Human Rights Work

So in this post - Cold War chaos, anarchy, in which the superpowers can and choose not to intervene and in which nationalist politicians set in motion these forces, let's look at what the human rights professional does. When one reads The Graves, for example, your book on the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, which you did with photographer Gilles Peress, what is quite striking is that this work requires courage, doesn't it?

I don't know if it requires courage; my wife might say stupidity. We call it "flack jacket archeology"; but at any rate, if it requires courage, the courage really is on the part of the local human rights activists -- whether it's Argentina, Guatemala, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia. It's the local human rights organizations which are out there day after day collecting the information. For those of us who come from the outside, the danger isn't constant. Durig the war in Bosnia, for example, we were very well protected. We had fifty-five Dutch military soldiers protecting us and ready to defend us, hopefully, if something happened.

Better than they were defending the Bosnians?

Better than they were defending the Bosnians themselves, so certainly problems can arise, but it's those local groups that remain there collecting the evidence day after day that really are the courageous ones.

Now what's interesting, and again we are looking at this period from Bosnia to Rwanda, the human rights people who've come in increasingly have been international in the sense that they are people who've worked in different parts of the world where human rights efforts are underway. Tell us a little about that process. Does the knowledge gained in training people in Argentina or Guatemala and so on lead to their helping new groups in the future?

If you look at the trajectory of the human rights movement, if you go back to the late sixties, early seventies, The New York Times hardly ever ran an article about human rights. Once in a blue moon, something would come out about human rights. Much to their credit, the human rights movement [brought] together, primarily in the beginning, lawyers from around the world to frame laws and ways of protecting rights of people. And also, with the development of electronic communications, there is no question, the internet or e-mail makes human rights work so much easier. Now, [If an] isolated small group working in Zambia has a land tenure problem and wants to communicate with another group in Venezuela, they can do it in a matter of minutes via the Internet. With the growth of communications, the information [can be shared] among all these various groups.

In the past decade, there has been an explosion of human rights groups around the world. Take a country like Croatia. Before the war, there were perhaps four or five organizations that dealt with civil or human rights. Now after the war, there are sixty, seventy, eighty of these organizations. And they are playing the role that the government isn't, that is, they are lobbying for civil rights laws and a change in government to protect rather than to persecute citizens.

Next page: Evidence in the Human Rights Process