HUMAN RIGHTS, THEN SECURITY
By Petra Hendrickson
Indiana Statesman, IN
April 9 2007
Last week, there was a discussion of human rights in one of my classes.
My class generally agreed that although human rights should feature
prominently in foreign policy discussions, matters of national security
generally preclude that from actually happening.
However, I’m not entirely convinced that human rights and national
security have to be mutually exclusive discussions.
First, it should be noted that there are two different conventions on
human rights. One is on civil and political rights, the other covers
cultural, social and economic rights. The U.S. is keen on the former,
not so much on the latter.
Discussions of which human rights should be emphasized, and whether
certain human rights have a Western bent or not will always be
legitimate and should be encouraged. But discussion should not
necessarily get in the way of action.
For instance, many countries accuse the U.S. of trying to foist our
conception of human rights onto other countries (i.e., mostly civil
and political, but not really social, cultural or economic).
According to one of my reading assignments for the aforementioned
class, even those countries who accuse the West of cultural imperialism
acknowledge that certain human rights truly are "universal."
Genocide happens to be among these. Pretty much everyone is in
agreement that genocide is reprehensible.
Granted, genocide has some definitional issues that have yet to be
resolved. The Armenians in Turkey in the early 1900s are an example.
The West generally calls what happened there a genocide.
Turkey, on the other hand, admits it expelled hundreds of thousands
of Armenians, killed similarly large numbers, and for no other reason
than they were Armenian. But Turkey refuses to call it genocide.
And I’m not sure the U.S. has a lot of moral high ground on this,
since pretty much the same thing happened to Native Americans during
the early 1800s.
Why, then, can I argue that human rights and security are not mutually
exclusive?
Take the area of land that was once Palestine. It’s generally
considered to be Israel today. But the Palestinians have been denied
their right to self-determination, which would almost certainly result
in Israel losing its claim to sovereignty over the area.
Consider for a moment the people there who have lost hope to the
point that becoming a suicide bomber seems like a good idea.
Their hope has been stripped away by decades of statelessness, by
being treated as something less than human. Some kind of nod to human
rights by Israel would probably provide some kind of hope again.
And with hope for the Palestinians, Israel would almost certainly
find itself more secure.
Petra Hendrickson is a junior majoring in political science. She can
be reached at [email protected]
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
