Fatoumata Sire Diakite, a government representative from the West African state of Mali, notes that wife beating is still a tradition in her country.
“Men say that if you don’t beat your wife, she won’t think you love her,” she said. “It’s nonsense. But in our country, where there is polygamy, there are women who really think that it’s a mark of attention from their husbands.”
Female circumcision, she said, is likewise rooted in Malian tradition. “If a girl is not circumcised, she’s not thought to be a woman,” she said. “Women in Mali are educated to show themselves as inferior to men.”
A few years ago, problems of this nature received scant attention at human rights conferences. The focus was on the problems behind the Iron Curtain: refuseniks, the Soviet citizens not allowed to migrate or even travel outside their country; political prisoners languishing in Siberian gulags; others detained in psychiatric hospitals, on the bizarre theory that anyone who didn’t find life ideal in the Soviet Union must be crazy.
Human rights conferences were one of the forums in which the Cold War was fought. The United States and its allies used them effectively to beat up on the Soviets, and little else that mattered in the field of human rights received all that much attention in the news media.
But at the United Nations World Human Rights Conference that ended in Vienna Friday, there was a new focus, and nothing dramatized this more than the attention given to women’s issues.
Women’s groups came away proclaiming victory because most of the issues that they wanted addressed were included in the conference’s final document.
This did not happen by chance. It was the result of years of work begun by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in the U.S., which drew together an alliance of women’s groups around the world.
Charlotte Bunch, the center’s director, said one of the important developments of recent years was the growth of the women’s movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The women organized local and regional hearings to gather written and oral testimony on abuses of women’s rights and flooded the UN Human Rights Commission with the evidence they gathered.
This culminated in an international tribunal at the conference at which women gave dramatic testimony of violence inflicted on them by husbands and boyfriends, of mass rapes during the war in Bosnia and other abuses.
The women’s groups are confident they have raised the consciousness of governments to the forms of discrimination and violence that are peculiar to women. But Bunch described this as “a half-step for women” and said the full step would come when measures to end such abuses are implemented.
Children’s rights was another topic that came in for more attention than in the past. This involved such questions as child prostitution, child labor, children as victims of poverty and health care for children. It was only in 1989 that an international Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, and many governments still have not ratified it.
Except for Bosnia and Angola, problems in specific countries were not dragged out for the world to see. But for organizations that work in the field of human rights, and for victims of abuses who showed up in large numbers, many countries did come in for specific discussion and condemnation.
Anita Thyssen of the London-based Amnesty International, one of the world’s largest human rights groups, said her organization’s focus has shifted from the problems of long-term detention and torture by authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe to such matters as people disappearing and political killings in Africa and in Central and Eastern Europe.
She said these problems were particularly acute in areas of the former Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia. “The situation may be a lot worse in Tajikistan, in terms of the numbers of people dying, than in Bosnia,” she said.
There also was testimony on the fringes of the conference that human rights violations of a less dramatic nature still occur in the former East bloc. Workers are being beaten up, fired and arrested when they try to assert their right to form or join trade unions in several countries, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
Other sources said there has been a deterioration in Eastern Europe regarding rights of women and access to education and health services.
Racism also remains a problem there, with migrant workers and Gypsies subjected to attack.
In Latin America, the sweep of democracy across the continent has brought some acknowledged improvements in human rights. But in Guatemala, Colombia and Peru, Thyssen said, there is still a high level of disappearances and political killings.
Thomas McCarthy, a senior adviser at the UN Human Rights Center in Geneva, said this conference has shown that it was easier to reach agreements on various issues because there was no longer a bloc vote coming from the Communist states and their Third World allies.
“In different regions, you now have more diverse opinions,” he said.
“Another difference is that the African human rights commissions are more outspoken. It used to be extremely difficult to get them to complain. Now the human rights issue is not seen as such a threat to the countries involved that the governments crack down.”
Some Third World countries, seeking to blunt criticism of their human rights records, have argued for a “right to development.” In doing so, they took Western governments to task on the issues of debt relief and foreign aid.
But McCarthy said human rights organizations from these countries reject the argument, saying that their governments have used the “right to development” as an excuse for not having fair trials, free association and other rights.
Another development, he said, is that human rights workers in many countries have manifested their distaste for a situation in which the U.S. has emerged as the sole superpower.
“There is a desire not to see one country call all the shots and assume its solutions are the best,” he said.
Some Third World people, he said, believe the U.S. and other countries follow a double standard in terms of protecting human rights-for example, condemning violations by regimes they don’t like, and overlooking abuses in countries such as Israel and Saudi Arabia that are friendly to them.
Some countries from Asia and the Middle East, with China in the lead, attempted to use the conference to redefine human rights.
They argued that, while rights are universal, their application may vary depending on differences in culture and tradition.
At first glance, this may have looked like a boldfaced attempt by authoritarian regimes to assert their right to torture people or hold them without trial. But it was not quite that.
The concerns of these countries had more to do with freedom of speech, freedom of association and, in the case of some Middle Eastern countries, the rights of women.
The final document essentially rejected their argument. It took note of different historical, cultural and religious traditions, but said, “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated.”
