RIGHTS-OUTLOOK: Landmark Year for Human Rights

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 1998 (IPS) - New challenges on rights issues face the United Nations in 1999, even as the world body ended a year that marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The United Nations enjoyed some notable successes in the past year – winning convictions on genocide charges for several of the leaders of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A U.N. tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia also moved ahead with convictions, although few of the “big fish” in the Bosnia- Hercegovina war have been snared yet.

By the year’s end, former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was engaged in a legal battle to fight Britain’s plans to extradite him to a trial in Spain for his alleged crimes – the first sign since this year’s creation of an International Criminal Court (ICC) that nations will band together to fight human rights violations in other parts of the world.

For groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, events of 1998 wiped away previously-held concepts of top-level impunity, and was thus proved a fitting 50th anniversary present for Human Rights.

Yet as 1999 loomed, there remained many challenges to human rights – including the prospect that atrocities actually were increasing in many nations. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned recently that crises in places like Kosovo may worsen in the coming year.

The most bleak prediction for next year came in U.N. report, in which Mahmoud Kassem, chair of a fact-finding mission on Rwanda, warned that the forces responsible for the 1994 genocide are regrouping in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Those forces, “once a defeated and dispersed remnant, have now become a significant component of the international alliance against the Congolese rebels” and against the current Rwandan and Ugandan governments, Kassem warned.

The longer a cease-fire in central Africa proved to be elusive, U.N. officials argued, the greater the prospect of a repeat of the 1994 massacres of nearly one million Tutsis and their moderate supporters.

The Kosovo picture appeared no less muddy. Although Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic responded to international pressure this year by pledging to withdraw his troops from the fractious, Muslim-majority province, U.N. officials believe that Belgrade is slowly increasing its presence in a bid to start a new crackdown on the Kosovar rebels this coming spring.

In other conflicts, U.N. officials have stood by powerlessly as human rights atrocities piled up. The United Nations pulled most of its staff from Afghanistan after problems with the dominant Taliban militias in August, leaving the world body unable to provide direct information on reports of massacres against the country’s Hazara minority afterward. Thousands of Hazaras were estimated to have been killed by the radical Islamist Taliban in cities like Mazar-e-Sharief and Bamyan.

The United Nations has fared little better in Angola, where peacekeepers relocated away from fighting in central towns like Bailundo and Andulo as the government and rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola re-started their conflict. Annan conceded this month that the new fighting in central Angola was in fact a new war – one which the United Nations estimates has displaced some 400,000 people.

Such grim reporting of massacres and population displacements has been a standard part of U.N. activity in recent years; but in 1998, human rights activists claimed, there was a remarkable wave of good news as well.

In July, 120 nations attending a conference in Rome approved the creation of an International Criminal Court empowered to try crimes against humanity – a sign to world leaders, along with Pinochet’s arrest in Britain, that their impunity is finally being limited.

A U.N. tribunal on the 1994 Rwanda massacres, meanwhile, secured the conviction of a former Rwandan official, Mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu of Taba, for genocide. Two other suspects, former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda and Omar Serushago, a leader of the dreaded ‘Interahamwe’ militia, pleaded guilty to genocide – also a first.

“I have seen a real sea change in the ability of the United Nations to monitor human rights, elections and conditions in different countries,” said Reed Brody, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

He noted that the United Nations quietly dropped Chilean Gen. Sergio Espinoza Davies, the leader of U.N. peacekeepers in Kashmir, who had been linked to Pinochet-era crimes – and was shifted back to a position in Chile when his role in executing Chileans following Pinochet’a coup was reported. Also the United Nations put its policies where its ideals were by forbidding anyone under 18 from serving as a U.N. peacekeeper.

Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also won considerable praise for talking out against massacres in Algeria and Colombia after the relative silence of her predecessor, Jose Ayala Lasso. But Human Rights Watch added in its annual report that “much work remains to transform the high commissioner’s office into an effective vehicle for defending human rights”.

That task could be made more difficult by Washington’s increasing opposition to some U.N. human rights efforts. Last year, the policies of the United States often clashed with those of the United Nations. The U.S. government was one of only seven which voted against the ICC – along with strange bedfellows like Iraq and Libya – and Washington continued to block the creation of the Court at year’s end.

Between its relative silence on the Pinochet affair and its increasing squeamishness over the ICC and other examples of the tougher U.N. response to impunity, Washington could be in for a long year in dealing with rights officials.