The Politics of Human Rights Protection

The Politics of Human Rights Protection

The Politics of Human Rights Protection Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment

Jan Knippers Black

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Black, Jan Knippers, 1940– The politics of human rights protection : moving intervention upstream with impact assessment / Jan Knippers Black. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-4051-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7425-4051-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-5729-1 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7425-5729-4 (electronic) 1. Human rights. 2. Political violence. 3. Political atrocities—Case studies. I. Title. JC571.B549 2009 323—dc22 2008036731 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to my former students, working all around the world—making policy, making trouble for tyrants, making dreams come true—in short, making the world a more hospitable place for people and other living things. They have been and continue to be my source of inspiration and of hope.

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1

The Human Rights Perspective and the Need for Impact Assessment

Part I: The Politics of a Human Rights Agenda 2

1 13

What’s in a Name? Deconstructing Human Rights Terms and Concepts

15

3

The Dialectics of Building an International Human Rights Regime

33

4

Human Rights Cleavages and Controversies: The Discourse

44

Part II: The Right to Eat: Social and Economic Rights

51

5

The Globalization of Vulnerability

53

6

From the Ashes: Argentina’s Return from Meltdown

66

Part III: The Right to Belong: Civil and Political Rights

73

7

Participation and Accountability

75

8

Wayfarers in a Walled-Up World

85

9

Chile’s Long Way Home

94

vii

viii

Contents

Part IV: The Right to Be Different: Cultural Rights

113

10

The Political Dimensions of Diversity

115

11

Feminism, Democracy, and Self-Determination: The Taiwanese Experience

129

Part V: The Right to the Commons: Environmental Rights

135

12

The Naked Ape in Nature: Master or Guardian?

137

13

China’s Three Gorges: The Dam and the Damned

146

Part VI: The Right to a Just Peace

153

14

From Sustainable War to Sustainable Peace

155

15

Against All Odds: East Timor’s Quest for Independence

173

Part VII: The Elephant in the Room

187

16

Empire as a State of War

189

17

Terror and the War to End All Rights

208

Part VIII: Strategic Focus: No Promised Land in Denial Valley

225

18

Cautious Mainstreaming, Constructive Subversion

227

19

Conclusion: Playing from Strength

242

Recommended Readings

253

Appendix: Human Rights Impact Assessment: Tips and Tools

261

Index

269

About the Author

281

Preface

As this book goes to press, the United States and the world face a great crisis—that is, a turning point, a time of danger and of promise. We are threatened with ever-expanding wars and with their attendant threats to civil and human rights; with dramatic growth in income and asset gaps and their attendant shocks and deepening desperation for the beleaguered majority; with deteriorating relations between Homo sapiens and other living things, between humanity and its would-be supportive environment, and between people who have the luxury of staying put or of living where they wish and those who are uprooted and displaced. In 2008, however, another outcome for this crisis seems possible—a turn in a different direction—toward peace and general, equitable prosperity; toward social responsibility for our offspring and their habitat; and toward reconstruction of our essential protective legal and institutional foundations, along with deconstruction of physical and attitudinal walls that imprison and divide. We can and must build bridges instead of walls. But no change in leadership can bring about such a sea change in social direction unless it is built upon and swept along by a massive and sustained mobilization of those who care enough to dare to understand and to act. The mobilization, or collective activism, I speak of must be global. Living in the whole world, as I chose early on to do, may no longer be a matter of choice. The accelerated globalization of the last two decades has meant that, more than ever before, we are all in this together. Our fates are intertwined and interdependent. That means global in the sense of embracing not only all states, but also all peoples, and not only addressing the rights of all peoples, but also hearing the voices of all peoples. Surely we have learned by now that we dare not place blind faith in leaders and “experts.” ix

x

Preface

In the United States, the word international has taken on a peculiar connotation: It has come to mean foreign, reflecting, perhaps, a long-standing assumption that we are somehow above and beyond—insulated from the vicissitudes that affect others. That being the case, some readers will find it discomfiting that with respect neither to the abusers of human rights nor to the abused is this book about some distant “other.” Growing up at the knee of a Tennessee legislator and judge whose commitment to intellectual honesty and to the public interest would have been rare anywhere, I learned that loyalty to country or to any other social construct implied assuming responsibility for correcting a course that was leading to disaster. Any such redirection calls first for taking a clear-eyed measure of where we are, in itself a major challenge in a country where self-contradictory thinking is encouraged—where it is acceptable to be for peace, but not to be against war. This book is not written for specialists in some disciplinary sense. On the contrary, it is a call to indiscipline—to crisscross disciplinary walls so as to understand better the connectedness of political, economic, ecological, and cultural impacts on social and individual well-being, and also to challenge authority, including official stories and supposedly reliable sources. I hope that my readers will include the merely curious and that their curiosity will be deepened rather than satiated. But most of all, this book is addressed to the committed, be they students or teachers, advocates, organizers, monitors, service providers, or policymakers, in the hope that it will serve to mitigate blindsiding and to offer firmer grounding for effective strategies for human rights protection.

NOTE ABOUT BLACK’S LAWS “Black’s Laws of Public Affairs and Paradoxes of Development,” epigrams by the author, introduce some chapters and are italicized in the text throughout the book. Other uses of Black’s Laws may be found with chapter headings in Black’s Inequity in the Global Village, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Books, 1999, and as an appendix to Black’s Development in Theory and Practice: Paradigms and Paradoxes, 2nd ed., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

Acknowledgments

Much of the intellectual ferment that inspired this book was provided by St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where I was in residence once again as a senior associate member in 2005. I benefited particularly from the insights of Sir Marrack Goulding, then warden of St. Antony’s and previously UN undersecretary-general for peacekeeping and for political affairs. I have benefited also from the generosity of the Joseph and Sheila Mark Fund, making possible a five-continent research agenda, and from the assistance of several of my former students in different phases of the project, among them Petr Lebeda, Mike Danielson, Bill Godnick, Cat Grant, RoniKay O’Dell, and Shadi Singh. As always, I am grateful as well to my husband, Dr. Martin C. Needler, who is my dictionary, my encyclopedia, and my all-purpose support system.

xi

1 The Human Rights Perspective and the Need for Impact Assessment

A meaningful life is the kind you get crucified for. —Jan Knippers Black Selective respect for human rights is just a matter of choosing sides.

What are all these suits doing on my bandwagon? In the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, a focus on human rights—like a focus on peace in the 1950s and 1960s—served to brand one as some kind of subversive. For those working in U.S. client states, particularly in South and Central America in those years, being seen as an advocate of human rights was life threatening.1 So why is it that in the twenty-first century platitudes about human rights slip easily off the tongues of CEOs and presidents, generals, and national intelligence chiefs? Can it be that my bandwagon has been hijacked? The answer lies in many trenches, among them the successes of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations in selling the ideal of respect for human rights, and the fact that in the virtual world of the communications revolution the most decisive battles are fought with words rather than bullets. But any explanation must begin with the recognition that words are prostitutes, for sale to the highest bidder. If all of us, from the most vulnerable to the least, are singing the same song, it doesn’t mean that we are singing in harmony. It may mean that somebody is trying to steal the songbook and change the tune. It is obligatory now in much of the world to speak of and pay homage to human rights, even as it remains potentially dangerous in much of the world—China and Russia, for example, and in every other decade in the 1

2

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United States—to be serious about it. The same might be said, of course, of democracy, which is an attribute and bulwark of the larger spectrum of human rights. Such ambivalence, or more often hypocrisy, with respect to human rights is in no way surprising, because rights are at the core of the power game. The struggle to claim rights and the assault against them constitute a presumably unending dialectic process. At any rate, it is critical that those of us who would speak for the vulnerable be clear about our own terms and concepts, theories and strategies. And we must be continually reassessing threats and opportunities and devising new means of approaching the challenge. Solutions sometimes seem simple, but to every solution there is a problem; any remedy devised to protect the interests of the less powerful will soon be turned by the powerful to their own advantage.2 Thus would-be protectors of the less powerful must be ever more clever and more vigilant to stay ahead of the game.

A HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE: GETTING FROM FACTS AND VALUES TO TRUTH Human rights, as a focus of concern, does not lend itself readily to definition. Definitions are limiting; they draw parameters, put up walls. A human rights focus is liberating; it frees us to think analytically and strategically, outside of all boxes, and it validates and unleashes a passion for caring. I like to think of the human rights perspective as a wide-angle lens—expanding horizons and visibility—allowing the curious mind and the caring soul to wander together, unimpeded by the walls normally erected by disciplines and professions. The perspective cannot therefore have preordained parameters; it must prepare us to prioritize undertakings for triage—to respond quickly and effectively to those cases wherein our response might prevent torture or save lives in the short run—but also to recognize and name new categories of abuse as they occur and new means of protection as they present themselves. As so much of what used to be national decision making has been outsourced—removed from the province of government—and as democracy has come to be defined in narrow terms of electoral process, basic social, economic, cultural, and ecological rights increasingly come to be recognized as human rights. It follows then that deprivation of these rights cannot be legitimated by government, no matter the rationale and no matter how such governments may have been conceived. As protection of such rights cannot be entrusted to individual governments, they must be the concern of the international community.

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3

Human rights is a call to action—to prescription and advocacy, organization, mobilization, and coalition building, to rule making, implementation, and adjudication. But for any of that to have utility—to make sense— it must also be underpinned by reliable explanation and prediction. Action without understanding is at best futile, at worst dangerous to those it is meant to help. Human rights is not a discipline, based on a generally accepted body of theory with a finite number of recognized bibles and priests. But it draws upon and feeds back into the humanities and each of the social sciences. Unlike some disciplines, human rights does not have the luxury of seeking theoretical validation in abstract worlds from which threats to real people have been assumed away. On the contrary, human rights activists are committed to attending to the real people hit by real bombs dropped from that abstract world. Nor can human rights activists afford to slip into magic realism to be “given a level playing field” or to imagine “all else being equal.” The human rights perspective and international human rights regime exist precisely because all else is not equal and because level playing fields are not given; they are won. When projected “solutions” turn out not to be, when “failure” turns out to be cover for goals never pursued and outcomes never intended, and “official stories” prove to be lies that result in wholesale slaughter, those scholars committed to the protection of human rights cannot take cover in research “objectivity” and “safe” sources. What is at stake in this endeavor is more important than careerist ambition or job security. A human rights perspective with respect to information and inspiration is the view from the bottom up. Whereas security is defined by those who have the most to lose, and “authoritative” commentary comes from those who have the most to hide, a human rights perspective reaches out and pays heed to those who have no spinmeisters, no official spokespersons or public relations teams, no layers of smoke and mirrors between their roles and their realities—and who, incidentally, without us may have no forum.3 Considering the stakes, it is all the more important that we get it right— that our understanding of cause and effect and our assessment of the reliability of sources lead to accurate predictions. The fact that our pursuit is recognized as normative, engaging both facts and values, cuts us no slack; rather it should give us the advantage as well as the obligation of being more readily cognizant of the differences between them. Facts, if true, portray the world as it is. Values portray also the world we aspire to. Our values are not subject to scientific validation, but they do help us understand which facts are important and which may lead us to truth.4 British novelist Graham Greene has said that novelists have little to do with journalists, as journalists deal in facts; novelists, he said, deal in truth.

4

Chapter 1

FALLBACK VERSUS FORWARD POSITIONING Much of the teaching and the literature dealing with human rights to date has been in the field of law, particularly international law. The field is underpinned by an accumulated body of international conventions and treaties and promoted by a large number of partially articulated international or nongovernmental organizations and institutions, constituting what has come to be known as the international human rights regime. Law might be said to be our currency, the way we seek to consolidate or “bank” our gains over the years; it is clearly a necessary element of our endeavor, but it is not sufficient. There is a great difference between what it takes to deal with perverse individuals in a relatively benign system and to deal with a system that is itself perverse—a difference that helps explain why a legal approach to human rights protection must be accompanied by a political approach. The principal limitation of a legal approach is that it constricts the focus to the immediate perpetrator of the offense and the immediate victim, or claimant to damages, usually without taking into account the endorsers of the abuse, the underwriters of the perpetrator, or the ripple effects of the crime. Nor does a legal approach take into account the perversions of the system that continually re-create conditions propitious to abuse. On the rare occasions when allegations of torture come before a court, the accused are ordinarily low ranking. Neither the instigators and enablers of abuse among the policymakers and along the chain of command nor those indirectly victimized by the ripple effect of fear and intimidation are taken into account. The legal approach also limits categories of wrongdoing, rules of evidence, and the possible remedies to those already provided by law and pertaining to conviction and punishment. But in many cases recognition of human rights (as opposed to civil rights underpinned by state law) and of the threats to such rights is required to generate new legislation or regulatory protections. Moreover, the standards governing legal protection are far more stringent than those that should govern politics and social relationships. The “beyond a shadow of a doubt” unimpeachable evidence of dastardly crime that might be required for conviction and imprisonment should not be required for defeating an incumbent government or even impeaching its leader, let alone for parliamentary censure and media criticism. But power inequity has become such that smoking-gun evidence of treason or crimes against humanity by the very powerful call for a lot more smoke than would evidence of misdeeds by ordinary citizens. In fact, a “smoking gun” is not likely to be picked up until its owner runs out of ammunition. At any rate, to prevent abuse and protect future generations, human rights analysis and strategies must be, at core, political. That is not to belittle the significance of the legal foundation of universal human rights, but simply

The Need for Impact Assessment

5

to note that recourse to law already on the books should be our fallback rather than our forward position. It seems that most people, from those having great responsibility—or liability—to students undertaking the study of human rights, are inclined to retreat to the relative ontological safety of law, even though law—whether national or international—is always subject to interpretation and is ineffective with respect to leaders who get away with placing themselves above it. But we dare not shy away from the fuzzy, or poorly demarcated, borders of acceptable human interaction, because that is precisely where clashes are most likely to occur and to prove intractable, resistant to solution. A proactive approach to protecting human rights must go far beyond identifying and punishing immediate perpetrators of abuse to building understanding of the root causes of human rights violations and bringing our understanding into the quest for solutions. A good place to start in holistic political analysis might be in conceptualizing, or tracking and identifying, the ultimate, base or systemic, cause of abuse. There may be many useful means of expressing it, but for me that cause is best understood as the combination of vulnerability on the one hand, impunity on the other—or taken together, inequality. Both vulnerability and impunity are perceptual as well as situational. Impunity has more to do with class (and thus power) than with law or with specific roles. Just as the price for political disaster—like war—is rarely paid by those who make and profit from policy decisions, economic disasters rarely redound against those bankers, investors, and other money movers whose decisions bring them on. At lower levels on the food chain, those workers seen as supporters or protectors of the power elite, like police, paramilitary, and other security personnel, also enjoy impunity. That is not to say that we must achieve absolute equality to diminish abuse, but we must reverse the trend to ever-greater inequality. It is also imperative that we seek to identify and nurture our greatest prospects for protection, beginning with individual recognition of the strength to be found in community, and community recognition of the strength to be found in individuals.

THE STRATEGIC PROMISE OF IMPACT ASSESSMENT The more important the decision, the fewer and the less well informed will be those involved in making it. Logic suggests that “democracies” would be less likely than authoritarian states to decide to go to war. But even in supposed democracies decisions as important as war and peace are not generally made democratically. They are most often made by a tight inner circle of executives on the basis of mistaken, misinterpreted, misrepresented, or outright

6

Chapter 1

prefabricated “intelligence,” then pushed hastily through intimidated legislatures, and sold to unengaged publics by complicitous or opportunistic media. When the outcome proves to be unmitigated disaster, decision makers and their cheerleaders are prone to offer up a plea of collective ignorance. It was the painful regularity of such a sequence of events that led me to invest in the prospects of human rights impact assessment. In pursuit of better-informed policy and more effective implementation, there is urgent need to move the intervention of human rights activists upstream in the decision-making process; downstream in implementation, follow-up, and seeding for sustainability; and cross-stream—that is, across the great divide between the official world and the real world.5 For human rights advocates, the first challenge is to identify threats to the peace or vulnerabilities that foretell abuse or neglect and to seek preventive action. Following the lead of environmentalists, we would hope to make it a matter of routine that the decisions of funding agencies and policymakers be informed by human rights impact assessment—that is, open and independent, well-publicized, and publicly debated assessment of how such policies and programs would affect people. Those who have devoted many years to monitoring human rights violations find it ever more frustrating simply to count bodies after disaster has struck. The claim by official spokespersons and media pundits in those cases, that no one could have foreseen such an outcome, can rarely be substantiated. There are almost always individuals or categories of people—for example, specialists or experienced locals—who see very clearly the possibilities and risks, and perhaps even less-risky alternative courses of action, but are not consulted or heeded by those committed, for their own reasons, to following through on a plan or policy. The point of requiring human rights impact assessments, like environmental ones, would be to ensure that those launching the project are aware of the risks, that their constituencies know that they are aware, and that pressures thus brought to bear allow immediate stakeholders and other concerned parties ordinarily excluded to engage in the policy-planning dialogue and to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear on decision makers. As policies and plans carrying risk to human populations are often drawn up and acted upon with great haste, it is important that information having a bearing on possible outcomes be readily available in a form that is usable to information-overloaded decision makers. It is even more important, perhaps, that individual scholars and activists and organizations and coalitions linking advocates across a broad range of human rights–related issues have timely access to data and analysis relevant to a plan or decision they seek to influence. There are now several “instruments,” or templates, drawn up over the last decade by European and Canadian human rights centers and, more re-

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7

cently, by UN agencies, and available on their websites, suggesting the steps that might be taken in assessing projected impacts of a variety of categories of policies or projects. Most assume the cooperation of the government or industry involved and assume as well the welcome involvement of other stakeholders—employers, clients, consumers, community members, or taxpayers. Of course, government agencies and corporations that willingly engage in the process are not as a rule the ones we most need to monitor and rein in. Their participation, however, should serve as a model to put pressure on more recalcitrant institutions. Some of these instruments and assessment tools, and the centers employing them, are discussed and listed with their websites in the appendix. Since the beginning of this century, I have been using for classroom purposes a template, or checklist, of my own design (see box 1.1). I have intentionally kept it very simple so that it might be useful particularly for assessments of past and ongoing policies or projects covering a broad range of topics. The point of such ex post, or after the fact, assessments would be, with respect to upcoming decisions, to allow us to repeat actions, or avoid repeating them, knowingly, and thus to deny the option of denial to our decision makers.

Box 1.1.

Human Rights Impact Assessment Checklist

1. Context: General nature of relationships or incentive/disincentive systems conducive to abuse in context to be addressed (e.g., gender relations, workplace, ecosystems). 2. Project, program, or policy (proposed, ongoing, or past) seen as conducive to or protective against abuse and as open to the interjection of human rights criteria. Analysis of cross-pressures affecting planners and policymakers in the context under consideration and useful points of intercession by human rights facilitators. 3. Actors and conflicts of underlying interests: Identity of a. the victims and the vulnerable—direct and indirect, short term and long term, and ripple effects or layers of victimization b. the perpetrators and others culpable—direct and immediate, underwriters, enablers c. other stakeholders 4. Nature of anticipated or observed abuse (if anticipated, how and why— previous comparable cases). 5. Protective documents, institutions, and organizations; international human rights conventions, treaties, declarations, national laws, court case precedents; institutional responsibilities and jurisdictions—World Court, ICC, (continued )

8

Chapter 1 Box 1.1.

(continued )

UN committees and commissions; intergovernmental or nongovernmental organizations or agencies potentially helpful in prevention, investigation, resolution, or restitution. 6. Alternatives to program or policy in question for meeting objectives or dealing with crises, or ways to amend so as to avoid abuse or to strengthen protections. 7. Lessons learned and foreseen future applicability. 8. Appendix: Political strategies for defeating or revising an offensive project or policy, or of enacting or bringing to fruition a protective policy or project, including particularly communication channels and media placements.1 1 Appended because ideas and suggestions included might accompany reports sent to supportive IGOs and NGOs but not necessarily to policymakers or media.

In addition, I particularly wanted to draw larger and overlapping circles around actors and actions, perpetrators and victims, projects and outcomes so as to emphasize the connectedness of trends for good and ill and the seeming infinity of possible reverberations. My intention, however, is by no means to promote a particular instrument, or research methodology, but rather to promote comprehension of the systematic basis and nature of abuse and of comprehensive proactive preparedness for protection. There is no particular magic in yet another research tool or instrument. The potential for magic lies rather in the changing of mind-set and political strategies from lamentative to preventative. We do not imagine for a moment that governments, companies, or other decision makers who assume the right or need to engage in questionable operations would be dissuaded by exposure to convincing prediction of negative outcomes. The more effective element should be that of ensuring that decision makers have foreknowledge that such prediction is being widely publicized and that they will be held accountable for their actions or inactions. In other words, the principal objective should be to strip from policymakers and enablers the cover of plausible denial—of claiming that “no one could have foreseen.” Of course, to bring living in the whole world and living in the real, as opposed to the official, world to the popular culture, we must aim ultimately to strip the cover of denial from publics as well.

THE STRENGTH OF SYMBIOSIS: ALL RIGHTS, ALL PEOPLES To bring new insight and new depth to our assessment findings, our analysis, and our strategies, this book offers a review of our basic terminological

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9

building blocks. The changing usage, in practice, of concepts as familiar as “human” and “rights” calls for a reopening of seemingly simple questions like: What is a human right? What is an abuse? And what is a protection? Human rights abuses are not unpredictable or inevitable. But to be prevented, they must be understood. In this book we also stress the organic, or systemic, bases of abuse—of seemingly unrelated circumstances, events, and outcomes—and therefore the interwoven nature of rights and protections. The most often touted of rights in the global West is the right to “freedom”; but freedom must be more than, in Kris Kristofferson’s immortal lyrics, “another word for nothing left to lose.”6 If there is a right to life, there must also be a right to those things that sustain and protect it: a right to food and clothing and shelter, to potable water and breathable air, and to medical attention for illness or injury. A right to human dignity must also mean a right to learn about and respect one’s own culture, to choose one’s own companions, and to participate in making the rules that sustain these rights. Such rights in turn must pertain to all peoples. Selective respect for human rights is just a matter of choosing sides. As we shall see, protection requires the drawing of an ever-larger circle, because if any category of people is left outside, vulnerable to persecution, none of us is safe. Like infectious disease, vulnerability moves up the social pyramid. Our claim to these rights is not new, of course. Human rights, broadly interpreted, have been recognized through the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights for more than half a century; and they have been embedded in national law and enshrined in layer upon layer of international legal documents—covenants and conventions, treaties and resolutions. How can it be, then, that asserting and protecting our claims remain such a challenge, that abuses continue to be rampant—that the right to life itself is constantly challenged by high- or low-intensity wars and their collateral damage to other rights and freedoms? How can it be that the right to life continues to be conceptually segregated from the right to earn a living even in an era when family farming and fishing have been overcome by resource pillaging and habitat trashing, when those left without income by downsizing and outsourcing and contraction of the public sector find no safety net to drop into? It is not so perplexing that there continue to be individuals and agencies who perpetrate unthinkable abuse. But how are we to understand the millions, perhaps billions, of well-meaning, generally well-behaved, people who quietly accept and go along with them? Of course, a “coalition” of the unscrupulous, the opportunistic, the fearful, the ignorant, and the apathetic makes for an ominous obstacle. But such a coalition is not a “given”; it is a product of the reproductive system of inequity—a tainted product that can and must be recalled.

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THE MYTH OF EXPERTISE AND THE TRIAD OF TRUMPS On August 24, 2005, hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives after the splashy “shock and awe” launch of a fresh war that has since gone stale, the New York Times allowed in an editorial, “Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had.”7 (Actually, there were on one day, February 15, 2002, in the buildup to invasion, more than 10 million people around the world marching through the streets in protest, but George W. Bush dismissed that as a “focus group.”) The outcry might have been greater, of course, had not the Times been serving as an echo chamber for the White House. At any rate, as we shall see throughout the text, popular acceptance, and even embrace, of the idea of inalienable rights continues to come up against the myth of expertise, the pervasiveness of denial, and the triad of trumps. Arguments having to do with the requirements of security, of the economy, and of religion—especially when, as is normally the case, the three pull together—are simply expected to be taken on faith. Blind faith in authority enables everything from faith-based elections and faith-based resource allocation to faith-driven wars. The “protection” of an inattentive public may become a protection racket. I do not suggest here that security, economic, or religious concerns should not be taken seriously. I note, however, that all too often those in a position to do so frame such concerns in a manner that places the security of government leaders or security agencies at odds with that of citizens; the material interests of corporate magnates against those of employees, consumers, and taxpayers;8 and the dogma of those who create their gods in their own images of omniscience over logic informed by experience. Trump cards once played stop the game, or at least the conversation. Other face cards, or “leaders,” fall silent because those who dare to tell the truth run the risk of losing their credibility. Speaking truth to power, throughout most of history, has been left to the jester. Playing trumps suppresses curiosity and conjures fear—if not of the wrath of gods or enemies or “markets,” at least of looking foolish, blasphemous, or treasonous. Dom Hélder Caˆmara, Archbishop of Recife, who in the 1960s and 1970s dared to question Brazil’s military dictators, commented, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”9 Overriding trumps is seldom easy, but the use of impact assessment— that is, truth that matters—to disallow denial and enable self-negating

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prophecy brings one more powerful tool to the multifaceted project of mainstreaming human rights.

NOTES 1. The same may apply, of course, to campaigning seriously for civil rights or democracy. In one of many conversations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, between 1997 and 2000, Joaquín Villalobos, field commander of the FMLN, the Salvadoran guerrilla army, in the 1980s and early 1990s, told me that his first foray into dissidence was in working with a Catholic lay organization that used the Constitution in teaching literacy to peasants. A number of priests who worked in that campaign were killed by government-sponsored death squads. 2. Black’s Law. 3. Investigative journalist Ray Bonner lost his position with the New York Times when he reported a massacre in 1981 in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote. Bonner’s sources were Salvadoran peasants, including the lone survivor, but Times editors chose to credit instead U.S. government sources who claimed the massacre had not happened. Bonner was ultimately reinstated, but Times editors are once again wiping egg off their faces after favoring “safe” official sources on Iraq. 4. It is a fact that Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that there were weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq in the windup to the U.S. invasion. In fact, what he said was not true. 5. This is particularly important for transforming relief into development—for learning when and how to let go. 6. Made famous in the 1970s through the vocal renditions of “Me and Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin. 7. “President Bush’s Loss of Faith” (editorial), New York Times, August 24, 2005, p. A16. 8. It was announced in January 2008, as the United States was sinking ever more deeply into recession, that Exxon-Mobil’s earnings for 2007 had amounted to $40.6 billion, the highest corporate profit on record for a U.S.-based company. 9. For context, see Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977; or Joseph Page, The Revolution That Never Was: Northeast Brazil, 1955–1964, New York: Grossman, 1972.

Part I THE POLITICS OF A HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA

While most women in Morocco remain shrouded, modernization has brought new freedoms and opportunities. Medina at Fez 1997.

2 What’s in a Name? Deconstructing Human Rights Terms and Concepts

The rich pretend to know more than they do; the poor pretend to know less.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Surely the meaning of their own words was “self-evident” to our founding fathers. Or was it? In practice it appears that “all men” really meant all affluent adult white, or European, men, as the soon-to-be-liberated country continued to hold kidnapped Africans in slavery and systematically to deprive indigenous people of land, liberty, and life itself. Presumably it also meant men with property because those without it were denied the vote until the 1830s. The endowment of rights was by no means intended to embrace women. The presumption that “a man’s house is his castle,” and that wives and children were chattel, held sway for almost another century in the realm of English common law and prevails still in much of the world.1 Moreover, courts and legislative bodies in the United States were so reluctant to assume jurisdiction in the delicate matter of child protection that the trail had to be blazed by the enactment of laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The organization of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the mid-1880s was followed in 1899 by the establishment, in Chicago, of the country’s first juvenile court.2

WHAT IS A HUMAN RIGHT? The concept of humankind as it relates to rights has always been highly elastic. Even Athens, the cradle of democracy, was a slave society. Spanish 15

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conquistadores and early settlers in Mesoamerica, who enslaved the indigenous and in many ways treated them as if they were animals, defended themselves by claiming that the natives were indeed subhuman. Father Bartolomé de las Casas, a Catholic missionary in what is now Guatemala, took his defense of the indigenous to the Spanish Crown, arguing that his mission of saving their souls implied recognition of their humanity. The Crown accepted his argument and prohibited enslavement of native populations but, missing the point entirely, authorized in their stead importation of African slaves. At least with respect to public discourse, the endowment of rights has expanded greatly since that time, embracing, in principle, all human beings. Still, what does it mean in practice to be human? The question continues to be asked again in earnest now and then, as when scientists discovered that there was a 98 percent DNA commonality between Homo sapiens and chimpanzees. The practical question, however, is not so much whether to draw the line between chimps and gorillas or between chimps and chumps as why and how human status comes to be degraded. What areas of controversy remain in identifying what is human in human rights? One is that of distinctions between human rights and other rights. A great many rights are not assumed by law or custom to pertain to all—that is, to have universal applicability. Citizenship, for example, extends to some humans rights that are denied to others. Even so, noncitizens anywhere by international and, in many cases, national law retain, as human beings, certain inalienable rights. A great many people, however, in rich and poor countries alike—including people in positions of great responsibility—appear to have difficulty in making that distinction. The noncitizen, especially if he or she is poor and of a racial or ethnic minority, may come to be seen as somehow less human, especially by those who seek to exploit others or who, for reasons of policy failures or policy decisions, find themselves in need of scapegoats. We will return to this issue in chapter 8. Another controversial area is that of supposedly exceptional circumstances. Some national constitutions and legal codes allow that in times of national emergency, such as war, governments are entitled to suspend certain rights. Unfortunately, national leaders commonly fail to recognize that human rights are precisely the rights that are not subject to exception. There is no circumstance, for example, under which torture—by any euphemism—is tolerated under international law. Moreover, because of public tolerance of the denial of rights in time of war, war itself or the threat of it may become a means to other ends, like suppressing information, detaining political opponents, manipulating election outcomes, and of course, plundering the public budget—in short, like sustaining an imperial presidency.3

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Human rights are further impacted in times of war or its immoral equivalents by the fact that dehumanizing the image of a designated “enemy” is a usual aspect of military training for international or counterrevolutionary war and, increasingly, for routine policing as well. Dehumanizing the enemy often becomes an objective also of government propaganda, or what is now called public diplomacy, and spreads easily into popular culture. In the process trainer and troops and media-saturated publics may also find themselves desensitized or “dehumanized.” Dehumanization is, of course, a necessary factor in genocide and, for that matter, in most any kind of structured impersonal conflict,4 but also in the ordinary, everyday meannesses committed against underclasses; like churchgoing and philanthropic giving, dehumanization takes the sting of guilt out of routine exploitation. A major weapon in a campaign of dehumanization, whether of a designated military enemy (Japs and Krauts, slopes and gooks, and now hajjis), or simply of vulnerable categories of people (wetbacks), is terminology. The Bush administration, to escape all legal constraints in dealing with captives of its War on Terror, a state of hostility that does not itself exist in law, invented a status, “enemy combatant,” that also does not exist in law.5 Less obvious, but just as threatening to the basic values underpinning human rights, is the dehumanization of those who fall afoul of law enforcement and corrections systems. And that contempt is compounded when the alleged lawbreakers are also racial or ethnic minorities or undocumented foreigners, as is most often the case.

WHAT IS A HUMAN RIGHT? Despite abundant documentation in national and international law, the essence of a right, in practice, is continually subject to debate and to depletion. Returning to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, we find that the parameters of unalienable rights were no more “self-evident” to the founding fathers than were the categories of men supposedly born to them. The original triad, drawn from John Locke, was life, liberty, and property. Property, however, proved problematic. Would it presume a right for those who had it to keep it? What if “all men” wanted in on it? Oops! Benjamin Franklin, taking exception to the inclusion of property, deleted it and substituted the more elusive “pursuit of happiness.” Happiness, then, would surely require chocolate.6 And perhaps alcohol. What about marijuana? A 2007 survey showed 42 percent of U.S. high school students had tried it. The pursuit of happiness would imply the pursuit of sex, of course—at least for men. Would it imply also sex with the mate of choice? Whose choice? What if mutually chosen mates are of the same sex? The

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pursuer of happiness may pursue sex, but what if the pursued is not happy about it? Rape was rarely prosecuted, even in the supposedly developed world, until the 1970s. Date rape and marital rape are relatively new and still controversial concepts. Anatole France, a major figure of French literature, mocked the social ethics of the late nineteenth century when he wrote that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Such prohibitions, including that against sleeping under bridges, remain intact to this day.7 But surely there is a right to sleep, and by implication to sleep somewhere—if not in a public place, then in a private one. A place, then, must be bought or rented with goods bartered or money earned. So there must be a right to land or to a job—to some means, anyway, of livelihood. Governments now normally claim that they cannot afford to create jobs, except for police whose job it is to prohibit one’s sleeping under the bridge. In fact, public sector jobs, except in “security,” are being cut rather than expanded. And for business, downsizing is no longer episodic, but rather systemic. The neoliberal economic system now prevailing globally operates on the assumption that a significant level of unemployment must be maintained to keep wages depressed. And yet, most who believe that there is neither a right to welfare nor a right to earn a living believe also that they are fully committed to human rights. A human right may be best understood in terms of what it is not. It is not charity—not solicited or gifted—and not compensatory, or earned. Civil rights, or rights of citizenship, must be legislated and in practice may be taken away, as legislation may be repealed and constitutions changed. But human rights are understood as pertaining to the individual, deriving from the attribute of being human. They are not bestowed by governments or other authority figures and thus cannot be taken away. What, then, are these rights, or what should they be? The great French novelist Albert Camus said that “there is no truth without commitment.” The timeless answer lies in commitment. It is individual, or personal, in that it lies in values, not in facts. However, it is useful to consult theoretical constructs and empirical findings with respect to human physiological and psychological needs. For guidance, one might then turn to the psychological theories of Abraham Maslow, beginning with his hierarchy of needs, first proposed in 1943 in “A Theory of Human Motivation,” and elaborated in several subsequent texts.8 He suggested that as humans meet their basic needs, they seek to satisfy successively higher needs that occupy a set hierarchy. His hierarchy is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels, as shown in figure 2.1. The hierarchy begins with four categories of “deficiency” needs: (1) physiological, (2) safety, (3) love/belonging, and (4) esteem, which once satis-

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Figure 2.1.

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Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

fied might leave one free to pursue “being” or “growth” needs: (1) self-actualization and (2) self-transcendence. The importance of human social and psychological needs has been underscored by another category of professionals. One means of acquiring insight into what humans need most to feel human is to look at what the worst human rights abusers strip away from their victims. Expertise has been systematically and continuously gathered at least over many decades, if not many millennia, by agencies employing intimidation and control. Such experts by no means limit themselves to the infliction of physical deprivation and pain. They systematically destroy individual dignity and selfrespect along with personal relationships and community trust, for example, by forcing victims to betray their friends or to helplessly witness the torture or execution of family members. A young Maryknoll nun, Sister Diana Ortiz of New Mexico, seized by military intelligence in Guatemala in the 1980s, survived to tell of having her hand placed on a machete that sliced the arms of another victim.9 Human rights are seen in the first instance as individual rights; but such rights can be asserted only through the exercise of community rights. This suggests another set of categories that I will call (1) self-sufficiency, (2) selfgovernment, and (3) self-definition. In practical terms of the sustainable defense of rights, establishing a hierarchy among them would become a very difficult and perhaps irrelevant

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chicken-versus-egg proposition. What seems clear to me, however, is that each category is essential and that they are mutually reinforcing. Political contests treated like boxing matches might seem to individuals struggling to meet their basic physical needs to have little relevance. An outcome, however, that promised self-government or collective problem solving might prove the best or only assurance of survival. And as so many self-destructive members of dwindling tribes around the world are now demonstrating, individual survival may be problematic in the absence of self-definition—a culture to call one’s own. In any case, for temporal or practical purposes, human rights are those that are recognized as such, particularly in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in international conventions and treaties. (The evolution of the human rights regime—that is, international legal documents, institutions, and organizations—will be elaborated in chapter 3.) That, however, by no means suggests that the matter is settled. In the first place, law applies only to abuses or needs that have already been recognized, not those yet to come—or to come to the public agenda. Moreover, even more than national law, international law is in practice susceptible to bending. The extent to which it is respected or implemented is subject to the dynamics of the largely anarchic, multilayered global power game. Therefore, while as a matter of definition human rights are unchanging, the range of rights likely to be recognized and respected is in constant flux. New ones may be added even as rights previously respected may cease to be. Moreover, rights that may appear to be safely embedded in legal documentation may be lost by stealth, by linguistic erosion—the encroachment of euphemism, doublespeak, and other forms of semantic gymnastics.10 Unlike the allocation of material goods, the allocation of rights is necessarily a zero-sum game, the status of which cannot be a status quo. If the categories of “humans” entitled and of rights respected are not expanding, they will be contracting. In fact, as far as we know, in real life there are no happily-ever-afters. Rights may be won and lost and won again indefinitely. But we do know that the more extensive the categories of rights that are recognized and protected and the broader the categories of people covered, the greater will be our prospects of defending what we have and continuing to expand the frontiers.

WHAT IS AN ABUSE? Most would probably assume that such a simple question would have a simple agreed-upon answer. And they would be wrong. Surely there are some areas of generalized agreement as to what constitutes an abuse of human rights. Public repulsion upon the discovery of Nazi

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extermination camps led to one of the earliest conventions in what is now the international human rights regime, the convention that labels genocide a crime against humanity. As it turns out, however, it is easier to recognize such an abuse in retrospect than to recognize a case that is ongoing. Why is it easier to be outraged in hindsight? The most obvious reason is because dead villains—or vanquished regimes—can’t fight back. Another is that recognition of ongoing abuse implies obligation to do something about it. In the case of genocide, formal recognition automatically triggers obligation under international law to take collective action to put an end to it. Can we say, then, that the failure to respond to genocide is an abuse of human rights? Abuses of omission (of responsibility abnegated) are harder to recognize and to deal with than those of commission, but the absence of social responsibility is complicity—or anarchy. What could be more abhorrent to civilization, more a blight on the selfrespect of the species, than torture? Tourists passing through the Tower of London or any of Europe’s medieval dungeons find it hard to imagine that human beings ever did such things to each other, and most no doubt take comfort in the conviction that such practices are buried in the ancient past. But are they? Sadly, such practices have continued to be common, and not only on the part of “banana republic” dictators. Torture has been regarded as heinous enough—and, sadly, pervasive enough in modern times—to justify the drafting of an international convention against it. How then do practitioners and decision makers get away with it even now in supposedly developed democracies? The explanation is twofold. Though few would claim that torture as such is not an abuse, it is commonly claimed that an exception must be made in this or that case because of the urgency of extracting information from rebels or terrorists—the enemy, however defined—to protect the public. Agents and defenders of the Bush administration have claimed such urgency for the War on Terror and, by extension, the war on Iraq.11 In practice, however, as the so-called Downing Street Memo, among other documents, makes clear, the last thing that the administration wanted was unedited information. And the kind of premisinterpreted “intelligence” they sought as cover for plans already made could be—and was—easily bought. The other “fold” of this pseudolegalistic cover-all-bases defense—apart from, as noted above, dehumanization (e.g., “enemy combatants”)—is the claim that the treatment that has been observed or reported is not torture at all but rather “enhanced interrogation techniques” or some such euphemism. And many who clearly oppose torture as they perceive it are tolerant of abusive police tools and practices—new tools like the taser gun, or older police practices, like hand-to-ankle cuffing in manners and positions intended to cause pain and humiliation, not to mention old-fashioned beatings that occasionally result in death.12

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Even among those who are sure they would not tolerate genocide, there are many who tolerate—or even “patriotically” support—wars undertaken on false pretenses or suspect motives that kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and displace millions. Some who would oppose extralegal resort to political execution nevertheless favor capital punishment, perhaps unaware of or inattentive to the political implications of a system in which the poor cannot expect equal treatment before the law and innocent people are all too often convicted of crimes, including capital crimes.13 Most people would oppose slavery but have given little thought to where to draw the line on unfair labor practices. Would they, for example, see obligatory, uncompensated overtime work as a human rights abuse? Driving people from their homes for reasons of race or ethnicity, as in “ethnic cleansing,” is seen clearly now as abuse. What about such displacement for economic reasons?—for example, because settlers came in with titles to lands worked communally for centuries by indigenous peoples, or because the indigenous couldn’t pay the “taxes” charged by ruling conquerors? And what of the demolition of poor neighborhoods in the name of “eminent domain” by governments craving the property taxes that might derive from new, ritzier housing or commercial developments? Perhaps those who would choose to tolerate genocide rather than take appropriate action and those who perceive exceptional threats that justify torture are themselves exceptions, but what about the injustices that people routinely suffer at the hands of others? Is there any real consensus about which should be dealt with as human rights abuses, deserving of serious and concerted sanction? And who should be prosecuted, or at least held responsible? Wife beating was not prosecuted under English common law until 1849. Rape, unless it was assumed to be of a white woman by a black man, was rarely successfully prosecuted in the United States before the 1960s. Date rape and marital rape did not enter the conceptual lexicon until the 1980s. Capital punishment, suspended in the United States from 1967 to 1976, came back with a vengeance in the 1980s, even as it was being foresworn in most of the rest of the world. At what level of social, or contextual, inadequacy do low wages become an abuse? When working people cannot afford shelter? Health care? In Western democracies, it is assumed that minority civil and political rights must be protected. Why not economic and cultural rights? Even as the rights of some categories of the disadvantaged (e.g., the physically or mentally handicapped) come to be recognized and addressed, other categories are subjected to new abuses. Some medical insurance companies have recently been engaged in discussions with their corporate clients about means of denying normal benefits at equal cost to workers who are unhealthy, especially those who are obese.

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How do abuses come to be seen at all? How are some chosen for the limelight of public attention while others of seemingly equal or greater gravity get short-shrifted? The answers in the final analysis are not found in theology or in law, but rather in patterns of political history, because the struggle for respect for human rights is the last refuge of the human spirit.

GUIDELINES FOR ANTICIPATING ABUSE AND PUBLIC RESPONSE The historical dialectic of abuse, resistance, and political compromise that gave rise to the international human rights regime is addressed in the chapter that follows. Here we will simply offer some guidelines to understanding how abuses come to be recognized and dealt with, or tolerated and disregarded. Only as these all-too-human tendencies are analyzed and understood can they be factored into strategies for preventing or mitigating abuse. • As noted, an abuse is more clearly visible in historical perspective. Retrospective official United Nations recognition of the genocide that took place in Rwanda in the early 1990s requires no action in the twenty-first century.14 Real-time recognition of ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, on the other hand, would obligate the UN Security Council to take effective action now. At any rate, governments and publics alike will avoid seeing and understanding an ongoing abuse if they can. The path of least resistance lies in being radical about the past, ambivalent about the present, and delusional about the future. • An abuse is more easily recognized by one who can identify more readily with the victim than the victimizer. It is generally the case that human rights abuse rises to the global radar screen only when it reaches the point on the social pyramid where likely victims are well connected abroad. Abuse of the poorest is never fully abated. As Brazil’s military dictatorship entered into a phase of distençäo, or decompression, in the late 1970s, a social worker commented to me that the tyranny of the previous decade had “democratized” abuse, in that even the rich had been vulnerable; decompression meant that abuse was being refocused on the poor, where it had always been. • Human rights abuse is not necessarily illegal, even in developed democratic states. Democracy defined only as majority rule does not prevent abuse of minorities or, for that matter, of foreigners. Law is simply a tool of social systems, reflecting the balance of power at a point in time; it may serve either to strengthen or to weaken respect for human rights. • Abusers will seek out many covers, or hiding places; among them are plausible deniability, inadvertence, projection or blame shifting, euphemism,

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failure, resource scarcity, and exigency—overriding justification for, or exceptional right to, abuse. Routine use of exceptionalism itself is an abuse. • Abuse often accompanies and masquerades as misfortune. The distinction, however, is generally clear. Unmasked, abuse can be seen to involve both victims and victimizers, to be traceable to acts of commission or to decisions resulting in omission. Abuse represents individual or collective choice, including policy choice. Even in major media coverage in the United States, in the fall of 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina came ashore, few commentators would treat the fate of New Orleans as simple misfortune. Amnesty International has urged federal, state, and local authorities to respect the rights of those displaced by Katrina to return to their homes.15 • An abuse must have a name. Until it has a name it cannot even be discussed, much less successfully contested. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his confirmation hearings, was accused by his former legal assistant Anita Hill of “sexual harassment.” The naming of an abuse from which no full-grown female in the country had been spared brought angry women out in droves for the elections of 1992. The Clinton administration did not fail to notice; sexual harassment was soon to become an offense. During the seemingly chaotic transnational multiethnic conflagration that swept the Balkans after the implosion of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, concerted actions that had been lumped into the general and amorphous category of civil war were given a new name—ethnic cleansing. The nomenclature made the motives and dynamics of the abuse easier to report, analyze, and counter. • Absence of complaint does not mean absence of abuse. As noted above, it may simply mean that the abuse has no name. It may also mean that the same vulnerability that invited abuse gives the victim good reason to refrain from reporting it. In much of the world, only a most courageous woman will report rape, because she is likely to be gravely mistreated thereafter by the courts, the community, and even her family. In Chile, many survivors refrained from reporting the disappearances of their loved ones until General Pinochet was indicted, more than a decade after the country’s return to civilian rule. The poor are always vulnerable, not only to direct acts of abuse, but also to the abuse of their right to be heard. • An abuse that comes to be routine will cease to be seen as an abuse. In fact, acceptance of such abuse becomes an aspect of political climate and finally of political culture. When the homeless began to appear in large numbers on U.S. streets in the early 1980s, they were widely seen as victims of unfair landlords and policymakers. Now, they are more likely to be seen as a public nuisance.

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• Impunity is the unit measure of tyranny. It is the obverse of vulnerability, a license to abuse. It is a morally inverted incentive system and a compensation system of unspecified forms of payment. Most governments maintain various categories of informants and enforcers (generally paramilitaries and intelligence agents, often “off-duty” military and police as well) who, in exchange for doing the dirty work of the government or the rich and providing cover, or deniability, for decision makers, are licensed to collect whatever they can on the side—in effect, to rape and pillage. Dictatorship is not sustained by autocracy but by license—by many little dictators who are empowered by a climate conducive to machismo, or bullying. • Human rights abuse has many manifestations, but a single cause: inequity. Abusers abuse because they can, because their power and wealth or their utility to those having power and wealth give them actual impunity or, at the least, a sense of impunity. The most egalitarian societies in social and economic terms are also those least subject to abuse of political power and the use of force. • Abuse may be wholesale—as by terrorist states or occupation armies against whole nations; retail—targeting particular categories (racial or ethnic, women, workers); or selective—targeting individuals, for demonstration effect, or to crush leadership. • Abuse is most likely to become more frequent and widespread when ruling elites or regimes feel that their position is threatened. • Abuse falls not only on the oppressed—the unavoidably vulnerable—but also on those having great personal strength who become vulnerable by choice—by choosing to speak for the oppressed. • What might otherwise be seen as incidental crime may come to be seen as human rights abuse if it appears to constitute a pattern involving vulnerability on the one hand, impunity on the other (e.g., wife beating or “hate crimes”). • Rights are abused in bunches. The vulnerability that gives rise to economic exploitation is likely also to result in denial of services or of political rights and arbitrary resort to violence. As rights are violated in bunches, they can be protected only in bunches. • Abuse uncountered at the base of the social pyramid—that is, abuse of the poorest and otherwise most insecure—will move upscale. Sooner or later the oppressed will seek protection through unions and NGOs, whose leaders in turn will seek out lawyers, religious leaders, university professors, media personalities, and other opinion makers; thus challenge and vulnerability proliferate until those at the top find themselves in a circular firing squad. Vulnerability is contagious. If one lacks rights, all eventually do.

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WHAT IS A PROTECTION? There are many social undertakings, instruments, and institutions that offer some protection. But none is sufficiently effective or reliable in itself to be entrusted with a cargo so precious and so vulnerable as human rights. It is scarcely possible for individuals or even major global organizations or movements to fight on all fronts at once; it is all the more necessary, then, that human rights activists be attentive and available at all times to be pulled from guard duty in the protection of a particular right for a particular category of people to the ramparts of the people and the right most immediately and grievously under assault. Below I address several of our protective shields, noting also their limitations. Democracy Democracy should be protective—to the extent that it is social, economic, and cultural as well as political; that it incorporates benefits and protection for minorities; and that it is implanted in social attitudes as well as in laws and institutions. While many countries around the world have approximated it at times, democracy is ephemeral—an ideal never fully achieved and always at play in the power game, subject to conceptual manipulation. We deal with this matter in greater depth in part III. Law Law is often seen as the sine qua non of human rights protection. That is not to say that in the absence of clarity about who is in charge under what legal code a fearsome anarchy would necessarily prevail. I have been in many places over the years—particularly around the ex-Soviet sphere as that empire was imploding—where anarchy at the top of the system seemed scarcely to strain the stability at street level. When anarchy intrudes at street level, however, and the social fabric begins to unravel, as we have seen most starkly in “failed states” and in late-stage war and postwar situations, one sees very clearly the centrality of the rule of law. We return to this issue in part VI. Law is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end—a tool that can become a weapon, and as such will fall into the wrong hands. Dictatorships also have what they call laws and, for that matter, what they call elections. But countries generally seen as democratic also make laws that conflict with other laws, laws that violate constitutions, and laws that provide cover or justification for the violation of civil liberties and human rights. (Both the U.S. Patriot Act and the United Kingdom’s antiterror laws, passed in the panicked aftermath of the 9/11/2001 attacks in New York and Washington,

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D.C., have been condemned by the Council of Europe.) And good laws can be turned inside out in implementation. In the first decade of the twentyfirst century, the office of the U.S. Justice Department established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to root out schemes to suppress the African-American vote was being used to suppress the African American vote and that of other minorities. It is often noted that international law is not enforceable; but neither is national law if rulers choose to flout it and publics fail to protect it. To be a protection, law must be just and must be equitably implemented. That, in turn, requires a “civil society” that is indeed civil, also well informed, well organized, and vigilant. If any category of persons is not protected by law or by enforcement of law, no one is reliably protected; those who seek to defend or speak for the abused will also be targeted, and vulnerability will creep upward in the food chain. Security Systems Recent decades have seen a proliferation of national and multinational security systems and security forces. Do they not represent a protective shield against human rights violations? Not often and not likely. This topic is dealt with in parts VI and VII. Suffice it here to note that even more than most other kinds of policies, “security” policies are designed by those who are objectively most secure—that is, by those nations, classes, and individuals who have the most to lose. Their purpose is to protect governments or businesses or both from needy people—the haves from the have-nots. Ultimately the real threat even to those most secure is most likely to come from their own guardians. Most henhouses are guarded by foxes. Security systems, or rules and procedures, devised particularly to constrain certain abuses and protect publics have a poor track record— unfortunately, but also unsurprisingly, since we are talking about Davids taking on Goliaths. In the late 1970s, I asked a couple of courageous priests in Brazil how they dared to confront their country’s “national security” regime straightforwardly. They answered that the generals “can’t lock up all of us.” It is disappointing that the power of numbers is so seldom used effectively against arms and money, as it was, for example, by Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King; but such leaders take great risks. Most who are elected or appointed to lead are afraid even to follow the people. Moreover, most measures taken to protect the unpowerful succeed only in contexts that are compromised and often on premises that are self-contradictory. The United Nations Charter obliges the organization to protect peoples against oppressors and aggressors, but also recognizes state sovereignty. The Convention against Genocide, and other projects of international law to

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be addressed in subsequent chapters, tend to be carefully overlooked or reinterpreted when they are needed most.16 UN peacekeepers have been a great blessing at times and in places. But the uniform of the system, designed only for arbitrary and limited response, is a straitjacket. As to the state’s obligation to protect the people’s right to safety and freedom from fear and abuse, police and other armed bodies assigned to the task almost everywhere show insufficient interest in protecting the most vulnerable. Women needing protection from violent husbands, for example, are more likely to find it through women’s crisis centers or other good Samaritans. In increasingly alienating urban environments, police rarely work in their own neighborhoods or walk a beat. Rather they are trained and assigned to patrol alien turf, like armies of occupation.17 It is not surprising that many of the contracted security forces and prison guards charged with abuses in Iraq are drawn from similar duties in U.S. cities and prisons. Nongovernmental Organizations and Institutions Nongovernmental social institutions and organizations in general— organized religion, organized labor, communications media, and universities, for example—may have decisive roles as legitimators, whose influence serves as a counterbalance against that of the wielders of force in sustaining the position of a particular government or ruling elite. The role of legitimator also implies the option of delegitimating. Such institutions, therefore, are in a position to serve as protectors of human rights. They are able to do so, however, only under certain circumstances, as when they enjoy a degree of autonomy and when several such institutions recognize a convergence of interests. Other nongovernmental organizations, having constituencies organized particularly for the purpose of defending popular as opposed to elite interests—that is, one or another category of the unpowerful—are now among the most reliable and most effective sources of protection for human rights, especially through their ability to build coalitions and influence and focus public opinion. But we must remember that, like law, institutions and organizations, public or private, national or international, are tools— crucial, perhaps, to the protection of rights, but subject also to infiltration, co-optation, colonizing, and hijacking. The Roman Catholic Church, reacting to the European Renaissance, established the Grand Inquisition. The same Roman Catholic Church, under the spiritual guidance of a very different pope, John XXIII, launched the Liberation Theology movement that in the 1960s and 1970s inspired and empowered millions to exercise and defend their rights.

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Education Education can be a great liberator, of course; but its nature makes a great deal of difference. Talleyrand observed that God gave man speech in order that he might conceal his thoughts. Communications media and skills may be used to inform or misinform or disinform. The undervaluation of common sense and experience and the overvaluation of abstraction and expertise can lead people to deny their own senses and logical powers, to believe the unbelievable and accept the unacceptable. Henry Kissinger, after all, is highly educated.18 Moreover, formal education may be empowering or disempowering, mind expanding or mind enclosing. Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, renowned as the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and conceptual progenitor of concientização, launched adult literacy programs among peasants of Brazil’s poverty-stricken Northeast in the early 1960s.19 Freire noted that self-depreciation is a characteristic of the oppressed, deriving from their internalization of the opinion their oppressors hold of them. Thus he sought to instill in his students a realization of their self-worth, as well as a critical awareness of the society in which they lived. Along with teaching them to read and write, he wanted to help them learn how to think and understand and act, as subjects capable of changing their own environment rather than objects subjected to the whims of fate. Arrested and exiled in the aftermath of Brazil’s counterrevolution of 1964, Freire went on to have a major impact on educational innovation elsewhere in Latin America and in other parts of the world. The character assumed by literary programs in Northeast Brazil thereafter was that promoted by USAID’s so-called ABC Crusade, a program that according to Joseph Page trained peasants to accept things as they were and make the best of them.20

Truth in History Even where there is very little of either truth or reconciliation to be found, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has become a standard fixture of the postconflict or posttyranny transition process. At times it can be a major source of revindication and reempowerment for victimized populations. At the very least, it offers generalized acknowledgement of the importance of truth for individual and social or national recovery, as we shall see in chapter 9. It might seem curious that official acknowledgment by tyrannical leaders or their henchmen of massacres, systemic torture, and other outrages against their populations would be necessary. It is not as if the crimes of a

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terrorist state could be a secret, but there is a major difference between popularly experienced truth and officially acknowledged truth. Official truth is actionable and can be incorporated into official history. History itself can be protective, but only if it is honest and generally known and understood. It has been said that those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it. But knowing “the official story” is not the same as knowing what actually happened. History, after all, is written by the winners (the losers write the songs). The catalysts of wars and states of siege are very often “false-flag” or other subversive events staged by provocateurs. Yet political leaders and other elites and opinion makers are able to get publics to believe or pretend to believe that war, even endless war on multiple fronts, is unavoidable. Furthermore, with respect at least to “Western Civilization,” history is all about gods and kings and warriors (the rest is women’s studies). Such an approach to history is hardly empowering to those most in need of human rights protection. The utility of history depends heavily on whose history it is and from whose perspective it is viewed. The history of Papua New Guinea has usually been presented as a history of European settlement—visits by Spanish and Portuguese fleets in the sixteenth century, claims laid in the late nineteenth century by Germany on the north coast and Britain in the south. Australian acquisitions in the twentieth century were interrupted by a League of Nations mandate, Japanese occupation, and UN trusteeship. Two more decades of Australian suzerainty led finally to Papua New Guinean independence. Apart from curiosity and necessary self-defense, the “virtual history” of European colonists has been of little relevance to the region’s indigenous people, whose ancestral roots date back some 50,000 years. Until the advent of the airplane, most of the region’s several hundred language groups remained isolated not only from the outside world, but even from each other. Over the last couple of decades, however, the impact of that virtual world has become very real indeed—and very threatening. For good or ill, at least in the context of colonies and modern multinational states, mountain people, whether in Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Appalachia, or Colombia, have been, relatively speaking, ungovernable. When conquerors and hegemonic powers take their own “virtual history” too seriously and believe that they can and must bring such peoples under their control, the upshot is bound to be a human rights catastrophe. Individual and Community Strength There are two additional categories of protection that we will return to in chapter 18, but which should be mentioned here. The first is the power and

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ripple effect of individual commitment. Real power is not an attribute of a role, but rather of personal character. The other and perhaps most important of all protections is that of community, of people—be they family, tribe, village, neighborhood, professional colleagues, or larger identity groups—who understand symbiosis and recognize mutual dependence and responsibility. An understanding of community is protective in another sense as well, in the recognition of the commonality of vulnerability—that those who care about the welfare of any people should for practical reasons as well as moral ones care about and protect all individuals, all peoples, and all rights. Unscrupulousness ought to count for something; but exercising a broad array of rights can offer effective protection against that force. Rights may be individual, but protection can only be collective.

NOTES 1. Charged with dereliction in the matter of his wife’s disorderly conduct, and told that the law assumes that a man controls his wife’s behavior, Mr. Brumble, in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, responds that if the law says that, “the law is a ass.” 2. Judge Ottis J. Knippers, Kids and Common Sense, Saratoga, CA: R & E Pub., 1984, pp. 2–3. As president of the Tennessee Association of Juvenile Court Judges, Knippers, legislator as well as jurist, promoted a system favoring education and rehabilitation over incarceration for youthful offenders. 3. Many in the United States and around the world saw the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq as a means of plundering Iraqi resources, but amounts plundered there have been piddling compared to those plundered from the U.S. Treasury. We will return to this in chapter 16. 4. A much-cited comment by a U.S. officer serving in Vietnam was, “The Vietnamese don’t value life as we do.” 5. In the same rush of heady legal creativity, the Bush men invented a category of government-funded mercenary organizations like Blackwater, supposedly accountable to no one. 6. After conquistadores in Mexico in the early sixteenth century discovered chocolate, the Spanish court had the good sense to keep it an official secret for a century. 7. As well as prohibition against helping those who sleep under a bridge. In 2007, the municipality of West Palm Beach, Florida, passed an ordinance to prohibit feeding the homeless. The quotation by Anatole France is found in chapter 7 of his novel, The Red Lily, 1894. 8. Originally published in Psychological Review, 50, pp. 370–396. 9. For further gory details on such professional expertise see A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 10. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the U.S. government is asserting that we do not torture; we do, however, employ “enhanced interrogation techniques,”

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such as water-boarding, simulated drowning refined in medieval times by the Spanish Roman Catholic Inquisition. 11. Of course such urgency did not lead them to heed the warnings prepared prior to 9/11 by their own staff. 12. The staser gun has been used liberally in the United States and Canada, not only against able-bodied men, but against women—including pregnant ones—children, and the elderly, and it has resulted in deaths. The United Nations and Amnesty International have identified the staser gun as an instrument of torture. 13. In the United States, 130 “death row” prisoners whose cases were adopted in recent years by the Innocence Project have been released on the basis of new DNA evidence. This topic is revisited in chapter 8. 14. There are exceptions, of course; recognition of the Turkish genocide against Armenians in the second decade of the twentieth century may have unfortunate repercussions in Turkey and elsewhere even now. 15. “The Right to Return Home,” Amnesty International, magazine of AI-USA, Winter 2007, p. 22. Unsurprisingly, most of the 120,000 or so who have been unable to return are poor African Americans. 16. Perry Anderson, in a review of two books on Kofi Annan’s tenure at the United Nations, notes that the Clinton administration dragged its feet on the issue of a finding of genocide in Rwanda, as that “could commit the U.S. government to actually ‘do’ something.” See “Our Man,” London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 9, May 10, 2007, pp. 9–12. 17. A story circulating in Mexico City in the mid-1990s featured a tourist recounting the bad news and the good news of his day. The bad news was that he was mugged. The good news was that he was able to get away before the police arrived. 18. Though university spokesmen may try to conceal it, Harvard gave Alberto Gonzales a degree in law and George W. Bush a degree in business. 19. Freire, Pedagogía do Oprimido, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1975 (original publication, 1968). 20. Page, The Revolution that Never Was: Northeast Brazil, 1955–1964. New York: Grossman, 1972, pp. 212–232. See also Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977.

3 The Dialectics of Building an International Human Rights Regime

How can you know where you’re headed if you don’t know where you’ve been?

Like most aspects of social development, the evolution of international rights law and institutions—the so-called human rights regime—has followed a dialectical, or zigzag, course. That is, human rights protections have followed upon human rights abuses. Advances, however, in human rights law and practice have come not only from disaster, or unspeakable abuse, but also from collective, or political, triumph over such abuse. Advances also represent new recognition of rights and thus of rights abuse. Initial response to abuse may take the form of outrage that impels mobilization sufficient to give rise to laws and institutions. It has also been unfortunately the case that new forms of abuse or new targets of abuse have followed upon the investigation and discrediting of previous forms and targets. For example, in terms of what is considered “politically correct,” the discrediting of racist abuse as such in the Global North is being replaced by the currently more “correct” or acceptable abuse of immigrants. Just as “security” interests and policies are normally calculated and devised by those having the most to lose and dropped from the top down, human rights concerns are pushed from the bottom up—normally reported by victims or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and to the media and thence to governments. The process, or contestation, is and must be profoundly political. Those who would depoliticize a human rights agenda would kill it. Human rights issues, however, may be, and generally must be, distanced from partisanship, perhaps by pointing out that we are not dealing with Right versus Left, but with Right versus Wrong, and generally legal versus illegal as well. 33

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Whether or not there was any real-world referent for the Greek Golden Era play Lysistrata by Sophocles, wherein women withheld sexual favors in an effort to stop their men from going off to war, organized efforts to prevent or stop human rights abuse must be as old as time. The British antislavery society of the early nineteenth century and the International Red Cross, which came into being in midcentury, are generally considered the first nongovernmental institutions to have exercised far-reaching international influence in modern times, including promotion of the earliest of the Geneva conventions (1864), protecting the wartime wounded, and the convention of 1926 against slavery and related practices. Meanwhile, miserable working conditions accompanying industrialization in the late eighteenth century gave rise in the early nineteenth to labor organizations and finally unions strong enough, at the close of World War I, to bring about the founding of the International Labor Organization and the adoption of conventions underpinning labor rights.

WAR AND THE DIALECTIC OF RIGHTS PROTECTION Most of the early benchmarks in the development of human rights awareness and institution building came with the victory of the Allies following World War II. Both the United Nations (UN) itself and the World Court were established in 1945, almost before the smoke cleared—and adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) followed in 1948.1 The Nuremberg Trials, at the close of the war, pierced the conceptual wall of national sovereignty and affirmed the obligation of individuals in or out of uniform to defy illegal orders. And prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity established a precedent that, though buried for half a century, was to be recovered at the turn of the twenty-first century to deal with perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and later to serve as the raison d’être of the International Criminal Court. The horrors of the Holocaust—the Nazi mass murder of 6 million Jews— gave rise to the concept of genocide and in turn to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 and entered into force in 1951. Codification of the Geneva Conventions on the Protection of Civilians in Time of War and on the Treatment of Prisoners of War followed in 1949. These measures were made possible, of course, by the lopsided outcome of World War II and thus the willingness of those left standing to overlook the war crimes (e.g., saturation bombing of cities, and the use of the atomic bomb) of the Allies. Reference to the Geneva Convention relative to treatment of prisoners of war in a ruling by the United States Supreme Court in mid-2006 against the leader of a still standing empire was encouraging to a

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point, but effects of the ruling were largely nullified in practice by the congressional response of legislating extended powers to the presidency. The experience of refugees during and after World War II also gave rise in 1951 to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; its reach was extended by a protocol appended in 1967. Apart from voting and holding public office, persons admitted as legal refugees are to enjoy most of the rights of citizens. States, however, are not obliged to accept refugees, so the specter of statelessness remains. Stilled temporarily perhaps by the polarization that soon burgeoned between former Allies having Security Council veto powers, human rights activity saw no great flurry in the 1950s; but the 1960s ushered in a period of prolific development. Amnesty International, a membership organization soon to become a major actor in the international politics of human rights, was established in l961 by a British lawyer, Peter Benenson, seeking amnesty for students locked away as political prisoners by Portuguese dictator António Salazar. As regimes akin to that of Salazar came into being or came under scrutiny in other parts of the world, as the Vietnam War and the opposition to it in the United States and abroad intensified, and as a post–World War II and postcolonial baby boom generated a new transnational constituency of young idealists, concerns for the protection of human rights built and came to be codified in a major new body of international law. The United Nations considers two covenants adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 (ratified and entered into force in 1976), along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), to constitute an “international bill of human rights.” Unlike the enormously influential Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, as a resolution, is not legally binding for signatories, the covenants carry the weight of international law. These core documents, sometimes called the cold war twins, are the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The rights represented by the former are construed to be negative rights—that is, rights of individuals not to be abused by governments. Those of the latter are conceived as positive, or active, rights—entitlements, or rights to the active attentions or provisions of government. The use of these basic covenants made by the cold war superpowers was on the order of a “double con” game. While the West championed political rights and the East socioeconomic and cultural rights, each appeared to suggest that the two sets of rights were incompatible and that countries could opt for only one or the other. A thaw of sorts in superpower relations in the late 1970s made possible the landmark Helsinki accords and enabled Helsinki Watch in 1978 to begin monitoring Soviet bloc compliance with the accords’ human rights provisions. Helsinki Watch spawned other

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regional branches that united in 1988 to form Human Rights Watch, now the largest rights organization based in the United States.

NEW CLEAVAGES, CONSTITUENCIES, AND CONVENTIONS With the end of the cold war in the 1990s, the line of cleavage moved so as to lie more nearly between North and South, with the North hyping political rights and the South economic rights. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the cleavage has been primarily between the interests of public and private sectors, and, sadly and ironically, as we shall see in chapter 5, government support has been most often drawn to the private sector, leaving public sector interests to be represented by nongovernmental organizations. Ideational cleavages and coalitions, under any circumstances, generally vary by issue; trade issues have tended to re-create the North-South divide, while some issues of territorial or resource control (e.g., petroleum under the Caspian Sea) revert to pitting West against East, and others pit most countries and regions against the imperial ambitions and assumptions of the United States, and more recently, also of China. More limited or transitory cleavages divide or engage rural versus urban populations and JudeoChristian versus Moslem, not to mention other actual and potential schisms within any identifiable category. As more peoples of North, South, East, and West come to recognize their own rights and to find governments unaccountable on either political or economic scores, the emerging cleavage may be one of people versus government—not necessarily a helpful development in the absence of an alternative body in which people might invest their energies and their trust. While the core covenants competed for primacy in the arena of global politics, other major components of international human rights law were drawn up in response to the emergence of newly mobilized constituencies. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1965 and entered into force in 1969, gave expression both to the successes of the civil rights movement in the United States and to the ideals and aspirations of new states arising as European ones lost or shed their former colonies. The right to self-determination, championed by secessionists from the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I, was revived in the 1960s in anticolonialist sentiment and is featured in each of the “twin” covenants. Unsurprisingly, however, the issue remains mired in superpower politics. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted in 1979, four years into the UN-designated Decade for Women, and ratified in 1981, reflected more than a decade of

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mobilizing and global networking among women’s organizations. The prohibition in both of these cases of discrimination by governments is accompanied by government commitments to sanction such discrimination by private actors and institutions as well. Formal international recognition in 1993 of the systematic use of rape as a war crime was a response in part to the nature of wars raging in the early 1990s; but in a broader sense, the issuance in 1993 of the UN Declaration on Elimination of Violence against Women attested to the increasing strength and global reach of the women’s movement. The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted in 1984 and ratified in 1987, followed upon a couple of decades in which brutalization by Third World tyrants having the backing of superpowers had generated outrage and galvanized public opinion so as to strengthen existing human rights organizations and to generate a proliferation of new ones. In Indonesia, Indochina, Brazil, and the Congo in the 1960s, in South America and South Asia in the 1970s, and in Central America and South Africa in the 1980s, great battles raged within, and at times among, states as have-nots found hope and haves found threat in the prospect of democracy and social change. The threat of imprisonment, torture, execution, and disappearance was such that human rights, as monitored by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, and other NGOs and IGOs came to be seen primarily in terms of such politically motivated, physical threats by official or officially tolerated thugs. Such a focus seemed unavoidable because the deluge of cases needing urgent attention called for a system of triage. In fact, over those years, human rights organizations developed communications alert systems and urgent action campaigns to sharpen their focus and enhance their impact. The Convention against Torture (CAT) represented a response to the “dirty wars” of state against nation, of governments against their own peoples. Lest anyone presume to trifle with definitions, the CAT, in Article One, prohibits “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted.” And to stave off lapses into circumstantial relativity, Article Two asserts, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal instability or any public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.” (We return to this issue in part VII.) As the cold war skulked off into history at the beginning of the 1990s, and the assertiveness of the private sector in a now globally planned economy became apparent, political triage issues slipped into the background, and the focus of human rights lawmaking came to rest on issues more readily characterized as social, economic, or cultural. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed in 1989 and entered into force in1990, was inspired and

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propelled both by the global networking of women’s organizations and by the steady work of several UN committees and affiliates. The convention is designed primarily to compel state governments to protect children in their territories from abuse, neglect, or exploitation, and to attend to their needs for education and health care. The United States signed the convention in 1995 but remains only one of two countries in the world—the other being Somalia—that has not ratified it.2 Both new threats to habitat and to culture and new efforts on the part of social scientists, along with NGOs and IGOs, to organize indigenous peoples locally and globally bore fruit in 1991 in the entry into force of the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries. The convention tries to walk the fine line of guaranteeing equal citizenship rights of individuals while safeguarding tribal autonomy so as to protect and support cultural difference. In practical matters of litigation and implementation, the convention thus far has not proved to be a very useful tool. The UN General Assembly, however, declared the years 1995–2004 to be the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, and the UN, particularly through its Commission on Human Rights, continued to work diligently with other intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations to draft a more useful declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. That effort finally came to fruition in September of 2007 when the General Assembly adopted such a declaration. Although the International Labor Organization had attempted at times since the 1920s to represent the interests of migrant labor, it became clear over the course of the twentieth century that stronger protections were greatly needed. Thus, the UN General Assembly in 1990 adopted and opened for signatures the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. The convention entered into force in 2003. Almost all of the countries that had ratified by 2007, however, were predominantly senders rather than receivers of migrants. The convention provides that along with basic health and welfare services available to citizens, migrant workers are entitled to the protection of the state against violence or intimidation and to due process under law, including court interpretation and consular representation. Though basic human rights apply to all regardless of legal status, undocumented workers are not necessarily covered by this convention and remain, in practice, highly vulnerable. The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of conventions, protocols, and resolutions dealing with new or resurgent abuses, including human trafficking, the use of child labor and child soldiers, and the use of new weapons or of old weapons, like landmines, that continue to find new victims. Among the most important international instruments adopted since the turn of the twenty-first century have been the Convention on the Rights

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of Persons with Disabilities, an estimated 65 million people around the world, and the UN General Assembly resolution recognizing the “responsibility to protect” and legitimating intervention in “failed states” or other states that prove unwilling or unable to protect their own peoples, both adopted in 2006. The drafting of the former, which has fifty articles covering such topics as accessibility, inclusiveness, participation, and nondiscrimination, benefited from the input of some ninety NGOs. Unfortunately, with respect to the latter, the United Nations and its member states have been slow to deal with the crisis that inspired it, that of Darfur province in the Sudan. In that province more than 300,000 have died at the hands of the governmentbacked paramilitaries known as the Janjaweed, and more than 2 million have been displaced. Finally, on July 31, 2007, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to send up to 26,000 UN peacekeepers to Darfur. However, by mid-2008, only 9,000 had been sent, and they were not always able to protect even themselves. Thus, the challenges to implementation of the mandate remain enormous.3 Another initiative long in gestation that was realized at the end of 2007 was the UN General Assembly resolution, passed by a vote of 104 to 54, declaring the death penalty a violation of human rights and calling for a moratorium on executions. The U.S. government opposed the resolution; but even in the United States, for the first time in more than thirty years, the tide appeared to be turning against capital punishment.

REGIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS Regional human rights treaties and institutions have also had important roles in the construction of an international human rights regime. Europe reborn after World War II as a champion of peace, tolerance, and human rights has been a pioneer in this regard. The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953) and its many additional protocols have been a major source of protection for Europeans and foreigners within their territories, as have the European Social Charter (1965) and the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975). The European Convention has been incorporated into national law throughout the Council of Europe, and European documents and institutions, in continuous elaboration, have often served as models for initiatives in other regions as well as for global initiatives. Other important regional human rights treaties include the American Convention on Human Rights (adopted by the Organization of American States [OAS] in 1969 and entered into force in 1978), along with its more recent additions, the Protocol to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Protocol

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on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights was adopted by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1981, and the Arab Charter on Human Rights was adopted by the League of Arab States in 1994.

INSTITUTIONS AND IMPLEMENTATION Benchmark treaties and covenants for the protection of human rights are normally penned in response to need made urgent because powerful leaders or groups assuming impunity are violating those rights. It stands to reason, then, that such documents are not self-executing. Indeed there is now a thicket of permanent committees and commissions and ad hoc working groups and projects set up to monitor, investigate, inform, advocate, and otherwise promote adherence to these treaties and compliance with international law. Compliance with most of the major treaties is now monitored by permanent committees. The Human Rights Committee, attached to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and responsible also for monitoring compliance with the Convention on Torture, is the broadest in jurisdiction and is probably the one most closely watched by would-be abusers. The UN Commission on Human Rights, created in 1948 as a special agency of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), was composed of high-level diplomats representing their own governments, a structure that while generating high visibility also succumbed to polarization and thus limited effectiveness in dealing with many grievances. On those occasions, however, when agreement could be reached about stark violations, it was able to exercise great influence—for example, by passing resolutions of condemnation. The commission assumed oversight of implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination as well as of conventions on refugees, women, children, tribal and indigenous peoples, and migrant workers. The Human Rights Commission worked proactively, through rapporteurs and working groups, to highlight needs and strengthen protections. Both the Human Rights Committee and the Human Rights Commission were entitled to hear complaints from individuals and NGOs as well as from governments. Under the inspired leadership of Mary Robinson, former president of the Irish Republic, appointed to the relatively new position of high commissioner in 1997, the commission, and with it a broad range of human rights issues, enjoyed a high profile—a matter that left Robinson vulnerable after 2000 to U.S. disfavor. Robinson retired from that position in 2002, but the commission continued for a while to expand its horizons, with a growing number of rapporteurs following up on new concerns and opportunities.4

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In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the commission itself was always polarized and sometimes deadlocked on issues having high visibility, but with able and dedicated staff it was extending its reach, particularly in Africa, by working through and helping to establish national Human Rights Institutes. The commission remained sufficiently influential and resistant to U.S. pressures as to make the Bush administration’s hit list in the UN’s “reform process” undertaken in 2005. A new Human Rights Council replaced the commission in 2006. It differs little in structure and mission from its predecessor, but attempts have been made to streamline procedures and achieve greater focus. The council staff placed great hope in a new instrument known as the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), intended to “promote the universality, interdependence, indivisibility, and interrelatedness of all human rights.” With a reporting team drawn from national human rights institutions, independent experts, and international and local NGOs, the UPR is to review the human rights standards and records of all UN member states, not just those that had stood for election to the council. Even so, the effectiveness of the council and its UPR is hampered by the ability of individual states to resist transparent investigation and to obstruct collective action.5

INTERNATIONAL ADJUDICATION The International Court of Justice, or World Court, post–World War II sibling of the United Nations, is empowered to hear only cases brought by states against other states. Like any court, it lacks the means of implementing its own decisions and is therefore dependent upon respect by state governments for the rule of law, both national and international. Its limitations were well illustrated in the mid-1980s when Nicaragua brought charges against the United States before the court. Nicaragua charged the Reagan administration, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with various acts of aggression, including the bombing of port facilities and the mining of harbors. The court found for Nicaragua and assigned damages, whereupon the United States simply rejected the jurisdiction of the court. The youngest of the international courts and the only other court to have global jurisdiction, the International Criminal Court (ICC), became a reality when its enabling treaty, signed in Rome in 1998, entered into force in July 2002. The ICC, which represents a major milestone in multilateral pursuit of the rule of law and respect for human rights, began operations in 2003 in The Hague. It is the first international judicial body to come into being since the creation of the World Court in 1945. Whereas the World Court adjudicates only disputes between states, the ICC is authorized to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and other war

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crimes. It was virtually stillborn, however, for the familiar reason of superpower rejection; it has been adamantly opposed by both China and the United States. By 2006, it had received more than 1,700 complaints from 139 countries, but only four cases had been opened for investigation, three of them referred by their own governments. The fourth was a referral from the UN Security Council, to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for atrocities in Darfur. The ICC is discussed further in subsequent chapters, particularly in part VI.

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS The bodies that have proved most effective in the monitoring and implementing of international human rights law have been those operating under the auspices of the Council of Europe: the European Commission on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. These bodies have greater authority than any counterparts around the world to investigate and adjudicate and to hold governments accountable for their actions, as was manifest in a 2007 decision against the government of Russia for the violation of the rights of noncombatants in Chechnya. Representatives from each government that is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms are elected by the Council of Europe to act on the commission in their individual capacities. The commission may refer cases brought by individuals or groups, including NGOs, to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights. The court, comprising jurists from each of the Council of Europe member states, is authorized to deal with cases referred either by the commission or by a member state. The bodies designed to implement the American and African human rights treaties, a commission and a court, are modeled after their European counterparts, but in fact are considerably weaker in enforcement powers. Until recently, the inter-American system in particular had been hamstrung by pressures brought and obstacles posed by the United States, which has yet to ratify the convention. Ironically, however, the extremism of U.S. positions since the turn of the twenty-first century has stimulated popular support for Latin American nationalism and regionalism and thus enabled the region’s representatives and jurists to operate with greater autonomy. As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the international human rights regime is abuzz with activity, as new organizations and coalitions crop up around the world and new layers of legal documents are laid down every day. It is unfortunately the case, however, that abuses previously discredited fully and addressed by law and by institutions will reappear, often, but not necessarily, in different guises and under dif-

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ferent rationales. And if allowed to stand, such abuse will be, de facto, relegitimated and will once again require massive efforts to put down.

NOTES 1. The Guiness Book of World Records lists the UDHR as the most widely translated document in the world; former High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson has commented that it is unfortunate that it is not also the most widely read. Keynote address, “The Realization of Human Rights over the Next 40 Years,” conference, “2048: Drafting the Future of Human Rights,” University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Law School, February 29, 2008. 2. Apart from the post–World War II Geneva Conventions, the United States has ratified only four of the conventions mentioned here, all of them belatedly: the Convention on Genocide in 1988 and the other three in the 1990s. 3. Mary Robinson noted at the aforementioned conference in February 2008 that only twenty-six helicopters had been made available by member states for the UN operations in Darfur. 4. Robinson noted, in conversation with me in 2008, that despite the pressures she faced after 2000, she had felt that speaking out and taking a strong stand might help to strengthen the position of the High Commission. 5. Conversations with Danielle Solick, Office of the President of the Human Rights Council, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, of Mexico, in 2007, during and after her Monterey Institute professional semester service in that office in Geneva.

4 Human Rights Cleavages and Controversies The Discourse

Collective, or cultural, rights cannot include the right of half the community to abuse the other half.

In politics there are no happily-ever-afters; and as we have noted, politics is at the core of the struggle to implant respect for human rights. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for most of us the creed of the human rights movement, was intended to be all-encompassing. Since that time of heady idealism, however, even as rights activists have sought to bulwark our claims with tighter definitions, elaborated arguments, and international laws, institutions, and support organizations, we have been confronted on all sides by efforts to roll back the parameters so marked and the circumstances of applicability—to constrict the rights that may be claimed, the means that may be employed for claiming them, and the range of rightful claimants. Moreover, in human rights as in the broader power game, Talleyrand’s observation that “man was given speech in order to conceal his thoughts” still applies. The rights so claimed are rarely opposed or rejected straightforwardly. Rather, they are found to be in conflict with other rights, to be unenforceable, or to be subject to exception. While it is true that even in a more nearly perfect world—one in which a level playing field was indeed a “given,” or once leveled was not subject to overnight retilting—human rights scholars and advocates could still tie themselves in knots trying to sort out competing needs and responsibilities and to allow for overlaps and underlaps and head-on collisions of rights, the fact is that the discourse is rarely if ever dominated by such scholars and advocates; it is more likely to be dominated by those whose political or ma44

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terial interests lie in framing the discourse so as to relocate points of contention, and thus deflect challenges to their own prerogatives. We will return to the politics underlying the discourse in subsequent chapters; I note here only a few of the most resilient lines of controversy.

POLITICAL VERSUS ECONOMIC RIGHTS, OR VOTING VERSUS EATING We have noted the implicit claims of cold war contenders that a people must choose, because it was not feasible to have a full fare of both political and economic rights. Indeed, in some aspects of life, the extremes on each side appeared to confirm that contention. While the meaning in the East of the “workers’ state” appeared to be that workers conspired against themselves as consumers, in the all-about-business West, consumers conspired against themselves as workers. And if the essence of counterproductivity in the East was a conspiracy of society against the individual, in the West it was a conspiracy of individuals against society. But the choice was always a phony one. A glance at the states that have been most democratic in terms of all-inclusive and effective participation in decision making (e.g., Scandinavia) gives empirical backing to what logic also suggests—that those states have also been the most responsible in respecting social and cultural rights and in providing for the material requirements of all their people.

UNIVERSAL JURISDICTION VERSUS STATE SOVEREIGNTY Another of the perennial great debates has pitted universal jurisdiction against state sovereignty. A seeming contradiction on that score was in fact built into the United Nations Charter; and despite the case prepared in a Spanish court and brought against former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, state sovereignty has clearly continued to have the edge in practice. That is not only because stateholders able to do so are likely to insist upon their rights to behave as they wish toward their own populations, but also because governments of weaker states, whether good or bad, responsible or brutish, can rightly claim that they at times need protection against stronger states having unworthy motives. Superpowers will continue to play that card either way that suits their immediate purposes; but, particularly since the 1990s, recognition has been spreading that national sovereignty is not the same as popular sovereignty—that the interests of governments are often at odds with the interests of their peoples, and that there is little justification for collective protection of tyrants. The newly employed concept of the “failed state,”

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wherein no contending group is necessarily willing or even able to protect the larger population of the national territory against plunderers, warlords, or simple anarchy, also appears to make uninvited collective intervention more readily justifiable. The UN General Assembly’s 2006 resolution on the “responsibility to protect,” elaborated in chapter 3, was a response to a thunderous appeal from around the world for intervention by the international community on behalf of the peoples of the Sudanese province of Darfur. The assault in October 2007 by Burma’s military government on a massive peaceful prodemocracy demonstration led by Buddhist monks, and the criminally irresponsible and self-serving response of that government to the devastating cyclone that struck the Irrawady Delta in May of 2008, made the appeal for UN responsive capability even more urgent.1

STATE SOVEREIGNTY VERSUS NATIONAL SELFDETERMINATION The issue of self-determination may be the prickliest of them all in the early twenty-first century. Self-determination has been held aloft as a collective right of nations perhaps since conquerors began to assign surviving tribes to resource-free reservations, and certainly since the outcome of World War I spelled the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it is very clear at times that there can be no democracy without popular sovereignty and vice versa. It is clear enough that seizure and occupation of one nation by another, whether or not the collectivity seized and occupied technically constitutes a state, is a fearsome violation of collective and individual rights. The issue of secession of a culturally identifiable set of people who constitute a component of a multicultural or imperial state, however, opens a Pandora’s box of such proportions as to suggest caution. There is hardly a state anywhere, or even a territory of secessionist inclination, that does not have within it another tribe or nation whose members would prefer to go their own way. Perhaps the most promising short-term approach to this frustration that simmers in so many regions is a more concentrated effort to design a range of workable models for autonomy. Spain’s post-Franco democratic government has been relatively successful in dealing with this challenge. As to reaching international agreement on necessary and sufficient conditions for independence, obstacles posed have less to do with domestic governability than with the presumptions of hegemonic powers, as illustrated by the very different prospects of Kosovo and Taiwan in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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INDIVIDUAL VERSUS COLLECTIVE RIGHTS Another human rights controversy that has engaged a great many politicians and pundits in the first decade of the twenty-first century has been that of whether individual or collective rights should override in the event of a conflict. Often featured as a cleavage between North and South or First World and Third, at the level of statecraft the debate generally turns out to be on the order of a “double con.” The arguments set forth for collective, or cultural, rights generally appear to be a defense of tradition—that is, patriarchal tradition—over liberation. In other words, cultural preservation around the world, as employed in the discourse, most often seems to be about preservation of a great variety of ways to suppress and exploit women. Oppression of women is universal. Only the variations in its manifestations can be said to be culturally specific. Meanwhile, what distinguishes Global North from South with respect to individual rights? In the United States, individual rights in contemporary practice do not include the rights of cancer patients to use medical marijuana or of non-English speakers to converse among themselves in the workplace in another language. The defense of individual rights by spokesmen of First World values all too often boils down to defense of private material, or property, rights over collective, or public interest, rights. Perhaps a recombination of supposed First and Third World positions would better serve to protect the rights of the majority worldwide. There is no defensible argument that the collective rights of any group should include the right of half of that group to abuse the other half, or for anyone, under cover of culture, to abuse the human rights of another. On the other hand, the conceptual relationship of individual rights to property rights is clearly a self-interested notion, bounded in time and space, and particularly now in the legal construct of “corporate personhood.” This notion has been expressed, for example, in corporate claims to intellectual property rights to the healing remedies of traditional indigenous communities and in corporate lawsuits brought against governments on the “takings” argument that government services or regulations stand in the way of potential profits.2 Nineteenth-century French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously observed that “property is theft.” Enclosure of the commons, across many centuries of conquest and colonization transforming communal property into private property, has been and remains a major means of imperial domination and of wholesale theft of land. And among indigenous groups around the world, communal lands represent not only the major source of livelihood but also the practical and psychological anchor, or social glue, of the community. The community disintegration and individual vulnerability caused by its loss is reflected

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around the world in high rates of indigenous alcoholism, imprisonment, and suicide. There are and must be in all communities individual rights to be respected, but there is no such thing as individual security. Security can only be collective. The greatest respect for individual and collective rights should come together in the protection of the individual’s right to practice and take pride in his or her own culture and identity or identities, free of discrimination, so long as rights of others within and beyond the community are not infringed. It is not simply the land and other resources of indigenous, or culturally distinct, peoples that are currently under threat; it is the culture itself. Nearly half of the world’s 7,000 surviving languages are now in danger of extinction. They are dying off in the twenty-first century at a rate even faster than that of species of flora and fauna.3 Culture is threatened also by the displacement consequent to conflict and to shifting patterns of production and trade, and even by development specialists who claim, and perhaps believe, that they are helping materially deprived communities. When culture itself is seen as a major obstacle to development (and it often is, though few development professionals would concede that that is the case), unraveling that culture will be seen as a sine qua non of progress. Designing culturally based and culturally nourishing approaches to development is one of many endeavors that should allow activists of human rights and of development to work more effectively together. It should be noted here that a great many anthropologists have also devoted themselves to this goal.

THE RIGHTS OF PRESENT, VERSUS FUTURE, POPULATIONS Finally, a controversy, or debate, that is a relative newcomer to the human rights discourse, having arisen only since 1970’s Earth Day, the birth of the green movement, pits the present against the future—the rights of those of us currently enjoying nature’s bounties against the rights of our grandchildren. There are genuine human rights dilemmas to be considered in this context. The boulders of contention that most often strike us, however, and delay responsible actions of precaution and preservation have been rolled down from the high end of a tilted playing field. As a practical matter, the contention is most often framed as one between environmental preservation and jobs. In fact, it is rarely the case that many jobs would be gained or saved, for example, by large-scale logging of a virgin rainforest, or that jobs gained would be a fair and reasonable balance against habitat and livelihood lost. What is really at stake in this discourse is profit.

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That argument may also be turned inside out for unseemly purposes. In the late 1990s, both the Sultan of Brunei, on the island of Borneo, and the military tyrants ruling Burma sought international acclaim, tourist dollars, and perhaps future deals for resource rights unchallenged by prior claimants by setting aside large tracts of virgin forest for preservation. The plan also, coincidentally, provided cover for expelling the indigenous peoples whose ancestors had been an integral part of those ecosystems for millennia without despoiling them. Issues surrounding resource depletion do often raise questions as to whether hardships should be imposed now so as to mitigate heavier future impact. Living on a tilted playing field, we know that any such hardship is likely to be pushed down to the lower end of the field or forward in time or both. Energy use issues, with unimaginable riches born of oligopoly at stake, are particularly subject to manipulation. Recurrent leaps in the price of petroleum always give impetus to expansion of nuclear energy generation, even though the lack of processes and places for safe and legal disposal of nuclear and other toxic waste has been a crisis for more than two decades; that crisis, in turn, has generated a new category of trade for international organized crime and a new means of exploiting poor neighborhoods and countries.4 The unavoidable cleavage here is one of short-term versus long-term thinking, neither of which can be safely discounted. The terms in contention, however, are being conflated. Arctic polar bears and half the former population of New Orleans—now in diaspora (unsurprisingly the AfricanAmerican half)—might attest that global warming no longer challenges us to behave responsibly for the sake of future generations; the price for emission of greenhouse gasses is already being charged. And dare we take into consideration the rights of generations past? The wholesale destruction in the first decade of the twenty-first century of the great works of our ancestors of many millennia past—works that have given way to the defacing and demolition weapons of Afghanistan’s Taliban, to the Yangtze waters behind China’s Three Gorges Dam, and to the vandalism and pillaging of Baghdad’s ancient treasures consequent to the U.S. invasion of Iraq—does not bode well for living history. A recommitment to respect the achievements and the wisdom of our forebears might in fact offer some protection for the rights of contemporary sojourners. There are and will continue to be genuine rights and urgent needs that come into conflict and that challenge the talents of committed and disinterested planners and negotiators to seek resolution. But we should not allow the noisier Potemkin conflicts of convenience to obscure the far greater confluence of rights and of interests that might be protected if we could better comprehend that confluence and harness it for coalition building.

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NOTES 1. Along with many other friends of the Burmese people, I refrain from recognizing the name Myanmar, as it was imposed by armed oppressors. Jorge Heine addresses the outcome of Cyclone Nargis and its relevance to R2P in an editorial, “Should R2P have been invoked in Myanmar?” The Hindu, June 7, 2008. 2. Such claims have been brought particularly under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 3. For elaboration, see David Harrison, When Languages Die, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 4. Laurence Summers, as World Bank chief economist in 1992, reportedly said (perhaps ironically) in a leaked memo that the economic logic of dumping toxic waste in the lowest-wage countries was impeccable. See Doug Henwood, “Toxic Banking,” The Nation, March 2, 1992, p. 257.

Part II THE RIGHT TO EAT Social and Economic Rights

What free trade, like free love, is free of is social responsibility. There is an inverse relationship between the value of what one does and what one gets paid for doing it.

Isolation has helped Yemen maintain dense marketplaces of small business; in some cases little has changed since the Middle Ages. Sana’a 1999.

5 The Globalization of Vulnerability

In 1971, Brazilian dictator General Garrastazú Médici, lacking the subtlety of his economic advisers, commented that “the economy is doing fine, but the people aren’t.” The economy, as conceived by Médici, has continued to thrive through the first decade of the twenty-first century on what neoliberal policymakers and deal makers call comparative advantage. The people, meanwhile, have been subject increasingly to what I call comparative disadvantage—the inability to produce what one would consume, to consume what one produces, or to have any say about what is to be produced or consumed. Despite what we have learned over the years since Médici’s gaffe, or, for that matter, since David Ricardo’s theorizing about comparative advantage, comparative disadvantage remains the prevailing wind at our backs. This conceptual and material disjuncture between the economy and the people—the missing link—is or should be development, which leads me to what I see as the most important lesson to be learned in international development: that development is a right. It is moreover a member of a community of rights that are mutually dependent and reinforcing. Those rights and their relevance in the context of international development are addressed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In pursuit of the ideal of freedom from fear and want, the Covenant, in Part II, Article 2, holds that each state party “undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and cooperation, especially economic and technical” toward achieving the rights recognized by the Covenant. 53

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DEVELOPMENT VERSUS CHARITY IN THE CONTEXT OF RIGHTS Another important lesson to be learned in international development is humility. When I went off to Chile in 1962 with the first wave of Peace Corps volunteers, we had been told, “Don’t give a man a fish; teach him to fish.” That sounded right until it dawned on us that we didn’t know how to fish, and he did. In 2007 the slogan—if not of the Peace Corps, at least of the International Monetary Fund—would be, “Don’t give a man a fish; sell him the fish—in a can—and if he can’t afford it, give him a loan.” Perhaps by now there are also development guerrillas who are teaching that fisherman how to drive out the gringos who are scooping up all the fish in factory ships. Despite our general naïveté in the early 1960s, we had one thing right about the fisherman; he did not want or need our charity. The basic difference between charity and development is or should be quite clear: Charity builds dependence; development builds independence. That is not to say that we should scorn charity, or that the motives of those building dependence are necessarily charitable. But in a world serious about democracy and equity, charity should be a stop-gap measure rather than an ongoing process. Charity is a special tax on the caring, one that is often essential, but never a reasonable substitute for development or for responsible government. Development is a word, of course, and words are prostitutes, subject to reemployment by the highest bidder; the discourse of development has been continually bought off from ever-deeper pockets.1 Leaving Chile in 1964, I told my Chilean friends that my intention was to get reeducated (I was trained and experienced then as an artist and musician) and come back to help them in development. They said, “Forget it; we can do that for ourselves if you’ll just get your government off our backs.” I took them seriously, but my efforts in that vein were too feeble and too late. In the process, however, I came to see all too clearly what so many builders of disciplinary walls still do not—that politics and economics are inseparable; politics without economics is entertainment, and economics without politics is religion.

TRUMPING RIGHTS WITH ECONOMIC STRESS AND INSECURITY From a human rights perspective, it makes no more sense to dismiss human needs from policy considerations in times of economic stress than it does to withdraw human rights protections in times of war. Moreover, just as economic stress can be induced to justify exploitation, to dismantle social

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infrastructure, or to bring about “regime change,” it appears that, particularly in the United States, “times of war,” enabling otherwise unacceptable political constraints and economic excesses, have been built into a sustainable, self-contained system that maintains and expands not only supplyside wars, but also prison, pharmaceutical, and other profitable initiatives subject to manipulation of demand through fear. Thus a multidisciplinary and holistic approach to analysis and, in particular, an understanding of the sociopsychological use of linguistic “trump cards” are necessary defenses against the dismissal of real-world needs and the overriding of universal rights by the merchants of fear and of market-forces snake oil. The trends impacting these needs and rights in the post–cold war period are most often addressed through the prism of globalization or of security— and the two are symbiotic. But there are differing interpretations as to what is to be secured for whom and what has been or should be globalized. With respect to the latter, the simplest answer for most people would probably be “free trade.” That sounds positive enough, if one accepts the judgment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that a single economic strategy could be optimal for every place and every time.2 But that is just the cover story. In fact, “free trade” is not free and not about trade; above all, it is about investment. It is better than free in aggregate terms—in fact a windfall—for the countries of the Global North that protect their own markets while prying open markets of the Global South. It is profitable beyond our wildest imagination for money movers who buy and sell governments—who pay their taxes in the Bahamas, and their campaign contributions in Washington, London, Moscow, and Tokyo. But it is enormously costly for the underclasses of countries caught up in debt servitude, watching the trickle of money from North to South become a gushing torrent in the other direction. It is not surprising that for a decade or more the volume of South to North money flow has been far greater than that from North to South. Nor is it surprising that bankers have ceased to talk about debt crisis; instead they talk now about debt sustainability. Some would say that what has been globalized within the last two decades is markets; but markets have been global since the beginnings of transoceanic trade and empire. The post–cold war difference was that of the sudden loss of an alternative market system (with dire consequences perhaps most clearly visible in Cuba in the early 1990s3). Even more damaging perhaps was the loss of an alternative paradigm, or dream. The discrediting of the dream of social justice was such that until very recently only leaders plotting merciless exploitation dared to speak of compassion. The cold war ended more or less as it started and as most wars start and end: as a conspiracy of sorts of economic, military, and intelligence leaders against their own peoples. It is not surprising that new leadership in both superpowers emerged from their respective intelligence agencies. Nor is it

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surprising that the anticipated “peace dividend” vanished into thin air—or perhaps into deep pockets.4 Meanwhile, centralization and privatization of resource allocation has clearly meant the globalization of insecurity. The end of the cold war might have left us with the best of both worlds, but the outcome was more nearly the opposite: the privatization of profits and benefits and the socialization of costs and losses. More important, it left us also with the privatization, or outsourcing, of government. The real victor in the cold war thus was neither West over East nor North over South so much as the private sector over the public sector. That by no means ordained that the state was to fade away or that public budgets were to shrink. Rather it meant that the boundary between public and private domains was to be set by the private sector rather than the public one and that the power base of governments would shift more decisively from popular constituencies to corporate ones.5 Turnover at the top of the best governments money could buy became routine and came to be mistaken for democracy. The loss of a competing market system, and particularly the consequent cartelization of credit, has facilitated, in effect, the outsourcing of economic policymaking as well as the leveraging of many decisions that have little to do with national economies. In Costa Rica in 2002, I found a great deal of indignation about U.S. demands that, in exchange for inclusion in Central American trade packages, Costa Rica was expected to welcome a new U.S.designed and -operated program for training Costa Rican police forces. For better or worse (most blessings are mixed), a new alternative market is now bursting onto the scene. China’s emergence as a superpower means also a supermarket that is already making new policy options and levels of decision making available to governments otherwise dependent and vulnerable. Unfortunately, though, the new market does not bring with it a new paradigm or a new dream. In sum, what has become known as neoliberal globalization might be better understood through the conceptual lens of neocolonialism, its most important break with colonialism being the shifted balance between public and private. Whereas mother countries generally assumed certain responsibilities with respect to their colonies, multinational megacorporations are unburdened by “maternal” guilt. From time to time in the twentieth century, and peaking perhaps in the 1960s and 1970s, more or less independent former colonies, forced by war and depression and collapse of transnational markets to fend for themselves and, to some degree, to industrialize, built strange-bedfellow coalitions of national business and labor, underpinned by widely based unions and parties, and moved toward varying degrees of economic sovereignty. At the least, such governments had begun to regulate the movement and interplay of national and international capital. Post–cold war

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globalization, however, as it forced unfettered external competition into previously planned or regulated economies, corralled national markets into a single centrally planned global market economy, for which the most readily apparent enforcement mechanism was control of the credit spigot. The economic upshot has been what I call Second-Coming Capitalism.

SECOND-COMING CAPITALISM This post–cold war, globalized capitalist system is called “Second Coming” because in the first place we have seen it before. Both in terms of social relationships and of the values and practices that sustain them, it harkens back to the nineteenth century, to times portrayed so poignantly in the novels of Charles Dickens. The gains made since then through popular organization and mobilization, and expressed in government-regulated mixed economies with all-inclusive service and social welfare provisions, have been severely eroded since the 1980s, and the concomitant values of sharing and social solidarity have fallen into disrepute. In the second place, my designation of this system as Second-Coming Capitalism was inspired by James Watt, U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior in the 1980s. Pressed by environmentalists to preserve virgin forests for future generations, Watt, a religious fundamentalist, asked why we should bother, since the Second Coming of Christ might be any time. The reigning attitude with respect to resource exploitation from the 1980s into the twenty-first century has been “There may be no tomorrow! Get yours now.” Such exploitation is facilitated, of course, by twenty-first-century technology. That technology, including particularly the electronic transfer of funds, together with globally integrated, and thus invisible, corporate bureaucracy, serves as cover for the modern robber barons. In fact, market forces are not forces of nature; they are just people who are able to avoid social responsibility. Johan Galtung quipped at a meeting of the International Studies Association in Chicago in 2001, “Ask me about market forces, and I’ll give you names and addresses.” Once known as Spencerian, this brutish strain of capitalism, like a bacterium that has become resistant to antibiotics, has returned in more resilient form. Perhaps the greatest source of this resilience is the speed-oflight mobility of money. But what, you might ask, does all of this have to do with human rights? How do these developments impact the most vulnerable—the poor, the sick, the old, the young, women, minorities, refugees, and immigrants? How do they lead to exploitation, persecution, and other abuses?

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For connection, we turn again to political rights—particularly the right to participate effectively in the making of decisions that predetermine the quality of individual and community life.

MOBILE MONEY AND IMMOBILIZED POLITICAL LEADERSHIP Mobile money means that even the hint of policy change in the public interest (i.e., taxing corporate profits to fund public health or education programs) risks bringing on a credit freeze or setting off a stampede of capital flight. When markets get the “jitters,” politicians get cold feet because, in fact, an economy can now be stripped of capital as if by thieves in the night. The state then typically sees its currency devalued, its assets privatized at fire sale prices, its budget priorities revised and “structurally adjusted” by creditors, and its role in the global marketplace defined ever more by the dimensions of its debt. This process began to be played out as early as the 1980s in the Western Hemisphere and in Africa, in the early 1990s in the ex-Soviet sphere, and in the late 1990s in East and Southeast Asia, with ricochet effects that continued for several years to bounce around the world. What “free trade” turns out to be free of is us. Like free love, free trade is free of social responsibility; it is free also of the public interest, of popular sovereignty— in a word, of government. Government has, of late, acquired a bad name, in large part because it has fallen into the clutches of its enemies, of leaders hell-bent on proving its uselessness to ordinary people. The nation-state, even under supposedly democratic government, has indeed proved a weak vehicle for pursuing fulfillment of the collective will of territorially defined populations. But it remains the only vehicle on the lot designed for that purpose and the only potential means of employing the strength of the many against the rapaciousness of a privileged or unscrupulous few. It matters a great deal whether its leaders are willing and able to respond to a popular mandate or whether they are dependent for their positions or their ability to govern on external masters. What then becomes of public services and responsibilities—of utilities, transportation, and safety, of schools and clinics and parks, when states are stripped of resources and options? The nonprofit sector has been in no position to pick up the slack; nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations alike have been largely dependent on the taxing prerogatives of governments. And what is democracy supposed to mean in that context? Unless the unaffluent and unpowerful can reclaim or reinvent government, we must deal with a whole new range of insecurities and vulnerabilities for which the “free-market economy” becomes an ever more all-encompassing and blame-absorbing abstraction.

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A system of “sustainable debt,” sustained by and for a creditor cartel, is a seller’s market for capital. Whereas in many countries in the mid-twentieth century, and particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, the pursuit of industrialization and some degree of economic sovereignty meant that foreign investors competed for rights to participate in their national markets, governments now compete with each other for the favors of foreign capital. In the manner of South Pacific “cargo cults,” they build landing strips and docks, golf courses and industrial parks, diverting scarce resources from urgently needed social services. To lure the capital, they also offer up ever longer tax holidays and cheap, docile labor. In fact, once natural resources are exhausted, the only collateral remaining for debt is the labor of those who cannot leave. It might appear, then, that the problem is simply one of too little money. In fact, however, the opposite is the case. The problem is one of too much money—but, of course, in too few hands. More than a trillion dollars in liquidity can be found sloshing around on any day lusting for procreation. The more there is of it—the denser the swarm—the more its predations resemble gang rape. Decisions with respect to planning and investment that might have been made in the public interest by national or local governments are thus ever more likely to be made by “high-altitude bombers,” far removed from any responsibility or even direct awareness of the consequences of their decisions. The state, then, is left unemployed—unable either to protect or to provide. But unemployed governments do not allow themselves to starve. The bankrupt ship of state is likely to become a receivership, or “receiver state,”6 distributing surplus value generated by exploitable workers among foreign bankers and international financial institutions.

A NEW GLOBAL UNDERCLASS: THE HOMELESS AND THE STATELESS Sustainable debt means that money and resources are continuously siphoned off from poor countries or regions to richer ones. But borders wide open to capital fleeing poor countries slam quickly shut when would-be workers try to follow. Those who have lost land or livelihood but who are old enough or young enough and able bodied may have little choice but to follow the money to where the jobs are. They must do so, however, without the rights of citizenship—and increasingly, without the acknowledgment even of their human rights. As political or economic refugees, undocumented workers, or even “guest workers,” they will not normally be able to vote or to organize politically or to bargain collectively, and they are often subject to abuse and exploitation.

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In some countries at some times—Kuwait, for example, before Desert Storm (the war to make the world safe for feudalism)—such alien workers have constituted a majority of the population. In general, their numbers have grown to such an extent that migrant workers could now be said to be the most heavily traded “product,” and for many countries, remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange. Sex trafficking and other forms of outright slave trafficking, higher now in absolute global numbers than ever before, are only the most extreme expression of this trend. Even as straightforward racism has fallen into putative disrepute, a new global underclass of the stateless is being generated. Like the market for credit, globally controlled on the supply side, the market for labor, controlled on the demand side, becomes yet another source of “flexibility” for capital but not for labor, for employers but not for employees—another means of tilting the playing field further to favor those already flush with options. And for political leaders unwilling or unable to generate employment or to service collective needs, this readily exploitable underclass offers scapegoats to be used as scapegoats always have been—to distract attention and deflect blame.

THE COMMODIFICATION OF LABOR Deterioration in the terms of exchange for labor is exacerbated by continual diaspora and the vulnerability coincident with statelessness. But the trend is far more broadly manifest. Nor is it confined to those living in or moving from less-developed states. In socioeconomic discourse North and South, or First World and Third, should be seen now as places not on a map but on the food chain. The gap now in the United States between average salaries of CEOs of major corporations (over a billion in sales) and average salaries of employees is such that the CEOs earn more in a day than their employees earn in a year. That is up from a proportion of about 30 to 1 at midcentury to more than 365 to 1 in 2006. Calculations of wealth are even more divergent. The top 1 percent of U.S. households claimed more wealth in 2007 than the bottom 90 percent.7 Adding insult to injury, the Bush administration decided in mid-2008 that the lives of Americans are not worth what they used to be. This devaluation was not a response to the free-falling value of the dollar, but rather to cost-benefit analyses undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency found that dropping the valuation by a million dollars from that of five years earlier made life-saving benefits from restrictions on air pollution less worthy of the costs. Globally, about half of the people are living on less than two dollars a day—a crude measure of living standards to be sure, but whatever it means,

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it can’t be good.8 The income gap between rich and poor has almost tripled since the 1960s; the ratio of the income of the top 20 percent to that of the bottom 20 percent is now more than 80 to 1, and that ratio difference calculated in terms of assets would be even greater. The holdings of three of the world’s billionaires are greater than those of forty-eight countries with a combined population of 600 million. As more and more goods and services are traded internationally, prices almost everywhere are “international” while wages everywhere are local— that is, prices rise and wages drop as far as the global market will bear. For localities, this growing wage-price gap might re-create the rigidly delineated dual markets associated with colonialism if the homegrown foodstuffs, healing remedies, and crafts of that era were still available. Globalized cost control may allow prices of high-tech gadgets in elastic demand to fall, but costs of essential services—particularly health care and education—rise inexorably. Allowing the market to determine the cost of Nintendo games may be defensible; allowing it to determine the cost of drugs essential to treating and containing a pandemic is not. Unemployment, a requirement of the profit maximization system (when labor markets tighten, stock markets plummet), keeps unions weak and wages low, as dissatisfied workers can always be replaced—if not by hiring locals or replacing them with machines, by importing workers or by moving the whole operation offshore. Job insecurity is compounded by the loss of government services and safety nets, while earned retirement disappears into devalued currencies, stock market dives, and embezzlement of corporate accounts. Meanwhile, the same pundits and policymakers who argue that there is no right to a safety net argue also that there is no right to a job or livelihood. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights begs to differ. Part III, Article 6 states that “the states parties to the present covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right.”

WHERE THE BUCK STOPS So where does the buck stop? It stops where it always has—with women, and particularly the poorest of women who have no one else to turn to. When there are small mouths to feed, men may escape to another mate or another town, or just into a bottle. Women cannot. As decision making becomes removed from and invisible to the publics affected, as governments become stateholders and major stakeholders become stakemovers, women with shrinking resources confront ever greater responsibilities. The stripping of those functions of the public sector that

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actually served the public means that women who had enjoyed professional employment in wholesale, or collective, caregiving—guarding and teaching the children, healing the sick, caring for the old or disabled and for the liveability of neighborhoods—have lost the best jobs generated for them through the several decades of nationally planned economic development, along with their best sources of authority and access to public resources. The care that had been delivered collectively and rewarded, albeit modestly, in the marketplace must still be delivered, gratuitously, by each woman to her own family and community even as she must seek employment in the harsher, unregulated setting of the informal sector—a sector now comprising more than a billion people.9 The accompanying valuation of profit over service also means less respect for women’s roles and less appreciation of the societal advantages of cooperation over competition and conflict and of nurture over punishment—values that inform the agenda of the new global women’s movement.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION OF NATURE’S GIFTS The late great economist Kenneth Boulding said that anyone who believes in unlimited potential for economic growth is a madman or an economist. The global expansion of the exploitation of natural resources is not news, but the rate of acceleration of such exploitation within the last couple of decades is stunning. This relates, of course, to population growth, but probably more to the dramatic changes in the economic system associated with globalization. In 1991, when the UNDP was almost alone in representing the international assistance community in Cambodia, Country Director Grant Curtis told me he was fearful that aid and investment money was soon to come pouring in and overwhelm the still traumatized Cambodians. The dystopia he foresaw was delayed, in part by the economic meltdown of Southeast Asia in the late 1990s. But by 2008, as economic crisis in the West sent investment capital east again in search of bargain buys in prospective tourist destinations, 45 percent of Cambodia’s landmass, particularly coastal regions where those uprooted by the genocide of the 1970s had been resettled, had been sold off to foreign speculators.10 This economic system has subjected Mother Nature to a feeding frenzy through a three-pronged assault. First, technological advances have brought the highest mountains, the deepest oceans, and the most remote and impenetrable jungles into exploitable reach. Second, lusty concentrations of capital are ever more urgently on the prowl for new investment opportunities. And finally, debt-strapped governments see no alternative to serving up

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national resources in exchange for hard currency. What Papua New Guineans saw in the 1990s as abrupt loss of land and livelihood, tradition, and culture, and environmentalists saw as dangerous depletion of virgin rainforest, government economists celebrated as 14 percent economic growth. Moreover, wherever there are hardships to be shared, we may be sure that the poor will have more than their share of them. Indigenous peoples, for example, driven by the feeding frenzy from the homelands that only they knew well and might have been entrusted to preserve, are likely to find themselves resettled in areas already ravaged by man and nature—subject to drought or flooding and to pollution of air, water, and soil. In urban areas particularly, the “best things in life” that used to be free—stars you can see and air you cannot—no longer are. And along with the misallocation of nature’s blessings and distresses, we always find the misallocation also of blame. The rich North has exported to the poor South its production models, its consumption habits, its polluting technology, and its garbage. Now it seeks to export as well the blame for environmental degradation and the responsibility for reversing it.

BACK TO THE FUTURE? Market forces—the nameless and thus blameless high rollers in what often appears to be a global crapshoot—simply denied for the better part of a decade that the impact of the neoliberal order included growing gaps and reckless endangerment of people and other living things. Their response to irrefutable evidence was that we were seeing short-term impacts that were sure to be reversed in the longer term. In the long term, of course, as British economist John Maynard Keynes noted, we are all dead. In general, it’s a good bet that those who argue for short-term sacrifice for long-term gain are taking their cut in the short term. Sometime in the late 1990s, the storyline took a sharp turn: The drought for those who were to have been trickled on was indeed real, but it was inevitable—an attribute of market trends now irreversible. This storyline is no more credible than its predecessor. We escaped the nineteenth century once; we can do it again. The means of erecting and maintaining a just and liveable society need pose no great puzzle for policy wonks. Contemporary models are strongest in Scandinavia, but many eras and many parts of the world have useful pieces to offer.11 For now, however, the dominant trend continues to be in the wrong direction, and we continue to be lured by problems posing as solutions. When the problem is posed as one of scarcity, the tendency is to see the solution as money—or worse, as monetization. Anything that can be

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monetized can be bought and sold, and some things—body parts, pollution rights, presidencies—should not be. The most serious scarcity suffered by the scrupulous over the past three decades is that of political will. That is not to discount the recently growing countercurrents. In the West, the European Union has established important models for international cooperation and global governance, especially in the areas of human rights protection and environmental preservation. Whether the emergence in the East of the new superpower and its new supermarket constitutes in general the good news or the bad news, this development has certainly been good news thus far both politically and economically for many developing countries. Women in much of the world have been subjected to new affronts and indignities by the collateral damage of free trade—sex trafficking, for example— and by the atmospheric violence that accompanies war and war talk. But even as many have lost ground in professional employment and have suffered new economic hardships, women have made very considerable gains globally since the beginning of the 1990s in political arenas. And in the United States, in 2006 and 2007, immigrants, legal or otherwise, surprised friends and foes alike with a seemingly spontaneous mobilization of hundreds of thousands, marching in defense of their rights. Meanwhile, federal lawsuits in the United States alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act have more than doubled since 2000; and an increasing proportion are being filed by undocumented workers.12 In the promotion of democracy and development and the protection of human rights, there is no such thing as a status quo. Processes are dynamic and power competition is zero-sum; and in these cases, if we are not gaining ground, we are losing it. As noted in chapter 2, rights are won and lost in bunches; the more rights a people loses, and the more peoples who lose rights, the harder it becomes to defend those remaining. At this point momentum for progressive change seems to be building. Getting back to the future, however, will require negotiating a complete U-turn. How will we know when we have accomplished that? Perhaps only when gaps in wealth and standards of living begin to narrow. Or when, in general usage, reform comes once again to mean redistribution of wealth and power from the top down, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than from the bottom up.

NOTES 1. Most of the arguments put forth in this chapter were presented in a keynote address for the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Studies in International Development, June 1, 2007, Saskatoon, Canada. Portions of the address are to appear in a future issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

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2. The freezing of aid and credit in the 1990s to Haiti’s elected government in an effort to impose downsizing, outsourcing, and privatizing of an already absurdly inadequate social infrastructure is only one of many examples of the shamelessness of the so-called donor governments and institutions. See Peter Hallward, “An Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” London Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 4, February 22, 2007, pp. 9–13. 3. See Jan. K. Black, “Cuba, Clinging to the Dream,” chapter 11 in Inequity in the Global Village, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1999. 4. In the aftermath of World War II, the victorious allies prosecuted leaders of the defeated states but assisted in relief and reconstruction for civilians. Not so after the cold war. Western favors were lavished on leaders of the ex-Soviet sphere in exchange for access to markets and resources and privatization deals. Meanwhile, private citizens were punished through the stripping of currencies, social services, and jobs. Meanwhile U.S. defense budgets literally soared into outer space. 5. One private sector argument for this shift is that government should be liable for damages from any regulation that interferes with or precludes pursuit of profit. Efforts to codify this interpretation of “takings” have been found in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, stalled in Europe in the mid-1990s, in chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and in stalled initiatives of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the U.S.-promoted Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). Under NAFTA’s chapter 11, for example, the private, U.S.based United Parcel Service has a lawsuit pending against the Canadian post office (Canada Post). 6. Term coined by Jorge Nef. See Nef, chap. 13, “Globalization and Insecurity in the Americas,” in Jan K. Black, Latin America: Its Problems and Its Promise, 5th ed. rev., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005. 7. Bill Moyers, “A New Story for America,” The Nation, Vol. 284, No. 3, January 22, 2007. 8. Gary Younge, “Colour at the Crossing,” Guardian Weekly, January 26–February 1, 2007, p. 6. 9. For more on the growth of the informal sector, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, 2006. 10. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, “Sale of the Century,” Guardian Weekly, May 2, 2008, p. 23. 11. See Riane Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, San Francisco: Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2007. 12. David B. Caruso, “Tired of Living on Tips, Low-Paid Workers Are Turning to Courts,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 2007, p. C6.

6 From the Ashes Argentina’s Return from Meltdown

To those who have been living for decades without wheels, a reinvented wheel is not unwelcome.

As the Mundial, the World Soccer Cup competition, got underway in the Western Hemisphere in 2002, Argentina found a great many unexpected fans in its corner—people like me, normally a dedicated Brazil fan. To many Latin Americans, Argentines, especially porteños—from the cosmopolitan port city of Buenos Aires—are seen as pitucos, or uppity, the other Western Hemisphere people who imagine that they live in Europe. But Latin America in 2002 was deeply shaken by what was happening to Argentina. Economic meltdowns by that time were not uncommon; but this one was uncommonly severe, knocking out the livelihoods not only of working and would-be working classes, but of the highly educated, skilled, and professional middle classes as well. Moreover, it could scarcely be said by the tinkerers of the global economy that Argentina had been misbehaving. Particularly throughout the 1990s, under the Menem kleptocracy, Argentina had been a virtual poster child of international financial institutions and private multinational creditors. The crisis this time was not essentially different from previous crises arising from postcolonial dependence on unreliable markets and credits, but that dependence had been deepened, first by human sacrifice—the depletion of the best and brightest of a generation—then by the depletion of the products of their labor, by carpetbagging and privatization on a grand scale: a decade-long fire sale, not only, or even primarily, of failing state companies, but particularly of essential resources and services, like water aquifers and sanitation systems previously shielded from the commercial domain. 66

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Argentina’s crisis was in fact an extreme version of a global crisis that has for the most part ceased to be seen as such. That is, what was seen for a time as crisis—new age economic meltdowns, characterized by soaring debt and plunging currency values, by hyperinflation coupled with widespread unemployment, crisis conditions bouncing from continent to continent from the 1980s into the twenty-first century—has settled in as a system, supposedly inevitable and still “in the long run” beneficial. Bankers who in the 1980s spoke of debt crisis speak now of debt sustainability. (It is not a crisis for bankers anymore.) And for countries or regions seemingly lacking in collateral, new age economists come up with new products—like aquifers— to be monetized. The crisis at the core of a seemingly stabilized system is not one of too little money, but of too much—a frenzy of monetization that has blurred the critical distinction between price and value. Moreover, overcrowded money—too much in too few hands—is predatory money. It must consume resources, including people—their time and labor—in ever greater volume.

POSTCOLONIAL DEPENDENCE Having had the good fortune of being unattractive, of offering nothing of obvious value to the Iberian conquistadores of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Argentina, with its great expanses of fertile land, was nevertheless a backwater. It became enriched only over the course of the nineteenth century through the export of primary products to the British market. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was said that there were more cars on the streets of Buenos Aires than of New York. Two world wars, however, divided by a great depression, took their toll on that system, breaking the link with European markets. That left Argentines with little choice but to fend for themselves, to make what they needed—import-substitution industrialization—and, prodded by strong unions, to pay workers enough to buy their own products. This strategy for expanding domestic markets had been employed earlier, to good effect, in the United States. Urban progress, however, came to some degree at the expense of the owners of landed estates. The ranchers’ backlash was felt as early as 1930, when Argentina was said to be the seventh richest country in the world. For the next half century, while the country sank from seventh place on the global scale of national riches to seventy-seventh, Argentina’s political economy was caught up in a tumultuous tug-of-war. The pursuit of national economic sovereignty called for taxing the externally connected landed oligarchy in order to subsidize domestic industry.

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And in political terms, such a trajectory underwrote a strange-bedfellow coalition of management and labor. A related configuration—and clash— of interests in much of Europe, with its consequent expansion of political participation, was resolved, so to speak, by the outcome of World War II. Not so in Argentina, where the middle class acquired a tenuous foothold in the political system, but labor did not. The rationale of demand-driven growth was never fully accepted by Argentina’s elite, and it has since been rejected by U.S. elites as well. The tug-of-war over that half century was manifest in a half-dozen military coups d’état, the sixth of which, in 1976, ushered in a new era of “shock therapy”—both political and economic. The “dirty war” that raged until 1983 left some 30,000 dead and hundreds of thousands imprisoned, tortured, or exiled, destroying particularly the leadership of labor and the national intelligentsia. Economically, the period of militocracy offered a preview of globalization, as tariffs were lifted and deindustrialization got under way.

FROM MILITOCRACY TO KLEPTOCRACY The prospect of popular distraction from a deteriorating economy was assumed to have been among the motives that drew the military junta into the absurd Falkland-Malvinas war—a war even stupider than most— though, ironically, the Argentine people proved to be the winners. For Argentines, shameful defeat brought down the militocracy and led to restoration of democratic government, while for the British, military victory meant the retention of office by Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher. The government of Radical Party leader Raúl Alfonsín was launched with great promise, on the political front of prosecuting military usurpers and on the economic front of challenging carpetbaggers and foreign creditors. But civilian leadership proved too weak to contain the simultaneous push-back on both fronts. Military acts of insurrection backed up demands for a “full stop” to prosecutions and amnesty for most human rights abusers; and a credit freeze, backed by the IMF, led to hyperinflation. Thus the economic miracle brought forth by Alfonsín’s successor, Carlos Saúl Menem, was the usual kind of miracle—of resurrection from the dead. And the Argentine economy was resurrected in the usual way—as an appendage to other economies. Deeply slashed tariffs opened up sinkholes under national industry. The labor constituency of Menem’s own Peronist Party was clobbered as wages shrank, jobs disappeared, and the public sector was gutted. Deindustrialization cleared markets for foreign investors, but also deprived the country of foreign exchange with which to fund imports. No

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matter, credit was easily drawn by raising interest rates. But stratospheric interest rates beggared small businesses, which soon followed big ones into oblivion. The relative demise of local business, in turn, left the country even more heavily dependent on foreign investment and loans. Privatization drew foreign investment, of course, but not to companies that were failing. On the contrary, risk-averse foreign investors most of all wanted utilities—essential services with captive markets. That is, the only businesses that could have been depended upon to bring in a small margin for government now brought in a large margin for foreign companies, leaving consumers squeezed, local needs unmet, and government with no means of plugging the gap. Deregulation of money movement also drew foreign capital, but the upshot was what I call a eucalyptus economy—of foreign implants, fast growing on a base of shallow roots, exhausting the nutrients that had sustained native species. Worse yet was the streaker capital (portfolio, hedge funds, etc.) that simply sucked up local capital as it dashed through. A revolving door for money, moreover, requires ever higher interest rates, continually bankrupting local business. That some of the surplus generated through the privatization fire sales ended up in Menem’s own coffers seems scarcely worthy of a footnote, considering the overall extent of the damage. After almost a decade of Menem’s kleptocracy, the only market that seemed to matter was the money market. Credit was extended generously as payoff for privatization and other policy favors for foreign investors. Wherewithal to service the foreign debt so amassed was, in turn, extracted through structural adjustment programs (SAPs). The adjustment implied in SAPs is redistribution from the bottom up. Costs and social responsibility are pushed down the food chain and forward in time while benefits and authority are pushed up, and ultimately out of the country. If those who enjoyed the benefits of international loans had to assume personal or institutional responsibility for them, the system would quickly unravel. Thus, in deeply indebted states, those clinging to the lower links of the food chain are bled continuously so that those on the upper links can get transfusions from abroad.1

ANATOMY OF A CRISIS In 1999, when Menem was decisively defeated by the mayor of Buenos Aires, Fernando de la Rúa Bruno, representing a coalition between the Radical Civic Union (UCR) and a Center-Left front known as Frepaso, the economy was already deep in recession. Such was the prelude to crisis—an economy so vulnerable to external shock that the ricochet effect from crises

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elsewhere (the Tequila Effect of 1994, the East Asian meltdown of 1997, the Brazilian devaluation of 1999) seemed almost enough to bring it down. In a last-ditch effort to stabilize the economy and deal with market jitters, Menem had pegged the Argentine peso to the dollar—seriously stranding would-be exports and, in the absence of foreign exchange, imports as well, and leading back into the vicious cycle of loans and debts and SAPs. Moreover, the federal government, unable to block the acquisition of debt by provincial governments and private companies, was nevertheless pressured to guarantee the servicing of those debts. When a few holdout provincial governments refused to structurally adjust their own economies, the IMF withheld the next scheduled loan disbursement (of $1.3 billion), and the jig was up. The country’s foreign exchange pipeline ran dry. To top it off, the U.S. government, which in times past had felt obliged to bail out sinking allies, seemed unruffled about watching Argentina sink. (Perhaps the Bush administration believed at that time that a sinking Argentina would take Mercosur, South America’s common market, down with it.) The de la Rúa government then placed tight limits on bank withdrawals, a measure that led to rioting and looting, particularly of supermarkets. Police countermeasures resulted in twenty-four deaths, hundreds of injuries, and thousands of arrests. By December 2001, the revolving door for money had become a revolving door at the Casa Rosada (Pink House), the presidential palace. Over a two-week period five presidents came and went. Argentina began the new year of 2002 with a massive debt in default and a plunging peso. By April the peso had lost more than two-thirds of its value, the country was in default on a debt of more than $141 billion, unemployment was officially spun at 25 percent, and half the population was said to be living in poverty. At that point a new kind of miracle was making its appearance: popular sovereignty and self-help.

A NEW KIND OF MIRACLE The elections of 2003, in which, incredibly, Menem tried (and failed miserably) to make a comeback, saw the election of a little-known Peronist provincial governor, Nestor Kirchner. From the beginning, Kirchner appeared to be taking his cues from Argentine popular organizations more than from the high-altitude bombers of global economic strategy. Moreover, his position was buffered increasingly by a new cadre of South American populist leaders representing the tortured generation. And their resistance to U.S. economic pressures was underpinned by a widespread outpouring of popular anger directed at the U.S. government; it appeared

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that widespread dismay with swaggering imperialism exercised by the Bush government elsewhere in the world had released Latin Americans to express their own long-pent-up anger and frustration. Among the early decisions taken by the new government was that of lifting immunity from prosecution from former military leaders. Though momentum had been building since the mid-1980s from campaigns by human rights organizations, reverberations of the off-again, on-again case against Chilean tyrant Pinochet, launched with his detention in London in 1998, had helped to accelerate and deepen the trajectory of transitional justice in Argentina as well. Little by little the weight of evidence and convictions, and the public absorption of the extent of the dirty war’s atrocities, began to erode the sense of impunity previously enjoyed not only by the security forces but also by their civilian backers.2 Finally, the rise, for the first time since the implosion of the Soviet Union, of an alternate market in Asia, and particularly China, opened for Argentina as for other Latin American countries new economic policy options and, in general, greater latitude for decision making. The success in 2005 of Kirchner’s take-it-or-leave-it offer of thirty cents to the dollar owed on the more than a billion in foreign debt, to be paid in long-term, low-interest bonds, seemed to signify that Argentina had finally come in from the cold—more or less on its own terms. As the Argentine economy rebounded with Asian investment (China is now the country’s fourth-largest trading partner), lenders saw Kirchner’s package as an offer they couldn’t refuse. Even the IMF, fearing the bad example of outright default on the one hand or the appearance of IMF irrelevance on the other, was obliged to sanction the deal. For the IMF, the deal was at the same time sweetened and soured by the Venezuelan purchase of a billion dollars of the debt, enabling Argentina to pay off the IMF in full. Meanwhile, also in 2005, the amnesty law protecting perpetrators of “dirty war” crimes was overturned by the Supreme Court. Following upon that decision, a new criminal complaint has been filed charging Ford Motor Company and, in particular, four of its officials, with colluding with Argentina’s military government to suppress labor activism. The lawsuit, alleging the kidnapping, detention, and torture of twenty-five employees by soldiers, facilitated by the company (apparently backed, in turn, by the U.S. embassy), is the first legal proceeding dealing with military-industrial collusion; but it is not likely to be the last.3 In January of 2006, the now-renowned Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo staged the 1,500th—and final, they say—demonstration in front of the Casa Rosada of the Argentine presidency on behalf of their “disappeared” children. It was final, one of the leaders said, because the presidency was finally in the hands of a “friend of the family.” Kirchner had said in one of his first speeches, “We are all Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.”4

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NOTES 1. According to Mark Weisbrot, codirector of the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, D.C., South America’s economy grew by 75 percent during the twenty years between 1960 and 1980. During the next twenty years, he says, between 1980 and 2000, when those countries were supposedly following the guidance of the IMF, their economies grew by a total of only 6 or 7 percent. 2. For good in-depth coverage of these developments, see Kathryn Sikkink, “From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights,” presented at the Latin American Studies Association International Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 2006. 3. Kelly Hearn, “Ford’s Past in Argentina,” The Nation, May 8, 2006, pp. 6–8. 4. Regina M. Anavy, “Hope Ends 29-Year March of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 2006, p. E3.

Part III THE RIGHT TO BELONG Civil and Political Rights

An administration that sets out to prove that government doesn’t work always succeeds. Bipartisanship is a conspiracy of the elected against the electorate—competing parties want to share blame, not credit.

The early 1990s was a time of political transition in much of the world. In Moscow in 1994 there was wholesale loss of public service jobs but a flourishing of microenterprise.

7 Participation and Accountability

The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights embraces, in principle, most of the rights laid out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent treaties and other documents that underpin the international human rights regime—a range far broader than most common concepts of democracy. Democracy by its simplest definition, rule by the majority, offers little protection against the abuse of human rights in the absence of safeguards for minorities. (Benjamin Franklin once defined democracy as two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch.) Moreover, numerical majorities may be, or may become, minorities in political effect—majority rule has been, in practice, about power rather than about numbers. Nor are elections any guarantee; Germany’s Nazi Party, after all, won a plurality in elections, and Hitler expanded his powers with legislative consent—albeit with the help of shams like the Reichstag fire.1 Furthermore, elections themselves may become part of a cover story that enables authoritarian rulers to avoid criticism of their human rights records. Human Rights Watch reported at the beginning of 2008 that around the world despots were getting away with human rights abuse partly because the United States and the European Union have been willing to accept their claims that holding elections in itself made them democracies.2 Even so, where the ideal of genuine all-inclusive democracy is approximated, other rights are less likely to be abused and to be at issue. It is in part the failure of most countries to approximate the ideal, whether or not elections are held and legislative bodies meet, that has made necessary a much wider-ranging topical approach to advocacy, rule making and institution building for human rights protection. This chapter focuses, however, on the more narrowly political and legal rights associated with citizenship that are 75

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not discussed directly elsewhere in the book and the challenges to recognition and enforcement of those rights. The plight of noncitizens is addressed in the next chapter.

REGAINING PARTICIPATION IN POSTCONQUEST SOCIETIES All political systems are systems of limited participation. Nowhere, for example, are children allowed effective participation, and in much of the world women are excluded in law or in fact. The origins of most complex, highly stratified social and political systems can be traced to armed conquest, and the impacts of such beginnings linger. In systems based on violence or the threat of it, the roots of inequality become gradually obscured, as subsequent generations are taught that differential reward and punishment derives from merit or divine purpose. Over time exclusion comes to follow the lines of class, reinforced by racial and ethnic divisions. Whether in colonies or countries, at least until the twentieth century, political participation was generally limited to the elite. Intraelite competition— among landholding families and later between landholders and representatives of commerce and industry—might have been regulated through face-to-face encounters in social or business settings. When compromise failed, the outcome was sometimes determined by clashes between more or less private armies. The nation-state system, having its origins in Europe with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, in itself offered little inspiration to those lacking family pedigree until the success of the late-eighteenth-century French and American revolutions. The prospect of self-government, however, gave hope thereafter to the unhappily colonized elsewhere in the world. Constitutional and legal systems of the new republics were copied by countries subsequently gaining independence; but those systems served largely to legitimize political arrangements that had been reached in private—through intrigue or through force. The dominance of the economic elite was underwritten, in general, by military and paramilitary forces, by leaders of the dominant organized religion, and, in colonies or former colonies, by a hegemonic power. In providing force, material resources, or moral sanction to the ruling classes, these institutions and foreign powers acquired or maintained a measure of power in their own right in the emerging societies.

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OR REDEVELOPMENT Given the gradual demise of a rural subsistence economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and increasing urbanization and the spread of

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mass communication in the twentieth century, together with the expansion of institutions of formal education, mounting pressure for fundamental changes in the social structure was to be expected. The question, then, was what the nature of change would be. To the extent that the elite found it necessary to share power, accepting the participation of new groups in the political system, nonviolent change, mediated through more or less democratic systems, became possible. Where for reasons of extreme social distance, of prejudice and paranoia based on presumed racial and ethnic difference, the aristocracy concluded that it dare not expand political participation, or for reasons of reliable support from a hegemonic power, that it need not expand political participation, the outcome has been, in rare cases, successful revolution, or, more commonly, inconclusive cycles of insurgency and repression. In countries where the middle classes succeeded in their bids for participation, the rituals associated with electoral and parliamentary systems began to take on a serious function. Middle classes in modern times, however, have generally lacked assured and independent sources of wealth; they have been salaried or entrepreneurial classes, whose income ultimately depended on the expansion of commerce and government. Their bid for effective participation could not rest upon their own numbers and material resources alone. They found it necessary to incorporate the numbers (and potential disruptiveness) of peasants and urban laborers into their power bases. Middle-class bids for political power have generally been spearheaded by intellectuals or military leaders and underpinned by social movements or broadly based political parties, but they have rarely been successful unless they were believed to have the backing of organized labor. Thus the effectiveness of the ballot box has been preceded by an effective demonstration of power in the streets, on the farms, and in the factories. The effectiveness of democratic processes introduced with middle-class participation has been limited, however. Middle-class leaders have generally proved reluctant to extend full participation, through the electoral system, to urban workers and peasants. Even in countries where democracy had appeared to be well entrenched, constitutional systems have often been brought under stress by economic decline, which sharpened competition between middle and lower classes. Such competition in Europe in the 1930s contributed to crisis and ultimately all-engulfing war. And Latin American experience suggests that while a middle class may still rise to the full exercise of political rights through democratic processes, it is extremely difficult for manual workers and peasants to do so. Moreover, limited democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The greater the proportion of the population participating in elections and other political processes and the longer the unbroken tenure of constitutional rule, the more policy will incline toward national self-determination

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and toward redistribution of wealth and opportunity. Such a course of events is seen as threatening not only by the middle and upper classes but by foreign investors and hegemonic powers as well. Their power ebbing away and their economic interests in jeopardy, elites lose confidence in the constitutional system. They may enlist military and paramilitary forces as well as foreign governments and investors in the defense of their interests. The subsequent demise of the constitutional system and the abrupt constriction of political participation is explained and justified as a response to threats to national security. Even as South America’s most highly developed states were succumbing in this manner to a new style of military dictatorship, their Iberian mother countries were finally throwing off the rusty chains they had dragged since their fragile republics were crushed in the 1930s. The trend to democracy and decolonization that spread outward after World War II from the heart of Western Europe was slow to reach the Iberian Peninsula, where corporatist authoritarianism maintained its grip. In Western Europe’s poorest state, Portugal’s dictatorship, fighting a losing battle to hold on to African colonies, outlasted its architect, António Salazar, by six years; it fell in 1974 to the so-called Carnation Revolution. Spain’s thirty-six-year dictatorship followed suit, with a process of transition to democracy aided by King Juan Carlos, following closely upon the long-anticipated death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

HUMAN RIGHTS TRIAGE AND DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION The spread of electoral democracy—or at least of elections—over the longer term has by no means been unbroken; it has come in fits and starts, waves and cycles, incomplete and always subject to reversal. The cultivation of democracy cannot be equated with or tracked through the ritual of national elections. Elections are a means, not an end, and means are always subject to fraud, subversion, or corruption, to irrelevance—the absence of real options—or to reversal by military intervention. Premodern societies may well have seen more effective participation than is common in contemporary democracies. However, in the absence of more reliable means of recording choice in complex societies, it has become difficult to speak convincingly of democracy without reference to elections. By some accounts, at the turn of the twentieth century there were only 9 countries that could legitimately be considered democratic; by 1960 the number had increased to 29. Such a survey in 1990 found 65 countries engaging in creditable elections. With the implosion of the Soviet Union and the spread of separatist fervor in the early 1990s, there was an explosion in the number of recognized states and consequently of national elections.

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Qualitative considerations aside, some 118 states in the late 1990s had elected governments. Though elections have become the sole acceptable means of leadership succession, they should not be seen as the best we can do toward achieving the popular ideal of democracy. Requiring elections represents, rather, a change in the way the game of power competition is played, a change that offers both new opportunities and new vulnerabilities. As Human Rights Watch has noted, the good news is that even dictators have come to believe that elections are the route to legitimacy; the bad news is that too often the so-called Western democracies have allowed them to believe that elections are all that is required. This new wave of democratization owes much to the postwar resuscitation of Western Europe. Having developed a strong democratic vocation, having abandoned by the mid-1970s the costly last defenses of straightforward colonialism (though not of neocolonialism) and found economic strength in unity, the European Community exerted a strong pull on the continent’s still-contested fringes. The lure of membership in the Community clearly gave an edge to democratic forces confronting authoritarian regimes in Portugal, Spain, and Greece, as did the formation of a new generation of human rights organizations. As noted in chapter 3, the birth of Amnesty International in 1961 responded particularly to a British lawyer’s concerns for Portuguese students imprisoned by Salazar’s autocratic regime. The Western Hemisphere as well felt the influence of Europe, but a climatic change in the post–Vietnam War United States made a greater difference in Latin America. Concern for human rights found expression there when, in the mid-1970s, the U.S. Congress belatedly withdrew military aid from some of Latin America’s predatory military regimes. The congressional response came in part because victimization was no longer limited to the anonymous poor. Both human rights in general and democracy in particular advanced further when they were adopted by the administration of Jimmy Carter. The prospects for democracy in Latin America suddenly brightened when Carter insisted on respect for the electoral outcome in the Dominican Republic in 1978. Initiatives of the Carter administration and of like-minded governments and NGOs in Europe and elsewhere emboldened would-be democrats and wilted the will of oppressors. But the “legitimation” of the burgeoning human rights movement in the 1970s and 1980s came about also in part because abuse in East and West alike had been “democratized”; that is, it had reached levels of persons in the social pyramid or, in cruder terms, the food chain, with whom professionals influential in decision-making circles—leaders in politics, religion, academia, and the media—could identify.3 Democratic transition often came to mean only that abuse had been refocused on the poor, who had always been vulnerable.

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The hypocrisy that accompanied official obeisance to human rights principles reached new highs in the 1980s when U.S. military and intelligence officers offered training in human rights to Salvadoran officers who moonlighted as death squads. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration’s Democratic opposition in the U.S. Congress was demanding the staging of elections in Central America in exchange for appropriating financial support for the antidemocratic forces there. With the abrupt ending of the cold war at the beginning of the 1990s, warlords and apparatchiks alike flocked to pay tribute to democracy. The Soviet bureaucrat who inherited Turkmenistan rechristened himself the Turkmenbashi, or father of all Turkmen, and took the electoral system so seriously that his electoral victories scored routinely in the ninety-eighth to ninety-ninth percentile. Attentive to petroleum reserves under the Caspian Sea, USAID officials just held their noses and passed him more money. In Azerbaijan, a USAID official working in a training project on conducting elections lamented to me that she feared the president’s henchmen were learning only how to do a better job of rigging them. Democracy defined as elections may have been new to the ex-Soviet sphere, but that was not necessarily the case elsewhere. A Cuban diplomat commented to me in 1999 that Cuba was all too familiar with the kind of multiparty elections the United States was promoting, and knew them to be “tainted goods.” The United States had indeed been promoting elections off and on, here and there, throughout the twentieth century. What was new in the twenty-first, apart from the proliferation of what Human Rights Watch has called the sham democracies, was that even elected leaders who wished to be accountable found themselves too weak to protect their constituencies against even physical abuse, never mind deprivation. The proliferation of new states—shards of the Soviet Empire—constituted a new frontier, an irresistible challenge to seekers of power and profit as well as to those of more benign motives. Whatever might have been the motives of decision makers—whether revision of property and investment codes or facilitation of new forms of expression and participation—the staging of elections was essential to organizing and legitimating the new power game. And Western governments, as Human Rights Watch has noted, have seemed willing to accept even the most dubious of elections so long as the winner was a commercial partner or a strategic ally. In general, the end of the cold war meant both liberation and resignation. For the Right it meant loss of a cover story, for the Left, loss of a dream. First World potentates and profiteers lost their rationale for openly underwriting militocracies and kleptocracies on security grounds. But then they no longer needed dependent tyrants; in an unregulated global capitalist economy, there was little danger that hungry natives could successfully protect their labor rights or their resources under any form of government.

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WEAK GOVERNMENTS AND STRONG CENTRIFUGAL FORCES The threats to human rights posed by governments that are too strong visà-vis the resources of civil society are all too well known, but there are also dangers that arise from governments that are too weak. A government seriously lacking in both carrots and sticks, unable either to reward responsible citizenship and meet general needs or to monopolize the use of force within its territory is an invitation to activism by vigilantes or regional warlords and by politicians who stand to gain from stirring up ethnic and regional rivalries. Moreover, when such weaknesses become recognized and even, perhaps, accepted as normal, governments are better able to get away with covertly subsidizing and benefiting from operations of thugs—paramilitaries or death squads—or simply with looking the other way as mafias and militaries, operating autonomously or on behalf of landowners or businessmen or foreign powers, violate citizens’ rights. A government that for lack of resources is unable to follow through on a popular mandate does not simply wither away, however; rather, it becomes more vulnerable to being pressed into the service of domestic or foreign elites. Citizens do not have a choice between an honest public sector and a corrupt private one or vice versa; if one sector is successfully corrupted, the other will soon follow. The first thing a really talented thief steals is the government. Some civilian governments—those of Indonesia, Chile, and Colombia in the 1990s, for example—proved dangerously weak vis-à-vis military and paramilitary forces. Meanwhile, those of Russia, South Africa, and Albania seemed impotent at times vis-à-vis mafias composed largely of former police, military, and intelligence officers. Central governments have proved unable to deal with religious leaders in Iran, with warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or with large landholders in Brazil. In the United States, city governments routinely allocate major portions of their budgets to payment of “police brutality” judgments rather than attempt seriously to rein in outof-control police forces. A greater threat, however, in the new centrally planned global market, has been the seemingly limitless mobility of money. To the extent that elected governments become more nearly accountable to broader constituencies, banks and corporations having the greatest interests at stake have on the one hand thrown their weight behind antidemocratic forces within state systems and, on the other, sought freedom from regulation and protection of assets beyond the reach of any state. As the Cayman Islands became the world’s fifth largest banking center—sheltering, according to the U.S. Government Accounting Office, more than 18,000 corporations in 2008 in a single building4—virtually all governments except those of China and a few petroleum fiefdoms seemed helpless vis-à-vis global high rollers—the creditor cartel.

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MOBILE MONEY AND THE ABSENCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY In the now globalized economic system, the idea that the role of government is to represent and promote the public interest has given way to the assumption that the government’s role is to mediate between public and private interests. Having lost the protective role—such as it was—of the government, virtually all states are, in a sense, vanquished states—that is, the public sector has been eaten up by the private sector. China is, of course, another matter—the 500-pound panda who sits anywhere he pleases. The disinclination of the West to challenge the legitimacy of China’s form of government or even seriously to protest its systematic human rights abuses might be attributed to prudent caution in dealing with powerful states. But prudence in international politics is not customary; and the power that takes precedence now is market power. The most powerful constituents of Western governments—the money movers—are not anxious to risk disruption in diplomacy or trade with the country to which they are busily moving their money. Moreover, the U.S. government is inhibited now in its dealings with China by a trillion-dollar debt to Chinese banks. Apart from players holding trumps, like statist China or feudalistic Saudi Arabia, states, as such, hold weak hands. The seeming coincidence between “free elections” and “free markets” has come about in large part because, with the advent of a single global market, economic interests are less threatened now than they were two or three decades ago by the formal processes of democracy. Global concentration of economic power in the twenty-first century is such that elected leaders have very little latitude in economic policymaking anyway; and elite interests are well served by allowing elected governments to absorb the blame for policies punishing to the poor. Faced with the increasingly costly high-tech, media-led, professionalized game of electoral politics and finding the vestments of office akin to a straitjacket, leaders unable to deal with the needs of the unaffluent are regularly discredited and defeated by leaders uninterested in doing so. Thus the frequent turnover of heads of government from one party to another, long viewed as evidence of electoral transparency and systemic stability, suggests also the inability of elected leaders to deal with the most urgent needs of their constituencies so as to be seen as worthy of reelection. In its eighteenth annual report, released at the beginning of 2008, Human Rights Watch took note of electoral manipulation, including fraud, control of electoral machinery, interference with opposition, political violence, stifling of media, and undermining of law along with other categories of rights abuses in scores of countries. It allowed also that rights abuses committed by the United States and some European countries and the hypocrisy of those countries in crediting fraudulent elections carried out by their allies served to devalue the currency of democracy.5 Likewise, Freedom House reported in

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2008 that the year 2007 had been noted for setbacks, having witnessed retreats from democratic standards in one-fifth of the world’s countries. The great danger now is that the foxes guarding the henhouses will succeed in redefining electoral democracy, redrawing its parameters so as to trivialize it—to further marginalize governments from economic policymaking, to equate free thinking with free markets, the right to compete with the right to destroy competition. In such a political climate, no matter how large a majority preferred that campaign finance, for example, be removed from the private realm or that running water or health care be offered in the public realm, such a policy would be seen as antidemocratic. The initiative for setting boundaries between public and private domains has been seized by the private, and redrawn borders are rapidly being codified into national and international law. Meanwhile border regions vacated by the public sector are being homesteaded by the private. That is not to say that this wave of democratization offers no hope. But it offers hope only if those who are serious about democracy understand the players and the game well enough to treat elections as an opening pitch rather than the final clearing of bases. Thomas Jefferson’s well-known observation that “the answer to what is wrong with democracy is more democracy” remains as relevant as it was in his day. For monitors of Mexico’s benchmark elections of 1997, there was much to learn, but a surely unintended learning experience was that of the children who participated in a UNICEF training poll. UNICEF’s noble intention was to teach children the virtues of political participation, while linking that participation to the protection of human rights. The ballot offered no candidates, but a choice among rights, such as rights to education, health care, housing, potable water, and breathable air, as well as rights to various freedoms, including freedom from premature participation in the workforce.6 What children might have learned from the exercise was that unless we all learn how to participate effectively in government so as to change social and economic direction, we will continue to find ourselves choosing among rights rather than enjoying all the rights to which, under international human rights law, we are entitled.

NOTES 1. The German Parliament passed and President Paul von Hindenburg signed, on March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler’s regime to rule, in effect, by decree; however, as a warrant for the legality of their acts, the Nazis more frequently cited the decree conferring special powers on Hitler as chancellor, signed by President Hindenburg in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire (the torching of the seat of Parliament, which the Nazis blamed on the Communists).

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2. Kenneth Roth, “Despots Masquerading as Democrats,” in Human Rights Watch World Report, 2007, New York, released January 31, 2008. 3. Interviewing former U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon on March 12, 1975, I asked why, after having dedicated so much time and energy to conveying a positive image of Brazil’s military regime (a regime that was systematically engaging in torture and underwriting death squads), he had signed a letter of protest in 1969 against the purging of tenured university professors. Gordon, who had been a professor of business at Harvard, responded that, with that move, the regime had gone too far. 4. U.S. Senator Barack Obama noted on the presidential campaign trail that the building must be either the world’s biggest building or the world’s biggest scam. 5. Roth, “Despots Masquerading as Democrats”; see also William C. Mann, “Report Says West Lets Fake Democracies Thrive,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2008, p. A18. 6. I was an official observer of that election, on behalf of Mexico’s most highly respected nongovernmental election monitoring organization, Alianza Cívica, or Civic Alliance.

8 Wayfarers in a Walled-Up World

There is no such thing as a system that doesn’t work; every system works for somebody.

If a regime in support of universal human rights was urgently needed in the 1970s and 1980s because national governments were so often systematic violators, the need has been urgent since the 1990s because national governments have been so likely to be impotent, at least with respect to promoting and protecting the rights of their citizens. When politics becomes entertainment and economics becomes religion, where is one to look for social responsibility? The question becomes all the more salient when outgoing resources and incoming bombs destroy what is, for most, the last bastion of security—community—and keep people on the move. Migration, legal or otherwise, is not a simple matter of individual lawlessness, or even necessarily a matter of individual choice. Nor is it simply a matter of occasional adjustments to episodic shifts in national or regional economic fortune, or even of response to natural and man-made calamity. It is all of those things but much more, and with the turn-of-the-century advent of a new kind of globalization, it has grown from a trickle into a tidal wave. Without even taking into account outsourcing and offshoring, and the export-processing zones that have turned so many into unprotected “guest workers” in their own countries, or the clearly criminal trafficking in persons, human labor has become far and away the most important commodity in international trade. Nor is the flow limited to the unskilled. For the rich countries that have seen their public sectors plundered and their budgets piratized, imported professionals are seen as crucial to keeping public 85

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services like health care operating. And for a great many supposedly developing countries, remittances have become the major source of foreign exchange (“supposedly developing” because what greater evidence might there be that local economies are not developing?). To all of this the most common response, especially among those who habitually exploit such labor, has been to blame the newcomers for every uncertainty except the weather and to seek to deprive them even of basic human rights, not to mention of benefits they have clearly earned.1

ON BECOMING A MINORITY History is rather monotonous when it comes to human behavior and social relations; the monotony is disguised by technological advancement in tools and refinement of rationales. People have always been on the move—some by choice, including the choice of taking what belonged to others; others then have been forced to move precisely because of those who chose to deprive them, or forced by the exhaustion of the land or the ravages of nature. At any rate, nonconquering newcomers to the territory, even if they were kidnapped and brought against their will, are blamed for being out of place—for failing to belong. Slavery or indentured servitude in one guise or another has always been with us; and almost any new guise or rationale makes it socially tolerable again, at least for a while. Rationales, of course, continue to change, but the scale of more or less involuntary movement in search of elusive means of livelihood has changed significantly in recent decades. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Western Hemisphere became the escape valve for the Old World’s “teeming masses,” even as the Old World leaders of those teeming masses busied themselves with colonial wars, generating additional uprooted masses in Africa and Asia. World Wars I and II uprooted millions more in Europe, whose transplantation elsewhere, in turn, often displaced others. Innocents on all sides of all borders around the Middle East are still paying for the failure of the Allies, particularly the United States, to take in Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, leaving the British to give away for settlement land that was not theirs to give. The end of the cold war had much the same effect, in that its victims included new categories of the deprived and displaced, some by shifting boundaries and trade patterns, others by a new generation of nationalistic turf wars. A wholesale shift in states, upon the implosion of the Soviet Union, left Russians who had been the privileged majority in a multinational imperial state as the vulnerable minority in a host of new nation-states. In the United States, the social and political polarization so strongly manifest in the twenty-first century does not seem to threaten disintegra-

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tion, despite wistful drawings of horseshoe-shaped maps. The most serious secessionist movement in the United States is that of the rich, whose withdrawal of resources has intensified state by state the struggles among deprived identity groups for the scraps. With respect to the right to belong and to citizenship somewhere, the conquests and clearances of times past serve only as preview to the consequences of economic changes taking place at the turn of the twenty-first century (changes and their consequences dealt with in greater detail in chapter 5). “Globalization” of the market, and the redefining of competitiveness in terms of short-term productivity and flexibility—that is, reduction of labor costs—have continually left more workers competing for fewer jobs and have generated a backlash against those who, for whatever reasons, might be seen as not belonging. That is not to say that there need be no rules with respect to citizenship. It is to say, however, that whatever the exclusivity implicit in citizenship, neither international law nor standards of human decency nor the logic of self-preservation permit the expulsion of respect for human rights. There are no chosen people; either all of us belong or none of us do.

CITIZENSHIP AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY It has been noted that in political terms majority or minority status is not about numbers; it is about power. The same exercise of power and protection of privilege govern acquisition of citizenship—all the more so if elections are taken seriously as a means of power allocation. In most of the world, unless birth and death rates are artificially modified through feticide or infanticide, women have the edge in population. Yet nowhere in the world do they have the edge in power. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, half the population lived essentially under house arrest. Majority status in an actual nation-state can be turned into minority status without any short-term population shift simply by imperial conquest, a fate that befell Mexicans of that country’s northern territories in the 1840s and the Tibetan people in the 1950s when China reached out and claimed their territory. Having emerged since the 1980s as statist (“communist” without social responsibility), China is now more straightforwardly expansionist. Hong Kong and Macao have already lost their autonomy, and the hard-won popular sovereignty of the Taiwanese people is under constant threat. In political effect, majorities can become minorities, even noncitizens, merely by pretense or by legal artifice, such as the Homelands policy of South Africa’s apartheid government; that fabrication allowed the Afrikaner-led Nationalist government to claim that it was not denying civil

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and political rights to black citizens, because the blacks who worked in South Africa’s cities and mines and lived in outlying townships and labor camps were actually citizens of some distant and resource-free homeland. Majority status can be changed by ethnic cleansing—the Balkans and Central Africa offering the starkest recent examples—and, as we have seen, by the implosion of multinational imperial states. For Russians in breakaway Soviet republics, loss of majority status in some cases, particularly in the Baltic states, meant loss of citizenship rights as well.

EXCLUSION THROUGH SECLUSION Thinking holistically, or outside the boxes, we can see that any area of systematic abuse in the social or governmental structure against any category of people has a corrosive effect on the rule of law and the level of respect for human rights. One such area that corrodes many otherwise seemingly civilized countries is the corrections, or penal, system. Apart from the general arbitrariness and abusiveness common to such systems, the people most likely to be caught up in and abused by those systems are the poor, among whom the indigenous and other racial minorities are overrepresented along with, more recently, noncitizens and immigrants. It should be noted that along with denial of citizenship to those who were there first (the indigenous) and those who arrived last (border crossers) and other means of exclusion, many countries, most notably now the United States and China, limit political participation through seclusion, or imprisonment.2 The United States, holding some 2.3 million in 2007, had the world’s largest population of prison inmates—about one-fourth of the world’s prison population, the preponderance of minorities among them such as to suggest a version of ethnic cleansing. That population has quadrupled in the last three decades, a period in which the rate of violent crime has been steadily dropping. Most inmates now, including particularly women, whose rate of incarceration has increased steeply, are convicted of drug use or drug dealing, often simply because such things happened where they lived. Likewise, rules governing parole and parole violation at the state level and the clemency system at the federal level are often used capriciously and in such a manner as to maximize incarceration. Moreover, plea bargaining, rules and misrules of evidence, and inadequate representation for indigent defendants often lead to wrongful conviction. The Innocence Project, launched in 1992, has since spawned a network of legal clinics across the United States, employing new investigative techniques such as use of DNA evidence. The project reported in October 2007 having identified 208 defendants wrongly convicted of serious crimes, 130 of whom were on death row.3

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Absent a political epiphany, the U.S. prison population will continue to grow, because incarceration, like war, has become an integral, self-sustaining or self-regenerating part of the socioeconomic system. A system privatized increasingly since the 1970s, it is not dependent on consumer demand. It should be countercyclical, in that rates of serious (as opposed to victimless) crime rise in periods of economic decline, but in fact it responds above all now to political climate, particularly the generation of fear. Like war, it responds to supply-side pressures, reflecting an ever-growing and well-funded lobby of prison owners, builders, managers, and unions, as well as “service” suppliers. The pharmaceutical industry is a special case; its political clout resulted in August 2006 in the peeling away of regulations guarding the use of inmates in experimental testing of new drugs and cosmetics (insourcing, so to speak).4 An advocate of the testing suggested, with no intended irony, that it might be a means for prisoners to get medical attention. On the downside, it might also be an incentive to some 40 million Americans without medical insurance to go out and commit crimes. The political uses of the corrections industry are likewise akin to those of war. Crime scares—sufficient to distract attention from official malfeasance or political failures—are not dependent on crime waves; they can be generated independently. Sources of fear and targets of hate are readily dehumanized and serve to direct anger down rather than up the food chain. Moreover, with respect to electoral politics, the device of disenfranchisement of former felons, which came to public attention in the contested results of Florida’s vote in the U.S. presidential elections of 2000, has built in electorate bleaching potential that stretches far beyond its ostensible purpose. In fact, the lists of alleged felons whereby thousands of black voters were turned away from the polls in a presidential election decided by 537 votes (or, ultimately, 1 vote—that is, the 5–4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore) had been selectively purged and padded.

NONCITIZENS AS THE NEW GLOBAL UNDERCLASS The combination of outgoing capital and incoming job seekers has become provocative in the twenty-first century to countries both rich and poor. Such pressures are increasingly felt in many European countries, though somewhat less intensely than in the United States. Human rights monitors report that since 1993 some 4,000 immigrants and refugees have died at the gates of Europe, victims of minefields, of drowning, or of suffocation in freight containers. With unions in Europe to some degree protecting salaried citizens, and with the discrediting of unabashed racism in the United States, noncitizens are becoming the exploitable underclass, as well as the scapegoats for crime

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and scarcity of essential services; they are also being targeted as a means of localizing the War on Terror. In the timeless course of human migration, only the borders are alien. Expanding and congealing particularly since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and carried by European imperialism to the rest of the world, the territorially defined nation-state has become the nominal locus of sovereignty, even as the globalization of markets has stripped such sovereignty of content. And the physical boundary that becomes increasingly “virtual” for money and goods becomes ever more real and ominous—psychologically degrading and, in fact, life threatening—for people. These trends that might seem contradictory are actually complementary. Rich countries have stayed that way in part by lifting or luring money and resources from poorer ones while keeping their people out, or at least tightly controlling their entrance. The boundary serves as a regulator of supply and demand for labor at the service of the demand side. That is, enforcement— restriction of passage and roundups and deportations of “illegal aliens,” or unauthorized immigrants—can be geared up or down as needed for the maintenance of a loose labor market. Meanwhile the stigma and vulnerability of illegality makes these border crossers more readily exploitable for both economic and political purposes.5 The U.S.-Mexico border, now the entry point for about half of the estimated 11 million undocumented workers in the United States, is not the only international border where more open markets for money and commercial goods, including illegal ones—arms and narcotics—have meant the attempted closing of timeless routes for people. Since the early 1990s, when the implosion of the ex-Soviet sphere swelled the ranks of the displaced and dispossessed, freedom’s gates have been slamming shut all around Europe and Asia as well. But the consequences on the U.S.-Mexico border have been particularly stark. It is estimated that since the inception of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, some 4,000 to 6,000 Mexicans and Central Americans have died trying to cross the treacherous terrain to which they have been diverted. What had been a sparsely settled frontier in the late 1880s between Mexico and the United States became, over the course of the twentieth century, both a zone bustling with economic growth and a formidable international boundary. Some 2 million Mexicans were deported at one time or another, and a “crisis” of illegality and of the “out-of-control” border cited regularly in times of economic stress and electoral challenge is a U.S. government construct. The border remained essentially open during the nineteenth century, facilitating the economic penetration of northern Mexico by U.S. settlers and investors. It was not until the early twentieth century, when the Mexican Revolution threatened to spill over into the U.S. Southwest, that border control became an issue. Thereafter, the recession following World

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War I and the onset of the Great Depression led to vigilante attacks on, and mass deportations of, people of Mexican origin. It has been estimated that almost a half million were forcibly expelled between 1929 and 1935 alone. Labor shortages during World War II led to the establishment of a U.S. government–operated contract labor program, the so-called bracero program. But once again, in the 1950s, postwar recession inspired a backlash, expressed particularly in Operation Wetback, in which more than a million Mexicans were apprehended in 1954 alone. The bracero program was terminated in 1964, but demand for cheap labor continued, and growers hiring undocumented workers suffered no liabilities. Thus unauthorized immigration continued and in fact accelerated in the 1970s. It was further swelled in the 1980s by the flow of refugees generated by the Reagan administration’s counterinsurgency campaigns in Central America. The powers and the status of the Border Patrol continued to grow, even as the agency’s prospects of stemming the tide of unauthorized crossings diminished. But the United States had succeeded in the more important task of establishing ideological hegemony vis-à-vis the boundary. Given increasing inequality between pay scales and job opportunities on the two sides of the border, the boundary was destined to be not only a barrier but also a conduit. The imposition of ever tighter controls at the official boundary paradoxically gave rise to a bustle of commercial activity, international interaction, and ultimately urbanization and economic growth in border regions. But while actually contributing to integration in the border region, the boundary nevertheless heightened the sense of national or cultural confrontation. Paradoxically, then, growth and integration in the border region and the militarization of the international boundary served to reinforce each other; and while the boundary failed to seriously limit unauthorized immigration, it successfully limited the parameters of debate. Despite the fact that the only real “alien” was the border itself, few U.S. citizens having a forum to lose dared to defend the rights of the “illegals,” who had defied U.S. law by crossing the line. In fact, the infamy of “illegal aliens” was such in the early 1990s as to inspire Republican governor of California Pete Wilson to base his 1994 reelection campaign largely on a popular initiative, Proposition 187, denying them access to schools, clinics, and other basic services. Prop 187, as the measure came to be known, passed readily but soon struck down in court, was generally opposed by the Democratic leadership; but that leadership felt obliged to show that they too were tough on lawbreakers. Thus Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton administration’s response to Prop 187, was launched in 1994 and came into full effect in 1996.6 The massive infusion of resources, including personnel, into the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the construction of an unbroken

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and seemingly impenetrable steel fence turned what had been a chaotic border scene into an eerily quiet one. Casualties escalated dramatically among the unauthorized immigrants whose crossing now had to be through hazardous mountain and desert terrain. The newly fortified border did not appear to reduce the numbers getting through, but it offered a semblance of order at the previous point of crossing. Lest one derive from this account the lesson that government has a monopoly on action—on initiatives and results—it must be noted that Prop 187 backfired on its author and his party. The scapegoating of Hispanic immigrants—legal or not—in the early 1990s served to a degree to unite a population previously divided by ideology, class, and country of origin. Organization and mobilization campaigns doubled the naturalization rates between 1994 and 1996, and naturalized citizens registered to vote in record numbers because they feared losing eligibility for earned benefits. Not surprisingly, the great majority of them registered as Democrats. Since that time, apart from a crazed posse here and there, immigrant bashing, and particularly Mexican American bashing, has come to be seen as politically costly. It remains “politically correct,” however, and even, as the U.S. elections of 2008 approach, politically useful, to scapegoat illegal immigrants. Thus, despite the many ironies, paradoxes, and strange-bedfellow coalitions generated by this issue, it has become routine to blame the victims of reckless raids, extralegal detentions and deportations, and other abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the enforcement arm of the INS as incorporated into the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, for their own misfortunes.7 Meanwhile, the United States seems intent on walling itself in. Even during the Clinton administration, as NAFTA opened borders for the movement of goods and money, walls along the U.S. border with Mexico continued to be built longer and taller in the futile effort to block the movement of people. As the 62 miles of steel walls and chain-link and barbed-wire fences stretching inland from San Diego and Tijuana seemed only to have pushed the crossing points farther east, the United States, in 1997, put up another wall, this time dividing Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. The new wall, fourteen feet high, was designed to resist penetration by climbers, by vehicles, by firearms, chisels, hammers, and welding torches; but, its designers claimed, it was meant to be friendly looking. Mexicans appeared to be aesthetically unimpressed. The Bush administration had no such aesthetic concerns. It was committed to the construction of a 700-mile wall along the border. It appeared, though, that a major stretch of the wall that went up in 2007 might have to be pulled down. Mexico had noted with displeasure that the wall was put up on their side of the border. News anchors of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, commenting on reports that the construction workers in this case were Mex-

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ican, said that confirmed that it was necessary to have Mexicans willing to do the jobs Americans would not do in order to keep out the Mexicans willing to do the jobs Americans would not do.

NOTES 1. According to David Broncaccio, reporting on October 19, 2007, on the PBS program Now, economists estimate that undocumented workers now contribute about $8.5 million in taxes to the U.S. Treasury annually. 2. That is not to mention the permanent exclusion wrought by capital punishment. Even as a majority of UN members and almost all developed countries have abandoned the practice over the last three decades, the United States has increased its use. Since 1976, when a Supreme Court decision calling the practice into question was overturned, some 1,100 have been executed in thirty-eight states. Amnesty International noted that 91 percent of the executions around the world in 2005 and 2006 took place in just six countries—China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, the Sudan, and the United States. While the number of countries practicing execution continues to shrink, according to the Rome-based anti–capital punishment organization, Hands Off Cain (forty-nine retained the penalty in 2007, but only twenty-six used it that year), the number of prisoners executed annually rose again in 2007, with China accounting for the great majority, at least 5,000. 3. The best known of these nonprofit legal clinics is based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City. 4. Until the early 1970s, about 90 percent of pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates. Abuse—including exposure to radioactivity—both by government and by private pharmaceutical companies generated pressures that led finally, in 1978, to regulations. See Ian Urbina, “Shortage of Test Subjects Has Researchers Eyeing Prisons,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 13, 2006, p. A5. 5. An excellent source on the systemic aspects of contemporary immigration is William I. Robinson, “Why the Immigration Rights Struggle Compels Us to Reconceptualize Both Latin American and Latino/a Studies,” Latin American Studies Association FORUM, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, Spring 2007. 6. For a comprehensive and authoritative study of Operation Gatekeeper, see Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the US-Mexican Boundary, New York and London: Routledge, 2002. 7. See Megan Kennedy, “Raids Undermine Basic Human Rights,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, April 22, 2007.

9 Chile’s Long Way Home

Dictatorship is not one-man rule, but the empowerment of bullies throughout the system.

In the United States now, and in much of the world, 9/11 is shorthand for another day that will live in infamy. But for me it has been so for more than thirty years, since 9/11/73. Until that day of the Pinochetazo—the military counterrevolution led by General Augusto Pinochet—Chile, where I had been among the original Peace Corps volunteers in the early 1960s, was one of very few Latin American countries having benefited from a trend of elected government almost unbroken since the nineteenth century. By 9/11/2001, Chile had learned a great deal from the original 9/11; the United States had not. The year 2006 turned out to be a bad one for lingering tyrants. The election of Michelle Bachelet, along with her parents a victim of Pinochet’s cruelties, to the presidency of Chile at the beginning of the year and the death of Pinochet at year’s end appeared finally to bracket the last bittersweet chapter of Chile’s long-playing political tragedy. We must, however, resist the temptation to quickly consign this sad era to history and move on. History is not a “given,” immutable and unbiased. Lessons learned depend on who is writing and who is reading and on the larger political context. On this matter, I do not pretend to offer either the first word or the last, only to do what I can to further the learning process. If short-term reconciliation is deemed to require the suppression of truth, the history lessons unlearned might allow for repetition somewhere.1

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DEMOCRACY’S AGE OF INNOCENCE Lesson I Imperial design is not conducive to democracy either at home or abroad. (Imperial powers used to build pretty good roads, aqueducts, and bathhouses; but no-bid contracts put an end to that.) For any government seeking hegemony over another, the ultimate enemies are foreign nationals seeking to govern themselves and home state nationals who oppose the hegemonic thrust. Chile’s democracy was limited in the early 1960s in terms of effective participation, but it was expanding. It was limited also in accountability, or payoff; political democracy had done little to promote economic democracy, but there was promise—or threat—that it might do so as participation expanded. When I arrived in 1962, walls around Santiago, the capital, were covered with graffiti, carrying slogans like “Yanqui go home!” I knew right away that I would feel at home there; Yankees were not very welcome where I had come from in Tennessee either. Misgivings about U.S. policy notwithstanding, Chileans were, in fact, very civil toward foreigners, as they were toward each other. There was almost no street violence or political violence. Chileans were shocked and horrified in 1963 by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. President Jorge Alessandri, better known as “Pelado,” or Baldy, walked unaccompanied, by the same route every day, from his apartment to the Moneda, the presidential palace. Chile offered my first exposure to freedom of expression in practice. We had it in principle, of course, in the United States; but in rural Tennessee where I grew up, the range of acceptable opinion was, at most, from Republican to Democrat, and at any rate talking about politics was generally considered bad manners (as was talking about religion, money, sex, or almost anything besides the weather). In Chile, I was regularly at dinner tables where political leanings ranged from socialist to monarchist, and no topic was off limits. In Latin America in the 1960s, the United States had touted democracy, but within limits. Not surprisingly, some political leaders chafed at the limits. They came to be seen by U.S. policymakers and the region’s own economic elites as “subversives.” Those who accepted the limits came to be seen by their own constituencies as “entreguistas,” or sellouts. When the entreguistas began to lose their political bases to the subversives, elites and their external supporters began to get edgy. Parties on the Left rejected electoral democracy in principle, seeing it as a contaminated product, but accepted it in practice. Parties on the Right did just the opposite; they accepted it in principle but opposed it in practice.

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That is, they accepted electoral outcomes that served their purposes, but conspired against those that did not. Thus the election in 1970 of a socialist led to counterrevolution—seventeen years of terror—and for most, economic devastation. The high rates of economic growth—up to 10 percent— that kicked in in the late 1980s constituted a rebound from rates sinking to a negative 13 percent in the early 1980s. It was the usual kind of economic miracle—of an economy rising from the dead; and it came at the expense of a great many people who, at least in economic terms, remained dead.

THE ERA OF MILITOCRACY Lesson II Tyranny is an equal opportunity abuser; it “democratizes” abuse otherwise limited to the poor. Returning in 1977, I found no graffiti on the walls and no conversation on the streets. The slogans no longer scrawled on walls had been etched on faces. At bus stops, people stood silent as ghosts, staring straight ahead; and their voices dropped to a whisper even in their own homes. It was not that all anticipated abuse, or had been subject to abuse, but all knew at some conscious or subconscious level that anyone could be a victim—that no one was safe. Chile’s counterrevolution began with the murder of members of the armed forces and police whom the conspirators suspected of loyalty to the constitutional government. Scores of officers and enlisted men were killed before the assault on the presidential palace. The systematic use of torture began even before the tanks rolled into the streets. Public gathering places were transformed into prisons and morgues. Within weeks of the military takeover, concentration camps had been established throughout the remote areas of the country. The National Congress was closed. Ministries and courts were purged, and tens of thousands of workers and professionals whose commitment to anticommunism was less than fervent were dismissed from their jobs. Corporate entities that had belonged to the state for more than a decade were privatized. More jobs were lost as industrial production dropped dramatically. Salaries were frozen while inflation soared. “Inefficient” national businesses were absorbed by “efficient” foreign businesses in accordance with the Chicago Boys’ strategy of “constructive bankruptcy”; and the world of finance was colonized by a group that came to be known as the “piranhas.”

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Chile’s universities had produced much of the original and influential theorizing about the constraints of “dependent” development, about the potential advantages of Latin American economic unity, and about the threat of U.S. imperialism; and they paid a heavy price for having been right.2 All the universities were purged and placed under the direct control of military rectors. Thousands of professors and students were dismissed, and entire departments and research institutions were abolished. An Argentine sociologist visiting Santiago in 1977 was told by a smug minister of justice, “There are no sociologists here; they’re all six feet under.”3 Book burnings in street bonfires around Santiago were reminiscent of Nazi Germany. In the shantytown of La Victoria, the Rosas family, of which I had come to feel a part, had seen their house damaged and family members injured by artillery shells, as tanks settled in for a week after the coup on three sides of the intersection beside their house. The eldest son, Rubén, had been in the military at the time, but rather than shooting or arresting people who were caught out after curfew, he helped them to get home safely. For that he was accused of subversion and confined for three months in a box of about four feet by four feet; when he was finally released, he had to be hospitalized for another three months. His mother, Maria, was herself imprisoned and tortured when she went to the Ministry of Defense to inquire about Rubén. From the start, there were many who dared to dissent and resist, and they paid a heavy price. Casualty figures are always tentative—responsive to changes in political climate—but even the most inclusive figures do not begin to capture the extent of damage done when the state becomes the enemy of the nation. A sizeable proportion of any population will pay tribute to a tyrannical regime when it is new. Sooner or later, though, almost everyone experiences both fear and guilt—fear either of taking a stand or selling out, or of some combination of the two that leaves one feeling both ineffective and dangerously exposed, and guilt either for “going along” with an immoral reality or denying its existence, or for challenging it and thus endangering family and friends. And some who stood to gain economically from authoritarian rule may have been forced to wonder if they had sacrificed their children for the sake of their money. For more than a decade, resistance efforts seemed to gain no traction; but by the late 1980s a democratic movement had grown strong enough to force a referendum on the continuation of Pinochet’s rule and to force a legitimate count as well as respect for the outcome. The referendum was followed by elections that brought a Center-Left coalition government into office in 1990.

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TRANSITION, PHASE I: CO-GOVERNMENT CAZUELA, OR HORSE AND RABBIT STEW Lesson III (A) It is impossible to complete a transition to democracy while an unrepentant tyrant hovers over the process. (B) An elected civilian government in a straitjacket—a government unable or unwilling to act on a popular mandate—may be a better safeguard for inequity than a military dictatorship. In Chile in the early 1990s, I found an eerie sameness to the country I had known in the early 1960s. Most of the parties had the same names, and the president elected in 1994 was named Eduardo Frei, just like the president elected in 1964.4 (The younger Frei had commented on the campaign trail that he had two things going for him: his last name and his first name.) But the sameness was illusion. In the early 1960s, electoral democracy was being discredited around Latin America by fraud or, in the case of the Southern Cone particularly, by vulnerability to military intervention. The power behind every throne, because of his external connections, was the military commander in chief. By the early 1990s, elections were being discredited by irrelevance. Representatives of the public interest could be elected to office but not to power, because the gray eminence now behind the throne was the minister of finance, likewise because of his external connections—in this case, to multinational corporations and free-floating capital. The democracy of the early 1960s had been unstable because of the fears of the elite. That of the 1990s was more stable because there was little fear, but also little hope of redistributive economic change. Following the U.S. model, elections had become a contest of personal popularity, a form of entertainment. The electoral system inherited by the Concertación, a coalition composed mainly of the Christian Democratic and Socialist Parties, had various features, like a body of appointed senators, designed to ensure that “democracy” would not get out of hand. The military, with Pinochet still serving as commander in chief, served as a sort of co-government (on the order, perhaps, of what the British call horse and rabbit stew—equal parts: one horse, one rabbit). It made its own personnel decisions, which could not be overruled by the civilian government. The implications of such an arrangement became clear in July 1994, when President Frei publicly declared that the commander of the Carabineros, or National Police, accused of responsibility for a massacre in years past, lacked the confidence of the government; the president, however, was not able to relieve him of his command.

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Meanwhile, even more than most of Latin America, Chile had become both richer and poorer. The rapid economic growth of the late 1980s that continued into the 1990s and allowed the international financial institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to tout Chile as a model for the rest of the world, had contributed to a yawning gap, leaving Chile second only to Brazil in Latin America in extent of inequality. In this context, Chile was said to be undergoing a process of reconciliation, or social healing; but it was a reconciliation of the abused and the abusers, of the rich and the wretched, without atonement and without any leveling of the playing field with respect to wealth or power. As conveyed so poignantly in the Ariel Dorfman play Death and the Maiden, the torturers, still living among their prey, had not even been openly identified and discredited. Thus the people who had once spoken freely and competed openly for political participation and economic justice were now muted. They wanted to believe the rhetoric of recovered freedoms, the promise of elections, and the taming of the security forces, but, like battered wives still living with abusive husbands, they could not be sure the promises would be kept. So they blamed themselves for provoking the excesses to which they had been subjected, and they tempered their words and actions.

TRANSITION, PHASE II: OVERCOMING DENIAL Lesson IV Abusive governments get away with denial because abused populations want denial, too. (A) Denial is the most challenging obstacle to transition. Truth is the most promising remedy; but (B) only “official” truth can become official history. Until official history coincides with shared experience, the vulnerable dare not and the invulnerable need not assume that their experience has really become history (that is, superseded). The arrest of Chile’s retired dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, (at that point, by his own rules, senator-for-life) in London on October 16, 1998, garnered a mixed response in Chile. There was great celebration in some quarters, especially in Santiago’s barrios populares, or shantytowns, but elsewhere there was also disbelief, confusion, concern, and consternation. The objection made to Pinochet’s detention by a Center-Left government—a government, that is, supposedly representing Pinochet’s victims—the degree of unease and polarization, and the extent of hedging and evasiveness

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among those, even on the Left, who enjoyed a political forum, suggested that Pinochet, or Pinochetismo, still cast a long shadow across the land. Thus the need for a stain remover remained acute. Pinochet was held in London on a petition for extradition from a Spanish court on complaints initially of murder and “disappearance” of Spanish citizens, complaints later expanded to formal charges of genocide, terrorism, and torture committed against Chileans and citizens of many other nationalities. A British high court ruling that Pinochet enjoyed immunity as former head of a sovereign state was overruled by the House of Lords, ruling that the crimes with which he had been charged could not be considered legitimate official functions. Meanwhile, extradition petitions had been filed by several other European governments. Final adjudication by a subsequent House of Lords panel considered only the charges of torture occurring after December 8, 1988, when the United Kingdom ratified the International Convention against Torture (Spain and Chile had ratified previously). That narrowing of focus did not result in reversal of the extradition order. The order was subsequently vacated, however, by British Home Secretary Jack Straw, who alleged that Pinochet was physically unfit to stand trial. Official Truth Encounters Official Obstruction It was a sad day for the standard-bearers of justice when Pinochet left London a sick old man and arrived in Santiago an image of invincibility. Invigorated by the airport reception of his military followers, he sprang from his wheelchair to greet them. But the case against Pinochet was not yet to be laid to rest. As President of the Senate Andrés Zaldivar asserted, the Chilean government’s insistence on the sovereign right to try him in Chile imposed also the obligation to do so.5 Though a few military officers had been prosecuted—including General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, former head of the secret police, DINA—the judicial benches of Chile’s court system were still strewn with Pinochet appointees, who had resisted acting on the many charges brought against Pinochet himself. The fact, however, that events in London had brought the Chilean courts into the spotlight of international attention created a context that enabled jurists less compromised to launch investigations and bring charges or to get traction on investigations already underway. Judge Juan Guzmán, by reputation a social conservative, surprised his colleagues by vigorously pursuing the case brought before his court in early 1998 against those responsible for the so-called caravan of death. Reinterpreting forced disappearance as a crime of “permanent sequestration,” to which the statute of limitations therefore did not apply, he bypassed also the military’s autoamnesty law of 1978 to order the arrest of five retired military officers in

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1999. On March 6, 2000, three days after Pinochet’s return to Chile, Judge Guzmán petitioned the Supreme Court to negate Pinochet’s claim to senatorial immunity. Five months later the Supreme Court granted the request, and Pinochet was indicted on charges of kidnapping and murder.6 Chile’s ambassador to the United States Andrés Bianchi commented to me in June 2001 that the case against Pinochet showed that in Chile no one was above the law.7 Some, however, manage to slip around it. It came as no surprise in Chile that the Supreme Court, on July 9, 2001, suspended the case against him, ruling that the eighty-five-year-old was mentally unfit for trial. As Julio Silva, prominent publisher and social activist, noted, juridical criteria for decisions about the fate of Pinochet have, for the most part, simply been cover for political criteria.8 The law on which this suspension was based had not come into effect at the time the decision was made and, in any case, had application in only two districts, not including the one in which Pinochet was tried. Under preexisting law, a defense of mental incapacitation was to come into play only after a finding of guilt.9 The decision was appealed, but it began to appear that, despite at least 259 criminal claims brought against him by that time, Pinochet had eluded the courts. The Protection of Impunity The crimes of Pinochet’s seventeen-year militocracy were not exactly a secret, certainly not to the hundreds of thousands who were directly or indirectly victimized. But there is a major difference between truth, even widely shared and acknowledged truth, and Official Truth. Only Official Truth— sanctioned by national or international institutions—can be used effectively in defense of the weak against the powerful, and only Official Truth can become a part of Official History.10 Thus, the most important outcome of this process of judicial teasing and miscarriage is that it has denied to society in general the moral and psychological defense of denial. Even those who for reasons of vulnerability or invulnerability (that is, a sense of impunity) had insisted on disbelieving the pervasive accounts of atrocities now had to acknowledge that atrocities did indeed take place. In fact, the abuses of the Pinochet years were addressed officially early on in the process of democratic transition. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission, better known as the Rettig Commission, appointed by the elected Concertación government of Patricio Aylwin, published a report in 1991 addressing crimes committed between 1973 and 1990. Its effects were muted, however, because it investigated only accusations brought before it and reported out only cases (including some 3,000 deaths) that were well documented and in which evidence was clear. Its primary objective was to bring a sense of closure to survivors by documenting the fates

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of the disappeared. The identities of perpetrators of the crimes were not revealed, and amnesty was offered to those who confessed and assisted in the investigations. Subsequently, a less formal process carried forward the work begun by the Rettig Commission. Known as the Mesa de Diálogo (Dialogue Roundtable), it brought representatives of the military and police, the government, and the Catholic Church together with lawyers representing those abused by the Pinochet regime. According to a former staff member of the Chilean Human Rights Commission, this process turned out to be highly frustrating to defenders of the abused. It had the peculiar consequence at times of drawing testimony in which details of confessions were contradicted by more convincing evidence. Apparently some abusers who simply wanted to grab the offer of amnesty and anonymity while they could had confused or forgotten details.11 One of the reasons why this sordid history had not been previously dealt with more straightforwardly is that many civilians were less than confident that it was indeed “history.” There was an undercurrent of fear that a military organization still shielded from civilian interference might resist the exposure of their crimes by violent means. Moreover, the surviving power structure was for the most part a legacy of a thoroughgoing counterrevolution. It was not simply the leadership of the military and the police that remained intact. To a large extent leaders in business and industry, in the professions, in political parties, in the courts, in the universities, in the media, even in the Church, were beneficiaries, directly or indirectly, of the long dictatorship. Full exposure was not in their interest.

TRANSITION, PHASE III: PRUNING PINOCHETISMO Lesson V (A) Beheading alone will not kill the beast. Dictatorship is not the province of a lone tyrant. The example and the implied impunity emanating from the tyrant at the top empowers lesser tyrants throughout the system. Liberation will not be complete until they, too, have been swept back into the woodwork. (B) External leverage is crucial in prying open a closed system. (C) Identifying the disappeared may liberate survivors, but only identifying the abusers can liberate a society. Senate president Zaldívar expressed to me in November 2001 the belief that the actions taken in London had finally made it necessary for the Chilean people to deal with their history. He noted that many other cases of rights abuse were being investigated or tried, and there would be more to come.

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He noted also that Chile, having a long tradition of reliance on international law and multilateral approaches to problem solving, had signed the treaty creating the International Criminal Court. After the arrest of Pinochet in London, there seemed little doubt among Chileans who identified with the democratic movement and the ruling Center-Left coalition government that European intervention had been crucial in opening or reopening political discourse and judicial reckoning in Chile. Even so, it is not surprising that the government mounted a case for resistance to foreign prosecution. While the discrediting of the dictator seemed well underway, many aspects of Pinochetismo remained fully entrenched in the system. Pinochet himself had become an embarrassment even to those whose careers he nurtured. From all points on the social pyramid and the spectrum of ideology, Chileans were quick to assert that Pinochet was not an issue. From all walks of public life, politicians, bureaucrats, and even military officers rushed to distance themselves from Pinochet. The cognoscenti of public affairs all seemed to be aware in the fall of 2001 that military officers who had habitually shown up at Pinochet’s estate to help him celebrate his birthday had failed to do so that season; and according to a former officer, the new commander in chief of the armed forces had recently begun to purge Pinochetistas from the command structure.12 Even such subtle and measured change in personnel and attitudes in the military had to be good news to a civilian government cohabiting without controlling. The greater concern of the government, however, was with the attitudes of local entrepreneurs and their multinational networks. The election of Socialist Ricardo Lagos in 2000 to the presidency was enough to scare away capital and plunge the country into an economic slump, even though his economic policies did not deviate markedly from those of Christian Democratic predecessors, or, for that matter, from those of the Pinochet years. Economic growth had become the issue, and if military officers could distance themselves from Pinochet, so could civilian politicians. A media product with virtually no policy profile, Santiago mayor Jorge Lavín had been gaining steadily in opinion polls after narrowly losing the previous presidential election. In fact, he had been carefully groomed over the years by Pinochet, especially in economic matters, but he, too, had succeeded in distancing himself. And surprisingly few middle-class Chileans seemed prepared to acknowledge a link between economic interests and the forcible suppression of political participation in the 1970s and 1980s. The Utility of Universal Jurisdiction Resistance notwithstanding, the European sanctioning of Pinochet and the international spotlight on his misdeeds made it feasible for Chileans to

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begin to deal with them as well. Even after the Supreme Court in 2001 declared Pinochet unfit to stand trial, Judge Guzmán alone had another 250 cases on his docket relating to the crimes of Pinochet’s accomplices. Other judges also began to dust off old cases and launch investigations on new ones. Journalist Pascal Bonnefoy, working with the Chilean Human Rights Commission prior to the referendum of 1988, had found that clearly political assaults, if they were reported to authorities at all by friends and families of the victims, would usually be reported as apolitical, criminal attacks. Since the discrediting of Pinochet, she said, many survivors had come forward for the first time to report that a loved one had been murdered by functionaries of the regime.13 El Mercurio, the country’s dominant daily newspaper for more than half a century, had yet to be inspired by any of the dramatic events along the zigzag course of democratic transition to break its silence on the crimes of the dictatorship. But the arrest and indictment of “El Jefe” had to be explained. Even reporters from that and other right-wing newspapers began finally to cover the findings of mass graves and the new reports of old deeds of torture and murder. A Chilean film company produced a retrospective documentary, Estadio Nacional, in which survivors shared vivid recollections of the terror they experienced during the first month after the Pinochetazo, when thousands were detained in the National Stadium. It was shown in November 2001 in Santiago at an international exposition of documentaries, along with El Caso Pinochet, also directed by Carmen Luz Parot, presenting the case brought in Europe for extradition. It was well received critically, but was not to be aired on local TV. Some TV talk shows, however, had dared to examine cases of human rights violations. Professor Cecilia Medina escaped early into exile and served as John F. Kennedy Professor at Harvard Law School and as chair of the UN Human Rights Committee before returning in the late 1990s to chair the graduate program at the University of Chile’s Institute of International Relations. As Pinochetistas still made up about half of the administrators of Chile’s public universities, Professor Medina was not surprised that she could not then make full professor at her home institution. She was pleased, though, that the university’s law school had recently, for the first time, introduced a course in human rights law.14 In the working class neighborhood of La Victoria, where murals honor fallen heroes and the neighborhood’s own place of honor as the front line in the long and costly struggle against Pinochet, the response to his arrest was not so muted as in the uptown “barrio alto.” The celebration went on around the clock for days. In the early 2000s, children still hopped gleefully around the neighborhood to a jingle that ends with “Jump if you’re not

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afraid of Pinochet.” And school children were being encouraged, particularly in art classes, to express openly the fears and traumas buried deep inside. But for the grown-ups, jubilation was giving way to quiet desperation as it began to appear that the policies that left them sinking deeper again into poverty were not to be revisited.15 The Economic Legacy: Consumer Debt and Job Insecurity Guillermo Videla, labor and human rights lawyer and director general of the Labor Ministry in the 1990s under the government of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, pointed out that only 12 percent of the labor force was organized in 2001 (down by one-half since the mid-1990s) and that 10 percent of the force was formally listed as unemployed. He said that events of the last several decades had left the country, and the working class in particular, in a manic-depressive state. Unions scarcely seemed interested in collective bargaining. With credit card debt on the one hand and consumer values on the other, he said, workers settle for bonuses instead of wage raises and benefits.16 In fact, Chile had one of the highest levels of clinical depression in the world. This was attributed partly to anxiety and repressed anger, even posttraumatic stress, from Pinochet’s reign of terror; but many believed that the pressures of consumerism and consumer debt had also contributed. Chile also had—along with high levels of public savings, forced by the privatization of social security—one of the world’s highest levels of private credit card debt. Cecilia Medina noted that pressures were intensifying as prices for goods and services (including essential services like health care that used to be free or subsidized) rose while wages and salaries did not.17 The unmasking of Pinochet served in many ways to relieve the pent-up stress of anger and anxiety and to allow for individual vindication, or reempowerment. Elizabeth Lira Kornfeld, clinical psychologist and recipient of awards for her work with victims of torture and other abuse, said that until that event made denial untenable, many who had dared to resist and had suffered abuse had been disbelieved by their coworkers, neighbors, or even families, or blamed for their own misfortunes and for bringing misfortune down on others.18 The socialization of the truth they knew too well may have served to end their marginalization and self-deprecation or to soften the edges of their resentment. At the same time, though, that some found vindication, others found their self-worth called into question, as personal value came to be measured in material gain that most would never attain. Guillermo Videla found encouragement in the new articulation of respect for human rights and for the environment. But he did not see in such developments a return to the freewheeling debates and social energy of the 1960s and 1970s. Wage and salary employees were afraid of losing their

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jobs. Political parties were afraid of losing their elective offices. And the Lagos government was afraid of losing foreign investment. (Even before the Argentine meltdown, the damage that could be done by capital flight was all too apparent.) Most Chileans with whom I spoke at the end of 2001 believed that there were contingencies (for example, a major display of social unrest) under which the military would once again intervene. Society as a whole was clearly cautious about pushing the parameters of protest. But some activists were finding imaginative ways of taking matters into their own hands when the media and the courts balked at placing blame where it belonged and identifying the perpetrators of oppression. One popular means had been through “outings,” wherein noisy demonstrations around the homes of torturers and murderers served to draw media attention, or at least to enlighten their generally affluent neighbors. As Margaret Mead has noted, great change must begin with the visions of a few committed people. And committed Chileans have never lacked for creativity. It seemed that the most serious limitation to social learning in Chile was the fact that the democratic transition had scarcely begun to level the playing field, even in political terms. And in economic terms, the impact of the growing gap in Chile was exacerbated by the implications of the growing global gap.

TRANSITION, PHASE IV: THE COUP DE GRACE Lesson VI Goliath cannot be killed with Goliath-sized stones; the stones must be David-sized, so David can pick them up. Denial is easier to maintain with respect to Big Lies and Big Crimes—so big as to be unimaginable. Petty crime is accessible to the popular imagination and cuts the tyrant down to size. Political climate change, like global warming, can edge along almost imperceptibly for long periods and then reveal itself almost suddenly, in dramatic manifestations. Such has been the nature of Chile’s return to democracy. As with earlier phases of transition, external developments and trends served to establish a permissive context for the fast-moving final phase. By 2005, governments in Brazil and around the Southern Cone had passed into the hands of the tortured generation, and human rights abuses were being prosecuted vigorously even farther afield in the hemisphere.19 Twenty-two Western Hemisphere countries had ratified the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights and accepted the jurisdiction of the InterAmerican Court for Human Rights; and the court’s rulings with respect to cases in one country were being cited in rulings elsewhere.

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Argentina’s amnesty laws of the 1980s had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The main precedent cited in that case was an Inter-American Court ruling that statutes of limitations did not apply to crimes against humanity, a ruling from a case in Peru, where numerous intelligence and security officers were facing charges for their actions during the Fujimori regime. Meanwhile in Uruguay, the new government of Tabaré Vásquez was presiding over the prosecution of former President Juan Maria Bordaberry for politically motivated murders during that country’s dirty wars. These developments had been catalyzed to a degree by the arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998 and now fed back into Chile’s own political climate. Climate change in Chile and beyond also responded to global trends, particularly the discrediting of the “Washington Consensus” on neoliberal economy policy and of the Bush government’s designs for a New American Century. Disillusionment and anger provoked by these trends were serving to regenerate nationalism and thus to once again build bridges across the great divides of class in Latin America. In Chile, even El Mercurio had abandoned all efforts to defend Pinochet. I felt in mid-2005, for the first time since the Pinochetazo, that Chileans were finally beginning to exhale. There seemed to me a real change in demeanor, in casual relations, even in body language, just over the course of a year. There were many new developments. Groups associated with the “New Music” of the seventies, like Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani, who had traveled around Europe and the United States in the years after the coup spreading the terrible news, were playing to sold-out houses in Santiago. The Santiago Stadium, where folklorist Víctor Jara, along with hundreds more, was tortured and murdered in the aftermath of the Pinochetazo, has been renamed Estadio Víctor Jara. A multiparty panel had interviewed 32,000 victims of the regime and in late 2004 issued the so-called Valech Report confirming more than 27,000 cases of torture. The work of the panel was highly influential, according to Guillermo Videla, because while the dead cannot talk, torture victims can, and their testimony can be shocking.20 Pinochet had been indicted and placed under house arrest for his role in Operation Condor, a collusion among Latin America’s military regimes, coordinated from U.S. facilities in the Panama Canal Zone, to help each other in tracking and killing opponents. The murder of Chile’s former Defense and Foreign Affairs minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. assistant Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C., in 1976 was a project of Operation Condor. Another case making its way through the court system charged Pinochet with fifty-nine cases of kidnapping and torture at a secret detention center known as Villa Grimaldi. The site, in a Santiago suburb, had been converted

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into a memorial park honoring the hundreds held and tortured there, and it had become a popular destination for tourist buses. It appears, though, that none of this accumulation of new charges and new evidence of atrocities had quite the impact of the revelations that began to emerge after a U.S. Senate committee, tracing funding for terrorism through U.S. banks at the end of 2004, stumbled upon multimillion-dollar secret accounts in the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., that turned out to be held by Pinochet. Additional accounts, held in false names from fake passports, were subsequently excavated from the Bank of Boston and elsewhere. At least $17 million was being held in foreign accounts. Records also surfaced of other corrupt dealings, including land deals laundered through the military security fund, and of almost $10 million owed to the Chilean government in back taxes. With the new charges of corruption and tax evasion, the slow-moving bandwagon of leaders distancing themselves from Pinochet took off at a gallop. Even those who could condone murder and mayhem in the name of security had trouble defending petty theft. Caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Pinochet finally looked more foolish than frightening.

COMING FULL CIRCLE: HOPE AND HEALING WITH BACHELET? Lesson VII (A) Forgiveness and reconciliation come more readily to the abused than to the abuser. Before he can “forgive” his victim, the abuser must first forgive himself. To do so, he must confront and acknowledge his own crimes. Until he can do that he will project his guilt and thus will remain dangerous to his former victims. (B) Social learning can become general and effective only when options are apparent and people are prepared to deal with the consequences of what they dare to know. It seemed appropriate somehow that Michelle Bachelet’s electoral victory in Chile was announced on what was in the United States Martin Luther King Day. It was a personal victory of great poignancy, a case of overcoming seemingly insuperable odds, as well as a very immediate and straightforward victory for the tortured generation, especially those who suffered for standing their ground in defense of democracy and human rights. It also meant a long-overdue victory for an underrepresented demographic: Chile’s women. Bachelet is Chile’s first female president and only the sixth woman to serve as head of state in the Western Hemisphere. She was elected as a proud

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single mother in a country that had only a year earlier, for the first time, legalized divorce. Her commitment to women was made clear on inauguration day when she introduced a gender-balanced cabinet; half of its twenty members were women. The government’s prioritization of social justice was manifested early on in an innovative preschool program, the provision of free health care for senior citizens, and a measure of reregulation of labormanagement relations.21 Bachelet’s father, Air Force General Alberto Bachelet, was imprisoned and tortured to death for defending the constitution. A medical student, twentytwo years old at the time, Michelle Bachelet was kidnapped, along with her mother, Angela Jeria, and taken to Villa Grimaldi, where both were held and tortured. The president has spoken only in vague terms of her treatment, but her mother once spoke to reporters of being held for a week in a box, blindfolded and tied up, without food. (Neither mother nor daughter, however, signed on to the criminal complaint against Pinochet for crimes committed at Villa Grimaldi.) A practicing pediatrician, Bachelet also studied security and defense at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. She served as minister of defense in the government of Ricardo Lagos, a post even more unlikely for women in the Western Hemisphere than that of president; and she reportedly enjoyed great respect within the military for her competence as well as for her conciliatory demeanor. She has been widely praised for displaying no resentment or anger over the fate of her family at the hands of the military regime. Monsignor Alejandro Goic, head of Chile’s Catholic Church, is one of many who have spoken of her as a symbol of national reconciliation. Notwithstanding Bachelet’s great popularity and her early achievements, it must be anticipated that the strengths of her government will be sorely tested in the years to come. It will still have to contend with a national power structure that remains largely Pinochetista and a global economic power elite that believes that Pinochet was the good news. The appearance of continuity, or reconnection, with a democratic past is in part illusion. The kind of power that is a readily convertible currency does not lie with parties or other traditional political actors, even conservative ones, but rather with newly rich commercial and financial interests given rise by the policies of Pinochet. A single enterprise, El Mercurio, controls 90 percent of the country’s media directly, and El Mercurio itself, along with other media, are controlled indirectly by the advertisers. They have no qualms about generating fears of economic crisis in order to weaken left-ofcenter governments. Already, in 2006, critics were complaining about an economic growth rate of “only” 4.5 percent. The governing coalition itself represents a delicate balance between middle- and working-class interests, seen now even more than before the era of

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militocracy as divergent. Moreover, the transition to democracy, even in legal, electoral, and institutional terms, remains incomplete. Despite some important reforms in 2005, civilian leaders remain bound by electoral and representational rules that make it difficult to amend the Pinochet-era constitution or to modify legislation on labor, trade, finance, taxation, and other matters put in place by the dictatorial regime. Such leaders may be faulted for going along with hobbled democracy rather than crying foul; but crying foul is easier to do from outside the system than from within it. And even outside the system, criticism tends generally to be muted, because much of the economic restructuring imposed on Chile by dictatorial fiat has since been accepted elsewhere by governments desperate for the blessings of the international financial institutions and the largesse of creditors and investors. At the time of Pinochet’s death, just past his ninety-first birthday, he was under house arrest, with more than 200 criminal complaints against him pending. With each indictment on each charge brought before the Supreme Court, the court had to rule first on whether the former dictator, on the basis of his official roles, enjoyed immunity from prosecution, then in a separate ruling, whether he was physically or mentally unfit to stand trial. For some while the Supreme Court had managed to have it both ways with respect to the cases coming before it—first stripping Pinochet of immunity from prosecution, then ruling that he was nevertheless physically or mentally unfit to stand trial. Perhaps that ruling, finally, was true. Bachelet resisted pressures to give Pinochet a state funeral. There were mourners, of course, as well as many celebrants, of his passing. I might have been among those, like human rights lawyer Hugo Gutiérrez, mourning his premature departure from the courtrooms, where his conviction would have strengthened the body of “official truth” with respect to his crimes. At any rate, his legacy will no doubt remain on trial for decades to come; and we must hope that the nature of, and the antidotes to, Pinochetismo will be subject to intense scrutiny for a long time to come as well. As for me, the case will not be closed until the United States experiences a glasnost of its own, acknowledging and forswearing collusion in such desecration of countries and peoples, and until the likes of Henry Kissinger, whose footprints lie across so much of the dark side of twentieth-century history, can be put on trial rather than on pedestals.22

NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented for the Symposium on International Human Rights, State Terrorism, and Universal Jurisdiction, sponsored by ISLAC, University of South Florida, September 11–12, 2006.

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2. The role of the United States in undermining the Allende government, instigating the coup, and supporting the Pinochet regime is summarized in Black, Sentinels of Empire: The US and Latin American Militarism, Westport, CT: GreenwoodPraeger, 1986, and probed in great detail in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File, New York: New Press, 2003. 3. Conversations with Dr. Pedro David in mid-1984 in Vienna, where he was on assignment with the United Nations. David is now a judge of the national chamber of penal cassation in Buenos Aires. 4. In 2007 the family made it public that, on the basis of newly released autopsy findings, they now believe that the original President Frei was murdered by the Pinochet regime. 5. Senator Andrés Zaldívar, president of the Chilean Senate, interview, Valparaiso, November 20, 2001. 6. Judge Guzmán accepts no credit for courage or grit. He says he was simply doing his job (conversations and correspondence, 2005–2008). For more on the job of prosecuting Pinochet, see Juan Guzmán Tapia, En el Borde del Mundo: Memorias del Juez que Proceso a Pinochet, Barcelona: Crónicas Anágrama, 2005; and the documentary, “The Judge and the General,” screened by Westwind Productions in 2008. 7. Ambassador Andrés Bianchi, Chilean ambassador to the United States, conversation, Washington, DC, May 27, 2001. 8. Julio Silva, publisher, Ediciones CESOC, attorney and former Christian Democratic member of the National Congress, interview, Santiago, November 22, 2001. 9. Silva, interview. 10. Official truth may emerge from court or congressional proceedings or may be extracted by “forensic research” from declassified government documents. The most influential of such research on Latin America has been done by the National Security Archives at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. 11. Pascal Bonnefoy, journalist and former member of the Chilean Human Rights Commission, conversations, Santiago, November 27, 2001. 12. Chilean Army Captain Carlos Pérez, political prisoner under Pinochet, now living in Europe. Recipient of the WARUNIF Peace Praxis Certificate, 2001. Interview, Santiago, November 21, 2001. 13. Bonnefoy, conversations. 14. Professor Cecilia Medina, graduate program director of the University of Chile’s Institute of International Relations. Formerly JFK Professor at Harvard Law School and chair of the UN Human Rights Committee. Conversation, Santiago, November 21, 2001. 15. Discussions with members of the community of La Victoria, including the extended family of María Arancíbia de Rosas, former president of the confederation of mothers’ centers of La Victoria, La Victoria, November 25, 2001. 16. Guillermo Videla, labor and human rights lawyer, director general of the Ministry of Labor in the 1990s under the presidency of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, conversation, Santiago, November 27, 2001. 17. Medina, conversations. 18. Dr. Elizabeth Lira Kornfeld, director of the Ethics Center, Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago. Recipient of the 2001 LASA/Oxfam America Martin Diskin Memorial Lectureship. Interview, Washington, DC, September 8, 2001.

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19. Conversations with Judge Cecilia Medina, now associate director of the Human Rights Center of the University of Chile Law School and a member of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Santiago, January, 2005. 20. Conversations with Guillermo Videla, Santiago, January 2005. 21. Lorna Scott Fox, “The Feminization of Chile,” London Review of Books, December 2006, Vol. 28, No. 24, pp. 19–22. 22. Dr. Brady Tyson of American University, representing U.S. Ambassador to the UN Andy Young at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in 1978, apologized to the world for U.S. complicity in the demise of Chilean democracy; but he did so without authorization, and his apology was retracted by the Department of State.

Part IV THE RIGHT TO BE DIFFERENT Cultural Rights

History is about gods and kings and warriors; the rest is women’s studies.

Women around the world work longer hours from an earlier age for less pay as well as less food and less access to services than men. Malawi 1995.

10 The Political Dimensions of Diversity

Cultural diversity provides much of the spice that makes city and coastal living so attractive. Except with reference to irremediable bullies, ethnocultural or other appearance or lifestyle difference is not likely in itself to be perceived as a provocation. Such difference is most likely to give rise to negative stereotyping, condescension, discrimination, or violence in a circumstance in which one identity group covets the territory, resources, or labor of another or is deliberately pitted against another to serve the ambitions of colonial or neocolonial leaders. Hostile behavior on the part of hegemonic peoples or dominant groups within established societies becomes more likely also when groups within those societies—identified, for example, by race, ethnicity, class, gender, even age—threaten to abandon expected roles or to reject positions of subservience. Collective discrediting, or in more extreme cases, dehumanizing, then provides the would-be abuser a psychological cushion (in the terminology of psychologists, a means of resolving cognitive dissonance), suppressing the guilt that might attach to abuse of social equals. Vulnerabilities deriving particularly from racial and ethnocultural difference generally attach to peoples who have been wherever they are either for too long (the indigenous) or not long enough (refugees and immigrants, the trafficked or transplanted). Over time the physical and cultural differences deriving from armed conquest of populated territories and the transplantation of slaves or indentured serfs, combined with circumstances of time in place, evolve into class systems. Indigenous peoples have aroused the fear, the ire, and ultimately the contempt of conquerors, missionaries, and late settlers simply by having been there already. The indigenous have tended to be among the first of the native 115

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species to be depleted by explorers and exploiters and the last of the peoples in the state superimposed over their homelands to enjoy the rights of citizenship. They are also the only reliable guardians of their own ecosystems. If and when their numbers are seriously diminished, they are likely to be replaced by a new workforce of peoples who are trafficked and transplanted as slaves, or serfs in debt servitude, or who in search of secure life or livelihood feel compelled to flee from their homelands. Indigenous peoples of Western Hemisphere islands and lowlands, for example, were relatively quickly annihilated and replaced by Africans kidnapped, transported, and enslaved in the New World. Such preponderance of brute force led to great wealth, which was passed along as conquerors left land and slaves and serfs to their legitimate offspring. The subjugation upon which contemporary social inequality is based gradually acquired a broader measure of legitimacy as multiple realities blurred into vertically integrated social systems, and conquered peoples occupying the lower rungs came to accept the mythologies of meritocracy that underpinned the exercise of power. Through miscegenation, immigration, and an increase in the categories of tasks to be performed, classes of intermediate social and economic rank—that is, between the “masters” and the “slaves”—came into being. It is quite possible, as social and political systems become more complex, for individuals, through accepting the social myths and incorporating the values of the conquering class, to rise above the station of their birth. The masters, however, do not voluntarily relinquish a share of their authority to a lower stratum on the social pyramid. Such a sharing of power across class lines comes about only when organization and the potential for the use of force on the part of the lower social stratum are such that the masters conclude that they must share their wealth and power or risk losing it all. There is no obvious limit to the layers of class vulnerability that may be added by new waves of conquerors or new and more subtle means of conquest. The same negative stereotyping employed by earlier and perhaps cruder conquerors is readily adapted for contemporary purposes. Such adaptations are often apparent in modern (post–World War II) First World development programs and strategies and the social science theories and models that underpin them. Perhaps the most commonly assumed or explicit explanation for differential reward and punishment in multicultural societies—local, national, or global—is cultural (formerly “racial”) causation. It predates the heyday (1950s–1960s) of development and modernization theories and underpins many of their assumptions. Since the 1980s it has made a comeback in more traditional and less nuanced form.1 In the case of orthodox economic models employing the “rational actor,” cultural causation becomes a means of explaining why some actors seem more rational than others. Thus the assumption is made that some cultures

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are more conducive than others to democracy and economic dynamism and prosperity. For elites in highly unequal societies, this approach has the virtue of directing explanation—and thus blame—for growing income gaps and attendant social disorder toward the presumed cultural weaknesses of disadvantaged groups. By the same token, the approach allows empathetically challenged development specialists to explain and justify programs that suppress or dismantle client state cultures and supplant them with supposedly First World cultural traits (individualism, competitiveness, risk taking, productivity) in order to meet the goals of external donors and creditors. After all, if culture is assumed to be the cause of underdevelopment, then its suppression must be a part of the solution.

NEW PROBLEMS FOR OLD-TIMERS The vulnerability of unintegrated survivors of so-called primitive cultures seems always to have invited abuse. They were exploited as gofers and spies in the wars of external anticommunist forces against local anticolonialists in high- and low-intensity conflicts around the globe in the waning decades of the cold war or just obliterated in passing as their ancestral homes got in the way of bombs and bullets and herbicides. The resources rush of post–cold war globalization is now pushing such peoples onto ever more marginal lands and subjecting them to new forms of violence, contamination, and deprivation. The most common means of measuring development—national aggregate data—tell us nothing about the fate of vulnerable peoples. High rates of per capita GNP growth may well represent the successes of conquering peoples or cultures in wiping out indigenous ones. In the last part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, some 370 million people—about 5 percent of the world’s population—representing 6,000 nations in seventy countries, have been categorized as indigenous. They are distinguished by having a unique language and culture and profound ties to an ancestral homeland. They are, in fact, the antithesis of a new order based on accelerated production and consumption, an order that demands mobility and flexibility, and instant assimilation to new cultures and virtual cultures. Such multigenerational attachment to, and familiarity with, place has made them at the same time more valuable and more vulnerable. It has been argued that the only real hope for most indigenous groups lies in assimilation into dominant cultures. But few seem willing or able to negotiate that obstacle course. In multicultural societies, to the extent that assimilation occurs, it is likely to be into another deprived underclass rather than into the dominant culture. In the rainforest or in the cities, wherever

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they are found—with the possible exception, in the United States, of some casinos—indigenous peoples are among the most disadvantaged. Along with material poverty, they suffer disproportionately from ill health, low levels of education, high levels of incarceration, and an inclination to selfdestructive behavior. Where is one to look for guidance and for a sense of dignity if one is expected to depreciate and reject his or her own culture? Like the loss of biodiversity, the loss of cultural diversity is a tragedy for the planet and all of its peoples. There are only some 7,000 languages spoken now around the world, and half of them are endangered, even more so than the flora and fauna also facing extinction.2 The loss of cultural diversity also implies the loss of biodiversity, because indigenous peoples are likely to be the only guardians of the secrets of their habitats, of the healing, nutritional, and other exploitable qualities of the flora and fauna of their environments. Fortunately a multitude of NGOs, with help from scientists and from UN affiliates, are supporting efforts of indigenous groups to defend their rights, including their prior rights to products that corporations may seek to sequester in patents protected now by treaties on international intellectual property rights.

OLD PROBLEMS FOR NEWCOMERS Neither the crime of human trafficking nor the displacement of peoples by conquest—of territory, resources, or markets—is new; but the privatization of imperial war and the deregulation of trade over the past two decades have resulted in an unprecedented level of continuous migration. In 2007, the UN High Commission for Refugees was seeking to attend to the needs of 12 million refugees—that is, persons who had fled their countries—and another 21 million persons displaced within their own countries. Apart from rural to urban migration, even major population shifts, at the turn of the twenty-first century, are not likely to be permanent. There are no states now lifting torches and offering invitations to huddled masses. In several regions, ambitious foreigners continue to exacerbate and exploit local conflict, uprooting and displacing peoples whose settlements had endured for centuries. Ethnicities newly made misfits by the shifting boundaries of the former Soviet empire and by subnational and transnational wars in Africa and the Middle East, where the residue of colonial overreach is aggravated by newer imperial ambition, are not likely to find long-term residence elsewhere. Those whose only moveable assets are skills and labor will probably have to keep moving. Under the rules of the cold war, refugees who might have been welcome in the Soviet Union would have been unwelcome in the Unites States and

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vice versa; but as the cold war has morphed into the War on Terror, almost all refugees have come to be suspect, regardless of country of origin or of destination. Meanwhile, even as the War on Terror makes it harder for people to cross borders of their own free will, the commodity most widely traded in the increasingly global “free trade” system has come to be labor. The new freedoms for movers of money and commodities have facilitated the operations of illegal traffickers in persons for sex and menial work, as well as the supposedly legal international operations of labor contractors, and the operations, legal or otherwise, of dealers in arms, drugs, and garbage. This juxtaposition in much of the world of a new fear of foreigners and an increasing influx of foreigners offers larger license to exploit, discriminate, and abuse in other myriad ways. In effect, it serves to generate a new global underclass of the stateless, exacerbating vulnerability, social stratification, and political polarization. It also makes for strange bedfellows and strange legislation as employers who want exploitable workers try to maintain their coalitions with chauvinistic vigilantes who want only more guns, more guards, and more walls along borders. One of the oldest observed techniques of those who would usurp, control, and exploit, one that was honed particularly during the centuries of straightforward European colonialism, is that of keeping conquered subject peoples or exploited underclasses fighting among themselves. That technique is flourishing in the twenty-first century as globe-trotting money and the global trade in labor maintain downward pressure on wages and pit disadvantaged ethnic and cultural groups everywhere against each other. The most obvious remedy—organizing inclusively—is also an old one, but this time it must be global as well as local.

LIFESTYLE DIFFERENCE As we have seen, differences of race, ethnicity, or culture are often seen as giving rise to prejudice and discrimination. But difference is not in itself provocative. Provocation has to do with how that difference plays into the ambitions and insecurities of those who would discriminate and find themselves in a position to do so. The issue of the right to be different may arise within apparently homogeneous communities or even families, triggered by changes in lifestyle, in appearance or behavior or attitude, suggesting the individual or subgroup may become less amenable to the rules and expectations of authority figures. Waves of such change swept over many countries, particularly of Europe and the Western Hemisphere, in the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired in the

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United States perhaps by the success of the civil rights movement, post–World War II baby boomers mobilized in opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, to government repression and corruption, and to inequity and social rigidity. The upshot, often called a cultural revolution, set a whole generation at odds with their elders. In 1968 alone, there were major demonstrations or riots in Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City, the latter resulting in the deaths of some 300 students. The elders responded in many punitive ways, the most enduring being the criminalization of marijuana. The ’60s generation, now in their sixties, subsequently struck back more or less in kind by the banning of cigarette smoking in public places. The antiwar and cultural revolution launched in the 1960s served to spawn a new phase of the women’s liberation movement that flourished particularly in the 1970s, as we see in the following section. These movements, in turn, gave impetus in the 1970s to another that came into its own only in the 1990s. Acceptance and, at times, celebration, of nonheterosexual orientations are traceable at least to ancient Greece, but in most regions in modern times, nonconformists have been subject often to discrimination and sometimes to fearsome persecution. Acceptance of sex or gender nonconformity has fluctuated with acceptance of nonconformity or diversity in general in that exclusive regimes—authoritarian, illiberal, and inequitable—need distractions and scapegoats. Inclusive regimes on the other hand, promoting participation and equity, need ever expanding constituencies to ward off the renewed encroachment of authoritarianism. So legitimation and delegitimation, criminalization or decriminalization, have followed a dialectical, or pendulum-like, course of authoritarian and repressive rule to democratic and liberal rule and back again. Resistance against such abuse became stronger in the 1970s in the company of other robust defenders of diversity. Many in the U.S. gay pride movement, now designated more broadly as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement (LGBT), trace its contemporary phase to incidents in 1969 known as the Stonewall Riots. At a gay bar in New York City, called Stonewall Inn, gay, lesbian, and transgender patrons, accustomed to being raided and abused by police, fought back in numbers growing over several days and found pride in having done so. This new spirit was reflected the following year in gay pride parades in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. The 1980s, however, brought popular and political reaction against all expressions of liberation in the United States and many other countries, as political hawks and robber barons made common cause with leaders of fundamentalist evangelical religions. The stronger political, legal, and cultural platforms built in the 1990s to support freedom of sexual orientation

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have held into the new century, although countercurrents have been strong and abuses remain all too common. The LGBT community continues to educate, lobby, and mobilize particularly against discrimination and for marriage equality, prison family visitation, health care access, and parenting and privacy rights. The good news for the community is that they are able now, in much of the world, to focus their efforts on the right to full acceptance and participation as self-defined individuals and groups. The bad news is that such openness in itself is still seen in some quarters as provocation and results in new bouts of persecution.

GENDER: THE PERSISTENT DOWNSIDE OF DIFFERENCE The right to be different is potentially applicable to and needed by all of us—not just Mexicans in California, Turks in Germany, or Kurds in Turkey. Any of us would be in a minority in most of the world, and almost all of us are in a minority in some aspect of our identities or cultures or characters even where we live. Moreover, natural or man-made disasters could turn any of us into refugees in very short order. The return of Soviet cosmonauts from the space station was delayed for several months at the beginning of the 1990s because the country that had sent them up was not there to bring them down. But half or more of the species is automatically in a “minority” in the usual political sense of the term—lacking equal access to power and resources, and subject to discrimination. As we appear to slip ever deeper into the Dark Ages with respect to human rights, it is tempting to single out women’s rights as a cause for celebration. And certainly remarkable progress has been made on several fronts. But before we rest on our laurels, we should recognize that our blessings are mixed ones and that such progress as has been made is on a zigzag course— always subject to reversal. Women’s rights are now expressed in an impressive body of declarations, conventions, treaties, and other legal instruments and supported by a thicket of local and global organizations. Their goals and activities are in turn legitimized and to some degree funded by the UN and its affiliates. The most comprehensive of the international legal instruments underpinning women’s rights is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), signed in 1979, entered into force in 1981, and ratified now by 170 states (not including the United States). CEDAW calls for full and equal participation of women in political, economic, social, and cultural life. The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993) further obliges member states to assume responsibility for eliminating gender-based violence in private as well as public spheres.

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This system of treaties, including the “cold war twins” conventions on political and economic rights, discussed in chapter 3, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, some with their own monitoring bodies and optional protocols allowing individuals to seek remedy through international courts, constitute a “global gender equality regime” that has made states more nearly accountable to international norms.3 Even so, compliance mechanisms remain weak, subject always to the ebb and flow of political currents, and dependent ultimately on a globally active and effective women’s movement. Despite spreading cracks in the glass ceiling, many believe that the movement’s energy peaked in the mid-1990s with the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing and other intergalactic conferences. Legal instruments and global mobilizations notwithstanding, UN Development Program surveys continue to indicate that there is no country in the world where women have status and earning power equivalent to that of men. Sixty percent of the poorest 1 billion of the world’s population are women and girls, as are some two-thirds of its illiterates; and women and children make up 80 percent of the world’s refugees and displaced peoples.4 Despite increasing global attention and availability of legal remedy, onefourth to one-third of the world’s women (one-half in the United States) will be subject at some point in their lives to physical abuse. Even so, in much of the world, women are assuming ever greater responsibilities. And when worse comes to worse—as it so often does—women are most likely to be the economic mainstays as well as the caregivers of their families and the organizational glue of their communities. As agenda setters for purposes both secular and religious, men have relegated to themselves responsibility for the “right to life” before birth and after death; but women are still responsible for the part in between. In so many traditional societies, particularly of Africa and Asia, women grow most of the food, yet are landless. They work longer hours, from an earlier age, for less pay, and they do so with less nourishment because they must feed the men first. Modernization has not necessarily improved their situation. In rural areas, the encroachment of cash cropping, logging, and mining has shrunk, eroded, and degraded the land available for subsistence farming, while the water women must draw becomes more polluted and the firewood they must gather becomes scarcer and more distant. Meanwhile, the cash acquired in modern commercial operations is earned and controlled almost entirely by men. Urbanization and, more recently, globalization have been mixed blessings for women. They have opened up new options, including new directions in education and new lines of work. Nevertheless, most of the jobs available for women have been in the informal sector where wages are low,

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tenure is uncertain, and the protections of labor unions and labor law are generally lacking, Only in the public sector in countries where social responsibility was taken seriously and social infrastructure was expanding had professional positions become available on a major scale. The authority that accompanied such positions had begun to give women organizational and representational traction in much of the world where they had long been excluded from the political sphere.

GLOBALIZATION AND STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT The peak of global mobilization for the women’s movement represented also the clearest juncture or watershed for women’s political and economic fortunes. Progress has continued against the glass ceiling, not so against the sticky floor. Given the post–cold war preponderance of the private sector over the public, it was hardly coincidental that space opened for women in the leadership of the public sector, while the sector as a whole shriveled— the sector that had been for women the best source of professional employment. Even as so many of these women lost their source of income, they had to take over service roles with respect to their own families and communities that they or other professionals had previously filled on public payrolls. Those who held on to public service positions often did so for less pay and fewer benefits. Meanwhile, as wages remained local while prices became international, women married or single, with or without children, ceased to have a choice about entering the job market. In ever increasing numbers they were drawn into “maquiladora” or other “informal” market jobs, where legal protections did not apply. These hardships are by no means limited to so-called Third World countries. In the United States, 21 percent of the children live with single mothers, who head up 50 percent of the families living in poverty. Hovering near or below the poverty line are 45 percent of the children of divorced mothers and 69 percent of those of never-married mothers. Of the elderly poor, 74 percent are women. The end of the cold war meant, in much of the world, transition to “democracy” or at least to elections, and thus new opportunities for women in the public arena. Such political space appeared also in part because power in an unregulated single global market was moving offshore, and the mantle of elective office looked increasingly like a straitjacket. In global aggregate terms, women have enjoyed great progress in political representation since the 1970s: from an average of 7.4 percent of parliamentary representation in 1975 when the UN declared a Decade for Women, to 11 percent in 1995, 14 percent in 2002, and 16 percent in 2006. In the United States,

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women’s representation leaped from 5 percent in 1987 to the global average of 11 percent in 1995. After a bi-election in 2006 seen as a tsunami for the Democratic Party, U.S. women caught up again with the global average at 16 percent. Still, the United States ranked 85th among nations globally in representation of women (139th in voter turnout). In 2000, women served as heads of government in nine countries, more than at any previous time in modern history. By 2006, twenty national parliaments had met the Beijing Conference goal of 30 percent female membership.5 By 2008, the number of female heads of state around the world had risen to twelve. Globally female representation correlates positively with socioeconomic equity. The highest representation of women in parliament regionally has been scored by Scandinavia, at about 40 percent in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Norway, by law, every corporate board must be 40 percent female. Both men and women are required to take paid parental leave from work. Women get almost half a year off at full pay, a full year at 80 percent pay.6 The lowest representation scores are found in Islamic fundamentalist states (the average in Arabic-speaking states was 8 percent), though in some states—Iran, for example—election results suggest more female activism than is otherwise visible. Among other anomalies are the United Arab Emirates, where women cannot vote, but 72 percent of university students are women, and Tunisia, where women are relatively liberated and their organizations are strong, but not autonomous; they are supported by and responsive to a relatively benign but authoritarian government. Also, in Yemen, considering the proximity and hegemony of Saudi Arabia and the weight of fundamentalist law and custom, women have more options in practice than one might expect. Perhaps that is because someone must be able and authorized to do the heavy lifting during those long hours when most of the men are busy chewing qat.7 The backlash of religious fundamentalism that has been building since the 1980s, from the United States to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and the Central Asian fringes of the ex-Soviet sphere, has been, in places, straightforwardly a response to political strategy; but it reflects also a reaction of patriarchs and patriarchal cultures around the world to the gains registered by the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Such fundamentalism represents a major setback to the human rights agenda, in that religion enjoys the kind of “trump card” status with respect to social and cultural rights that “security” does with respect to civil and political rights. In particular, it has served to spread confusion and intimidation and to enable deception, as in parading the protection of abuse under the guise of preservation of culture.

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REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN ABUSES AND CONCERNS As noted, it cannot reasonably be argued that abuse of and discrimination against women is cultural; culture assumes a place of origin, and gender inequality is global. Degrees of inequality vary, however, as do types of abuse and discrimination. Thus one finds considerable regional variation in problems and priorities. In the United States, the feminization of poverty has been particularly stark in recent years; and growing income gaps that the women’s movement has generally failed to bridge may help explain the lag in political participation and representation. Stuck for three decades in the abortion issue quicksand laid down by its patriarchal enemies, the women’s movement has been unable to set forth an agenda with cross-class appeal. The regular recurrence of war has also contributed, along with economic insecurity, to recurrent surges of domestic violence. Women’s rights and women’s political representation have been better protected in Europe, but women are sure to be affected there as well by the steady erosion since the 1980s of labor rights and social infrastructure. Continuous migration into Europe, a long-term trend begun as colonial backwash and maintained as the commodification of labor, has also transplanted abuses of women generally identified with Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. A study by the British Department of Health, released in 2007, estimated that 66,000 women and girls in England and Wales have been subjected to genital mutilation. No one had yet been prosecuted under the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act of 1985 or the Female Mutilation Act of 2003, but London’s metropolitan police in 2007 were offering a 20,000-pound reward for information leading to prosecution for this form of “child abuse.”8 Female genital mutilation (FGM) is known to have been practiced on more than a million women in some twenty-eight, mostly African, countries. A major study conducted in 2006 by the WHO Study Group on FGM and obstetrical outcomes found that the procedure raised by 50 percent the likelihood that in childbirth either mother or child would die.9 African women are also suffering now from HIV/AIDS in ever higher proportions relative to men. Despite their traditionally central roles as economic mainstays for family and community, the persistence of sexual subordination has left them highly vulnerable; and the widely disseminated myth that sex with a virgin cures AIDS has encouraged rape of girl children and even infants. In South Asia, despite powerful women’s organizations launched through the Gandhian Independence movement, mushrooming dowry abuse within the last quarter century has deepened the general depreciation

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of women and girls and increased the impetus to infanticide and feticide. Traditionally conceived as a gift to the bride from her family, or as a mobile inheritance, since women could not inherit land, it has been transformed by consumerist greed into modern urban crime—a means employable by the groom’s family to continually milk the family of the bride. The bride’s unwillingness to go along sometimes leads to suicide or so-called bride burnings—death by kitchen fires, reported as accidental. The abuse was first recognized and proscribed by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. In 1986, dowry death was addressed in India’s penal code. The amendment required a postmortem report and coroner’s inquest in the event of the death of a bride within seven years of marriage. Enforcement, however, has been lax. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, several hundred thousand dowry abuse allegations awaited court action. Even so, the activism of Indian women remains strong and offers promise on many fronts. A constitutional revision in 1994 provided that one-third of the seats on local councils, or Panchayats, should be reserved for women. In the 1960s, Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, became the first of the South Asian states to have a female head of government. India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan followed later in the twentieth century. In 2007, however, for the first time, India elected a female president, Pratibha Patil, former governor of the north India state of Rajahstan. She was strongly supported by Sonia Gandhi, the very popular leader of the ruling Congress Party. Much of West Asia and the Middle East lives under the fundamentalist Islamic Sharia legal code, which is in itself an abuse of women’s human rights in that it fails to recognize the full personhood of women. Heinous abuses under that theocratic system are too numerous to mention. Many, such as stoning to death for adultery, apply to men as well as women; but since the testimony of women carries less weight than that of men, penalties fall more heavily on women. Among the worst of still common abuses are the so-called honor killings—murders of women, generally very young women, carried out by their fathers or brothers, based on allegations that they were seen in the company of a man to whom they were not related. Such killings persist in provincial areas of even highly modernized and Westernized Turkey, and occasionally target immigrant women in Europe and the United States. The lure of European Union membership, however, has inspired the Turkish government, with UN assistance, to strongly foster respect for women’s rights. China’s capitalist road since the 1970s, and especially the robust growth and economic modernization of the last two decades, has meant liberation for many women, but for a great many more it has meant economic insecurity and sweatshop working conditions. Seventy percent of the 5 to 10 million children under sixteen working in China are girls.

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The economic transformation of the ex-Soviet sphere was even more abrupt and devastating in its effect on women. The shock of “shock therapy” was felt first in the loss of public sector service jobs held mostly by women. In the Ukraine, 80 percent of the jobs lost in the first ten years of transition were lost by women. Little wonder then that the Ukraine along with other countries in the region, especially melted-down Moldova, took over from Southeast Asia as the resource center for a newly thriving sex-trafficking industry. Human trafficking, like trafficking in arms, narcotics, and garbage, has been facilitated by the deregulation consequent to “free trade.” Figures vary, but the United Nations estimates that about 4 million women are now caught up in the trade. Enhanced and focused policing would help, but it would not in itself deal with the demand-side issues of immigrant labor and troop movements or the supply-side problem of livelihood loss for women. Government and bureaucratic leaders who systematically violate, or fail to protect, the rights of some category of their citizens usually protest that they are bound by the prejudices of their constituencies; but that claim is rarely validated by public opinion polls. An international poll released in advance of UN International Women’s Day—March 8, 2008—in the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human rights, finds large majorities around the world in favor of equal rights for women. The poll of 14,896 respondents, representing 58 percent of the world’s population in sixteen of the largest countries representing all major cultural regions, found widespread consensus that they would like their governments, and the United Nations as well, to assume a more active role in preventing discrimination.10

NOTES 1. See, for example, Samuel Huntington and Lawrence Harrison, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, New York: Basic Books, 2000. 2. For elaboration, see David Harrison, When Languages Die, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 3. See Nuket Kardam, “The Emerging Global Gender Equality Regime from Neoliberal and Constructivist Perspectives in International Relations,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 6, March 1, 2004, pp. 85–109. 4. Choices, UNDP, New York: 2002. 5. Inter-Parliamentary Union Annual Report, cited by Edith Lederer, “Record Number of Women in Politics,” Guardian Weekly, March 10–16, 2006, p. 9. 6. Tania Branigan, “Is This the Promised Land for Women?” Guardian Weekly, April 22–28, 2004, p. 22. For elaboration, see also Riane Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007.

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7. I conducted research on women’s rights and roles in India in 1988, in Yemen in 1998, and in Tunisia in 2005; in each case, I was impressed by the sophistication and inspired by the commitment of the leadership of women’s movements. 8. Helen Pidd, “Police Offer 20,000 Pounds to Stop Mutilation of Girls,” Guardian Weekly, July 30, 2007, p. 17. 9. Cited in Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Genital Cutting Linked to Childbirth Woes,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 2006, p. A20. 10. Poll conducted by www.WorldPublicOpinion.org, a collaborative project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

11 Feminism, Democracy, and Self-Determination The Taiwanese Experience

If it is possible to do irreparable harm, is it not also possible to do irreparable good?

The recent history of Taiwanese democratization, development, and cultural flourishing might have been a model and a source of inspiration to much of the rest of the world. It remains, however, an anomaly—democratically selfgoverned and economically more nearly self-sufficient than most states, and yet unable formally to claim its own sovereignty. The Democratic Progressive Party government, in power from 2000 to 2008, scheduled a referendum for March 2008 on the issue of applying to the United Nations for membership as the nation-state of Taiwan.1 Opposed both by China and the United States, the application had no prospect of acceptance; it served, however, to highlight the frustration of the Taiwanese and the hypocrisy of a global state system whose members profess commitment to self-determination, as to so many other individual and collective rights, but, as with respect to recognition of genocide, withdraw or withhold recognition of statehood precisely when and where that recognition is needed most. The Taiwanese experience also demonstrates the contagion of empowerment, as the mobilization of women in pursuit of their rights served to galvanize a democratic movement in support of popular sovereignty for a territorially identified and suppressed cultural group. It suggests also that national self-determination is not possible—or authentic—without democracy and that the converse is also true, that democracy is not possible without self-determination.

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On May 20, 2004, Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu, representing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), were inaugurated for a second four-year term. The DPP succumbed, however, in the presidential election of March 22, 2008, to its now-united opposition, the Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, nurtured for four decades by U.S. governments, and more recently favored politically by and linked commercially with mainland China as well. The referendum that occurred on the same date also failed for lack of an adequate turnout. And the newly elected president, Ma Ying-jeou, has pledged to erase the designation “Taiwan” or “Taiwanese” that had been incorporated into the names of national landmarks and governmental entities. Riots in Tibet, occurring also in March, and their violent suppression by mainland Chinese authorities contributed to the cross-strait tensions in the run-up to elections.

AN AUDACIOUS DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT There were many issues at play in the DPP’s rise to power, but the overriding one was Taiwanese nationalism. In the spring of 2000, the Taiwanese people elected the first government to truly represent them—a feat all the more impressive in that mainland China had all but openly threatened to wage war on the island should the DPP be elected. I had the good fortune to be present for the inauguration in 2000—as a special guest of Vice President Annette Lu. That was because she believed that, along with other Amnesty International activists, I had a lot to do with her being there. Work on behalf of prisoners of conscience is always rewarding, in that the cause is so basic and so important and the need for protection so urgent; but the rewards are rarely immediate and personal. It was a humbling experience to be reminded that for the most part all we in Amnesty International and other human rights organizations generally try to do is be there, in the safety zones, for the real players on the field. Theirs is the vision and the courage, the risk, and all too often the terrible price. And yet, their prospects for success against tyranny, even perhaps of survival, and ultimately of keeping hope alive, are utterly dependent on having support groups—groups that by the nature of the struggle must be global in purview—who will back them in the worst of times. The worst of times for Taiwan’s democratic movement came at the beginning of the 1980s; but for the Taiwanese people bad times have a long history. When Communist forces took the Chinese mainland in 1949, the Kuomintang (KMT) government fled. With U.S. and UN support, it occupied Taiwan, recently emerging from Japanese occupation, called it the Republic of China, and declared martial law. No one consulted the Taiwanese, who constituted 85 percent of the population.

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The constitution under which the KMT was to rule had been drawn up in 1947 in China and provided, at the insistence of Madam Chiang Kai-shek, that 10 percent of all legislative seats would be reserved for women. But such guarantees became meaningless when the KMT government was imposed on Taiwan, leaving the islanders—male and female alike—unrepresented and repressed. The movement launched in the 1970s by Annette Lu and others began to sensitize and mobilize women in defense of human rights in general and women’s rights in particular, ultimately building a new constituency for a remarkably successful democratic opening. The opposition movement benefited in the late 1970s from a political decompression, inspired in part by the Carter administration’s human rights policies, as well as from the forums offered early on by a magazine called Formosa and by the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church. Lu Hsiu-lien, better known even in Taiwan as Annette Lu, had been studying law in the United States, at the University of Illinois and at Harvard. She returned in 1978 and started to practice law as well as to organize on behalf of human rights, feminism, and democracy. She was also a candidate for the Taiwanese National Assembly in the elections scheduled for 1978—until those elections were canceled. That was the year when the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China, pulling the rug out from under Taiwan’s burgeoning democracy movement.

A REIGN OF TERROR AND TYRANNY On December 10, 1979, in Kaoshiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, the social activists associated with Formosa magazine sponsored a rally in honor of Human Rights Day. The peaceful rally came to be seen as a riot after police encircled and assaulted the crowd; and the KMT took advantage of the supposed provocation to shut down the prodemocracy movement. Two hundred people were arrested, and forty were sentenced to prison terms— eight of them, charged with sedition, for twelve years to life. All of the eight defendants charged with sedition testified at the trial that “confessions” had been illegally extracted from them during two months of interrogation that included beatings, denial of sleep, and psychological manipulation. Lu was threatened not only with her own execution, but with the arrest of family members and friends. The following April a Presbyterian minister and nine members of his congregation were also imprisoned. Legal defense for those charged with sedition was offered by Chen Shiubian, who was to become president in 2000. KMT revenge came in the form of an assassination attempt against his wife, which left her permanently crippled.

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In l980, Annette Lu was languishing in prison, with failing health and failing hopes, when a jailer brought her a gift, saying it was delivered by the mayor of Albuquerque, from her friends in New Mexico. Her first thought was “What friends in New Mexico?” But then she realized what it meant— that Amnesty International had adopted her case. The case was assigned to the group I was working with at the time, in Albuquerque. My husband and I paid a visit to Taipei in 1980. We were not able to get into the prison to see her; but we were able to do the next best thing: to make a big fuss, so that no one who mattered could miss the fact that there was international, and particularly U.S., interest in her case. She began to receive medical attention soon after our visit. Back in the States, I published several articles about the case that were well circulated. Our group appealed to women, lawyers, Harvard alumni, and others who might identify with Annette and ultimately directed some 25,000 pieces of mail to Taiwan’s authoritarian government. Annette was released in 1985 and returned to the United States in 1986, where one of her first stops was Albuquerque. From Harvard, where she was on a visiting appointment, she helped me arrange for my students on the fall 1988 voyage of Semester at Sea to meet with outlaw groups promoting human rights, women’s rights, and democracy. That was quite an adventure because the security forces of the still-dictatorial regime had gotten wind of the plan and had made an all-out (ultimately abortive) effort to detain the notorious Dr. Black.2

DECOMPRESSION AND DEMOCRATIC REVIVAL In 1989, as tensions began to ease and martial law was finally abandoned, Annette returned to Taiwan. Representing the newly legitimated Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), she was elected to Parliament in 1993, where she became cochair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1994, she organized the Global Summit of Women, drawing several hundred elected officials and other political leaders from some eighty countries, who became the core of a new international organization of women in political leadership. Annette invited me to be a speaker for that summit and for another in 1995. I missed the meeting in 1995, but I was able to visit her that year, en route to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing. It was an interesting time to be there, because she was a precandidate for vice president at the time. It was also the time when China was lobbing missiles in the direction of Taiwan, by way of sending a message. Since Annette was generally recognized then as leader of the movement for Taiwanese sovereignty, it was easy to imagine that they were figuratively lobbing the missiles at her!

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Meanwhile, the DPP was growing stronger. Annette was elected magistrate of the politically important province of Taoyuan in 1997. Chen was elected mayor of Taipei the following year. The KMT, corrupt and careless, had begun to splinter; and on March 18, 2000, with a 39.3 percent plurality, the DPP won the presidential election. The inauguration, in May, was a sumptuous affair, and the four guests representing Amnesty International were front and center in it. At preinaugural events, we were seated with Annette at the head table. After a press conference on our first day in Taipei, several of the ambassadors and kings and Nobel Prize–winners we met said, “Of course I know who you are; I saw you on TV.” The biggest surprise came the day after the inauguration when we were invited to travel with Annette on Air Force II to Kaoshiung, at the southern end of the island, for a rally—the first-ever inaugural event outside of Taipei. When we walked onto the stage in that stadium with the president and vice president, facing some 50,000 wildly cheering fans, I finally knew what it was like to be Mick Jagger. Our VIP treatment at the inauguration was a measure in part of the deep gratitude that Annette and her DPP colleagues feel for Amnesty International. But it also indicated that they were keenly aware of the predicament they were in.

TOUGH TIMES FOR NON-HAN NATIONALISTS Taiwan’s treatment by its former benefactor in the twenty-first century has been almost as hostile as the island’s treatment by the mainland government. At some level of government, the United States must be mindful, of course, that military provocation of China is not a good idea (U.S. arms sales to Taiwan continue—a reflection more of the nature of the U.S. political economy than of Taiwanese government priorities). Moreover, the U.S. government dares not forget that China holds a trillion or so dollars in U.S. debt. But that the chill in U.S. dealings with Taiwan coincides more or less with the advent of democracy on the island is not simply an ironic coincidence. The replacement of a subservient government with one that responds above all to its own constituency must be a source of concern to the hegemon, if only because of the threat of the model—of client states getting “out of control.” As to the demeanor of the rest of the international community, many of the governments that are well enough grounded to resist the package of carrots and sticks that either China or the United States might proffer will have human rights liabilities or potentially secessionist regions that might serve to compromise their positions. Others will simply shrink from making waves. It seems unlikely that anything short of a major global campaign

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might sustain the rare and fragile beacon of hope that has been democratic, self-governing Taiwan. The most felicitous outcome of this impasse might be that Taiwan would serve as an inspiration to China’s suppressed democracy movement, such that that movement might prevail on the mainland. The more likely outcome, however, is that the Taiwanese card will increasingly be played on the mainland to the same end that the Cuba card has been played in the United States, to whip up patriotic fervor and consolidate a chauvinistic political base.3 It is also likely that the full weight of the carrots and sticks deployable by the mainland government will continue now to play into and heavily influence elections in Taiwan. Witnessing the rise, once again, of the formerly authoritarian party, the Kuomintang, which has roots in as well as newer links to the mainland, the Taiwanese can feel the hot breath of the dragon breathing fire across the Formosa Straits and demanding “One China.” The ethnic Taiwanese have never cared how many Chinas there might be, as long as there is one Taiwan. But they know all too well that democracy and self-determination are for them two sides of the same coin; they cannot lose one without losing the other as well. International support in “cross-straits” relations is crucial to their survival. So a democratic Taiwan must take every opportunity to remind the United States and the West that the credibility of their commitment to democracy and human rights is at stake.

NOTES 1. The UN seat that Taiwan had held under the name Republic of China was transferred in 1971 to the mainland government of the People’s Republic of China. 2. It should be noted that the success of this extraordinary venture in onsite education owed a great deal to the commitment of the Semester at Sea program, and particularly of its executive dean, Dr. Lloyd Lewan, to freedom of education and to human rights. 3. “Taiwan,” US Policy World, Institute for Policy Studies, www.ips-dc.org, November 30, 2007.

Part V THE RIGHT TO THE COMMONS Environmental Rights

The quickest way to achieve high GNP growth rates in a relatively underdeveloped region is to harvest all the resources and replace the local people with rich foreigners.

In Antarctica one has a sensation of being frozen in time, of an ageless ecology, untouched by the modern world. Nothing could be further from the truth. 2004.

12 The Naked Ape in Nature Master or Guardian?

Like human rights concerns in general, environmental concerns are defined less by topical focus than by perspective. An “interest” in some aspects of the environment may be akin to a cat’s interest in a bird. An environmentalist perspective, though, centers on respect for and protection of all that is natural—of life in its abundant forms—as opposed to the unnatural, the artificial products and transformations wrought by technology and commerce that consume and overwhelm nature. The conceptual margins of the area of environmental concerns are highly elastic to the extent that people are included—and they must be included for any consideration to be meaningful and useful. What, then, in a practical sense, does the environment have to do with human rights; and how is it linked to socioeconomic, cultural, and political rights? For the most part we have seen human rights as pertaining to individuals or to certain self-selected cultural or other identity groups. Environmental rights are among the most basic in that sense, as no individual or group could long survive without clean air and water, light and warmth and shelter, and the products of living oceans and forests and of arable land. The rights to the generosity and the protections of our planet, however— the protections afforded, for example, by earth’s atmosphere—are collective, or inclusive, in ways that pertain to no other set of rights. Nature’s increasingly violent tantrums in the first decade of the twenty-first century must serve as a reminder that there is a limit to the abuse that the planet can sustain, and that that limit speaks to the vulnerability of all life. Surely there can be no commercial or “security” right that overrides the survival 137

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rights of all life on the planet. The right to survival implies also the responsibility to take the measures necessary to ensure it.

COLLECTIVE VULNERABILITY AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY We know that in some cases, to some extent, human damage to nature can be repaired. The degree of rehabilitation of the ozone layer brought about in the course of a single decade through political will, collective action, and international accord should inspire us to tackle with great fervor the diminution of the CO2 emissions largely responsible for global warming and to undertake the general detoxification of the planet. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,000 scientists from 140 countries that shared with former U.S. vice president Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, in a synthesis of its work released in November 2007, found that the rate of emission of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming has accelerated greatly in recent decades. Global temperatures rose by one to two degrees over the past century, resulting in an average global sea level rise of six inches. Global greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories, vehicles, and other sources have grown by 70 percent, however, since 1970. Maintaining the current rate of emissions could raise global temperatures ten degrees by the end of the twentyfirst century, which would mean the extinction of more than half of the world’s plant and animal species, the proliferation of wildfires, the accelerated melting of glaciers, and the generation of superintensive hurricanes.1 A “megadisaster” is what Sir John Holmes, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, called the storms, floods, and droughts that had occurred in record numbers over the course of 2007.2 That is not to say, however, that the effort to contain global warming has failed; it simply has not been pursued with the focus and generalized commitment necessary for success. The effort has never enjoyed the cooperation of the country most responsible for the problem. Likewise, with respect to the most toxic of threats to the planet—that of nuclear war—the commitment to de-escalation of the arms race embodied in international treaties in the 1960s and 1970s has since been eroding. And generation of nuclear energy is on the rise again globally notwithstanding the failure thus far to develop means of ensuring safe disposal of radioactive waste. All of this suggests a reckless disregard for future generations, but what of the here and now? In the short term, the impact of our recklessness falls unevenly on the most vulnerable. The poor, often having been driven from more livable habitats, generally occupy the front lines in the engagement with toxic air, water, and soil, and with the encroachment of natural disaster—floods, tsunamis, mudslides, volcanic eruptions—because they have

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no place else to go. The front lines mean the poorest nations as well as the poorest neighborhoods in nations both rich and poor. Wherever there are hardships to be shared, the poor get more than their share of them and, among the poor, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous groups, and women. That is not to say that the wealthy are invulnerable. Sooner or later the toxins dumped in or released over poor neighborhoods make their way into aquifers and rivers and drift uptown and across national borders as acid rain. And the pesticides that first poison itinerant farm workers show up in suburbia in neatly packaged fruits and vegetables. But those who have options as to where and how they live can live longer with the illusion of polluting with impunity. And to add insult to injury, the First World, having exported to the Third its consumption mania, its production-driven economic model, its polluting and energy-inefficient technologies, and its garbage, seeks to export finally the blame for the now visible threat to the planet’s carrying capacity. Accelerated depletion of resources and despoliation of habitat are owing in part, of course, to population growth; despite deceleration in the rate of growth after the 1960s, global population more than doubled over the last half century, most of that growth taking place in the less-developed countries. Depletion and despoliation are due also to technological change that enables increasing production and commercially viable reach into the deepest oceans, the steepest mountains, and the steamiest jungles, pushing indigenous peoples onto ever more marginal land.

BOOM AND BUST CYCLES AND EXHAUSTIVE PRODUCTION The dominant approach to international development has always been one best characterized as cycles of boom and bust. At least since oceanic transport began to allow for exportation on a grand scale, colonial and neocolonial merchants and governments have been engaged in exhaustive production—that is, they deplete, despoil, and depart for as yet unplundered territory. The booms enrich foreign interlopers, at least fleetingly; the busts impact enduringly on plundered regions and communities. The feeding frenzy that besieged the Brazilian Amazon in the sixteenth century, resulting in near extinction of turtles, manatees, and other species, did not reach highland Papua New Guinea (PNG), quadrupling in a decade the rate of commercial logging there, until the 1990s. I do not know what the foreigners called such a frenzy in sixteenth-century Brazil—perhaps saving the souls of savages (who, incidentally, were also depleted); but in PNG, they called it 14 percent economic growth. The accumulation of private capital that must be invested coupled with the accumulation of public debt that must be serviced has meant

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that indebted governments have found it hard to resist privatization and exploitation, perhaps depletion, of scarce national resources when they are facing a short-term threat of depletion of hard currency reserves. Little wonder, then, that according to the Asian Development Bank, Asia had lost half of its forest cover during the last one-third of the twentieth century, along with one-third of its agriculturally productive land and one-half of its fish stocks. The Amazon region is estimated to have lost 20 percent of its rainforest just in the last forty years. In 2008, satellite surveillance revealed that Brazil was losing rainforest at the rate of 1,400 square miles a year. Deforestation also means loss of topsoil and loss of biodiversity. UN scientists estimated in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century that species are disappearing at 1,000 times the natural rate of extinction, losing 18,000 to 50,000 animal species each year. Moreover, the combination of lusty capital, anxious to reproduce, and desperate national leaders, casting about furiously for something to offer up in exchange, has led also to the monetization of phenomena like air (rights to pollute) and water (rights to divert rivers and tap aquifers), far too valuable and too clearly the property of Mother Nature herself to be legitimately put up for sale. Privatization and resource exploitation may generate jobs in the short term, but they are just as likely to result in job losses; and, in the longer term, depletion means loss of habitat and livelihood for millions of people and ever greater dependence on loans and investments from foreigners. Habitat hospitable to people and other living things is also lost to wars and seemingly perpetual low-intensity conflicts, sustained by high-intensity imperial ambitions. And habitat lost to modern warfare is likely to be lost for a very long time. The residue of herbicides, landmines, unexploded ordnance, fragments of depleted uranium, and a host of other deadly surprises make for a hazardous homecoming for returning refugees and exiles. Habitat is also lost at an accelerating pace to programs and projects that fall under the general rubric of international development. Apart from the endangered family farm, losing out almost everywhere to agribusiness plantations, the most ambitious of these projects is the construction of dams. More than 80 million people have been displaced by dams since the middle of the twentieth century. And dams, in turn, bring their own new threats to environmental equilibrium, particularly to public health. In the Brazilian Amazon, reservoirs backed up by dams built since the 1970s have made malaria the region’s most serious threat to health. There were well over a million cases in the region at the turn of the twenty-first century, and new strains, resistant to known antidotes, were appearing. As noted, loss of habitat generally means loss of biodiversity; it also often means loss of cultural diversity. For indigenous peoples, multigenera-

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tional attachment to place is most likely to be the core of collective identity as well as of self-sustaining livelihood. Loss of habitat and livelihood, in turn, forces migration to unprepared and unwelcoming cities. The UN Population Fund projects that with this surge and the natural population increase in urban areas there will be for the first time in 2008 a majority of the world’s population—3.3 billion—living in towns or cities. Most of the increase will be absorbed by slums and shantytowns, which already claim about a billion people. These areas generally lack secure housing, running water, sanitation, power, and other services.3 Along with competing for scarce resources and services, the new urban dwellers will join the competition for too few jobs at already inadequate wages. Repeated on every continent, in every major world region, this trend culminates in the so-called race to the bottom—the persistent downward pressure on wages even in the face of upward pressure on prices for essential goods and services. As we have seen, abuse of the natural environment constitutes, ipso facto, abuse of Homo sapiens—of people—because we are an inseparable part of it, dependent on the organic whole. The most direct and immediate connection, however, between human rights in general and environmental rights, and the one most obvious to most people placing “triage” demands on human rights activists, would likely be the political connection.

THE COSTS AND REWARDS OF POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT Some whose resources, habitats, and livelihoods, or whose health and safety, are threatened by environmental predation sooner or later engage in organized resistance. Their leaders are then assaulted by (1) government forces operating officially; (2) government agencies operating autonomously; or (3) thugs answering to private interests and operating with impunity—impunity owing to government complicity, government tolerance, or government weakness. The pollution of indigenous lands by oil companies—in the Ecuadorean Amazon by Texaco, for example; in Colombia, by Occidental and Shell Oil; in Nigeria’s Ongoniland, in the Niger River Delta, by Shell Oil—and the stripping of rainforests in India, Malaysia, Brazil, and elsewhere, have come to global consciousness only because of persistent and media-savvy resistance by the indigenous people themselves and the NGOs and scholars who adopt their causes.4 This has been at great risk and often great cost to leaders of such efforts. Chico Mendes, of the Brazilian rubber tappers, and Kenneth Saro-Wiwa, of the Ongoni resistance in Nigeria, are only the best known of many martyrs to the cause of environmental preservation.

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The efforts of these martyrs have not always been successful, but neither have they been in vain. They have served to set precedents, to inform and inspire publics, and to build ever stronger global networks among indigenous and otherwise isolated peasant groups, between urban and rural labor organizations, and between groups with so much at stake at ground zero and supportive international NGOs. They have, in fact, generated a very fruitful collaboration between environmental and human rights organizations in support of beleaguered grassroots leaders. On the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Cocuy, approaching Colombia’s border with Venezuela, a standoff dating back half a millennium between would-be conquerors and plunderers and the indigenous U’wa people, numbering now only a few thousand, has been revived over the past two decades. At the Caño Limón oil field, 160 kilometers east of what remains to the U’wa of their ancestral lands, a compound guarded by the Colombian army embraces the country club–style community of officials of U.S.-based Occidental, Anglo-Dutch Shell, and Colombia’s own Ecopetrol. As the Caño Limón field approaches exhaustion, it has been made known that the companies covet the remaining territory of the U’wa. In their vicinity, the oil companies have straightened the river, built new lakes, and filled in preexisting ones. Company officials are proud of their demonstrated mastery over nature—an attitude as alien to the U’wa as is the U’wa’s unwillingness to sell their land at any price to the oilmen. To the U’wa, guardianship of the sacred earth that sustains them is their collective purpose. When the Spanish first approached, the U’wa threatened to throw themselves off of the massive cliff that marks their territory in a mass ritual suicide. In a standoff that has been well publicized by NGOs, the U’wa have made that threat again—in the event that the oil companies encroach upon their lands. The effectiveness of the message was literally brought home to Rodrigo Villamizar, when he was serving as Colombia’s minister of mines and petroleum. His son came home from school and asked, “Daddy, are you going to make the Indians jump off the cliff?”5 Indigenous peoples native to the jungle along the eastern border of Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military thugs in power since 1990) have long been abused and exploited by the country’s military regime and its foreign business partners. The largest corporate investors in Burma in the late l990s were French-based Total and U.S.-based Unocal. Their gas pipeline construction, undertaken in partnership with the military government, has displaced more than 30,000 people in fifty villages and pressed villagers into unpaid labor. A lawsuit brought against Unocal in 1998 by enslaved and abused Burmese peasants (with help from foreign NGOs), under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 in the Ninth District Court for Central California was finally settled out of court in 2005; but the case, particularly the early decision that a U.S. company could be sued in a U.S. court for

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compensation for human rights abuses allegedly committed by the company’s “sovereign” business partner, continues to have major reverberations for U.S. business law.6 Since 1993, lawyers in the United States have filed at least thirty-six corporate abuse suits under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a matter which has apparently inspired some corporations to investigate what would be required to place themselves in compliance with international human rights law. In fact, “instruments,” or research approaches, for human rights impact assessment have been drawn up, under the auspices of the United Nations, especially for the use of corporations operating internationally. (See the appendix.) In the twentieth century, petroleum largely replaced so-called precious metals as the lure for the most unscrupulous and as the excuse for wars and other flagrant rights violations. This is a consequence of ignorance as well as of greed. While petroleum reserves are finite, crises of supposed scarcity thus far have had more to do with the psychology of pricing than with supply. Besides, renewable energy sources are plentiful. Resource scarcity wars for the rest of the twenty-first century are more likely to be fought over water. Water scarcity from the perspective that matters most—not of golf course maintenance, but of basic provision for human need—results not only from dramatic climate change and from diversion and pollution, but also from changing conceptions and conventions as to what may reasonably and legitimately be monetized. The most consequential resistance we have yet seen to the monetization and theft of water has been played out in recent years in Bolivia. In the late 1990s, Bolivia’s creditors made further loans conditional on the privatization of the country’s water supply. An international consortium, including U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation, convinced itself that it had leased not only a service delivery franchise but the country’s actual subsoil water aquifers, so that peasants who had dug their own wells were suddenly obliged to pay the consortium a fee for their water. In 1999, city officials of Cochabamba, in secrecy and in the absence of any bidding process, leased the public water utility company, with a guaranteed annual profit of 16 percent for forty years, to a Bechtel subsidiary. Within the year, water use rates had soared by up to 200 percent, to a monthly household fee amounting to one-sixth of the minimum wage. Street demonstrations, drawing scores of thousands, began to paralyze the city. The government responded with violence; several hundred were wounded in clashes with police. The demonstrations also resulted in an official declaration of a state of siege. Finally, however, the demonstrations resulted also in termination of the contract and in a rollback of water rates to preprivatization levels.7 In the longer term, the resistance and resolution of the water heist proved to be just the beginning of a wave of popular organization and protest on a

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range of issues and demands that brought down three presidents and in 2006 elected by a strong margin the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, leader of the cocaleros, coca-growing peasants. (It should be noted that Morales’s electoral prospects were greatly strengthened by a propaganda campaign waged openly against him by the United States.)

ON REASSESSING VALUE A human rights approach to environmental issues may need to focus first on triage—on seeking to protect the individuals in immediate danger for choosing to speak or act on behalf of peoples who have no voice and no choice—whose options have already been constricted by nature’s fury or human greed. But the approach must deal also with the broader political challenge of setting priorities, of assessing the merits and the urgency of competing claims on scarce resources, and of assigning blame and liability as well as responsibility. When it becomes clear that the practices of rich countries or neighborhoods are responsible for contaminating environments in poorer ones, should the responsible public or private parties be held liable and expected to pay compensation? If environmental degradation knows no borders, should nonnationals be entitled to a voice in the policy deliberations of polluting countries? Where do justice and reason lie when the interests of human populations appear to run counter to those of endangered plant and animal species, as is claimed now in drought-stricken parts of the U.S. Southeast? Perhaps the most important conflict of interest in the environmental arena lies between the old and the young, or between generations depending now on nature’s blessings and generations yet to come. In this contest, future generations, lacking weapons and votes, are at a distinct disadvantage. Clearly a human rights perspective dealing in both facts and values must deal also with facts about values. The restoration of nature’s greatest gifts to their rightful place—the commons, beyond reach of an all-consuming commercial market, will call for a measure of social soul-searching and a reconsideration of the high regard now allotted to competitive accumulation and conspicuous consumption.

NOTES 1. The reports of this panel have underpinned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in turn is to serve as a platform for the forging of a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Policymakers met in Bali in December 2007 to begin work on that treaty.

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2. Cited in Julian Borger, “Climate Change Disaster Is Here, Warns UN,” Guardian Weekly, October 12, 2007, p. 5. 3. Celia W. Dugger, “U.N. Predicts Urban Population Explosion,” New York Times, June 28, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/world/28population .html?ex+1340683200&en+c64d4c9596 4. Victims of corporate ecological damage and deception and heroic resistance to such practice have by no means been limited to the indigenous of the Third World. Efforts by Karen Silkwood to expose the radioactive contamination of workers in Oklahoma by Kerr McGee that cost Silkwood her life, and efforts by Erin Brockovitch to protect families in California whose neighborhoods were contaminated by toxic effluence from facilities of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) were featured in popular films. 5. John Vidal, “A Tribe’s Suicide Pact,” Guardian Weekly, October 12, 1997, pp. 8–9. 6. Lucien J. Dhooge, “A Close Shave in Burma: UNOCAL Corporation and Private Enterprise Liability for International Human Rights Violations,” University of North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulations, Vol. 24, Fall 1998, pp. 1–69. 7. For elaboration, see John Crabtree, Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia, London: Latin American Bureau, 2005.

13 China’s Three Gorges The Dam and the Damned

It is not enough to speak truth to power if power is not listening. China has a long history of going for superlatives. The Chinese government is now racing toward completion, scheduled for 2009, of the Three Gorges Dam project begun in 1988. The dam itself, on which construction began in 1994, is the world’s largest, and probably the world’s largest construction project of any kind. The first phase of construction was completed on June 1, 2003, when the click of a computer mouse closed the gates on 4,000 years of Chinese history and 2 million of prehistorical settlement. The official celebration was covered on live television, as raging white water lost its battle with closing sluice gates. The water level in what was to be a 400-mile-long reservoir was expected to rise to 135 meters within two weeks and eventually to 185 meters.1 Another phase of construction was completed in May of 2006 when the last of 16 million tons of reinforced concrete was poured, creating a barrier 2.3 kilometers long and 185 meters wide. In 2008, when the last of the twenty-six turbines comes into operation, the hydroelectric project will generate 84.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year. Budget figures given for the project ranged from $22 to $50 billion. In any case, it was not clear what had been or was to be covered. It was noted in late 2007, however, that $1.6 billion had been spent recently on stabilization of the transformed geology of the area—that is, on dealing with unintended consequences. In fact, the destabilization was said to be such as to threaten environmental catastrophe. The government acknowledged that it had drawn up plans to move at least 4 million more people, beyond the two 146

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million already relocated. Continuing the trend to superlatives, it was expected to be one of the largest resettlements in modern history. The displaced are to be encouraged to move into the already congested suburbs of the megacity of Chongqing. Could any of this have been foreseen? Of course it could and it was. Such catastrophe was clearly foreseen and forecasted by natural and social scientists alike around the world. But it is not enough to speak truth to power if power is not listening. When I visited the construction site on the Yangtze River in 2001, the scene had an eerie sort of timelessness. Mountains of concrete and otherworldly cranes towered over workmen carrying water in cans hanging from poles balanced across their shoulders. This most audacious of all public works projects since the Great Wall was certainly generating awe. But not all the Chinese are celebrating. Before proceeding, China’s twenty-first-century leaders might have done well to look back a couple of millennia and consider the fate of the initial mastermind of that wall.2 Construction and reconstruction of the Great Wall continued for more than a thousand years, and the “barbarians of the North” the wall was erected to keep out continued from time to time to pour over it and around it and take control of the empire. Though he was the first to centralize political authority in China and to link scattered walls into a Great Wall, the originator of the Qin (alternatively spelled Ch’in) dynasty, is better known now for his efforts to achieve immortality in the literal, personal sense. It is not known definitively into what sort of afterlife the masterfully sculpted bronze four-horse carriages he commissioned deposited him. But the thousands of terra cotta warriors who stood guard over his mausoleum in Xi’an were easily overrun by angry peasants. The dynasty turned out to be a short-lived one. The construction of his personal vehicle to immortality became the all-consuming project of the emperor’s forty-year reign, employing the labor of several hundred thousand workmen. His subjects may have expected that upon his death some 2,000 to 3,000 of his concubines would be entombed with him. But the surviving laborers and artisans who had worked on the project were entombed by trickery to keep the tomb’s location secret; and the son and successor who was held responsible for that deed was overthrown just four years later by a popular uprising.

SUBMERGING THE PAST: ATLANTIS OF THE YANGTZE Among the gains the government promised in return for its investment in the great dam were hydroelectric power, enough to satisfy 10 percent of domestic demand; flood control; enhanced irrigation and navigation; and promotion

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of tourism. Tourism? For tourists who had packed Yangtze riverboats between 2000 and 2003, the attraction was not what was to be gained with the dam, but what was so soon to be lost—soaring peaks shrouded in mist, interspersed with cascading terraces of rice paddies; hovering cliffs, crowned with pagodas, linked by gracefully arching bridges; and far below the placid precipices, a thoroughfare of rushing waters urgently going about the business of delivering boats to the settlements they service on the shoreline. Upstream at Chongqing, already one of China’s largest cities and expected to absorb several hundred thousand of the soon-to-be-displaced, one found a panorama of the damned gracing the walls of the Three Gorges Museum. The mural, by local artist Liu Zuo-zong, navigates in a hundred meters the 600-kilometer stretch of the Yangtze over which water was to be backed up by the dam, mapping peaks and valleys, islands and tributaries, cities and towns, bridges and temples, imperial halls and pavilions, and archeological sites. A dotted line running through the mural corresponds to actual markers along the shoreline, showing how much of this deeply rooted thicket of civilization was to be submerged. There were plans to relocate a few of the historically most significant temples and pagodas; the second-century Zhang Fei temple of Yunyang, for example, was to be rebuilt on higher ground when the densely populated city center of Yunyang, a municipality of more than a million people, was submerged. But prehistory is another matter; archeologists had been working feverishly simply to document what they could from some 1,300 known sites before they were washed away. Some traces of the ancient Ba people would remain, as their “hanging coffins” were situated high on the cliffs, but the society represented by the 2-million-year-old jawbone recently discovered at Dragon Bone Cave would be forever lost. For threatened plant and animal life, there was to be no Noah’s Ark. The dam project would wreak havoc on fish populations; it was expected to destroy much of the habitat of the giant panda and the Siberian white crane, both of which are endangered species; and it was expected to cause the extinction of the Chinese alligator and the baiji, the white dolphin found only in the Yangtze. There were fewer than a hundred baiji remaining in 2001, and efforts to promote reproduction outside their river habitat had failed. And then there were the people. More than 700,000 had already been uprooted, most of them within the previous year. Estimates of the total number to be displaced ranged then from 1.1 to 1.9 million, with most falling into the middle range of 1.4 to 1.6 million. At any rate, it was to amount to the largest peacetime evacuation in history. The reservoir would cover more than 630 square kilometers, flooding thirteen major cities, 140 towns, and over 1,300 villages, along with 1,600 factories and mines and an unknown number of farms and plantations.

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Among the first cities to go under would be Zigui and Badong. Just upstream of the dam, in the Xiling Gorge, Zigui hosted the temple of Qu Yuan, great poet of the Warring States Period (475–221 BC). Badong, with half a million people in the city and outlying settlements that made up the municipality, was the gateway to the popular Shennongxi Canyon and Gezihe Stone Forest. Further upstream, Wushan City, hub of another municipality of a half million, was also to be totally inundated. Its Damiao Longgu ruins were the locale of one of the earliest humanoid fossils ever found. Fengjie, just above the spectacular Qutang Gorge, a municipality of almost a million, dates to the New Stone Age and had a 4,000-year history of continuous settlement. Its city center was to be totally submerged, along with the centers of two municipalities of more than a million just upstream: Yunyang, home of the famous Zhang Fei temple, and Wanxian, known as the Emperor City since it hosted troops of the Emperor Hanzhao. Moving upstream toward Chongqing, two more municipalities of about a million, Zhongxian and Fuling, were to lose only half to two-thirds of their densely populated centers; but Zhongxian municipality would lose a portion of ShibaoZhai, the thirteen-story, fifty-six-meter Ming dynasty pavilion and the town that accommodated, and thrived from, its visitors. Situated between those two cities but on lower ground, Fengdu, with a population of 740,000, was to be mostly submerged. Some of its seventy temples, the oldest dating to the Tang dynasty, would survive, however, as they climb the Mingshan Hill above the city.

COMPOUNDING INSECURITIES The government had far-reaching resettlement plans, of course. Along the Yangtze from Chongqing to Yichang, where cities were to be submerged, new construction could be seen in progress on mountainsides above the anticipated waterline. The people to be displaced had been promised new accommodations—though often in distant and ethnically distinct locales— or compensation for their homes and lands. But, in all too many cases, new jobs were not available, new houses were not affordable, and new farmland was not arable. And some officials involved in relocation management had already been convicted of embezzling funds. The World Commission on Dams, an international panel of experts, estimates that up to 80 million people around the world have been displaced or directly disadvantaged by dams. By these calculations, dam refugees outnumber war refugees four to one. In China as elsewhere, refugees of relocation schemes less ambitious than the Three Gorges project have often found that promised funds and facilities were not forthcoming or that the money

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soon ran out, leaving them at the mercy of insecure job markets in unwelcoming cities. According to the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, at least 46 percent of the 10 million Chinese previously displaced by dams and resettled now live in conditions of extreme poverty. The curator at the Three Gorges Museum laid out the pros and cons of the project with carefully crafted dispassion. Even in private, he declined to give an opinion of his own. Asked how the local people felt about it, he responded, “I don’t know for sure; but what I know for sure is that how they feel doesn’t matter.” Hundreds of opponents of the construction of the dam had been arrested or “disappeared,” putting a damper on open criticism. But passive resistance is said to be the Chinese way, and some were simply refusing to leave their villages. Greater resistance was expected from the rural population, who understand the irreplaceable value of land, and from the elderly, both rural and urban. Apart from those most immediately affected, the 1 to 2 million who could expect to be uprooted—to lose homes, communities, livelihoods, and social, historical, ecological, and aesthetic grounding—and a few million more on the perimeter who would feel the pressure of a massive new influx of population on water and other resources, on land and housing, and on demand for jobs and services, the concern most readily expressed was that of security. To some, security concerns centered on the viability of the dam itself, given the possibilities of incompetence, malfeasance, or just plain errors on the part of bureaucrats, engineers, or contractors. One of the country’s supposedly unbreakable dams collapsed in 1975, leaving 200,000 dead. Before the last sluice gate closed, the Three Gorges Dam had already developed hundreds of cracks, some tens of meters long. Moreover, the Three Gorges Dam site is in an earthquake-prone region. Project engineers claim the dam could withstand quakes up to a magnitude of 7 on the Richter scale and that no stronger quake had struck the region in more than a century. (The devastating quake that struck Sichuan province on May 12, 2008, leaving more than 450,000 dead or injured and some 5 million homeless, measured 7.9.) Yet, in the history of the Yangtze, a century is not a very long time; and a miscalculation puts at risk a floodplain population of some 300 to 400 million. To most who expressed concern, however, even before the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Pentagon and World Trade Center, security has had military connotations. A multibillion-ton wall of water a mile wide and hovering forty stories high over several hundred million people on China’s richest farmland might pose an attractive target to terrorists or would-be enemy nations. What no one seems to mention is that such a potential security threat becomes an actual threat to civil liberties and human rights, as any criticism of the dam project or highlighting of its vulnerabilities can subject one to charges of treason.

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PURCHASING POWER AND IMMORTALITY There is no denying that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (more accurately, capitalism with statist characteristics) has produced a robust economy demanding ever more energy, and from sources less pollution prone than the currently pervasive coal. It also needs effective means of flood control. In the last century alone, floodwaters have claimed 300,000 lives. But the high-reservoir-level needs of electricity generation and the low-reservoir-level needs of flood control cancel each other out; and experience suggests that where goals are in conflict, the goal that generates money wins out. It was recognized early on, and noted by foreign observers, that ultimately accumulating silt would interfere with both objectives. And, with respect to agriculture, commentators found it hard to imagine that anticipated improvements in irrigation would compensate for the many acres of already productive farmland to be submerged. Displaced farmers were being encouraged to dig up fertile soils under the floodline and re-lay it on hilltops. As to improving conditions for navigation, flooding the gorges should have done that in general for underdeveloped stretches of the river, but submerging factories and whole cities was bound to create new hazards for shipping even though the cities were first to be demolished. And along with the garbage and sewage trapped in the reservoir, rather than flowing downstream, the debris of submerged cities was sure to introduce pollution hazards heretofore unimagined. In stark contrast to the celebratory tone of media coverage of the pouring of the last concrete in 2006, the Xinhua news agency and the People’s Daily website in late 2007 were citing official warnings of landslides and dangerous levels of pollution along the reservoir. Water quality had deteriorated for many miles upstream (particularly from Chongqing, where half of the city’s sewage goes into the river untreated) as the flow behind the 2.3-kilometer blockade was too slow to flush out pollution. Tributaries were being affected by outbreaks of algae. Fish that had spawned upstream were in particular danger, and it was feared that the white dolphin has already become extinct. Erosion of the river banks was triggering landslides, and sudden collapses into the water had created waves up to fifty meters high. Precautions undertaken by the government in the last few years, including closing or moving 1,500 factories and building more than seventy waste treatment plants, are reported now to have been insufficient. Xinhua quoted officials as saying that “regular geological disasters are a severe threat to the lives of residents around the dam,” and “if preventative measures are not taken, the project could lead to catastrophe.” Wang Xiaofeng, director of construction of the Three Gorges Dam, reportedly told the prime minister’s council in

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2007 that “we cannot win by achieving economic prosperity at the cost of the environment.”3 Are there alternative means of generating energy and promoting flood control? With drawbacks no doubt, but a quicker and cheaper means that would avoid the most dramatic threats and sacrifices and have the additional benefit of decentralizing control would be the erection of a number of smaller dams on tributaries feeding into the mighty Yangtze. In fact, the government has sought to deal with the supposedly unanticipated silt accumulation downstream by building two more dams in an upstream tributary, but they are huge dams that together will generate even more electricity than the Three Gorges Dam. Scattered smaller dams would not have served so effectively as a symbol of technological superstardom, a monument to the current leadership—the mausoleum or chariot to ensure passage to immortality.

NOTES 1. The higher the level, the faster the turbines and the greater the production of electricity. 2. This chapter draws upon material gleaned from observations and interviews obtained onsite on the Yangtze in July 2001, some of which was used in an article published in Z Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 7/8, July–Aug 2003, pp. 78–80. 3. Sources include several articles and news items in the Guardian Weekly, particularly pieces by Jonathan Watts, “Collateral Damage in a War on Nature,” May 19–25, 2006, p. 8, and “Beijing Admits Dam Dangers,” May 10, 2007, p. 6.

Part VI THE RIGHT TO A JUST PEACE

Peace is not simply the absence of war; but the absence of war might be a good place to start.

Emerging in 1991 from the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodians were hopeful, but suffering from a collective version of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Royal Palace at Phnom Penh receives a facelift in anticipation of Sihanouk’s return.

14 From Sustainable War to Sustainable Peace

Perhaps with the commitment of a new generation of human rights activists, we will see a time when our efforts may be directed mostly to the preservation and nurturing of peace and the prevention of conflict. In much of the world, however, for the foreseeable future, it seems our triage priority must lie in breaking the habits, removing the incentives, and challenging the acceptance of war, simply to give peace a chance. This book emphasizes the need for human rights advocates to more effectively move our interventions upstream in the decision-making process. Engagement in the information dissemination, policy debate, and strategic calculations that should precede policy and program planning, however, is not enough. We must extend our interventions downstream as well, in implementation, follow-up, and seeding for sustainability. This challenge is particularly great for NGOs and IGOs engaged in disaster relief or postconflict reconstruction. The first requirement for moving from sustainable war to sustainable peace may be that of reconceiving threats and goals and thus the nature of the challenge, particularly with respect to security. The basic problem with the prevailing concepts of security and security threats and thus the policies, strategies, plans, and actions that derive from them is that they respond to the interests of the nations, governments, classes, and individuals who in fact are the most secure—that is, those who have the most to lose. The fact that a top-down conceptualization has apparently prevailed in much of the world throughout history reflects the social psychology of power and resource inequity. (As noted, history is written by the winners; the losers write the songs.) Until that underlying problem is acknowledged and addressed, there 155

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will be ample demand for human rights monitors and peacemakers. In the meantime, those who undertake to disassemble the underpinnings of war and build a sturdy foundation for peace must come to understand security and insecurity from the bottom up—that is, from the perspective of those who have the least to lose and the most, objectively, to fear. As we have seen in recent decades in Somalia, the Sudan, Colombia, and elsewhere, prolonged war may become a way of life, with its own rules, ethics, and economy.

SEEKING SECURITY IN THE LINE OF FIRE Professor John Arquilla of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) calculates that the world has seen almost as many “catastrophic” conflicts—that is, conflicts killing more than a million people—during the last half century as during the previous century and a half, ten such conflicts in the last 50 years as opposed to six in the previous 150 years.1 Increasingly, these conflicts are subnational or transnational rather than international, and increasingly casualties are civilian, especially women and children. That is not to say that the efforts of the would-be peacemakers have been in vain. Recent efforts have, in fact, been extraordinarily fruitful. The UN Security Council resolution of April 28, 2006, authorizing collective action on behalf of endangered peoples whose government cannot or will not protect them, counters what had been an absolutist interpretation of state sovereignty, and the International Criminal Court, which began operations in 2002, is the first international juridical body to be established since the World Court in 1945. However, there is little doubt that, on balance, measures taken in the name of security over the last century have left most people less secure. That is hardly surprising in that global gaps in wealth and income between and within countries have expanded steadily. Even now, societies are increasingly fragmenting between those made insecure by conspicuous consumption— that is, consumption so conspicuous as to attract thieves—and those for whom insecurity means a daily struggle for survival. Those made insecure by opulence routinely seek to advance their own security by provoking ethnically or culturally diverse underclasses to fight among themselves. One of the most disturbing areas of recent slippage has been that of the personal security of humanitarian and relief workers and human rights monitors. Far from being perceived as neutral and essential caregivers, and thus appreciated and protected, as was generally the case in the twentieth century, they may now be suspected of being undercover intelligence agents or members of special forces. The resources they bring for refugees and other desperate civilians are likely to be plundered to sustain combatants.

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Even when identifications and roles of NGOs or IGOs are unmistakable (as in the cases of UN relief workers killed in refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor in 2002 and in southern Lebanon in 2006), their presence may be seen by some combatants as a provocation, an advantage to their adversaries, or just as a nuisance. A UN-commissioned study on the security worldwide of the organization’s staff members, delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in June 2008, concluded that staff members are increasingly being targeted by people who see the United Nations as a tool of its most powerful member states. The report led to the resignation of the UN under-secretary-general for safety and security. Serious efforts have been underway over the past decade to teach soldiers how to protect NGOS and IGOs, as well as to teach NGOs and IGOs how to accommodate such protection. But not only does such effort make for very strange bedfellows whose mandates and objectives are bound to diverge at times; it may also reinforce the suspicions of some combatants— insurgents, for example, in occupied territories—that “humanitarians” are simply adjuncts to a war machine, or worse, that civilian relief operations offer cover to military and intelligence agents. The protection of caregivers, as of other noncombatants, might be seen as an obvious role for UN peacekeepers. But under the rules thus far prevailing, peacekeepers are not sent to conflict zones until there is a peace to keep—that is, their presence must be accepted by acknowledged combatants on both or all sides. Moreover, the UN secretariat has found it always difficult and time-consuming, and sometimes impossible, to raise the funds and the troops for a peacekeeping operation.2 (When that is not so difficult, it is generally because a superpower has an interest at stake; and that does not bode well for felicitous outcomes.) At any rate, peacekeeping units are likely to be underfunded and underprepared, and they are not normally mandated or equipped to protect anyone other than themselves. Even when troops are mandated to protect only themselves, they are likely to become targets; and their presence may serve to keep conflict going. In postconflict situations, a formal cease-fire between organized warring parties does not in itself mean that noncombatants are safe. Along with humanitarian workers, local civilians may continue to be preyed upon by irregular forces or just plain bullies. Prolonged war, like tyranny, tends to legitimate violence and to empower bullies. Once a peacekeeping process is underway, organized government or guerrilla forces may be demobilized, and guerrillas or “liberation” armies may be disarmed. Irregulars and bullies, however, are a different matter. Death squads and paramilitary units are likely to continue to prey on civilians, often with surreptitious assistance from demobilized intelligence and security units. Moreover, if peacekeepers focus exclusively or excessively on maintaining a formal cease-fire, or if the

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objective is defined merely as countering the most immediate threat to life, then protections and resources for the most vulnerable are likely to be withdrawn before underlying problems have been seriously addressed.

THE RULE OF LAW: FROM CHAOS TO LEGITIMATED ORDER No real progress toward the reweaving of the social fabric can be expected until a modicum of security has been restored. Bottom-up, or human, security and the rule of law are symbiotic. The rule of law implies both order and legitimacy and is not attainable without security; likewise, security is not sustainable in the absence of the rule of law. The most critical undertaking in the trajectory from cease-fire to rule of law may be the enhancement of communication, between or among combatants as well as between combatants and external negotiators. That is not to say that communication begins only after a cease-fire is in place; it simply assumes a less threatening form thereafter. Joaquín Villalobos, ultimate field commander of El Salvador’s FMLN and the leader most responsible for negotiating, through the UN, terms of settlement with the Salvadoran government, has observed that military engagement is itself a form of communication. Now an Oxford University–trained specialist in conflict resolution, Dr. Villalobos highlights the importance to would-be peacemakers of being able to decipher the message and translate it into a language more precise and acceptable.3 With respect both to communication and to the legitimation of leadership and rule making, mediators can expect pressures from direct and indirect parties to the conflict to exclude other parties. They should be excluded, it will be claimed, for reasons of ideology or previous behavior, or because they lack legitimacy or credibility or commitment to nonviolence. But, as Sir Marrack Goulding, former UN under-secretary-general for Peacekeeping and for Political Affairs, has noted, excluded parties are almost always a danger to the peace process.4 And perhaps because national leaders are generally fearful of losing face and appearing weak, the commitment of a few to sabotage generally trumps response to the needs and desires of the many for peace. “Exclusive peace” may have short-term propaganda advantages (as in the case of the U.S.-Israeli strategy for Palestine—of favoring their selected Fatah leader in the West Bank while, in effect, holding the more than a million strong, Hamas-leaning, population of the Gaza Strip under a state of siege), but it is an oxymoronic idea. It has been observed that one does not negotiate peace with friends, but with enemies. Once a cease-fire is in place (or once an aggressor’s goals are met), international mediators and occupation armies alike are usually anxious to remove themselves as soon as possible from responsibility or accountability

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or at least from the media spotlight. The preferred means of appearing to transfer power back to legitimated local hands is the staging of elections. The decision to do so seems often to be made routinely, without attention to particulars of time and place, power balance, or popular animosities. While it seems reasonable that elections might be the first option to be considered, it should be borne in mind that an electoral system is not necessarily coincident with a democratic system. Elections, as we have noted, are tools, susceptible to falling into the wrong hands and being used, in fact, to frustrate democracy. The electoral option should take into account the fact that the scheduling or the outcomes of elections have on occasion led governments or hegemonic forces to kill or drive out their enemies rather than to win them over.5 Conflict or resettlement schemes in previously undisturbed areas may be launched to bring about population shifts favorable to the architect’s electoral prospects. Premature elections may further polarize a society already fractured by racial, ethnic, or cultural strife. Moreover, in cases wherein the struggle for freedom from tyranny or colonial rule has served to forge unity across divides of class, race, or ethnicity— unity that might have eased the tasks of reintegration and reconstruction of social and physical infrastructure, not to mention the task of defense against reconquest—elections are likely to dissolve that unity. And given the norm now prevailing globally of the purchase of votes or candidates or electoral processes, elections are likely to generate or exacerbate a climate of corruption. If an election is to be carried out under armed guard, it is essential that the guard be under command of an international organization or coalition whose credibility is beyond challenge. Regional security organizations like NATO or the OAS would not normally qualify, and the UN has at times been seen to be operating straightforwardly under U.S. influence. Military occupiers might find it difficult to avoid the temptation to rig the outcome of elections, and even if such temptation is resisted, they will be suspected of having rigged them. Show elections can be even more awkward when such a regime declines to rig, or fails to successfully rig, an election and finds after the fact (as in Iraq or Palestine in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century) that it is not prepared to live with the outcome. Unfortunately, there may be no means of rule making acceptable to all contending groups or stakeholding constituents within an otherwise pacified region, but in some circumstances a power-sharing agreement among leaders may well prove less divisive or provocative than elections. Also there have been occasions in which it was, or might have been, preferable for negotiators or external administrators on their own to undertake territorial or jurisdictional realignment or to facilitate segregated resettlement of warring ethnic or cultural groups rather than prematurely to promote reintegration.

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In the pursuit of peace, as of economic development, there is no one size that will fit all. There is simply no substitute for engaging personnel who are culturally sensitive, well informed, and able to listen and learn from the local people. And there is no substitute for serious attentiveness to the peculiarities of each case as opposed to presumption that so-called best practices are best for all circumstances and peoples.

SOCIAL HEALING: THE POWER OF TRUTH With security and a legitimized rule of law in place, the very challenging process of social healing can get under way. In this process, the most essential—in some cases, virtually the only—tool is truth. But truth is elusive. Even the extent and nature of the conflict to be resolved is likely to have been intentionally misrepresented. Most conflicts that are labeled “civil wars” are actually revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. The latter is not necessarily provoked by the former; it is more likely to arise in response to a democratic movement that threatens to afford effective political participation to working classes. Brazil and the Southern Cone of South America experienced such wars beginning in the 1960s and running through the 1980s. Successful revolution, like that of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, is rare and generally short-lived, but insurgency and counterinsurgency raged through Central America in the 1980s. In that local elites have the straightforward or surreptitious backing of colonial or hegemonic powers, such conflicts have had much in common with the anticolonial or independence wars of Africa and Asia since the mid-twentieth century, as seen most recently in microcosm in East Timor. Conflicts based essentially on a clash of class interests are likely also to be exacerbated by differences of race or ethnicity. And even those, for example in the Balkans, the Middle East, and in parts of Africa, that have appeared to be based primarily on difference of culture or ethnicity are also about differences of economic and political ambition on the one hand, vulnerability on the other.6 Like class and colonial wars, wars that appear to be “tribal” in nature are almost sure to be exacerbated by foreign political or economic interests. Those interests, unfortunately, do not cease to come into play simply because the language and the tools of the power game change after a cease-fire agreement. The rituals of transition to democracy that began to appear in Latin America in the 1980s and became routinized in much of the rest of the world in the 1990s have generally rested on some concept of reconciliation. But it has most often been reconciliation without atonement, a reconciliation of the privileged and the wretched, the armed and the unarmed, the abusers and the abused. The objective of a social healing process should be

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to individualize, or criminalize, the worst abuses—pushing blame upward in the chain of command and outward, if relevant, to external provocateurs or manipulators, in order to lift blame from ethnic or other categories of equally vulnerable or victimized peoples. Ironically, as elaborated in chapter 9, forgiveness comes more readily to the abused than to the abusers. Before abusers can “forgive”—or cease to hate—their victims, they must abandon denial, recognize the humanity of their victims, and, to themselves as well as to the public, acknowledge their crimes. Until they can do so, they remain dangerous to the peoples they have abused. A tool that has come into common use in postconflict arenas since the 1980s is the truth and reconciliation commission. Unfortunately, in most such circumstances the truth has been doled out so parsimoniously as to leave abused populations reconciled to living a lie, with little hope of rebuilding trust among neighbors and even less of general reempowerment of previously participant citizens. Under such circumstances, victims, direct and indirect, fail to feel vindicated; they find it difficult to exercise freely their hard-won civil rights when perpetrators enjoy impunity, free even of open condemnation of their misdeeds. Like battered wives, battered populations, having no clear alternative, choose to try to believe the protestations of abusers that it will not happen again; but lacking full confidence, they temper their words and actions. Processes of “democratic transition” come without warranty of completion. The battered population syndrome is indicative of incomplete transition. In South America, the process finally appears to be nearing completion, due in part to the coming of age of a less-battered generation and to the discrediting of the so-called Washington Consensus on economic policies that disabled civilian government and fortified barriers between classes. Also, as elaborated in chapter 9, the avalanche of judicial processes launched in 1998 with the arrest in London of Chile’s General Pinochet and his prosecution in Chile by Judge Juan Guzmán have served to promote healing and even reempowerment across the continent. The effectiveness of a truth and reconciliation commission is a function in large part of the pace and degree of transition a country has experienced, although, of course, the ingenuity and courage of its organizers also matter. In Chile, as we have seen, an autonomous military, still under the command of Pinochet, hovered over the civilian government for almost a decade into the transition. By contrast, the transition in South Africa, culminating in the mid-1990s, represented a genuine transformation of the political system from minority white European to majority black African rule under Nelson Mandela, who enjoyed immense popularity at home and commanded great respect around the world (except, perhaps, within the U.S. “security” community, which kept him on the now one million–strong “terrorist watch list” until mid-2008).

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South Africa’s unaided transition to democracy was a great victory, but it was the victory of a civil rights movement or of belated decolonization, not a social revolution. That is, it did not serve to displace the socioeconomic elite or to disestablish the security system that underpinned the elite. Thus, even though, under the wise leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the commission was able to call forth the healing power of truth, and through the generosity of spirit of ANC Army Commander Solomon (Soly) Molo, ANC and Nationalist military commands were peacefully merged, few of the worst perpetrators of abuse were successfully prosecuted. In fact, successful prosecution of the highest-level architects of atrocity has been most rare. Some community leaders in East Timor have commented that the regional and communal conflicts that shattered the island’s peace in mid-2006 might have been prevented by the prosecution of the Indonesian generals most responsible for the devastation of 1999. Full divulgence of a regime’s misdeeds and far-reaching prosecution of civilian and military leaders can be expected only in the event of decisive military defeat (the classic case being that of the Nuremberg Trials). And even in such cases, a fleeing tyrant is often able to find refuge in another state. Social mending for the peoples physically and psychologically scarred by civil conflicts of the 1990s and early in the first decade of the twenty-first century in Liberia and Sierra Leone was facilitated by the establishment of a dual court system. Those charged with lesser rights abuses were offered the option of amnesty in exchange for truth; but for the architects of the greatest atrocities, a separate court engaged in thorough-going investigation and prosecution. Even so, it was not until a newly elected regime was installed in Liberia in 2006 that the tyrant Charles Taylor was sprung from his plush exile in Nigeria to stand trial. At the beginning of 2008, the case against him was making its way to the chambers of the International Criminal Court. The Nuremberg Trials, following World War II, made it possible politically for reconstruction to get under way and allowed for the reintegration of Germany into Europe. Disregarding the co-optation of the second-tier Nazi strategists and enforcers and first-tier Nazi scientists by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, it might be said that the victorious Allies made a point of punishing “war criminals,” the leaders of the defeated states, but promoted relief and recovery for ordinary citizens. In the aftermath of the cold war the approach of the United States and its allies was just the opposite. Western favors were lavished on opportunistic leaders of the fractured “evil empire” (in exchange, of course, for access to resources and markets and privatization deals); long-suffering private citizens, on the other hand, were punished all over again. The stripping of the value of a currency is more subtle and impersonal, of course, than the plunder of a homestead or looting of the land, but it is no less devastating to the victims. The consequences of such a peace are unlikely to include sustain-

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ability. The temporary warm spell at the summit of what had been the cold war arena could not contain the conflicts breaking out all over among the shards of imploding empire. In Yugoslavia and in Russia itself, as in smaller breakaway republics, withdrawal of resources from the state-centric public sector gave powerful impetus to centrifugal forces, in particular the politically ambitious whose potential bases lay in exploitable ethnic or cultural identity groups.

RELIEF TO DEVELOPMENT, DEPENDENCE TO SELF-SUFFICIENCY For those engaged in peacemaking and peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, and reconstruction, the greatest challenges may be those of timing of entrance and exit and of pacing of project implementation. Whereas the pacing of grassroots development projects is usually too fast, the pacing of relief efforts is almost always too slow. That is in large part because the clock is set in accordance with the political and bureaucratic needs of the donor or intervener rather than those of the would-be beneficiaries of the intervention. Development projects generally fail to successfully transfer “ownership” to locals and thus to promote local self-sufficiency, in part because donors’ needs for financial accounting, evaluations, and new proposals are driven by the urgency of the fiscal year appropriations cycle in the metropole, with little regard to organizational maturation needs of projects in client states. Relief projects, on the other hand, including relief from conflict, are rarely responsive to the urgency emanating from the devastated country or region. Rather, they are paced by the slow maturation of public opinion favoring intervention and then delayed further by bureaucratic inertia and by lack of coordination among would-be donors. The meaning of “emergency” seems simply to be lost on most bureaucracies. The shortcomings of the relief effort undertaken following the devastating tsunami that struck South Pacific and Indian Ocean coastlines during the Christmas season of 2004 generated a great deal of investigation and soul-searching within the international relief and assistance community. But relief efforts in some hard-hit communities, particularly Aceh, in Indonesia, and the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, were coordinated creatively with approaches to conflict resolution, offering some very positive lessons. In the case of the well-announced visit of Hurricane Katrina to the U.S. Gulf Coast in the fall of 2005, there has been more blame passing and ducking than serious investigation. What passed for government relief efforts have been almost as devastating to New Orleans as Katrina herself.

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Once the most dangerous period of emergency has passed, relief must soon become development—that is, the promotion of self-sufficiency—lest it serve to prolong dependence and even sustain or reignite conflict. Relief supplies, as we have seen in the Sudan and elsewhere, may become yet another kind of resource to fight over, luring armed groups or militias to continually prey on helpless communities and refugee encampments. Refugee camps are particularly subject to being taken over by armed combatants— to the distress of professional humanitarian service providers. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has often found itself lacking the resources even to protect its own caregivers—not to mention the refugees under its care—from such predation. Rwandan refugee camps in the Congo, for example, were flagrantly overrun by marauders. This situation often leads to a sort of catch-22 in which relief providers can serve their helpless refugees only by serving also the captors and exploiters of those refugees. It should be no surprise that regardless of the source from which conflicts arise or the ultimate motives or goals of decision makers, the frontlines of conflict, the first communities and peoples to be devastated, are usually those who were most vulnerable at the outset—those least able to protect or defend themselves. Whatever they might have had in the way of crops or animals or other sources of livelihood is bound to be destroyed at least for the short term. Such destruction will not be remedied by imported consumer goods, even if they are donated and are appropriate to meet local needs. If locally sustainable means of livelihood are not restored expeditiously, and restored under the initiative or at least with the participation of local community leaders, dependence will take root, to be sustained by burgeoning debt and perhaps external exploitation of resources and labor. It might have been predicted that once the post-9/11 U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began to subside, the cultivation of poppies for heroin would prove more robust than ever. Other more fragile, alternative crops and livelihoods, scarcely competitive with narco-trafficking anyway, were likely to be destroyed, along with their markets. By 2005, Afghan poppy growers were producing 90 percent of the world’s opium, to be refined into heroin. Despite several hundred million dollars in Western antinarcotic assistance since then, opium output continues to increase. In Colombia, where “low-intensity conflict” was endemic even before the terminology came into use, the U.S. War on Drugs cum War on Terror has used hundreds of thousands of gallons of highly toxic herbicides in aerial spraying of coca fields—and also, incidentally, of food crops and villages. Such spraying serves in the long term to increase acreage planted in coca; the coca plant is more resilient than most and will grow in soil too damaged for replanting in food crops. Even in the short term, peasants whose food crops have been eradicated will be driven onto less fertile land that is

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fit for little else than the extraordinarily resilient coca. The upshot for Colombia of such “foreign assistance,” along with other aspects of the drug and terror wars, has been mushrooming, unassimilated urbanization, more than 2 million peasants displaced and desperate, and an ever more bountiful trade in illicit drugs.7 There is no such thing as a system that doesn’t work; every system works for somebody, though not necessarily for the supposed beneficiaries. To be effective, those who would promote postconflict development must recognize that there will be some degree of difference in perspectives and thus in goals between national, intergovernmental (IGO), and nongovernmental (NGO) donors as well as between some donors and their NGO contractees, partner organizations, and clients, or would-be beneficiaries. In fact, with respect to any particular program, there may be as many goals as there are institutional or even individual actors. Ambiguities and inconsistencies that might derail a program often remain unacknowledged, perhaps even unrecognized; they are pushed out of the boardroom and into the field, to be resolved through the dynamics of the process. Relief and development practitioners, then, must map out carefully the intersections between the official world—the virtual or transient world of donor and planners, implementers and evaluators—and the real world of local people who must live with the consequences. A major objective of any development program, made more urgent by the trauma of conflict, must be to prevent wrecks at those dangerous intersections as well as to be prepared to apply first aid when they occur.

RESOLVING ROOT PROBLEMS Can there be sustainable peace without justice? Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan says “No.” It is even more critical in postconflict situations than in other development arenas that foreign assistance be distributed in such a manner as to enable a degree of leveling of the playing field. Otherwise, damage sustained in conflict will most likely serve to exacerbate the inequity and vulnerability that encouraged violence in the first place. Transparency in the use of resources is particularly important for international and foreign agencies when it must be assumed that no local institution can be relied upon to exercise oversight and to protect national resources and markets from the depredations of foreign companies. The self-sufficiency that should be the goal of community development programs—whether or not the community in question has been torn asunder by war and rendered dependent—is not to be confused with economic growth. Much less should it be confused with “economic miracles” in postconflict or post–shock-therapy disaster scenarios; such miracles—of an

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economy returning from the dead—are generally indicative of a frenzy of carpetbagging, of foreigners profiting from the desperation of locals. The relief and reconstruction effort in itself can be expected to generate a dual economy; and the larger that effort in relation to the size of the preexisting economy, the larger the social gap it will open. The international community of administrators and service providers may be prepared to accept some hardships, but scarcely to live like Peace Corps volunteers, let alone like disadvantaged locals. The longer the transition period, the greater will be the buildup of local and expatriate import and retail operations catering to the foreigners, and the greater will be the inflation generated by First World spending and consumption habits. Moreover, even when the ravages of war or of malevolent whims of nature fall more heavily on rural than on urban areas, relief, reconstruction, and development funds will be spent mainly in the cities, where offices are maintained, supplies are purchased, and accommodations and transportation are arranged. Thus the urban backwash of rural assistance is likely, ironically, to exacerbate rural-urban gaps in living standards. There were endless horror stories coming out of the Sahel in the late 1970s about creeping desertification and its wake of famine and starvation. But Ouagadougou, the previously sleepy capital of what was then Upper Volta (since renamed Burkina Faso), was booming. The boom could not be credited to tourists; there were none to be seen. But Ouagadougou, I was told at that time, had the highest per capita concentration of rural development specialists in the world.8 Unless service providers are keenly aware of these tendencies, their very presence, despite good intentions, may serve to exacerbate inequities and vulnerabilities that invite abuse and may even contribute to a renewal of conflict. Inequities in racial, ethnic, or regional representation in legislative bodies and security forces, as well as in access to resources and services, may be ameliorated to some degree through the terms of an overarching peace settlement. It is to be expected however, that governments that have fought to a draw with insurgents will try to win back in settlement documents what they lost in battle and will welsh on commitments to former adversaries, particularly commitments to invest in land or production resources for the benefit of these adversaries or to make compensation payments to deprived families or communities. It will be claimed, and with some legitimacy, that the funds required to follow through simply are not in the budget. Having been confronted with such stonewalling by the ARENA government of El Salvador after a UN-brokered settlement between that government and the FMLN guerrillas, Marrack Goulding, then UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping, resolved to ensure, as parties approached settlement in Guatemala, that funds committed in pursuit of peace were set aside in trust and could not be tapped for other purposes. Whatever the

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arrangements agreed upon, however, their implementation calls for very long-term monitoring and pressure. And where major powers have interests, playing field–leveling agreements have short-term prospects. Compensations intended for indigenous Guatemalans were soon to be largely diverted as a consequence of regime change at the United Nations, in the United States, and in Guatemala itself. There is also a danger that international agencies offering relief or brokering settlements will be unduly influenced by hegemonic powers with interests at stake. With no apparent sense of irony, the United States in mid2006 was providing relief supplies to deal with the devastation of Lebanon even as it rushed shipments to Israel of the weaponry needed to continue the devastation of Lebanon. Nefarious external interests are often among the root causes of conflict. If such root causes are not addressed, peace talks may become cover for ongoing conflict, and reconstruction aid may underwrite it. After all, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the world’s longestplaying war, underway since the middle of the last century, is called the “Peace Process.”

INVESTING IN PEACE Through the first decade of the twenty-first century the United States lurched from war to war—a misdirection play in effect if not intent. Perhaps the Bush regime hoped each time that war fever for the new engagement would distract attention from the disaster still unfolding at the scene of the last one. As the regime became ever more embroiled in two full-scale wars (or contested occupations), in cosponsorship, so to speak, of another crossborder war in the Middle East, and in ongoing low-intensity conflicts here and there in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, a popular bumper sticker said, “I’m already against the next war.” As foretold in George Orwell’s 1984, the war report had come to be a routine feature of the daily news, along with the local murders, prison breaks, and indictments of celebrities and public officials. Even the terminology of “sustainable peace,” as in Orwell’s “doublespeak,” had been hijacked and employed to sustain war. (There should be no cease-fire in Lebanon, Secretary-of-State Condoleezza Rice kept repeating, until the battlefield situation allowed for sustainable peace.) How did this come to be? Perhaps it has always been so, but not always so consistently and systematically so, and not always so readily accepted by civilian populations under supposedly democratic regimes. Readiness for war, but not for peace, is learned behavior; it can and must be unlearned. With respect to conflict prevention and resolution, peacemaking and peacekeeping, there are many promising recent and ongoing proactive efforts

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under way on the part of governments having no material or strategic interests at stake. The Finnish government, for example, has maintained a multifaceted training and networking program for legislative, academic, humanitarian, and community development leaders from East Timor to enable the Timorese to achieve recovery and development on their own terms. Unfortunately, their efforts have suffered a setback with the new outbreak of communal strife in 2006. Finland has also taken a lead in using the urgency posed by the tsunami of Christmas 2005 to mold a workable truce and autonomy model for Indonesia’s secessionist province of Aceh. A similar effort initiated by Finland and Norway targeting the long-running ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, also devastated by the tsunami, followed a promising trajectory for more than a year before it experienced a serious breakdown in mid-2006. Much has been achieved also in opening minds and cultivating a political climate permissive of peace by coalitions or movements of peace activists across ethnic or ideological lines of fire. Such bridges have been built at various times in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and in the Mediterranean between ethnic Greek and Turkish Cypriots by academic, religious, and other civil society leaders, often backed by the good offices of Scandinavian and other countries—the Netherlands, Canada, and Costa Rica, for example—relatively unsusceptible to power envy. A peace movement generated largely by women had a major impact in the early 1990s in Northern Ireland.9 It is also encouraging that governmental and nongovernmental leaders who promoted peaceful settlements in the early 1990s in Ireland and in South Africa have continued to act as support systems for each other—to study the organic processes of peace and to build bases of support for it in both countries. In addition, thousands of NGOs, from large, well-established, experienced, and multitasking organizations like OXFAM, to smaller and more focused ones like Global Majority, launched by Professor Bill Monning of the Monterey Institute of International Studies and his students in 2004, work tirelessly and selflessly around the world to prevent or resolve conflict and build lasting peace based on cultural tolerance and social justice. Global Majority, based in California, trains, networks, and advocates globally, but works locally as well to teach cross-cultural respect and mediation.10 In the process of promoting peace and of assisting in transition, NGOs may seem to occupy the front lines, but they will continue to rely on IGOs and governments for essential resources. While for some governments war is always affordable, peace must be self-supporting. So even as NGOs stretch meager means to meet immeasurable need, they will be obliged to mobilize their constituencies to pressure governments to invest in peace. In the longer term, in much of the world and particularly in the United States, investing in peace means many things—a revolution of sorts, a complete overhaul of the economy, the bureaucracy, the electoral system, the so-

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cial infrastructure, the nature of diplomacy and relations with other states and IGOs, and finally re-visioning of what civilization can and must be about. For the time being, however, most of all investing in peace must mean investing in the UN, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and other multilateral organizations and institutions. The 9/11 terrorist assault on the United States highlighted the urgent need for international understanding and cooperation, for enduring alliances, for strong international organizations and institutions, and most of all for the new ICC. That attack brought to light an ongoing threat that demanded to be taken seriously; but it was not in any legal or traditional sense an act of war. Treating that dastardly deed as what it was—transnational organized crime—rather than as a war might have spared the lives of several thousand innocent Afghans and built a stronger coalition for tracking the elusive Osama bin Laden. While we must hope that no U.S. government would shun responsibility for protecting its own people, terrorism is a global problem, demanding a global solution. If the United States wants cooperation, it must respect the needs and views of its allies and be prepared to be guided by global norms. Just as nation-states seek to replace vigilante justice with the rule of law, the United States should have looked to international law and international tribunals for the prosecution of this awful crime. Fortunately a body appointed to that purpose was soon to be born. Unfortunately, the Bush administration had done everything in its power to abort it. No sooner had the treaty creating the ICC been validated, through exceeding the required sixty-state ratification in April 2002, than Bush announced that he was unsigning—that is, withdrawing the signature entered by his predecessor, President Bill Clinton—a gesture that, according to the chief of the UN treaty section, was unprecedented. The Bush administration proceeded, then, to push through legislation, the American Service-Members’ Protection Act of 2002, blocking U.S. military aid to countries that ratified the Rome Treaty. It came to be known in some quarters as the “Hague Invasion Act,” as it also authorized the use of force to liberate any American civilian taken into custody by the court. Like most foreign-aid restriction measures, it has been used selectively with respect to recipients, and used to threaten or withhold economic as well as military aid. Bush spokespersons argued that among other things, the court might jeopardize freedom of action of the U.S. military abroad. Would that it had done so!

SUPPORT FOR UNITED NATIONS AUTONOMY In the United States in 2003, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, as the Bush administration in vain sought UN support for that endeavor, the

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media obligingly generated a great debate about whether or not the UN had become irrelevant. Who then would have imagined that more than a year after the “liberation” of Iraq and Bush’s celebration of “mission accomplished,” the resistance of Iraqis would be building rather than fizzling? Well, almost anybody who paid much attention to history or the dynamics of international politics. Firefights erupting all around Iraq in the spring of 2004 brought a new kind of shock and awe to the administrators and diplomats huddling in Baghdad’s Green Zone. At that point, the dogs of war who for so long had seen the United Nations as a fire hydrant began to see it as a fire extinguisher. Not a moment too soon, the Bush administration announced that it was accepting the outlines of a UN envoy’s proposal to replace the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council with a UN-approved caretaker regime, allowing the United States formally to abandon its administrative role at the end of June. The reengagement of the United Nations could not have been expected to restore order so long as the United States maintained its military occupation. Even so, it was welcomed by most Iraqis, as the United Nations was able to bring a modicum of moral authority to the defense of Iraqi rights and resources. It also brought invaluable experience and commitment to the delivery of humanitarian relief, elements not evidenced in the operations of U.S. commercial contractors.11 Constructing democracy under U.S. military occupation was never a very promising idea, but a UN-approved regime stood a better chance of enjoying credibility than a U.S.-sponsored one. For the Bush administration, losing credibility at home and abroad in an election year, facing blame for both postsanction and postwar hardships in Iraq, seeing poorly trained and badly stretched National Guard troops increasingly targets of random violence and themselves charged with atrocities, UN participation appeared then as an indispensable face saver, and perhaps regime saver. As it turned out, the UN mission never recovered from the bombing of its headquarters in 2003, and Iraq became ever more mired in civil war. But as that war rages on and is overshadowed from time to time by new flareups of an even older war in the Middle East or the threat of a brand new one in Iran or Pakistan, the question remains as to whether it serves the long-term interests of the global community for the UN to save the credibility of the U.S. government, or any other government unamenable to multilateral influence, at the expense of its own credibility. Supporting the UN must mean supporting its operational autonomy from any particular superpower or major donor, including particularly decisions with respect to personnel. Fortunately, most of the governments that donate generously, on an ad hoc basis, to individual UN projects do so without disguised or self-interested motives; but the motives of superpowers and their regional surrogates must always be examined.12 The Bush ad-

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ministration did not put out all those noncompetitively bid multibilliondollar contracts in order to deal with the shards of war and everyday needs of Iraqis. It will expect the UN to muster the resources for that. When the U.S. troops are finally brought home or sent home, I would hope that UN conditions for picking up the pieces in Iraq or Lebanon or elsewhere would include at the very least full authority for peacekeeping and transitional administration, as well as full underwriting of costs by aggressor governments, derived perhaps from a special tax on corporate war profiteers. But would such a UN role serve the long-term interests of the American people? It would not if it served to obscure the nature of our own responsibility. The UN cannot handle the contextual problem—the larger, longerterm challenge of reining in an out-of-control war machine. And the last thing any human rights advocate would want is to see the UN becoming the cleanup crew, sucked into war after war. The real challenge falls now on the American people: to put a lid on “supply-side wars,” on making wars “because we can.”13 After all, the strategy of fighting war after war to end all wars has failed; maybe we should try something other than war to end wars. Investing in peace also means mustering the political courage to campaign for peace, again and again, against all bullies and dogmas and against ignorance, apathy, and denial.

NOTES 1. John Arquilla, chap. 6 in The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. 2. The United Nations has suffered considerable criticism for its failure to intervene in Rwanda, despite warnings that an ethnic clash of epic proportions was in the offing. But Sir Marrack Goulding, UN under-secretary-general for political affairs at that time, told me that he and Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali trolled the corridors of UN headquarters for weeks in search of delegations that would commit sufficient resources to an intervention. As noted in chapter 2, we now know that the United States was pointedly resisting the use of the term “genocide” because its use, according to the international convention on genocide, would be expected to trigger UN intervention. 3. These and other challenges with respect to reaching settlement were discussed with me in several conversations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, between 1997 and 2005. 4. Likewise with respect to conversations with Sir Marrack, who became warden of St. Antony’s College upon retirement from his last post at the United Nations, that of under-secretary-general for political affairs. 5. As exemplified at the beginning of 2008 in the lethal drama being played out in Kenya. 6. Dr. Svetlana Broz, physician, committed advocate of peace and social reintegration in the Balkans (and coincidentally granddaughter of the late president of

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Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito), told me (in conversation in Monterey, California, in 2007) of a couple fleeing ethnic cleansing with their children. As they approached a border particularly threatening to the husband, he turned to his wife and asked, “By the way, what is your ethnic background?” Professor Alfred Stepan, who served as the first president of the Central European University in Budapest, commented to me (at All Soul’s College, Oxford, in 1998) that at least in terms of intermarriage, the Balkan region had been one of the most fully integrated ethnically of any of the world regions. 7. In 2004, Jan Egeland, UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, noted that Colombia’s situation was “by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in the Western Hemisphere.” Cited in Peter Canby, “Latin America’s Longest War,” The Nation, August 16/23, 2004, pp. 31–38. 8. I was engaged in research in Ouagadougou and surrounding communities in mid-1978. 9. It is widely believed, at least by men, that women are ill-suited to the “hard choices” or “hard decisions” that must be made in wartime. In fact, meeting violence— or even perceived or threatened violence—with violence is the easy choice. Opting for peace is the hard choice; the payoff is for publics, not for decision makers, who are likely to be ridiculed regardless of the outcome. 10. See www.globalmajority.org. 11. Halliburton scarcely even showed embarrassment about the $8 billion that went missing, or could not be accounted for, in the first couple of years of the U.S. occupation. 12. Conversation with Jan Kavan, Czech parliamentarian and former president of the UN General Assembly, Alameda, California, November 2007. 13. I am borrowing the phrase “supply-side wars” from Martin C. Needler. His paper, “National Security Doctrine: Supply-Side Perspectives,” will appear in the forthcoming proceedings of the International Conference on Armed Forces and Society: New Challenges and New Environments, Santiago, Chile, June 25–28, 2008.

15 Against All Odds East Timor’s Struggle for Independence

The perfect plausibility of policy failures makes them good cover for policy decisions.

There has been a great deal at stake in the process, over the past six years, of the consolidation of independence for the South Pacific island state of East Timor—not only for the indigenous people who had fought so hard and sacrificed so much in the pursuit of nationhood, but also for the United Nations and for the international assistance community. As these stakeholders, and particularly East Timor’s own policymakers, survey the damage from recent riots, rampages, and assassination attempts, and weigh current needs against resources and options, they may come to feel that carrying out elections and fashioning political institutions was the easy part of birthing a new nation. In the early years of the twenty-first century, East Timor seemed to be the “poster child” of United Nations effectiveness in nation building. Now, as the decade ages and the new state unravels, we are reminded that East Timor was the Darfur of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and we are taunted again to ask why. The atrocities of the past quarter century continue to haunt, demanding atonement and accountability. East Timor has finally come back around to where it was more than three decades ago—that is, to the independence to which it was then entitled; but after so much violence and devastation that might have been avoided, citizens are not likely to feel secure in their independence so long as those most responsible for the heinous crimes committed against them enjoy impunity, and the social solidarity forged over the course of the independence campaign continues to unravel. 173

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The gathering of centrifugal forces in the consolidation phase of revolutionary change is not unusual; and the outbreak of renewed violence and vandalism in the spring of 2006 might be seen as overdetermined in the ministate that remains Asia’s poorest population, where about half of the labor force and far more than half of the urban youth remain unemployed. But such a large-scale breakdown of civility and dissolution of security systems just four short years after the celebration of independence does not speak well for the social learning capabilities of our international institutions. In particular, it leaves one to wonder whether ambitious member states will ever allow the UN to follow through on the mandates it is given and whether or to what extent real independence, or sovereignty, is attainable for new states in the twenty-first century.

INDEPENDENCE ONCE REMOVED The first time East Timor declared its independence, after Portuguese colonizers withdrew in 1974, it was immediately overrun by Indonesian troops. Their occupation, until 1999, wiped out a third of the population—but not the independence movement, which seemed to have been invigorated by the reign of terror. In the UN-sponsored referendum of 1999, the vote for independence was overwhelming; but the Indonesian armed forces and their militias voted with their weapons, leaving thousands dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, and the built environment—cities and villages alike—in ruins. Mercifully, elections for a constituent assembly that took place on August 30, 2001, after a period of United Nations tutelage, were peaceful— even festive, passing leadership to Fretilin, the party perceived as representing the independence movement.1 Following the adoption of a constitution in March 2002, presidential elections on April 14 gave resounding victory to poet-cum-guerrilla leader-cum-statesman José “Xanana” Gusmão. He was inaugurated on May 20, as the United Nations withdrew from a two-and-a-half-year stint of transitional administration. The UN, usually the most authoritative of election monitors, was this time around the governing body whose performance was to be judged. And with respect to East Timor, the UN had a badly blotted copybook to clean up. Most East Timorese had yet to recover from the aftermath of the 1999 referendum. Those able to escape their burning homes with families intact and find hiding places in the mountains were the lucky ones. Many families were torn asunder when the Indonesian occupation forces entrusted by the United Nations with “security” for the elections followed through on their threats of retaliation against proponents of independence.2 Some

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1,600 of the children separated then from their parents remained separated when the UN relinquished responsibility. Colonized by Portugal for more than 300 years, East Timor, half of a lush and balmy palm-fringed island, had enjoyed a whiff of independence when Portugal, undergoing its own revolution, withdrew in 1974. Before leaving, the Portuguese hastily organized an election that was won handily by the fledgling Leftist-Nationalist party Fretilin. But with the blessings of then U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Indonesia, already controlling the western half of the island, launched a full-scale invasion of the eastern portion in 1975. Neither the UN nor its member states ever formally recognized Indonesian sovereignty there; but no foreign entity mounted resistance when Indonesian forces unleashed a campaign of genocide. Some 200,000 people, a third of the preinvasion population, were killed over the quarter century of occupation; survivors fought harder than ever for liberation. And after President Suharto was forced out of office in 1998, the successor government of B. J. Habibie permitted the UN to conduct a referendum on August 30, 1999, to choose between independence and integration, as an “autonomous” province, into Indonesia. Despite threats and acts of violence (between 3,000 and 5,000 were killed in the months preceding the election) by Indonesian “security” forces, voter turnout exceeded 98 percent, and more than 78 percent of the voters opted for independence. Punishment was swift. The U.S.-trained Indonesian special forces unit, Kopassus, and the paramilitary mobile brigade, Brimob, and their East Timorese militias—supposedly safeguarding voters and election results—ran amuck, killing some 2,000 and driving more than three-fourths of the population from their homes. About 250,000 were driven forcibly to camps under militia control across the border in Indonesian West Timor. Towns and villages were leveled, properties plundered, homes and crops burned, cattle rustled or slaughtered, irrigation systems ruined. The capital, Dili, was rendered a ghost town, with hardly a public building left standing. In the country as a whole, some 75 percent of the buildings were destroyed. Once again the UN and the international community (that’s not “them,” that’s us) fiddled while East Timor burned. Only Australia was willing to talk about dispatching troops, and then only with U.S. clearance, which was slow to come. When the Clinton administration finally announced its decision to cut off military assistance, Indonesian forces started to withdraw. Only then was President Habibie able to determine that his own forces were out of control and to invite the UN to send in the Australian-led force, INTERFET. Without that invitation, Russia and China would not have accepted a Security Council decision to intervene. It was not until October, when the smoke had cleared and the territory’s physical infrastructure had been utterly demolished, that the United Nations

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Transitional Authority in East Timor (UNTAET) was established and reconstruction could begin.3 The Security Council resolution had empowered UNTAET to exercise all legislative and executive authority until formal independence was recognized; and that it did, presiding over all aspects of macroeconomic policy and political institution building as well as many details of day-to-day administration. Leaders of the proindependence movement, organized as the National Council for East Timorese Resistance (CNRT), protested their exclusion, arguing that having won the referendum they were entitled to participation, but UNTAET countered that, in the absence of general elections, there were no legitimately elected leaders and parties. At least until the elections of 2001, the Indonesian military continued from time to time to rearm militias and filter them over the border to stir up trouble. On the eve of independence, more than 60,000 East Timorese were still being held hostage in refugee camps over the border in West Timor in squalid conditions, unmonitored since September 2000. Following the murder at that time of three of its employees serving in the camps, the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) withdrew all of its personnel. Even so, the UNHCR felt obliged to stave off starvation in the camps, so it continued to supply essentials, knowing that it was supplying the militias as well, and giving the militias further incentive to hold hostages as an insurance policy.

NOT NECESSARILY THE ELECTORALLY CHALLENGED Few of the East Timorese with whom I spoke during the run-up to the elections of 2001 were prepared to dismiss lightly the worst-case scenarios of plotting by Indonesian special forces, Kopassus, and the militias. Those groups had argued before the referendum that under Fretilin East Timor might become “the Cuba of Southeast Asia” and that its political participation threatened a civil war.4 Election planners and monitors had to be mindful as well of a smorgasbord of reliable means of disrupting and corrupting elections employed elsewhere in the underdeveloped and overdeveloped world, many of which could be especially tempting in the Timorese context. Mimicking of the names, flags, or logos of more popular parties, for example, can spread confusion and deceit in any electorate and might have been particularly befuddling in East Timor where 60 percent of the population was illiterate. Nationalists suspected the chicanery of Indonesian intelligence and its local allies in the appearance of new parties whose emblems might have been mistaken for those of the independence movement, Fretilin, with which most of the population identified.

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Elections are also prone to attract money or violence or both, as the East Timorese know all too well. And the staging of elections in a society just emerging from conflict is in itself risky, as it can be expected either to intensify polarization or to generate schisms where the unity forged by struggle remains crucial to national reconstruction or decision-making autonomy. For the most part, though, Timorese social activists focused on more immediate problems and challenges. Voter registration, in which UN volunteers assumed a major role, was an awesome task where homes and villages had been destroyed and residents dispersed. Voter education was also a formidable undertaking. The punishing experience of 1999 was this electorate’s first exposure to the process since 1975; and the objective in 2001 was different and more complex. They were to elect delegates, representing an array of new parties, to an assembly tasked with drawing up a constitution. Polls had shown that few outside of the capital, Dili, understood fully what the elections were about. Most seemed to think they would be electing a president. The UN transitional authority was just beginning a couple of months before the election to send educators into the countryside to teach local trainers about electoral processes and the choices voters were to make. Local nongovernmental organizations had expressed concern that this election represented a rush to judgment. Though other rationales were floated, premature scheduling of elections appeared to be the main reason Xanana Gusmão had withdrawn in June from the National Council (CNRT), which had become a consultative body representing the indigenous population within the UNTAET structure; and the National Council had, in turn, dissolved itself. As it happened, voter turnout, 91 percent in August 2001 for the election for the Constituent Assembly, which became the country’s first parliament, and 86 percent for the presidential election in April 2002, did not match the stunning 98 percent in 1999, when voters knew they were putting lives and livelihoods at risk. But neophyte East Timorese voters put to shame the phantom half of the U.S. electorate who can scarcely be bothered to turn out even for a presidential election. Moreover, East Timorese election planners and monitors might have had a thing or two to teach in Florida and Ohio.

HUMAN SECURITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY The election did not in itself leave the people of East Timor fully confident of the security of their independence. Issues of personal and national security remained linked with that of accountability for the wholesale crimes

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against the population. And security concerns were heightened by the Bush administration’s determination to lift or bypass legislative restrictions on U.S. military aid to Indonesia. In fact, by 2005 all remaining restrictions had been waived, and by 2007 the United States was once again providing military training to the notorious special forces and police units, Kopassus and Brimob, that had been held responsible by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations for atrocities on a major scale in the 1990s. Moreover, U.S. funding for “foreign military financing” for the Indonesian military in the FY2008 appropriations bill was double the amount allocated for 2007. As noted by the country’s highly respected human rights organization, Yayasan Hak, when the Timorese needed them most there were no effective international institutions to lift the impunity of those responsible at the highest levels for the worst of crimes. The newly established International Criminal Court, now investigating cases in The Hague, would have been the appropriate body, but it has no jurisdiction to deal with crimes committed before its governing treaty came into effect on July 1, 2002. Under the joint UN–East Timorese process, involving UNTAET’s Serious Crimes Unit and the so-called Special Panels, 392 individuals were indicted before the process was concluded in 2005; but Indonesia refused to cooperate, so most of those indicted remained free, and some of the masterminds of mass violence and destruction remained in positions of power. An ad hoc tribunal that finally began work in Jakarta in 2002 brought charges against lesser officials, but only for failing to prevent crimes, not for committing them. All but one (an East Timorese militia commander) were acquitted or had convictions overturned on appeal, and no Indonesian military officer has been convicted of crimes against the East Timorese.5 To deal with some of the unfinished business, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed three international jurists in 2005 to a Commission of Experts (COE) to evaluate judicial processes to date and to propose means of achieving accountability for the serious crimes committed in East Timor in 1999. The COE’s recommendations included the establishment of an international criminal tribunal, if Indonesia remained recalcitrant, and the revival of the UN–East Timor Special Crimes Unit and Special Panels process. The Security Council response in August 2006, however, called only for the revival of investigations. Meanwhile, in early 2005, apparently in an effort to head off the appointment of the COE, the presidents of Indonesia and East Timor established a binational Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF). To establish a “shared historical record,” the commission was empowered to promote reconciliation and to recommend amnesty but not to compel testimony or to recommend prosecution. The CTF was roundly criticized by human rights organizations, and the UN’s COE found its terms of reference noncompliant with domestic and international law.6

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The most detailed documentation to date of human rights abuses perpetrated between 1974 and 1999 was to be found in a report released in 2006 by East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR). Its findings deal with roles of foreign governments, and it calls for reparations and for greater international control of the arms trade. Some of its documentation, however, with respect in particular to crimes against humanity perpetrated by Indonesian military officers, was burglarized from the offices of the crimes commission.7 Thus East Timorese nationalists continue to call for the establishment of an international tribunal, as authorized in January 2000 by the UN International Commission of Inquiry on East Timor. The UN should remain committed to the creation of such a tribunal if only to clarify events and to learn from its own monumental failure in 1999 to protect a vulnerable people and an electoral process for which it had assumed responsibility. For the East Timorese, the absence of such a tribunal means that conflict perpetrated by Indonesia will remain quarantined in East Timor. Uninterred anger will remain focused on local collaborators—rank-and-file militia— making the residue of imperial design look like civil war, thus delaying social healing and clouding prospects for much-needed reweaving of the social fabric. The centrifugal forces to be expected in postrevolutionary contexts have also begun to take their toll on the nationalist coalition. The Church that so strongly supported liberation for the overwhelmingly Catholic East Timorese was not prepared to condone the full range of liberties that women who fought and sacrificed so much now demand. And language differences that were surmountable in the face of a common enemy begin to divide cultures and generations when education policy is at issue. There is no serious lack of an educated elite, but those who attended local schools before 1975 speak Portuguese, while those educated since learned Bahasa Indonesia. Eighty-five percent of the population speaks one of the two dozen indigenous languages. Even dialects of the predominant lingua franca, Tetum, vary greatly among regions and from rural to urban areas. And there is rising demand on all sides to learn English, the de facto language of UN tutelage.

THE LEGACY OF UN RULE UNTAET’s Security Council mandate ended upon East Timor’s independence in May 2002. It was replaced then by a support (as opposed to authority) mandate for the UN Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET), of which the first phase ended in May 2004 and the second in May 2005. At that point, the UN Office in Timor Leste (UNOTIL), a political mission

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with a one-year mandate to May 2006, replaced UNMISET. In fact, the United Nations had pulled most of its personnel out of East Timor before the middle of 2005, leaving only remnants of peacekeeping forces, civilian police, a serious crimes unit, and a few civil servants. For many East Timorese, the departure of the UN came none too soon. The new Timorese government reported that more than half of the foreign assistance sent to the nation-in-waiting during the UN’s tenure was expended as salaries and consultant fees for foreigners. Not surprisingly, then, the Timorese had seen the development of a full-blown dual economy, with prices in Dili geared to the pay scales of international organizations. When those organizations pulled out, the dynamic part of that economy collapsed, leaving thousands out of work in Dili alone. There was little in the way of industry apart from coffee growing, and although most of the people were dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods, less than 2 percent of the foreign aid that reached the transitional authority had been spent on agriculture. The East Timorese government has been benefiting since 2005 from access to the Timor Gap petroleum reserves, which it shares with Australia; and it remains hopeful that the Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS agreement), signed between the two countries in January of 2006, will offer a major boost to the economy in the future. The Timorese had expected oil and gas development projects to move forward more expeditiously, but Australia had resisted sharing that resource in the manner recommended by the UN Law of the Sea, a manner that would allot to East Timor all (rather than half) of the royalties and taxes accruing from oil and gas produced on their side of the undersea median line between the maritime territories of the two countries.8 The UN, during its period of exercising full authority, accomplished a great deal in the way of resurrecting physical infrastructure, but considerably less in the provision of social services and safety nets. Even with respect to such basic “services” as maintenance of law and order—mainly policing and prison management—UNTAET was not always mindful of the requirements of due process and other individual protections found in international law. Compounding the frustrations of independence leaders, the UN adhered to a strategy of limiting the role of government and the levels of local wages, set at a fraction of those of their foreign counterparts. Meanwhile, international financial institutions seemed to be looking, mostly in vain, for operations or resources to privatize and to be pushing loans to a government-in-waiting committed to avoiding the debt trap. For all their good intentions, the UN bureaucrats and their counterparts from the World Bank and other donor agencies were running this unique experiment in nation building in accordance with the only real-world model they know: colonialism.9 To be sure, there are mountains of paper

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attesting to consultation with local leaders and to grassroots organizational efforts. And there have been a great many young people serving the intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations who are well trained in bottom-up, participatory approaches to development and fully committed to the well-being of the East Timorese. There are also a great many well-educated, experienced, sophisticated, and public-spirited East Timorese serving in political roles as well as in more than 200 local NGOs. But for the most part international bureaucrats and local leaders have simply failed to connect. Those who invested so much in the dream of independence became fearful early on that by the time an indigenous government was in place, the most crucial decisions would have been made and their mantle of office would be a straitjacket. It should be noted that for the East Timorese and other peoples who must avail themselves of the services of the United Nations, the organization’s overriding problem is not its arrogance but its weakness. In East Timor as elsewhere, the UN has been handicapped by the ad hoc nature of its funding. Most operations have been funded by a limited number of national donors, who may assume a proprietary sort of interest in the manner in which the program is designed and managed. It is pointless, then, to blame the UN, as such, for its shortcomings. It could scarcely be expected to fulfill its mandates effectively without more clout, which would in the first place require more nearly adequate funding as well as programmatic autonomy—real, not just nominal, independence from funding sources.

THE UNRAVELING OF A POORLY PATCHED FABRIC It was apparent to many observers well before the UN’s scheduled departure date of May 20, 2006, that the new state’s institutional bases were beginning to unravel. As is common in cases of international intervention, the UN and other aid agencies had favored and given consultative status to a few leaders who constituted the international face of the independence movement, while neglecting or marginalizing many social activists, including midlevel leaders of what became the movement’s political party, Fretilin. Thus the political solidarity essential to success for a chain-breaking movement of the oppressed began early on to show strains. Strains in the political system became outright fractures in what was to have been the security system. Again, as is not uncommon, the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) approach, which has come to be a sine qua non of postconflict reconstruction, was undertaken carelessly, if not selectively, in a manner that appeared to undermine the independence movement, based in the eastern part of the country, to reempower the militias based in the west and, with the kindling of unemployed

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urban youth, to reignite what had been an independence struggle as simmering civil strife. The FALINTIL, the fighting force that had been the engine of independence, was reportedly neglected by the government after the elections of 1999, left unemployed and underpaid. It eventually became the base of a new military establishment, Forças de Defensa de Timor-Leste (F-FDTL), which was under FALINTIL leadership but “reintegrated” with almost half of the body representing a Western, not necessarily proindependence, perspective. A new, “integrated” police force, Policia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL), was also created, but largely under leadership that had served the Indonesian occupation. It appeared in some ways to represent a counterforce to the F-FDTL, but like the F-FDTL it was internally fractured. UN field activities, especially with respect to security, tended to be ad hoc, according to an in-depth study by Ludovic Hood. No effort was made, he says, to acquire the lessons learned in Kosovo.10 Some failures of the security system might be explained by the hesitance of the UN itself, as UNTAET or later UNMISET, either to take its own initiatives with respect to the fate of FALINTIL and to assume responsibility for the subsequent development of the defense and police forces or to engage the nascent country’s political leaders in the process. Rather it left that responsibility with the bilateral donors, particularly Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, all of which had historical and prospective interests that made many East Timorese uncomfortable. Executive authority for all police functions remained in principle with the UN mission for two years after independence. But none of UNMISET’s one hundred civilian advisors were tasked with helping the new government establish civilian control over the PNTL.11 Instead UN police officers (CIVPOL), who had recruited into the leadership of PNTL 350 East Timorese known for previous service as officers for the Indonesian police, maintained full executive authority, while 3,000 additional police officers were recruited and trained. The unraveling began in earnest in March 2006 when some 600 soldiers, mainly from East Timor’s western regions bordering Indonesia, on strike against the eastern-based leadership of the 1,400-strong F-FDTL, were dismissed by Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. The mutiny of almost half the defense forces, still fully armed, led to east-west-based disintegration of the police as well and to a surge of vandalism and street-gang fighting, largely with axes, machetes, stones, and bows and arrows, though guns were by no means scarce. The mayhem was heightened in May by clashes between the defense forces and the police. At least thirty-seven people were killed. An attack by the rebel soldiers, led by former army major Alfredo Reinado, on the F-FDTL on May 23 caused the Timorese government, no doubt regretfully, to request the return of Australian troops. Reinado was indicted for murder

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and detained briefly but broke out of prison and remained in hiding with his loyalist troops. As fear mounted, especially in the east, and more than 100,000 fled their homes, East Timor’s foreign minister, Jose Ramos Horta, and the UN representative in East Timor, Mr. Hasegawa, appealed to the UN Security Council for a twelve-month renewal of the mandate for a UN-integrated office in Dili. Only the United States and Australia opposed that proposal, but their position prevailed at that time, and the mission was extended for only another month. Meanwhile, efforts of East Timor’s President Xanana Gusmão to bring about stability included forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Alkatiri and replacing him with Foreign Minister Ramos Horta. A year later, with some 3,000 mostly Australian troops guarding the polling places, a new election brought Ramos Horta to the presidency with a strong lead in a field of eight candidates. Leadership of the parliament was more closely contested, as Fretilin’s plurality was bested by a coalition put together by former president Xanana Gusmão. The positions of Ramos Horta and Gusmão were then reversed, as Horta called upon Gusmão to serve as prime minister. The elections of 2007 set off another round of skirmishes, particularly in the two eastern districts where some 150–200 homes were reported to have been burned down, in some cases clearly by gangs from western districts. Tensions reached another crescendo on February 11, 2008, when President Ramos Horta was shot at his home and gravely injured by gunmen under the leadership of the renegade Reinado. Reinado was killed in an exchange of gunfire with the president’s guards. At the same time, in what has been called an attempted coup, there was an unsuccessful ambush on the motorcade of Prime Minister Gusmão. Gusmão declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew; he also requested and expeditiously received additional security forces from Australia. Meanwhile the insurgent troops loyal to Reinado remained in hiding, presumably in the hills south of Dili. The commander in chief of the Timorese armed forces blamed the United Nations for the failure of its 1,400-member international police force to protect the country’s leaders and demanded an outside investigation.12 Even so, the expectation now is that foreign police and military forces will be in the country for a long time to come.

INDEPENDENCE WITHIN LIMITS? Emerging from centuries of colonialism and occupation, the East Timorese have been advised by a parade of consultants, representing intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations,

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and overdeveloped states on how to deal with the challenges of independence in the twenty-first century. But most of us who are so ready to advise hail from states where electoral credibility and independence as popular sovereignty are fast eroding and where twenty-first-century technology camouflages a return to nineteenth-century social relations. One of the questions that remain to be addressed is whether the failures revealed by the recent renewed resort to violence in East Timor should be seen as their failures or ours—the failures of the East Timorese or of the international community that rallied around ostensibly to midwife the birth of an independent nation. The case of East Timor, a source of pride for the United Nations and the international assistance community at its formal assumption of independence in 2002, sets in relief the pitfalls and challenges of guided postconflict transition and reconstruction. Whereas intervention, or entrance into conflict zones, for purposes of peacemaking or peacekeeping is usually too little and too late and lacking in mandate, exit is likely to be too early, before security for the most vulnerable has been seriously addressed and before the rule of law has been fully implanted. (That is not to say that military occupation by aggressors should be prolonged; their presence itself becomes the casus belli that may extend conflict for decades.) Extended guidance or protection by external administrators representing the United Nations and member countries lacking imperial ambitions may serve to buy time for the reweaving of social fabric. However, even those foreigners with the best of intentions and training run the risk of weakening local leadership, of building dependence rather than empowerment, of generating dual economies and ruralurban imbalance, and of exacerbating rather than ameliorating social inequities. Where the UN member states most involved in funding and in certain crucial aspects of transitional administration do indeed have imperial histories or contemporary hegemonic designs, we should not be surprised to see a people who had been sufficiently motivated and unified to win their independence—against all odds—rendered once again divided and dependent. Especially where popular mobilization threatens to liberate locals and to begin to level the playing field in socioeconomic terms, externally supported reconciliation processes tend to retilt the local social order so as to bring it back into alignment with the operative model of the global order. I am not suggesting that the basic problem in this case was one of calculated ignorance or of corporate or contractor freelancing—as we have seen in more recent nation-building “failures.” Rather, it appears that operations in this case were mostly “by the book.” That in itself suggests that the book should be reviewed, along with the inclination to structure all nation-building or -rebuilding programs by the same book, as opposed to in accordance with the needs and priorities and visions of particular peoples.

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East Timor’s now apparent “failure to thrive” comprises many failures, among them (1) failure to prevent or stop sporadic violence, (2) failure to empower local leadership, (3) failure to account for atrocities and to promote social healing, (4) failure to cultivate a locally sustainable economy, and finally, (5) failure to protect noncombatants—including even elected government leaders. The tendency of international media, echoing in part the international assistance community, is to blame the victims—in this case, the local people. Even blaming the United Nations, or otherwise taking refuge in failure, is not helpful. The UN is not them—it’s us. We are all accountable, and we should all be asking why it is that the worst of history keeps repeating itself. It is still possible to imagine a launching of the new state of East Timor under very different circumstances—circumstances in which the United States had issued its ultimatum to its Indonesian military clients before the vote on independence, thus enabling the United Nations to take responsibility for the security not only of the ballots but also of the voters and their built environment. The road to independence would have been strewn with fewer potholes had it bypassed the avoidable postelection rampage and rubble. Moreover, it is hard to see the logic of expecting real independence, or popular sovereignty, to spring from a process in which the rescue crew assumes full operating authority rather than playing a supporting role, especially since, in this case, the argument of a lack of local expertise does not wash. In fact, in dealing with the challenges of securing survival and self-sufficiency in the face of scarcity, the East Timorese surely have more to teach than we. Over the course of their long struggle, many have learned that each-against-all individualism reaps only a nothing-left-to-lose kind of freedom, that security can only be collective, and that real security lies ultimately in the symbiosis and mutual commitments of a caring community. And perhaps they have also learned to be cautious about accepting gifts from strangers.13

NOTES 1. This chapter builds upon my observations gleaned in meetings with a great many domestic and international NGOs, as well as with Timorese political leaders and officials of intergovernmental organizations, including UN peacekeepers, in the course of a speaking tour in East Timor in 2001, shortly before the constituent assembly elections. Some of my earlier observations were published as “Indonesia: Independence for East Timor?” Z Magazine, July–August 2002, Vol. 15, No. 7/8, pp. 26–28. General impressions have also been gleaned from conversations at Oxford University in 1998 with now president Jose Ramos-Horta and in 2005 with Timor-Leste’s first First Lady Kristy Sword Gusmão and with a visiting delegation of Timorese leaders at Trinity College, with Bishop Carlos Filipe

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Belo at the presidential inauguration ceremonies in Taiwan in 2000, and on various occasions with Antero (“Neto”) Benedito, founder and director of the Center for Peace and Human Rights in Dili. 2. A UN officer who had been in East Timor at the time told me that the UN had fully understood at that time, in 1999, that if the islanders voted for independence, the Indonesian military and its Timorese militia would “run amok,” but they were not authorized to do anything about it. In fact, there were no armed UN peacekeepers accompanying UNAMET, the election organizing mission. 3. This tumultuous period is covered in great detail in Anthony L. Smith, “The Role of the United Nations in East Timor’s Path to Independence,” Asian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 9, No. 2, December 2001, pp. 25–53. It is also addressed by Noam Chomsky in Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. 4. Smith, “Role of the United Nations.” See also Juan Federer, The U.N. in East Timor: Building Timor Leste, a Fragile State, Darwin, N.T., Australia: Charles Darwin University Press, 2005; and Joseph Nevins, A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 5. Paul Barber, UK Indonesia Human Rights Campaign, “Stability in East Timor,” Guardian Weekly, July 14–20, 2006, p. 4. See also the online reports of the East Timor Action Network/US, www.etan.org/news/2007/03justsumm.htm, and www.etan.org/news/2007/11unscr.htm. 6. The January 2008 report on the CTF by Megan Hirst for the International Center for Transitional Justice (New York) is entitled “Too Much Friendship, Too Little Truth.” 7. “Justice Processes and Commissions for Timor-Leste,” www.etan.org/news/ 2007/03justsumm.htm. 8. Union Aid Abroad, Australian People for Health, Education, and Development Abroad (APHEDA), “Update on East Timor,” report circulated by Oxfam in June 2006. 9. According to Smith, Gusmão was heard, on occasion, to refer to the UN as the “neocolonialists,” Smith, “Role of the United Nations,” p. 44. 10. Ludovic Hood, “Missed Opportunities: The United Nations, Police Service and Defense Force Development in Timor-Leste, 1999–2004,” Civil Wars, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 143–162. 11. Hood, “Missed Opportunities.” 12. Ian Mackinnon, “East Timor’s President Wounded in Rebel Attack,” Guardian Weekly, February 15, 2008. Accounts of the events of February 2008 have been gleaned from personal correspondence and from online reports from the New York Times, Asia Pacific section, the Australian, the Jamaica Gleaner, and the East Timor Action Network/US. 13. A “potshot” by my friend Ashleigh Brilliant, the famous epigramist, seems appropriate here. “If things don’t start to get better soon, I may have to ask you to stop helping me.”

Part VII THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Being a superpower means never having to say you’re liable. If war is the answer, you have asked the wrong question.

Hardships for Cubans resulting from the U.S. embargo were compounded by the collapse of the Soviet sphere market in the early 1990s, but the Cuban economy recovered quickly as a consequence of Cuban ingenuity, survival skills, and tourism. Havana’s new airport, 2002.

16 Empire as a State of War

Politicians and pundits are forever saying “Nobody wants war”—and publics pretend to believe them. In fact, at least for a superpower, all wars are wars of choice. Otherwise, how would we distinguish a superpower from any other self-important bully in the neighborhood? The good news for my generation is that we are finally able to see a consensus in principle among states and peoples around the world that all of us, humanity in general, are entitled to respect for our basic human rights. The bad news is that in fact or in practice, there are exceptions, the most common and far-reaching of them being “in time of war.”

EXCEPTIONS IN TIME OF WAR The bad news, further, is that the entire lifetime of my generation of Americans (the generation that came of age in the 1960s) has been a time of war. The same might have been said of the generation of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, except that there were somewhat longer periods of respite between their wars. The Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I were not presumed to constitute a single ongoing state of war. There were, to be sure, the ongoing wars against Native Americans in the nineteenth century, and frequent outbursts of “small wars” that demanded official U.S. engagement—aspects of a continual thrust of imperial expansion. World War I—the “war to end all wars”—was indeed followed by a respite of some two decades free of major wars. But the “consequences of 189

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the peace,” foreseen so clearly by British economist John Maynard Keynes— consequences that punished peoples rather than leaders—began to engulf Europe, then Asia, and ultimately the United States in an even more allencompassing war. The long-term consequences of WWII have shown peace lovers around the world that the only thing worse than losing a war is winning too big. Of course, U.S. allies and client states were also impacted by the enhanced power and status of their armed forces. Unless it is held in check by a strong civilian political apparatus or by its own internal cleavages, a wellorganized, well-trained, and well-equipped military will not just sit on its hands; it will make war or politics or both. The United States emerged from World War II with three-fourths of the world’s invested capital and two-thirds of its industrial capacity. Documents declassified in the 1970s reveal that George Kennan, credited as the architect of the policy of containment, admonished in 1948, We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 3.6 percent of the population. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. . . . We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. . . . We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. . . . The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but . . . we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government.1

In the postwar period, the United States began to teach a new global strategy based on the need for permanent alliance in the face of a presumably permanent war. The cold war worldview held that the enemy was not a nation, or even a group of nations, but rather an ideology, as likely to be carried by compatriots as by foreigners. Conventional military strategy premised on temporary ally and adversary relationships for protection or extension of national borders gave way to training for counterinsurgency against an enemy as likely to be internal as external. The United States had only a year or two to enjoy the new peace and freedom after the ending of World War II before the cold war began to cast a chill over the freedom we were presumed to have secured. The red scare that swept then across the land with McCarthyism and the new maze of security laws and regulations and agencies has never seriously abated. The cold war was not to be another “war to end all wars.” It was the war to end all peace. When it appeared that the indispensable enemy, in the late 1980s under Gorbachev, might sue for peace, the “defense” establishment swung into action, generating new enemies and new war rationales—drug wars, resource wars, and, even then, a new War on Terror. By the time the “evil empire” imploded at the beginning of the 1990s, the scaffolding of a

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new state of war was in place. It needed only a “Reichstag fire” to be fully activated.

THE ENEMY CRISIS AND SUPPLY-SIDE WAR I am not alluding here to a conspiracy—a product of the coordinated actions of witting industrialists—but to a system. Nor do I presume that it is peculiar to the United States. War has perhaps been more common than peace to much of the world for many millennia. But it has not always been so destructive. Moreover, it is not inevitable. Many countries, perhaps most at one time or another, and notably over much of the past half century those of Scandinavia generally and including the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Costa Rica, and New Zealand have systematically cultivated tolerance and equity at home and peace and equitable development abroad. In fact, the greatest hope for peace and social justice in the Third World lies in the transformation of the First World. In a part of the United States where war was less popular then than it is now, my father and I used to sing an old spiritual, “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those in the Pentagon suites and Rocky Mountain bunkers working on the next generation of Star Wars or on the “imaginary weapons” featured in the recently published book by that name (e.g., nuclear grenades and mind-control techniques for handling the “human problem”) would decide to study war no more? But before that can happen, those of us who are not dependent on war, or who want to be dependent no longer, must study it carefully. It is unfortunate that the “state of war” to which I allude is not a conspiracy, because a conspiracy—made up of individuals—can be disassembled and prosecuted. A state of war is a system, an organic equilibrium that will not be disturbed simply by the replacement of individuals in key roles. The configuration of roles themselves, having roots in domestic and international economic interests and in electoral markets and legal institutions and their religious and psychosocial underpinnings, would have to be changed. The required transformation would call for a conceptualization of security that embraces all of us; for weaning the economy, the legislative process, and the electoral system away from imperial expansion and from war and the threat of war; for removing the protective shield of deniability from elected and bureaucratic leaders, from opinion leaders in the media, academia, organized religion, and other institutions, and from overworked, intimidated, uninformed, despairing, or apathetic publics; and finally for rediscovering a value system and a vision of national and global civilization

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that is powerful enough to substitute for the political high voltage of war— not the immoral equivalent of war but rather the social requirements of peace.

THE PERCEPTUAL NATURE OF SECURITY Security is a conceptual trump card, played always by those who have the most to lose rather than the most to fear. The concept of security is eminently elastic. Whether with regard to states, classes, or individuals, the idea of what is to be secured stretches to encompass not only what the “haves” have, but what they think they have or think they should have. Emerging from WWII obsessed with security, the U.S. government turned inward, chilling relations within the State Department with a debate on “who lost China?”—as if China had been ours to lose. In the absence of an immediate military threat to the national territory, especially in the case of a superpower, there is no such thing as an objective assessment of security threats. Security and insecurity lie in the minds of the strategists. Thus the Reagan administration, in 1983, perceiving a threat to U.S. national security, launched an invasion of the tiny, distant island state of Grenada, which had a population of about 10,000 and no standing army. The most nearly credible of the many rationales presented by administration spokesmen for that action was the fear that if it did not invade, the United States would be viewed as a “paper tiger.”2 The “paper tiger” or “pitiful helpless giant” insecurity complex has been cited at some point by virtually every U.S. administration since World War II to explain strategic goals and military actions that are otherwise inexplicable. It was cited repeatedly throughout the Vietnam War years and was the fallback rationale for mushrooming military involvement in Central America in the 1980s. If we cannot control the little countries in our own backyard, the argument goes, how can our allies and our enemies take us seriously? In fact, such evidence as is available suggests that what is in doubt among U.S. allies and enemies alike is not whether or not the United States will use its military power but whether or not it will use that power in a rational manner. The first step for U.S. policymakers into this particular kind of credibility trap is the declaration that some distant or relatively insignificant and powerless state is “vital” to U.S. security. It follows that events in an area or state that is vital must be controlled by the United States. No rational person could discount the military power of the United States, but obviously there are limits to the efficacy of military solutions to political problems. Nor is there room for doubt that the American people have the political will to defend themselves. But there are clearly limits to

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the willingness of the American people to defend governments of dubious legitimacy in distant lands. If policymakers proceed, nevertheless, to make extensive commitments on the basis of such casual declarations of vital interest, their fears of loss of credibility may be self-fulfilling. It has commonly been the case that those individuals, groups, or nations whose wealth and power should make them invulnerable are, in fact, the most paranoid; by their frenetic attempts to ensure their security, they bring on their own destruction. Security as the problem implies force as the solution. A bottom-up approach to security might recognize that war itself is the greatest threat and thus cultivate peace through multicultural understanding and multilateral cooperation. In times of global warming, security policy must include preparedness to deal with natural disasters at home as well as support for public transportation and alternative energy sources. But it would concern itself also with hunger and disease and freelance violence. A bottom-up approach might acknowledge that no nation is secure when those who are able to work are not able to earn enough to feed and shelter and otherwise care for their young, their old, and their sick. A people are only as secure as the most vulnerable in their midst.

SUSTAINABLE DEBT AND SUSTAINABLE WAR Almost a century after the “war to end all wars,” war itself is more than ever the greatest threat to the security of civilians as well as to respect for human rights. More than 50 million people were killed by the wars of the last half of the twentieth century; several million more have died in the eight years since, largely in conflicts raging under the radar screen of the international communications media, in Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, Colombia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Southwest and Himalayan Asia, East and Central Africa—the Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and Somalia, Burundi, Uganda, and particularly the Congo. That is not to mention the tens of millions more killed by warrelated disease and starvation and those who have been disabled, displaced, and dispossessed. The end of the cold war saw a spike in the number of hot wars underway. The breakup of the Soviet empire launched a process of social unraveling that may have no clear stopping place—from a putative federation of republics, nation-states that though cut with cookie-cutter precision inevitably retain smaller nations or secessionist miniatures inside. Moreover, the crippling of one of the previous superpowers left the other with what some call a heightened sense of global responsibility and others call extraordinary arrogance. It also turned a relationship based on

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mutual recrimination about human rights abuses into one of mutual denial, tolerance, and cover-up of abuses. The number of hot—as opposed to simmering—wars dropped in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but the number of casualties did not. In the Congo alone more than 4 million were killed between 1998 and 2005. Moreover, the globalization of a natural resource feeding frenzy in the past two decades has roused many would-be stateholders from what had been a benign form of denial. For several centuries, many national, colonial, and neocolonial governments had been content to live with the illusion of control over claimed territories. Heightened stakes have since led them to mount military campaigns in an attempt seriously to control indigenous peoples, on rugged lands, that they need not, should not, and probably cannot dominate. With all that, few of these wars can be said to be over. It may be that just as an international economy fueled by debt has settled into acceptance of “sustainable debt,” an international power system underpinned by arms production and armed forces has settled into acceptance of sustainable levels of conflict. The likes of “small wars,” counterinsurgency, and “low-intensity conflict” have been a part of the lexicon and experience of the U.S. armed forces for more than a century, but both the imperial economy and the organizational bureaucratic imperative demand expansion. Unconventional war is now the only kind that is conventional. In the business of abuse, including the mother of all abuses—war—things are rarely as they seem. As politics by other means, wars, like elections, are tools—tools most readily available to those actors with the biggest tool sheds. War is almost always misrepresented. Most wars are labeled either interstate wars or civil wars. In fact, most supposedly interstate wars are colonial or neocolonial wars. Most supposedly civil wars are, at least in origin, revolutionary—that is, nation against state (people against government)—or counterrevolutionary, state against nation (government against people)—and whatever the origins, such a war will soon have characteristics of both. Wars of resistance to occupation are likely to be mislabeled as interstate or civil wars, insurrection, or terrorism. In fact most modern wars, however they are labeled, are in some way or to some degree neocolonial, or imperial. Most of the wars that have raged since the end of WWII at mid-twentieth century have engaged so-called nonstate actors and have been labeled as civil wars, but they have not been very civil, even in the sense of being contained within national borders; both the fighting and those fleeing from it can be expected to spill over. Moreover, such wars—of competing warlords or guerrillas against governors or government-supported militias, or of communists or terrorists supposedly against Christian civilization or modern consumerism—almost always from the beginning, and always before the end, draw upon resources—arms, training, fuel, money, information,

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propaganda, or diplomatic or political support—from more ambitious states. The “nonstate actors” these wars are said to engage are allegedly, but not necessarily, unconnected to governments of their own states. Death squads and militias, in particular, tend to be more or less surreptitiously underwritten and used by their own governments as well as by ambitious foreign powers. In fact, civil wars in the Third World often have more to do with political issues and partisan or factional competition in distant hegemonic states than with locally based disputes, disputes that might have remained at the level of family feud had not a superpower chosen to sign on.

THE LURE OF EMPIRE: A “NEW AMERICAN CENTURY” The elephant in the room in the early twenty-first century is not simply war. A U.S. public fatigued with the daily accounts of casualties and corruption has finally pushed war to the forefront of political campaign chatter. Public discourse has even dealt occasionally with the seamier side of war, as atrocities that turn out to be ours—not theirs—crop up like so many tips of an iceberg. But the elephant in the room remains unmentioned—and thus unseen. Actually seeing the pachyderm would call for recognizing patterns. It would be necessary to notice that we launch our wars not because we must, militarily, but because we can—without serious concern about retaliation. The “must” with respect to supply-side war has to do with the underpinnings of an economy in which the profits that have come to be expected would be hard to come by in the absence of fear. Rather than stumbling erratically into war after war after isolated war, the United States lives in a state of war; at the end of 2007, it had military bases in 63 countries and troop presence in 156, as well as conflicts raging or simmering on all continents save Antarctica.3 The elephant in the room has a name well recognized elsewhere in the world, which is “Empire.” The United States is not the first, and will not be the last, of the world’s major empires; but it is the one that has loomed large over the last half of the twentieth century and the one that is wreaking the greatest havoc at the turn of the twenty-first century. A public opinion poll of 17,000 people in fifteen countries, conducted in 2006 by the Pew Research Group, found that most believed the United States to be the biggest threat to world peace. Another poll jointly commissioned by major newspapers in the United States, Britain, Canada, Mexico, and Israel in 2006 produced similar results.4 Much of the Third World has been concerned since 2000 about the implications of what Bush administration insiders called a “New American Century”—presumably all around the world this time. It behooves us therefore to

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know something of its modus operandi. To that end, I draw some distinctions between those U.S. approaches to imperialism that are enduring and those that are subject to change, between those that are on the order of state-to-state actions and those that constitute penetration—continuous manipulation of the internal political process—and between those that are old (but still in the tool shed) and those that are new, with particular attention to “electoral democracy” as a maintenance tool of empire.5

UNCHANGING MOTIVES, CHANGING MEANS The most enduring feature of the U.S. approach to empire has been enduring far longer than the United States itself—that is, the nature of the power game. In the Golden Age of Greece, Thucydides expressed it in simple terms: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature, they seek to dominate wherever they can.” Empire does not mean the exploitation of one nation by another, but rather the exploitation by a ruling group, in the first instance, of its own nation (e.g., as taxpayers and troops), enabling the exploitation of others. Thus the strategies and tactics for building and maintaining empires and their consequences that affect subordinated states affect the population of the metropole, or core state, as well. It cannot be said, then, that the American imperial system has failed—every system works for somebody—but it has clearly failed to serve the interests of the American people. American exceptionalism is a myth. Superpowers do not promote democracy, not at home and certainly not abroad. Democracy requires popular sovereignty—power to govern without external control—the antithesis of empire. Empire implies control—at the least, exercise of a veto power over policy and personnel. Popular sovereignty means “getting out of control.” Empires do, however, dominate the discourse with their own cover stories or rationales—that is, they offer theater. What, then, apart from rationale, or “spin,” is subject to change in the building and maintenance of empire? (1) Tools, techniques, and tactics— the means of rape and pillage; (2) institutional roles, or career and interest profiles, of the actors; and (3) the nature of the loot—from precious stones and metals to land and minerals, including petroleum; markets and utilities, now including even water; interest and portfolio investment; and finally cheap and docile labor. As to spin, empire from the perspective of its architects and apologists has enduringly been about bringing God and civilization to the heathen, along with, for the last half century, development and democracy. The most immediate packaging of the pursuit of empire, however—from the Crusades to white man’s burden to manifest destiny, gunboat diplomacy, wars to end

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all wars, the cold war, the drug wars, or the War on Terror—has been sensitive to targets of opportunity and to serendipity (particularly the scare potential of unanticipated events) and subject to change at the drop of an opinion poll. There is little doubt that national leaders, generally adept at the resolution of cognitive dissonance, have been able to convince themselves of the worthiness of their intentions. What has been exceptional about the American experience, however, has been the ease with which leaders have marketed their spins and passed along to the general public a predilection to seek plausible deniability for the society at large and to excoriate any who might ask probing questions. The administration of George W. Bush has put a particularly clever spin on the American Empire, speaking instead of the American Century. Those of us who have been around for a few decades have had some practice in opposing empires, but how does one go about opposing a century? Unfortunately for the Bush league, they are staking their claim a little late. While the power game doesn’t change, the powers in the play-offs do. America has already had a half century, and that’s about all it is likely to get. Competition for imperial control of the twenty-first century comes not only from an emerging superpower—China, to which the United States has become deeply indebted—but also from the stateless creditor cartel, the black-hole density of corporate economic power that propels what has become known as neoliberal globalization. The appearance of coincidence between that “market power” and U.S. political and military power does not mean that global economic power is at the service of U.S. empire, but rather that U.S. power is at the service of the creditor cartel.

IMPERIAL ACTIONS AND PENETRATED STATES State-to-state actions, generally reactive to perceived threats or opportunities, either domestic or in client states, and open or at least hard to camouflage, may be diplomatic in the sense of conveyed through diplomatic channels even when the action taken is quite undiplomatic, as in the case of veiled or open public threats. Such threats have been employed by the United States from time to time over the years in often vain attempts to influence the outcomes of elections or legislative debate or of other aspects of the domestic power game. On several occasions since the turn of the twenty-first century, U.S. ambassadors have publicly implied or threatened that if disfavored candidates were elected, trade with and aid from the United States would be jeopardized. It should be noted that open attempts to influence the outcome of elections have most often been counterproductive. Other common “diplomatic”

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control techniques have included exercise of a veto over who might serve in presidential cabinets and whose support a U.S.-favored candidate might accept, a major objective always being to drive a wedge between Center and Left. The United States also uses bilateral and multilateral treaties or organizations selectively to justify its decisions, impose its will, or damage leaders or would-be leaders who do not welcome its dictates.6 The State Department’s annual report on countries permissive of human trafficking has become just another all-purpose power tool. The report for 2007 initially listed sixteen countries, but the “final determination” published by the White House, which under bilateral treaties becomes a basis for allocation of carrots and sticks, listed only Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela—the “usual suspects” who show up on all administration blacklists. The recent deceptive use of treaties and agreements on nonproliferation, first against Iraq and more recently against Iran, is too well known to bear elaboration here, but the fact that the issue was even broached with the government of Luiz Inacio da Silva (universally known as Lula) in Brazil set off alarms around the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, in South America, the United States has made extensive use of the “certification” provisions of the drug war agreements—threatening disruption of trade and aid to the decertified—to support or damage or otherwise have its way with signatory governments. The most common U.S. use of international agreements to impose its will or punish the obstreperous is the use of conditionality agreements between debtor states and international financial institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to force such states to adopt policies punishing to their own peoples, including policies that may relate only remotely to debt service but that are beneficial to foreign investors. Such use of the IMF, often in tandem with the World Bank, by U.S. and other creditors backed by the U.S. government has become continuous over the last couple of decades. The state-to-state approach includes also some very undiplomatic initiatives that, though not necessarily open, are not easy to camouflage. These range from collusion in the assassination of leaders to outright full-scale military invasion. The episodic imposition or attempted imposition of control might also include the drafting of unenthusiastic allies into service in U.S. wars. Service has clearly been more willing at some times than at others. Troops drawn into Iraq as members of the “coalition of the willing,” or, more realistically, based on the necessary bribes, the coalition of the billing, have recently looked more like the coalition of the bailing, as one country after another has pulled its troops out. Costa Rica had lent no troops or technicians, only its name. But in mid-2004, the Costa Rican Supreme Court, treating the United States like a pesky telemarketer, demanded that the country’s name be removed from the list.

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The more dramatic episodes of imposing or demonstrating imperial control, as in sending in the Marines, often appear to represent the deployment of weapons of mass distraction, undertaken more likely for their effect on the domestic power game—elections, opinion polls, or impending legislation— than for effect on the target country or region. The most effective tactics for empire maintenance are played out day by day, year by year, almost automatically, below the radar screen. They have become so nearly routine as to be scarcely recognized for what they are either by those who carry them out or by those who are targeted.

THE NATURE OF PENETRATION Such continuous operations are intended either to tilt or to maintain power balances within client states. They serve to inject the representatives or interests of the dominant state directly into the power games and prospects of every politically articulated, or relevant, group in the target society, an array of groups or social categories that changes over time. Tools and tactics for influencing and for nurturing or suppressing also change over time, but those employed for nurturing would generally include funding and coalition building among existing organizations and institutions. Groups or organizations to be suppressed or co-opted would be infiltrated and perhaps replicated. That is, new and better-funded organizations might be generated to operate parallel to previously existing ones, so as to provoke schisms and to weaken by siphoning off funds and personnel and generally sowing confusion and division. Societies in which popular leaders or parties are already discredited by the economic straitjacket of debt and credit conditionality are particularly vulnerable to such manipulation. The strategy in broad outline is designed to continuously (1) unite and strengthen the Right (the economic elite and its guardians and apologists); (2) divide and weaken the Left (the poor, peasants, and wage-dependent workers, their service providers, and intellectual defenders); and (3) scare the bejeebers out of the middle class (professionals, salaried workers, and small business owners, less poor but highly insecure). Co-optation or underwriting of local media and ad agencies plays a major role in meeting this objective. Much of the effort involved in this approach has been undertaken by official intelligence agencies operating under cover of other government agencies supposedly supporting, for example, security, development, labor, or trade; government-funded but supposedly private contractors; and a broad array of NGOs whose personnel may be witting, or unwitting, or should be witting but in denial. Other operations for tilting power balances, particularly for directly influencing electoral outcomes, previously carried out by

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the CIA under relatively deep cover are now undertaken almost openly through the National Endowment for Democracy and its two partisan offspring organizations. It appears that some members of Congress in the 1980s, tired of feigning ignorance of operations with botched covers, decided to take some of those operations out from under the table and plant them boldly on top—in the name of promoting democracy.

OLD OBJECTIVES AND NEW TOOLS The means, or maintenance tools, of empire tend to be cumulative. Empires are not good at discarding things. Any tool or tactic that ever worked, and many that did not, are likely still to be found in the tool shed. Any tool—a law, a treaty, an election, even a value or principle, like human rights—can become a weapon. Any weapon can be expected to fall into the wrong hands. And any weapon is likely to serve best the player with the biggest armory, at least in the short term. As the Bush administration just proved once again with the invasion of Iraq, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time—and that’s quite enough. In combination with misleading information and misuse of treaties, even straightforward colonialism, complete with military occupation and torture, is not out of date. One can readily see, particularly in Latin America, that the full range of imperial options employed over more than a century is still in play: • Full-scale military invasion, as employed complete with a coalition of the billing in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983, and unilaterally in Panama in 1989. Since then the targets of high-intensity warfare have been mainly in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. • Exile invasion, or cross-border operations. Among the best known deployments have been those in Guatemala in 1954, at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in 1961, and, in Nicaragua, continual incursions of the Contras throughout the 1980s. Also beginning in the 1980s, exile incursions from Pakistan’s tribal lands into Afghanistan have been continuous. The most recent U.S.-promoted exile invasion in the Western Hemisphere was that leading to the “facilitated departure” of President Aristide from Haiti early in 2004. • Low-intensity conflict. Known in the Philippines as well as in Central America and the Caribbean during the first three decades of the twentieth century as “small wars,” this plague, complete with scorched earth, free-fire zones, and strategic hamlets—tactics later refined in Vietnam—returned to Central America in the 1980s; to the Andes, as the War on Drugs, in the 1980s and 1990s; and in intensified form to

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Colombia and the Amazon in the early twenty-first century as the War on Drugs morphed into the War on Terror. Regime change by military coup has been particularly common in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, but has been seen also in Africa and elsewhere. The most ambitious and perhaps most damaging uses of this tool in the Western Hemisphere, in that each unleashed more than a decade of brutalizing military counterrevolution, were those in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973. “Diplomatic” carrots and sticks. The largest outlays of carrots usually turn out to be accompanying (e.g., as “economic support funds”) much larger outlays of sticks, for use by governments against their own people. Sticks might be said to include the previously mentioned ambassadorial threats against electorates, threats of disruption of aid and trade if the wrong candidates are chosen. Such threats have been remarkably open of late and, at times, remarkably counterproductive. Economic sanctions. But for South Africa in the early 1990s, this tactic has an almost unmixed record of failure—that is, failure to meet stated goals. The most spectacular of these failures has been the sanctions against Cuba, in place now for forty-six years and counting. Its target, Fidel Castro, stood down ten U.S. presidents and was, when he stepped down in 2007, the world’s longest-serving head of government. Elsewhere, however, informal and limited sanctions have sometimes been effective in influencing specific policy outcomes in target states. Economic manipulation has been continuous, widespread, multifaceted, and generally effective, particularly in the form of, or as a threat of, a U.S. credit freeze backed by other public and private creditors and coordinated by the IMF. Such freezes have often led to bouts of devastating hyperinflation. But the levers that were available to a single superpower in decades past have been superseded and dwarfed by those available to the private money movers, or “market forces,” of the globalized twenty-first century; they are addressed in the next section. Democratization, or electoral manipulation, has been employed at least since the early decades of the twentieth century when U.S. Marines, occupying Central American and Caribbean countries, presided over “Free and Fair” elections. (The quotation marks are not mine. “Free and Fair” elections are addressed that way in the Small Wars Manual of the epoch.) Means of influencing electoral outcomes, however, have been finely honed since that time, as we see below.

ENHANCED POWERS AND AMBITIONS Innovations in the business of empire expansion in the early twenty-first century derive in large part from the extreme concentration of wealth that

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followed the implosion of the Soviet Union and its alternate market system. Such market monopolization has led to the monetization and commercialization of almost everything from breathable air to body parts and presidencies and to the apparent conviction on the part of those at the high end of the income gap that the prospects for continuing concentration are limitless. Money movers are thus inclined and able to invest more than ever before in means of controlling the power game. A particularly consequential area of this concentration, for purposes of empire maintenance and expansion, is that of control—both national and global—of media. In addition, technological and bureaucratic innovations, from electronic funds transfer to electronic voting machines to the datamining capabilities of the Internet, multiply the levers available to those having imperial ambitions. Some such innovations, fortunately, also expand levers available to those who would resist. As mentioned above, corporate conglomeration, enabled by deregulation and the abandonment of antitrust enforcement, has made it more difficult to identify the military-industrial complex as a category apart, and thus more difficult to juxtapose the interests of corporations dependent on effective consumer demand against those dependent only on generation of fear. The absorption of media into this multifaceted conglomeration has also made it more difficult to educate the public about the real costs of empire in standards of living as well as in civil and human rights. The challenge posed by creditor conditionalities has been noted in previous chapters. Desperate debtor nation governments, highly dependent on imports and dangerously short on foreign exchange, routinely relinquish— in effect, outsource—the central role of independent government, economic decision making, in exchange for new lines of credit. Since the demise of the Soviet-dominated alternative market, creditors have operated in the manner of a cartel, acting together or in parallel in accordance with rules enforced by the international financial institutions. These institutions, particularly the IMF, play the role of a credit bureau, passing on each country’s creditworthiness and negotiating with countries individually on behalf of creditors collectively. The immobilization experienced by national leaders threatened with a credit freeze is compounded by the contingent but more general vulnerability to capital flight. Technology is not an independent force of nature, though it is often discussed or shrugged off as if it were. Technologies such as electronic funds transfer come into being and into use as a consequence of individual, institutional, and corporate interests and decisions. New technologies along with new categories of corporate organization have made it possible for corporate money movers to wreak financial havoc on uncooperative countries with virtual anonymity and absolute freedom from responsibility.

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During Brazil’s presidential election of 2002, the private credit-rating enterprise Standard and Poor operated a “Lula Meter.” When Lula, who had gained his popularity as a dedicated labor leader willing to take on the military dictatorship, moved up in opinion polls, the interest rate Brazil was forced to pay on its loans rose accordingly. Even so, Lula won an impressive victory; but creditors have since sought to keep him on a short leash. Leaders suspected of being serious about following through on a popular mandate begin to pay a kind of insurance premium to the creditors—in the currency of their freedom of speech and of action—even before they are elected to office. Most governments can be controlled now simply by the threat of “market jitters,” and the threat falls continuously on any leader who might be tempted to tax or regulate foreign capital or—Heaven forbid—defer debt service in order to deal with the needs of the desperate.

ELECTIONS AS A MAINTENANCE TOOL Whatever the United States may appear now to be doing abroad, the storyline is that what we are really doing is promoting democracy; thus the most visible tool must be the election. Most countries now call themselves democracies, but those democracies and the elections that define them call for a mouthful of modifiers. Over the last two decades, I have monitored several benchmark elections in the Western Hemisphere, experiences that inspired the modifiers listed below and that make it clear that the impact of empire does not start at the Mexican border, but at the Washington Beltway. Exclusive Elections Exclusion can take many forms and have many targets, sometimes legitimate and straightforward, but more often false pretenses erected for partisan or otherwise indefensible purposes. Literacy requirements, in the United States and in the Andean countries, have been used to exclude racial and ethnic minorities. Exclusion of noncitizens is the norm in most of the world, but denial of citizenship is all too often intended to maintain a defenseless workforce; and withdrawal of civil rights, as in the case of U.S. former felons, as a means of bleaching the electorate would be reprehensible even if lists were not selectively purged and padded. In the United States as elsewhere in the hemisphere, along with get-outthe-vote campaigns, we now see campaigns to throw-out-the-vote (as in shredding registrations cards, disqualifying new registrants on petty technicalities, and losing absentee ballots); keep-out-the vote (as in “caging,” challenging, and intimidating voters inside polling stations, withholding voting machines, and thus stalling the process and generating long lines);

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turn-back-the-vote (police checkpoints causing traffic jams and traffic barriers blocking off the polls); keep-home-the-vote (rerouting buses, threats to whole communities, or security agent visits to vulnerable communities); and get-out-the-vote-on-the-wrong-day-or-in-the-wrong-place (dirty tricks on the elderly and other relatively isolated communities, including what Paraguayans would call “urnas con patas,” or ballot boxes with feet). Today’s “dirty tricks” are not just college frat pranks or CIA cloak-anddagger stunts. Since the heyday of the Nixon administration’s clumsy “plumbers,” such tricks have been honed and systematized and precisiontargeted with computerized databases. Such data mining has been carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice in Latin America as well as in the United States through long-term contracts with affiliates of the same company that in 2000 overhauled Florida’s voter registration records so as to disenfranchise thousands of black voters in a presidential election decided by 537 votes. Reversible Elections Reversible elections are not over until they are settled by battles of wills or weapons. The U.S. attitude about elections in Latin America was best expressed by Kissinger. With reference to the 1970 election of Socialist Salvador Allende to the presidency in Chile, he reportedly said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”7 In times past, the usual means of reversal has been the military coup. That tool is still in the shed, but now it is unlikely to be either the beginning or the end of the process. In the case of Hugo Chávez, a military populist-elected president of Venezuela in 1998, the United States has supported lawsuits, demonstrations, strikes, lockouts, an abortive coup, and more recently, a recall election—all to no avail. The same party engineered a successful recall in California and, previously, an impeachment in Washington. Subcategories might include anticipatory reversal—a coup, for example, to head off an election, as seen in Guatemala in 1963, or a timely indictment of the candidate leading in the polls, as in Mexico in 2005, and postponed elections, an idea floated by the Bush administration in the summer of 2004. Such postponement would presumably have been until the threat of terrorism, or of a Democratic victory, subsided. For-Profit Elections In the early 1990s, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari invited a dozen or so corporate high rollers to lunch. After they had eaten well, he

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asked each of them for a million-dollar contribution. Talk about no free lunch! A few decades ago, in the United States as elsewhere, buying votes was common. Unfortunately, perhaps, since there are few other means now of redistributing income, that practice is passé, replaced by buying candidates, which is more or less legal and a better investment. Latin American countries routinely experience both overt and covert infusion of dollars into their elections. The infusion, however, of the U.S. model—of auctioning off the government to the highest-bidding campaign contributors—is even more damaging. In Latin America, as in the United States, commercialization of the electoral process is accompanied by professionalization and privatization: That is, party programs and activists are drowned out and sidelined by slogans and spinmeisters, who sell candidates as they might sell soap. Little wonder then that publics treat elections like soap operas. Show Elections At what point does the extent of exclusion or intimidation, or the sheer weight of sham, signal that an electoral process is not to be taken seriously, that the exercise has simply been a show in that the incumbent government or dominant power was prepared to celebrate victory but not to accept defeat? Sometimes the parameters are clear, as in under-the-gun elections staged by military occupation forces or other dictatorships. These might include ritual elections of continuation or transition—such as Papa Doc’s 1971 referendum on passing Haiti’s presidency for life to his son, Baby Doc. A subcategory, the exit-strategy election, as in Iraq, offers the bull a graceful exit from a thoroughly smashed-up china shop. The exit-strategy rationale turned inside out begets invasion-strategy elections. It was argued that invasion was necessary to prepare Fallujah for elections. More common now are faith-based elections, conducted on hackable voting machines with no paper trails, which most often are also structurally secured elections, characterized by slide rules (they slide right off the table) and partisan supervision. Many Mexicans took pride in the fact that after seventy years of one-party rule, their presidential elections of 2000, newly under nonpartisan supervision, enjoyed greater credibility than did those of the United States of the same year. Noting then that Florida’s secretary of state was also vice chair of the state Republican presidential campaign, former president Jimmy Carter said he would have declined to monitor an election anywhere in the world under those conditions. In 2004, he commented that the basic requirements of a fair election were still missing. In fact, the practice of assigning supervision of

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the electoral process to partisan campaign officials had spread to other swing states—most critically Ohio. Paraguay’s transitional elections of 1993 presented a more nuanced situation. Observers from the World Council of Churches spoke of “fraude ambiental,” a climate of fraud.8 While the final vote count in the presidential election was not seriously challenged, a smorgasbord of ruses raised another question: Should an election be considered legitimate if the incumbent actually wins the most votes, even when it has been clear that the levers of power were not actually put at risk? Fraudulence is less about outcome than about intent. All broadly based Latin American parties or political movements have at some point faced the dilemma of whether to stage an open-ended challenge— risking further polarization and perhaps even a violent crackdown on the opposition—or simply to concede. Unqualified concession, however, also carries risks; it means risking irrelevance, not only of the party but of the electoral process. If partisans of democracy in the United States as elsewhere are not prepared to challenge and to demand standards, the sum total of our efforts does not amount to nothing; rather, it amounts to the legitimation of a fraud-ridden system, with its concomitant risks to civil and human rights.

NOTES 1. Cited in Saul Landau, The Dangerous Doctrine: National Security and US Foreign Policy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988, p. 33. 2. Perhaps they should have cited the island’s strategically critical nutmeg. 3. “U.S. Military Troops and Bases Around the World,” United for Peace and Justice, www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/military_map.pdf, December 20, 2007. 4. “US Biggest Global Peace Threat,” BBC, June 14, 2006, News-Americas section, news.bbc.co.uk./2/hi/americas/5077984.stm, December 20, 2007; “International Poll Ranks Bush a Threat to World Peace,” Associated Press, International Herald Tribune, November 3, 2006, News-Americas section, www.iht.com/articles/ap/ 2006/11/03/america/NA_GEN_World_Views_of_Bush.php, December 20, 2007. 5. Some of the ideas and observations laid out here, especially those relating to “penetration,” were first published in Jan K. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977. Others were first presented at an international symposium on “Inter-American Relations in an Era of Unilateralism,” at the University of South Florida, Tampa, October 3–5, 2004. 6. Perhaps the most egregious such case to date was U.S. reliance in 1903 on a bilateral treaty through which the United States guaranteed Colombian control over Colombia’s then territory of Panama to justify U.S. provocation of Panamanian secession, so that the United States could set aside a zone for the construction of its canal.

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7. From records of a secret meeting in 1970 of the “40 Committee,” cited by Seymour Hersh, “Censored Matter in Book on CIA,” New York Times, September 11, 1974. 8. Elaborated analyses of some of the elections I have monitored are found in Jan K. Black, Inequity in the Global Village: Recycled Rhetoric and Disposable People, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1999.

17 Terror and the War to End All Rights

No matter how bad things appear to be, they’re actually worse.1

THE HEIST OF THE PEACE DIVIDEND Even though new wars seem always to be popular, at least in the United States, old wars are much less so. That is, popularity wanes as the years and the wars drag on. (By early 2008, opinion polls in the United States were showing some 65 percent of the population to be against the war in Iraq.) But until a budgetary equivalent of war—a threat so all-consuming as to justify the movement of enormous sums of money from public to private coffers with minimal oversight—comes along, stakeholders in the system will continue to opt for war. Just as war is politics by other means, it is also business by other means— “other” being, for example, the sustenance of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex and of what Noam Chomsky has called military Keynesianism—that is, business that is not dependent on consumer demand, only on fear (the prison-industrial complex operates on the same principle). As the cold war slipped away, our best hope of avoiding further supply-side wars might have been that the cost of cleanup of U.S. nuclear weapons facilities would rival the cost of making the mess in the first place. Any long war becomes a system; and there is no such thing as a system that doesn’t work; every system works for somebody. (Otherwise, it would cease to be a system.) There are no reliable ways to track the profitability (even economic, let alone political) to be found in annual defense allocations of sev208

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eral hundred billion dollars, or in the more than a trillion dollars spent by U.S. taxpayers on security since 9/11. It would be very hard indeed to calculate how much of the national debt of some $9 trillion the costs of past, present, and future wars represent—costs that are spread over a larger terrain than the Pentagon budget. However, setting aside this national debt, we can catch glimpses of the profitability of war from the arms trade or from private contracts for reconstruction of cities we have destroyed. Glimpses are available, for example, from whistle-blowers, or from congressional hearings of irregularities, like the multibillion-dollar reconstruction job contracted out to Bechtel Corporation for which funds appropriated passed through several sets of subcontractors and trickled out before reaching the construction site, or the $8 billion contracted to Halliburton that was said to be unaccounted for. The most artful dodge of them all is the argument that “no one wants war.” War happens in large part because of the many industries, agencies, and political careers that thrive on war and would wither without war or the threat of war. At least since the Vietnam War, military careers have been destined to early plateaus in the absence of war-zone “ticket punching.” A similar trend can be seen more recently in the Middle East and Southwest Asia with respect to diplomatic, foreign assistance, and even media careers. The international trade in arms, however, provides us a clearer illustration of the complex system underlying a state of war. One might have imagined that the trade would wither as the superpowers ceased to threaten each other. In fact, the consequences of this peace were quite the contrary. No doubt the outburst of new wars in the ex-Soviet sphere was a boon to the arms trade, as was the lifting by the United States in 1997 of the twentyyear-old ban on the sale of sophisticated weapons to Latin America. But the most important new boost to U.S. and Western European arms sales in the 1990s was the major expansion of NATO. NATO began then to require that each of it members spend at least 3 percent of GDP on national defense. Some might wonder why, as the enemy it was organized to counter imploded, NATO would be expanding. That question leads back to the arms trade and to a chicken-versus-egg sort of quandary. The NGO in the forefront of lobbying efforts in the United States, the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, was headed by Bruce Jackson, director of strategic planning for Lockheed-Martin, a major arms manufacturer. Lockheed-Martin was also a major contributor to U.S. presidential and congressional campaigns.2 In 2005, U.S. exporters earned $18.6 billion on the sale of fighter planes, attack helicopters, tanks, battleships, and other weapons; this was more than half of the total of global arms deliveries, $34.8 billion, for the previous year, and the numbers continued to increase thereafter.3 U.S. sales dwarfed those of all competitors including Russia, which came in second with a mere $4 billion. In fact, sales of U.S. exporters alone amounted to

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more than those of the next six largest exporters combined. Such sales are normally subsidized by U.S. taxpayers and used to leverage highly favorable terms for U.S. traders and investors. They also serve to promote job placement at high levels for retiring Pentagon contract officers. Not surprisingly, twenty of the top twenty-five U.S. arms purchasers in the Third World in 2003 were authoritarian regimes or governments with badly sullied human rights records. The draining of the U.S. budget into the production of new generations of Star Wars space weaponry and “bunker busters” as well as into arms export subsidies is facilitated by an electoral system run on campaign contributions and the spread of production facilities and military bases far and wide among congressional districts. The costs of such bases are much greater than the short-term diversion of funding away from schools and clinics and safety nets and transportation systems and emergency planning and other ordinary civilian needs. The magnetic field of such a concentration of resources acts like a black hole, sucking in ever more people and businesses and institutions. Cannibalistic corporate conglomeration is among the most consequential developments of recent years, one that cuts right to the core of the national and global power game. It has blurred the edges between national and international capital and between the functions of force and legitimation in maintaining power equilibrium. Scarcely more than a decade ago it was still possible in the United States to identify a military-industrial complex as a category apart, a complex of companies that clearly stood to gain from war or at least from fear of enemies. The advantage of war is that there is no need for effective consumer demand—just fear, such that even in times of economic decline taxpayers tolerate the diversion of revenues from essential services to weapons. The interests of this corporate complex were in direct conflict with those of major players in international, or global, capitalism, who were dependent upon expanding effective consumer demand for goods and services, expansion certain to be disrupted and damaged by war. Corporate conglomeration facilitated by the globalization of neoliberal norms, including deregulation and abandonment of antitrust enforcement, has served to blur the distinction. Companies like General Electric, for example, are deeply entrenched in both kinds of markets.4 Moreover, like many other megacorporations, GE not only manufacturers weapons along with its kitchen appliances; through ownership of the major TV network, NBC, it also manufactures news. And the companies that make kitchen appliances and weapons and news are the same companies whose campaign contributions elect leaders and shape policies. It is in the nature of the power game that the economic elite is dependent upon popular acceptance, or legitimacy, supplied in centuries past primarily by religious institutions and today primarily by media. To the extent that the

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governing elite begins to lose legitimation, or to find it too costly, it becomes more dependent for the security of its position on the wielders of force—that is, military, paramilitary, and police. Depending heavily on armed protectors, however, implies a risk of having to share wealth and power with them. The need, then, for legitimation generally offers some potential for a polity, or civil society, to constrain the actions of the governing elites. If the same conglomerates, however, that underwrite the government and sell kitchen appliances—more recently, even medical insurance—also make weapons and news, it becomes much easier for those who stand to profit from war to build a case and a constituency for it and thus to keep war makers in power. In short, it means an absence of checks and balances, or counterforces, from either public or private sectors of society. Insurance against cuts in the Pentagon budget has also been purchased over the years through doling out pieces of it in the form of military facilities to states and districts having members on relevant congressional committees. Since the War on Terror came up to full throttle, that practice has been taken up also by the Department of Homeland Security. The list of cities or regions—forty-five in 2007—at high risk of a terrorist attack, and thus eligible for the competitive counterterrorism grant program, has been expanded to sixty for 2008. Because that is where the money is, funding for what should be strictly civilian enterprises—for urban infrastructure, even for climatic or clinical research or college scholarships—is increasingly run through defense or related budgets. Finally, even efforts of humanitarians to assist victims and mitigate the awful damage of war are in danger of becoming subsidiary operations of the war effort. The $3 trillion budget submitted by the Bush administration for 2009 calls for funding cuts for teaching hospitals and a freeze on medical research. In fact, the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services is to be cut by $2 billion as part of the domestic sacrifice necessary to increase the Pentagon budget by $35 billion to $515 billion. That budget would cover only core programs, however, not counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which some $200 billion was requested for 2008. One of the consequences expected could be an annual deficit breaking the 2004 record of $413 billion.5

THE MULTIPURPOSE WAR-ON-TERROR FRANCHISE Turning Crime into War War talk is dangerous. Many words are overused metaphorically to the point of obscuring original meaning; but such use of war can have dire, unanticipated consequences. Of course, the events of September 11, 2001,

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constituted an unspeakable crime and tragedy. But the assault—presumably by nonstate actors—did not in any sense constitute an act of war; treating it as such mindlessly punishes innocent populations and predisposes all concerned to favor the force of arms over the force of wits. War talk is highly counterproductive in the first place because to characterize a heinous crime as an act of war turns criminals into warriors, validated in the eyes of actual and potential followers. War fever threatens civil liberties and squelches open debate just when they are most needed. It matters less how much money goes into intelligence than how much intelligence goes into the use of money. The most obvious drawback to modern warfare is “collateral damage,” like the UN landmine clearance technicians who were among the early victims of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. High-altitude bombing carries high risk of collateral damage along with low probability of hitting moving targets, like the elusive Osama bin Laden. (The United States had been bombing Iraq for a decade without bothering Saddam Hussein.) And killing innocent Afghans did not vindicate the killing of innocent Americans. With more than 7 million people displaced and desperate, Afghanistan soon came to represent a humanitarian disaster that dropping snacks along with the bombs could not mend. But why Afghanistan? The leadership of the terrorist organization blamed for the crime hails from all around the Muslim world; and some 80 percent of those directly involved (including the alleged mastermind) in the September 11 attacks hailed from Saudi Arabia, a country whose autocratic government is heavily subsidized by the United States. There may have been no doubt that bin Laden had financially underwritten the Taliban and was in turn sheltered by them; nonetheless, the Taliban regime was receiving U.S. foreign assistance just a few months before the bombing started. At any rate, war is not the solution; war is the problem. Just as a peace process requires the acknowledgement of crime and identification of individual criminals, the generation of wars requires collectivization of responsibility for individual crimes and dehumanization of whole populations. War sows the seeds of terrorism yet to come—and incidentally spreads around the weapons that make it possible. After all, bin Laden and the Taliban are in large measure products of the earlier U.S. war to unseat a Soviet-supported government in Afghanistan. Over the years since, it appears ever less likely that the United States and its NATO allies can rout the Taliban, and maintain united, stable, and broadly supported governments intact and in place without ongoing skirmishes for any considerable period. Afghanistan has been meting out humility to meddlesome foreigners at least since Alexander the Great. Predictably, bombing and the threat to expand it to other countries—most notably Iran—deepen fears and further inflame anti-American antagonism

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in Muslim countries, particularly Pakistan and Egypt, where government control is already precarious. We now find ourselves engaged, directly or indirectly, in low-intensity conflict of indefinite duration in several countries, largely to prop up governments of dubious legitimacy and shameful human rights records. To the extent that terrorism is a global problem, it demands a global solution. Should the U.S. government genuinely seek cooperation, it would be required to respect the needs and views of allies and be prepared to be guided by global norms. Just as nation-states replace vigilante vengeance domestically with the rule of law, nation-states, including superpowers, must adhere to international law and recognize the jurisdiction of international tribunals. Even if U.S. and allied forces succeeded in killing bin Laden, how would that deter terrorists whose modus operandi is the suicide attack? And would we not run the risk of making him a martyr and making ourselves the target for a whole new generation of terrorists? By 2006, bin Laden was coming off better in popularity polls around the Muslim world than Bush was in the United States. Surely it would be wiser to see bin Laden and his cohorts fully discredited and on trial before a global body for crimes against humanity. The attack on 9/11 might have proved an opportune moment for the United States to pay its overdue assessments to the United Nations; to sign and to ratify the treaty creating the International Criminal Court; and to sign, ratify, and abide by other major international treaties, many of which we are almost alone in shunning. Terrorism represents a clash between criminals and honorable, law-abiding, and peace-loving people. It is not a clash of states, much less of civilizations, unless we choose to make it so. Turning War into Crime The first surge of the U.S. War on Terror targeted the wrong people with the wrong rhetoric and the wrong weapons, with counterproductive and as yet unforeseen results. The “why” with respect to taking action was clear enough; in the rush of patriotic fervor, however, the other “whys”—why war and why Afghanistan?—were not asked. And why not? The answer appears to lie in the terror routinely experienced by elected leaders or opinion leaders of appearing to be unpatriotic. At any rate, however, in the panicked aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. assault on Afghanistan was plausibly sold as “defensive.” Likewise, the previous occasion in which a Bush administration went to war against Iraq could plausibly have been justified by the fact that Iraq had invaded its neighbor, Kuwait.6 For the younger Bush, there was no such cover. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was launched as “preemptive”—that is,

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elective, a matter of choice. Elective war, like elective surgery, is elective either because it is nonessential—for appearances, perhaps, as in cosmetic surgery—or because it is not clear that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. Even if the members of Bush’s inner circle, insulated by secrecy and arrogance, had convinced themselves that there was a likely act of aggression to preempt, there was no openly discussed calculation of costs versus benefits.7 The most serious of the rationales the Bush administration floated for its proposed war on Iraq was that Iraq would soon have the capability of making and using nuclear weapons. Under what circumstances might a Saddam Hussein, lacking in scruples but not in survival instincts, have used the deadliest of weapons in his arsenal? The most likely, according to CIA as well as to academic analysts at the time, would have been when he was under imminent attack, and the most likely target would have been Israel. Thus, had Hussein actually had the capability and the inclination, an attack on Iraq might have been self-fulfilling prophecy with respect to the unleashing of Iraqi weapons. Of course, we know now that the notion of a war against Iraq was under discussion well before 9/11 and that the evidence of a connection to 9/11 as well as of a threat of nuclear war was prefabricated and diligently marketed to the U.S. public and the world.8 What then might this war have been designed to preempt? Suppose that like elective surgery, elective, or preemptive, war is not only exceptionally risky but also nonessential—perhaps, cosmetic. Suppose that the diagnoses and prescriptions in this case were not those of clinical specialists but of spin doctors. U.S. wars sometimes appear to be elective in a more nearly literal sense, at least with respect to timing. As the story of the Enron scandal began to break in 2002 and the economy began to unravel, Bush’s “brain,” political adviser Karl Rove, reportedly told the Republican National Committee that the fall’s midterm congressional elections would have to be about national security, not about the economy; and in the summer of 2004, as noted Bush floated the idea of postponing the elections in case of a security threat. Some analysts assumed that, under the coded alarm system in place since 9/11, that would mean threat of terrorist attack (Code Red) or of Democratic victory (Code Blue). What is “super” about a superpower if it lacks the material or intellectual resources to avoid going to war? And what is the payoff to populations, as opposed to leaders, or stateholders, of superpower status, if we can no longer schedule elections without running the risk of unleashing our own ultimate weapon of mass distraction? In the final analysis, the best defense against terrorism, at home and abroad, is reasonable policy, responsible government, and a well-informed and attentive public.

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ON WINNING AND LOSING Unscrupulousness ought to count for something; and indeed it does. At a time when bullies in dress code or camouflage, prison stripes or pin stripes, can so readily get money and guns and governments, democracy and human rights are fragile, easily eroded. And war under any pretense gives bullies the edge, at least at the outset. New wars, like newlyweds, always get a honeymoon. The most devastating of South America’s wars of the nineteenth century was the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), in which Paraguayan dictator Solano López engineered the unlikely feat of aligning such strange bedfellows as Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay at once against his essentially buffer state. The biggest winner of that war was Solano López himself, who emerged in perpetuity as the most revered of Paraguay’s national heroes. The biggest loser was the Paraguayan population. Some 90 percent of the country’s men were killed in the fighting. Paraguay was eventually repopulated by occupation troops from neighboring states. As I finally understood with respect to the U.S. post–Civil War South, losing too big has the same tragic effect as winning too big—popular glorification of war. For the losers, recourse to denial finds expression in insistence that the losses cannot have been in vain. The Falklands-Malvinas War of 1983 made for an interesting study of winners and losers. With officially unacknowledged support from the Reagan administration, the Argentine military junta, whose “dirty war” against its own population was going badly in the face of a steep economic decline, abandoned negotiations with the British over the future of the islands claimed by both and seized them. The British fought back and, as such wars are normally scored, won. For the British people, however, that meant the reelection of Prime Minister “Iron Lady” Maggie Thatcher, whose unpopular domestic policies had been expected to bring about her defeat. For the Argentine people it meant liberation from the brutal militocracy that had ruled since 1976 and a return to democracy. With all that, some calculated that the real winner had been the French arms industry, whose Exocet missiles carried the day for the British navy and sold internationally thereafter like hotcakes. And how might we assess winners and losers of war in times of terror or terror in times of war? In 2001, before the smoke had cleared from the rubble of the 9/11 assault on New York’s World Trade Center, the legislative bill known as the Patriot Act had struck the floors of the U.S. Congress; the bill contained explosive materials, categorizing rights that might be denied in times of security threat, that had lurked in file cabinets around the capitol for more than a decade. The weightiness—literally—of the act, and the supposed urgency of its passage, meant that few, if any, of the members who adopted it almost unanimously had read it through.

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When citizens beyond the Washington Beltway began to read it, however, concern spread and resulted in resolutions passed by at least 300 city councils instructing local law enforcement officers to disregard some of the obligations placed on them under the Patriot Act. Four days after the mayor of one such city, Mayor Emily Reilly of Santa Cruz, California, sent the notice of the council’s resolution to the Justice Department, there was a burglary of Reilly’s bakery, very professionally executed, in which the only item taken was the hard drive of her computer. A few days later, in a city with no history of bakery inspections, the mayor’s bakery was visited by inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration. No citation was issued, but the message was not lost on Santa Cruz.9 An extensive overlay of new security programs and agencies and strategies and regulations was soon in place in the United States and around the world, and plans for the next war, this time in Iraq, were well developed, awaiting only the rationale. As before, the Bush administration had decided to go to war before deciding why. It is not as if no one cared about our twenty-first-century wars. In the course of the lengthy run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were massive protests in the United States and around the world—one of them drawing an estimated 10 million people into the streets. Even so, until recently, practically the only people having a forum who dared to use it straightforwardly to oppose war were comedians and cartoonists. In the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures, the media, the universities, and the churches, the few who raised their voices were shunned or ridiculed.10 While opinion polls collected globally have found a majority believing that the U.S. government represents a greater danger than any other to the security of the world, other governments and international institutions have been for the most part indirect, cautious, or muted in their criticism. In war there are political, bureaucratic, and corporate winners, but there are no national winners, only losers in greater and lesser degrees. Opinion polls in the United States in 2006, just prior to the outbreak of renewed violence in the Middle East, showed a strong majority in opposition to the war in Iraq. Opposition to ongoing wars, however, in no way deterred the U.S. government from providing full-scale material and diplomatic backing for Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Lebanon. The war known for most of the past half century as “the peace process,” raging once again like a wildfire through the Middle East, was of the broad category generally known as unconventional, even though the previously conventional kind—officially declared state-on-state war—had been virtually extinct since WWII. Some military strategists spoke of it as “fourth-generation” warfare, in that relatively small, nonstate actors (in this case Hezbollah, operating out of southern Lebanon) could lose tactically, overwhelmed by high-tech massive fire-

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power wielded by a modern state (Israel) and still win strategically; war remains inherently political, and, for good and ill, the political goals that are paramount are influenced also by public opinion. When a cease-fire finally began to take hold across the wasteland that once again briefly had been Lebanon, both Hezbollah and Israeli leadership declared victory. After a month of Israel’s winning tactically— displacing almost a million people and virtually depopulating the southern quarter of the territory of Lebanon—public opinion polls that had shown that some 90 percent of the Lebanese people opposed the presence of Hezbollah in their country had been turned inside out to show 87 percent support for Hezbollah. Meanwhile polls in Israel showed the prime minister’s popularity on a steep decline and a majority doubting that their country was winning. Counterinsurgency specialist Kalev Sepp, of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, noted that Hezbollah appeared to have gained the advantage because Israel had allowed its tactical goals to undercut its political ones.11 Whatever winning or losing might look like to those plotting the action from the “situation room,” it will look different to those on the oops! end of a smart bomb that flunked. It may also look different over time to a public saturation-bombed with devastation on their TV screens. If it is not all right for nonstate terrorists to kill innocent civilians, how long can it be all right for governments to do so?

WAR AS THE COVER STORY? In time of war—and we are now indefinitely in time of war—peace is a hard sell. It must override the vast economic, bureaucratic, and political interests invested in war over more than half a century. More important, it must penetrate the androcentric consciousness that elevates machismo to the highest virtue and that leaves men and women alike in leadership positions very much afraid of being seen as weak on war. Precious few for whom security is about having too much to lose—including, ironically, too much credibility— have the courage to risk it by opting unequivocally for peace. In the power game, war still trumps. Peace has rarely if ever enjoyed the “moral equivalency” of war in the popular conceptualization of sacrifice and heroism, individual and collective “glory.” James K. Polk, eleventh president of the United States, was generally rated by historians as a hohum kind of president until his diaries revealed that he had not stumbled into the Mexican-American War but had plotted it, intentionally staging a provocation, whereupon he was promoted to the “near great” category. Peace is a hard sell also for a myriad of reasons relating less to material or career interests than to ignorance and apathy—not knowing why or how

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war-prone leaders are wrong or mendacious or not having the energy or the courage to resist. Finally, peace is a hard sell because entire societies, from those who send their young to war to those who march off to die, bury themselves in denial. Peace, even conceived simply as the absence of war, is a hard sell. In the first place, war is always affordable; peace has to be self-supporting. Only as the cost of war would any U.S. government try to defend a national debt of $9 trillion. Were such a debt not defensible, as to protect American freedom, it might be seen as an indefensible transference of the wages and salaries of hard-working, tax-paying citizens to the coffers of those too rich to pay taxes, or ultimately to the Chinese, who now hold the lion’s share of the U.S. debt. Because security has for so long been a political gotcha, resources like petroleum that stateholders and other stakeholders might gain from occupying and pillaging another country are peanuts compared to the income transfers that can be contracted for reducing country after country to rubble and building it back again. Can it be that with respect to war cause and effect have been conceptually reversed, that far from being an aberration, war has become the engine of the system, edging out supposedly representational, constitutional government at the heart of an organic process of allocation of wealth and power? Under such a system, “exceptions” to respect for human rights are not and cannot be exceptional.

BE AFRAID! BE VERY AFRAID! The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released at the end of 2007, reflecting a consensus among sixteen intelligence agencies, concluded that Iran, branded early on in the Bush administration as a member of the Axis of Evil, had closed down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The report echoed the long-standing argument of the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, that there was no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.12 It also repudiated an NIE released in 2005 that the White House has used since to portray Iran as representing an immediate and intolerable threat to U.S. national security. The 2007 NIE also noted that the White House had spurned a serious diplomatic overture from Iran in 2003, predictably strengthening Iran’s hardliners. One might have thought that a leader whose approval rating was hovering near a percentile in the lower twenties, largely over an aging failed war, might welcome an incentive to back away from the brink of yet another war. Instead, the White House response, in January 2008, to this most recent NIE has been to escalate its rhetoric about the nuclear threat emanating from Iran. In the War on Terror, terror always wins.

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Under cover of the War on Terror, every horror that has ever served to mobilize human rights activists has reappeared and has been first denied, then defended by the United States and its coalition of the willing. For the most part these abuses and atrocities continue to be committed and, national and international law notwithstanding, are in danger of being legitimated by lack of formal repudiation. In the United States, and to varying degrees in many other states, we are losing our rights to privacy and to unreasonable search and seizure. With the complicity of the communications conglomerates, our phones are tapped without warrants;13 NSA satellites track and record tens of millions of our domestic and international calls, and data-mining companies collect records on our physical and mental health, our marital status, our credit ratings, our court appearances, and our voting patterns, and probably our high school grades, for the use of bill collectors, insurance companies, and government agencies. Meanwhile AOL has allegedly tracked its users’ Internet search habits at the behest of the U.S. government, while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have drawn criticism from Amnesty International and other human rights groups for cooperating with the government of China. As a cost of doing business in that country, they are said to have filtered out information deemed inconvenient and turned over personal information on Chinese Internet users to the government.14 Anyone who assumes she or he has full freedom of speech probably hasn’t tried to use it. Our right to freedom of expression is being lost by disuse, due perhaps to ignorance and apathy, but also to fear, not so much of imprisonment as of unemployment; by government use of classified information or mined data to discredit whistle-blowers and other purveyors of inconvenient truths, like terrorism chief Richard Clarke, who testified to immediate and detailed warnings to the White House shortly before 9/11, and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose testimony undermined presidential pronouncements about a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat from Iraq; and by recent prosecutions not only of leaks of classified material, but also of receipt and retransmission (by journalists, for example) of material, classified or not, that can be said to threaten defense interests. Moreover, our rights to political participation, to elections that are free and fair, inclusive and fraud free are threatened by the constant refinement of exclusionary tactics and other electoral dirty tricks, by electronic voting machines that employ a new math, by partisan control of regulations and counting procedures, and most of all by the central role of money in the elections. Weakened rights to privacy, to free expression, and to political representation of course mean that the rule of law in general is at risk. Concepts of due process have been battered and limited, and not only with respect to alleged terrorists. Even the right to habeas corpus, the right of a prisoner to

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challenge his detention, fundamental to Anglo-Saxon law since the fourteenth-century Magna Carta, has been systematically violated by the Bush administration; and its abandonment was enacted into law in the form of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an act packaged as a retreat from indefinite detention and torture for suspects who had yet to be charged with crime. The U.S. Supreme Court, acting on June 12, 2008, in a five-to-four decision on a case brought by a prisoner detained at Guantánamo, upheld the constitutional right to a “writ of habeas corpus” and extended that protection to noncitizens held outside U.S. territory. The decision in Boumediene v. Bush was only the third in U.S. history to declare unconstitutional a federal law restricting federal court jurisdiction. Even so, the Bush administration made no move toward closing Guantánamo nor even canceling trials scheduled through the newly established military commissions system. Moreover, the Bush administration has fabricated a conceptual shield for the protection of official lawlessness, including extralegal categories of crime and of criminal suspects—“unlawful enemy combatant”—of practices—“enhanced interrogation techniques” —and of agencies—mercenaries, like Blackwater, contracted by the U.S. government, who match in numbers, but greatly exceed in pay, regular U.S. military troops, and who are asserted by the Department of State to be accountable to no state or legal system. As was the case when terror-as-the-enemy was first floated in the 1980s, today’s terrorist suspects are sure to include the Quakers and other religious pacifists as well as other categories of peace and human rights activists. As occurred in the 1970s, peace marches and peace coalition gatherings are routinely infiltrated by federal or local intelligence agents. The U.S. Justice Department in 2006 was refloating the idea of “preventive detention”—tried here and there and discredited in the early 1970s, when “the enemy” were mostly students—Vietnam War protesters and unemployed kids. One might hope that, as a practical matter, decision makers would be deterred by the fact that the U.S. corrections system, holding the world record for numbers incarcerated (more than 2.3 million, 25 percent of the world’s prisoners in a country having 5 percent of the world’s population), is already showing serious strains and has been the subject of numerous critical reports by Amnesty International and other international human rights organizations. Apart from the wholesale killing of innocents that is in the nature of bombing campaigns in populated areas, and the atrocities that will be committed— however unjustifiably, absolutely predictably—by stressed-out troops in war zones, the most disturbing aspect of this War on Terror is the advent of straightforward, unabashed, systematic U.S. government use of torture. From the centers we have learned so much about in livid, horrifying, photographic, and cinematographic detail—Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo—to the dozens of other still secret ones around the world run

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by U.S. intelligence agencies, including the outsourced, pseudoprivatized “off-the-shelf, self-sustaining” ones, to the practice of “rendition”—of flying alleged (but never formally charged or tried) “enemy combatants” to other countries for interrogation, the United States has placed torture at the center of its control system.15 In so doing, while still claiming to be in the business of promoting peace, democracy, and human rights, it has given all other governments so inclined license to follow suit. Former High Commissioner of Human Rights Mary Robinson says that often when she tried to call abusive national leaders to account for their misdeeds, their response would be, “But standards have changed; just look at the United States.”16 Unfortunately, the systematic use and promotion of torture by the U.S. government has not been uncommon in decades past, but past policymakers have had the shame to stick with denial rather than straightforwardly defending torture and even presuming to use it to political advantage. Moreover, the system has become ever more bureaucratically elaborated, scientifically grounded, and technologically advanced. Having failed to hold its ground in denial, the Bush-Cheney government has sought to redefine torture; to deny its illegality by denying that international laws, conventions, or treaties apply; by denying the applicability of U.S. law to the U.S. commander in chief in times of war; and by asserting that such interrogation is essential to obtain critical information. As late as February 6, 2008, the White House continued to assert that waterboarding, a torture technique refined and professionalized in the sixteenth century by the Spanish Inquisition, was essential for obtaining information. And on March 8, 2008, Bush once again vetoed legislation that would have banned—or underlined the constitutional ban of—the use of torture, including waterboarding and other “enhanced” or “harsh” interrogation techniques that have been practiced by the CIA.17 Meanwhile, however, just in case some court ruled to the contrary, the White House slipped into the Military Commissions Act, passed hastily on the pretense of diminishing the abuse of prisoners, an opaque section designed, in effect, to extend amnesty for such acts of abuse to officials of the Bush administration.18 Each of these claims has of course been challenged, and some struck down, at least partially, in courts. The final one, however, is perhaps the most absurd on its face. Though experts have indeed confirmed it, it takes no expertise to see that “information” obtained through torture is by its nature unreliable. It is also clear that leaders who make designated enemies of people they know nothing of, who decide to invade countries before deciding why—or at least what the official rationale will be—are not in search of information. They may be in search of disinformation. In fact, a critical piece of disinformation supposedly linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden was provided under torture by a suspect “rendered” to Egypt for that purpose.

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It is easier, of course, simply to buy disinformation, and that was being done as well. A paid intelligence asset known as “Curveball,” answering to Cheney and Rumsfeld but considered highly unreliable by the CIA, was the single source of some of the most important allegations about the WMD threat from Iraq. Amnesty International and other human rights monitors have reported that many of the prisoners held at Guantanamo were noncombatants kidnapped and turned over by informants paid royally for each suspect. Many of those suspects in turn came to believe that they were being held under pressure to give the kind of information their interrogators wanted to hear.19 That is not to say that torture is ineffective. Its most consequential effect is to intimidate, not simply its immediate victims but also their friends and relatives and communities—the society at large. Its effectiveness is such that for the most immediately affected society it generally takes the coming of age of a new generation to break its spell. Disinformation, likewise, may be very useful to political leaders; for the poorly informed, the idea that a particular piece of “intelligence” was obtained by torture may give it an undeserved aura of authenticity. During the early months of the post-9/11 War on Terror, a “high-value suspect” said under torture that Saddam Hussein had offered training to Osama bin Laden in the use of chemical weaponry. The suspect later recanted. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, however, opinion polls showed that a large majority of Americans believed that Hussein was behind the assault on 9/11. As late as 2007, polls showed that about half of the U.S. public still believed that.20 Of course, the most basic of all human rights, the right to life, is threatened in war, the lives threatened including not only those of “enemy combatants” and bombed-out civilians, but also soldiers of the invading countries whose duties had been limited in principle to defending their own countries. A case bringing that issue to the fore was making its way in 2007 through the British court system. The case has been brought by families of British soldiers killed in Iraq who are seeking an independent public inquiry into the government’s decision to invade. On the basis of Article 2 of the European Human Rights Convention, which affirms that the right to life is protected by law, the families argue that military orders pursuant to an unlawful invasion breached the article. Overturning a previous high court ruling, the Law Committee of the House of Lords obliged the government to explain how a thirteen-page equivocal opinion of the attorney general delivered on March 7, 2003, was transformed within ten days to a onepage unequivocal opinion that invasion would be legal.21 This case is only one of many legal challenges in many countries to the war in Iraq. There have been peace movements to challenge each war in turn as well as the general trajectory toward militarization and global em-

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pire. And there have been congressional hearings, leaked documents, and whistle-blowers to reveal tips of icebergs that might explain such a trajectory; but the United States has yet to experience its own glasnost.

NOTES 1. Black’s First Law of Public Affairs. Governments and other public and private institutions can be expected to cover up their failings—not to mention their crimes—and to put the best face possible on what they are doing or planning. They release detrimental (admission against interest) information only when it is already known or to put a lid on what might be even more damaging revelations. 2. Bill Mesler, “NATO’s New Arms Bazaar,” The Nation, July 21, 1997, pp. 24–28. 3. Frida Berrigan, San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2006, pp. E1–6. 4. Incidentally, GE alone received about $8 billion in the U.S. tax relief bill passed by the Congress in October 2004. 5. Andrew Taylor, “New Bush Budget of $3 Trillion Could Hit Record Deficit,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, 2008, p. A4. Both debt and deficit exploded after the U.S. markets meltdown of September 2008, calling for a trillion-dollar bailout. 6. That is, setting aside arguments that U.S. Ambassador April Gillespie’s noncommittal response to the news from Saddam Hussein’s government that it was planning an invasion might have been seen as a “green light” and that the intelligence reported at the time that Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia turned out to have been false. 7. It appears, in fact, that like the elder Bush, George II had made a point of targeting our own “assets” (leaders who were compromised by having been funded and supported by the United States), knowing full well that they could not fight back and that none would come to their defense. Moreover, any open calculation of the distribution of costs and benefits would surely have made the invasion a hard sell. 8. There are many books and articles dealing with the run-up to war in Iraq, some of which are listed in the recommended readings. Interesting insights with respect to the role of oil are found in Jim Holt, “It’s the Oil, Stupid,” London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 20, October 18, 2007, pp. 3–4. 9. Sources include media accounts and conversations with Mayor Emily Reilly in California in 2006–2007. 10. One hundred forty-four members of the U.S. House of Representatives actually voted against authorizing Bush to take unilateral action against Iraq; but only ten voted against the enabling appropriations. I am proud to say that my own congressman, Sam Farr of California’s District 17, was among them. 11. Sepp, as cited in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2006, p. A1. 12. ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2005 for his work to ensure that nuclear energy be used only for peaceful purposes, has also often said, including in conversation with me in 2007, that it will continue to be very difficult to get other nations to take the need for nuclear disarmament seriously so long as the most powerful nations maintain large stockpiles.

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13. It was reported in January 2008 that on several occasions when the telephone companies had cut off the FBI wiretaps, it was not out of shame, or even of fear of liability, but rather because the FBI had been derelict in paying its bills. See “Oops—FBI Wiretaps Halted over Unpaid Bills,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 11, 2008, p. A6. 14. Ellen Lee, “Amnesty Rebukes Search Engines,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2006, p. D1. 15. The only U.S. Army officer court-martialed in the Abu Ghraib scandal was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in January 2008 after a four-year investigation. 16. Lecture by, and conversation with, Mary Robinson, University of California, Berkeley, February 29, 2008. 17. In January 2008, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee was investigating the destruction by the CIA of training videotapes showing actual “enhanced” interrogations that had included waterboarding. The agency had been under court order to turn those tapes over to a federal judge. Both Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell have declined for legal reasons to state categorically that waterboarding is torture. In an interview with New Yorker magazine McConnell had said, “If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.” Cited in Pamela Hess, “If Used on Intelligence Director, Waterboarding ‘Would be Torture,’” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2008. 18. See Section 8, Revisions to Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 Relating to Protection of Certain United States Personnel, Public Law 109-366, October 17, 2006. 19. The Oscar-winning documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side, released in 2008, claims that 93 percent of the more than 83,000 prisoners held without trial since 9/11 had been turned over to U.S., Afghan, or Iraqi authorities by bounty hunters like those of the Afghan Northern Alliance. 20. For elaboration on intelligence generation and sourcing for the War on Terror, see “The Dark Side,” written, produced, and directed by Michael Kirk for Frontline, aired on July 3, 2006, by, and available through, PBS affiliate KTEH. 21. Richard Norton Taylor, “Soldiers’ Families Can Challenge War,” Guardian Weekly, August 4–10, 2006.

Part VIII STRATEGIC FOCUS No Promised Land in Denial Valley

The essence of waste is to sell out when no one is buying. If we can’t tell the difference between where we are and where we want to be, we’re not going anywhere.

Indigenous peoples, in the Amazon and around the world, are organizing and working with NGOs to protect their habitats and our planet. Amazon River, east of Manaus, 1991.

18 Cautious Mainstreaming, Constructive Subversion

Our forerunners in the struggle to protect human rights and human dignity and to clean up the reputation of our species did not let us down. Over the course of more than a century, they laid down layer upon layer of conceptual and legal tools for our use. They established a thicket of institutions for research and planning, negotiation and adjudication, as well as organizations for communication and coalition building, for advocacy and mobilization and focus of the energies of outraged publics. Unfortunately the champions of human wrongs have been busy as well. They have seized our conceptual tools and bent them and hurled them back at us like a boomerang. The words spoken by U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey in the troubled year 1973 have resonance now as then: There is a familiar maxim—that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This admonition applies to both nations and individuals. With Watergate we have seen officials of our government commit criminal acts that strongly resemble the practices and methods directed against foreign governments and other peoples. Counterespionage, cover-ups, infiltration, wire-tapping, political surveillance, all done in the name of national security in faraway places, have come home to haunt us. The spirit and purpose of domestic policy is said to condition our foreign policy. The reverse is also true.1

And so the twenty-first century that to dreamers of the sixties generation should have been the “Age of Aquarius” looks more like the “Age of Scrooge” depicted by Charles Dickens. The European model of equilibrium, or social contract, that had inspired so much of the world in the 1960s and 1970s lost its resonance in the 1980s and fell into disrepute. 227

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GETTING OUT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AGAIN Ongoing, even proliferating, horrors, however, do not mean that the situation is hopeless or that the human rights movement and related, sometimes articulated, movements of peace, humanitarian relief, democracy, grassroots development, and environmental preservation are failing. After all, we must expect unscrupulousness to have its advantages. If we understand that trying to represent the unpowerful and the scrupulous necessarily means swimming upstream against a swift current, we know better than to declare defeat. In fact, the accomplishments of human rights and related organizations are legion. Utopias aside, the idea of a social system that is relatively open and democratic, fair and equitable, and at the same time creative and productive is no pipe dream. We have seen many such systems at local and national levels in the past, and a few exemplary cases, particularly among the Scandinavian countries, are holding on despite all odds even now. Moreover, many trajectories of long-term global trends, including assessments by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), suggest that we could in time eradicate mass poverty and achieve a more hospitable world. The good news is that we can get there from here. The bad news is that we are headed in the wrong direction. Getting there need not be so hard. The hard part is negotiating the U-turn. The obstacles to civilization are not to be found in a lack of technical or economic know-how. We know how to produce and conserve, to regenerate and recycle. We know how to redistribute resources and expand opportunity. We know how to re-create and protect human intellectual and physical capabilities, to educate and socialize, to cure and heal, and to maintain social infrastructure and a social climate conducive to physical and mental health. And we know how to care for those with special needs. The resources are not lacking; they are simply maldistributed. What is most sadly lacking is political will. And the black-hole density of the current concentration of economic power and the technological sophistication with which it is continuously reconcentrated make the political task an awesome one. On a bad day in the early years of the Peace Corps, some of us used to say that the way to avoid disappointment was to aim low. But we would never have suggested such a thing to the Peace Corps’s founding director, Sargent Shriver. In fact, our lofty goals are not unreasonable or unreachable; but we must start from where we are. And to start from where we are, we must know where we are. Our best theoretical guidance in this case might be found in the law of holes—briefly stated, “If you find yourself in one, stop digging.” Then, perhaps, we should take a measure of the hole, and finally look for a way out.

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THE HOLE IN THE BRIDGE TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY As elaborated in chapter 5, the cold war victory of the private sector over the public one has allowed the former increasingly to redraw the jurisdictional lines between the sectors to its own advantage, to employ twenty-first-century technology (e.g., electronic funds transfer) and multilayered bureaucracy (“market forces”) to reimpose nineteenth-century social relations. In particular, mobile money means immobilized political leadership. Any policy in the public interest—meeting a public need that unmet might have offered a captive market to profit seekers—runs the risk of generating “market jitters” and perhaps capital flight. The alienation, or distancing, of decision making about priorities and livelihoods that is the essence of neoliberal globalization is the nemesis of popular sovereignty. It strips away all prospects of local and perhaps national self-sufficiency, leaving ever fewer people the option of producing what they would consume or consuming what they produce or having a voice in the decisions on either production or consumption. But underemployed, or downsized, governments do not wither away. Such governments, including local governments in the more developed countries, compete among themselves, in the manner of South Pacific “cargo cults,” to offer runways and ports, industrial parks and golf courses, and the cheap and docile labor that will lure riches, now in the form of loans, from afar. Governments, then, are reemployed to serve global money movers rather than national or local constituencies. Moreover, when strangers bearing riches and newfangled technology approach debt-starved governments, the outcome is likely to be a feeding frenzy of whatever remains of natural resources—minerals, forests, fish, or, of late, even water—and incidentally also of national initiative. Then as money and other resources are siphoned off from poor countries or regions to richer ones, the people have no choice but to follow; but they do so devoid, in practice, of rights. As the new stateless underclass, they become the scapegoats for citizens who are also exploited and who see their own incomes and rights and safety nets eroding away.

THE WAY OUT We escaped the nineteenth century once; we can do it again. But we cannot do it in quite the same way. The process of incorporating or reincorporating the nonaffluent into public decision making in the twenty-first century must call forth all the vehicles mobilized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—organized labor, racial-, ethnic-, and gender-based social movements, multisector and multiclass political parties—and much more.

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Like bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics, the untamed nineteenth-century version of capitalism has returned in more virulent form. To limit mobility of money or to globalize the popular regulation of it, social activists need new paradigms and more effective strategies and organizations. We need better understanding of the strengths and limitations of mass movements and new actors, particularly nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, and of the prospects for transnational coalition building— among NGOs representing different movements or constituencies, and between NGOS and IGOs and other more traditional organizations. And perhaps most important, we need to channel the product of these efforts— the social learning and the organizational clout—back into national and international decision-making systems at the times and in the places where it will make the most difference.

PARADIGMS WITH A PURPOSE The last couple of decades have seen the amassing of social creativity, of scholarly and popular literature and documentary film inspired by unmet global needs and interests, and recognition of new means of organization and communication. This intellectual flourishing, however, particularly on the part of environmentalists, feminists, and advocates of grassroots community development, has only recently begun to break through the barriers to major media exposure. We can see from the perspective of environmentalism that the global village is being stripped of resources—exploitation enabled by deregulation and new openness of markets and fueled by hard-currency debt-service requirements. Chroniclers and supporters of the international women’s movement, likewise, have noted that the front-line victims of the economic restructuring now sweeping the global village are women. Shrinkage of the public sector has cost them professional jobs as well as family services and social safety nets and has drawn them in ever greater numbers into exploitative informal-sector work. Theorists of grassroots development have pointed out that commitment to community runs counter to the dog-eat-dog or all-eat-dog options suggested by neoliberal individualism. All of those who have seen their prospects of individual and collective self-sufficiency, or empowerment, stripped away by the general trend of alienation of decision making about priorities and livelihoods must come to see the utility of pulling together. What is needed above all for getting out of the hole and back into the twenty-first century is a political strategy for breaking out of the isolation of identity and single-issue politics and building inclusive communities, with

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respect to both the peoples we would represent and the rights we would protect. We must break barriers old and new to recognition of common interest, and we must communicate ideas and options clearly enough to penetrate the fog spread by corporate-controlled media. Taking liberties with Lincoln, we know that “you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time,” and for the obfuscators, that’s quite enough. We cannot wait for “leaders” to lead; they have too much to lose. (The quickest way to lose a forum is to make use of it.) We have met the real leaders, and they are us. Real leadership must surge from the bottom up and build bandwagons for elected or appointed leaders to jump on to. There is no point in blaming the “leaders” for failing to lead; we must anticipate that and act accordingly. Dream Freely, Think Holistically, Act Strategically The so-called neoliberal (actually neocolonial) paradigm that held unchallenged sway through most of the 1980s and 1990s has since come under assault by social scientists and social activists across a broad range of disciplines and concerns, including even by influential renegades from the high priesthood of orthodox economics. But it makes little difference when progressive scholars win the debates in the ivory towers if we are unable then to communicate our theories and findings to others who can invest them in the public interest. Social science is not rocket science and should not get away with pretending to be. As Shakespeare might have noted, “needs no ghost come from the grave” to show us that those who call for short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term benefit are taking theirs in the short term. Shouldn’t the right to “eat dessert first” fall to those for whom life is indeed uncertain? New paradigms and strategies for coalition building call for more inclusive concepts of identity and interest as well as for shared perspectives.2 All of us have multiple identities and multiple interests that allow for mixing and matching so as to make friends as readily as to make enemies. Serious ecologists now readily make common cause with the indigenous peoples; whereas globe-hopping investors deplete, despoil, and depart, leaving communities and ecosystems devastated, peoples who do not have the option of leaving have lived for millennia in harmony with their ecosystems. To the pattern of boom and bust and the fantasy of unlimited growth potential, we counterpose protection of a finite planet. Turning to alternative energy sources and public transportation does not call for unavailable resources or know-how, just for political will. Against the presumed virtues of the cargo cult, depending on the “kindness of strangers,” we propose return to the pursuit of sustainable, protective levels of self-sufficiency. Community gardens

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would be a good place to start. If the job is too challenging for adults, give it to the children. Instead of stripping the domestic budget for social services in order to engage in foreign wars, we might withdraw from foreign wars in order to deal with domestic need. In fact, we might even refrain from prioritizing spending to prepare for war and invest instead in incentives for the promotion and nurturing of peace—beating swords into plowshares. Instead of demanding for young women a role in combat, we should be demanding for their mothers a role in deciding whether anyone’s sons and daughters must go off to war. It is not reasonable or practical for human rights activists in the United States and around the world either to ignore or deny the threat posed by a reckless, war-prone empire or simply to lay blame and shrug off responsibility. There is no such thing as sitting this one out. Even at the global level, there is no safe haven left for innocent bystanders. Those who are not doing battle with the system of bellicosity and greed are in danger of being swept into its service as its dependents, legitimators, and cleanup crews, as we have seen in many cases of humanitarian and relief workers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Revive Values The meaning of reform is a fairly reliable social compass. Any meaning it might have beyond the simplest one—change—is particular to time and place. But it also implies human agency—that is, social intent or action— and in common usage it is value charged, implying progress. When I was coming of age in the early 1960s, terms like socioeconomic and structural change meant progress toward equity, redistribution of wealth and power from the top down. Since the 1980s, those terms have morphed into meaning economic restructuring and structural adjustment, which, in practice, have generally amounted to the opposite, redistribution from the bottom up. Likewise, reform in the guise of “free trade” in the international arena has also meant “sustainable debt” and thus massive and continuous transfer of wealth from poorer to richer countries and regions. Such a wardrobe change for reform suggests that both the economic and political elite and the echelon of legitimators—the information and communication elite, or opinion leaders, of organized religion, academia, and the media—have undergone a value system replacement. I find it hard to believe that most people in the twenty-first century, or at least most people having a forum, really find it acceptable that three individual billionaires control more wealth than forty-eight of the poorest countries with a total population of more than 600 million, or that “intellectual” property claims of private pharmaceutical companies could override the rights of

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wretchedly poor countries to produce the drugs needed by their HIV/AIDSstricken populations. The growing inequalities and spreading wars of the United States are the product not of policy failures but of policy decisions. If they do not represent our values—if the values of leaders are actually at variance with those of supposed constituents—we’d better say so soon before the practice of abuse comes to represent an accepted norm. We propose a human rights perspective, of course, beginning with rethinking the value scale so as to place human rights above property rights, and thus to reclaim the concept of personhood that has allowed corporations to place their rights above those of real persons. And we affirm that the protection of any right of any person requires a community of rights and of rights holders. Those communities must be expanding, lest they be contracting. In politics, there is no steady state; and if any rights are lost, those remaining become more difficult to defend. Organize and Network At all levels, from the local to the global, and across all issue areas of public interest, human rights organizations and other NGOs must organize and network. We should assume from nonperforming political parties the essential role of aggregating interests (all the while hoping to inspire broadly based parties to reclaim the role); and where we find progressive governments—or at least governments in accord on some progressive issues—we should promote coalitions among them. We should devise new and imaginative means of providing support for those who risk their jobs or more in the exercise of free speech and the employment of other means of protecting human rights and promoting the public interest. At the least we need additional means of supporting whistle-blowers3 as well as rogue professionals who are willing to break with professional standards or “best practices” that are “best” perhaps for protecting professionals but not for the clients or publics that they would serve. In the case of whistle-blowers—from scientists who tell the truth about global warming to human rights monitors who uncover new schemes for promoting slavery or torture or war—material assistance, perhaps in the forms of legal aid and at least temporary employment by journals, for example, or think tanks, would be very much in the public interest.4 In mid-2008, a coalition of 112 religious, scientific, consumer, civil liberties, civil rights, peace, small-business, labor, libertarian, journalism, environmental, and good-government organizations, representing millions of Americans, was lobbying the U.S. Congress to move forward intact a bill offering strong protections to whistle-blowers on the federal payroll. The

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campaign, spearheaded by Public Citizen, the Government Accountability Project, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, was urging particularly the guarantee of a right to jury trials for federal employees, including scientists, contractors, and intelligence agents accused of security breaches. Divide and Conquer Advocates of equity, of redistribution from the top down, should unite and strengthen organizations and movements that share our goals; but for legislative and other purposes we should also seek out strange bedfellows on a case-by-case basis. That means expecting divisions of interest in the realm of megabusiness—between financial and productive sectors (high interest rates and heavy debt service put a damper on commerce); between energy or medical industries and all other sectors (increasingly frequent soaring sprees of petroleum prices and health benefit costs generate hardship for all other businesses and often sharp economic decline); between national and international business; and between small business and big business. The megamergers and global conglomerations of recent years have been devastating for national and local businesses almost everywhere, the businesses most responsible both for innovation and for employment. Unfortunately, business owners at the local and national level have often been swayed by antilabor propaganda to side with international business on “free trade” policies that lead to their own demise. Meanwhile, cases brought in the United States under the Alien Torts Claim Act against companies seen to be violating rights in Burma, Ecuador, and elsewhere have served, according to Robert Haas, former CEO of Levi Strauss, as a wake-up call for the corporate community.5 And successes of consumer boycotts and “name and shame” campaigns have made some corporations more sensitive to the need to collaborate in human rights impact assessments. Follow the Money—and Bring It Back Global restrictions on the movement of money, especially currency speculation and the transit of streaker capital, or hot money (e.g., hedge funds) would probably be the single most effective means of restoring a measure of economic and political stability at the national level. There have been efforts, of course. The Tobin tax on international currency transactions, proposed by U.S. economist James Tobin, was championed for a time in the mid-1990s by Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Chile’s Center-Left Concertación government was able for a time in the late 1990s to require a security deposit to accompany portfolio investment. The European Union, after the turn of the century, campaigned for international

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agreement on closing tax havens. Each of these efforts succumbed to pressures from international money-movers backed by the U.S. government. In the United States, in particular, a return of trustbusters—even of serious implementation of still existing antitrust legislation—and of more sharply graduated progressive income tax, would be a move in the right direction. Even less likely, but very much in order, would be special taxes on price gougers and war profiteers. Contest All Arenas and Institutions As Immanuel Wallerstein and others predicted, the nation-state has proved a weak reed for protecting the public against the whims of the global economic elite.6 But we cannot afford to give up on the state; we have no substitute for it. It remains our only potential vehicle for popular sovereignty. For limiting the adverse effects of globalization, however, for now regionalization may hold the greatest promise. Both the European Union and South America’s Mercosur have shown promise in this regard. And regional human rights commissions in Latin America and Africa have been increasingly active and effective in recent years. The World Trade Organization is, of course, a vehicle of the global creditor cartel, but it is structured as a one state–one vote member organization. It is therefore not so far removed from popular access as is the IMF, for example, wherein decisions are literally for sale to the highest bidder—that is, state votes are weighted in accordance with financial contribution. Seekers of equality need not seek to win the soul of the WTO; that belongs to international capital. We might expect, however, to delay or turn back threatening initiatives from time to time. That indeed occurred in Cancún in 2003 when a coalition of Third World states under Brazilian leadership and advised and assisted by a host of NGOs deadlocked the WTO global forum, holding off yet another effort to disadvantage Third World agricultural producers and, in general, to favor private over public interests. Whether or not the UN might be able someday to serve as a core for global federalism, it is by no means clear that such a concentration of global power would be a positive development. Why should we imagine that a single global government would be more responsible or less repressive and corrupt than state governments we know all too well? And if it failed us, as one of my mentors, Ted Couloumbis, once asked, “Where would the refugees go?” Even so, for all its weaknesses and liabilities (the UN, after all, is us—its member states), the UN remains our most promising institutional anchor for the protection of human rights and rudder for advancing liberties and living standards. We must be aware, however, that the more effectively it performs those tasks, the more threatening or useful it may appear to

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powerful actors, and the greater will be the contest for mastery of its soul. In that contest, we dare not flinch. The global network, or civil society of the caring, should prioritize its best strategic and greatest mobilizational efforts to liberate the UN, program by program, from extreme dependence upon, and vulnerability to, its most ambitious member states, particularly at present the United States.7 The worst kind of dystopia would be one in which the United Nations served simply as validator or legitimator of the norms and policies of superpowers and as cleanup crew for their wars. Apart from the secretariat and its bodies assigned specifically to human rights concerns, several agencies and affiliates of the UN at one time or another have been central to the global campaign for human rights and social justice—the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the early twentieth century and again in the early twenty-first, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in the 1960s and 1970s, the UNDP in the beleaguered 1980s and 1990s, and the UN High Commission for Refugees in the 2000s. We should return the support such agencies have given us and help them stay focused on the needs of the humble. Finally, we should be open to allies wherever we find them. Any social institution can be used for good or ill, but those having people-to-people exposure as fostered by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter are particularly promising. The international Sister City program has taken bold initiatives in promotion of democracy, peace, and human rights, and has exhibited remarkable independence of political and economic pressures. With respect to the rights of women and girls, even the Girl Scouts, on occasion, has found itself out on the cutting edge.

MAINSTREAM WITH A TIGHT GRIP ON ANCHORS AND RUDDERS When former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan began to urge the mainstreaming of human rights, High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson asked him what that meant. He responded, “That’s for you to decide.”8 Events since that time have underlined the importance that must be attached to determining who is to define and design such mainstreaming. The United Nations has recently undertaken several initiatives to that end. Among the most successful and least controversial of these initiatives has been the UN’s Declaration of a Decade (1995–2004) for Human Rights Education. The declaration launched a multifaceted effort to persuade countries around the world to introduce human rights into the curriculum of public schools; to make funding available for graduate courses and workshops online and onsite in university human rights centers; and to maintain through an e-mail Listserv an extensive global network of human rights

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educators and students. In 2007, the Listserv was reaching more than 5,000 members in 181 countries. Growing support within the UN of the principle of the “responsibility to protect (R2P),” addressed in chapter 3, and the establishment of an intergovernmental Peacebuilding Commission, pooling the efforts of countries emerging from conflict and their neighbors with those of major relief contributors and international financial institutions in reconstruction and institution building, have generally been seen as promising. Member states have also endorsed in principle the creation of a standing police force to attach to peacekeeping missions. There is as much to be said for promoting new institutions responsible for sustaining peace and protecting human rights as for implanting in existing institutions offices and teams assigned to monitor compliance with international human rights laws and treaties. But the establishment of bureaucratic ritual and routine sometimes becomes a substitute for seriousness of purpose. Moreover, the proposed UN Peacebuilding Commission and standby police force will be vulnerable to “law of the instrument” inclinations—to foxes guarding henhouses and to sending bulls back in to clean up the china shop, especially if the funders include members having hegemonic presumptions or strategic interests at stake. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, the Pentagon called upon its several regional and unified commands to identify locations for holding prisoners. The Southern Command (SouthCom), now based in Miami, identified Guantánamo Bay as a likely place to warehouse them. Some years earlier, in the 1990s, when General Wesley Clark was in command there, SouthCom had integrated instruction on human rights into its routine training programs. As prisoners began to arrive and it became clear that they were to be held indefinitely without trials or even charges brought against them, SouthCom legal staff became perturbed, according to a lieutenant colonel serving there at the time, and began to fire off complaints to Washington. But the complaints drew no response, and the matter died there. The Pentagon has since elaborated plans for coordination or integration of U.S. overseas humanitarian, relief, and development efforts with its own operations. Such a partnership might or might not offer a modicum of much-needed protection for civilian services in war-torn areas; but civilian organizations would discover very quickly which was the senior partner— the horse in the “horse and rabbit stew.” Mainstreaming will by its nature bring independent NGOs into structured interaction with more traditional institutions, including governments and corporations. Many organizations are already engaged in cooperative programs or impact assessment with government agencies and multinational companies. Some collaboration has gone further afield, however, onto what appears to be

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thin ice. It was announced in 2007 that a new counterinsurgency field manual for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had been produced with the collaboration of Human Rights Watch and Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights. An argument for offering information and advice may be reasonable, but if that must unavoidably lead to endorsement of the activity or product of the collaboration, human rights organizations are in danger of seeming to legitimate the very abuses they set out to prevent.9 The mainstream is monitored by some very big boats. Human rights advocates should not venture into it without our own navy. If we are not very careful to engage only from our own bases and on our own terms, particularly avoiding enticements of status and serious money, we may find ourselves becoming dependent, and thus tamed. Organizations falling into that trap may then become the interpreters of human rights principles and the legitimators of human rights campaigns, to the detriment of less compromised advocates. The pitfalls of mainstreaming through impact assessment may not be so deep, but they merit consideration nonetheless. Those pitfalls are twofold: 1. The approach may come to value technique over substance, giving the edge to technicians or bureaucrats over those more knowledgeable and insightful on substantive issues and perhaps those less inclined to “mission creep.” The tendency to mission creep favors adoption of issues that are easier to research and resolve over commitment to fighting the necessarily uphill battles. 2. Impact assessment is a tool, and like any other, susceptible to falling into the wrong hands where it may become a weapon—in fact, a boomerang. It can be used to mislead and misinform or to monopolize or cut off discussion. The most crucial difference between human rights impact assessment and impact assessment devoted to other topics is that interaction relating to human rights is far more likely to be adversarial (though under most circumstances the adversarial nature will be camouflaged on both sides, at least early on). It may be possible at times for human rights advocates to employ collaboration so as to strengthen similarly inclined individuals within otherwise unfriendly institutions. It is important to remember, however, that what is at stake here is power, and politics is not a gentleman’s game. Human rights can never glide comfortably down the mainstream. That would mean that the power game was over and that all who love justice have run out of dreams. Find Security in Community Bound first in the twenty-first century to distant creditors, governments routinely default on their obligations to their own citizens, leaving the newly displaced and deprived to discover that the last bastion of security is

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the community, a community organized and aware of the need for general commitment and mutual support. I am not suggesting that we could or would want to turn back the clock to some imagined “good old days” down on the farm. On the contrary, we must ultimately meet economic power with people power in the global arena. In the meantime, however, I am suggesting that in a fragile and unstable world, without grown-ups in high places, we must wrap ourselves in community and communities that are able to find, if not self-sufficiency, at least strength in numbers. Examples of what such a community can do are most likely to be found where people have had no choice. Time and again since its revolution, Cuba has been cut off from markets and suppliers and has seen its economy upended. But thoroughgoing social revolution is, after all, the ultimate training in self-sufficiency. In the worst of times in the early 1990s, Cubans once again turned necessity into invention; they turned garbage dumps into urban gardens, fuel shortages into solar energy, fertilizer shortage into organic agriculture with marketable natural fertilizers, and shortage of medical supplies into an export industry in biotechnology and an international smorgasbord of innovative approaches to healing.10 We should need no such exigencies, however, to begin to turn obstacles into assets. Our most foolishly wasted asset in the overdeveloped world is people. Despite so many daily social needs that are unmet, we intentionally keep large numbers of would-be workers unemployed and then blame them for not working. We exclude old and young, minorities, immigrants, and the infirm from full participation in community life and then blame them for their alienation. Most absurdly and ironically, in terms of national budgets and public discourse, we have turned one of our greatest social achievements—increased longevity—into a crisis. Must we wait for a real crisis to be reminded of the virtues of social integration? Kick Their “Buts” But this is war! But this is economic meltdown! But this is Armageddon! The triad of trumps would have us believe that we dare not entertain a priority higher than state or nation, religious sect, or money; and it would offer us only false and unacceptable choices. The human rights movement, however, invites us to live in the whole world and to prioritize our identity with humanity. Human rights are the rights left over after all the allowable exceptions have been made. They are sacrosanct. No buts about it!

TO EVERY SOLUTION, THERE IS A PROBLEM For those who are swimming upstream, seeking to represent the powerless against the powerful, the scrupulous against the unscrupulous, there are no

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happily-ever-afters, no final victories. Any new law or program designed to benefit the “have nots” will simply be seen by the “haves” as a provocation, one that they must turn with all due diligence to their own advantage. Thus, those who would promote human rights and social justice dare not be caught napping. In the first place, we should try to anticipate the failure modes of our legal protection and policy designs—the places where loopholes will appear and grow, where implementation will be bought off and turned inside out by reinterpretation—and build in corrective measures. Our solutions all too often call for the bull to clean up the mess in the china shop. We settle for mandating that a flawed bureaucracy or abusive agency pay lip service to our values and concerns—that drill sergeants teach human rights to death squads—rather than changing incentive systems. Police brutality settlements drawn from tax-based general operating budgets provide little incentive to change. Settlements drawn from salaries, starting with those of the mayor and the police chief, might make a difference. In the second place, we must avoid confusing means and ends and keep our focus always on ends. Solutions as presented are generally means, not ends. With Schumacher, I am inclined to believe that “small is beautiful,” and with Aristotle, Rousseau, and others that real democracy is possible only in small states. But the appropriate technology is not always small, and small states can also be overrun by tyrants. Centralization and decentralization are means, not ends. The means most propitious to promotion and protection of human rights are particular to time and place. They are always subject to change and vulnerable to hijacking. That is not to say, however, that means are unimportant. As Mahatma Gandhi reminded us, means are ends in the making. Immoral, abusive means are sure to lead to a bad end.

NOTES 1. Cited in Black, Jan Knippers, United States Penetration of Brazil, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977, pp. 260. 2. See Martin C. Needler, Identity, Interest, and Ideology, Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 1996, particularly the introductory chapter. 3. There is protective legislation in the United States, but for a variety of reasons it has not proved to be very effective. 4. Such support systems should honor above all and prioritize the protection of those who choose truth and the public interest while they are still “in the loop.” But they might also offer some postcareer incentive to come clean—a soul buyback market, so to speak. 5. Haas in conference presentation at “2048: Drafting the Future of Human Rights,” University of California, Berkeley, February 29, 2008.

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6. See Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York and London: Academic Press, 1974. 7. Jan Kavan, president of the UN General Assembly in 2002–2003 and a leader in Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” expressed his chagrin that while the United States felt free to act without the approval of the UN, the UN did not feel free to act without the approval of the United States. Conversation with me on November 3, 2007, in Alameda, California. Kavan is now a member of Parliament of the Czech Republic. 8. Conversation with Robinson, and her keynote address, at University of California, Berkeley, February 29, 2008. 9. Tom Hayden, “The New Counterinsurgency,” The Nation, Vol. 285, No. 8, September 24, 2007, pp.18–24. 10. See Jan K. Black, “The US-Cuba Standoff: A Double Con?” in Michelle Zebich-Knos and Heather N. Nicol, Foreign Policy toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

19 Conclusion Playing from Strength

Success and greatness lie on different tracks. One does not achieve success with powerful enemies. One does not achieve greatness without them.

The struggle for human rights is a power struggle, one in which rights advocates have the mightier weapons. But we must learn more about how to play from strength. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, but not in handto-hand combat. Our greatest strength in tactical terms lies in numbers and in truth, and the link between them is such that neither can be employed to great effectiveness without the other. It is not enough to speak truth to power when power is not listening—or listening only when they tap our phones. Power keeps its own counsel, builds around itself an almost impenetrable bubble that lets inconvenient truth neither out nor in. The denial and deniability contained in that bubble may be withdrawn from the powerful only by denying it first to the public—ourselves.

PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY AND ROUTINE SELF-DECEPTION In substance, or practice, plausible deniability is probably as old as ambition. An early example often noted was the public plea of King Henry II of England: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” King Henry denied later that he had sought or inspired the assassination of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas à Becket.1 The terminology first came into general usage however, after a U.S. Senate investigating committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) re242

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vealed in 1975 that the CIA, at least since the directorship of Allen Dulles in the 1950s and 1960s, had left the command and control system for assassination and other dastardly deeds deliberately ambiguous so that presidents might avoid responsibility. With respect to numerous abortive attempts to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro, the committee reported that non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and principal purpose of the so-called doctrine of “plausible deniability.” Evidence before the Committee clearly demonstrates that this concept, designed to protect the United States and its operatives from the consequences of disclosures, has been expanded to mask decisions of the president and his senior cabinet members.2

Legislation adopted both before (the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974) and after (the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980) the Church Committee hearings— the closest exercise the United States has had to a glasnost of its own—sought in principle to rein in such practice of premeditated irresponsibility—but the legislation in itself bore strong resemblance to plausible deniability in that its ambiguity left it toothless. The practice then surfaced again in the mid1980s in the Iran-Contra Senate hearings. President Reagan’s security advisor, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, testified that he made “a deliberate decision not to ask the President,” about the diversion in order to “insulate [the president] from the decision and provide some future deniability for the President if it ever leaked out.”3 The practice has continued into the twenty-first century, spawning wars and other unsavory acts, along with an expanded vocabulary. “Extraordinary rendition,” for example, refers to the practice of sending detainees suspected of involvement in terrorism or insurgency to other countries to be tortured in order to “plausibly deny” intention of torture and thus violation of U.S. and international law. When the bone-chilling photographs from Abu Ghraib were first made public, the Bush administration’s response was that they represented the work of poorly trained bad apples who would surely be prosecuted. In April of 2008, the Associated Press and ABC TV reported that in 2002 and 2003 the country’s highest officials dealing with foreign affairs, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Attorney General John Ashcroft, CIA Director George Tenet, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, met regularly in the White House Situation Room to discuss and, with approval from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, sign off on CIA interrogation methods (including methods clearly prohibited by international law). It was reported that those officials took care, however, to insulate the president from those meetings.

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The story came and went as had so many others, scarcely raising a ripple in the Congress or the courts, the state capitals, the churches, the universities, or elsewhere in the media. Plausible deniability for a president hardly seems necessary when denial at street level has become so complete. From high-level policymakers and high-altitude bombers to limited-option paramilitaries, the line between plausible deniability—conscious, straightforward, intentional avoidance of knowledge—and simple everyday use of denial (akin to other psychological defense mechanisms, like resolution of cognitive dissonance) is a fine one. If a president having war plans but no marketable rationale for the war finds himself becoming convinced by dubious intelligence that supports the case he wants to make, is that plausible deniability or just plain barnyard-variety denial? Does it matter? We know that the more important the decision, the fewer and less well informed will be those making it. A well-functioning system for the development of human rights impact assessment would enable us to be proactive rather than merely reactive, to use what we know, or patterns we have seen in previous cases of abuse, or prevention of abuse, to guide decision making and policy implementation. We know that even smart bombs will flunk the test, and that there will be collateral damage, like the rubble that used to be Lebanon. We know that intelligence is often unreliable, especially when it derives from torture or from payoffs. And we know that such intelligence is often delivered to decision makers premisinterpreted, especially when it is clear that that is the kind of “intelligence” decision makers want. We know that assessments of security threats are subject to fallible analysis, to technically flawed calculations, to unprofessional pressures, and sometimes to outright fabrication based on motives suppressed even by those who act on them. We know, for example, that most U.S. wars at least since the MexicanAmerican War4 have been triggered to some degree by faked or “false flag” incidents, or justified by doctored intelligence or misinformation, if not disinformation. We know that when war drums are beating, legislators and others having a forum to lose, for fear of being cast as unpatriotic or just out of step, will cast votes they are soon to regret, votes that will trap them into defending or sustaining a quagmire rather than assuming leadership in finding the way out. Votes cast in collective haste are often regretted in lingering solitude. And what of the journalists and TV news anchors who pass along unexamined corporate or White House press releases sure to have a major public impact, perhaps to change the course of history?5 Would they raise an eyebrow or even a question if they knew that more would be demanded of them by well-informed publics? Why is it that whole societies, even multinational or transnational ones, drop into a sort of trance—a subconscious

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conspiracy of the whole—in which we manage not to notice the emperor’s nakedness? Actually, we know why (those who believe they have freedom of expression have not tried to use it), but we deny that, too. Is there not something we can do to break this cycle of public deception and self-deception? Could we not help some of those actors in key roles to salvage their self-respect and their options by paying heed to a history that is not obscure, simply unacknowledged?

FROM LAMENTATIVE TO PREVENTATIVE, ABUSE TO PROTECTION “Speaking truth to power” is not a new idea, certainly not among human rights activists, but is there not some more effective way to do it? What I am proposing is that we seek not only to deny the escape into denial to the presidents and other high-level officials who have relied on and, in a myriad of creative ways, gotten away with, plausible deniability, but also to deny it to other actors up and down the chain of command, and to wouldbe opinion leaders who want to safeguard their jobs, their access, and their forums, and finally to disallow the denial employed by publics to free them of the burden of inconvenient knowing. The tactic is to place before the public, before the decision is made or the action taken, as much as we can present clearly, concisely, and convincingly, to project the likely outcome based on historical precedent and patterned behavior. For anticipated actions we hope to prevent, the human rights impact assessment might serve as self-negating prophecy.6 It is not simply a matter of helping leaders make informed decisions; it is a matter of making it more costly for them to move ahead with uninformed or misinformed decisions by making them aware that they will have to deal with informed publics and that their protestations that “no one could have anticipated . . .” will not wash.

MOVING INTERVENTION UPSTREAM A seasoned official with Oxfam commented to me a few years ago that she and her colleagues were doing a fair job of “pulling drowning babies out of the water,” but were very much frustrated by their inability to stop the folks who were throwing them in upstream. A collective determination to move intervention upstream has led a great many of the NGOs and IGOs engaged in human rights monitoring, grassroots development, conflict resolution, disaster relief, and charitable operations to direct a portion of their efforts and budgets to policy advocacy.

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Traditionally, the primacy of business and security interests in the foreign policies of First World governments has been such that the adoption of policy that substitutes conflict resolution for conflict exacerbation, human rights monitoring for subversive, or antielite, activity monitoring, and, in general, support for popular interests over elite interests calls for the organization and mobilization of nontraditional actors—that is, NGOs or social movements representing categories of people who have not previously or recently sought collectively to secure their rights. The building of cross-class and cross-sector alliances and other elements of a come-from-behind political campaign will also be necessary, even when the policy change sought would appear to be in line with a particular administration’s inclinations and the interests of the administration’s major constituencies. Presidents and other decision makers can be expected to place their highest priority on keeping their jobs, laundering their legacies, or moving on to something more lucrative. Doing what is right is bound to be a more appealing option to policymakers if the political climate is propitious. Even heads of government who seem genuinely committed to a course of action favoring the unpowerful may find themselves unable to move, to risk the displeasure of companies or agencies with interests or prejudice at stake, in the absence of a vociferous display of public support. Thus, even though the roles of nongovernmental organizations and other nontraditional actors may not be expected to be strong enough in themselves to redirect the general course of policy, their participation may in some cases be critical. That is, the mobilization of public support by NGOs and social movements may be a necessary enabling factor, if not in itself a sufficient cause, for policy reversal. The prospects and means of human rights organizations and other NGOs in the policymaking arena are not unlike those of other handicapped power contenders. Having limited resources, they must choose their battles carefully. They must play from strength, which they should find in numbers (coalition building and constituency mobilization), in truth (media access for embarrassing truths that discredit previous policy), and in commitment (sweat equity sufficient to overcome financial and other disadvantages). Like other public interest advocates, human rights advocates must be able to seize the agenda and to reframe the issues in contention in ways that suit their purposes. They must seek to widen fissures in the opposition camp, and they must be prepared to compromise without surrendering and without losing sight of ultimate goals. Finally, to the extent that they are successful, they can expect to be subject to efforts aimed at co-optation and Potemkin rivalry—that is, sabotage of the goals of authentic human rights NGOs through competition for their command of the agenda and for their constituencies.

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In practical terms, the handicapping means that such NGOs would have greater prospects of success in defensive operations than in offensive ones— that is, in putting the brakes on an operation they oppose (e.g., war or torture) rather than in redirecting policy or in launching new initiatives. They are also more likely to be effective if the outcome they seek means saving taxpayer money rather than spending more of it. Success is more likely if the issue in contention is one that engages NGOs across various sectors—human rights, minorities, women, labor, environmentalists—and if pressure is brought to bear on one action or decision at a time. Even so, were it not for wrong reasons, there’d be no right things done. Organizations or campaigns representing the concerns of the powerless are unlikely to succeed unless they are able to enlist strange bedfellows, political forces normally in league with the powerful. Even public opinion polls showing majority opposition to capital punishment and imprisonment for victimless crimes are not likely to turn the tide until fiscal conservatives take note that such practices are very costly. I have spoken of human rights organizations and other public interest NGOs as handicapped players, but they are not without their strengths. NGOs play a liaison role, linking people in bureaucracies and even in elective office with like-minded people on the outside. Even governmental officials at fairly high levels perceive themselves as having far less power and less voice than outsiders might imagine. Thus it is often the case that only through helping NGOs to mobilize support on the outside are some government or corporate officials able to acquire voice on the inside. Also, it often happens that NGOs in themselves having limited budgets and memberships are able to tap into strongly held but poorly articulated public opinion and give it resonance. Human rights organizations have often been quite effective in drawing upon and channeling the largely untapped wellspring of human compassion and empathy.

REAL POWER: THE POWER OF CONVICTION AND COMMITMENT In the protection and expansion of human rights, there is no dearth of failure to learn from; but there are also many successful campaigns and organizations. Among the attributes they share are flexibility, creativity, political and public relations savvy, a tightly held focus on ends rather than means, and a habit of practicing what they preach with respect to democracy and neighborliness. Among promoters and practitioners of grassroots development, the models of Mondragón, a complex of worker-owned companies in Spain’s Basque region that at the turn of the twenty-first century had annual sales

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amounting to almost $5 billion,7 and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, empowering hundreds of thousands of women and their communities through microlending and microenterprise, are well known. But there are many successes on a smaller scale to learn from. Most of the experiments undertaken by urban “hippies” in the late 1960s and early 1970s to establish rural utopias failed. One such experiment, however, that transplanted about 250 young San Franciscans to “the Farm” in southern middle Tennessee8 has thrived. The Farm’s population peaked at more than 1,500 in the 1980s. Though the population has since dwindled, the Farm still markets handicrafts and processed foods, runs wilderness programs for inner-city kids and training programs in environmentally sustainable development, and supports grassroots community development programs around the world. Rather than putting up defenses against what might have been for them a hostile social environment, the settlers early on began to share their surpluses and services with their neighbors; and they let it be known to local politicians that they voted as a block. I happened to be in Auckland, New Zealand, in mid-1985 when the Rainbow Warrior, flagship of Greenpeace’s campaign against nuclear testing in the South Pacific, was sabotaged and sunk in the harbor by French “intelligence.” Many feared that that disaster would mean the end of Greenpeace, or at least of its campaign against nuclear testing. It was not Greenpeace that surrendered, however, but France. In 1996, France signed the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty and began the process of permanently closing down its test sites at Mururoa and Fangatanfa. Greenpeace campaigned successfully in the following year to prevent Shell Oil from sinking the Brent Star oil storage buoy at sea in the North Atlantic. Late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Greenpeace had a contribution list of 2.8 million noncorporate and nongovernment supporters and millions of volunteers in regional offices in forty-one countries.9 It has been able to employ a broad array of effective techniques in its public information and policy advocacy campaigns, from a slick quarterly magazine to celebrity press conferences and meetings with policymakers. But its trademark continues to be high-visibility guerrilla theater and nonviolent but risky encounters on the high seas. At the beginning of 2008, Greenpeace was engaged in a campaign to protect whales in Antarctica from a Japanese whale “research” (hunting) expedition. Amnesty International, flagship organization of human rights monitors, initially undertook only to bring pressure to bear on governments for the release of political prisoners, for prohibition of capital punishment, and for maintenance of humane prison conditions. But as tyrants began to respond by “disappearing” their adversaries rather than imprisoning them, Amnesty modified its own tactics accordingly, with “urgent action” and other emer-

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gency response campaigns. In 1977 Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As noted in chapter 3, until recently in the developed West, the notion of human rights had generally been limited to civil and political rights. The 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, had sought to establish a far more encompassing view of the rights needing protection. As human rights organizations expanded, incorporating more chapters based in the Third World, pressures mounted for extending the parameters of the mandate—for recognizing a human right to food, clothing, shelter, medical attention, and literacy, to drinkable water and breathable air, and to a language and culture of one’s own. Amnesty International has by no means abandoned its early prioritization of protecting prisoners of conscience and other individuals targeted by tyrants. With some 2.2 million members now and chapters in more than 150 countries, AI has helped to bring about resolution of the cases of more than 40,000 political prisoners. (One of them, Annette Lu, served as vice president of Taiwan from 2006 to 2008.) Late in the first decade of this century, triage-type attention was devoted to challenging new rationales, techniques, venues, and cover stories for torture, to shutting down U.S. prison camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere, and to putting an end to “extraordinary rendition.” But AIUSA has also helped to frame a new discourse on rights and responsibilities. In the late 1990s, it opened for the first time an office devoted to investigation and reporting on allegations of rights abuse in the United States; and in 2007, it launched a new campaign in support of the human right to dignity and freedom from poverty.

OUR DISCOMFORTING POWER In the words of the great Greek stoic Epictetus (a teacher, thus a slave, under the Roman Empire), everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one by which it cannot. Pick it up, he said, by the handle by which it can be borne. If the prospect of our major social institutions has become so unedifying as to tempt us to “drop out,” we must remind ourselves, in the first place, that in the power game there is no such thing as dropping out—only dropping under. We are either subjects or objects, participants or victims. In the second place, seeing the damage that can be done to our institutions, public and private, when they have been hijacked by their enemies, we should be able to imagine the good that might be done if those institutions could be reclaimed by leaders genuinely representing the public

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interest—and publics informed and attentive and determined to hold them to it. The brute force required to destroy or detain free spirits does not constitute real power. From time to time we are allowed a glimpse of real power, as when Aung San Suu Kyi has chosen time and again indefinite detention over comfortable exile from which she could not return to seek liberation for the Burmese people, or when Nelson Mandela, in the early 1990s, refused to come out of prison until the conditions of the African Democratic Congress’s democratic movement had been met. Most of us who are advocates and activists for human rights, whether or not we would find the courage to seek to liberate the oppressed, will not, at any rate, find ourselves in a position to do so. But all of us have the option—the luxury really—of supporting those who by some combination of personal strength and coincidence of time and place find themselves on the front lines. Human rights monitoring is not just about protecting the weak; it is also about supporting those who are strong enough to confront dangerous rights abusers armed with nothing more than the power of their convictions. In the well-known words of anthropologist Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.” That said, though, it must be recognized that that small group of committed people, for all their vision and courage, would have very poor prospects of success against tyranny without the organized support of a great many people around the world who are prepared to back them in the worst of times. None who have tried to swim upstream against the most powerful currents would claim that it is easy, but we have no way of gauging the efficacy of people power unless we exercise it. Nelson Mandela, borrowing the eloquent lines of Marianne Williamson, defined the challenge most eloquently on the occasion of his inauguration in 1994: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. . . . As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence liberates others.10

I remain an optimist; were it not so, I would not be writing books and making speeches; I would be making music. Epigramist Ashleigh Brilliant asserted in one of his famous potshots that if enough people beat their heads against a wall, that wall will fall. As our most recent Nobel Peace laureate, Al Gore Jr., noted in the film An Inconvenient Truth, we have a tendency to go directly from denial to despair without stopping to take action. But he also affirmed that “political will is a renewable resource.”

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NOTES 1. See T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral. 2. U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Report No. 94-465. 94th Congress, 1st Session, November 20, 1975. 3. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair. House Report No. 100-433. Senate Report No. 100-216. November 1987, p. 271. 4. President James K. Polk was held in low esteem by U.S. historians until it was discovered in his diary that he had intentionally provoked war with Mexico in 1845, after which historians lifted him out of obscurity to be considered among the greats. 5. Bill Moyers Journal, “Buying the War,” aired on PBS TV station KQED in September and October 2007. 6. The opposite of self-fulfilling prophesy, like Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. With luck, we may find that the articles by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker in 2006–2007, warning of the Bush administration’s plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear power facilities, with support from the National Intelligence Estimate’s belated acknowledgment of error, amounted to self-negating prophesy. 7. Henry Veltmeyer and Anthony O’Malley, Transcending Neoliberalism: Community-Based Development in Latin America, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001, p. 33. 8. Near Summertown, Tennessee, a rural community on the outskirts of my hometown, Lawrenceburg. 9. See www.greenpeace.org. 10. From “Our Deepest Fear,” A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, New York: HarperCollins, 1992, pp. 190–191.

Recommended Readings

PART I: THE POLITICS OF A HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA Call, Charles, ed., Constructing Justice and Security after War, Washington DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2007. Carter, Jimmy, Our Endangered Values, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Falk, Richard A., Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World, New York and London: Routledge, 2000. [Look for the new edition, forthcoming under the title Extending Human Rights Horizons.] Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Fritzsche, Karl-Peter, and Felisa Tibbits, eds., “International Perspectives on Human Rights Education,” Journal of Social Science, Special Issue, 2006. Goldhaber, Michael D., A Peoples’ History of the European Court of Human Rights, Rutgers University Press, 2007. Gore, Al, Jr., The Assault on Reason, London: The Penguin Group, 2007. Landman, Todd, “Human Rights Impact Assessment,” in Studying Human Rights, New York: Routledge, 2006. ———, “Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice, and Policy,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2004, p. 906ff. Meijer, Martha, ed., Dealing with Human Rights, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001. Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, London: Harper Perennial, 2003. Ropp, Steve, Thomas Risse, and Kathryn Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rothenberg, Paula S., Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically about Global Issues, New York: Worth Publishers, 2006. 253

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Said, Abdul-Aziz, ed., Human Rights and World Order, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978. Schultz, William, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Wellman, C. “Solidarity, the Individual, and Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 22 (3) August 2000, pp. 639–657.

PART II: THE RIGHT TO EAT: SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS Black, Jan Knippers, Development in Theory and Practice: Paradigms and Paradoxes, 2nd ed., rev., Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1999. Bowe, John, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2007. Eade, Deborah, series ed., Development and Rights, introduced by Firoze Manji, Oxford: Oxfam Publication, 1998. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001. Eisler, Riane, The Real Wealth of Nations, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2007. Farmer, Paul, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Friedman, Tom, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Gills, Barry, ed., The Global Politics of Globalization: Empire vs. Cosmos, New York: Routledge, 2007. Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Korten, David, When Corporations Rule the World, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001. Krugman, Paul, Pop Internationalism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Perkins, John, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2004. Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom, New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Strange, Susan, Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Governments, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Stiglitz, Joseph, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003. Telvainen, Teivo, Global Civil Society in Action, New York: Routledge, 2008. Veltmeyer, Henry, On the Move: The Politics of Social Change in Latin America, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007. Wronka, Joseph, Human Rights and Social Justice: Social Action and Service for the Helping and Health Professions, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007. Yunus, Muhammad, and Karl Weber, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2007.

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PART III: THE RIGHT TO BELONG: CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS Angell, Alan, Democracy after Pinochet: Politics, Parties, and Elections in Chile, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007. Beetham, David, Democracy and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Black, Jan Knippers, A Penetração dos Estados Unidos no Brasil, Recife: Editora Massangana, Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, 2008 (Portuguese ed., with new preface, of United States Penetration of Brazil, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). Burbach, Roger, The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice, London: Zed Books, 2004. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Vol. 1 of The Political Economy of Human Rights, Boston: South End Press, 1979. Cronkite, Walter, A Reporter’s Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Dean, John W., Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, New York: Warner Books, 2005. DeStephano, Anthony M., The War on Human Trafficking: U.S. Policy Assessed, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Goldman, Francisco, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? New York: Grove Press, 2007. Guzmán Tapia, Juan, En el Borde del Mundo: Memorias del Juez que Proceso a Pinochet, Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005. Kornbluh, Peter, The Pinochet File, New York: New Press, 2003. Kymlicka, Will, “Immigration, Citizenship and Multiculturalism: Exploring the Links,” Political Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. S1, August 2003, pp. 195–208. Marmot, Michael, The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity, New York: Hold Paperbacks, 2005. Nevins, Joseph, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the US-Mexico Boundary, New York: Routledge, 2002. Shah, Dhavan, Douglas M. McLeod, Lewis Friedland, and Michelle R. Nelson, “The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 611, May 2007. Shlaim, Avi, Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001. Schwarz, Frederick, and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, New York: New Press, 2007. Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present, New York: Perennial Classics (HarperCollins), 2003.

PART IV: THE RIGHT TO BE DIFFERENT: CULTURAL RIGHTS Barry, Jane, Rising Up in Response: Women’s Rights Activism in Conflict, Boulder, CO: Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights, 2005.

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Blaut, J. M., The Colonizers’ Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Press, 1993. Foot, Rosemary, Rights beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fanon, Franz, Les Damnées de la Terre, Fransçois Maspero, ed., 1961; in English translation, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1965. Harrison, David, When Languages Die, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Htun, Mala, Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jaquette, Jane S., and Gale Summerfield, eds., Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice: Institutions, Resources, and Mobilization, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Jenkins, John, Indigenous Minority Groups in Multinational Democracies in the Year 2000, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1987. Kardam, Nüket, Turkey’s Engagement with Global Women’s Human Rights, London: Ashgate Press, 2005. Kindlon, Dan, Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World, New York: Rodale Books, 2007. Malark, Victor, The Natashas: Inside the Global Sex Trade, New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003. Norberg-Hodge, Helena, Ancient Futures, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992. Ore, Tracey C., The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality, New York: McGraw Hill, 2002. Paxton, Pamela, and Melanie M. Hughes, Women, Politics and Power: A Global Perspective, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, Sage Publications, 2007. Phillips, Kevin, The American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, New York: Viking Adult, 2006. Roniger, Luis, and Tamar Herzog, The Collective and the Public in Latin America, Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2000. Scott, Joan Wallach, The Politics of the Veil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

PART V: THE RIGHT TO THE COMMONS: ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS Calvert, Peter and Susan, Environmental Politics in the Third World: The South, the North, and the Environment, London: Cassell-Pintor, 1999. Danaher, Kevin, Shannon Briggs, and Jason Mark, Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots, San Francisco: Global Exchange, 2007. Gore, Al, Jr., Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Langholz, Jeffrey, and Kelly Turner, You Can Prevent Global Warming (and Save Money!): 51 Easy Ways, Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2003 (2nd ed. rev. forthcoming 2008).

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Martin, James, The Meaning of the 21st Century, London: Riverhead Books, The Penguin Group, 2006. McDonald, David A., Environmental Justice in South Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Moyers, Bill, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, Global Dumping Ground: The International Traffic in Hazardous Waste, Washington DC: Seven Locks Press, 1990. Dinar, A., S. Dinar, S. McCaffrey, and D. McKinney, Bridges over Water: Understanding Transboundary Water Conflict, Negotiation and Cooperation, World Scientific Series on Energy and Resource Economics, Vol. 3, 2007. Dinar, Shlomi, International Water Treaties: Negotiation and Cooperation Along Transboundary Rivers, London: Routledge, 2007. Stea, David, and G. Shane Lewis, “Harmonizing and Disharmonizing Human and Natural Environments,” in Jan Knippers Black, ed., Latin America: Its Problems and Its Promise, 4th ed., rev., Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 2005. Zarsky, Lyuba, ed., Human Rights and the Environment: Conflict and Norms in a Globalizing World, London: Earthscan Publications, 2002.

PART VI: THE RIGHT TO A JUST PEACE Ashdown, Paddy, Swords and Ploughshares: Bringing Peace to the 21st Century, London: Orion Publishing, 2007. Bhouraskar, Digambar, United Nations Development Aid: A Study in History and Politics, New Delhi: Akhil Books Pvt. Ltd., 2006. Black, Jan Knippers, Inequity in the Global Village: Recycled Rhetoric and Disposable People, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1999. Broz, Svetlana, Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War, New York: Other Press, 2005. Dhooge, Lucien, “A Close Shave in Burma: UNOCAL Corporation and Private Enterprise Liability for International Human Rights Violations,” University of North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulations, Vol. 24, Fall 1998, pp. 1–69. Dodd, Christopher, and Larry Bloom, Letters from Nuremberg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice, New York: Crown Publishing, 2007. Farah, Douglas, and Steven Braun, Merchant of Death: Money, Guns and Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible, Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2007. Foot, Rosemary, “The United Nations, Counter Terrorism, Human Rights: Institutional Adaptation and Embedded Ideas,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, May 2007. Gottlieb, Gidon, Nation against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and Decline of Sovereignty, New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993. Goulding, Marrack, Peacemonger, London: John Murray Publishers, Ltd., 2002. Nevins, Joseph, A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. “Tempering Collaboration: UN Task-Sharing with Regional Arrangements and NonGovernmental Organizations for Security and Services,” Special Issue of Third World Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1997.

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Unmatched Power, Unmet Principles: The Human Rights Dimensions of US Training of Foreign Military and Police Forces, New York: Amnesty International, 2002. Volkan, Vamik, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism, La Vergne, TN: Lighting Source Inc., 1999. Walker, Thomas W., and Ariel C. Armony, Repression, Resistance and Democratic Transition in Central America, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000.

PART VII: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Art, Robert, and Louise Richardson, eds., Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons from the Past, Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007. Black, Jan Knippers, Sentinels of Empire, Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger Press, 1986. Cashman, Greg, and Leonard C. Robinson, An Introduction to the Causes of War: Patterns of Interstate Conflict from World War I to Iraq, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, New York: Vintage Press, 2007. Chomsky, Noam, The Umbrella of U.S. Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Contradictions of U.S. Policy, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Cockburn, Patrick, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, London: Verso, 2006. Cole, David, Justice at War: The Men and Ideas That Shaped America’s War on Terror, New York: New York Review of Books, 2008. De la Vega, Elizabeth, United States v George W. Bush et al., New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Drogin, Bob, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Launched a War, New York: Random House, 2007. Farer, Tom, “The Two Faces of Terror,” The American Journal of international Law, Vol. 101, No. 2, pp. 363–381. Fallows, Jim, Blind into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq, New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Foot, Rosemary, “Torture: The Struggle over a Peremptory Norm in a Counter-Terrorist Era,” International Relations, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 1, 2006. Goldsmith, Jack, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Hoffmann, Stanley, Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for US Foreign Policy, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Kornbluh, Peter, and Malcolm Byrne, The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History, New York: New Press, 1993. Lando, Barry, Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2008. Miller, Greg, and Chris Mackey, The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America’s Secret War Against Al Qaeda, New York: Back Bay Books, 2005. Mueller, John, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, New York: Free Press, 2006.

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Murphy, Cullen, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Power and Superpower: Global Leadership and Exceptionalism in the 21st Century, New York: The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, 2007. Pruitt, Dean G., and Richard C. Snyder, Theory and Research on the Causes of War, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1969. Rich, Frank, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, New York and London: The Penguin Group, 2006. Rick, Thomas E., Fiasco, London: Allan Lane, 2006. Rogan, Eugene, and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Scahill, Jeremy, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, New York: Nation Books, 2007. Scheer, Robert, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, New York: Twelve, 2008. Shalom, Steve, Imperial Alibis: Rationalizing U.S. Intervention after the Cold War, Boston: South End Press, 1992. Shenon, Philip, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, East Providence, RI: Twelve Publications, 2008. Weinberger, Sharon, Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, New York: Nations Books, 2007. Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower, London: Allan Lane, 2006. Zimbardo, Philip, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, New York: Random Books, 2008.

Appendix Human Rights Impact Assessment Tips and Tools

Human rights impact assessment (HRIA) is essentially a twenty-first-century initiative that builds on somewhat older experience, particularly the relatively successful experience with the promotion and use of environmental impact assessment, but also more recently, social, health, and regulatory impact assessment and the rights-based approach employed by many practitioners of grassroots development.1 Impact assessment may be employed with respect to policies, projects, or programs, and may be introduced for purposes of planning, implementation monitoring, or evaluation. Such assessments may be intended to broaden the range of participation and the scope of considerations in planning, to solicit stakeholder input and to monitor and offer correctives along the way in implementation, or to analyze consequences—to keep alive the lessons of experience so as to make both protections and pledges of “never again” more effective. A major difference that makes human rights impact assessment more challenging than other types of impact assessment is that, while some such undertakings are voluntary and cooperative, in human rights cases where the need is greatest, the assessment is more likely to be straightforwardly an adversarial procedure, in which investigation will be obstructed and crucial information will be withheld, destroyed, or discredited. Moreover, decision makers in such cases will be unlikely to take timely and appropriate action on findings unless they are impelled to do so by public pressure. All too often, in fact, “studying” a problem becomes just another means of sweeping it under the rug. Therefore, strategy with respect to collection of information and use of findings—including the choice of who is to collect and use information—is extremely important. 261

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European and Canadian human rights organizations and centers have taken the lead in the development of “instruments,” or research guidelines, indicators and indexes, and databases for use in HRIA. Most of these have been employed in assessments undertaken on a cooperative, or nonadversarial, basis. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a number of United Nations agencies, including the UN Development Program, UNESCO, and the Human Rights Council, were also employing human rights impact assessment. Three of the earliest and most important centers engaged in this endeavor are in Europe. The Dutch Humanist Committee’s Aim for Human Rights hosts an annual conference on human rights impact assessment and sponsors the Human Rights Impact Resource Center (HRIRC). The HRIRC website makes available a great deal of information on methods, tools, and case studies. HOM has also sought to incorporate human rights impact into the rights-based approach to development and has developed an instrument known as the Health Rights of Women Assessment Instrument (HeRWAI). The Danish Institute for Human Rights is particularly noted for its Human Rights Compliance Assessment, designed for businesses. Scotland’s Commission for Children and Young People (SCCYP) has developed an approach to impact assessment designed particularly to bring the protections of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to bear on the development of policy. An organization created by the Canadian Parliament in 1988, Rights & Democracy, initiated a project in 2004 for assessing the human rights impact of foreign direct investment that has since been employed in a number of case studies. The Halifax Initiative Coalition (HIC), formed in 1994 by Canadian NGOs, also drew up in 2004 an instrument for assessing the human rights impact of trade and project finance. The HIC instrument went beyond identifying impacts to bring rights protection into plans and policies. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has for some years employed a rights-based approach to planning and assessment. An important recent contribution by the United Nations to the process of impact assessment is the so-called Rugge Report, the Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. It was undertaken by the Human Rights Council in response to General Assembly Resolution 60/251 of March 15, 2006, and offered for general distribution on February 5, 2007. Building on previous work in environmental and social impact assessment, it describes principles and characteristics of human rights impact assessment especially appropriate for business. It addresses methodological questions and notes both similarities and distinctions between human rights and other approaches to impact assessment, and it describes some of the initiatives that have been undertaken under this model.

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HRIA CENTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND RESOURCES Human Rights Tools (www.humanrightstools.org) produces newsletters and maintains resource and career placement centers as well as useful websites, including the following: www.undemocracy.com/ offers easy access to transcripts of the UN General Assembly and Security Council; www.undemocracy.com/securitycouncil lists documents sorted by topic; and www .undemocracy.com/securitycouncil/documents lists documents sorted by year. HOM Human Rights Impact Resource Center: www.humanrightsimpact.org/. This site includes information that relates to HRIA, including tools and instruments to use as well as examples of prior assessments and organizations currently working on HRIA. University of Minnesota Human Rights Library: www1.umn.edu/humanrts/. This site contains information on United Nations, ILO, and other international human rights treaties, including ratification and signatory status and links to other human rights resource centers and databases. Also available at this site is the “Training Manual on Human Rights Monitoring.” University of Washington Human Rights Education and Research Network: depts.washington.edu/hrights/. This site is invaluable for providing timely information about current human rights issues and concerns. Also provides links to other research sites. Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, International (HURIDOCS), through its Hurisearch Portal, provides links to over 3,000 human rights websites: hurisearch.org. Carr Center for Human Rights Policy • www.ksg.harvard.edu/cchrp/ Danish Institute for Human Rights • humanrights.dk/ • Human Rights & Business Project: www.humanrightsbusiness.org/ Netherlands Dutch Humanist Committee’s Aim for Human Rights (HOM) • www.aimforhumanrights.org/ • HOM Human Rights Resource Center: www.humanrightsimpact.org/ Rights & Democracy • www.ichrdd.ca/site/ United Nations • Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: www.ohchr .org/english/ • The UNHCHR has also compiled a database on human rights education: hre.ohchr.org/hret/intro.aspx. Human Rights Resource Center’s list of organizations • www.humanrightsimpact.org/resource-database/organisations//, for an expansive list of organizations that have participated in HRIA projects.

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International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) • www.iaia.org/, for information on other types of impact assessment. Oxfam Novib • www.oxfamnovib.nl/: rights-based approach to development European Commission • “Impact Assessment Guidelines” (June 2006) at ec.europa.eu/ governance/impact/key_en.htm

HRIA BY CATEGORY: TOOLS AND INSTRUMENTS Women’s Rights to Health Care Instruments • “The Health Rights of Women Assessment Instrument (HeRWAI)” (developed by HOM)2 䊏 Six steps: (1) The Policy, (2) Government Commitments, (3) Capacity to Implement, (4) Impact of the Policy, (5) State Obligations, (6) Recommendations 䊏 Based on CEDAW and ICESCR 䊏 For women’s, health, and human rights organizations to utilize in analyzing a government policy, or local implementation of that policy 䊏 For enhancing lobbying activities to implement and improve women’s human rights (lobby government, lobby international organizations, shadow reports) 䊏 Examples: 䉬 Saskia Bakker, Draft Health Rights of Women Assessment Instrument; HOM and Saskia Bakker, CEDAW and Women’s Health in International Relations; HOM; and other examples.3 Tools • Thesaurus of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights4 䊏 Tool to identify relevant documents and indicators, gather more information • HeRWAI Discussion Guide in Annex VII of HeRWAI • “Fulfilling Reproductive Rights for Women Living with HIV” (developed by International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS [ICW])5 䊏 Monitoring tool to monitor progress on governments fulfilling Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 3, 5, and 6 as pertains to reproductive rights of women living with HIV/AIDS

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Monitoring Corporate Policies and Programs Instruments • Human Rights Compliance Assessment Tool for Companies,6 䊏 Quick Check provides a sample of twenty-eight main questions with 240 corresponding indicators. It is a diagnostic tool that promotes corporate social responsibility by detecting human rights violations caused by company policies. 䊏 Quick Check questions and indicators can be used by students to assess a company by interviewing employees and reading policies. 䊏 Examples: Shell and TNT.

Tools • Country Risk Assessment 䊏 www.humanrightsbusiness.org/070_country_risk.htm

Monitoring Trade and Investment Programs Instruments • “Risk, Responsibility and Human Rights: Taking a Rights-Based Approach to Trade and Project Finance” (developed by the Halifax Initiative)7 䊏 Framework used to translate international standards into policy and analyze trade and project finance. 䊏 Four phases: (1) Feasibility Study, (2) Project Development— Conduct HRIA, (3) Project Implementation Preparation, and (4) Project Implementation. 䊏 Phase 2 HRIA includes (1) Executive Summary, (2) Policy, Legal Regulations, Institutional Framework, (3) Project Description, (4) HRIA Methodology, (5) Participation and Involvement, (6) Baseline Studies, (7) Identification of Human Rights Impacts, and (8) Human Rights Protection Plan. • “Human Rights Impact Assessment for Investment”8 (developed by Rights & Democracy) 䊏 Ten steps in the instrument: (1) Scoping; (2) Specific Research on the Investment Project; (3) Adapt HRIA tool to Project; (4) Expert opinion to be sought on key questions; (5) Interview representatives from community, workers, corporation, government on questions deemed relevant; (6) Verify information, identify factual disputes; (7) Development of Draft Report; (8) Development of Recommendations for Corrective Action; (9) Final report; and (10) Monitoring and ongoing evaluation.9

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䊏

Used by financial institutions as a basis for investment or by governments on foreign direct investments. Methodology: groups, companies, and governments assess human rights impacts of investment through interviews: questionnaire tool.10 Develop HRIA methodology to address link between human rights and economic globalization or investment. Assess human rights impacts of foreign direct investment projects.

Assessment of Rights Protection by Country Instruments • “Common Country Assessment” (developed by UN)11 䊏 Process: (1) Information gathering, (2) Assessment, (3) Identify challenges, (4) Analysis, (5) Short list, challenges for development cooperation. 䊏 This instrument can be used as a guide for conducting a broad HRIA on a country. • “The Democratic Development Exercise: Terms of Reference and Analytic Framework”12 䊏 Analyze link between human rights and democratic development. 䊏 Analytical framework consists of six categories of rights concerning concepts of democracy, civil society, and citizenship that serve as proxies for the huge list of human rights in UDHR, ICESR, ICCP, CEDAW, Declaration of the Right to Development, and the ILO Convention of 1969 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries. Tools • Transparency International 䊏 www.transparency.org/ • Democratic Development Index 䊏 www.dd-rd.ca/site/ • Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 䊏 www.oecd.org/home/ • Country Risk Assessment 䊏 www.humanrightsbusiness.org/ Assessing Nonprofit NGO Programs Instruments • “CARE Impact Guidelines” (developed by CARE)13 䊏 This document was created for CARE to assess its policy impact on Household Livelihood Security Impact.

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This instrument can be used as a guide to create an impact assessment for any organization to assess the impact of that organization and its policies on a particular human rights theme. • “Strategic Programme Impact Framework” (developed by International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour under International Labor Organization)14 䊏 This instrument is to be used in the planning, development, monitoring, and evaluation of a project. Can be used as a guide to developing HRIA. 䊏

Assessing Implementation of Children’s Rights Instruments • “Children’s Rights Impact Assessment: The SCCYP Model” (developed by Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People)15 䊏 Analyze policies that will affect children; determine what kind of effect policy will have on children’s human rights. 䊏 Eight stages: (1) Identify (decide what to assess), (2) Map (description), (3) Gather (research), (4) Consult (interviews), (5) Analyze (assess impact on children), (6) Recommend (conclusions), (7) Publicize (make HRIA known), and (8) Monitor (M&E).

NOTES Most of the research for this appendix was compiled by Ronikay O’Dell (MAIPS 2007, Monterey Institute of International Studies). 1. The European Union, the United States, and Canada are among the countries that have legislation incorporating environmental impact assessment into the process of policy formulation. For elaboration, see Peter Morris, ed., Methods of Environmental Impact Assessment, 2nd ed., New York: Spon Press, 2001. 2. Humanist Committee on Human Rights (HOM), “The Health Rights of Women Assessment Instrument (HeRWAI),” at www.humanrightsimpact.org. 3. Examples of HeRWAI being used are found at the Human Rights Impact Resource Center, www.humanrightsimpact.org/hria-instruments/item/instrument/1/. 4. Stephen A. Hansen, Thesaurus of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Terminology and Potential Violations, Washington, DC: AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, 2000, at AAAS website: shr.aaas.org/thesaurus. 5. International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS, “Fulfilling Reproductive Rights for Women Living with HIV,” at www.humanrightsimpact.org/. 6. The Danish Institute for Human Rights, “The Human Rights Compliance Assessment Tool,” The Human Rights & Business Project, at www.humanrightsbusiness .org/. Quick Check online free of charge through the HRIA Resource Center at www .humanrightsimpact.org/.

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7. Halifax Initiative, “Risk, Responsibility and Human Rights: Taking a Rightsbased Approach to Trade and Project Finance,” at www.humanrightsimpact.org/. 8. Rights & Democracy, “Human Rights Impact Assessment for Investment,” in development, due to be published 2007. Information about development of the instrument at www.humanrightsimpact.org/ or at www.dd-rd.ca/site/what_we_do/index .php?subsection=documents&lang=en&id=1489. 9. Rights & Democracy, “Steps to Follow: A Guide for Case Studies for the HRIA Initiative,” at www.dd-rd.ca/site/what_we_do/index.php?subsection=documents &lang=en&id=1615. 10. The questionnaire tool is being developed in part according to guidelines in United Nations, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Norms on the responsibilities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises with regard to human rights, at www.dd-rd.ca/site/_PDF/publications/globalization/norms%20english.pdf. 11. United Nations, “Common Country Assessment and UN Development Assistance Framework,” 2004, at www.humanrightsimpact.org/. 12. Rights & Democracy publication. 13. www.humanrightsimpact.org/. 14. www.humanrightsimpact.org/. 15. Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People, “Children’s Rights Impact Assessment: The SCCYP Model,” at SCCYP website: www.sccyp.org.uk/web pages/pr_single.php?article=Children’s%20Rights%20Impact%20Assessment:%20The %20SCCYP%20Model&id=27.

Index

Abu Ghraib, 220, 224n15, 243 abuses of human rights: anticipating, guidelines for, 23–25; causes of, 5, 9; in East Timor, 179; and social healing, 160–61; term, 20–23; women and, 125–27 accountability, 75–84; in Chile, 95; in East Timor, 177–79, 185; of highestlevel officials, 162; mobile money and, 82–83 adjudication, 41–42 Afghanistan, 164, 212–13 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 40 Alessandri, Jorge, 95 Alien Tort Claims Act, 142–43, 234 Alkatiri, Mari, 182–83 Allende, Salvador, 204 Amazon, 139–40, 226f American Convention on Human Rights, 39, 106 American Service-Members’ Protection Act, 169 Amnesty International, 35, 79, 222, 248–49; and Lu, 130, 132–33 Annan, Kofi, 165, 178, 236 Antarctica, 136f antitrust legislation, 234–35

AOL, 219 Arab Charter on Human Rights, 40 Argentina, 66–72, 107 arms trade, 209–10 Arquilla, John, 156 Ashcroft, John, 243 assimilation, 117–18 Aung San Suu Kyi, 250 Australia, 175, 180, 183 Aylwin, Patricio, 101 Azerbaijan, 80 Bachelet, Alberto, 109 Bachelet, Michelle, 94, 108–10 Badong, 149 baiji, 148 Bangladesh, 126 Ban Ki-moon, 157 Ba people, 148 battered population syndrome, 161 Bechtel Corporation, 143, 209 Benenson, Peter, 35 Bianchi, Andrés, 101 bin Laden, Osama, 212 biodiversity: and cultural diversity, 118; loss of, 140 Blackwater, 220 Bolivia, 143–44

269

270

Index

Bonnefoy, Pascal, 104 Bonner, Ray, 11n3 Boulding, Kenneth, 62 Boumediene v. Bush, 220 bracero program, 91 Brazil, 84n3, 139–40, 198, 203 Brilliant, Ashleigh, 186n13, 250 Brockovitch, Erin, 145n4 Broz, Svetlana, 171n6 Burma, 46, 50n1, 142 Bush administration: and Argentina, 70–71; and East Timor, 178; and empire, 195, 197; and immigration, 92–93; and Iran, 218; and rule of law, 220; and torture, 221, 243; and war, 167, 169–71, 211, 213–14, 216 California, Proposition 187, 91 Cˆamara, Dom Hélder, 10 Cambodia, 62, 154f Camus, Albert, 18 capitalism: China and, 151; nineteenthcentury version of, 230; “secondcoming,” 57–58 capital punishment, 22, 93n2 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 234 CARE Impact Guidelines, 266–67 Carr Center for Human Rights, Harvard University, 238, 263 Carter, Jimmy, 79, 131, 205, 236 Castro, Fidel, 201, 243 Catholic Church, 28, 109, 179 Cayman Islands, 81 cease-fire: effects of, 157–58; and rule of law, 158–59 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 41, 200, 214, 221–22, 224n17, 243 charity, versus development, 54 Chávez, Hugo, 204 Cheney, Dick, 11n4, 243 Chen Shui-bian, 130–31, 133 Chiang Kai-shek, Madam, 131 children: Convention on the Rights of the Child, 37–38; HRIA instruments for, 267; and participation, 76 Chile, 94–112, 161

China, 71, 82, 126, 197, 219; and Taiwan, 129–34; Three Gorges Dam, 146–52 Ch’in dynasty, 147 Chomsky, Noam, 167, 208 Chongqing, 151 Church, Frank, 242–43 Church Committee, 242–43 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency citizenship, 87–88; refusal of, 89–93 civil rights, 18, 73–112; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 35; war and, 212, 219 Clark, Wesley, 237 Clarke, Richard, 219 client states, 197–200 Clinton administration, 91–92, 169, 175 CNRT. See National Council for East Timorese Resistance coalition building, 231–32 coca cultivation, 144, 164–65 cold war, end of, 190–91, 193–94; and accountability, 162–63; and democracy, 80; and economic issues, 55–57; and migration, 86–87; and women, 123 collective rights, versus individual rights, 47–48 collective security, 48 collective vulnerability, 138–39 Colombia, 141–42, 164–65 colonialism: and Argentina, 66–68; and East Timor, 180–81; and globalization, 56 Commission of Experts, 178 commitment: power of, 247–49; as protection, 31 Common Country Assessment, 266 commons: enclosure of, 47; right to, 135–52 communication: military engagement as, 158; Talleyrand on, 29, 44 community: building, 230–31; recommendations for, 238–39; strength of, as protection, 30–31 community rights, 19–20

Index comparative disadvantage, 53 complaint, versus abuse, 24 Congo, 193–94 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 37 Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, 38 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 36–37, 121 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 36 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 34 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 38–39 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 37–38 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 35 conviction, power of, 247–49 corporations: and elections, 204–5; and empire, 202; HRIA instruments for, 265; and human rights, 47; oil, 141–43; recommendations for dealing with, 234; and war, 210–11 corrections system, 88–89, 93n4 Costa Rica, 198 Couloumbis, Ted, 235 Country Risk Assessment, 265 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 75 credit. See debt and credit issues crime, and war, 211–14 Cuba, 80, 188f, 201, 240 cultural diversity: and environment, 140–41; loss of, 118; political dimensions of, 115–28 cultural preservation, 48–49; dam building and, 147–49 cultural rights, 113–34; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 35

271

Curtis, Grant, 62 Curveball, 222 Damiao Longgu ruins, 149 dams, 140, 146–52 Danish Institute for Human Rights, 262–63 Darfur, 39 da Silva, Luiz Inacio “Lula,” 198, 203 David, Pedro, 111n3 DDR. See disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration approach debt and credit issues: in Argentina, 69, 71; in Chile, 105–6; and empire, 197, 202–3; and environmental issues, 62–63, 140; and human rights, 81; and war, 209. See also sustainable debt deception, 244–45 decision making: alienation from, 229; exclusion from, 244; human rights and, 6 Declaration of Independence, 15 dehumanization, 17 de la Rúa Bruno, Fernando, 69–70 de las Casas, Bartolomé, 16 democracy, 75; in Chile, 95–96, 98, 106–8; definitional issues with, 2; versus empire, 196; in Iraq, 170; limited, 77–78; as protection, 26; sham, 80; in Taiwan, 129–34; transition to, 78–80, 160 Democratic Development Exercise, 266 deniability, plausible, 242–45 denial, in Chile, 99–102, 105 dependence: Argentina and, 67–68; versus self-sufficiency, 163–65 development, 53, 76–78, 163–65; versus charity, 54; and environment, 139–41 dialectic process: and human rights, 2; and international human rights regime, 33–43 Dickens, Charles, 31n1, 57, 227 diplomacy, 197–98; and empire, 201 disabilities, persons with, Convention on the Rights of, 38–39

272

Index

disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) approach, 181 diversity, political dimensions of, 115–28 Dominican Republic, 79 Dorfman, Ariel, 99 dowry abuse, 125–26 Dutch Humanist Committee’s Aim for Human Rights, 262–63 East Timor, 162, 173–86 economic issues: in Argentina, 66–72; in Chile, 94–112; in East Timor, 185; and empire, 201; and environment, 139–41; and migrants, 85–86; and peace, 167–69; and politics, 54; and prisons, 89; recommendations for, 240; and Three Gorges Dam, 146; as trump, 10, 54–57; and war, 208–11; and women, 122, 125. See also miracles, economic; mobile money economic rights, 51–72; future of, 63–64; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 35; versus political rights, 45 Ecopetrol, 142 education: in human rights, recommendations for, 236; as protection, 29 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 208 ElBaradei, Mohammed, 218, 223n12 elections: versus democracy, 75, 80; in East Timor, 174–77, 183; and empire, 201, 203–6; manipulation of, 82–83; and peacekeeping process, 159; spread of, 78–80; threats and, 197 elites: and cultural diversity, 116–17; and participation, 76; and transformation, 246–47 empire, 189–207; actions of, 197–99; innovation and, 201–2; tools of, 200–201 enemy combatant, term, 17 energy use issues, 49; China and, 151; in East Timor, 180

environmental issues, 48–49, 135–52, 230; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 138; and war, 194 “eucalyptus economy,” 69 European Commission on Human Rights, 42, 264 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 39 European Court of Human Rights, 42 European Social Charter, 39 European Union: and democratization, 79; human rights instruments in, 39; as model, 227 exceptional circumstances, 16–17, 21; Conventions on, 37; war and, 189–91, 212 exclusion: and elections, 203–4; and peace process, 158 exile invasion, and empire, 200 expertise, myth of, 10–11 exploitation, and empire, 196 expression, freedom of: in Chile, 95, 105; war on terror and, 219, 245 failed state, concept, 45–46 FALANTIL, 182 Falklands-Malvinas war, 68, 215 the Farm, 248 Farr, Sam, 223n10 fear, exploitation of, 218–23 female genital mutilation, 125 Fengdu, 149 Fengjie, 149 Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 39 financial issues. See economic issues; mobile money Finland, 168 Ford Motor Company, 71 former Soviet states: and accountability, 162–63; and women, 127. See also cold war: end of France, 248 France, Anatole, 18 Franco, Francisco, 78 Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 75

Index Freedom House, 82 free trade, 55, 58; and human trafficking, 127; term, 232 Frei, Eduardo, 98, 105 Freire, Paulo, 29 Fretilin, 174, 181 Fuling, 149 future populations, rights of, 48–49 Galtung, Johan, 57 Gandhi, Mahatma, 240 General Electric, 210 Geneva Conventions, 34 genocide, 21, 34; in Chile, 100; in East Timor, 175 Girl Scouts, 236 globalization, ix; and migration, 87; and vulnerability, 53–65; and women, 122–24 Global Majority, 168 Gojc, Alejandro, 109 Gordon, Lincoln, 84n3 Gore, Al, 138, 250 Goulding, Marrack, 158, 166, 171n2 governments, weak: and human rights, 81; mobile money and, 58–59 Grameen Bank, 248 Great Wall of China, 147 Greene, Graham, 3 Greenpeace, 248 Grenada, 192 Guantánamo Bay, 220–22, 237 Gusmão, José “Xanana,” 174, 177, 183 Gutiérrez, Hugo, 110 Guzmán, Juan, 100–101, 104, 111n6 Haas, Robert, 234 habeas corpus, 219–20 Habibie, B. J., 175 Haiti, 65n2 Halifax Initiative Coalition, 262, 265 Halliburton, 209 Hands Off Cain, 93n2 happiness, pursuit of, 17–18 Harvard University, Carr Center for Human Rights, 238, 263 Hasegawa, representative, 183

273

healthcare, HRIA instruments for, 264 Health Rights of Women Assessment Instrument, 262, 264 Helsinki accords, 35 Helsinki Watch, 35–36 heroin, 164 Hersh, Seymour, 251n6 Hezbollah, 216–17 Hindenburg, Paul von, 83n1 HIV/AIDS, and women, 125 Holmes, John, 138 homelessness, 59–60 honor killings, 126 Hood, Ludovic, 182 HRIA. See human rights impact assessment human(s): relationship to nature, 137–45; term, 15–17 humanitarian relief, 163–65 humanitarian workers, safety of, 156–57, 164, 176 human rights: changing attitudes toward, 1–2; definitional issues with, 2; mainstreaming, 227–41; monitoring, 250, 265–66; perspective of, 1–11; strategies for, 225–51; terminology in, 15–32; triage, 78–80; unity of, 8–9, 45. See also transformation Human Rights Committee, 40 Human Rights Compliance Assessment Tool for Companies, 265 Human Rights Council, 41 human rights impact assessment (HRIA), 261–68; checklist for, 7–8; and decision making, 244; need for, 1–11; pitfalls of, 238; resources for, 263–64; strategic promise of, 5–8; tools and instruments for, 264–67 Human Rights Impact Resource Center, 262–63 Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, International, 263 human rights instruments: adjudication of, 41–42; implementation of, 40–41; regional, 39–40

274

Index

Human Rights Resource Center, 263 Human Rights Tools, 263 Human Rights Watch, 36, 75, 238; and elections, 79–80, 82 human trafficking, 127 Humphrey, Hubert, 227 Huntington, Samuel, 251n6 ICC. See International Criminal Court IMF. See International Monetary Fund Immigration and Naturalization Service, 91–92 impact assessment. See human rights impact assessment impunity, 25; and abuses of human rights, 5; in East Timor, 173; Pinochet and, 101–2 India, 126 indigenous peoples, 115–16, 226f; Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, 38; in East Timor, 173, 177, 181; and environment, 140–41; problems of, 117–18 individual rights, versus collective rights, 47–48 individuals, strength of, as protection, 30–31 Indonesia, 175 inequality, 25; and abuses of human rights, 5; economic issues and, 60–61; and participation, 76; reproduction of, 9; service providers and, 166 Innocence Project, 88 institutions, 28; and implementation, 40–41; limitations on, 246–47; recommendations for, 237; regional, 42–43; strengths of, 247 intelligence, and war on terror, 222 Inter-American Court for Human Rights, 106 interdisciplinarity, human rights and, 3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 138 international, term, x

international agreements, uses of, 198 International Association for Impact Assessment, 264 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 38 International Court of Justice, 41 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 35 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 35, 53 International Criminal Court (ICC), 41–42, 156, 169 international human rights regime, 4; building, dialectics of, 33–43; current status of, 36–39; development of, 34–36 International Labor Organization, 236 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 70–71, 99, 198 intervention: in East Timor, 184; guidelines for, 23–25; moving upstream, 6, 245–47 Inti-Illimani, 107 investment programs, HRIA instruments for, 265–66 Iran, 218 Iraq, 169–70, 198, 212–14, 216, 222–23, 223n10 Islam, and women, 124, 126 Israel, 216–17 Jackson, Bruce, 209 Jara, Víctor, 107 Jefferson, Thomas, 83 Jeria, Angela, 109 Juan Carlos, king of Spain, 78 jurisdiction. See universal jurisdiction justice, and peace, 165–67 Katrina, Hurricane, 163 Kavan, Jan, 241n7 Kennan, George, 190 Keynes, John Maynard, 63, 190 Kirchner, Nestor, 70–71 Kissinger, Henry, 175, 204

Index Knippers, Ottis J., 31n2 Kornfeld, Elizabeth Lira, 105 labor: abuses of, 22; in Argentina, 68, 71; commodification of, 60–61; current status of, 64; migrant, 59–60, 85–86, 91; and participation, 77; women and, 114f, 122–23 Lagos, Ricardo, 103 land rights, 22, 47 language(s): in East Timor, 179; extinction of, 48 Latino population, immigration policies and, 92 Lavín, Jorge, 103 Law of the Sea, 180 legal approach to human rights: limitations of, 4; protections of, 26–27 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement, 120–21 Letelier, Orlando, 107 Lewan, Lloyd, 134n2 Liberia, 162 life, right to, war on terror and, 222 lifestyle difference, 119–21 Liu Zuo-zong, 148 Locke, John, 17 low-intensity conflict, and empire, 200–201 Lu, Annette (Hsiu-lien), 130–33, 249 mainstreaming human rights, 227–41; pitfalls of, 238; recommendations for, 236–39 majority rule, 75 malaria, 140 Mandela, Nelson, 161, 250 Maslow, Abraham, 18 Ma Ying-jeou, 130 McConnell, Mike, 224n17 Mead, Margaret, 106, 250 media: and accountability, 244–45; corporations and, 210–11; and East Timor, 185; and empire, 199, 202

275

mediation, 158 Médici, Emilio Garrastazú, 53 Medina, Cecilia, 104–5 Mendes, Chico, 141 Menem, Carlos Saúl, 68–70 Mexico, 83, 84n6, 90–92, 217, 244, 251n4 Middle East, 216–17 migration, 85–86; citizenship and, 89–93; history of, 86–87; International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 38; and labor, 59–60, 85–86, 91; problems of, 118–19 military: in Argentina, 68–69, 71; in Chile, 96–98; in East Timor, 182; and elections, 205; and empire, 190, 200–201; and security, 192–93 Military Commissions Act, 220–21 military-industrial complex, 208, 210 minorities, 85–93; citizenship and, 87–93; development of, 86–87; prisons and, 88–89; women as, 121–23 miracles, economic, 165–66; in Argentina, 68–71; in Chile, 96 mobile money, 58–59, 229; and accountability, 82–83; and empire, 202; and human rights, 81; recommendations for, 234–35 Moffitt, Ronni, 107 Molo, Solomon, 162 Mondragón cooperative, 247–48 monitoring, 250; HRIA instruments for, 265–66 Monning, Bill, 168 Morales, Evo, 144 Morocco, 14f Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 71 Mukasey, Michael, 224n17 music, in Chile, 107 National Council for East Timorese Resistance (CNRT), 176–77

276

Index

National Endowment for Democracy, 200 national self-determination, versus sovereignty, 46 nation-building, failures in, 184 nation-state, 76, 235; and noncitizens, 90. See also sovereignty natural resources, exploitation of: debt and, 140; globalization and, 62–63 nature, human relationship to, 137–45 needs, hierarchy of, 18–19, 19f networking, recommendations for, 233–34 NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations nineteenth century, getting out of, 63, 228 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): history of, 34; HRIA instruments for, 266–67; and indigenous peoples, 118; and mainstreaming, 237–38; and peace, 168; as protection, 28; recommendations for, 230; safety of workers for, 157; successes of, 248–49; and transformation, 246–47 nonstate actors, and war, 194–95 North, Global: and environmental issues, 62–63; and free trade, 55; and human rights, 33, 36, 47 Nuremberg Trials, 34, 162 Obama, Barack, 84n4 Occidental Petroleum Corporation, 141–42 oil companies, 141–43 omission, abuses of, 21 Operation Condor, 107 Operation Gatekeeper, 91 organization, recommendations for, 233–34, 236 Ortiz, Diana, 19 outings, in Chile, 106 OXFAM, 168, 264

Pakistan, 126 Papua New Guinea, 63, 139 Paraguay, 215 Parot, Carmen Luz, 104 participation, 75–84; regaining, 76 Patil, Pratibha, 126 Patriot Act, 215–16 peace, 218; justice and, 165–67; rights to, 153–86; sustainable, 155–72 Peacebuilding Commission, 237 Peace Corps, 54, 94, 228 peace dividend, 56; heist of, 208–11 peacekeeping process, effects of, 157–58 peace process: in East Timor, 173–86; in Middle East, 216–17 penetration, imperial: nature of, 199–200; and states, 197–99 Peru, 107 pharmaceutical industry, and prisoners, 89, 93n4 Pinochet, Augusto, 71, 94, 99, 101, 104, 107–8, 110 plausible deniability, 242–45 Poindexter, John, 243 police, 81, 182 political approach to human rights, 4–5; and environmental issues, 141–44 political rights, 73–112; versus economic rights, 45; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 35 politics: diversity and, 115–28; and economics, 54; money and, 58–59 Polk, James K., 217, 251n4 popular sovereignty: in Argentina, 70–71; and migration, 87–88 Portugal, 78, 175 poverty, women and, 125 Powell, Colin, 243 power: of commitment, 247–49; and international human rights regime, 4; use of, necessity of, 249–50; war and, 217 preventive detention, 220

Index prisons, 88–89, 93n4 private sector, 82–83; economic forces and, 58 privatization, 56, 140; in Argentina, 69; in Bolivia, 143; in Chile, 96, 105; in Haiti, 65n2 production, exhaustive, 139–41 property rights, 17 Proposition 187, 91 protection: dialectic of, 33–43; HRIA instruments for, 266; recommendations for, 245; term, 26–31 Protocol on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 39–40 Protocol to Abolish the Death Penalty, 39 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 47 public sector, 82–83; economic forces and, 58 Qin dynasty, 147 Quílapayún, 107 Qu Yuan, 149 racial discrimination, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of, 36 Rainbow Warrior, 248 Ramos Horta, Jose, 183 Reagan administration, 192, 215 reconciliation, 160–63; in Chile, 108–10; in East Timor, 178 reform, term, 232–33 refugees, 35, 59–60; camps for, 164; Three Gorges Dam and, 147–50; War on Drugs and, 165. See also migration region, and women’s issues, 125–27 regional human rights approaches: institutions, 42–43; instruments, 39–40 Reichstag fire, 75, 83n1 Reilly, Emily, 216 Reinado, Alfredo, 182–83 relief workers, safety of, 156–57, 164, 176

277

religion: recommendations for, 240; as trump, 10; and women, 124 rendition, 221, 243 resistance: in Chile, 97; to environmental exploitation, 141–44, 150 responsibility to protect, 46, 237 Rettig Commission, 101 Ricardo, David, 53 Rice, Condoleezza, 167, 243 rights, term, 17–20 Rights & Democracy, 262–63, 265 Robinson, Mary, 40, 43n1, 43n3, 221, 236 Rosas family, 97 Rove, Karl, 214 Rugge Report, 262 rule of law, 158–60; war on terror and, 219–20 Russia, 74f Rwanda, 171n2 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 35, 78 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 204–5 SAPs. See structural adjustment programs Saro-Wiwa, Kenneth, 141 Saudi Arabia, 82; and women, 124 Scandinavia, and women, 124 Schumacher, E. F., 240 Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People, 262, 267 secession, 46 Second-Coming Capitalism, 57–58 security: collective, 48; in East Timor, 177–79, 181; focus on, effects of, 156–58; nature of, 192–93; recommendations for, 238–39; reconceiving, 155; rule of law and, 158–60; and Three Gorges Dam, 150; as trump, 10, 54–57 security systems, as protection, 27–28 self-deception, 244–45 self-definition, 19 self-determination: right to, 36; versus sovereignty, 46; in Taiwan, 129–34

278

Index

self-government, 19 self-negating prophecy, 245, 251n6 self-sufficiency, 19; versus dependence, 163–65 Semester at Sea, 132, 134n2 Sepp, Kalev, 217 September 11, 2001, 169, 212–13 Sepúlveda, Manuel Contreras, 100 Shell Oil, 141–42, 248 ShibaoZhai, 149 Shriver, Sargent, 228 Sierra Leone, 162 Silkwood, Karen, 145n4 Silva, Julio, 101 Sister City program, 236 social healing, 160–63 social responsibility, 138–39 social rights, 51–72; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 35 socioeconomic, term, 232 Solano, Franciso López, 215 Solick, Danielle, 43n5 Sophocles, 34 South, Global: and environmental issues, 62–63; and free trade, 55; and human rights, 33, 36, 47 South Africa, 161–62 South America: and democracy, 79; economy of, 72n1 South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, 248 sovereignty: popular, 70–71, 87–88; versus self-determination, 46; versus universal jurisdiction, 45–46 Spain, 78 Sri Lanka, 126, 163, 168 statelessness, 59–60 Stepan, Alfred, 172n6 stereotyping, 115–16 Stonewall Riots, 120 Strategic Programme Impact Framework, 267 Straw, Jack, 100 streaker capital, 69 structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 69; and women, 123–24

structural change, term, 232 subversion, 227–41 Sudan, 39 Suharto, 175 Summers, Laurence, 50n4 supply-side wars, 171, 172n13, 191–92 surveillance, 219 sustainable debt, 59, 67; and war, 193–95. See also debt and credit issues sustainable war, 155–72 system, state of war as, 191, 208 Taiwan, 129–34 Taliban, 212 Talleyrand Perigord, Charles Maurice de, 29, 44 taser gun, 21, 32n12 Taylor, Charles, 162 technology: and empire, 202; and surveillance, 219 Tenet, George, 243 terrorism: in Chile, 100; war on, 208–24 Texaco, 141 Thatcher, Margaret, 68, 215 threats, 197; reconceiving, 155 Three Gorges Dam, 146–52 Thucydides, 196 Tibet, 130 Tobin tax, 234 torture, 16, 21, 31n10, 220–22; in Chile, 99–100, 107; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 37 Total, 142 trade programs, HRIA instruments for, 265–66 transformation, 191–92, 245–47; future of, 240–41; paradigms for, 230–36 transparency, 165 treaties, uses of, 198 Triple Alliance, War of, 215 trumps, 54–57; recommendations for, 240; triad of, 10–11

Index truth: power of, 160–63; as protection, 29–30. See also reconciliation tsunami relief, 163 Tunisia, 124 Turkey, 126 Turkmenistan, 80 Tutu, Desmond, 162 Tyson, Brady, 112n22 Ukraine, 127 unemployment, 61; in Argentina, 70; in East Timor, 174 United Arab Emirates, 124 United Nations: attitudes toward, 157; autonomy of, support for, 169–71; and East Timor, 173–82; establishment of, 34; human rights resources of, 263; instruments of, 36–39; recommendations for, 235–36; United States and, 241n7 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 83 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 40–41 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 236 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, 121 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 236, 262 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 164, 176, 236 United States: and Argentina, 70–71; attitudes toward, 216; and Bolivia, 144; and Chile, 110, 112n22; current status of, 193–94; and democracy, 79; and empire, 189–207; and human rights instruments, 38, 42, 43n2; and Mexico, 90–92; prisons in, 88–89; and September 11, 2001, 169; and Taiwan, 133; and United Nations, 241n7; and war, 167; and war on terror, 208–24; and women, 124

279

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 34–35, 43n1 universal jurisdiction: in Chile, 103–4; versus state sovereignty, 45–46 Universal Periodic Review, 41 University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, 263 University of Washington Human Rights Education and Research Network, 263 Unocal, 142 urbanization, and women, 122–23 Uruguay, 107 U’wa people, 142 Valech Report, 107 value(s): reassessment of, 144; revival of, 232–33 Venezuela, 71, 204 Videla, Guillermo, 105, 107 Villa Grimaldi, 107–9 Villalobos, Joaquín, 11n1, 158 Villamizar, Rodrigo, 142 voter interference, 203–4 vulnerability, 25, 115; and abuses of human rights, 5; collective, 138–39; economic issues and, 85–93; globalization and, 53–65 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 235 Wang Xiaofeng, 151–52 Wanxian, 149 war: as cover story, 217–18; and cultural change, 120; and dialectic of rights protection, 34–36; in East Timor, 173–86; and empire, 189–207; and environment, 140; and exceptional circumstances, 189–91; and human rights, 16–17, 22, 55; incidence of, 156; study of, 191; sustainable, 155–72; on terror, 208–24; winners and losers of, 215–17 Washington Consensus, 107, 161 waterboarding, 221 water issues, 140, 143 Watt, James, 57

280

Index

Weisbrot, Mark, 72n1 whistle-blowers, protection for, 233–34 Williamson, Marianne, 250 Wilson, Joseph, 219 Wilson, Pete, 91 women, 114f, 230; Bachelet and, 108–9; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 36–37; and cultural change, 120; current status of, 64; and diversity, 121–23; in East Timor, 179; economic issues and, 61–62; HRIA instruments for, 264; in Morocco, 14f; organizations for, 236; and participation, 76; and peace,

168; in Taiwan, 129–34; war and, 217 World Bank, 99 World Commission on Dams, 149 World Court, 34 World Trade Organization, 235 World War II, effects of, 190 Wushan City, 149 Yayasan Hak, 178 Yemen, 52f, 124 Yunyang, 149 Zaldívar, Andrés, 100, 102 Zhongxian, 149 Zigui, 149

About the Author

Jan Knippers Black has been a professor in the Graduate School of International Policy Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California since 1991. She has also been a senior associate member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, a faculty member in the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester-at-Sea program, a research professor at the University of New Mexico, and a research team supervisor at American University. A founding-generation Peace Corps volunteer in Chile, she holds a PhD in international studies from American University in Washington, D.C. Dr. Black has served on some two dozen editorial or NGO governing or advisory boards and has traveled extensively, to some 175 countries, undertaking research, speaking engagements, workshops, consulting, and program evaluation. She is author, editor, or coauthor of more than two dozen books and 200 chapters or articles in anthologies, encyclopedias, journals, magazines, and newspapers. Recent books include Inequity in the Global Village, Development in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. rev, and Latin America: Its Problems and Its Promise, soon to go into its fifth edition. With avocations including music and art, she is now collaborating on musical comedy.

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