THE NEW TRIBALISM: Defending Human Rights in an Age of Ethnic Conflict : Rights of Nations Clash With Rights of Victims

Whenever a tyrant--or a tyrannical majority--tramples on the rights and lives of a people at home, the world outside rarely does more than grit its teeth and cry foul. The sacred principle of sovereignty stands in the way. No one has the right, according to a sheaf of international documents, to cross borders and interfere in the internal affairs of another country.

Yet the world’s mood is changing, the principle is eroding. France’s Bernard Kouchner, the flamboyant former health minister who led President Francois Mitterrand to Sarajevo last year and helped carry rice ashore in Somalia, offers an astounding prediction:

He envisions a global, standing U.N. Human Rights Army in 20 years. Filled with idealistic, well-meaning young recruits, this army, on orders from the United Nations, would march across borders to stand between antagonistic peoples and thus prevent the eruption of ethnic civil war.

“It can happen,” he insisted to several Times reporters at a luncheon in Paris.

Most other human rights activists would be satisfied with more mundane steps to help people oppressed by leaders or by a country’s dominant ethnic group. They would like to see the appointment of a U.N. high commissioner for human rights and a ringing endorsement of the thesis that the world as a whole is diminished when anyone tramples on human rights within his or her borders.

Hopes for these steps could be buoyed--or dashed--by the impending U.N. World Conference on Human Rights, the first such gathering in a quarter of a century.

Outbreak of Hatred

The 12-day conference, opening in Vienna next week, comes at a time when the world has been dispirited by a New Tribalism--an outbreak of ethnic hatred particularly among peoples in Eastern Europe whose rage at one another was suppressed by decades of communism.

This outburst of hate and cruelty is much like the Old Tribalism that came to the fore in independent Africa after decades of a colonialism that suppressed longstanding ethnic hatreds. But Eastern Europe and tropical Africa are not the only sites of ethnic and religious violence. Muslim Egyptians still persecute Christian Copts. The Indonesians still oppress East Timor. The list is long and woeful.

In fact, according to a major U.N. report released late last month, whether because of discrimination or other factors, “almost every country has one or more ethnic groups whose level of human development falls far below the national average.”

Outrage over recent outbursts of particularly pointed ethnic violence in the post-Cold War world has led to some erosion of the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of a country.

Foreign troops and air power have protected the Kurds in northern Iraq. The United States and four European governments have proposed sending U.N. troops to half a dozen Bosnian towns to protect Muslim civilians against Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat aggression. The Clinton Administration is contemplating the dispatch of troops to Macedonia as a deterrent against any attempt by the Serbian government to suppress the Albanian people who live inside the Serbian province of Kosovo. U.S. and U.N. troops did not ask for any official Somali blessing before entering Somalia.

Some analysts insist that situations like Somalia and Iraq are special cases. But Sadako Ogata of Japan, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, dismisses that analysis as too glib.

“When there are so many special cases, I begin to wonder,” she says. “There definitely has been an erosion of sovereignty.”

Some human rights specialists believe that the international community of nations may be closer than ever to embracing the principle that violations of human rights are everyone’s business--that there is no moral justification for closed borders serving as a sanctuary for those who abuse rights and peoples.

Former Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier, a onetime dissident who was punished and harassed for years in what was then Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, sees progress in human rights issues despite the horrors of nearby Bosnia.

It was less than 20 years ago at a conference of 34 European nations in Helsinki, Finland, he recalls, that Soviet leaders were forced to accept the principle that human rights were a legitimate subject for discussion.

“Now there is acceptance of limitations of sovereignty in the defense of human rights,” Dienstbier says, speaking in his small office off Wenceslas Square in Prague.

Within the space of a few breathtaking days in November, 1989, Dienstbier turned from a dissident stoking coal for a living into his country’s foreign minister. “I know from my own experience that miracles are possible,” he says.

Many human rights activists look toward the United Nations as a potential force for breaking borders to guarantee human rights. Yet the sovereignty of nations has no greater champion than the United Nations.

U.N. Bans Dissident

Only a couple of weeks ago, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who will inaugurate next week’s Vienna conference, banned Chinese dissident Shen Tong, one of the organizers of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tian An Men Square, from holding a news conference inside the U.N. Secretariat building under the sponsorship of the U.N. Correspondents Assn.

Boutros-Ghali acted after the Chinese ambassador complained that the United Nations was abetting a propaganda attack on his country. Despite pleas from reporters that the United Nations had for decades allowed dissidents from many countries to hold news conferences at its headquarters, Boutros-Ghali refused to rescind his ban. Reporters met with Shen Tong on the sidewalk outside the visitors entrance to the General Assembly. Freedom of speech had been overpowered by state sovereignty at the United Nations.

Other signs from the United Nations are just as frustrating. Meeting in Thailand in April, diplomats from 40 Asian and Pacific countries issued the “Declaration of Bangkok,” which set down their human rights position for the Vienna conference. The declaration contended that different civilizations treat human rights in different ways; waved the hoary principles of sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, and denounced any attempt by rich countries to cut foreign aid because of human rights violations.

The Declaration of Bangkok, in fact, sounded like a retreat from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the resounding but non-enforceable pronouncement on the universality of human rights that the U.N. General Assembly adopted in 1948.

The signs from Africa are just as frustrating. At their preparatory meeting in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, last November, African delegates declared that “no ready-made model (of human rights) can be prescribed at the universal level” because of the different histories, cultural realities, traditions, standards and values of each nation.

The Clinton Administration wants the conference to recommend the creation of a new U.N. high commissioner for human rights with the prestige and authority both to call the world’s attention to violations of human rights and to pressure governments to allow U.N. officials entry to deal with the problem.

The model would be the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, who has the resources and authority to spotlight and handle refugee problems throughout the world. But Ogata, who has filled the refugee post for more than two years, says that national sovereignty is a substantial obstacle to her work.

Legally, Ogata has no right to enter a country and care for its internal refugees. Refugees come under U.N. protection only after they flee their homelands. Ogata has managed to do some work with refugees within Sri Lanka and is considering a request from Peru that she deal with internal refugees there. But, by and large, she is kept out of the internal affairs of countries.

“I don’t see how a human rights commissioner can move into a state situation,” she told a Times reporter at the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Washington.

Support for a U.N. high commissioner for human rights is tepid at best within Asia and Africa, and many analysts now doubt that the Vienna conference will adopt the proposal.

The grim plight of southern Sudan underscores the pernicious strength of sovereignty. Many observers insist that the starvation and horror of Sudan is far worse than that of Somalia. But the world has not discovered Sudan, mainly because television cameras have not yet entered in force.

Since Sudan’s independence in 1956, the southern region has been ravaged by intermittent civil war as the Christian and animist black Africans of the south chafe under the domination of the Muslim Arab-influenced Sudanese of the north.

According to a recent State Department report, Arab militias, with the connivance of the Sudanese government, are guilty of massacres, kidnaping, rape, slavery and forced Islamization in the south. Although the Sudanese government, under pressure, agreed to allow outside agencies to supply relief in 1991, almost all was suspended after Sudanese soldiers killed aid workers. U.N. officials insist that they would like to alleviate the starvation and care for refugees but that they feel helpless in the face of Sudanese government hostility. “We would like to be involved in the Sudan,” says a U.N. undersecretary general. “But where’s the hook?”

As in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is not always wise to put all the blame on one side. The southern Sudanese rebels are divided into two feuding factions, and their raids on each other have crippled relief. In late May, however, the two factions signed an agreement creating four demilitarized havens in the south and invited the United Nations to ship in supplies of food. Although the agreement was hailed by the State Department, it is too soon to tell how it will work in practice.

Prospects for Progress

Meanwhile, the attention of human rights activists has turned to Vienna, where 5,000 delegates from more than 180 nations are assembling for the World Conference on Human Rights. Several thousand observers will be coming from private organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as well. Unlike at the enormous Earth Summit that attracted world leaders to Rio de Janeiro a year ago, few statesmen are expected to attend. Neither the history nor the vibes are auspicious.

The first and only previous World Conference on Human Rights was held in Tehran, Iran, in 1968, the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its opening moment reeked with hypocrisy: The delegates were welcomed by the Shah of Iran, who presided over one of the world’s most notorious secret police operations. The Tehran conference passed a condemnation of Nazism, a plea for non-discriminatory hiring and some other milquetoast and obvious resolutions.

The delegates are likely to be more forthright this time. But many human rights activists fear that the poorer nations of the world will downgrade the basic issue of human rights abuses and turn the conference into an affirmation of their right to economic development. Poverty, they are likely to insist, is an abuse of human rights like all others.

“I’m worried about the conference,” says Karsten Luethke, chairman of Amnesty International in Germany. “It’s almost certain nothing is going to come out of it.”

Yet the conference will convene at a time of more awareness of the issue than ever before and at a time of such sophisticated means of worldwide communication that abuses are harder to hide than ever before. In the first months of 1993, the Center for Human Rights, the Geneva-based agency that monitors abuses for the United Nations, has received more than 125,000 complaints of violations of human rights, more than three times the complaints that were filed in all of last year.

A partial list of the world’s most flagrant abusers of human rights underscores the extent of the problem. According to the United Nations, private human rights monitors and news accounts, some of the worst areas involving the suppression of one ethnic or religious group by another include:

* Bosnia-Herzegovina, where rebellious Bosnian Serbs have murdered, raped and forced Bosnian Muslims out of territory that the Serbs want exclusively for themselves, a heinous practice known as “ethnic cleansing.”

* Sudan, where the Muslim government has decided to treat the rebellious black animists and Christians of the south with brute and cruel force rather than try to accommodate their grievances.

* East Timor, where the Muslim government of Indonesia seized the territory just as Portugal granted it independence in 1975 and has tried to quash any nationalist moves for independence ever since.

* Iran, where the Islamic government is trying to wipe out the Bahai minority by denying them education and jobs so long as they declare themselves to be Bahais.

* Iraq, where, according to the United Nations, the Baghdad government is guilty of “massive violations of human rights, of the gravest nature,” especially against Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south.

* Israel, where the Israeli army is trying to quash the intifada, or uprising by Palestinian refugees, in the occupied territories.

* Egypt, where the government has failed to prevent harsh Muslim discrimination against Coptic Christians.

Another discouraging list describes human rights abuses where the offenders are trying to wipe out political dissent. This list includes:

* China, where the government, its tyranny exposed by its assault on pro-demcoracy marchers in 1989, still stifles democratic opponents with arbitrary arrests, sham trials and torture.

* Haiti, where 300,00 people have fled into hiding and more than 1,000 have been murdered by political executioners since the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. Abuses, according to the United Nations, include “disappearances and murders, preventive repression, arbitrary detention, torture, the extortion of protection money from citizens by security forces . . . the banning of demonstrations and police repression of all anti-government protest.”

* Myanmar, the former Burma, where the government allows no criticism and holds more than 1,500 prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

* Tibet, where China is accused of committing severe violations of human rights as it tries to suppress Tibetan nationalism and separatism after more than 40 years of Chinese military occupation.

France’s Kouchner intends to base his U.N. Human Rights Army solidly on international law. He hails the Security Council resolution that protected the Kurds in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. Until then, he says, “international law was so old-fashioned that it was OK to protect oil, but not a persecuted minority.”

Kouchner estimates that it would take five years to lay the legal groundwork for his army and to persuade Third World countries that intervention is in their interest.

“Of course, this will take time,” he says. “But we need a major world debate on this issue. We have to make (Third World countries) realize this is for their people too. Such an idea can only work if it comes from the Third World too. For that, you have to sit down and speak with them frankly, as equals, not like arrogant conquistadores.

“The debate will be difficult,” he goes on. “But politicians must accept their responsibility. Otherwise, we’ll all be blown up in one war after another.”

Kouchner stresses that his Human Rights Army would rarely fight but would be strong enough to intimidate human rights abusers. “If you go in before the war,” he says, “you have a chance to win. If you wait until during or after, the chances of winning are zero.”

Not Facing Reality?

But critics believe that idealists like Kouchner are refusing to face the rigors of reality. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Stephen John Stedman, an associate professor of comparative politics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, dismisses Kouchner-type schemes as a “new interventionism” that will not work.

Stedman points out that the U.N. Security Council was able to protect the Kurds only after a $70-billion war in which the Iraqi army was soundly humiliated. In practical terms, he writes, the United Nations simply cannot intervene whenever a nation “fails to meet the humanitarian needs of its people.”

“To do so,” he states, “would dictate intervention in every civil war as well as in states with regimes so repressive as to destroy even its incipient threat. Potential cases for intervention far outstrip available resources. . . .

“The United Nations is simply incapable of playing the role that the new interventionists demand of it,” he concludes.

No matter how true this assessment, there still has been a subtle change of mood.

As President Clinton put it in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 1: “During the Cold War, our foreign policies largely focused on the relations among nations. . . . Today, our policies must also focus on relations within nations. A nation’s form of governance, economic structure and ethnic tolerance are of concern to us, for they shape how it treats its neighbors as well as its own people.”

Special correspondent Iva Drapalova in Prague contributed to this article.

U.N. Conference Agenda

* What: U.N. World Conference on Human Rights

* When: June 14-25

* Where: Vienna

* Who: 5,000 delegates from about 180 nations. Private groups and intergovernmental organizations will also attend.

* Why: To approve a draft document that sets out universal human rights issues and proposes an action plan. The first such conference in 25 years.

* Key Issues: Eliminating torture. Protecting women, the disabled, minorities and indigenous peoples. Establishing office of High Commissioner for Human Rights and an international human rights court.