Human Rights?
When I was a little girl I asked my father: “But what is it really communism?” This is what he replied: “We’re almost living in communism, but not quite yet. You’ve got to wait another little while. But when we do, we’ll all be equal, and unto everyone it will be given according to their needs. They’ll ask you: ‘Have you got a radio?’, and if you didn’t, you’ll get one. They’ll ask you: ‘Have you got a fridge?’, and if you didn’t, you’ll get one.” I spent quite some years of my life waiting for communism, until I eventually forgot about it.
Years later my own children started asking me what was really communism, and I ended up terribly embarrassed not knowing what to tell them. I remembered my own father and explained to them what was communism. “They’ll ask you: ‘Have you got a …?,’ and so on and so forth …
Frankly, I don’t really know why is it that at every mention of ‘human rights’ I always remember this family illusion from my childhood. Maybe it is because in the last decades of my life the notion of human rights has increasingly become wishful thinking rather than everyday reality. Too often human rights have become ‘property’ of various ‘commissions’, and a favourite past time activity of charitable organizations, smart officials and well-paid human rights fighters. Having said that, there are many individuals working out there that remain invisible to the public eye. I only need to think of deminers all over the world, or doctors without borders who go to work in Nigeria, Iraq or Sierra Leone instead of going on holiday; or of young volunteers who are putting their own lives at risk in their quest for justice. After all, I have met here in the city of Graz more people than in many other places who are making constant appeals against human rights violation in our own environment. Therefore it comes to me as no surprise that it was in Graz where the project “Land of Human Rights. Artistic Analyses and Visions of the Human Rights Situation in Europe”, was initiated.
Margarethe Makovec and Anton Lederer asked me if I would give a short address at the opening of < rotor >’s project “Land of Human Rights.” “I’d be delighted to,” I said after they’d explained to me their aims and objectives. And I was rather proud too, but I began to wonder almost instantly, whether I was the right person for it. What indeed are human rights? Where does the land of human rights lie?
I remember, in Sarajevo how I ran together with a friend of mine towards a makeshift shelter to escape sniper fire. Once we reached its safety, there was a woman wearing high heels and an expensive fur coat standing there; God knows how she ended up there. My Sarajevo friend made a cynical comment: “Look at her. She’s come here to defend my human rights, but she doesn’t even know in which continent she is, let alone in which country.” I laughed, but … Human rights, which continent?
The other day I got an email message from Nicaragua. Water supplies are to be privatized, and it is feared that the village where my friends were living might be unable to afford it. In New Delhi I’m looking through a car window, and I can see children who are living almost literally in the streets, in the dust, among cows, stray dogs and rubbish heaps, and I’m listening to my fellow traveller saying that these children are actually quite lucky. I’m only waiting for him to add that they don’t know any better anyway. Those Indian children, who are ‘lucky’, are labouring in sweatshops. Girls from Morocco working as maids in Spanish houses, boy soldiers in African countries, killed inhabitants of indigenous villages of Guatemala and Columbia, and … Women in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Buddhist monks in Burma, displaced Tibetan nomads in Chinese villages. Children in Palestine, starving and scared to death. Mothers who lost their sons. Children of raped women all over the world. Boat people.
The list goes on. I remember 1960s, with all their rallying and shouting of ‘Ho Chi Minh, Vietkong, Mao, Che Guevara’, and anti-American slogans. It occurred to me then that we should perhaps say a word or two about us, about our part of the world. Such things as how widely practised it was that factory workers in many countries, in the West or in the East, doesn’t really matter, were still being closely monitored how many minutes they’d spend in the loo, and that there was no paid holidays for many, and that women in Switzerland had no right to vote.
Today, the situation is similar. We are so prone to promote human rights in distant places, in places that are as far as possible from Europe. We do like to advocate women rights in Arab countries where things are indisputably very bad, and where they presumably equal human rights, but we do tend to ignore the position of women in Europe. We like to stick to clichés, which is the case especially in the new EU countries, and we so easily ignore women who are doing three jobs to support their families. They’re the lucky ones, as many might say.
Wars are being fought in distant places and have become fodder for television viewers. Meanwhile it is not so long ago that at airports all over Europe young men were crying when they were being shipped back to various parts of former Yugoslavia. Why? It is as simple as that: they were being sent to war zones directly in the line of fire. How about their human rights?
Berlin in 1990s: Russian soldiers who refused to go back to Russia were hiding in abandoned barracks, Vietnamese workers were instructed either to leave Germany or risk becoming illegal immigrants since they were no longer needed as work force in the newly reunited Germany. For years to come media would be covering stories on Vietnamese mafia and Vietnamese cigarette traffickers. And at Berlin radio station, many editors and journalists living in the eastern parts of the city are still earning less money than their colleagues who were lucky enough to have been born in the West.
Ever since the collapse of the Berlin wall, Eastern Europe has seen an influx of non- governmental organisations dealing with human rights. I quote the director of Slovene governmental agency for refugees: “We should not criticize our government for not securing funding for this year’s project.” I also remember how the US-Americans strongly advised Serbian NGOs dealing with human rights issues to keep a low profile during election campaign. And I do remember Slovene peace fighters who flew to Hiroshima to attend the commemoration of the nuclear bomb attack when the war in Bosnia started.
Europe has changed. It is opening, so I hear. Admittedly, during the last twenty years borders have changed, but many new fences have been erected as well. In Slovenia, where I was born, I saw posters: “Slovenia, the lighthouse of Europe”. Nice. And I think of my friends from my former home country who have to wait for months with their letters of guarantee to be granted visas to visit us. Or refused, as the case may be.
Last September I heard the news that the Slovene charity Karitas was raising funds for school text books. In Maribor, which lies just half an hour’s drive from Graz, some 8000 children didn’t have them because their parents couldn’t afford to buy them.
A year ago in Slovenia, Slovene citizens were lighting bonfires and erecting homeguard-style barriers to stop authorities who tried to find a new home for a Roma family, who had been evicted from their plot of land by their fellow-villagers. A year later, Slovene government is still tirelessly trying to find a new location for their home.
A few days ago in Russia, Garry Kasparov, who became world famous for his chess playing and not for his fighting for human rights, was arrested. And it strikes me that in the days gone by, we would at least gather and rally in the streets upon hearing such news.
Land of Human Rights. I do hope that many will find their home in it.
Maruša Krese
Translated by Tina Mahkota