African human rights organizations: Questions of context and legitimacy

The human rights movement is largely the product of the horrors of World War II. The development of its normative content and structure is the direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. The two principal documents of the movement-the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)-largely establish hands-off rights that either limit or prohibit altogether government intrusion into the private realm. It is ironic, to say the least, that it was the victors of the war, most of whom held colonies in Africa, who determined and prevailed upon the United Nations to give form and content to the human rights movement. It is this exclusionary beginning and lack of genuine universality- The absence of major cultures and geographically specific historical perspectives-that are the source of serious tensions within the human rights movement today. In this chapter, I examine the problems raised by the transplantation of this movement-which is uniquely a creature of the North-to Africa and the prospects for viable nongovernmental human rights organizations (NGOs) on the continent. There is nothing new about the human quest for liberty, justice, and freedom in the diverse cultures and political traditions of the world; this quest is in fact the essence of human history. What is new about these struggles is their reduction by the majority of nations-acting through the United Nations-in the last half century to widely accepted norms, processes and institutions. Prior to the emergence of the modern human rights movement-in the pre-war period-it was not possible to talk of a corpus of international law against which states could be held accountable for the ill treatment of their own citizens. Even so, Africans organized, mobilized, and fought against the abrogation of the right to self-determination and other civil, economic, cultural, social, and political rights by the colonizers. For Africa, the anticolonial struggle was a human rights movement. Local nongovernmental agitators and groups defined their own human rights in relation to resistance to the colonial state and its denial of the whole family of human rights. In the North, the traditional human rights movement did not produce its engine of growth-the NGO-until well after the war. The leaders in this respect-the International Commission of]urists (IC]) , Amnesty International (AI), and Human Rights Watch (HRW)-did not mature until the late 1960s and 1970s. It was these human rights organizations, together with the foundations and groups that supported them, that set the agenda for the human rights movement and came to exemplify the model human rights organization. Without exception, the mandates of these organizations were narrowly tailored to focus only on certain aspects of political life in repressive societies, especially in the South. AI, for example, often emphasized the "prisoner of conscience," the IC] focused on the absence of the rule of law in the former Soviet bloc, and HRW worked against torture, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest and detention, and the denials of the freedoms of expression, assembly and speech-all paradigmatic civil and political rights of immense importance in the North. None addressed the violations of economic, social, and cultural rights. Born and raised on a diet of the Cold War, the traditional human rights movement took the historical and philosophical trajectory of industrialized democracies in the North. Interestingly, the traditional human rights movement did not discover Africa until the 1970s, well after the establishment of post-colonial states. Quite often, AI would adopt a prisoner of conscience in Kenya or Zaire and document and publicize the massacre of innocent civilians by security forces in Uganda or Ghana. It might seem that colonialism itself was not a strong enough moral and legal evil to rally public outrage in the West, yet there are some explanations for this. For one, the creation of AI was inspired in 1961 by Peter Benson, a British lawyer, who was enraged by the imprisonment of students by Antonio d'Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, and the incarceration of six political prisoners-three by East European regimes in Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and three by Western states in Greece, U.S., and the Portuguese colonial regime in Angola. The IC], for its part, was immersed in the examination of the failures of communism. But the rise of despotic post-colonial states in Africabeneficiaries of both Western and Soviet bloc clientilism-at the height of the Cold War became the targets of the traditional human rights movement. AI, the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR), and the IC] exposed the denials of civil liberties by sub-Saharan regimes of the right and the left. LCHR and HRW campaigned for the linkage of U.S. economic support of these regimes to their human rights records. This was Africa's first contact with the traditional human rights movement: As foreign and distant voices decrying the denials of civil and political rights by African governments. In the early 1960s, soon after independence, the traditional human rights organizations did not exist in African countries. But private nongovernmental formations such as cultural, professional, women's, development, or ethnic associations arose to address a variety of state-society relations, including questions of governance, the conduct and accountability of public authorities, and matters relating to economic development, health and education. In Kenya, for example, ethnocultural associations and women's self-help development groups multiplied soon after independence. Elsewhere, small farmers and professional groups such as lawyers, doctors, teachers, and accountants pressed their cases before the state. The despotic state was not always a good listener, and more often than not openly confrontational groups and individuals were coopted, ousted, harassed, detained or even murdered if they were perceived as serious and direct threats to those in power. The iron fist cowered opponents and forced them to present their grievances to those in power in a friendly and constructive style. For many, the distant criticism of AI was the only independent corroboration of their suffering.