August 17, 2003

Minorities of one or the other kind have almost always faced discrimination, even extermination in history. It’s time now for the UN to come to their rescue by putting in place an independent watchdog

WE often tend to forget that every member of a majority community is a minority in some context or when somewhere else. For a segment of any society anywhere, a majority status is only true when confined within a fixed boundary or compartment. Germans living outside Germany are a minority as are the Chinese outside China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and Russians outside Russia, a Sunni Muslim in Iran, or a Shia in Pakistan. Even inside Pakistan a Sunni of the Deobandi sect may find he is in the midst of a great number of Barelvis in a certain area or vice versa. It is axiomatic that in almost all countries of the world there are ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities. And in many, their cultural freedom and human rights need protection.

Some of the ancient empires built by the sword also perished by the sword. A Roman citizen in England and another in Italy took on different nationalities when the Roman Empire disintegrated. An Austrian and a Hungarian national became such only after the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs collapsed.

Maria Theresa (1717-80) was the queen of Hungary and Bohemia and the Archduchess of Austria. She succeeded her father Charles VI to the German throne in 1740. Her right to the throne was contested and caused the war of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). During her reign, Frederick the Great attacked and defeated Austria in the Seven Years War (1756-63). Her daughter Marie Antoinette became the queen of Louis XVI of France and was guillotined on October 16, 1793. To try and decipher the nationality and citizenship of the mother and daughter would require quite a bit of working at the jigsaw puzzle. People in Alsace and Lorraine as well as Shleswig Holstein were alternately French and German as well as German and Danish nationals even in the 20th century. The seat of the European parliament today, Strasbourg in Alsace, is back in France.

The process of historical change gave birth to the present day concept of political sovereignty in the nation state. In the last three hundred years, due to centrifugal forces, the political map of the world has changed a number of times. Nation states emerged as in the cases of the Central Asian nations on the demise of the Soviet Union, the resurrection of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, the separation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Pakistan and to a small extent Indonesia (after the emergence of East Timor).

On the other hand, sometimes states voluntarily decide to give up some of their sovereignty and state powers as in the case of countries that formed the European Union, by abolishing visas and the national currencies and adopting some common laws and shared responsibilities. So even if national boundaries exist they are being transcended by common consent in many fields.

In this continuous process of political evolution, a majority can and does become a minority or the converse. The Jews, almost a perpetual minority in known history, have now become a majority in the state of Israel. East and West Germany became one state and much of Europe is getting closer to forming one government, allowing centripetal forces full play. People thus keep groping in their eternal quest for the most viable forms of inter-relationship between man and man, between state and state, and between citizen and the state.

Minorities, religious and ethnic, almost everywhere feel discriminated against. Discrimination, whether actual and real or perceived, is a fact of life. In Canada, the US, Australia, and even in Japan and Brazil lately there have been instances of judicial and sometimes governmental actions in affording the minorities a measure of relief, like the creation of autonomous Nunavit.

The Cree in Canada, the Inuit, earlier known to the West as Eskimos in Alaska (discovered by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering in 1741), the Amerindians and some of the Australian Aborigines are beneficiaries of these belated but welcome gestures. The modern-day Americans, too, are increasingly aware of the ancestral wrongs done to the first peoples, to the African slaves, and to the Japanese Americans during World War II, and have consequently started a process antithetical to the previously racist and imperialistic attitude toward these unfortunate groups.

This salutary trend deserves emulation worldwide, particularly in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where subtle to the grossest discrimination exists. As far as Europe is concerned it is not that blatant today, but is nevertheless on the increase against African and Asian ethnic groups. We would do well to keep in mind the massacre of Jews in Russia in 1905-6, of the Jews and Gypsies between 1939 and 1945 under the Nazis, and Stalin’s ‘purges’, wherein millions perished.

Human rights violations at the hands of despots or extremists in multifarious forms demonstrate how essentially inhuman human beings have often been when charged with power or with racial or religious fervour.

Australian Prime Minister Howard had expressed regrets over the past policies of the government that had caused so much suffering to the Aboriginal population. In July 2000, a UN committee rebuked Australia for its treatment of Aborigines who make up about 2.3 per cent of the 19 million population. It urged Australia to do more to make amends for a past government policy under which about 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken from their families, some forcibly, between 1910 and 1970, to raise them in a civilized environment.

Official figures show that death rates among Aboriginals are higher in all age groups than for other Australians, with many of the deaths attributed to socio-economic disadvantage. Rates of suicide, crime, alcoholism, smoking and deaths in police custody are also significantly higher for Aborigines.

A recent judicial denial of compensation to those who years ago as children had been forcibly taken from their parents and raised by white foster-parents, was deeply disappointing.

The rights of the indigenous peoples have even stirred the judiciary in homogeneous Japan. The Time magazine, August 21-28, 2000, reports: “In a landmark 1998 ruling, a judge in Hokkaido recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people for the first time. While Tokyo has yet to follow suit, it no longer claims Japan has no racial minorities. Recognizing the Ainu as an indigenous people would raise land-rights issues the government would rather avoid. But after intense lobbying by Kayano and others, Tokyo officially accorded the Ainu minority status in a law passed in 1997.” The Ainu number less than 20,000 souls. In Brazil, too, the indigenous people are speaking up.

Sad as it is, today violence and discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities in the subcontinent have become endemic and are almost seen as some natural phenomena. In Sri Lanka, the recent negotiations between the government and the Tamil Tigers, brought about through Norwegian mediation, are a hopeful sign. In Bangladesh, the conflict between the majority Bengalis and the ethnic minorities like the Chakmas and others collectively called the Jumma, and in India the insurgencies in the northeast have caused many deaths, not to speak of the terrible ongoing tragedy in Kashmir, and the horrors in Indian Gujarat.

In Pakistan, religious minorities often feel discriminated against, not as a consequence of State policy, but for lack of political will to confront the extremist elements, which, though a minority in themselves, wield disproportionate power and authority on society at large.

President Pervez Musharraf took some courageous measures to counter the onslaughts of the extremist elements, and now that we have an elected parliament and a civilian government under the large-hearted Prime Minister, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, we can hope for the adoption of concrete measures.

And the most urgent of these steps would be (a) the constitution of a Minorities Commission under the chairmanship of a sitting or retired judge of the Supreme Court. The second most important measure would be the implementation of its recommendations, and not its relegation to the dustbin as has been the case with so many important commission reports in the past. The chairman of the commission should wield the power and authority of a federal ombudsman. Besides, there should be more representation of the minorities in the federal and provincial cabinets.

In Europe there were the Inquisitions and religious wars, not to speak of the territorial wars. However, the blood and thunder, the cruelties and the hateful sprees of aggression have not been confined to the white races, nor to Europe and the Americas. In Asia and Africa, history has recorded as many instances, if not more, of murder, mayhem and massacre. In Latin America and Africa subtle to gross forms of discrimination and deadly antagonisms, like that between the Tutsis and the Hutus, are rampant. In Asia, we can name conquerors even more bloodthirsty than the Europeans. Ghengis Khan, the Mongol conqueror, and the White Huns or Epthalites like Torarnana and his son Mihiragula, are a few examples.

Leaving aside the rapacious conquests of the past as aberrations bred by ignorance, today in the new millennium too, apart from some sporadic forays into global poverty eradication, and anti-Aids campaigns, and fitful gestures at social justice here and there, the overall picture of the deprived and disinherited, particularly amongst the minorities all over the world, ranges from pitiable to horrendous.

Today, apart from the vast disparities in wealth and privilege between the proverbial haves and have-nots, and the grossest discrimination against women from bride-burnings in supposed accidents while cooking in the kitchen, to honour-killings, karo kari and vana, there exists persecution at worst, and irresponsibility at best, in the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities.

In Bhutan, there is the problem of the ethnic Nepalis. In Nepal, the resurgent Maoists had started increasing their militancy, though now both sides are negotiating for a settlement. In northeast India, the various ethnic hill-peoples are asking for more political autonomy and economic justice. In Burma, apart from the Karen and Shan aspirations, there is the standoff between the democratic forces under Daw Suu Kyi and the military government. The Kashmir conflict rages on, occasionally threatening a war between the nuclear states of India and Pakistan.

The long held dispute between Argentina and Chile on the Beagle channel was resolved by Papal arbitration, and the border dispute between Peru and Ecuador are close to a similar non-violent, negotiated settlement. Norwegian efforts have brought about a ceasefire and a probable settlement in Sri Lanka. In the same manner, that is through third-party arbitration, mediation or facilitation for dialogue we can try to resolve other territorial disputes between states. Tripartite dialogue and negotiations on Kashmir in which the Kashmiris are included would be a step forward.

In Bangladesh, there was a Peace Accord signed between the government and the Shanti Bahini in December 1997, as a result of which the Jumma, mainly Chakma freedom-fighters, laid down their arms. Despite a lapse of five years in the troubled Chittagong Hill Tracts, the promised Regional Council has been formed, but has no started functioning. Many of the thousands of uprooted hill people have neither got back their lands nor proper compensation. Some of the promised amendments have not even been introduced in parliament. Documented gross human rights violations have not been inquired into, or when inquiries were held, the inquiry reports have not been published. Needless to say, not a single person has been tried for human rights violations, including murder, nor any relief provided to the maimed or to the next of kin of the victims.

Apart from the injustices to the Jummas in the Hill Tracts, there is the festering case of the Biharis. It appears that neither Bangladesh nor Pakistan, nor the international community, is sufficiently interested in rehabilitating these unfortunate people either in Bangladesh or Pakistan or in some other country. As a consequence, thousands live wretched lives in deplorable conditions in refugee camps in Bangladesh. And this has been their fate since 1971.

It is not only obvious, but urgent that minorities be protected. They need more than a show of good intentions by governments, particularly at international moots, where they are all professed champions of human rights and protectors of the minorities in their charge.

Religious and ethnic minorities definitely and on a priority basis require the establishing of an independent, fully autonomous anti-discrimination authority under the auspices of the UN or as an organ of the UNHCR, under Mary Robinson or someone like her. The authority must have adequate power to monitor, inspect and take punitive actions wherever discrimination or human rights violations occur. It should also have subsidiary establishments wherever they consider necessary. The authority should submit an annual report to its head who should present it to the UN General Assembly every year.

These measures are not going to eradicate discrimination or human rights violations immediately, but they would help reduce them. The problem and the challenge lies in finding an acceptable balance, an equilibrium, between a state’s right to disallow ‘interference’ in its internal affairs on the one hand, and a minority-community citizen’s right to be protected against omissions and commissions by the state or its functionaries or groups of citizens.

In the 1960s, I had asked, on the floor of the East Pakistan Assembly, that on the lines of the French Droits Administration and the Scandinavian Ombudsman, the institution of Ombudsman should be introduced in Pakistan, initially at the provincial level. Considerably later, but nevertheless, we have ombudsmen in Pakistan today. To protect citizens’ rights further, this office should be strengthened and be made more accessible, even at the tehsil and union levels.

To empower a supranational body, states will have to give up a small part of their jealously-guarded ‘sovereignty’, but nations everywhere have already made some concessions in this regard or else the United Nations and its various organs including the Hague Court for war crimes in Bosnia could not have been set up, nor the European Union, the European Parliament, the Euro etc., and of course the newly created International Criminal Court. The High Commissioner for Human Rights certainly needs greater empowerment and resources as Mary Robinson has pointed out so clearly and emphatically.

Can a modern-day dictator perpetrate another holocaust within the state boundaries? If the scale of murder and mayhem is not widely publicized, can and do human rights violations take place in different and diverse parts of the global village? The answer is an unequivocal YES. We cannot allow the state or a given society to have absolute authority to ride roughshod over human rights and commit violations against its own citizens, be it through state machinery or groups or individuals. This then is the bottom line.

So, then, what are we waiting for? How many more of the interminable resolutions at national and international fora would we require before a potent, capable, internationally supported and universally recognized body is established and empowered to take punitive as well as preventive measures against infringements of Human Rights as defined in the Universal Declaration?

Only then can we hope to minimize persecution and cruel and inhuman violations. Only then can we have a fair and humane interaction between the wielders of authority in a state and its minority citizens, and, in some societies, its women. Is that too much to expect in this new millennium? Or do we have to wait for the year 3000 to arrive?

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