[afro-nets] Food for thought or a thought for food?

Food for thought or a thought for food?
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MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Human Rights Reader 60

AS HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS WE ARE TOO OFTEN COMMITTED TO STABIL-
ITY AS THE PREREQUISITE FOR JUSTICE...RATHER THAN THE OTHER WAY
AROUND. (Part 6 of 16)

52. Much of what has been called liberal activism in the last
half century has been merely an accommodation to historical
change --to circumstances. It represents a triumph of circum-
stance over ideology.

53. Not too differently, in-the-world-that-liberalism-finally-
forged, the world of the welfare state and the transnational
corporation, liberalism itself has become politically and intel-
lectually bankrupt. (.is Kerry really so much better than Bush
for the world's human rights cause..?).

The disparity between what liberals say in public and what they
do in private is actually the reason why it is so easy for young
people to unmask the hypocrisy of their liberal parents.

54. For many human rights (HR) activists, the freedom from hun-
ger and disease and from other HR violations is as important as
the freedom of expression, but the latter, by itself, is a value
devoid of sincerity.

55. When we think of the 'left' or leftists, we think of people
who espouse equality as an absolute and who measure injustice by
distribution of wealth. But the 'right' and the 'left' do not
occupy two extremes with a middle made up of liberals. Liberal-
ism is another dimension altogether. It remains empty of stan-
dards, committed to everything and, therefore, to nothing.

56. We can tell in the greatest detail what liberals are opposed
to or simply worried about. But when it comes to the question of
what, in positive terms, they stand for, answers are often
fuzzy.

57. The long march of liberal solutions to social injustice is
really devoid of the more fundamental questions about wealth and
power and their gross maldistribution.

58. One can see a political commitment to the 'idea-of-
upholding-human-rights' without the same commitment to deal with
the concomitant praxis to tackle the deep-rooted social and po-
litical problems behind the impunity we encounter when HR are
violated.

59. Our use of HR education interventions alone can thus be the
result of our adherence to a 'concept of society' which derives
from functionalist social theory. For the functionalists, there
are 'practical-difficulties' and 'obstacles-to-desirable-
changes', but fortunately there are also 'various-services-
and/or-facilities'-to-overcome-them. So, in the end, everything
will be fine.

60. It is incumbent upon us to make governments conscious of HR
problems, but at the same time emphasizing that HR education in-
terventions alone do not solve the problems at hand and that the
answer is not to be found in small projects or in having a few
experts running around.

61. Is it fair to say that we keep diagnosing the obvious and
giving a prognosis of a tragedy? Why do we keep emphasizing sec-
toral solutions that deal with what is important and not with
what is fundamental? Everything is important. But what is funda-
mental? Important is the help given to some marginalized groups,
but fundamental is the promotion of more permanent structural
changes that will avoid those groups being marginalized in the
first place.

62. We keep projecting tendencies of all what we do not want to
be continued. But tendency is not destiny. The destiny is in our
hands. When dealing with HR problems, it is important to act on
the causes, as well as on the effects. It is useless to take
care of those whose rights are violated the most while the root
causes of these violations are not solved. The greatest waste in
this latter task is time. Time wasted on exhaustive diagnoses
for checking easily verifiable tendencies; time wasted on excess
methodology. Decisions thus tend to be delayed by a system with-
out any synchronization with the speed of events. We often fail
to strike the right balance between theory and practice, aca-
demicism and activism.

63. All the elements needed to study HR violations in their
wider economic and political context are there (i.e. unequal
distribution between the various sectors of society, the role of
state and private interests and the conflicts between them), but
in spite of this, our colleagues continue to discuss matters
within a framework of cultural differences and ignorance in the
area of rights. Their implicit social model (ideology) does not
enable them to handle the complex social and economic phenomena
they themselves witness. A classless approach in sociological
studies, for the most part, focuses its analysis on the poor,
not on the economic system that produces poverty. Thus, not
paradoxically, most of the strategies for eradicating that pov-
erty have been directed at the poor themselves, but not at the
economic system that produces it. Problems are thus 'solved' in
an isolated and totally a-political way, because there is still
a lack of understanding of what determinants are really impor-
tant and how they need to be tackled.

Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn