have publicly credited the human rights movement for generating the critical momentum, the expertise, and the intellectual leadership behind this new piece of international law. That's one of the most interesting transformations in US foreign policy in the last 60 years, thanks in part to the vibrancy of the ideas enunciated in the Universal Declaration itself -- foreign policy is no longer the exclusive preserve of men in governments. Or their wives, for chrissakes.
The lack of a serious speaker on this important topic, and on this important day, suggests a real flaw in the Council's own analysis of the role human rights plays in international affairs today. Why not organize an event about how non-governmental organizations just helped bring into being the most significant arms control treaty in a decade -- the ban on cluster munitions being signed in Oslo this week? Several foreign ministers and senior ambassadors have publicly credited the human rights movement for generating the critical momentum, the expertise, and the intellectual leadership behind this new piece of international law. That's one of the most interesting transformations in US foreign policy in the last 60 years, thanks in part to the vibrancy of the ideas enunciated in the Universal Declaration itself -- foreign policy is no longer the exclusive preserve of men in governments. Or their wives, for chrissakes.
Why Eleanor Roosevelt Still Matters
When I was a kid, Eleanor Roosevelt was a figure of fun. She had big buck teeth and that goofy falsetto voice. Growing up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, I wasn’t given books about Eleanor Roosevelt or told to follow in her footsteps to greatness (though my parents were Democrats). She died in 1962, beloved but still easily satirized, the kind of celebrity Jon Stewart would have had a field day with. Even back when her husband was president, people had joked about his nightly prayer, “Dear God, please make Eleanor tired.”
Today, Eleanor Roosevelt is viewed as a figure of near-saintliness and great prescience. My daughter dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt one year for Halloween. She’s a weird kid, I’ll admit, but it still indicates a trend. Pick up a copy of “Olivia Saves the Circus” (or borrow one from nearly any 5-year-old girl) and note that the piggy heroine has a huge poster of Mrs. Roosevelt on her bedroom wall. The author, Ian Falconer, admits that he used the image in part for absurdist effect, but also because Eleanor Roosevelt “is a great role model.”
The sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated today, and no doubt Eleanor Roosevelt will be celebrated along with it. And indeed, the role she played in producing the declaration explains, more than any other achievement, the latterly rise in her reputation. For the two and a half years that she chaired the United Nations committee to draft the declaration, and for many years thereafter, human rights was a spindly, if noble, idea. Thirty-five million people had just been slaughtered in World War Two, and the wife of the now-dead American president was working with some leading intellectuals from the global wreckage to draw up a document saying such things shouldn’t happen. Hmmm.
Most of the people who supported the idea from inside the U.S. government did so only because they thought a declaration might be a good club to whack the Soviets with.There were no Amnesty Internationals or Human Rights Watches. There were no Assistant Secretaries of State for Human Rights, or university majors in human rights, or international conferences devoted to human rights. The term “human rights” didn’t appear much in the newspaper or on the radio. The field of human rights, quite crowded today, was hardly peopled.
When Human Rights Watch was founded thirty years later, its first achievement was to help publicize the names of Soviet dissidents who were white, mostly male, and not just educated but among the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century. It was a fairly narrow, if impressive, slice of the global population. Today the universe of people laying claim to the human rights idea has grown to encompass women, children, gay people, refugees, prisoners, people living with HIV/AIDS, people living with disabilities. The beauty of the Universal Declaration is that it has grown along with them. Like the US constitution, it’s a document that is flexible enough, and basic enough, to remain relevant while the world around it gets way more complicated. Eleanor Roosevelt and the drafters did a good job.
Mrs. Roosevelt did a lot for human rights, and human rights returned the favor. The embrace of any Big Idea entails lonely work at the beginning, of course (it makes a better story for Hollywood that way, too), but if the Big Idea catches on, it sends a lot of luster back through time to its earliest proponents. Nietzsche wrote that “truth has the fewest defenders not when it is dangerous to speak the truth but when it is boring.” People used to think Eleanor Roosevelt was kind of boring. Not anymore.
Today, Eleanor Roosevelt is viewed as a figure of near-saintliness and great prescience. My daughter dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt one year for Halloween. She’s a weird kid, I’ll admit, but it still indicates a trend. Pick up a copy of “Olivia Saves the Circus” (or borrow one from nearly any 5-year-old girl) and note that the piggy heroine has a huge poster of Mrs. Roosevelt on her bedroom wall. The author, Ian Falconer, admits that he used the image in part for absurdist effect, but also because Eleanor Roosevelt “is a great role model.”
The sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated today, and no doubt Eleanor Roosevelt will be celebrated along with it. And indeed, the role she played in producing the declaration explains, more than any other achievement, the latterly rise in her reputation. For the two and a half years that she chaired the United Nations committee to draft the declaration, and for many years thereafter, human rights was a spindly, if noble, idea. Thirty-five million people had just been slaughtered in World War Two, and the wife of the now-dead American president was working with some leading intellectuals from the global wreckage to draw up a document saying such things shouldn’t happen. Hmmm.
Most of the people who supported the idea from inside the U.S. government did so only because they thought a declaration might be a good club to whack the Soviets with.There were no Amnesty Internationals or Human Rights Watches. There were no Assistant Secretaries of State for Human Rights, or university majors in human rights, or international conferences devoted to human rights. The term “human rights” didn’t appear much in the newspaper or on the radio. The field of human rights, quite crowded today, was hardly peopled.
When Human Rights Watch was founded thirty years later, its first achievement was to help publicize the names of Soviet dissidents who were white, mostly male, and not just educated but among the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century. It was a fairly narrow, if impressive, slice of the global population. Today the universe of people laying claim to the human rights idea has grown to encompass women, children, gay people, refugees, prisoners, people living with HIV/AIDS, people living with disabilities. The beauty of the Universal Declaration is that it has grown along with them. Like the US constitution, it’s a document that is flexible enough, and basic enough, to remain relevant while the world around it gets way more complicated. Eleanor Roosevelt and the drafters did a good job.
Mrs. Roosevelt did a lot for human rights, and human rights returned the favor. The embrace of any Big Idea entails lonely work at the beginning, of course (it makes a better story for Hollywood that way, too), but if the Big Idea catches on, it sends a lot of luster back through time to its earliest proponents. Nietzsche wrote that “truth has the fewest defenders not when it is dangerous to speak the truth but when it is boring.” People used to think Eleanor Roosevelt was kind of boring. Not anymore.
No Dancing on Journalism's Grave
In general I think we fret too much over the changes roiling the journalism business these days. Many good people are losing their jobs and they need help – I’d love to know HOW to help them – but we can’t bemoan the changes in technology that are driving the trend. They just ARE. It’s like the weather. No sense railing; just adapt. Find another way to deliver the social good that newspapers have traditionally delivered, with admittedly uneven success: an informed citizenry. It’s a mistake to want to save newspapers out of sentimentality, or fondness for the ways of our youth, or insistence that it’s more “natural” to read the news on paper. Since journalists, er, tend to write a lot, we tend to read a lot of commentary about the future of journalism that goes, “We must save the newspaper industry because AIEEEEEEEEeeee….” (sound of author falling off cliff). One news consumer on the San Antonio Express-News website put it bitingly, “A good reason to read a newspaper is to keep them in business because, if we don't read they don't print and they then go out of business.” But while we’re all busily trying to find that magical other way to deliver that social good of the informed citizenry, we have to note with alarm who’s dancing on journalism’s grave. Part of what makes the decline of newspapers really alarming is the relish that the American far right is taking in their demise. If the drooling pack of know-nothings that has been howling away in the Uinted States over the last decade is welcoming the end of newspapers, then there must really be something to mourn in their passing. Take a look at some of the other comments on the San Antonio Express-News website, responding to the sensible and even-handed column of Bob Rivard, “2 Reasons You Should Read the Newspaper”: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/Good_and_bad_news_2_reasons_you_should_read_the_newspaper.html?c=y&viewAllComments=yThe comments are no uglier than what we all see on the internet every day. But let not familiarity mellow our revulsion: that’s pretty ugly. These people have been shouting loudly and rudely in the national political conversation for quite a few years now. The presidential election makes clear that they’re in a minority in the United States, thank god. But they may garner an even more disproportionate audience thanks to the collapse of newspapers, which have traditionally helped orchestrate and filter the political debate. Where journalists ebb, these morons flow. We live in an incredibly information-rich society, much richer than ever before. But we haven’t figured out how to fund news-gathering (as opposed to news-commenting). Just as important, we haven’t figured out how to ensure that news commentary is reasonably civil. The commercial viability of the media and the civility of American debate are connected, and their solutions are likely to be connected as well -- hopefully soon. History is littered with examples of dangeorus political movements gaining momentum as public discourse grows more shrill, and more chauvinist. Very recent American history, in fact. And maybe some history that’s yet to be made.
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