1

2014 KLEIN LECTURE

THE HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLEN GES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

REV DR. WILLIAM F. S CHULZ

Presented on 10/12/2014, First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor as part of the 2014-15 150th anniversary events.

The title of my remarks this afternoon—“The Human Rights Challenges of the 21st

Century”— is surely a bit grandiose, particularly inasmuch as we are in only the 14th year of the century and my powers of prognostication are about on a par with Calvin Coolidge’s who, when once asked to predict what would happen if people lost their jobs, replied,

“Unemployment will result.” But I had to give a title for my talk several months ago and foolishly ignored the advice of a professor at my seminary, Meadville Lombard, who advised us that, if we ever needed to give a title for a sermon long before we knew what we were going to talk about, we should give the title, “Out of Ambiguity, Hope.” It would cover all bases.

Let’s begin at the beginning. What are human rights? They are the rules agreed to by the international community that describe a civilized society. A civilized society, for example, does not torture or deny people fair trials—therefore, we have a set of civil and political human rights. A civilized sees to it that its citizens have enough to eat, a decent 2

education and adequate shelter from the elements—therefore, we have a set of social and economic human rights.

Notice that I said these rules are agreed to by the international community. This means that no one nation alone, no matter how powerful or how idiosyncratic its own cultural traditions, can decide what human rights are. The death penalty, for example, is a violation of internationally-recognized human rights. The United States considers the death penalty Constitutional but that does not make it consistent with human rights. The United

States in this respect is a human rights outlaw. We can disagree with the judgments of the international community—we can contend in this matter that it is not uncivilized to execute those convicted fairly of capital crimes--but we cannot pretend that the death penalty is not a human rights violation because we Americans don’t get to decide that all by ourselves.

But where do human rights come from and how does the international community decide what makes something a right? There are only three choices for the source of human rights: God, natural law, or general consensus. The problem with God as the source of human rights ought to be obvious: even within singular religious traditions, it’s hard to agree on what God wants. An early Christian sect called the Montanists believed, for example, that only those who ate a steady diet of radishes would ever be saved. If the

Montanists’ view had prevailed, Christians would take vegetables with their communion wine rather than wafers. And natural law is not much better. Natural law is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. The philosopher, John Locke, the so-called “Father of Natural Law,” believed that natural law required the recognition of the rights of everyone—oh, with the exception of women and poor people. So how do rights get recognized?

Robert Frost said that poems begin with a lump in the throat. And human rights do too. And they have done so for almost 4000 years, back at least to 1740 BC when King 3

Hammurabi codified his laws against unfair trials, torture and slavery. At the end of the day, the reason any one of us cares about human rights is because we feel sick at heart at the sight of misery.

But whose misery? You see, King Hammurabi's strictures against torture and slavery applied only to his own people, the Babylonians. As for the Assyrians, his archenemies, why, you could torture and enslave Assyrians as much you wanted to. And the guiding document of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizens, or the U. S. Bill of Rights-- well, these too only helped out the French and the Americans; they didn't do anything at all for the Thai or the Congolese.

There is an old Chinese saying that "You can stand on a hillside for a long time with your mouth wide open before a roast duck flies in" and it took almost that long, it took a very long time for human beings to feel sick at heart at the sight of everybody's misery--not just at the misery of my own clan or tribe or nation, not just at the misery of the nobles or the ruling class or the wealthy.

Indeed, it was not until 1948--3688 years after Hammurabi--that the people of the world managed to agree that everybody's misery mattered. That was the year the United

Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a statement of some 33 civil, political, social and economic rights that anyone can claim simply because they are born human. The Universal Declaration—and all the subsequent human rights covenants and conventions and treaties and decisions by international courts and judgments by international human rights organizations—all these collectively define human rights and reflect as close to consensus as we’re ever going to get about what a civilized society looks like and hence what makes a right a right. 4

But who’s paying attention? As we survey the world at large, it looks as if human rights face enormous perils: ISIS in Iraq; Russia in Ukraine; Israel and Hamas; police killings in Missouri. But if you take a bit longer view, if you consider that before 1948 the concept of universal human rights did not even exist in any formally-recognized way—the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi Holocaust broke no international law—why, the progress in the last

66 years has been enormous.

Shortly before I left my position as head of Amnesty International in 2006, I gave a lecture at Syracuse University on the state of human rights around the world. At a dinner beforehand, the President of the University asked a gathering of faculty members whether human rights were better or worse off today than they were two hundred years before.

With one exception, the faculty all insisted that human rights were in worse shape at the moment than they had been two millennia before.

After listening to all this moaning, I couldn’t contain myself further and I said in my customarily tactful way, “Are you folks nuts? Why, in just the twelve years I’ve been with

Amnesty we’ve seen a huge growth in democracy around the globe; we’ve seen war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone; we’ve seen the British Law

Lords rule in 1999 that Augusto Pinochet (and, by implication, any former national leader anywhere) was not protected by the concept of sovereign immunity and could be prosecuted for his crimes; we’ve seen the creation of the International Criminal Court; we’ve seen all but two countries—Somalia and the United States--ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child; we’ve seen the US Supreme Court rule unconstitutional the execution of children and the mentally retarded. And you don’t think we’re better off today than in 1806 when a slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, could get elected President?” 5

Indeed, had I been responding to those professors today, I would have added that perhaps the most promising development of the past ten years has been the explosion in the number of human rights groups that exist around the world and the growing sophistication of their techniques. A recent study for the US Holocaust Museum identified

115 organizations working on genocide prevention alone. The twelve major ones were all founded in the past five to seven years. The same is true of national and regional human rights organizations. Virtually every country, even some of the most repressive, like Belarus or Cambodia, can now boast indigenous human rights groups which track violations, report abuses and hold their governments to account.

Furthermore, those proliferating groups no longer must rely on twentieth century techniques alone to carry on the good fight. On-line-generated protests are now the norm, as we have seen in Serbia, Tunisia and Egypt, and satellite imaging has identified slave labor camps in North Korea and offered protection to villages at risk of massacre in Darfur, Sudan.

But these positive developments don’t obviate the fact that human rights face significant challenges ahead. I want to focus on four them:

Can universal values trump cultural identity?

Can human rights ever be enforced?

Will climate change make human rights obsolete?

And will the United States be a human rights leader or an outlier?

So let’s start with the first one: can universal values ever truly trump cultural identity? Adam Smith advised us to love our country but “merely as a part of the great society of mankind.” Immanuel Kant called for “global patriotism.” But other philosophers 6

like Alasdair MacIntyre, often dubbed “communitarians,” believe that human beings are lost unless they can find their identity in a nation or a religion or a cultural community. When we are asked the question, “Who are you?”, we are more likely to answer “An American” or

“A white male” or “A Unitarian Universalist” than we are to say, “I am a citizen of the world.”

And if we do say, “I am a citizen of the world,” it doesn’t give others much information about us except that maybe we’re some kind of pointy-headed liberal.

Moreover, we who are educated in the Western tradition are taught to show respect for different cultures. Indeed, we often self-correct for our Western biases by being reticent to condemn behavior in other cultural contexts that we would have no hesitation in criticizing in our own. Maybe the Saudi practice of amputating the hand of a thief is gruesome but who are we to judge? The very mark of cosmopolitanism is an all-pervasive tolerance. We have learned well the lesson taught by the Persian king Darius who asked a group of Greeks what might induce them to eat rather than burn their dead. Nothing could make anyone do something so atrocious, they replied. And then Darius introduced them to some denizens of India who regularly consumed their dead. “What might persuade you to burn your dead instead?” asked the kind. “Nothing could make us do something so abominable,” they replied.

But universal human rights reject such relativism. They fly in the face of our well- cultivated impulse to withhold judgment. Amputating the hand of a thief is wrong. Eating the living, if not the dead, is wrong. Female genital cutting is wrong. Regardless of cultural prerogatives. How do we resolve this contradiction between universality and particularity?

We ask, “Where does the power lie?” Does it lie with the thieves and the eaten and the cut? Or does it generally lie with the prosecutor or the chieftain or the cutter? Does it lie, in other words, with the victims and the less powerful or with the inflictors of pain and 7

the wielders of power? The answer, of course, is that the powerful have usually made the rules—the wealthy, the better educated, the males. But human rights depict a society in which the interests of the less powerful are taken equally into account, a society in which the rules are made by all. And when that happens, cultural practices tend to gravitate toward the mean. The victims of atrocities or discrimination have more in common with one another than they do with their fellow nationals or sister ethnics or brother tribespeople. They constitute, as it were, a global community of suffering. And when those who suffer help make the rules, the rules reflect a high degree of generosity and pity.

Human rights are promises the less powerful demand of the powerful. And if the less powerful are not satisfied, the result will eventually be revolution or at least hundreds of thousands in the streets of Hong Kong. The challenge, then, is clear: how do we insure that the victims have as great a voice as the perpetrators in the design of human rights rules and hence that universal values trump narrower cultural and religious identities? That’s the first challenge the human rights movement faces and it is made only worse by extremism in religion of all stripes and an obsession with sovereignty by nationalists of all regions.

Which leads to the second challenge: Once we’ve agreed on the rules, can the rules actually be enforced? China, for example, has some of the strictest laws in the world prohibiting torture of suspects in police custody. But such torture is rampant in China.

Because there is no international sheriff empowered to arrest human rights violators, human rights are in large measure self-enforced. But there are a few things—five things, to be exact--that we can do to encourage governments and corporations to live up to the human rights rules.

First, of course, we can shame them, expose their abuses to international scrutiny.

That’s the principal strategy that Amnesty International has relied on for 53 years—just 8

telling the truth about what a government is doing to its own citizens--and Amnesty estimates that it works about 40% of the time. But many countries like Russia, China, North

Korea and sometimes even the United States don’t care what the world thinks so shaming is often not an effective way to enforce human rights.

Gradually, over the past twenty years, legal sanctions have become a second prominent arrow in the human rights quiver with the creation of War Crimes Tribunals for

Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and especially with the birth in 2002 of the

International Criminal Court. But the ICC has managed in fourteen years to convict only two defendants and the courts have no power to take into custody those who are charged with crimes so the promise of international justice is neither swift nor sure.

Economic sanctions constitute a third way to enforce human rights and these have been far more successful than their critics acknowledge. Burma (now called Myanmar), for example, was persuaded to tiptoe its way toward democracy in good measure because

Burmese oligarchs realized, once they had stolen millions of dollars through corrupt practices, that as long as the country was under economic sanctions from the West, they would have no place other than China in which to invest their ill-gotten gains. And for all the criticism of President Obama’s weak-kneed response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, the fact is that Putin has muted his aggression there because he is uncertain whether the

Russian economy can truly withstand economic isolation from the West. The problem with economic sanctions of course is that they are applied sporadically and, interdependent as our world is, result in blowback to harm the sanctioning countries as well as the sanctioned.

It is not a coincidence that no human rights advocate has ever seriously advocated that the

US impose widespread economic sanctions on China because, as the Chinese Finance

Minister said not long ago, “It’s not wise to be tough with your banker.” 9

Which leads to a fourth tool for the enforcement of human rights—military intervention. I want to dwell a bit longer on this topic because it is so controversial, especially on the Left. There is no question of course that many wars have been fought for egregiously illegitimate reasons, the most recent the war in Iraq. Nor is there any doubt that all use of force, even the most well-intentioned, carries with it the danger of exacerbating a problem and causing harm to innocents. But do these facts mean that force should never be employed to stop massive human rights crimes? For two reasons I think the answer is “No.”

The first is that it strikes me as just a little too easy for comfortable Americans to be telling the most miserably oppressed people in the world that we will never resort to violence to protect them because war might do more harm than good.

There is a smell to refugee camps which, once you have inhaled it, you never forget—a smell of goat dung and human waste; of sweat and tears and unstaunched menstrual blood; but also a smell of desperation that gives way to sagging shoulders and the decay of the human soul. For a body can be clothed in the raiment of fear or stalked daily by death for only so long before the soul—whatever makes the human animal “human”— begins to collapse upon itself as surely as the shoulders do.

When I visited the enormous Kalma Refugee Camp in southern Darfur in 2004--

90,000 teeming people who had been burned out of their villages, their menfolk murdered, many of the women battered and sexually assaulted--I was struck by a thousand things: the children who called out to us repeatedly the only English word they knew: ironically enough, “OK,” “OK,” (with the thumb sign up) when nothing was OK, absolutely nothing was

OK. Or the police sent by the Sudanese government to guard the camp, many of whom were suspected of having raped and murdered more than one of those they were supposed to be 10

guarding. But what really took my breath away was this: a young woman who, amid the utter squalor and degradation, her clothes, such as they were, tattered and falling off her, wore around her neck a lovely piece of jewelry—just glass no doubt but a turquoise-colored glass that sparkled constantly in the relentless sun.

At first I thought it was a religious symbol and I asked our Arabic-speaking translator to ask her what it was. “She says ‘It is me.’” he told me. At first I didn’t understand and thought she had said simply “It is mine” and he had mistranslated. “What did she say?” I asked. “Did she say it is hers?” “No,” he said definitively, “She said, ‘It is me.’”

And suddenly I understood.

When the women workers who led the strike against the textile mills in Lawrence,

MA, in 1912 were being hosed down and beaten by the police, they shouted “Give us bread and roses” and that chant, “bread and roses”—we demand bread to eat, yes, but we demand our dignity too—has been a watchword of the labor movement ever since. And here in this dreadful camp was the very same demand.

This piece of jewelry, this small, sparkling piece of glass around my neck: “This is me!” This is how I know that, though I am mere brute flesh, bone, water, swollen tongue, excrement-stained thighs, my most private parts exposed for all to see, that though I am brute flesh right now in this horrific camp, I am not just that. I retain a tiny hint of my humanity. I require bread to live, of course. So do the cows, goats, sheep, pigs—bless them all. But none of them decorate themselves with turquoise glass; only humans do that. Only humans look on a sparkling piece of glass and call it beautiful. And I am a human being!

Still. And I demand roses too. 11

Who are we sitting in our comfortable homes to tell that woman that we can’t save her because of our vaunted moral objections to war? Sure—it would be best if she and all the other refugees in that camp rose up against their oppressors themselves. We all admire the students of the Serbian revolution, well educated, sophisticated about the media, who in the year 2000 used their cell phones and text messages to summon tens of thousands of their fellow Serbs to Belgrade to overthrow the dictator Slobodan Milosovic nonviolently.

But Darfur, Sudan was not and utterly chaotic Syria is not the Serbia of 2000. They are not well-fed Serbia. They are not well-educated and electronically well-connected Serbia. They are not the Serbia of huge trucks that can block well-paved superhighways and bring the nation to a standstill. Who are we to tell them that they must just suffer in silence? Who are we to tell the Syrians that they must just accept 60,000 dead, mostly at the hands of Bashar al-Assad?

Violence takes many forms—not just those of guns and knives and howitzers. One dies as readily of hunger as of wounds, of the death of the spirit as readily as that of the body. There truly is no peace without justice and those who shout “Peace! Peace!’ without pointing a viable way to justice are collaborators with the oppressors just as surely as if they had supplied them with arms or turned the keys of their jail cells.

And the second reason I don’t altogether rule out the use of violence for humanitarian purposes is this. Of all the tragic aspects of the US’s post-9/11 misadventures and especially the war in Iraq, perhaps the greatest was that America’s arrogance and sense of exceptionalism (the notion that we made the rules and so we could break them at will) have made it far more difficult for us to provide leadership to the world, moral or military, even when doing so, even when doing so militarily, is in the best interests of a suffering humanity. A NATO supplied no fly zone over Darfur, for example, in the mid-2000s would 12

have stopped the genocide dead in its tracks because the Janjaweed militia, who were largely, though not exclusively, responsible for the killing, would not have operated without the cover of the Sudanese Air Force. But the moral authority of the US was so compromised by Iraq; the US was so overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan; our credibility in the Islamic world was so low and the American public were so wary of further military commitments that we allowed 250,000 people to die and 2.5 million to be displaced without lifting a single weapon to stop it.

I readily admit that my view of all this is colored by my experience of Rwanda. The

1994 genocide in Rwanda took place two months after I had assumed the leadership of

Amnesty and I will forever be haunted by our inability to do more to stop it. Especially tormenting is how little force would have been required. General Romeo Dallaire, the

Canadian General who was in charge of UN troops in Rwanda when the killing began; who I have had the privilege to meet; who subsequently suffered a breakdown over his failure to save lives; and who is one of the great unsung heroes of my generation, believed that it would have taken no more than 1500 soldiers to save the lives of close to a million people.

Fifteen hundred soldiers to save a million! When wickedness is in fashion, it is sometimes simply impossible to secure a “just peace” through nonviolent means.

But how do we know that wickedness is truly in fashion and not just the whim of some dreadful fashion designer? Fortunately, just as international justice has evolved over the past years, so has the concept of legitimate humanitarian intervention. It’s called the

“responsibility to protect” and in 2005 the United Nations adopted guidelines as to when such protection is required and when such intervention is justified. It must, for example, be designed to counter large scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing; it must be a last resort; it must receive some type of international imprimatur. Had these guidelines been followed, 13

we would never have invaded Iraq in the first place but we certainly would have taken far more proactive steps to stop the slaughter in Darfur. So a fourth legitimate tool for the enforcement of human rights is military intervention.

But such intervention is and ought to be rare. And such intervention can do nothing to address abuses of social rights like widespread violence against women; it cannot stop the deprivation of economic rights caused by pervasive poverty. To address these crimes— and they too are crimes—requires the fifth and final instrument with which to enforce human rights and that is massive nonviolent citizen action. Such action can take the form hundreds of thousands of people blocking the streets of Hong Kong or it can take the form of hundreds of thousands of cellphones used as a vehicle of banking in the rural reaches of

Africa or it can take the form of thousands of same-sex couples getting married or it can take the form of Malali inspiring a new generation of girls in the Asian subcontinent to complete their education. Such citizen action does not always succeed in reaching its goals, at least not right away. But the truth is that there is no more sure-fire way to bring about change in human rights norms than this: an inspired citizenry intent on ushering in a new world.

But of course one of the realities of that new world is climate change which threatens to wipe away all human rights progress. I am not just talking about the threats to all of our welfares caused by rising sea levels and expanding drought. I am talking about the fact that these threats and scarcities will inevitably bring greater competition for resources and hence greater violence. In fact, it has already happened. It is no coincidence that

Rwanda had the highest population density per square mile in all of Africa at the time of the

1994 genocide. Similarly, the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, was prompted in good measure by the fact that the encroaching desert in western Sudan began to gobble up pasture land that 14

sedentary farming tribes had long drawn upon for their livelihoods. For many years these farmers had permitted tribes of herders to cross their lands with their goats and sheep but, as the farmers saw their land shrinking, they tried to put a stop to the grazing, thereby threatening the livelihood of the herders. The result was a conflagration that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Climate change is not just a practical puzzle or an environmental problem; it is a full-fledged human rights challenge as well.

But the very fact that we can speak of environmental issues as somehow distinct from human rights issues reflects the fact that we here in the United States have managed to delegitimize social and economic rights, such as the right to a healthy, sustainable environment, by associating them with Communism, socialism or at least do-gooder liberalism. But in fact, if you believe that having enough food to eat or clean water to drink or adequate shelter to live in is a higher order human need than, say, having the right to vote, then you might want to argue that social and economic rights are the most important rights in the whole lexicon. Addressing climate change goes hand in hand with protecting human rights all over the world and that will be a third major challenge to the human rights movement in the 21st century.

There are of course many other human rights challenges facing us today, including the stand-off between Israelis and Palestinians; the plight of massive numbers of refugees; the continuing plague of child soldiers and sex trafficking and violence against women, 70% of whom have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes. But finally I want to bring this home by asking whether the United States will reclaim the mantle of human rights leadership or throw up roadblocks of indifference or even obstruction to the realization of the human rights dream. 15

The United States has always understood itself to be a champion of human rights around the world. Indeed, there would be no such thing as the contemporary human rights movement had President Franklin Roosevelt not declared in 1941 that there were four freedoms that every human being on earth had a right to claim – freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. Seven years later Eleanor

Roosevelt led the effort to make those freedoms more concrete with the adoption of the

Universal. Over the years the United States has led the charge to defend many of those rights around the world.

During the years of the Bush Administration of course the US’s reputation for moral leadership tumbled dramatically. The Obama Administration has slowed that decline by banning the use of torture; re-joining the UN Human Rights Council and reaching out to the international Muslim community even as it has increased the use of drones and continued widespread surveillance on US citizens.

Moreover, tempting as it may be to some political partisans to attribute all our problems to one President or one party and assume their complete eradication by another, such simplistic thinking, while appealing, ultimately will not do. After all, I’m from

Massachusetts where a few years ago it was a Democratic State Senator who got on statewide radio one night and proclaimed in loud and fervent tones, “The Republican octopus is spreading its testicles across the entire Commonwealth.” The hard truth is that the decline in our reputation for human rights leadership was rooted not just in the personality of George Bush alone but in a predilection of the American character that goes way back to the founding of the country.

Perhaps because both their names begin with the letter “P,” we Americans have had a hard time distinguishing between the Pilgrims and the Puritans. The Pilgrims were the 16

ones who arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620 to escape religious persecution. The Puritans came ten years later under the leadership of Governor John Winthrop not because they were being persecuted but in order to found a religious utopia, a more pure community, a

New Jerusalem, what Governor Winthrop famously called a “City Set on a Hill.”

Both the “City” part and the “Hill” part were equally important. The Massachusetts

Bay Colony was to be a City of great virtue. The minutes of an early town meeting caught the spirit perfectly: “We passed three resolutions,” the Minutes read. “Voted first that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Voted second that the earth is given to the saints. Voted third that we are the saints.” But what good was sainthood if nobody knew about your saintliness? So the “Hill” part was just as important. That City had to be set not in a valley where no one could see it but on a hill where it was visible to all. The eyes of all people are upon us,” Winthrop declared, and, if we succeed, they shall say of later plantations “Lord, make it like that of New England.”

From the very beginning, then, this country saw itself as a model for the less enlightened to emulate. And that sense of moral mission has never left us. So when George

W. Bush declared in his Second Inaugural that “freedom is written in the human heart” and that “it is the policy of the United States to…support the growth of democra[cy]…in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he was hearkening back to an age-old American assumption embodied, among other places, in the

Declaration of Independence—a document that proclaimed the value of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” not just for Americans or for British subjects but for all “mankind.”

Indeed, that assumption is reflected every time a preacher or a politician refers to the

United States, as they so often do, as “the greatest country on the face of the earth.” 17

So this predilection to believe in America’s exceptional qualities and transforming mission is an old one and it is exactly what led to the notion that America is exempt from the rules by which everybody else must play. Our reputation for human rights leadership declined because we indulged the narrow, paternalistic inclinations of the American character – a disdain for international covenants; a hypersensitivity to maintaining our own sovereignty; a suspicion of international institutions like the United Nations or the

International Criminal Court; a refusal to consider adopting international treaties; a scapegoating of immigrants.

Will the US reclaims its proud history of human rights leadership? Well, fortunately that part of the American tradition that is narrow and nationalistic; tempted by hubris and disdainful of differences, is not the only part of our heritage upon which to draw for there is also an American tradition of generosity and hospitality; of rescue and liberation; of decency and virtue.

That part of the American tradition is manifest in a Roger Williams who thought the early colonists ought to pay the Indians for the land they appropriated and in a Judge

Samuel Sewall making public apology for his role in the Salem witchcraft trials. It is manifest in the Bill of Rights. It is manifest in a William Lloyd Garrison and a Lydia Maria

Child demanding an end to slavery and in an Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressing outrage when the World Anti-Slavery Society in London denied delegate status to women; in a

Sojourner Truth leading slaves to freedom and a Lincoln offering his adversaries “malice toward none and charity for all.” It is manifest in the defeat of fascism; in Truman’s support for the United Nations; in Eisenhower’s stirring conviction that “the only answer to a regime that wages total cold war is to wage total peace.” It is manifest in the civil rights movement; in the resistance to those pinched souls who would not be where they are today if their 18

immigrant ancestors had been treated the way they propose to treat the latest generation of new Americans; and in the courage of those lawyers, including military lawyers, who have defended prisoners at Guantanamo at the expense of their careers. Draw upon this part of the American tradition and we not only repair our reputation rapidly; we reestablish ourselves as the human rights leader we all want America to be.

The challenges to human rights are still immense but the odds of its ultimate triumph are even greater. Because at the end of the day human rights emerge out of the common misery of humankind signaled as it is by that lump in the throat, the sad but gentle truth that the angel of death perches on the shoulders of every one of us, and in the face of that truth, human rights give voice to our deepest yearnings—yearnings for things like the reconciliation of adversaries; the eradication of fear; a better life for our children; a fair distribution of the earth’s abundance.

In the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide a girl's school was attacked by machete- wielding militiamen in the middle of the night. The teenagers were rousted from their beds about 2:00 AM and forced to line up in the dining hall. They were ordered to separate themselves, Hutu from Tutsi, so that only the Tutsi would die. But the girls refused. A second time the commander ordered them to divide up by ethnic group. But still they refused. And finally one of the girls found her voice and, though very frightened, this is what it was reported later that she said: "We cannot separate ourselves, you see, because we are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi; we are Rwandan" at which point every one of them was slaughtered.

But what a legacy they leave! "We are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi. We are

Rwandan." That sentiment expresses what is most fundamental about human rights—that we are all in this together--and the echoes of that young girl's voice bespeak a graciousness 19

for which the world is desperate. Human rights have a future. How vibrant it will be depends upon our capacity to remember the fragility we all share.