SYNERGY BETWEEN THE FIELDS OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Human rights movements have never used only the “naming and shaming” practice to bring out change. Negotiations and other political processes have led to extraordinary changes in the international scene with new states emerging, being formed, and recognized.

States do not apply human rights only because they are forced to do so, but also because it is becoming clearer to many ruling elites that it is indeed advantageous to the stability and further development of the state. The correlations between human rights and development,⁹ human rights and economic growth,¹⁰ and human rights and political participation,¹¹ are astounding. They constitute a call for further explo­ration of conflict resolution approaches, such as dialogues, negotiation, and medi­ation. The ways these conversations will be handled will have a huge impact on our understanding of human rights and conflict resolution in the future. This is why there is a growing interest in both fields about overlapping complementarity and the tensions that have emerged. Nonetheless, stressing the need for building bridges between conflict resolution and human rights does not imply merging the two fields, for they address underlying violent conflict from different but synergistic responses. (See Babbitt, 2005.)

How can human rights be brought into conflict resolution processes then? When conflict resolution techniques are used in human rights disputes in ethnic conflicts, it is crucial that prevailing universal norms and applicable interna­tional law be taken into account explicitly. Using human rights arguments pro­ductively helps the parties to develop and reach accords that include significant shifts in the individual’s system of protection.

Societies that have experienced deep and sorrowful moments of human destructiveness have identified the need for discontinuity. Thus, they introduced and used the instrument of amnesties to indicate a clear shift: a shift from war to peace, from enmity to partnership, from destructiveness to collective engage­ment. In this light, amnesties are not a suspension of human rights, but rather the space of discontinuity that societies emerging from violent conflict require to think of ways to put human rights into practice.

There is little respect for human rights in the midst of violent conflict, for the right of life, for the right to due process, and for the right to freedom. Civilians are often the first to experience the massive violation of human rights that occurs in the time of war. If the attempt to tame human violence through inter­national law was measured only by its results on victims, its record would be abysmal. The human rights implication of any violent confrontation is sub­stantial and we should take very seriously the need for prosecuting those who go beyond the boundaries of military engagement intentionally, who destroy and disrupt the lives of many.

Nonetheless, the enforcement strategy that only restricts justice to persecution will not achieve the justice that it claims. For many societies, in fact, prosecu­tion creates continuity, putting the conflict not in the past, but in the present. If this occurs, it is impossible to move on, to imagine the future that “must be imag­ined” for human rights to be fulfilled. Also, the implicit risk of prosecuting indi­viduals is that by identifying only some (out of many) as the true culprits of the violence implicitly clears the others. Moving the responsibility from the system to individuals is an important, yet dangerous step. The behavior of individuals con­stitutes expressions of the political formation, military structures, and systemic pat­terns concealing, sustaining, and actualizing violent behavior. Societies should not be deprived of their rights to get amnesties as a step toward the full realization of human rights.

However, as demonstrated in South Africa and Mozambique,¹³ a political process following violent conflict can be created that uses amnesties as a way to create a discontinuity from the violent system, ensuring the space in which a new political system will be developed along with an effective judicial system. This approach has huge implications as far as it concerns victims and their rights. No political authority can or should force victims to forgive, or even to forget. Instead, the experiences of the victims should be an integral part of the new political order, an order that recognizes, welcomes, and respects their memories. Furthermore, no successful peace process can emerge from forced oblivion. Rather, the very expe­rience of victimhood (see Meister, 2002) should be placed at the core of a new polit­ical construction that makes violating human rights unthinkable. Yet, it must be recognized that humans have been capable of extraordinary ingenuity in imagining and executing the unthinkable.

After the establishment of a discontinuity, the second step is to make sure that the voices of the victims of past abuses are heard and become an integral part of a conversation that includes them in such a way that new violations will be impossible. These processes take time and require a great political capacity, because victims are at times a difficult stumbling block on the way to peace. Unless the capacity of the system to represent them politically is secured, the actual emergence of peace is compromised. Also, victims must not necessarily have the leading role during the peace processes, but they should certainly be represented significantly in all stages.