[afro-nets] Food for do-gooders thoughts

[Claudio Schuftan <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

Food for do-gooders thoughts
----------------------------

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) situa-
tion of the have-nots in the world. I am amazed at the ?deafen-
ing 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 pri-
vate 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, ad-
dressed 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 recog-
nizable 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 anchor-
ing 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 in-
fluenced?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-behaviours.

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 out-
come.

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 over-
turn; we need those major breakthroughs. Only meaningful struc-
tural disturbances will lead to a new order. (As in complexity
theory, chaos or major crises are the breeding ground for radi-
cal 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, Vietnam
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn

--
Through much of this Reader I distilled arguments found in sev-
eral 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.