This is the text of a speech by Gita Sahgal at AIUSA Public Round-table on 16 Feruary 2007 cross-posted from Human Rights For All
****
In 1993, at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, a group of feminist advocates held a now famous tribunal on Violence against Women. And in that moving event which reflected the experiences of thousands of women across the world, a challenge was posed to governments and to the leadership of the formal human rights movement. It was not a challenge to abandon the principles of human rights, or to dilute them. It was a challenge to embrace them more fully by accounting for the experience of a whole category of excluded victims.
Another panel warned of the impact on women of the rise of violent religious fundamentalist movements across the world – Muslim, Christian – Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical, Hindu and Jewish. And there was a critique too of identity politics – often arising in oppressed minorities and a discussion of the ways in which this identity politics opened the way to the legitimisation of fundamentalism. States were often complicit or directly involved in this process.
This panel was not abandoning the principle of universality. It was a foundational challenge to the way in which universality is constructed. Many of you will have engaged with academic and other debates about whether human rights are a western concept. Do they really apply across the world? If you had been present at those discussions fifteen long years ago, the answer would have been obvious to you. Women intervened in Vienna to influence the deliberations of states. But they didn’t simply speak of their experiences – they fundamentally challenged both the theory and practice of the human rights movement as it was then understood in the West.
There are two things that it is vital to understand. As other speakers have pointed out many groups and organisations in other parts of the world, long before 9/11 were pointing to acts of terrorism and the ideologies of militarism and violence that fuelled them as grave threats to fundamental rights and freedoms. Fear of acts of terrorism was not just a fear of one kind of indiscriminate attack such as a bombing on a bus or in a public space. Nor was it of the kind of spectacular attack of 9/11 which wounded New York so grievously- and so suddenly.
Most acts of terrorism, in most parts of the world, are well sign posted by the groups that commit them. They are often carried out by people who know their targets well. Their aim is not only to murder and maim but to intimidate and control. In short, for civilians who are the targets of such attacks, the enemy is not unknown but an intimate one. And the threat of terrorism affects freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the right to education and to health and work as much as it threatens the right to life itself.
In Amnesty International’s report on Colombia, ‘Scarred Bodies, Hidden Crimes’ which was produced as part of the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign, we demonstrated the links between violence in the family and violence by armed groups.
Rosa was raped by her father when she was 7. He ran away from widespread social outrage to join the FARC, an armed group which controlled the area. The FARC kidnapped Rosa and her mother and later killed her mother’s new partner. They beat Rosa all over while she was in captivity forcing her to say ‘I am a cowardly Colombian woman’. Her mother survived being buried alive by the FARC when she was rescued by local farmers.
Amnesty International found that women were at particular risk if they were political activists; especially if they were from marginalised groups such as indigenous or Afro descendent communities. An indigenous woman from Putamayo said, ‘A young woman who talks who can express herself is seen as subversive. This happens even when we say it is our right.’
In long running conflicts with no side clearly in control, armed groups resort to methods that demonstrate their visible control over the population. They may be competing with security forces or state-backed paramilitaries who use similar methods. In Colombia, armed groups have put up orders to the local population called ‘Rules of Coexistence’ which seek to control what is regarded as ‘deviant’ or ‘immoral’ behaviour. People are attacked for being prostitutes, or lesbians, for wearing cropped tops. Men are not immune from such attacks as young boys with earrings had their ears pulled off.
The Taliban puts up night letters warning teachers not to teach and children especially girls not to go to school. Recently they have issued warnings to barbers’ shops to stop shaving men’s beards. Islamist militants from Algeria to Iraq and Kashmir have threatened women who do not conform to the dress codes they impose or the curfews they enforce. Armed groups may intervene in disputes at community level, providing their own forms of summary justice. The IRA’s practice of shooting offenders in the knee is an example. But such groups usually have a puritanical agenda as well. Their purpose is not simply to attack the forces of the state or an occupying force but to impose control on the population which is supposed to be their support base.
Civilians then are not simply caught in the cross fire between opposing forces. One of the objects of both terrorism and counter terrorism is the control of the civilian population itself. Attacks on civilians using the language of the Geneva Conventions may indeed be both ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘disproportionate’ but they are much more than that. Understanding this properly means unpacking the terms ‘civilian’ and ‘targeting’ in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. We also need to know what it means to ‘incite terror in a population.’
One of the purposes of orders issued by armed groups- is to set out the terms on which civilians are targeted. Women may be targeted for fraternising with the ‘enemy’, they may be assassinated for being ‘spies’, they may killed for infringements of invented codes of behaviour. Every form of discrimination that is practised in daily life is greatly exacerbated in conflict. But it goes far beyond ‘normal’ discriminatory social norms. According to a testimony obtained by Amnesty International, the FARC told two lesbians who were living together that they had to leave the municipality. Within a month they had ‘disappeared’ and were feared killed. But before these threats, their relationship which was public knowledge had been accepted in the town.
Finally, that is the challenge of a human rights account of terrorism. It is to understand how profoundly the use of a particular tactic of war, is adopted because of its instrumental use in the broader programme of the group. ‘Blood does not drown the revolution, it irrigates it.’ claimed the Peruvian Maoist group, Sendero Luminoso ( Shining Path). As with Shining Path, so with al Qa’ida. The blood of the martyr and the blood of the victim are the confluence over which a profound re-ordering of society is envisaged – one which is founded on violence and discrimination.
Not only governments but non-state groups are fighting the ‘enemy within’ They may be Christian fundamentalists bombing abortion clinics. They may be Hindu fundamentalists attacking Indian Muslims and Christians. It is a mistake to assume that what they are enforcing is simply a strict version of their religion. In general, they are intent on destroying religious minorities and of forcibly re-ordering their own religious practices – in ways that are neither traditional nor historically mandated. These are modern movements, no matter how medieval they may appear.
Amnesty International has reported that the Taliban and its allies in the MMA alliance which is in control of two Pakistani states have attacked such practices as the spring festival of Baisakhi, kite flying and listening to music. These are not Western customs, they are part of the profound expression of local culture, often of religious cultures deeply embedded in society. We have reported the threat to Hindu minorities and the threat to Ahmadiyas a minority Muslim sect who have been declared non-Muslims in some countries. In the context of conflict, these declarations of who is a true believer and who is declared an apostate or a blasphemer are not matters for theological debate. They are matters of life and death.
Yet states counter-terrorism measures do little to defend and protect people’s customary pleasures or their fundamental right to freedom of expression. Instead, they negotiate away the rights of women and ignore the threat to religious minorities. Many governments in pursuing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ counter-terrorism, play off one form of religion to control another that they deem to be more dangerous to their current interests. It is a cynical game and it is ultimately self-defeating. Governments, including Western governments have done much to promote organisations as their allies against terrorism against whom there are serious allegations of human rights abuses, which could amount to crimes against humanity. These they have termed ‘moderate Muslim’ groups.
A human rights analysis of terrorism must hold governments to account for their protection of serious human rights abusers. Security interests as a report on Northern Ireland has found,deepened and may have prolonged the conflict. Serious questions have been posed by activists on the protection of Algerian human rights abusers by the British state- possibly to defend its own security interests.
Numerous groups working on the ground in many countries have developed trans-national movements for accountability and justice that challenge the trans-national diasporic movements that have ideologically and financially supported those engaging in terrorism.
These movements were visible at the UN Conference at Vienna since when they have contributed to the negotiations for the Rome Statute; they have gathered evidence of serious human rights violations by both state and non-state actors for instance on the massacre of Muslims by the Hindutva movement in Gujarat, India. And they have demanded that investigations be conducted into serious international crimes using laws on universal jurisdiction. They have attempted to use alien tort law in this country .They have also developed highly innovative methods to put pressure on corporations and attack the charitable status of those groups that are funding the production of hate. None of these activities have been of the slightest interest to Western or other governments.
Few of the advocates come from formal positions in the human rights movement. Yet they have embraced and kept faith with the promise of universality and human rights. I hope that we can keep faith with them.
Negotiating Scylla and Charybdis – Human rights and terrorism
This is the text of a speech by Gita Sahgal at AIUSA Public Round-table on 16 Feruary 2007 cross-posted from Human Rights For All
****
In 1993, at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, a group of feminist advocates held a now famous tribunal on Violence against Women. And in that moving event which reflected the experiences of thousands of women across the world, a challenge was posed to governments and to the leadership of the formal human rights movement. It was not a challenge to abandon the principles of human rights, or to dilute them. It was a challenge to embrace them more fully by accounting for the experience of a whole category of excluded victims.
Another panel warned of the impact on women of the rise of violent religious fundamentalist movements across the world – Muslim, Christian – Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical, Hindu and Jewish. And there was a critique too of identity politics – often arising in oppressed minorities and a discussion of the ways in which this identity politics opened the way to the legitimisation of fundamentalism. States were often complicit or directly involved in this process.
This panel was not abandoning the principle of universality. It was a foundational challenge to the way in which universality is constructed. Many of you will have engaged with academic and other debates about whether human rights are a western concept. Do they really apply across the world? If you had been present at those discussions fifteen long years ago, the answer would have been obvious to you. Women intervened in Vienna to influence the deliberations of states. But they didn’t simply speak of their experiences – they fundamentally challenged both the theory and practice of the human rights movement as it was then understood in the West.
There are two things that it is vital to understand. As other speakers have pointed out many groups and organisations in other parts of the world, long before 9/11 were pointing to acts of terrorism and the ideologies of militarism and violence that fuelled them as grave threats to fundamental rights and freedoms. Fear of acts of terrorism was not just a fear of one kind of indiscriminate attack such as a bombing on a bus or in a public space. Nor was it of the kind of spectacular attack of 9/11 which wounded New York so grievously- and so suddenly.
Most acts of terrorism, in most parts of the world, are well sign posted by the groups that commit them. They are often carried out by people who know their targets well. Their aim is not only to murder and maim but to intimidate and control. In short, for civilians who are the targets of such attacks, the enemy is not unknown but an intimate one. And the threat of terrorism affects freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the right to education and to health and work as much as it threatens the right to life itself.
In Amnesty International’s report on Colombia, ‘Scarred Bodies, Hidden Crimes’ which was produced as part of the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign, we demonstrated the links between violence in the family and violence by armed groups.
Rosa was raped by her father when she was 7. He ran away from widespread social outrage to join the FARC, an armed group which controlled the area. The FARC kidnapped Rosa and her mother and later killed her mother’s new partner. They beat Rosa all over while she was in captivity forcing her to say ‘I am a cowardly Colombian woman’. Her mother survived being buried alive by the FARC when she was rescued by local farmers.
Amnesty International found that women were at particular risk if they were political activists; especially if they were from marginalised groups such as indigenous or Afro descendent communities. An indigenous woman from Putamayo said, ‘A young woman who talks who can express herself is seen as subversive. This happens even when we say it is our right.’
In long running conflicts with no side clearly in control, armed groups resort to methods that demonstrate their visible control over the population. They may be competing with security forces or state-backed paramilitaries who use similar methods. In Colombia, armed groups have put up orders to the local population called ‘Rules of Coexistence’ which seek to control what is regarded as ‘deviant’ or ‘immoral’ behaviour. People are attacked for being prostitutes, or lesbians, for wearing cropped tops. Men are not immune from such attacks as young boys with earrings had their ears pulled off.
The Taliban puts up night letters warning teachers not to teach and children especially girls not to go to school. Recently they have issued warnings to barbers’ shops to stop shaving men’s beards. Islamist militants from Algeria to Iraq and Kashmir have threatened women who do not conform to the dress codes they impose or the curfews they enforce. Armed groups may intervene in disputes at community level, providing their own forms of summary justice. The IRA’s practice of shooting offenders in the knee is an example. But such groups usually have a puritanical agenda as well. Their purpose is not simply to attack the forces of the state or an occupying force but to impose control on the population which is supposed to be their support base.
Civilians then are not simply caught in the cross fire between opposing forces. One of the objects of both terrorism and counter terrorism is the control of the civilian population itself. Attacks on civilians using the language of the Geneva Conventions may indeed be both ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘disproportionate’ but they are much more than that. Understanding this properly means unpacking the terms ‘civilian’ and ‘targeting’ in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. We also need to know what it means to ‘incite terror in a population.’
One of the purposes of orders issued by armed groups- is to set out the terms on which civilians are targeted. Women may be targeted for fraternising with the ‘enemy’, they may be assassinated for being ‘spies’, they may killed for infringements of invented codes of behaviour. Every form of discrimination that is practised in daily life is greatly exacerbated in conflict. But it goes far beyond ‘normal’ discriminatory social norms. According to a testimony obtained by Amnesty International, the FARC told two lesbians who were living together that they had to leave the municipality. Within a month they had ‘disappeared’ and were feared killed. But before these threats, their relationship which was public knowledge had been accepted in the town.
Finally, that is the challenge of a human rights account of terrorism. It is to understand how profoundly the use of a particular tactic of war, is adopted because of its instrumental use in the broader programme of the group. ‘Blood does not drown the revolution, it irrigates it.’ claimed the Peruvian Maoist group, Sendero Luminoso ( Shining Path). As with Shining Path, so with al Qa’ida. The blood of the martyr and the blood of the victim are the confluence over which a profound re-ordering of society is envisaged – one which is founded on violence and discrimination.
Not only governments but non-state groups are fighting the ‘enemy within’ They may be Christian fundamentalists bombing abortion clinics. They may be Hindu fundamentalists attacking Indian Muslims and Christians. It is a mistake to assume that what they are enforcing is simply a strict version of their religion. In general, they are intent on destroying religious minorities and of forcibly re-ordering their own religious practices – in ways that are neither traditional nor historically mandated. These are modern movements, no matter how medieval they may appear.
Amnesty International has reported that the Taliban and its allies in the MMA alliance which is in control of two Pakistani states have attacked such practices as the spring festival of Baisakhi, kite flying and listening to music. These are not Western customs, they are part of the profound expression of local culture, often of religious cultures deeply embedded in society. We have reported the threat to Hindu minorities and the threat to Ahmadiyas a minority Muslim sect who have been declared non-Muslims in some countries. In the context of conflict, these declarations of who is a true believer and who is declared an apostate or a blasphemer are not matters for theological debate. They are matters of life and death.
Yet states counter-terrorism measures do little to defend and protect people’s customary pleasures or their fundamental right to freedom of expression. Instead, they negotiate away the rights of women and ignore the threat to religious minorities. Many governments in pursuing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ counter-terrorism, play off one form of religion to control another that they deem to be more dangerous to their current interests. It is a cynical game and it is ultimately self-defeating. Governments, including Western governments have done much to promote organisations as their allies against terrorism against whom there are serious allegations of human rights abuses, which could amount to crimes against humanity. These they have termed ‘moderate Muslim’ groups.
A human rights analysis of terrorism must hold governments to account for their protection of serious human rights abusers. Security interests as a report on Northern Ireland has found,deepened and may have prolonged the conflict. Serious questions have been posed by activists on the protection of Algerian human rights abusers by the British state- possibly to defend its own security interests.
Numerous groups working on the ground in many countries have developed trans-national movements for accountability and justice that challenge the trans-national diasporic movements that have ideologically and financially supported those engaging in terrorism.
These movements were visible at the UN Conference at Vienna since when they have contributed to the negotiations for the Rome Statute; they have gathered evidence of serious human rights violations by both state and non-state actors for instance on the massacre of Muslims by the Hindutva movement in Gujarat, India. And they have demanded that investigations be conducted into serious international crimes using laws on universal jurisdiction. They have attempted to use alien tort law in this country .They have also developed highly innovative methods to put pressure on corporations and attack the charitable status of those groups that are funding the production of hate. None of these activities have been of the slightest interest to Western or other governments.
Few of the advocates come from formal positions in the human rights movement. Yet they have embraced and kept faith with the promise of universality and human rights. I hope that we can keep faith with them.