10/05/2012 - Myclipp

The New York Times/ - Politics, Sáb, 12 de Maio de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
Human Rights, Not So Pure Anymore
THE international commotion around the blind Chinese
activist Chen Guangcheng aroused memories of
earlier dissidents like Andrei D. Sakharov and
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of
another age who first made “international human
rights” a rallying cry for activists across the globe and a
high-profile item on Western governments’ agendas.
All the familiar elements were there: the lone icon
speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule,
the anonymous but courageous network at home that
sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied
around his cause, and the governments that made
their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral
ideals and geopolitical interests. The cat-and-mouse
game of Mr. Chen’s surreptitious flight and America’s
response resembled cold war cloak-and-dagger
intrigue, too, but dissidents then sometimes were
pushed into their own underground railroads, and often
states bargained over their ultimate fate. The 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights — which
Peng-Chun Chang, a representative of Nationalist
China, helped draft — had virtually no impact on world
politics in its time. It was only 30 years later that Soviet
dissidents and refugees from Latin American
dictatorships catapulted human rights to visibility. In
part because it was so new, the idea of international
human rights initially seemed an uncontroversial effort
to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold
war’s ideological battles. Forty years into the era that
Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and many less famous
dissidents founded, the meaning of human rights has
now become familiar. In reporting on Mr. Chen, most
publications, including this newspaper, used the terms
“dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer
to him. However, since the time Amnesty International
and other groups popularized those phrases, human
rights — a term that once meant the defense of
individuals against the oppression of an unjust state —
has come to imply other things, too. Today, it is just as
likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in
distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of
authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like
Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian
interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty —
not to mention a threat to their manner of rule. The
West’s continuing reckoning with China is not likely to
play out according to familiar protocols. China has
always had a much more distant relationship with
international human rights norms than the Communist
states of yesteryear. In the cold war, an era when
America didn’t ratify any human rights treaties, the
Soviet Union did. The fact that their governments had
done so gave dissidents’ appeals to international
human rights tremendous power at home. It was
Communist Czechoslovakia’s ratification of the main
international human rights covenants in 1976 that
brought them into legal force — and helped inspire the
creation of the dissident manifesto, Charter 77, the
next year. Prompted by the arrest of members of the
rock band Plastic People of the Universe, Vaclav
Havel and his fellow signatories criticized the
government for failing to abide by the human rights
treaties it had signed. Communist China, excluded
from the United Nations at the time the first human
rights treaties were drafted, still hasn’t ratified the
covenant for political and civil rights. Another reason
China’s Charter 08 — formed by Chinese dissidents
on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration —
hasn’t had an impact comparable to that of its famous
Czech predecessor is primarily because today’s
geopolitical balance of power is very different from the
one that favored cold war dissidents. Although
America was weathering its own economic storm as
the human rights era dawned in the 1970s, it was not
faced with the prospect of a rising Soviet Union at the
time, especially not one whose productivity had
supported their extensive borrowing.A professor of
history at Columbia University and the author of “The
Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.” Today, China is
rising, and because it controls so much Western debt,
it is unlikely to be as easy to target for its internal
conduct. Some claim that international human rights
norms undid the Soviet empire, while others say that it
declined and fell because of political mismanagement
and economic collapse — things that seem much more
prevalent in the West than in China now. This
geopolitical shift gives today’s dissidents and their
foreign allies much less leverage than their
predecessors had. BUT the main difference between
then and now is that the whole idea of human rights
has lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity.
Today, the issue of human rights is no longer just
about limiting power in the global arena but also about
how to deploy it. For many, defending human rights
implies the activist prevention of atrocity, after Bosnia
and Rwanda stoked our consciences. Following
America’s protective bombing of Kosovo in 1999,
George W. Bush in 2003 inveighed against Saddam
Hussein’s torture chambers before going to war
(though a few new torture chambers were set up once
Americans got there). Barack Obama, along with other
concerned politicians, appealed to human rights to
justify what became regime change in Libya, going far
beyond the cause of saving civilians from carnage.
That China and post-Soviet Russia have erected
obstacles to a rerun of that human rights war in Syria
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