Human Rights Nihilism
This past week, the Guardian published two articles in support of two of the more notorious tyrants in Africa. On December 27, Simon Tisdall argued that human rights groups were unfairly demonizing Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir during the run-up to the South’s January 9th independence referendum, with little consideration of the effect this could have on the new country’s already-tenuous future.
Tisdall’s partly right: a country with minimal infrastructure, low literacy, few urban centers, an oil-based economy and a government comprised of former warlords could be a source of instability if major regional actors aren’t on the same page. That includes Bashir, who is currently under an International Criminal Court indictment for genocide, but has accepted a compromise over the oil-rich border region of Abyei and even laid out his vision of a smaller, more centralized North. For Sudan watchers, the fact that Bashir hasn’t taken things nuclear yet is encouraging, but it doesn’t erase a 20-year history of erratic and even genocidal behavior. For Tisdall it does. He opens:
Bashing Omar al-Bashir is a popular pastime in progressive circles, not least in the conscience-flaunting milieus favoured by actor George Clooney and other celebrity campaigners. Sudan's president, demonised by the UN over Darfur, pre-judged by the international criminal court's chief prosecutor and ostracised by western governments, makes an easy target. America always needs bogeymen and Bashir fits the bill: big, bothersome, bad-tempered, black, Arab and Muslim.
…before lauding Bashir for “not purposefully obstructing the [January 9th referendum] ballot.”
Of course the fact that Khartoum has tolerated the referendum process doesn’t preclude an abrupt change of mind, as the past several years (and even the last few days) of its dealings with the insurgency in Darfur have bore out. Conversely, Bashir’s appalling human rights record doesn’t mean he should be marginalized or ignored, or that he won’t make the totally self-interested decision to help the referendum process along in return for, say, a share of Abyei’s oil revenues and the lifting of international sanctions against his regime. Tisdall “boogeyman” Clooney — possibly the most high-profile Save Darfur homer on earth — has said as much.
Yet for Tisdall, “progressives” reveal some kind of deep-seeded prejudice towards fat, Moslem or black people when they view the present in terms of the very recent past, while perfectly-reasonable criticisms of a blood-soaked African tyrant aren’t attributable to that leader’s tyranny, but to the racism of his critics. A few days later, and in the same newspaper, Steven Kinzer made a similar point from a similarly uninformed position about Paul Kagame, the warlord-turned-president who has helped turn Rwanda into one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most unlikely success stories. But he’s done it by using the memory of the Rwandan genocide as a justification for cracking down on internal dissent, as detailed in this provocative TNR cover story from a couple years back (and in this much shorter TNR story from earlier this year).
Kinzer claims that criticisms of Kagame aren’t based on his record, but on an imperialistic human rights community that cares more about imposing itself upon lesser peoples and cultures than it does about, say, preventing another genocide in Rwanda:
The place where I finally broke with my former human-rights comrades was Rwanda. The regime in power now is admired throughout Africa…It is also a regime that forbids ethnic speech, ethnically-based political parties and ethnically-divisive news media – and uses these restrictions to enforce its permanence in power.
By my standards, this authoritarian regime is the best thing that has happened to Rwanda since colonialists arrived a century ago. My own experience tells me that people in Rwanda are happy with it, thrilled at their future prospects, and not angry that there is not a wide enough range of newspapers or political parties. Human Rights Watch, however, portrays the Rwandan regime as brutally oppressive. Giving people jobs, electricity, and above all security is not considered a human rights achievement; limiting political speech and arresting violators is considered unpardonable.
Human Rights Watch wants Rwandans to be able to speak freely about their ethnic hatreds, and to allow political parties connected with the defeated genocide army to campaign freely for power. It has come to this: all that is necessary for another genocide to happen in Rwanda is for the Rwandan government to follow the path recommended by Human Rights Watch.
Kinzer, like Tisdall, has no idea what he’s talking about. Since the Rwandan genocide, the west has empowered Kagame far more than it’s criticized him, and the results have been catastrophic and, according to a controversial UN report from this past August, genocidal. Under Kagame’s lead, Rwanda has invaded neighboring Congo four times: In 1996, Kagame’s primarily-Tutsi RPF helped overthrow Congolese dictator Mubutu Sese-Seko, whose regime was providing a safe-haven for Hutu militants who helped lead and organize the atrocities in Rwanda. In 1998, Rwanda invaded again, touching off a conflict that would eventually involve six countries and last well into the next decade, leading to smaller Rwandan incursions in 2004 and 2009. So Kagame has had an instrumental and the for the most part destructive role in the world's deadliest conflict since World War II, and his treatment of the country's internal dissidents is actually an extension of this: in both instances, Kagame's interested in protecting Tutsi hegemony in the Great Lakes region, which requires things as mundane as jailing opponents for "divisionism" and as grandiose as escalating a war that would eventually kill over five million people.
Was fifteen years of ethnic warfare in the Congo worth the prevention of another genocide in Rwanda, and how much of a meaningful difference is there between these two scenarios? Complicated questions, but ones that Kinzer’s crusading opposition to the human rights community would never allow him to ask. These articles represent left-wing thinking on human rights at its most flippant and least rigorous. Both Tisdall and Kinzer have imputed racist, imperialist motives to western critics of leaders that these writers know almost nothing about. Their arguments fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. But that almost doesn’t matter, because Sudan and Rwanda have little to do with what Tisdall and Kinzer are actually talking about.
Currently, the left’s faith in the international system has been shaken to the core, perhaps understandably. After all, of what use is a human rights regime that allows the United States to invade Iraq, or Israel to occupy the West Bank or blockade Gaza for years and even decades at a time? For these critics, human rights are less about actually helping people than about salving the western conscience at the third-world’s expense.
But this critique often mutates from the principled hope that human rights will one day divest itself of its possibly self-defeating air of ultimate moral superiority (much more on that here) into a kind of enlightened nihilism. Because when you view the world solely through the lens of western hubris, things like freedom of speech and association don’t appear to matter that much or even at all. Writes Kinzer,
Those who have traditionally run Human Rights Watch and other western-based groups that pursue comparable goals come from societies where crucial group rights – the right not to be murdered on the street, the right not to be raped by soldiers, the right to go to school, the right to clean water, the right not to starve – have long since been guaranteed. In their societies, it makes sense to defend secondary rights, like the right to form a radical newspaper or an extremist political party. But in many countries, there is a stark choice between one set of rights and the other. Human rights groups, bathed in the light of self-admiration and cultural superiority, too often make the wrong choice.
Now I think the “stark choice” is actually between standing up for human rights and standing for nothing; between preventing some of the world’s most dangerous leaders from acting with total impunity, and a moral universe in which we aren’t horrified or even concerned by the likes of Bashir and Kagame. How we go about doing this is an open question. For instance, should Bashir’s ICC indictment be lifted, thereby jeopardizing the current international legal framework in exchange for peace in the South Sudan? And exactly what does the legacy of the Rwandan genocide entitle Kagame to? U.S. financial and military support? Benign dictatorship? The ability to invade neighboring countries whenever he wants? All three? None of them?
Tisdall and Kinzer circumvent these difficult questions by deciding that human rights are a racist western plot. Their refusal to engage with them is more dangerous than “human rights imperialism;” their brand of cynicism more damaging than the admittedly-flawed system that seeks to counter it.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based Contributing Writer for The Propagandist
