“ Pivotal Challenges to Human Rights in the 21st Century”

Keynote address for the International Human Rights Conference, State University of Makassar, Indonesia on February 27-29, 2009. Prepared by Professor Dr. Robert A. Evans and Professor Alice Fraser Evans

Effective promotion and protection of human rights depends on the establishment of priorities. Plowshares Institute has concentrated on issues of justice and peace for more than a quarter of a century.  Twenty years ago in our book, Human Rights: A Dialogue Between the First and Third Worlds, Alice Evans and I advocated that the priority must be placed on the survival and liberation rights of the world’s poorest and most marginalized people. Survival depends on the most basic rights - sufficient food, shelter, health and education.  Liberation entails the “right to hope for a better future…and freedom from...discrimination and exploitation at both national and international levels.”^1. In recent years awareness of the plight of the poor has grown and even some incremental progress has been made to end extreme poverty.  Nevertheless, the living conditions for these brothers and sisters continue to deteriorate even as their numbers have dramatically increased. The gap between the "poor and the non-poor" is growing exponentially.

Realistic strategies to eliminate extreme poverty have been identified, and many of these strategies have been implemented. They include liberation rights and access to basic survival rights, adequate transportation, debt reduction and proven programs such as micro-financing.  However, inaction by the majority of governments of developed nations and the elite of developing countries continues to thwart even these incremental advances to reduce extreme poverty. Now with a global economic crisis plus the growing threats of climate change, the endangered survival and liberation rights of the world’s poorest people are more at risk than ever before. In fact, numerous scholars have identified endemic poverty and global warming – which is both a cause and an effect of severe poverty – as the two greatest threats in this century to the human rights of our most endangered global family members.

Scholars have identified several reasons for the lack of progress in reversing both endemic poverty and global warming. These include inappropriate goals, inadequate strategies, lack of political will and debilitating polarization on religious, ethnic, and political grounds. I want to suggest in this keynote address that the lack of progress is not completely grounded in these elements. An undervalued threat to eliminating extreme poverty is as much educational as it is moral: the lack of constructive public and international dialogue and negotiation.

Darfur dissolves, Zimbabwe collapses, the Congo implodes and Palestinians are decimated. In each case there are underlying conflicts of needs and interests and the absence of genuine communication, understanding or empathy. As human rights advocates, we must begin to equip not only political and military leaders but also our young people with the transforming skills of deep listening, analysis, facilitation, mediation, negotiation and empathy if there is to be any hope for preventing violations of the most basic human rights in the future. [Demonstrations and riots bring pressure, but seldom produce sustainable change.]

Speaking yesterday to the Faculty Senate of Makassar State University, which honored Alice and me by making us honorary alumni, I congratulated them on launching simultaneously with this international conference - to my knowledge -the first graduate degree and community training program in Asia in “conflict transformation and peace building.”  This program’s vision is to equip both future and current community leaders with the transforming skills I described above. I believe that this university’s educational initiative holds the potential for influencing the fate of negotiations on climate change and the quest to end extreme poverty in Asia by 2015.  UNM will be able to develop skill-based, action-oriented educational programs to reach this goal and promote foundational human rights with the support and collaboration of those human rights activists, scholars and organizations present here today.

How can a skill-based educational program contribute to constructive change in such massive global challenges? I will begin with the potential of negotiations about climate change as emblematic of the crisis of communication. It is precisely in this most crucial conflict arena where Asia can be the "game changer."  In a recent report on the UN millennium goals Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon identified recent developments which will directly affect efforts to reduce poverty: “The economic slowdown will diminish the incomes of the poor; the food crisis will raise the number of hungry people in the world and push millions more into poverty; [and] climate change will have a disproportionate impact on the poor." (Report of the Secretary-General to the UN General Assembly, 2008)

Dr. Christine Loh, the Chief Executive Officer of a Hong Kong think tank, Civic Exchange, is a leading Asian advocate of climate control. In 2007 she was named by Time magazine as one of the “Heroes of the Environment.” Civic-Exchange is Plowshares Institute’s primary Chinese partner, with two decades of work together.  In her co-edited book released in late 2008, Climate Change Negotiations: Can Asia Change the Game? ² Loh makes a convincing case that Asia can become the critical change agent in these international negotiations. However, nations and advocates must cease merely pointing fingers of blame at Western developed countries as responsible for global warning. Rather, every nation must develop an emissions reduction plan as a basis for global negotiations. The negotiations must be guided by: emerging science; the alignment of sustainable development and climate strategies; a focus on energy efficiency and the co-benefits of integrated climate strategies; and innovative approaches from urban renewal and revamped forest policies.   

Assuming that negotiating parties are sincere in their deliberations about reducing emissions that contribute to global warming, Christine has persuaded me that a critical element for more successful local, national and international negotiating processes is to “improve the design of meetings and the deliberative processes for global collaboration.”³ A successful process calls for skillful and patient facilitators able to support the principal stakeholders in designing a process which builds mutual trust, enables them to hear and be open to understanding differing world views, and focuses on finding sustainable and mutually beneficial solutions to the planetary crisis of global warming.  

Violations of basic human rights are not negotiable. But to build communities based on human rights, those responsible for the violations must agree to change their patterns of abuse or neglect.  Consequently, I am convinced that human rights advocates must expend as much energy on developing "just and viable” processes for negotiations as they do a "position" on specific issues. UNM’s new program on conflict transformation and peace-building focuses precisely on the skill development necessary to develop effective processes and lead Asia as a critical change agent in the global climate debate.   

Let me share a dramatic example of this kind of personal and institutional transformation modeled in Indonesia during the last three years. Alice and I had the privilege of serving as international advisers to the first truth commission in the world between two independent nations: the Commission on Truth and Friendship (CTF) between Indonesia and Timor Leste. This commission completed its work in July of 2008 by presenting to the presidents of both nations a courageous truth-disclosing report which included healing recommendations. The presidents not only accepted the report and its recommendations but acknowledged with regret their role in gross violations of human rights against the citizens of both nations. Public acknowledgement of responsibility and bi-national commitment to healing the past and restoring the future is an exceedingly rare occurrence.    

The eight commissioners from each nation accomplished this extremely difficult journey against the horrific backdrop of a 24 years of presence of the Indonesian military in East Timor following 350 years of Portuguese colonization. With US and Australian consent, President Suharto ordered Indonesian troops to secure East Timor from an assumed Communist take-over. During the next 24 years, thousands of Indonesian soldiers lost their lives in what they understood to be a war of liberation. During this same period, one fourth of the population of East Timor died, and those who lived experienced intimidation, rape and appropriation and destruction of property by both the Indonesian military and local Timorese militias which they trained and armed. The Timorese independence forces, who sought to liberate their people from an oppressive occupation, were also guilty of gross violations of human rights.

 

The two teams of commissioners, coming from radically different world views, struggled with whether this conflict was about liberation or occupation. The commissioners gradually acquired and then employed the skills of conflict transformation and peace building that resulted in one of the most striking changes in international negotiations that we have experienced in 20 years as international mediators.

 

This process was rooted in the personal transformation of the commissioners themselves, which I believe is the basis of most world-shaping changes. To apply an insight of Ghandi, the CTF commissioners “became the reconciliation they sought.”  In transforming encounters over 30 months they came to first listen to each other, then to respect, then to dialogue, then to understand, then to cooperate and finally even to love one another. Indonesia and East Timor should celebrate what this groundbreaking commission had achieved by essentially applying the skills of conflict transformation and peace building. Their model holds great promise for future negotiations between other nations with a tragic history - most notably the United States and Iraq – as well as Palestine and Israel. This transformative process holds the same promise for global warming and the elimination of extreme poverty.

With this visionary illustration I turn to my second theme which connects global warming with endemic poverty. Global warming is becoming the modern plague fueling endemic poverty.  In a vicious cycle, the poorest communities denude the forest as they forage for fuel and burn tropical forests to scratch out a living- which lead to erosion, drought and loss of carbon sinks -and increase global warming. 

Through the millennium development goals (MDG) identified in the year 2000, the international community pledged to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty.” The MDG target date for the “end of extreme poverty” is 2015. A complementary and emerging agreement among human rights advocates is that a foundational cause and sustaining force behind world wide human rights violations is endemic poverty.

The most important human rights book of American origin in this decade may well be The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time,^4. written by Jeffrey D. Sachs, a developmental economist  and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.  As a principal architect of the millennium goals, Sachs uses a medical preventative care analogy, adapted from his physician wife, to show that with focused determination and relatively modest sacrifice we can defeat the scourge of global poverty. Sachs concentrates on the causes of poverty which include the protectionist role of rich-country policies and the corrupt elite of poorer countries. Seeded by Sach’s proposed plan, the promise of a “poverty free future” is a challenge which human rights advocates must embrace as a priority. The MDG goals were formally adopted by 190 nations including Indonesia.  Human rights advocates must not allow our universities, our communities or our nations to default on their commitment to meet these goals.

I want to suggest another Indonesian challenge that became an example of using the opportunity presented by a disaster and the conflicts it generated as a catalyst to confront extreme poverty.  This regional transformation surprisingly employed the greatest natural disaster in modern history as a catalyst for peace, rehabilitation and reconciliation. Alice and I had the privilege of accepting the invitation of the Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights to be trainers and consultants for a series of workshops on “human rights, conflict transformation and trauma healing” in post-tsunami Aceh Province.  In a series of training events sponsored by the Ministry, the University of Indonesia, Plowshares Institute and Acehnese community leaders, we helped equip some 200 persons with the skills of community conflict analysis, deep listening, empathic identification, mediation, collaborative problem solving and trauma healing.

These post-tsunami workshop participants included:

Parents who had lost not only their property and livelihood but their children and spouse;                                                                                                              Local government administrators struggling with local conflicts over housing and transport;                                                                                                         Teachers trying to negotiate with students and staff in order to rebuild their schools; and                                                                                                       Religious leaders seeking to provide spiritual guidance for  devastated communities.                                                                                                   

At times we also had in the same workshops soldiers from the GAM independence movements and nationalists who had fought against one another in the civil war.

Through a profound process of sharing with and listening to each other, these protagonists moved from their individual experiences of suffering to discover common ground and common goals for rebuilding their lives and communities. The mediating process of the course was linked to the development of action plans formed by diverse groups to heal and rebuild communities which had been destroyed by both the tsunami and thirty years of civil war.  Many of these action plans became part of peace-building by helping to transform a culture of fear and confrontation to one of mediation and negotiation: a school principal taught skills of mediation to all of his teachers and students; small groups of workshop participants worked together to deal with long-standing community conflicts; and a group of parents went together to explain the psychological effects of trauma to a teacher who had expelled a child who continued to cry in school for her mother who was killed by the tsunami.  Without healing and peace, prosperity is not sustainable.

This series of peace-building workshops was culminated just a few months ago in a three-day event hosted by Acehnese Governor Irwandi on “sustaining peace in Aceh.” More than 40 diverse Acehnese community representatives and provincial government leaders gathered to identify the elements which threatened prosperity, equality and long-term peace, to share their concerns and hopes with the governor, and to develop action plans which they would implement with the governor's support. The action plans included increased production of rice and fish to address food shortages; concrete strategies to develop model sustainable forests to protect the rights of indigenous people living in or near the forests and designating areas of these forests as carbon sinks to trade with the international community. Local health clinics, educational renewal and school construction in rural areas were the core issues of other action plans. The development of shared visions and action plans for ending poverty is an integral part of the rehabilitation of one of the poorest Indonesian provinces which is now on the boundary of new prosperity.    

The levels of honest dialogue, collaborative problem solving and trust building were not decreed by the governor. Rather, one of the most impressive short-term and restorative action plans I have witnessed had its seeds in the applied skills of conflict transformation and peace building. Equally impressive is that both the training in listening skills, group problem solving and group facilitation were provided by the participants’ fellow Acehnese citizens who had been initially equipped in the earlier Ministry workshops. That a devastating natural disaster can become a catalyst for an empowering, reconciling and replicable process gives hope for communities throughout Indonesia and the world.  

In light of a recent Indonesian law allowing dual citizenship, Alice and I have been have been graciously invited to become not only Indonesian but Acehnese citizens. Under the Bush administration, we were severely tempted accept.  However, our own home country is in the midst of an historic transition from the most disastrous American foreign and domestic policies in a century to the reliable promises of a President who brings new leadership to the US and the world rooted in the quest for constructive change. We need to focus on our responsibilities to help these promises come to fulfillment.

I want to close with a quote from Barack Obama, whom a friend describes as the first “Indonesian” president of the United States. Barack Obama has posed a challenge to Americans and others who seek to become human rights organizers and global citizens: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.  We are the ones we've been waiting for.  We are the change that we seek”. ⁵

 Rev. Prof.  Dr. Robert A. Evans, February, 2009

Notes:

1. Robert A. Evans and Alice Frazer Evans, Human Rights: A Dialogue Between the First and Third Worlds. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. p. 12.

2   Loh, Stevenson and Tay, Eds. Climate Change Negotiations: Can Asia Change the Game. Hong Kong: Civic Exchange, 2008.

3. Ibid., page 43.

4. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Penguin Group, 2005

5. Barack Obama , cited from a campaign address in 2008 but based on his book, The Audacity of Hope. NY: Three Rivers Press, 2006.