History is always written by the winners; the losers are obliterated and the winners write the history books which glorify their own cause and disparge the conquered foe. By its own nature, history is always a one-sided account. (Napoleon). (1) “What is history but a fable agreed upon?”

 

  1. International aid is purported to be helping in the quest for improved human rights (HR). But the crucial flaw of international aid (ODA) overall is that states cannot be made to work from the outside. So, are donors looking at or focusing on the wrong side of the coin?

 

1a. [Aid has become increasingly skewed –away from lower income to middle income countries. Moreover, aid is becoming a window dressing since, compared to their income, rich countries give only half as much foreign aid as they did in the 1960s].

 

  1. Corruption is importantly linked to foreign aid. The more corrupt a country, the more its internal tax revenue declines when it receives grant aid (or direct foreign investment, for that matter). The fruits of capitalist globalization then make the formal economy and the tax revenue of states smaller –ergo, the right-less are (as always) the bottom-line victims.

 

2a. [To grasp the magnitude of the problem of corruption here are some figures: Corruption is worth 400 billion USD/year, i.e, seven times the entire global budget for development aid; and if India were to cut its corruption level to, say, Italy’s, then its growth would rise by one percentage point per year].

 

  1. But uprooting corruption is not a solution to HR violations per-se. You and I know that a substantial, rights-respecting democracy requires more than that, and more than just formal elections. And you and I also know that governance by manipulative means is endemic in many societies with large marginalized populations in which the institutional tools of formal democracy are unable to function, precisely because of the poverty and economic dependence of the many. Such regimes, unfortunately, have remarkable longevity –and are the ones that should be our prime targets in HR work.

To make things even worse, around half of the world’s poorest countries are embroiled in an acute or latent armed conflict.

 

3a. [Under this scenario, it is not surprising that world hunger, for instance, is rising. A dozen children <5 die every minute from malnutrition-related conditions. 842 million were malnourished in 2003, an increase of 2 million over 2002. Hunger levels have risen every year since the world Food Summit in 1996. (Jean Ziegler, Special UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food).

That is why the rights-based approach struggles to position nutrition as a central development and social justice concern].

 

  1. So, yes, democracies are flawed and imperfect. Under such circumstances, to claim that they can do something more premeditated than trial and error is often an exaggeration. True reform processes take more than that. But democracies are also flawed from the side of their purported beneficiaries. Have you noticed that once a regulation (often a bad one) has been in place for some time, its users will evolve in such a way that they will become political defenders of that regulation? Giving the right-less legitimate-and-forceful-claiming-capabilities thus depends on whether we can provide the impoverished with new prospects –and creating a new consensus on these prospects is a political task towards democracy.

 

  1. The corollary of this is that building participative systems of social decision-making is the way ahead to revert HR violations. Beneficiaries may not always ‘know best’ but, given their life experience, they sure do know best who is likely to gain or lose from reforms in the making –and that is critical. This is said, not as a crude attempt to gain accolades, but as an appeal to reason. We must, therefore, not give-in in these efforts even if we cannot easily reach the end goal. (Interestingly, the progressive control of more of the needed development resources through active social mobilization has been said to be a ‘weapon of mass salvation’ by no other than Geoffrey Sachs).

 

5a. [To stay on the issue of development and HR, be reminded that what we call ‘mal-development’ started already in the colonial era.  Since then, it has become abundantly clear that states do not fail, political leaders and systems do, either because they are corrupt, or are incapable, or because ‘underlying conditions are too unfavorable’…and the latter must be carefully qualified].

 

  1. Reforms in the HR area have sometimes been implemented piecemeal, tried out on a small scale, and most often not expanded if they work. (it is like the ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ of Deng Xiaoping –but never really fully crossing). It is also true that in HR, as much as in other development work, one size does not fit all; what works depends on a country’s initial conditions.

 

  1. We often fail to realize that institutions that we have to deal with in HR work are often a proxy (just a front) for the political and economic forces behind them. Too often, these institutions try to make us accept that resource constraints are immutable, so we wrongly engage in various forms of pat solutions –and disassembling those may sometimes be difficult.

In this time of unprecedented economic abundance, we must rather

-become directly engaged in the underlying contemporary, ongoing, local

political debates (Ted Schrecker), and

-struggle for the reforms that tackle the redistribution of resources.

And, keep in mind, the economy is for the people and not vice-versa!

 

7a. [In Amartya Sen’s words: Social and HR changes come best from public argument rather than from dispensed privileged advice].

 

  1. Our closest partners in HR work are thus, above all, people, people’s movements and organized communities, trade unions, health workers unions, teachers unions, civic associations, public interest and consumer groups, and other such.

 

8a. [Our allies are not the 3,000 CEOs of the world’s trans-national corporations and business-interest NGOs or their proxies that meet at the yearly World Economic Forum… UNICEF and WHO, for instance, should be at the People’s Health Assembly and at the World Social Forum and not at the Davos meeting every year. (Alison Katz)  Furthermore, WHO country representatives (WRs) need to be made to understand by the Director General that not only governments and ministries of health are their working partners, but also local civil society organizations and local people’s movements].

 

  1. A new generation of efforts is thus needed. It is our turn to make the difference. With no grassroots involvement, we will go nowhere; with it, we can stop or launch anything. So, if the determinants of health and nutrition are social and political, so must be the remedies.

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

Schuftan@gmail.com

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