Today is Human Rights Day. I was just reminded of this over at Kathleen Kirk's blog, Wait! I Have a Blog? but had seen an email earlier about it from Care2 as well. Keeping with the theme here over the past week or so of things you can do that might actually do some good at a rather despairing point in our history, I'm going to link to their 5 Ways You Can Celebrate Human Rights Day post, written by Steve Williams. Some of the suggestions are about ways to educate yourself about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, how it came about and what human rights laws it has inspired over time and across continents. There are several videos, including a longer one in which Emma Watson interviews Malala Yousafzai. Here's a simple rendering of all our rights by some charming kids.
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Lovely! I love the right to play!
ReplyDeleteYes, that's one of the best and most surprising ones.
ReplyDeleteAs a grim sidelight to Human Rights Day, I have learned from my reading on Cambodia that, while there is no disagreement about the horror wrought by the Khmer Rouge, opinion is not unanimous on what constitutes genocide, and that governments and individuals have sought to exploit the word's emotional power for their own ends.
ReplyDeleteGenocide as a term does seem to get in the way of studying the actual facts of historical events these days.
ReplyDeleteAnd one feels churlish arguing that it may not apply to a given set of crime, however horrible. Grade inflation is one thing, easily made fun of but perhaps inconsequential. That may not be the case with genocide inflation.
ReplyDeletePhilip Short's "Pol Pot: Anatamy of A Nighmare" asserts that, as horrible as it was, Pol Pot's crimes did not constitute genocide because they did not aim at the elimination of people. (He does say the Khmer Rouge is guilty of crimes against humanity.) Coming as it does near the end of the book, the statement has the effect of a summing up.
Ben Kiernan's "The Pol Pot Regime," on the other hand, argues in one of its introductions that, based on legal definitions, the Khmer Rouge did commit genocide. My inclination, based on no research whatsoever but on the knowledge that "geno-" means "people" and "-cide" means "killing," is that that what the KR did may not have been genocide. But there are legal definitions of genocide that go beyond the common understanding go the word.
And I did visit S-21, now called the Teol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, designated as such under Vietnamese administration that had ousted the Khmer Rouge. And I did read an assertion that the museum had been deliberately set up to be reminiscent of Belsen. So yes, everything is subject to interpretation, political posturing, manipulation for a given party's ends. That's the way of the world, I guess.
Thanks for the references. I suppose the legal definition is the standard we should all use, but as it sounds a bit beyond our grasp, maybe we should refrain from using the word and speak about the historical situation.
ReplyDeleteFor me, it makes a difference how people of the country think and talk about the situation afterwards. Several people who have recently visited Berlin have told me that local residents were eager to engage with them about the holocaust, wondering what they thought, and of lot of that is down to the education of German youth today. While in Charleston this summer, the history sat a bit more uneasily. It wasn't that it was swept under the carpet but the beautiful old houses and the carriage rides sat a little uneasily with the history. Slavery wasn't genocide of course, but it was certainly a crime against humanity, and it seems like neither the South or the nation as a whole has really owned up to it in a way that would really help us move forward.
And I was surprised by the willingness with which the few Cambodians I've talked to were willing to discuss the Khmer Rouge. I can guess at any number of reasons for this. i may speculate about Cambodia's tangled relations with Vietnam, Thailand, their people, and their governments in a future post.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to it, Peter.
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ReplyDeleteThe most interesting assessment I heard was that Cambodian people like Vietnam's government but don't like its people, and like Thailand's people but dislike its government.
ReplyDeleteThe Vietnam part is especially interesting because the two countries have a history fraught with mutual jealousy and hatred. This is due largely to Vietnam's position as a much stronger country than Cambodia (odd to think of Vietnam that way, isn't it?). A considerable swath of Vietnam's territory once belonged to Cambodia.'s Khmer Empire, and Vietnamese Communists did not always treat their Cambodian comrades as equals, to say the least. On the other hand, Vietnam did liberate Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge. Southeast Asia is a complicated place, that is to say. Of course, many places are, but that part of the world is so remote to us and yet so replete with strong associations that the complexity of the reality comes as an especial shock.