South Africa cannot afford the Hate

BBC News story
Race hate lives on in 'rainbow nation'

GIAZILO’s commentary

With all the hope and promise of building a rainbow nation following the collapse of Apartheid, racial tensions are once again brewing in South Africa and this deserves the world's attention.

The murder, recently, of South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche by two of his black workers has further polarized the country and raised the ugly specter of the kinds of racial violence that characterized the worst days of the apartheid era. This time however, the story is a bit more complex.

Eugene Terreblanche, by all accounts, was an objectionable figure who thrived on stoking racial animosities. He led the Afrikaner Resistance movement, the AWB, which viewed the end of apartheid as surrender to communism and threatened full scale civil war if President F. W de Klerk handed power to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. He even led a violent attempt to disrupt the dismantling of Apartheid.

The death of Terreblanche has been blamed on Julius Malema, the vocal and controversial leader of the Youth League of the ruling African National Congress. Widely seen as a divisive figure, even within the ANC, Malema is a close ally of President Jacob Zuma. White groups and opposition parties blame Malema for singing an apartheid-era song at rallies that include the lyrics “shoot the Boer [farmer].”

This is particularly sensitive given that several white farmers have been murdered in their farms since the end of apartheid. Although the ANC rejected the link between the song and Terreblanche’s murder, it accepted that the song and the debate around it was polarizing society and subsequently instructed its members to stop using it.

Julius Malema and his supporters have defied this instruction and continued to sing the songs at political rallies. Within the ANC there is talk of initiating disciplinary proceedings against Malema where he is expected to answer to an array of charges, including promoting racism. But given his influence within the party, it remains uncertain whether the ANC leadership has the will or incentive to follow through on this.

Julius Malema and his supporters justify the singing of the song with the offensive lyrics in terms of history and heritage. The lyrics “Kill the Boars,” they insist is not intended to encourage violence against white farmers but to evoke the anti-apartheid struggle. It is a lame excuse. Given the fragility of post-Apartheid peace in the country and the racial tensions that simmer just beneath the surface, nothing can justify the singing of this song – not even the evocation of history and heritage.

In the arguments of Julius Malema and his supporters, I find parallels with the arguments of those in the United States who insist on flying the confederate flag in public spaces in the name of history and heritage. Groups such as the “Sons of Confederate Veterans,” seek to preserve the history and legacy of Confederate heroes, often without regard to the sensitivity of many African-Americans, for whom the Confederate flag evokes a different history and legacy.

Like the Sons of the Confederacy, Julius Malema and his followers have chosen to turn a blind eye to the fact that their interpretation and evocation of history have adverse implications for the rights, safety and wellbeing of others. We must be wary of those who evoke history and heritage in ways that are insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. I am all for protecting the freedom of speech and expression but there must be limits imposed when one’s freedom of expression so clearly poses a threat to the sense of security of others within the community.

The South African government needs to do more to rein in the divisive racial discourses growing on all sides. It must send a strong message that history and heritage cannot provide an excuse for divisive racial discourses. Those who are keen on those symbols of their history and heritage that provoke racial animosities may continue to “enjoy” them in the dark privacy of their homes, but they have no place in the public square.

South Africa cannot afford the Hate

5/01/2010 11:20:00 AM africa, human rights, politics, war and peace

Human Rights Web Archive, University of Columbia

The Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research (CHRDR), part of Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, is pleased to announce the development of the Human Rights Web Archive
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/humanrights/hrwa/

As part of Columbia's larger initiative to collect free and at-risk web resources, the Human Rights Web Archive is dedicated to preserving web-based information of importance to the global community of human rights researchers, students, policymakers and advocates.

Human Rights Web Archive, University of Columbia

4/25/2010 01:18:00 PM education, history, human rights

As you would have them do to you: Christianity and Human Rights

Talk delivered by Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh at the First Unitarian Church of Hamilton, March 7, 2010

Theme: Matthew 7:12 -- So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Besides the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of my favorite bible stories comes from the book of Matthew - Matthew 22:33. Jesus was teaching in the temple in Jerusalem before a crowd, when the skeptical Sadducees and Pharisees sought to trap him into saying something for which they could accuse and condemn him. One of the Pharisees, an expert in religious law, asked him: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the Law of Moses?" Jesus replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

It is interesting and noteworthy that Jesus stated that loving one’s neighbor as oneself is just as important as loving God. Our relationship with one another is as central to the Christian faith as the relationship with God. Christianity can therefore provide a moral foundation for protecting and promoting human rights even in an increasingly secular world.

We think of human rights today in very secular and legalistic terms. The defining document of international human rights is the Universal Declaration of Human rights. Adopted by the United Nations general assembly in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the world’s response to the atrocities of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The global community was appalled and horrified by the sheer brutality and inhumanity of that war. The Universal Declaration was intended to provide a framework in which the basic human rights of all peoples around the world would be protected based on certain agreed universal standards. Although not everyone in our world today presently enjoy these rights, we have as a human community at least agreed on certain basic rights that we should ideally all have.

Apart from International human rights laws, we also have national and provincial human rights laws and institutions such as the Canadian Human Rights Act which ensures equal opportunity to individuals who may be victims of discriminatory practices based on gender, disability, or religion. These laws promote and protect the basic human rights we should all enjoy as citizens of Canada and citizens of the World. They regulate how countries deal with their citizens and how we deal with each other within our communities. Take a few examples. All human rights laws whether domestic or international emphasize certain common principles – Everyone has the rights to life; No one has the prerogative to take another person’s life. Everyone has the right to property, the right to dignity and no one should be subjected to torture. Everyone accused of a crime should be given fair hearing and the opportunity to defend him or herself. Everyone has a right to practice his religion, express himself and associate with others.

Although we may think of all these human rights are secular laws, they are in fact deeply rooted in the Christian humanist call that we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” The connections between today’s secular human rights regimes and Christian teachings are not simply philosophical. They are concrete and practical. In the process of drafting the Universal Declaration of human rights, the drafters recognized that the different world religions had something to contribute to developing a modern and universal human rights document. The Human Rights Commission and UNESCO – The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization -- therefore set out to get input from the representatives of world’s religions by interviewing them. Jews, Christian, Buddhists, Hindus and Moslems were all consulted. So although the UDHR is a secular document it has benefited from religious notions of rights.

The Ten Commandments which is at the foundation of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is made of laws regulating both our relationship with God and our relationship with our fellow men and women. In fact, it is interesting that out of the 10 commandments, 4 deal with our relationship with God while 6 deal with our relationship with our fellow men and women.
- Laws relating to God - You shall have no other gods before me; You shall not make for yourself an idol; You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God; Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy;
- Laws relating to man - Honor your father and mother; You shall not kill; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor; You shall not covet what belongs to your neighbor

There are direct similarities between the Ten Commandments and our secular human rights laws today. "Thou shall not kill" protects the right to life. "Thou shalt not covert thy neighbor’s goods" protects the right to property. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" affirms the right to justice and fair hearing.

The other link between secular Universal human rights today and Christian teaching is the aspiration towards universality. Jesus Christ, we are told, came to take the good news to the gentiles and uncircumcised, not only to the Jews. This was a message carried on by the apostles in their missionary journeys around the world after the death of Jesus. In the book of Galatians, Apostle Paul states: “There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave and freemen, male and female for all of you are one person in Christ” (Galatians 3:28-29). Paul in his letter to the Romans states that God created all mankind and all races are equal before God (Acts 17-19).

Although human rights have increasingly become secular and legalistic, they are in fact also rooted in fundamental humanist Christian values. The underlying premise of universal human rights is that we should love our neighbors as ourselves; that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. International human rights laws are really only an affirmation of what the good Christian already knows – that his relationship with his neighbor is just as important as his relationship with God. Christian teaching can continue to play an important role in how we as individual and citizens promote the human rights of others within our communities.

As you would have them do to you: Christianity and Human Rights

4/17/2010 11:24:00 PM human rights, religion

Somali Islamists ban music

Here we go again...
Taliban style fundamentalist Islamists have banned music in the failed state that is Somalia. The long suffering people of Somalia already have to face the insecurity and uncertainty that comes with living a society overun by thugs and warlords. A decade of war and banditry has taken its toll on the civilian population. Now, even the simplest pleasure of music is being denied them. More disheartening, this irrationality is being decreed in the name of God and religion… When does the madness stop?

The Washington Post has the story... Somali Islamists ban music

Somali Islamists ban music

4/17/2010 10:18:00 PM africa, human rights, religion, war and peace

Serbia Apologizes for Srebrenica massacre

Too little, too late?
- Is this really about contrition for the atrocities of Srebrenica or more about Serbia’s quest to join the European Union?
- Has this apology come at this time only to prepare the way for Serbia's joining the Union?
- Why the reluctance to use the term “Genocide”? Who is afraid of the term “Genocide?”

However, I think this is a first step in the right direction. The true measure of the apology will be how it shapes Serbian government’s relations with its neighbors and Muslim minorities. This apology should be a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

Serbian MPs offer apology for Srebrenica massacre

Serbia's parliament has passed a landmark resolution apologising for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre - Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. The motion, approved by a narrow majority, says Serbia should have done more to prevent the tragedy.

It stopped short of calling the Bosnian war killings a genocide.

The murder of nearly 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) was carried out by Bosnian Serb forces - allies of then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. The massacre, in what was supposed to have been a UN safe haven, became a symbol for the atrocities of the Balkan wars.

Meanwhile, a Dutch court has rejected an attempt to hold the United Nations responsible for the killings.

The resolution - which the Serbian government sees as a crucial step in its attempts to join the European Union - was approved after almost 13 hours of heated negotiations in the Belgrade parliament.

More here…. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8594625.stm

Serbia Apologizes for Srebrenica massacre

4/01/2010 07:34:00 PM human rights, war and peace

Amnesty Conference: Human Rights in Canada

Amnesty Conference: Human Rights in Canada

3/21/2010 10:55:00 PM human rights, world

Book of the Week: John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions

I just finished reading John Foran’s new book, Taking Power (2005) and I think is a must read for anyone interested in human rights, social justice and peace. Although Foran is a sociologist and brings a predominantly sociological approach to his analysis, he also offers a multidisciplinary perspective.

He seeks answers to a simple age-old question: Why do revolutions happen? Focusing on a diverse range of revolutionary episodes – China, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Nicaragua, Angola etc – Foran argues that five inter-related causal factors must combine in a given conjecture to produce successful social revolutions – 1) dependent development; 2) repressive, exclusionary, personalist state; 3) elaboration of effective and powerful political culture; 4) crisis arising from economic downturn and 5) a world systemic opening (external factors).

While I do not agree with some of the more rigidly structuralist arguments that Foran makes, I think his overall attempts at systematizing our understanding of social revolutions is to be commended. I was particularly intrigued by his discussion on the “Future of revolutions." He questions whether Globalization represents the “Highest Stage of Capitalism?” (p.260)

Globalization the Highest Stage of Capitalism?
In his classic 1916 account of imperialism, Lenin conceived it as the highest stage of capitalism, and dated its rise in words that echo eerily almost a century later: “The beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.” Foran wonders if, as imperialism represented for Lenin a special state in capitalism, globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century represents a special stage in imperialism and neo-colonialism. This, I think, is an interesting proposition that draws attention to the structural inequities inherent in contemporary globalization.

Book of the Week: John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions

2/23/2010 04:16:00 PM politics, war and peace, world

Whose “Human Rights” Agenda?

A famous biblical verse states: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." I find this admonition by Jesus Christ relevant to the human rights movement in many ways. Not everyone who professes human rights does so with an objective commitment to human rights ideals. A look at the history of the human rights movement bears this out.

One of the legacies of the Cold War for human rights was the creation and intensification of the boundaries between civil and political rights on one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. These boundaries reflected the East West polarization in international relations which reduced human rights to a weapon of propaganda and political ideology in a bi-polar struggle. The West emphasized civil and political rights pointing the finger at socialist countries for denying these rights. The socialist (and many developing countries) emphasized economic and social rights criticizing the richest Western countries for failure to secure these rights for all its citizens.

In a post-Cold War era where the world is no longer that sharply divided between East and West, much of the propagandist human rights language of the Cold War era has lost its relevance. More countries across the former East West divide are now better disposed to affirming the interrelatedness, interdependence and indivisibility of human rights. However, the co-option of human rights by both state and non-state authority structures for parochial ideological and propagandist purposes did not cease with the end of the Cold War. International discourses on the right to development, for instance have continues to be underscored by similar manipulation of rights language to serve the political and economic agendas of states, ruling regimes and other non-governmental authority structures. The ideological fault lines may be less rigid than they were during the Cold War, but the language of human rights continues to be appropriated and invoked in ways that sell it short.

We must therefore continue to seriously consider the morally troubling outcomes that arise when human rights is co-opted by authority structures in ways that serve more to enhance their power than to alleviate human suffering. As we celebrate the many progressive developments that have been brought about by the post Second World War human rights movement, we must also pay attention to how the misuse of human rights can undermine its claims to universalism, inalienability and normative objectivity.

Whose “Human Rights” Agenda?

2/21/2010 04:40:00 PM human rights, world

Book of the Week - Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed

First published in Portuguese in 1968 Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains as relevant today as it was four decades ago. Written within the same Marxist intellectual traditions as Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the appeal of this book for me goes beyond its ideological message. In this classic which has now been translated into several languages, Freire, a Brazilian educator critiques what he called the “banking concept of education”, in which the student is viewed as an empty account to be field in by the teacher. He emphasizes the need for education that is self reflective and relevant to the intellectual and material empowerment of the disempowered and marginalized. In reading Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I am reminded of my high school teacher, Mr Onyema, who, when asked to define education stated: “Your education is what remains with you when all you learnt in school must have been forgotten.”

Book of the Week - Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed

2/21/2010 04:08:00 PM education

HAITI: Media Reporting and the need for Historical Contextualization

The outpouring of global support and assistance for the people of Haiti following the devastating earthquake in that country has been heartening. The people of Haiti are historically, a very resilient people and they will pull through even this devastation.

But I have been struck by the shallowness of the global media reporting of the event. Virtually none of the media reporting of the tragedy has gone beyond the fixation with Haiti’s recent history to explore the long and complex sequence of historical events that have shaped what Haiti is today. This is, in many ways, typical of Western media reporting - a preoccupation with the here and now. An obstinate presentism that insists on draining today's events of yesterday's antecedents; an antipathy for historical contexts. Yet, a broader historical context is crucial to understanding the realities of poverty and political instability in that country today. The only analysis have I seen in the media so far that even attempts to provide such a historical context is Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN (Below).

Beyond the media's fixation with Haiti’s present history of corruption, poverty and political instability, is a long and brutal history of slavery, emancipation, exclusion, hostility, and foreign intervention. The legacies of these historical realities continue to shape the situation in that country today. We need to understand this past to be better able to help the people of Haiti move into a more promising future.



Sir Hilary Beckles, the pro-vice-chancellor and principal of the University of West Indies offers a historical perspective to the Haitian situation on in his article, “The Hate and the Quake”

http://www.barbadosadvocate.com/newsitem.asp?more=letters&NewsID=8490

HAITI: Media Reporting and the need for Historical Contextualization

1/21/2010 11:58:00 AM history, media, politics, slavery, world