- As said so many times before, our ‘do-gooder’ zeal is not good enough to objectively improve the human rights (HR) situation of the have-nots in the world. I am amazed at the ‘deafening silence’ I find on this issue in most of the virtual and printed NGO and academic media.
- The bedrock is to start with oneself. I know who I am. I am someone who cannot live in this world unless he believes there is a hope. Further, for me, writing is first and foremost a private act whose audience is primarily my own self –and then, all of you, the readers of this Reader.
- Individually, we all carry conflicting arguments, reasons, desires and fears as a sort of contraband we do not declare in customs; they all are so secret that we hardly dare to admit them to ourselves. But these credos have to be unveiled, addressed and debunked –one-by-one.
- None of us can turn a blind eye on HR violations any longer –out of pure insensitivity and/or political convenience. Period.
Our actions have to flow from the conscious meaning we attribute to the social and political surrounding of where we work.
- What it ultimately is all about is basically to search for a space inside the system from-which-to-perturb-the-same.
- We thus need to look for new mechanisms that shift social controls to the poor, the marginalized and those whose rights are being blatantly violated.
- This will mean engaging in a joint enterprise with a recognizable bond –and, in our case, that bond is HR-understood-as-the-leit-motif-of-development-work. Therefore, important will be the creation of an identity, of a sense of belonging to such a worthy cause…and this Reader attempts just that.
- Embarking together on the right actions will, for us, mean using factual-truth, moral-and-political-rightness, and anchoring them both in total-sincerity-in-our-inner-thrust.
- In practical terms, we are called to interpret HR violations by putting them in the context of all the United Nations HR Covenants. HR violations are not meaningful by themselves; the existing codes put them in the right perspective and on the road of being abolished.
- A machine can be controlled; you, my peers, can only be influenced…and force is not the issue here; the issue is meaning: meaning that will trigger action aimed at structural changes.
- Outwardly, our message will have to get through, not only loudly and frequently, but also providing meaning and direction to people. (Where do we need to go so quickly that we cannot stop to look at where-we-are-going and what-we-are-going-through?).
- Our ‘aliveness’ will reside in our practice –in our setting in motion processes of structural change. (In a way, we need to become healers of the collective being, because it is society that is sick).
- Each of us should engage in multiple dialogues and invite colleagues to join in a process of rethinking and creating a new future that has each of them in it (engaged in the design and implementation of meaningful structural changes); we are not thereby selling-or-bribing-anybody-into-compliant-behaviors.
- We are at a point of crisis: the system may either break down or it may break through to a new state; every one of us counts to pave the way for the latter to become the final outcome.
- We already undertake and carry out projects to help others and, in the process, discover great satisfaction. But we also witness extreme injustice which gradual changes will not overturn; we need those major breakthroughs. Only meaningful structural disturbances will lead to a new order. (As in complexity theory, chaos or major crises are the breeding ground for radical change…).
- We work on a type of development of ‘doing-things’ and have no proposals for a development-that-fosters-liberation-from- (evident) oppression; without such proposals, we are left not knowing what all the doing is for.
- Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense –regardless of how it turns out. (Vaclav Havel)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City