Is the Human Rights Era Ending?
New York Times
February 5, 2002
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Since the end of the cold war,
human rights has become the dominant moral
vocabulary in foreign affairs. The question after Sept. 11 is
whether the era of human rights has come and gone.
If that sounds alarmist, consider some of the evidence.
Western pressure on China to honor human rights, never
especially effective, has stopped altogether. Chinese
support for the war on terror has secured Western silence
about repression in the Xinjiang region. China now says it
has a problem there with Islamic fundamentalists and
terrorists, and it is straining to link them to Al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany,
presented with evidence of Qaeda involvement in
Chechnya, calls for a "differentiated evaluation" of Russian
policy there. This new evaluation seems certain to involve
forgetting that Moscow's war against terror has actually
been waged against a whole people, costing tens of
thousands of lives.
A similar chill is settling over world politics. Australia's
government uses the threat of terrorism to justify
incarcerating Afghan refugees in a desert compound.
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have leveraged their provision
of bases and intelligence into a carte blanche for domestic
repression. Egypt, which for many years has used
detention without trial, military courts and torture to keep
control of militants, now demands an even freer hand.
Sudan, which was under attack from a coalition of liberals
and black churches determined to end slavery and stop
Khartoum's war against the south, is now accepted as an
ally against Osama bin Laden. And President Robert
Mugabe of Zimbabwe has decided that his longtime
political opponents are really "terrorists."
Human Rights Watch has condemned these developments
as opportunism, but something more durable than that
may be at work. Rome has been attacked, and Rome is
fighting to re-establish its security and its hegemony. This
may permanently demote human rights in the hierarchy
of America's foreign policy priorities.
Of course, just because the United States has other
priorities doesn't have to mean that, in global terms, the
era of this movement is over. Human rights has gone
global by going local, anchoring itself in struggles for
justice that can survive without American inspiration or
leadership. The movement does not have its headquarters
in Washington. But if Washington turns away, the
movement loses the one government whose power can be
decisive in stopping human rights abuses.
Activists may not see it this way, but their influence may
have peaked in the 1990's. That was the decade when new
constitutions brought human rights principles to the
states created in the Soviet breakup, when United Nations
agencies finally got the courage to tackle violations by
member states, when America's State Department actively
promoted human rights and democracy abroad. This was
the era of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo
and East Timor, the heyday of the United Nations
tribunals in The Hague and Arusha, Tanzania.
In the humanitarian interventions of the 1990's, political
figures like Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain believed
that they were ushering in a new era, backing human
rights principles with political will and military steel. In
reality, it was only an interregnum, made possible
because Western militaries had spare capacity and time to
do human rights work. Now with America launched on an
indefinite military campaign against terrorists, will there
be the political energy necessary to mount humanitarian
interventions?
The intellectual and political climate of a
war on terror now resembles the atmosphere of the cold
war. Then the imperative of countering Soviet and
Chinese imperial advances trumped concern for the
abuses of authoritarian governments in the Western
camp. The new element in determining American foreign
policy is what assets — bases, intelligence and diplomatic
leverage — it can bring to bear against Al Qaeda.
Some veterans of the human rights campaigns of the cold
war refuse to admit that the climate is any worse now
than it was then. But in the Reagan years, the movement
merely risked being unpopular. In the Bush era, it risks
irrelevance.
Divided between horror at the attacks and alarm at being
enlisted as moral cheerleaders in a war on terror, many
European human rights groups are sitting on the
sidelines. American groups like Human Rights Watch
have turned themselves into war reporters, subjecting
American military conduct to tough scrutiny on issues
ranging from prisoner detention to collateral damage. Still
others have teamed up with civil libertarians to defend
rights and freedoms at home.
But the movement will have to engage soon in the battle
of ideas: it has to challenge directly the claim that
national security trumps human rights. The argument to
make is that human rights is the best guarantor of
national security. The United States, to encourage the
building of secure states that do not harbor or export
terror, will have to do more than secure base agreements.
It will have to pressure these countries to provide basic
political rights and due process.
As the cold war should
have taught us, cozying up to friendly authoritarians is a
poor bet in the long term. America is still paying a price
for its backing of the shah of Iran. In the Arab world today,
the United States looks as if it is on the side of Louis XVI
in 1789; come the revolution in Egypt or Saudi Arabia,
American influence may be swept away.
The human rights movement is not in the business of
preserving American power. But it should be concerned
about stability, about moving strategically vital states like
Egypt and Saudi Arabia from closed to open societies
without delivering them up to religious fundamentalists.
Nobody's rights in Egypt will be furthered if the state
collapses into anarchy or fundamentalist absolutism. If
the movement hopes to have a future, it has to advocate
its objectives — freedom, participation, due process — in a
way that addresses the necessity to create political
stability. This doesn't mean suddenly going silent about
arbitrary arrests and military courts. It means moving
from denunciation alone to engagement, working with
local activists, and with the parts of the government that
will listen, moving these societies back from the precipice.
The movement aims at defending the rights of ordinary
people. To do this, it has to help them construct strong
civil societies and viable states. If it can't find new ways of
achieving that goal, it will be remembered as a fashionable
cause of the dim and distant 1990's.
Michael Ignatieff is professor of human rights policy at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
nytimes.com |
