[list_indonesia] [ppiindia] A shining light for human rights New Feature
- From: "Ambon" <sea@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <"Undisclosed-Recipient:;"@freelists.org>
- Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 07:48:21 +0100
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Meanwhile: A shining light for human rights New Feature
By Jonathan Power International Herald Tribune
Friday, March 4, 2005
LONDON 'Better to light a candle than curse the darkness" was a guiding vision
of Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, who died last Friday.
To which I would add, quoting Nehru on hearing of Gandhi's assassination, "A
light has gone out of our lives."
.
When Benenson was born, there was no Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Today we have nearly a hundred international agreements on all aspects of human
rights - from abolishing torture to outlawing the trafficking of women and
children. Human rights are now part of the world's common culture. Yet, to take
issue with one of the most important documents in the human rights canon, the
American Declaration of Independence, there is nothing "self-evident" about
them. Jefferson himself was a slave owner.
.
Benenson certainly did not invent the cause of human rights. What he did in a
stroke of genius was to popularize it and give it a political impact it had
never possessed before. The idea of Amnesty International was the simplest of
all ideas. That's why at first it passed many of us by. We spent our weekends
marching around South Africa House in Trafalgar Square trying with our trumpets
to blow the house down. Benenson that year - 1960 - was as usual commuting to
his law office on the Tube, reading his newspaper, when he saw a small item
about two Portuguese students who had been arrested in a bar after loudly and
perhaps a little drunkenly toasting the cause of freedom. This was at the time
of the Salazar dictatorship.
.
Benenson thought for a moment and took himself off to St. Martin in the Fields,
the beautiful Christopher Wren church next to South Africa House. He sat there
for nearly an hour and then the idea dawned. He wouldn't protest publicly. He
would get a few friends together and bombard the Portuguese authorities with
letters. It was, as Martin Ennals, a future Amnesty secretary general, observed
later, "an amazing contention that prisoners of conscience could be released by
writing letters to governments."
.
As Benenson nurtured the idea, it grew roots and branches in his mind. He
thought, Why have just one campaign for one country? Why not a one-year
campaign to draw attention to the plight of nonviolent political and religious
prisoners throughout the world?
.
He persuaded his friend David Astor, editor of the British paper The Observer,
to run a full-page article. Benenson conceived the "threes network" - each
group of Amnesty supporters would adopt three prisoners and work for their
release. One would be from a Communist country, one from the West and one from
the third world. Le Monde carried its own piece, and the next day newspapers as
diverse as The New York Herald Tribune, Die Welt and The Statesman of India
took it up.
.
More than 40 years later, we can see what Amnesty succeeded in doing. Yes, it
has successfully freed many political prisoners. Yes, it has built a membership
of nearly two million activists all over the world - even in small up-country
towns in places like Nigeria, where I have watched with astonishment their work
in helping to pacify Muslim and Christian rioters. But out of these individual
small-scale acts, it has shifted the political culture in a way we 60s
protestors could never have done. Most important of all its victories was its
success in persuading most of the world's nations to agree to the UN Convention
Against Torture - which finally showed its teeth when the former Chilean
dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London in 1998.
.
Today when you open your paper and read a review of the film "Hotel Rwanda" or
see that Croatia is in danger of losing the chance to enter the European Union
because of its refusal to hand over a general to The Hague war crimes court or
are confronted with revelations of American and British torture practices, you
realize that while Benenson did not change the world, he didn't leave it as he
found it either. More than ever, large numbers of people are conscious that we
have a duty to work, as Benenson said, quoting Shakespeare, "against oblivion."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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