Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights
In the course of the UN intervention into Somalia some years ago, soldiers from Belgian and Canadian contingents were charged with torturing individual Somalis. At the same time U.S.
forces carried out the destruction of entire city blocks and killed considerable numbers of civilians, as a consequence of the U.S. military doctrine of using overwhelming force (preferably from the air) in order to maintain minimal American casualties (preferably none).1 It was noted at the time that this clear breach of the Geneva conventions was not followed up by the United States holding a public inquiry into those responsible for the breach in the way the Belgians and the Canadians pursued the torturers. “The reason,” claims Alex de Waal, “is quite simple: orders for helicopter attacks came from higher authorities than the force commander in Mogadishu—they came from Cent- com HQ in Florida and the White House itself. The charge sheet for any inquiry into Mogadishu war crimes might contain the names of some very high-ranking American individuals.”2 The point I want to make is not that the United States is powerful enough to flout international conventions with impunity. It is that while U.S. military doctrine makes breaches of the Geneva Convention more likely, it makes actual cases of torture less likely because and to the extent that a direct encounter between individual1. This doctrine seems to be shared by other states too, as the Israeli army’s response to the Palestinian resistance to occupation demonstrates.
2. Alex de Waal, “Dangers of Discretion,” London Review of Books, January 21, 1999, p. 27.
soldiers and civilians is avoided. The use of excessive force against civilians through aerial bombardment is regarded differently from the use of violence perpetrated by particular officials against individual victims.
It is not a matter of human rights abuse but of collateral damage.But military action is not the only—or even the most important— form of intervention by powerful states in the affairs of others. Financial pressures can have effects that are more far-reaching than many military adventures. But the devastation these pressures can cause to social life, and the punishments they deliver to individual citizens of an economically weakened state, cannot be addressed as human rights violations.
For example: “In the early ’90s, East Asian countries had liberalized their financial and capital markets—not because they needed to attract more funds (savings were already 30 percent or more) but because of international pressure, including some from the US Treasury Department. These changes provoked a flood of short-term capital—that is, die kind of capital that looks for the highest returns in the next day, week, or month, as opposed to long-term investment in things like factories. In Thailand, this short-term capital helped fuel an unsustainable real estate boom.... Just as suddenly as capital flowed in, it flowed out.... Output in some of the affected countries fell 16 percent or more. Half the businesses in Indonesia were in virtual bankruptcy or close to it.... Unemployment soared, increasing as much as tenfold, and real wages plummeted—in countries with basically no safety nets. Not only was the IMF not restoring economic confidence in East Asia, it was undermining the regions social fabric.”[87] This account, which I have taken from Joseph Stiglitz (until re- cendy vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank) can be replicated even more dramatically for Russia. In both cases, die ability of the affected states to uphold certain rights was direcdy compromised by IMF and U.S. policies aimed at liberalizing national economies throughout the world. But these interventions themselves cannot be regarded as instances of human rights violation; they are presented as the promotion of economic restructuring necessary for development.
The first part of Article 25 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the
Redeeming the “Human“ Through Human Rights 129 right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” But the responsibility for ensuring the conditions in which these rights can be realized is assigned solely to individual sovereign states, each of which is defined in part by its right to govern “the national economy.” Damage done to the economy of another country (as in the case of the deliberate interventions I have mentioned) does not constitute a violation of human rights even if it causes immense suffering because in the final analysis the responsibility for the damage is borne only by the governors of “the national economy,” and in any case it is considered a short-term cost of a long-term benefit.
I stress that my concern here is »or to ascribe blame—to argue that Southeast Asian governments or Somali civilians were innocent victims of a conspiracy. In this chapter, unlike the previous one, my concern is not with cruelty as such but with how, in a secular system like human rights, responsibility is assigned for it. I point to a basic assumption about “the human” on which human rights stand: Nothing essential to a person’s human essence is violated if he or she suffers as a consequence of military action or of market manipulation from beyond his own state when that is permitted by international law. In these cases, the suffering that the individual sustains as citizen—as the national of a particular state—is distinguished from the suffering he undergoes as a human being. Human rights are concerned with the individual only in the latter capacity, with his or her natural being and not civil status. If this is so, then we encounter an interesting paradox: the notion that inalienable rights define the human does not depend on the nation-state because the former relates to a state of nature, whereas the concept of citizen, including the rights a citizen holds, presupposes a state that Enlightenment theorists called political society. Human rights, including the moral rules that bind humans universally, are intrinsic to all persons irrespective of their “cultural” make-up. Yet the identification and application of human rights law has no meaning independent of the judicial institutions that belong to individual nation-states (or to several states bound together by treaty) and the remedies that these institutions supply—and therefore of the individuals civil status as a political subject.