William Schulz
Executive Director, Amnesty International USA
Author, In Our Own Best Interests:  How Defending Human
Rights Benefits Us All

“Defending Human Rights”

Thank you, Curtis, and good afternoon to all of you,

  It’s always a pleasure to speak both here at the L.A. World Affairs Council and, indeed, to World Affair Councils around the country, which I do regularly.  These are very valuable bodies.  When I was introduced to the Council in Kansas City a few months ago, the moderator told a little story which I think summarizes some of the value of these institutions.  It was about a mother cat and her three kittens who were walking down the street one day when a large and ferocious dog came up.  Naturally the kittens were frightened, but the mother cat simply arched her back and said “bow-wow, bow-wow!” and the dog ran away.  The kittens were very impressed and their mother said to them “You see, my darlings, that’s the advantage of knowing a second language.” 

  Well, the Council encourages us to know second languages both literally and metaphorically, to know the world beyond our borders.  I also appreciate the opportunity to talk this afternoon about this new book, In Our Own Best Interests.   I’m on a 23-city book tour.  I was in Riverside last night at the World Affairs Council, at the Mission Inn, by the way, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with.  I learned a fascinating story that has nothing to do with my remarks but I have to tell you about President William Howard Taft.  The Mission Inn is very proud of the fact that President Taft visited the Inn many years ago.  Apparently it was at a dinner at the Mission Inn where Chancy dePugh [sic], who was a great business magnate of the early 20^th century, was introducing the immensely rotund President Taft.  Mr. dePugh said “The truth, ladies and gentlemen, is that President Taft is pregnant.”  When President Taft got up to speak, he decided to play along with this little teasing.  “Yes,” he said “I am pregnant and if it is a girl we shall name it after my wife, Martha, and if it is a boy we shall name it after myself, but if, as I suspect, it is nothing but a lot of wind we shall call it Chancy.”  I thought that was a very nice little story that has nothing to do with anything.

  What this occasion does have to do with [is] my book.  I must say I appreciate this opportunity not only to speak about it,  but perhaps to sell a few copies in order that I not have to record what Henry David Thoreau did in his journal when his publisher returned to him 700 of 1,000 copies of A Week on the Concord and Maramak Rivers.  Thoreau wrote that night in his journal, “I now have a library of 900 volumes, 700 of which I wrote myself.”  Better, I suppose, to have one’s work ignored than subjected to the kind of criticism that T.S.Elliott aimed at a poetic couplet composed by one of his contemporaries.  Of the two lines of poetry Elliott said, “It is all very nice, though there are dull stretches.” 

  Now, as one who has labored in the human rights vineyards for more than thirty years, I know that hearing about the travails of our fellow human beings can also get pretty dull at times.  It’s been called “compassion fatigue.”  But what it comes down to is this:  reading at the breakfast table that a family of 19 in Algeria have been neatly decapitated is simply not a very nice way to start the day.  So how can we in the human rights movement fit into the average American’s litany of worries concern about what’s happening to those 19 people in Algeria, concern about what’s happening to strangers far away, often of a different race or class or color?  Well, the traditional answer of the human rights activist has been that we appeal to Americans’ moral conscience.

  I once visited a prison in Liberia and met a young man in prison there whose body was covered with red dots.  “What happened?” I asked.  “Well,” he said “I stole the radio, I admit it, but when the soldiers caught me they didn’t just throw me in prison.  They forced me to lie down in a pit of red ants.”  Now, I suspect that not a single one of us here has ever been forced to lie in a pit of red ants for over an hour, but at the same time we know that those soldiers should well have arrested the young boy.  But they shouldn’t have tortured him, and we know that because what the soldiers did violates our sense of morality. We have a vivid enough moral imagination to imagine what it would be like to be forced to lie in a pit of red ants, and we don’t like the idea one bit. 

  The basic reason why Americans ought to support human rights, of course, is because violations of human rights are morally wrong, but sometimes, of course, our imaginations fail us.  Sometimes it’s pretty difficult to identify with the victims of human rights violations.  Sometimes they aren’t very nice people.  If that young boy had not just stolen a radio, but if he had raped a pregnant woman or massacred a group of children, we might be tempted to believe that red ants were entirely too good for him.  In order to identify with another person’s plight we have to include that person in the category “human being.”  And yet a tour guide through the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which is Islam’s third holiest site, once assured me that Jews did not breathe, eat or defecate in the same fashion that regular human beings do.  Conversely, an Israeli public official once wrote to me that Israeli torture of Palestinians was justified because “they are animals who do not feel pain the way the rest of us do.”  So, because our imaginations sometimes fail us, we also have need to resort to law and, of course, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the basis for everybody’s human rights, regarded as a form of customary law.

  The second reason that Americans should support human rights is because their violation is against the law.  But now, let’s face it: Americans, including the American government and American courts, Americans care about as much about international law as all of us did that the Mir spacecraft might crash into our houses when it returned to Earth last March.  And the moral claims of human rights, while they may be dramatic and compelling for a brief period of time to a limited segment of the population, they are not claims that will build an ongoing wide-spread movement for social change.  In addition to making the moral and legal arguments if the human rights movement is ever to become a major force in American culture, similar in strength to the environmental movement or the women’s movement, we must be able to answer the question from an average American, “So what does this have to do with me?” 

  It was that question that a Knoxville, Tennessee radio talk show host put to me in 1998.  We had been discussing human rights atrocities around the world—Bosnia, Chiapas,  Burma, China.  “I’m sure,” he said, “I’m sure we all agree that these terrible instances of brutality are morally repugnant, but tell me now, if I’m living in East Tennessee, barely scratching out a living, worried about paying my mortgage or sending my kid to college, what difference do all these atrocities happening so far away make to my life?”  I thought that was a very interesting question, and it’s a question, I might say, that most of us in the human rights movement fail to answer because we’ve been so persuaded of our moral righteousness. 

  This book, In Our Own Best Interests, is my attempt to persuade that hard-pressed East Tennesseer that human rights really are connected to her personal interests and to our national interest as a country.  The book is aimed not just at the general public, but also at a select group of foreign policy analysts who have appropriated for themselves the name “sobriquet realists”—in contrast, I suppose, to us flabby-minded do-gooders—and who believe that U.S. foreign policy should be driven solely by what they call our national interests.  By that they mean our military security and our economic growth, and they believe that human rights have virtually nothing to do with that national interest.  The grandpappy of so-called realism is the renowned diplomat George Kennan, who has said that the U.S. government should stop advocating democracy and human rights because, and I quote, “it has more important things to do.”  Realists!  But how realistic are they, really?

  Simia Sarwar [sic] was a 26-year old Pakistani woman who had been separated from her vulgar, alcoholic abusive husband for many months when she told her parents that she had met another man—a kind and gentle man and that she wanted to get a divorce.  Her parents forbade it—absolutely!  And so Simia fled from the city of Peshawar to the city of Lahore to seek the protection of the most famous woman lawyer in Pakistan….Simia’s parents followed her to Lahore but when after several weeks she still refused to see them, they gave up and they agreed that they would let her get divorced.  Finally, Simia thought, the years of terror will be over.  She waited in her lawyer’s office for her mother, who was a physician, to deliver the necessary papers.  But when the mother arrived, much to Simia’s surprise, she was walking on the arm of a stranger.  “Who is that man?” Simia demanded, quite alarmed.  “Who is that man?” she said as the mother and the stranger entered the office.  “Oh, he is my helper,” said the mother.  “I cannot walk without his assistance.  He is just here to help.” At that moment the man unloaded a full pistol into Simia Sarwar’s skull. 

  Simia Sarwar joined hundred of women who are killed every year for the honor of their families.  She joined thousands of girls and women who are victims of acid-burnings or dowry killings.  She joined hundred of thousands of women subjected to forced trafficking for sexual purposes.  She joined 114,000,000 women at risk of female genital mutilation.  What do the fates of all these women possibly have to do with us?  The foreign policy realists would say: tragic, yes, but very, very little.  And yet isn’t it obvious that women who cannot control their bodies, and cannot control their reproductive decisions cannot control or influence in positive ways their children’s futures?  And so unless we care nothing about a booming world population with its attendant water scarcity and pollution, unless we care nothing about perpetuating the violence and hopelessness that leads children to become terrorists, we would be fools to think that Simia Sarwar’s fate has nothing to do with us.

  Or, take our military security.  You know, we Americans are accustomed to disparaging politicians, and many of them deserve it.  One of my friends in the Massachusetts State Senate, a Democrat, got on the radio one night and proclaimed with great fervor: “the Republican octopus is spreading its testicles across the commonwealth.”  But we rarely stop to think that politics as we understand it here in this country, in terms of deals and tradeoffs and compromises, politics is part of what keeps us free and stable.  T. V. Smith, the political scientist, once observed that it is the job of the politician to keep the saints and the respective followers from slaughtering one another over matters of moral principles.  None of the countries in which U.S. soldiers have seen action in the last twelve years—Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo—ever witnessed a baby-kissing politician or a campaign finance scandal for that matter, because not a one of them was a true practicing democracy. 

  It’s commonplace to observe that no democracy has ever fought a war against another democracy.  That depends, of course, on your definition of democracy.  We did fight a war against Yugoslavia.  Milosovic did allow opponents to run in the elections, but it wasn’t a human rights-respecting democracy.  Not a true democracy, because those opponents often found themselves dead before election day rolled around.  The truth is that the more respect for human rights you find in a country the more stable that country is likely to be in the long run, the more inclined it is to honor and respect its international treaties and agreements, and the less likely it is to resort to war against other human rights-respecting countries to resolve conflicts. 

  That means that means that if we want to avoid a war with China over, say, Taiwan, we’ve got to care as much about the Chinese people’s human rights as we do about selling them pompoms.  But what about those 1 billion potential Chinese consumers of pompoms?  Are human rights in our economic and trade interests as well?  Well, I’ll tell you, they certainly are in the economic interests of the half million Americans who lost their jobs in the manufacturing sector in 1999 because U.S. businesses moved their factories to countries that deny workers the right to organize labor unions.  A unionized worker in New York is paid $8.31 per hour to make a T-shirt.  A non-unionized worker in Bangladesh is paid one cent an hour.  

  But it’s not just labor that suffers when foreign countries abuse human rights.  No, no, not just labor, business too.  In late March of this year Exxon Mobil announced that it was shutting down natural gas fields in Indonesia because of the violence in that province.  And what was the source of that violence?   Years and years and years of political repression and denial of basic human rights.  In order to do business, corporations require a free flow of accurate financial information.  Well, you can’t have that without a free business press.  In order to do business, corporations require fair enforcement of laws and contracts.  Well, you can’t get that without an independent judiciary.  In order to do business, corporations require as little corruption as possible.  The State Department says that in the last half of the 1990s U.S. businesses lost at least 24 billion dollars worth of foreign contracts because they would not pay bribes to corrupt governments.  But corruption comes hand in hand with the repression of a free press, of independent monitoring organizations and political opponents.  And this is to say nothing about the way in which association with human rights repressive regimes tarnishes the images of corporations.  Just tell Kathy Lee Gifford that her brand name won’t be spoiled by the use of sweatshops in Honduras.

  But our finances are not the only things that are at risk because of human rights violations; our health is, too.  When the door to a Russian prison cell is opened …one is hit by a blast of hot dark stinking gas, sweat, urine, feces that passes for air.  The result of the medical neglect in Russian prisons is that a strain of tuberculosis has been generated that cannot be cured by drugs and, thanks to trade and travel, that same strain has found its way around the world until today it is located as well in the United States.  Or consider the relationship between environmental threats and human rights violations.  Russia, again, dumps both solid and liquid nuclear waste into its Arctic Sea and that waste very likely makes its way down both of our sea coasts.  Now, why would Russia do something so foolish?  Well, when Russian environmentalists have tried to ask that same question and to stop the practice they have regularly been harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, tortured and threatened with execution.  So another reason human rights are in our national interests in addition to protecting our national security and our economic interests is because we may die of disease or a global catastrophe without them.

  But, why, if any of my theses are true, why are the so-called foreign [policy] realists so reluctant to admit the connection between respect for human rights and the pursuit of a wide range of our interests as a people, as a country?  Are they simply [immune] to human suffering?  Part of their reluctance, I think, stems from a genuine belief that the United States is the exceptional nation, what our Puritan forbearers called a city set on a hill, a beacon of moral righteousness, after which other nations ought to model themselves and hence a country that need not play by the same rules as everybody else.  One scholar put this perfectly:  international institutions, he said, are not good in themselves.  They are good only to the extent to which they contribute to furthering the well-being of America.  Now is it any wonder that we were kicked off the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission? 

  How realistic is it, in a world in which trade and electronic communication have bound us more closely than ever to our neighbors, how realistic is it to think that our national interests can be formulated independently of the interests of the rest of the world?  If American exceptionalism is so short-sighted, well, why do realists distain the struggle for human rights?  Are they just indifferent to human suffering?  Perhaps some of them are, but more of them are like the rest of us—merely overwhelmed.

  I had an experience in 1999 with David Trimble, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland., a quintessential political realist, that led me to wonder if this was so.  I had visited one of Trimble’s constituents, a Catholic family named Hamel whose son, Robert, had been murdered by a Protestant mob though he had paid them no offense, while the police sat across the street from the incident and did nothing.  When I met with the Protestant Mr. Trimble I raised the Hamel case with him.  Trimble had been carrying on his customary rant against the Catholics, and when I raised Robert Hamel’s name he took off on an indictment against the dead boy’s character.  The boy had no weapons but somehow he had invited the 25 members of the mob to stomp him to death.  So I decided to change my tactics with this angry rigid man.  “Mr. Minister,” I said as quietly as I could, and I put my hand gently on his forearm because we were seated side-by-side, “Mr. Minister, I don’t know the full facts of the Hamel case, but I do know that there are a mother, a father, a sister, in that house in deep mourning for a beloved child and I do know that as First Minister you’re now not just the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party.  You’re the leader of this whole community.  If Northern Ireland is ever to heal, it will be because people in your position reach out across the barriers of the mind to the regions of the heart.  Is there any chance that you could find it in your heart to reach out to a suffering family, members of your own constituency even though they be Catholic?  As simply one frail mortal human being to another?”

  When I finished something absolutely remarkable happened.  The room because still and for an instant David Trimble’s eyes filled with tears.  Now, the tears didn’t spill over and Trimble quickly caught his emotions and reverted to his more familiar, and no doubt more comfortable, aggressive style.  I was so surprised and stunned at what I had seen that I wasn’t even sure that I had seem it correctly and so twenty minutes later when the conversation came to a close I repeated my plea in very similar words and once again Trimble’s eyes became misty and he averted my gaze.

  I think for many realists what appears at first as hard-heartedness is, in fact, protection against feeling all the pain we see around us….Despair, fury, realism—they’re all caught up together but the simple truth is this:  most of the time, when it comes to human rights, we can have our cake and eat it, too.  We can stand up for what is right and at the same time benefit ourselves from our birthrights.

  Let me conclude my remarks, as indeed I do my book, with a confession.  When I was preparing the manuscript I summarized its thesis to a friend and her reaction interested me.  “What a shame,” she said, “to think that we need selfish reasons to care about our fellow human beings.”  And I understood what she meant.  I wish it were enough to tell people that in early 20^th century Congo, Belgium labor bosses cut off the right hands of boys who failed to meet their mining quota for diamonds and to show off how strict they were, kept baskets full of those hands displayed on their desks of their offices.  I wish the revulsion of that story was enough to motivate us to stop parallel atrocities going on today in Sierra Leone.  But they’re not….I’ve spent a professional lifetime trying to convey the truth about human suffering.  That it might touch another’s heart.  All of it is good, I think, but it is not enough, not enough to rescue the tortured and the dying from the troughs of perfidy.  At some level, of course, I accept my failure….But what I will not accept are those who tell us that it doesn’t matter and that we ought to offer a hand to anguish only in the narrowest of circumstances.  That I think is utterly shortsighted and my book argues that those circumstances are far wider than we think. 

  All 197 pages of what I have written are but a footnote to the real reason that we ought to offer that hand to anguish in the first place, because to look on agony and consistently remain unmoved is to be dead to all the things that truly matter.  Dead to the mystery of pulse and breath, dead to the gifts of grace and kindness and dead to fragility of all creation.  Ultimately, I don’t care why we staunch another person’s suffering: only that we do it.  I argue that it is in our best interests to do it, but I want always to remember the more fundamental fact that if we would live in a world with honor we must not let misery go unmet.  It’s a pleasant truth that in the case of human rights, honor and benefit coincide.  All that I ask is that we don our gowns and our ties and tails in order that we might meet the worst life has to offer with the very best that it is.  The very best.

  Thank you.