Joshua Foust has been raging for weeks on Twitter, in the Atlantic, and his blog Registan about the human rights crowd and their protests against Uzbekistan's dictator Islam Karimov -- who yes, was known to boil his opponents (and now freezes them?). Is human rights advocacy not only a futile but a dangerous activity that threatens even national security -- the vital supply route to troops in Afghanistan? Are we therefore to stand down and cease our complaints about Karimov's atrocities in the name of some greater good, involving...fighting the Taliban, and then going home in 2014?
That's apparently the proposition and it's worth debating. It's worth debating even in some other form that Foust -- who is a very cynical and nasty debater shifting his ground frequently -- is likely to claim it's really all about.
YES, THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT NEEDS CRITICISM
First, let me say that I think the human rights movement could do with a lot more criticism than it ever gets from serious interlocutors, i.e. not from right-wing hate blogs but intellectuals who share liberal values, let's say, but who have serious reservations whether the idealistic project of human rights is worth it, or has any effect, or does more harm than good. (I have always said that if politics is the art of the possible, human rights is the art of the impossible.)
The human rights movement not only suffers from the "halo effect," i.e. it's work is so religiously important and self-evidently good that it seems beyond criticism itself, it also suffers from another religious tenet, the "11th commandment," which is: "Thou shalt not ever criticize another NGO publicly."
A LATE 20TH CENTURY SECT
I think these religious doctrines should be abolished and there really should be more debate about the efficacy of the human rights movement and its ideals. Although I've participated in this movement myself ardently in various forms for the last 30 years, I've sometimes wondered if 100 years from now, some historian may describe the human rights movement as we know it today as a kind of sect, inspired by the great Aryeh Neier at the turn of the 20th century (and a number of these ideas, such as outspoken protest despite geopolitical necessities, as with the Soviet Union, for arms talks, or the notion of "surrogate advocacy," come from him). It's funny to think of some future scholar writing curiously about that flurry of human rights NGO activities from 1974-2014 as a kind of Burnt-Over Place, like New York State in the early 19th century. Most of the world isn't a human rights movement -- quite the contrary.
The problem is, these organizations tend to debate about policy and priorities only internally, and sometimes not at the staff level at all but only among senior officials and board members, and then have a set piece once they make up their minds, that they don't subject to debate in part because hostile governments might more successfully challenge them and undermine their work.
RIEFF IS THE ONLY ONE
David Rieff is one of the few critics -- only critic? -- of human rights organizations and their idealism, although most of his writing has been about the futilities and fallacies of humanitarian work rather than human rights work per se, which differs, although he does continually makes a helpful if savage debunking of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine (which I am a critic of as well, see my reply to Gareth Evans.) But as a rule, human rights as a project is so internalized in governments themselves nowadays and of course enshrined in the International Criminal Court, that there is little debate about whether it's an effective method (I can only think of Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia which I've only just started.)
PEACE UBER ALLES
This is not a new debate -- the proposition that this frenzied human rights protest should be held back while more urgent matters are addressed.
Back in the height of the Euromissile crisis, when a much larger -- mass -- world movement was lobbying for reduction of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe (and a minority within this movement was even protesting Soviet SS20s in Eastern Europe as well), the peace movement in the US mainly took it as an article of faith that you simply didn't raise human rights protests with the Soviet and East European governments. This was not done. Not only did the peaceniks believe our own government was as bad or worse than these communist regimes, with racism and poverty and wars abroad; they thought the crisis of reducing nuclear weapons so overrode any other concerns, however legitimate, that they simply had to be triaged. You had to keep silent.
E.P. Thompson, of course, was one of the peace activists who discarded that notion of silence and vigorously protested the East bloc's human rights crimes, whether the jailing of pacifists or the invasion of Afghanistan or the crackdown on Poland's solidarity.
EAST VS. WEST, PEACE VERSUS PROTEST
In the early 1980s, Aryeh Neier had a meeting with John Mroz of the Institute for East West Studies and they argued over whether the new Helsinki Watch, as it was then called, should vocally protest Soviet human rights wrongs -- Mroz felt surely this would endanger peace talks and strongly advised against it. Aryeh disagreed. The rest is history. And the early board members and staff of what later became Human Rights Watch mounted vocal protests about human rights violations in the Helsinki talks. It's hard to remember now that this was truly the debate then -- and an urgent problem for many civic organizations as well as government figures involved with the USSR.
If I -- and many of my colleagues -- didn't think condemning the Soviet Union's jailing of dissidents and invasion of Afghanistan would harm nuclear arms talks, for God's sake, why would picketing a president's daughter's fashion show threaten or stop the delivery of goods to troops in that same Afghanistan today?
In fact, if anything, what we learned in the 1980s and 1990s (although seemed to forget by about 1997) is that you cannot have fruitful arms talks and trade agreements and peace with regimes that have no civilian oversight and restraint on their militaries and on the corruption of elites. This was the premise of Andrei Sakharov and his friends although this integral relationship between arms control and human rights seems hard to convey nowadays. And by extension of the premise today, you cannot expect that cooperation with Uzbekistan for strictly pragmatic delivery options, much less something as ambitious as the State Department's Silk Road plan for post-conflict recovery, will ever really be authentic and successful if there aren't basic changes in the nature of the regime.
RAINING ON GOOGOOSHA'S PARADE
In The Atlantic, Foust complained about those of us who picketed Gulnara Karimova's fashion show. (I write for eurasianet.org and also cottoncampaign.org). It seems a perfectly reasonable and necessary protest to me -- you couldn't say it was about being nasty to cultural and design people unrelated to politics because a) Gulnara is an ambassador of her country to Spain and to the UN in Geneva; b) she was reportedly associated with Zeromax, a now-bankrupt state conglomerate with brought profits to the state and allegedly to the Karimov family; c) cultural events like this are used by the regime in propagandistic ways to influence public opinion and recruit supporters.
Foust not only found this futile; he found it misguided and strongly implied it shouldn't have been done, and human rights condemnation should be left to officials -- presumably quietly. Many of these same human rights groups and labour unions picketed the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC) conference with both US and Uzbek officials and corporate executives in attendance for the same reasons: that 's what protestors do, they find symbolic targets and call the press and march with their signs, you know, like Occupy Wall Street does? Or is it not OK to do it about foreign governments the US needs in its wars? I'm not getting any of this.
Foust's fury seemed all out of proportion to the issue at hand -- as if it was somehow politically incorrect to spoil Gulnara's big do in Manhattan. But she represents an oppressive state and more directly, she shows off fashions made of Uzbek cotton, and this is picked by hundreds of thousands of school children in the largest state-organized forced labour program in the world. Why can't we protest this any way we can, peacefully?
ALLEGED MORAL FAILINGS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
Foust's lashes out at all aspects of this story:
o the protestors didn't show up last year when Gulnara was in Manhattan at the same Fashion Week Show -- and then he links to my story from last year -- and therefore the implication is that they are opportunistic and not consistent in their moral outrage
Answer: We didn't know exactly when she was coming last year, and we had much less notice of her appearance last year. Indeed, I had to write about it *after* I saw mention of it in the fashion press.
o Foust then asks "why now" given that it was "long-scheduled" this year (again linking to my story).
Answer: Human rights groups didn't have the exact time and date and confirmation she was coming, although she was mentioned in press releases -- then it was found on the Mercedes Benz website later. And they did protest, but the organizers didn't want to undo it. The protest was advertised on NGO websites and planned for weeks before her arrival -- but that alone did not make the organizers change their plans to host Karimova.
We had no idea when we planned the picket that it would actually lead to Karimova being cancelled -- it seemed an impossibility at the time, given that she'd already appeared the previous year and was on the schedule. Nor was the amount of press attention expected -- I thought the entire episode might get a wire service report.
FASHION SHOW ORGANIZERS CHANGE THEIR MIND
Frankly, I think when the Uzbek emigres appeared on the very first day of Fashion Week with their protest, and the labor groups announced they were going to picket Gulnara's show then later (which was the following week), the organizers decided that it was going to look very bad for them to be associated with child labour in this fashion. They may not have felt this way when it seemed more abstract. Certainly the very hard-hitting Daily News Article helped a lot.
It isn't at all the case that "only when the press shines a light on" do people gasp. In fact, these human rights groups are what got the issue press in the first place! It just took time. Last year, they didn't have enough of a run-up of notice, and the campaign had taken awhile to attract companies to pledge not to use Uzbek cotton -- now there are 60 of them.
SURROGATE ADVOCACY
o Foust says: "It's no secret Uzbekistan abuses its citizens. So why do we only seem to get outraged with Uzbek human rights abusers when they publicly associate with our fellow Westerners?
Answer: because that's how the "surrogate advocacy" formula works. This is how human rights groups work their advocacy. They can't easily get at the target of their outrage, the Uzbek government, especially if that government is doing things like kicking out Human Rights Watch, so they go to those who have a relationship with that government, or even support it in some way, morally or politically or financially. This is an age-old formula used by many protest movements and shouldn't itself be targeted for indignation -- although I'm happy to debate as to whether it is inappropriately used or overused at times.
And I might add that whereas once, Human Rights Watch might have just gone about its business documenting bad things in Uzbekistan and publishing the results of its research on its website, and submitted reports to various EU or UN committees or commissions, once the worst happens, and it can't even function normally in a country, then understandably, its researchers are going to talk more to the media, even an unnatural interlocutor like the Daily News.
Foust says "it's not as simple as a senator or even organizer saying 'I disapprove of your human rights record.'" Well, it is. You work at getting senators to say that. Eventually, if you have enough of them, you don't then have something happen like the Senate Appropriations Committee deciding to put in language in the foreign operations bill to lift sanctions that had been in place for 7 years -- when there is no improvement in human rights. Yes, each senator expressing disapproval counts, that's politics, and that's how human rights advocacy works.
Recent Comments