65. SO, WHAT HAVE WE ACHIEVED IN THE LAST FEW YEARS? HAVE WE BEEN USING THE APPROPRIATE STRATEGIES, TACTICS AND TOOLS IN THE BATTLE AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS? (Part 11 of 16)

As I had said earlier, factors such as foreign debt, international and national income maldistribution, the exploitation of the primary (agricultural) sector, the commoditization of agriculture, overt or hidden un- or underemployment are some, but by far not all, of the causes at the root of human rights (HR) violations looked at as a social disease. This, for instance, means that poverty rather than any microbe, parasite or worm is the key vector of preventable disease and malnutrition.

But more often than not, we get involved in providing pat solutions that hardly dent the basic problems founds worldwide. (One often wonders if things would have been any worse without all these interventions…). It has been argued that what we have been witnessing (or been actors in) is rather a process of ‘modernization of poverty’ in which a myriad of new approaches have been tried that have mostly only complicated the problem.

All bilateral and multilateral development institutions channel their aid through governments. The state, in Third World capitalist-dependent countries where most of the aid flows to, is too often sustained by the local dominant class that has shown and shows little genuine interest in altering the status-quo beyond keeping the overall situation in the country politically under control.

Foreign development aid models are thus enthusiastically adopted by these ruling elites of recipient countries, basically because they do not erode their power base and still give them an aura of commitment. If this aid would somehow dent their power base, governments would flatly reject it even if grants would have to be foregone.

Short of an overt class struggle, a number of grass root organizations (sometimes called people’s development organizations, PDOs) have begun springing up taking their fate and future into their own hands –some more successfully so than others. Cooperatives, labor unions, consumer unions, popular organizations, women’s organizations of many types and purposes have started to directly or indirectly look into HR issues. It is to this phenomenon and its potentialities that we should definitively be paying more attention to. Bringing together these individual experiences and distilling their successes in tackling common challenges face-on is to become a higher priority for all of us so they can be replicate manyfold.

We are otherwise being used in one way or another and are thus, knowingly or not, at the service of status-quo. We do get involved in pat solutions, often dreamed up in a vacuum. We often even begin to believe in these solutions coming from our own ideological biases which are sometimes not too different from those of Northern donor agencies. In so doing, we legitimize this process. Ideological barriers act as a stained glass through which all of us look at one reality, but nevertheless draw different conclusions. Worse even, many of us never leave our ivory towers to look outside and see what is happening in the real world.

We have not succeeded. HR violation have not really decreased. We have even failed to show a more decisive support and to speak up for the more successful experiments in countries trying to tackle these violations with actions directed at the basic level. Some of them are even right now in jeopardy through external aggression and would need our full support.

We thus need to revise our role as advocates and genuine change agents. Our own personal political inclinations may be hampering us to become such agents. As HR activists, we can ill afford having split allegiances when we are out there trying to solve the problems of disease; hunger and malnutrition. We cannot afford to say “this is what science has taught me to do, I do it and anything beyond is not up to me and thus, none of my business”. Who are we cheating? Ourselves? The people we pretend to work for? Both?

But beware. We should, not primarily aim at developing a political- economic approach to the study of ill-health and malnutrition and other HR violations. Together with the affected, we need to come up with a concrete and sensible set of solutions and with a renewed commitment to see them through.

HR violations surveillance systems have, so far, served more as an instrument to keep a log about (mostly) deteriorating conditions and have seldom been used as a base to put in motion commensurate solutions to reverse the recorded trends when these have been negative. The same can be said about limited HR education programs: alone, they end up teaching people to do what is not in their power to do (as claim holders); these programs thus have only limited potential; they somehow reflect an attitude of: “Keep them poor, but teach them”.