Let us invent human rights

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 06/28/2006 3:56 PM  |  Opinion

Elizabeth Chandra, Chiba, Japan

The other day I was in Osaka for a three-day visit. In an attempt to avoid becoming a voyeurist of art in Japan, I had, perhaps subconsciously, avoided the Municipal Museum of Art and the likes. (I could not however resist the Osaka Castle.) I had immediately set out to conquer the Osaka Human Rights Museum and the Modern Transportation Museum. It is of the former, these reflections arose.

The museum, founded in 1985, was formerly a historical archive on problems of discrimination and human rights. It claims to be the first of its kind in Japan. Its overall theme viewed Japanese society from the perspective of human rights.

Accordingly, exhibitions were organized in sub themes -- human rights as a birthright, societal values, discrimination by nation, gender, according to economic or hereditary status, sexual orientation, of ethnic minorities, the disabled and the diseased. The exhibits themselves appear to be comprehensive and convincing.

But while the exhibits were laudable, they were built upon amorphous grounds. With my own Western academic bias, I had gone to the museum expecting to see Rousseau, Kant, or Hannah Arendt. I had expected the museum to give me, in a nutshell, the genealogy of the concept human rights itself: When did it arise? What are the basic rights? And who decides which rights are fundamental to humanity?

The Osaka Human Rights Museum, not unpredictably, locates ""human rights"" in the human itself. Its leaflet begins with a proclamation that ""human rights are the birthright of every individual."" It defines basic rights at the birth of man, thus tendering ""human rights"" as a self-defining concept. In other words, its reference and rationalization are in the ""human"" itself, irrespective of time and place. As such, its significance is projected to be equally all-encompassing, regardless of polity, race, gender, class, and other circumstances.

But since when did we become ""human""? A human child raised among chimpanzees would not be capable of uttering the word ""human"" in any language, much less of knowing its meaning. Our present understanding of self as a human subject only began, and was conceptualized through a long dialectical process, with the Enlightenment.

This relative infancy of the concept does not allow us to anachronistically say that the warlord Tokugawa committed crimes against humanity when he ordered the beheading of thousands of people in the seizure of the Osaka Castle from a rival shogun, Hideyoshi Toyotomi. In the traditional scheme of power, such things are permissible, if not normative, as people conceptualized the ""human"" differently.

Concepts such as human rights, humanity, and crimes against humanity are ""modern"" inventions. They exist in discourse, but manifest through laws, social activism, or events such as the Nuremberg and the Tokyo trials, which tried officials of the Nazi party and the Japanese military as ""war criminals"" and charged them with ""crimes against humanity."" And, had he not prematurely died in his cell, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic would have been a considerable step toward the institution of ""human rights.""

As it is only a discourse, the concept is perpetually in the process of being invented, as yet to be crystallized. As with the discourse on God, religion, morality, or ethics, we invent ""human rights"" and ""humanity"" to regulate selfish and aggressive behavior, to protect man from other men, the minorities from the majority, the people from a repressive government, the powerless from those with power. They serve mankind well against tyrants like Milosevic, though they have also been abused by others like George Bush, who uses them to justify aggression in Iraq.

At the present time, in Indonesia, the talk of the nation is whether or not former president Soeharto should to be tried for three decades of authoritarian rule and corruption.

The process of inventing ""human rights"" and ""crimes against humanity"" in this country appears to be quite premature, as the general sentiment among politicians is to ""forgive Soeharto, but get back the riches he had stolen from the nation.""

To focus on Soeharto's riches is to miss out on a momentous opportunity to have those useful Enlightenment concepts -- human rights, human dignity, and crimes against humanity -- take root in Indonesia. The trial of Soeharto, if it ever happens, should not be in order to get back what he allegedly stole. It should first and foremost be over the crimes he committed against humanity, against communist party members and their descendants, against the Acehnese, the Papuans, the East Timorese, the Muslims, or the men in the street with tattoos.

His trial will plant a seed in future leaders of the nation that no state killing is justified, that all forms of oppression are crimes, and consequently, that no atrocity will go unpunished.

The writer, is a doctoral graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. She can be reached at elizabeth.chandra@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.