WHRTF
HOME
Books
Calendar
Contact Us
Donations
Join
Newsletter
Photo Galleries
HISTORY
About Us
Human Rights
LINKS
Help
in Whatcom Co
Resource Sites
Solidarity
Free Speech
Local Business Support
ENDORSEMENTS
Against
neoNazi Mailings
FTAA
Austria
Makah
Whaling Rights
2006 International Human Rights Day event
Defending Human Rights in a Time of War
Michael Ramos
The UN Declaration of Human Rights has been rightly cited as the hallmark or frame of reference for discussion of human rights today. Promulgated in 1948, it is held up as a universal guide for how every nation should measure up to each other and to itself. Its upholding and affirming of political and civil rights are standards that Western nations draw on consistently. Lesser-known and valued in the US are the rights related to economic and cultural matters.
We ignore these points to our peril. With more than one billion people living on less than a dollar a day, and the systematic dismantling of local attempts at self-sufficiency through unrestrained economic globalization, we fail to see how lack of housing, inadequate or nonexistent medical care, and inability to educate children contribute to the civil unrest and political disruption that seem to bother Americans most.
Culturally, this plays out in violence toward women, human trafficking and anti-immigrant movements, here and abroad. In the United States, nativist movements rear their ugly head – built on an ideology of ethnic purity and racial hatred (see the Minutemen, and what a great job you have done in Bellingham to respond to them nonviolently!), neglecting to see that our economy is built on the backs of immigrant labor and is understood and accepted as reality by the engine-drivers of the economy. And our society’s history is built upon immigrants becoming contributing partners to the mosaic that makes the US what it is today. There was a higher percentage of immigrants in 1900 in the United States than there is today.
In France, the country built on secular values of the equal rights of individuals without mention of race, is forced to confront racism as a society as the demographic has changed and the neglect of one segment of the population has led to civil unrest. Economic and cultural rights undergird any notion we have of freedom and democracy and are as foundational for human rights as political and civil rights are.
Human rights are founded on the recognition of the dignity of each human being, and from the religious vantage point, as creatures or children God. Each person has inherent value and is created with full integrity and potential for generativity. With an understanding that genocide and wars were meant to be unrepeatable experiences, respect for individuals in society would strengthen the authentic part of nation-states in the world community.
Defending human rights in a time of war is a moral imperative. And with a war in Iraq within a continuing, perhaps never-ending, war on Terror, our landscape for human rights is challenged if not outright threatened. The logic of war is incompatible with the spirit of human rights. Wars are promulgated through force and violence even if the aim is to achieve certain political objectives. When these objectives are constantly changing or are so vague that the targets are undefined, or are misrepresented in order to serve a particular constituency, or to serve ends other than those stated, then the most unfortunate, albeit expected, outcomes of any ‘find, fix or destroy’ mission will become reality and thousands may be killed with impunity in order to extract the response of capitulation, of ultimate surrender. In the nuclear age, no moral framework based on human rights can accept the logic of preemptive war and continue to stand.
Let us not forget the effects of economic sanctions on the people, especially the children, in Iraq. A conservative journalist believes that “economic sanctions my well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction.” In preparation for war in 2002, the US abstained from two votes of the UN Disarmament Committee on the militarization of space and the General Protocol prohibiting the use of poisonous gases and bacteriological methods of warfare.
Blatant disregard for international cooperation to prevent war and the expansion of militarism in order to set the stage for proving victorious in some future conflict (behind the fear-based rhetoric of “homeland security”) leads to the erosion of standards of participation and dissent at home. Both the perpetration of war abroad and the assault on human rights at home are built upon the deconstruction – and devaluation – of the Other.
War is the end result in a society that has come to tolerate in Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, the “three evils” of poverty, militarism and racism. Violence begets violence until the cycle is stopped. These forms of structural violence need to be faced squarely, in a context of competition, greed and conspicuous consumption, so that the logic of war – that might makes right – may be challenged. And defending the human rights of people other than ourselves becomes the bedrock of framing alternatives to war and ongoing conflict.
If we were not convinced by the passage of the Patriot Act as the first domestic initiative of the war on Terror, we can now see that the logic of war almost certainly leads to the curtailing of civil liberties and civil rights. In other words, we erode democracy in order to promote democracy. Twelve hundred Southeast Asians, Muslims and Arabs were summarily picked up and detained as people “suspected” of terrorism. Today, people may be investigated, arrested, lose all possessions, be held without charge indefinitely, separated from their families and tortured if you are a foreign national held under US auspices. All legal. For Muslims and for others, this may mean that the fundamental right to religious expression is denied. If you speak out on the war in Iraq, you may be greeted with the IRS at your doorstep trying to reverse your non-profit tax status. Freedom of speech is now challenged. I contend that we need to approach these affronts to basic civil liberties as a threat to all of us. In a time of war, internal and external security are expanded in hopes that voices of dissent are muted. A human rights approach must not let this happen, because indeed our very humanity is at stake.
Behind the incredible incompetence and unconscionable neglect of mostly African American citizens in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Region when Hurricane Katrina hit, are the double whammy of poverty and racism. No plan was made to ensure that citizens were reached in their homes in the Gulf, so those who could not afford transportation or were afraid to leave stayed until the floods came. In Bangladesh, when a hurricane of this sort hits, authorities go door to door to ensure that they have reached everybody. Today, if you are urban, poor and a minority, you may be discounted and devalued, in other words, considered in effect, less than or even subhuman. Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini of San Marcos, Guatemala (an area devastated recently by Tropical Storm Stan) says, “It is the poor who suffer most in these circumstances, they who bear the brunt of impact and the consequences.” Now, as subsidized housing is running out for those who fled, tax cuts for food, shelter, and health care as well as permanent tax cuts, are being rammed through Congress. The reasoning is revealing: in order to offset Hurricane Relief. The audacity! The moral outrage?
One of the ways people today are discounted is, for working people, in the gutting of union protections for 200,000 Homeland Security employees and the potential loss of civil service protections for tens of thousands more under the Department of Defense. This is an unacceptable violation of basic worker and human rights.
If the basis of human rights is love for the other, and if the ground of human rights is social justice, then the destination of human rights is solidarity, sharing the essence of one’s humanity with another and walking in that intimate place together come what may, even in the face of rejection or even persecution. The quality that lends itself to solidarity is described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as ubuntu.
Ubuntu means, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.” A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”
When put into practice, mutual respect for the Other acknowledges the diversity of who we are as human beings and lends toward the realization of civil, social and cultural rights between distinct and different peoples. With such respect, we are all enriched.
Ubuntu in my estimation is often most readily found in those who have suffered the most: immigrant communities and those who are poor, including many low-wage workers, who are struggling to make ends meet.
For those communities whose human rights are routinely violated, their experience is sometimes described as being victims in a “war” against them. This is particularly true in the post-9/11 times in which we live. My Somali friend on the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride who would have been deported after being forced to register with ICE to possible death except for a successful class action suit under Hate Free Zone Washington that successfully stopped the deportations for 2,800 individual Somalis. For Maria, a janitor, who was willing to speak up for living wages and health benefits, good working conditions and a union contract, she engaged in a 2-day strike and lost her job because of it under the excuse of being thought to not have proper documentation. Because of the risk she was willing to take, the New York Times reported last week that Houston is on the verge of organizing 10,000 workers with a chance for all to be unionized. Ubuntu available for janitors, ubuntu for us. Yet in addition, there were those who stood as non-immigrants with immigrants on the freedom ride. For example, Mako from Seattle saw what was happening from the unique perspective of someone who had to live with her father taken behind bars as a Japanese-American in World War II and her whole family went to Idaho, for several years in internment camps. Mako said, “No way can this ever happen again!” She sat in front of the bus, reconciled us when we lost sight of our ubuntu as a group promoting our four goals (family reunification, justice on the job, legalization and a pathway to citizenship and civil rights and civil liberties). When she spoke in front of 2,000 people in Washington, DC, alongside John Lewis, we knew how profoundly changed we had been from journeying together through cities and towns all across America for 13 days and 13 nights.
Even with ubuntu, we seek results from our efforts. We must look at the horizon of our activities. What type of community do we specifically want to create? Is there not a sacred duty to “repair the world” and to frame our work in this holy image of tikkun olam?
This puts us, as human rights defenders, in the position of “repairers of the world.” It suggests a communitarian perspective where all are responsible for all. My suffering is your suffering. And your liberation, your freedom to live in dignity, is my liberation. Repair of the world confronts exploitation and oppression with a genuine preferential option for those who are poor or are on the margins. It means examining root causes and promoting social justice. As Chief Seattle said a century and a half ago, “Our destinies are intertwined.” Tikkun olam puts patriotism in a context where it is subservient to the preservation of peoples other than ourselves because such diversity, as with other species, makes us whole. Tikkun olam suggests wholeness and health for all.
As human rights activists, our task is before us.
If not us, then who, if not now, then when, if not here, then where? The circle of defender of human rights, especially in times of war, is larger than when it began. Let us strengthen the web of life.
March 2006