PHA-Exchange> Food for do-gooders thoughts

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

Human Rights Reader 75

MORE ON HUMAN RIGHTS WORKERS AS ACTIVISTS.

1. 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. 

2. 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. 

3. 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.

4. 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. 

5. What it ultimately is all about is basically to search for a space inside 
the system from-which-to-perturb-the-same.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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. 

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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?).

12. 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).

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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
).

16. 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.

17. 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
claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn 
==================================
Through much of this Reader I distilled arguments found in several issues of 
D+C the German development journal, the book ‘The Hidden Connections’, by 
Fritjof Capra, the book ‘Heading South, Looking North’ by Ariel Dorfman and the 
book ‘Refugiado del Iraq Milenario’ by Claudio Sepulveda.


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