64. PASSIVITY MAKES US ACCOMPLICES OF THE STATUS-QUO. MANY OF US, WITH AN ACADEMIC APPROACH TO CHANGE, SHOULD NOT FORGET THIS. (Part 10 of 16)

Given the present conditions, the outlook for quantum changes in the human rights (HR) situation in the world appears to be limited, but certainly not hopeless.

The room left for meaningful action has, I would argue, shrunk due to the overt and covert repression mechanisms at play in most of the countries where HR violations are rampant.

But changes are occurring everyday in the field of HR and these changes are the result of the constant confrontation of the different actors in this struggle, be it at the local, regional, national or international levels. These actors have different weights and power in each specific context and include such dissimilar groups as the organized peasants or workers, the bureaucracy representing government interests, the local elites, the church(es), the transnational corporations, the armed forces or yet other groups.

Be it as it may, any proposed action to tackle HR violations requires a correct analysis of the correlation of forces at the various levels, their roles and their underlying overt or covert interests as they shape the current, concrete situation (a part of capacity analysis). Only this will enable us to actually strengthen and help all those deprived of their various rights in their daily struggle (plus their strategic allies) to promote or precipitate the structural changes needed to ensure a more permanent access to their rightful entitlements. This effort includes the critical analysis of the existing measures to combat HR violations that are not really succeeding in addressing the problem and are thus ultimately contributing to demobilize the poor through the use of populist rhetoric and programs that leave the exploitative structures intact.

The special needs of women and of indigenous people have to be addressed explicitly as well in any forthcoming comprehensive HR strategy.

Carrying out HR education only as a mostly passive activity serves more to self justify our doing ‘something’ about the many problems rather than really significantly helping the poor whose rights are being violated. Many single-shot interventions have been tried in the past, each depending on the prevailing theory of underdevelopment that the international development community shared at a specific time. Aid programs have followed most of these theories (fashions?) in the past decades.

In the last 100-150 years, many underdeveloped countries have passed from outright colonialist exploitation to neocolonialism in which the exploitation might be more subtle, but still dominates their fate. The classical example for this is the competition for farmland by cash crops versus food crops. The underdeveloped countries have become so indebted, because of deteriorating trends in their international trade so that the balancing of their balances of payment has become a key issue in their economic policies (most often pushed by the International Financial Institutions); and when the country is basically a cash-crop exporter this is achieved at the cost of a lower food production and the hunger of the poor. Examples of the latter are numerous and seen in at least three continents.

The UN agencies directly or indirectly involved in HR have not escaped the fashions in foreign aid. The agencies ‘neutrality’ has been both an asset and a burden. It has enabled them to achieve a worldwide presence and prestige and, in some cases, enabled them to bring governments’ attention to HR problems. The burden, on the other hand, is their inherent advisory role with no power to implement programs along the lines of their perceived priorities –HR now centrally among them. These agencies have become an excellent source of collected data and statistics, but they can do very little to change some of the observed trends without the cooperation of each government. Their opening to work with civil society directly gives some reason for optimism.

Northern development planning has thus tended to disregard the overall revolution of expectations that modernization brings with it, especially that of the poor rural populations. Planners keep planning for the poor without incorporating them into the process. I think we simply fail to ask the following type of questions at the grassroots level: What are you and your family’s expectations? How do you see them materializing? Does the system, with its rules of the game, allow for your expectations to become true? If the system would not put a limit on your expectations what would your expectations be? What would your priorities then be? Which of your expectations would you like to fulfil first, and how? What in the present system does not allow for your expectations to become true? What can be done about the latter?

Too often we operate from our desks, submerged in complicated schemes and organizational charts. We tend to produce long documents for programs to be carried out by others and eventually get involved again with reality only to evaluate outcomes which are, not surprisingly, often poor.

To go anywhere from here, the future graduates of development disciplines will have to be true change-agents, HR activists, and generalists, not only experts in their own narrow fields. Health, education, ecology, sanitation, agriculture, management, nutrition, food technology, family planning and the many other fields have to be seen as contributors to the assessment, analysis and action on the-HR-improvement-front. More than our generation, they will have to get involved with the people they want to serve in community diagnosis (causal and capacity analyses included). For this to happen, existing curricula beg for substantive changes and this is a concrete area where many of us can contribute creatively.

As an international consultant, in this context, the role of the HR activist is beyond doubt a delicate one. As an outside observer s/he should help the local people and local officials see things from another angle –help them to explore their contradictions, perhaps being softly critical, so they can come to their own new conclusions, hopefully without creating false expectations. Sensitization and advocacy skills are perhaps more important to the consultant’s success than technical know how. Paternalism, often a subconscious attitude in consultants, should be actively combated.