Thread: Human Rights and Wrongs: Harrison George

Human Rights and Wrongs

Harrison George
17 October 2008
Alien Thoughts


This is where I lose some friends.

When foreigners observe the apparent impunity with which the so-called People’s so-called Alliance for so-called Democracy can defy the police, the courts, and anything approaching a sense of reality, the typical reaction is gob-smacked, flabbergasted, dumbfounded amazement.

But something that will also smack your gob, gast your flabber and found your dumb with equal force is the reaction of some local human rights activists when things turn nasty, as they did at the end of August and again last Tuesday. They take one look at police action, and promptly keel over in horror like a maiden aunt with a touch of the vapours.

They then wield the most powerful weapon in their arsenal – they issue a statement. In the heat of the moment, this confection may turn out to be a cross between a sob-soaked eulogy for the victims, a dash of conspiracy theory condemning the black-hearted motivations of whoever they think is responsible, and some half-baked prescriptions for political reform, which, given that in both incidents the first victims were PAD, tend to be not all that even-handed and to have a definite yellowish tinge.

Supalak Ganjanakhundee wrote a thoughtful piece over in the Nation on this apparent blindness among human rights activists where ‘they usually end up protecting their chosen side and ignore the rights of the opponent.’ Which in fact means none of them choose the government side. This, according to Supalak, may be a result of their history, which has led them to think that ‘standing against authority is the correct thing’.

Maybe so, but people working for NGOs in agriculture, women’s rights, the environment and so on also spend much of their time opposing the government. But despite the involvement in the PAD of NGO people like Phipob Thongchai and Suriyasai Katasila, and their pleas for their erstwhile colleagues to join the one true cause, most NGO workers have refused, muttering something about a plague on both your houses.

So what blinds so many human rights people and makes them different from most others in the NGO rabble?

Well the first thing you might notice is that they wear suits. Most NGO people tend to wear they same kind of clothes as their ‘clientele’, or at best ethnic chic. Most NGO people don’t even own a suit. But even women human rights defenders sometimes go for the power dressing. A superficial observation, but one that might indicate an underlying problem.

Years ago, in their early days, NGO meetings were largely NGO people. Women’s NGO meetings would be women’s NGO workers. Environmental NGOs meetings were environmental NGO workers. That quickly changed when these largely Bangkok-based, academic-oriented, single-issue NGOs started linking up with ‘integrated development’ NGOs from the rural areas. They found their constituencies, and realized the advantage, and the ideological need, to be seen ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with the people they were supposedly working for.

So now if there is an NGO alternative agriculture meeting, it will be alternative agriculture farmers plus NGO people; community forest meetings are villagers doing it, plus NGO people.

The human rights NGOs have moved much less farther along this road. A human rights meeting could still just be human rights NGO people, without the participation of any victims of HR violations.

Another factor may be that human rights defenders actually have professional training in what they do. It may come as a shock to many, but if you go through the roster of past and present staff of, say, the Alternative Agriculture Network, you have to look long and hard to find anyone with any training in agriculture.

But there’s loads of lawyers in human rights organizations. And that may be a problem. Law as an academic subject tends towards the local, in the same way that, say, history does. It’s no good just studying jurisprudence in general; you have to study Thai law, just like history classes and textbooks have an understandable bias towards Thai history. You do economics, or physics, then what you’ll study will be far more universal.

Law is also one of the licensed professions. You don’t just get a degree, you gain admission to a closed coterie of officially sanctioned practitioners, like doctors or pharmacists. This opens the opportunity for a ‘we know best and you shouldn’t expect to understand because you’re not qualified’ attitude

People working in agriculture in Thailand are quite willing to accept local vagaries of climate, soil, species and so on. People campaigning against corruption know they won’t get very far unless they look at its social and cultural roots.

But human rights are supposed to be, well human. People are not supposed to enjoy fewer rights just because they live in Thailand and not Sweden. So while human rights workers’ training probably narrows their horizons, their chosen field seems untrammelled by petty considerations of nationality.

Human rights defenders have developed a knee-jerk reaction. Turn on the telly and see someone in a yellow shirt being knocked to the ground by a baton-wielding copper, thumb through your International Conventions for the appropriate article and scream ‘violation’ round your networks in the expectation that human rights defenders outside Thailand will rally to your point of view.

But they haven’t rallied. Well, not as quickly or unconditionally as those in Thailand must have expected.

They want to see a bit more even-handedness, some consideration of issues of provocation and retaliation. In fact, just some common sense.

In very short supply these days.




About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
And if you believe any of those stories, you might believe his columns.

Very good article.