Topic: Human Rights from the Perspective of Different Cultures

Morning Session, Oct. 15

Václav Havel
Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, participants of the fifth annual Forum 2000,
After having had the honor of welcoming you to the Vladislav Hall of the Prague Castle last night, let me welcome you once again to our first working session. These are difficult, dramatic times. Many have cancelled their trips, while others, who originally did not intend to come, are arriving. Still, many others, due to the new developments, have had to change their arrival or departure dates. Either way, it is great and wonderful that this conference is taking place and that its theme — its permanent theme — may be discussed in light of, and in commemoration of, recent events. I wholeheartedly welcome all of you here and I look forward to our debate.

Jacques Rupnik
I want to thank the Czech President and founding father for his opening words, and would like to introduce now the second founding father of the forum. He’s at head of the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, a Holocaust survivor himself, a child of a European tragedy. Living in America, he has spoken out on behalf of victims of human rights abuses from Cambodia to Mosquito Indians, from the Vietnamese boat people to South Africa to Bosnia. I cannot think of anybody better qualified to open a discussion about the universality of human rights than Mr. Elie Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel
President Havel, Excellencies, my good friend, Jacques Rupnik, fellow participants, and friends. Gratitude is perhaps not on our official agenda, but it ought to be its companion. Gratitude to you President Havel, our inspired host, for helping us bring together for the fifth time here. Gratitude to Prague for continuing to offer us its enchanting past, which has a way of enveloping, with warmth, its visitors, to make them come back again and again. Gratitude to the Nippon Foundation for enabling us financially to have these conferences. And to the organizers, who, under our friend, Oldřich Černý, have masterfully prepared this gathering with devotion, skill, and sensitivity. Gratitude to the speakers, who I hope will stay within the limits accorded to them by the chairpersons of the sessions.
All of us share a passion: A passion for justice. A passion for truth and survival. President Havel, as you said last night, I also remember the beginning of this endeavor. We had the idea of Forum 2000 in 1995 in Hiroshima, of all places. We attended a conference which tried to answer a simple and urgent question. Does hope have a future? Naturally, the unanimous answer was yes, it must have. Since life has meaning, it is intrinsically linked to hope. Hope is a major component of existence, of social existence. The brain cannot live without dreams, nor can the soul without hope. But, as exuberant adolescents would say, it ain’t easy. Not these days. For years, globalization was the key word of most international meetings. With the shrinking of the planet Earth, it seemed imperative to abolish all frontiers, whether new or old, artificial or concrete, separating communities and people. We were in more than one place, but participated in the same adventure, determined not to repeat the outgoing century’s horror-filled blunders. Responsibility for one another became a universal commandment. Distances no longer matter. When men and women are hurt far away, we know about it immediately. Other people’s catastrophes affect us as well. Never
before have so many minds worked so closely to create systems based on solidarity to help those who need help. The innocent prisoners of destiny and injustice, the victims of starvation and disease, the dispossessed, the uprooted, the despairing parents of emaciated children. Human rights became a new secular religion. The right to be free, to seek peace, to celebrate life. What truth meant to ancient philosophers, and peace to Jews, and love to Christians, the fight for social equality and religious freedom meant to today’s idealists. Yet even in our darkest dreams, we could not imagine that evil, too, could become globalized.
Well, on September 11th, we woke up. September 11th will remain in history as a scar, a threat, a watershed. There is now a before and an after. After September 11th, nothing is the same. Nor should it be. The abyss of fanaticism, we realize, is still open. And its name is now terrorism. Since the origins of its dark reign during the French Revolution, it has spread fear and destruction in many lands before reaching and trying to dismantle the enviable democracy of America. What is terrorism? Its goal is not only to attain power, but it is to arouse fear. The terrorist uses death — his own, and that of others, in order to reduce innocent people and ask them and demand them and force them to give up their dreams, and their pride, and their dignity. And their life. To prevent them from making choices, by frightening them to the point of stifling what is their most precious aspiration: Their thirst for hope. Their thirst for freedom. Thus terrorism indeed has become global. And a global enemy of humankind.
When we first planned Forum 2000, Mr. President, as a beginning of a new century and millennium, we did not find it necessary to discuss it. We may have been naive. We thought that like other woes of the outgoing century — fascism, Nazism and communism — terrorism, too, would be left behind, and that the twenty-first century would harbor less threats to our children. We were wrong. Terrorism is alive, and it does constitute the supreme violation of human rights. But, we are right in believing that resignation is never an answer. We are right in affirming Albert Camus’ statement, that when there is no hope, it is incumbent upon us to invent it. We are right to have hope because we realize that the response to terrorism is also global.
As a New Yorker, Marion and I thank you for being here, but we must also tell you that what we have seen, that the response to terrorism was an honor to humanity. The way our people have responded, with so much compassion, with so much tenderness. With so much generosity towards each other and with so much sadness for the families of the victims. And then we have seen that the entire civilized world has responded unanimously in agreeing that terrorism is a threat, not only to one people, but also to all people. So in light of what had happened, eternities ago — because it seemed like eternities — this meeting is very special. It is the fifth of our conferences, and it has taken on a special dimension of intense need to understand. What happened, really? Why did it happen? Could it have been avoided? And once unleashed, can it be stopped, and how? All this is actually our desire. And that we shall hear from all the participants now. But remember, your questions are ours. And what I like about questions that it has a word: quest. Nothing is more beautiful in our endeavor, than to participate in the same quest. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Elie Wiesel, for setting the context in which our debate is taking place. It seems appropriate, since our meeting coincides with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, to open our panel discussion by quoting its new recipient, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who described the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “the yardstick by which we measure human progress.” It also seems appropriate to recall that the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of that Declaration, in December 1988, here in Prague, at a rally addressed by Václav Havel, was one of those symbolic turning points, heralding the return of freedom to Central Europe. Over the years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights became a sacred text of what Elie Wiesel called “a worldwide secular religion.” Which is precisely where some of the problems start.
For half a century, more precisely, since the end of the Cold War, the human rights cause advanced without questioning its largely secular humanist foundations. More recently, however, under the impact of challenges from non-Western cultures, the promoters of human rights have had to redefine some of their assumptions, starting with the very basic ones. Why do human beings have rights? Or, why does rights’ consciousness make so little headway against the culture of death? Witness, in the civil wars of the post-Cold War era, or in the recent terrorist attacks.
There are three main sources of the cultural challenge to the universality of Human Rights. The first comes from resurgent fundamentalist Islam, arguing that the Western separation between religion and politics is alien to the Islamic tradition and that the freedoms asserted in the declaration make no sense within their theocratic framework. The second cultural challenge comes from authoritarian regimes in East Asia, who oppose the universality of human rights to Asian values, to an Asian model of development, which has been rather successful economically, while maintaining authoritarian government and family structures. The third challenge to the universality of human rights comes from the West itself. It is that of post-modern cultural relativism. Human rights are presented here as a Western construct, of limited applicability. It cannot be promoted, let alone imposed, in cultures which do not share, at their core, the Western matrix of liberal individualism. In the words of Professor John Gray, “after September 11th, the era of globalization is over. The ideal of universal civilization is a recipe for unending conflict. It is time it was given up.” These are the three main cultural challenges to the universality of human rights, and that is indeed the context in which our debate takes place.
And the first speaker to open our panel needs little introduction here. Professor Francis Fukuyama is a well-known political philosopher who used to work at the State Department, a former consultant at the RAND Corporation, and now Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. Francis Fukuyama’s name is known to most people in this audience as the author of an essay published in the annus mirabilis of 1989 entitled, “The End of History”. It argued that liberal democracy is, after the defeat of communism, without rivals. A proposition which, I’m sure, will be debated at our meeting as well. The essay was later turned into a best-selling book, and it was followed by other works, let me mention among many, Trust. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Francis Fukuyama.

Francis Fukuyama
Thank you very much, Mr. Rupnik, for that introduction, and thanks especially to Forum 2000 and to President Havel for inviting me to this. I have been invited in past years and I am glad to be able to make the final meeting of this very important conference.
The topic of our discussion this morning, human rights from the perspective of different cultures, I think, is an extremely important one in light of the events of September 11th. This comes at a very perilous time for global society. Besides creating an enormous problem for security, I think that the September 11th events, as Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Rupnik have both indicated, also create a major crisis for human rights as well. Many people have argued that the attacks show that Samuel Huntington and his view of the clash of civilizations has actually proven true. Professor Huntington argued that the major fault lines in world politics are basically cultural ones, and that the present conflict between the terrorists and the West has to be seen as a larger civilizational conflict, between Islam and the West.
By this view, there are perhaps six or seven major cultural zones in the world, that can sometimes coexist, will often clash, but will never converge because ultimately there is not a shared basis of understanding of values between them. And furthermore, by this view, as Mr. Rupnik has indicated, what we in the West regard as human rights is simply the outgrowth of Western, Christian, European culture, that is unique to this cultural area, but is not something that is shared by the other four-fifths or six sevenths, or however large a part of humanity does not come from that particular tradition. And, therefore, that we have no right to talk to others about rights. Now my belief is that this view is fundamentally wrong, and that in the light of those attacks, we must not falter from our belief in the universality of human rights. Samuel Huntington was actually a teacher of mine and a good friend. We remain good friends, but I believe that he is completely wrong on this score. Another thing happened last week, which was the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the great author V.S. Naipaul. Mr. Naipaul wrote, a few years ago, an article entitled, “Our Universal Civilization,” which, in a way was a direct contradiction of John Gray’s call for an abandonment of the idea that there is such a thing as a universal civilization. Now if you think about V. S. Naipaul’s situation, it’s very appropriate that he should be an advocate for such universalism.
He is an author of Indian descent who grew up on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and he argued that not only is there an applicability of these Western values across cultures, but that he himself would never have had any status in world literature but for that universality. Because he, above all, does not come from any of Samuel Huntington’s civilizations. He crosses those boundaries and he speaks to people precisely because he is able to cross those boundaries. And I think that, in broader terms, is the issue that faces us.
There is an organizing principle, I believe, in human history, which is the general progress of modernization, whose institutional expression is liberal democracy in the political realm and market-oriented economics in the economic realm. This continues to be the primary force in world politics, and human rights is an expression, a moral expression, of that civilization. The present conflict does not constitute a clash of civilizations in the sense that we are all dealing with six or seven civilizations of equal standing. I think that it is something more of a rear-guard action by parts of the world that are in fact threatened by that ongoing process of modernization — and it’s a threat we need to take seriously, both in security and in moral terms. But I believe that we need to return to an understanding of those rights as a moral expression of that civilization, both in theory and to apply them in practice with a certain degree of flexibility and prudence. They are universal because they ultimately come from a shared human nature or essence, that we have qua-human beings, not qua-members of a cultural group or a gender, or a social class or an ethnic group. And it is that essence that is more basic than all of those other identities.
Now, let me back up and talk a little bit about our current discourse on rights. Because I think that anyone objectively looking at the way that we talk about rights in the West would have to admit that it is a big mess. There has been a multiplication of rights that we seek over the past several decades. For example, in the United States, a generation ago we began with advocacy of equal rights for racial minorities and for women. That advocacy has since spread to the handicapped, to indigenous people, the
rights of the accused, to gays, the right to life, the right to die, and beyond human rights there are powerful advocates for the rights of animals. And amidst this ever-increasing explosion of rights, I think there are a number of grounds for confusion, and again Mr. Rupnik referred to a number of them. I would give a slightly different list.
One important source of that confusion I think is the constant tendency towards an inflation of rights. This may be particularly true in my own country, the United States, where, as the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon has said, we have a certain kind of “rights culture,” in which anyone with a powerful social interest tries to convert that interest into a right, because a right is treated with more moral seriousness than a mere interest. And so, therefore, the interest in someone to publish pornography, or the interest in someone to own an assault weapon is converted into a First Amendment right to free speech, or a Second Amendment right to bear arms, and be given greater dignity. And those rights are asserted without correspondingly increased senses of duties to larger communities. So this is one, I think, important problem of the current discussion of rights.
A second source of confusion has to do with the use of rights language to recast the old ideological battle between liberal democracy and socialism. By this I refer to the distinction between so-called first- and second-generation rights or between individual rights and social rights that are still being fought out in international human rights fora. It is my belief — I think there will be people in this room who will disagree — but I believe that this fight was, in practice, won by the proponents of first-generation rights after 1989. Because what that revolution I think indicated was that, as a matter of practice, though the second-generation rights were desirable, it was not possible to achieve them in real-world societies in any kind of comprehensive way, except at the expense of many of the first-generation rights. Particularly the right of private property, but also other kinds of rights of association and speech and the like. And that given a choice between those classes of rights, the first-generation rights were the most important.
The third source of confusion, I think, concerns cultural relativism. The argument that values are incommensurate and that the rights proceed from these different sources of values. I will get back to that in a moment. Now given all of this rights talk and confusion about rights, you might reasonably ask the question, shouldn’t we drop discussion of rights altogether, and simply retreat into a kind of utilitarian discussion simply of interests. I think I don’t have to tell this audience, above all, that this is simply not an option for any of us. The language of rights, of human rights, is the only avenue that we have in the present-day world. It is the only gateway that exists to a discourse on moral issues. We discuss the most important moral issues of our societies by discussing rights, and by arguing what the nature of rights are, and where they come from. And we cannot abandon this discourse on rights without abandoning an interest in morality itself.
Now let me talk about where rights come from, as a way to perhaps structure the confusion about the origin of rights. I think that it is possible to look at three sources. I believe in fact that they are comprehensive and that virtually any right that is asserted or has been asserted historically can fall into one of these three categories. They can come from God, they can come from man, himself or herself, and they can come from nature. Let me go through each of these in turn. The original source of rights was obviously God or religion. And this is a source of rights that we in the West have rejected since the beginning of the liberal enlightenment. John Locke’s “Second Discourse on Government” begins with a long polemic against Filmer, and the argument for the divine right of kings. And that secularism of Western conceptions of right is indistinguishable from the larger liberal tradition of the enlightenment itself. Now, today this would seem to be the major dividing line between Islam and the West. Because many Muslims object to the very secularism of the West and to the secular state in itself. Before we declare that this is, in fact; however, an insuperable cultural divide, I think that we need to consider why it is that the secular state arose in the West in the first place.
I think that the growth of modern liberalism and the rise of the secular state were born precisely in the inability of Western societies to reach a religious consensus over their political basis. And the background for that was the intense sectarian struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, the Czech Lands, where we hold this meeting, were the site of many bloody battles, sectarian battles between different sects of Christians contesting over which religious order would prevail in which territory. And it is precisely against the horror of things like the Thirty Years War, that early liberals like Hobbes and Locke and Montesquieu all began to argue that it was necessary to separate religion from politics, precisely because religious consensus would never be possible. I would argue that Islam faces a similar choice today. The insistence on the unity of religion and politics, I think, not only separates Muslims from Christians, or Muslims from the secular West, from Jews, from Hindus, from other cultural groups, but in the longer run, it seems to me that it is also going to separate Muslims from each other, for precisely the reasons that religion separated Christians from each other during the wars of religion in Europe. As our politicians, both East and West, have been telling us over the last few weeks, it is not clear that there is a single interpretation of Islam. It is not clear that Islam itself necessitates an intolerant fundamentalist view that unifies religion and political power. And, in fact, I think if you look at the world and the diversity of strands of Islam, both historically and at the present moment, it is clear that that is one among many choices. That there have been more liberal movements and ways of thought in Islam. I think that contemporary Iran, having experienced theocracy for the past twenty-three years, is likely to be an important source of that. And so I think that this is a question of secularism and the need for religious tolerance, one that Muslims themselves must contend with.
The second source of rights comes from man, or from society, or from a particular culture. This is the idea that rights are essentially positivistic. The view that whatever a society declares to be a right is in fact a right. By this view, there are only procedural tests of whether something is a right. For example, whether it is passed by a super-majority or passed by acceptable constitutional means, but no substantive tests for what human rights are. In other words, this is the opening wedge for cultural relativism with regard to discourse on human rights. Now, Huntington, as I mentioned, argues that this is the case of Western views of human rights, that the individual liberal rights to speech, religion, association, all asserted against state power or communal power of various sorts, are things that come uniquely out of the Western Christian tradition, and are not a universal value. And I think, in fact, that this is the essential question that we face today. Are those rights that we assert in the West truly universal and what are the appropriate claims of other cultures against them? Now, I think that as a historical fact, the relationship between Western Christianity and contemporary secular human rights is incontestable. It is not an accident that modern liberal notions of rights grew up in the soil of modern Christendom, and in particular after the Protestant Reformation. Any number of philosophers–Tocqueville, Hegel, even the arch-anti-democrat Nietzsche himself—argued that modern liberal democracy, is in fact a secularized form of Christianity. But despite that cultural origin, we have to ask ourselves whether the invention of this concept of rights, despite that fact that it comes from the West, is not in some sense a universal acquisition. And I think you can take an example of the scientific method, where you have a certain attitude towards nature, a certain way of manipulating nature, that was invented clearly in Europe, in the West, at a certain historical period of time, but once invented, becomes something like a universal possession that all people from all cultures can use. I think that the question of whether this is true of Western human rights is an open question. My own personal view is that they are universal in their content and as evidence, I would simply cite a couple of things. One is the de facto spread of democratic institutions that are the embodiment of those rights across different cultures over the decades of the twentieth century, across cultures that are not Western in their fundamental outlook and values.
And I would also point to the movement of people. Every year there are tens of millions of people that come from traditional societies, from non-Western societies, who seek to settle in the West and most of whom ultimately assimilate to its values. The flow of people going backwards, in the other direction, by contrast, is negligible. Which to me, indicates that a great majority of people around the world are in fact voting with their feet. And I think; furthermore, if we simply adopt a positivistic view of human rights, then most of the people in this room might as well just close up shop and go home tomorrow. Because there will ultimately be no basis for anyone to assert the right of an individual against any state, against any society that oppresses them. Because they will always be able to hide, as, for example, the Chinese government does routinely, behind the argument that we are simply acting in accordance with our own culture.
Now, the final source of rights is really an argument, I think, about nature. It is an argument that was taken seriously by the American founding fathers, who did not speak about human rights, but about natural rights. Over the past couple of centuries, this view of rights has been rejected, along with the concept that there is such a thing as a universal human nature. But I think it is a concept that needs to be seriously reconsidered. It is an argument that there are, in fact, universal attributes, specific to our species, that constitute the basis of human rights and our special human dignity. There is, in other words, a certain human essence that defenders of human rights seek to protect from the authority of other groups or states or tyrannies. And I think that in fact, this kind of view is implicit in the way that we speak about rights. We say, for example, that race, ethnicity, wealth, social class, gender, are all nonessential characteristics of human beings, that should not be the basis for the assignment of political or human rights. If we say that these are nonessential, it obviously implies that we believe that there is a substratum of humanness, that is essential. That is the source of our dignity that goes beyond these accidental characteristics. I think that you see this very much in the consideration, for example, of the rights of women. Either women are equal with respect to this natural substrate, or they’re not, and if they are, in fact, equal by nature, then it seems to be very hard to accept cultural
arguments that would assign them a subordinate place in a social structure. And so this I think ultimately for me is the reason that I continue to believe that there is a universality to rights. That there is a shared humanness that all of us must appeal to in our defense of these rights.
Now, the final question is what to do. If we grant that human rights are in theory universal, how do we act on this knowledge, and in particular, do we demand the implementation of these universal rights everywhere, and at all times, and in particular, do we seek to impose this sense of rights, just as it may seem to us, on culturally different people? Now here I think things get a little bit complicated. And I think it is important for all of us to distinguish between a theoretical belief in the universality of human rights, and the actual practice of supporting human rights around the world. And I would refer actually to the argument that Aristotle makes in the “Nicomachean Ethics”, where he says there is such a thing as natural rules of justice and of right, but that their application demands flexibility and circumstances, and I think that is very true of the present world. We may have common human natures, and a common shared essence that is the basis of our dignity, but we interact with those natures with our social and technological environments in different societies, such that our perceptions of these rights, I think, does in fact differ.
There is, I think, a way in which the modern sense of rights flows from the requirements of living in modern societies. Modern, Western human views of human rights are very individualistic. But there are many poor societies, less developed societies in which the kinds of choices facing individuals, for employment, for family, for work, for careers, for economic betterment are very limited. And the promotion of individual choice and individual rights in such a society is obviously a very jarring thing. So that rights, I think, cannot be abstracted from the other elements of modernization — the political part that has to do with institutions and the economic part that has to do with development and prosperity. And to simply argue in favor of rights without paying attention to giving people the wherewithal to create the other elements of modernity, I think, is to put in certain respects the cart before the horse. And so I think we need to think about human rights, and we need to retain our commitment to them and absolutely to retain our belief in their universality. But we also need to understand that that comes now in a particularly complex context in which we need to think about the other elements of modern societies of our universal civilization, which has to do with economic justice and with political democracy. Thank you very much for your attention.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Professor Fukuyama, for this splendid introduction not only to our morning’s panel, but I think to the whole discussion of the next three days. We have on the panel four speakers, and the first among them is Mr. Joachim Gauck. He was born in Rostock, where he studied theology. He was very closely associated, involved with the events of 1989-1990, in the overthrow of the Communist regime in East Germany. And his name, I think, is associated with the dismantling of one of the most repressive agencies of the totalitarian state, that is the East German Stasi, the secret police that kept files on all East German citizens. And so he is going to provide us, through his personal experience, also with his thoughts, about the issues of today, of the universality of human rights. Mr. Gauck.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will speak in German. As part of the Soviet system, Eastern Germany, my political home base, has forced me, within a certain microcosm, to face the same problems mentioned here by Francis Fukuyama. First, I will enter this microcosm, and soon we will find out at what distance from the horizon of these microcosms we find ourselves. I remember the nearly fifty years of life under a totalitarian regime, shared with me by many other people in this country. By this I mean that I remember the life of an individual and of a group with a limited autonomy, limited human and civil rights. One of the techniques employed by the totalitarian rulers was a consistent ridicule of the human rights discussion in the free world and within opposition groups. The “socialist culture” supposedly had better values than the culture in the West.
In reality, however, the culture of the rulers sought different values than the culture of the ruled. For the ruled, human rights were exceptionally important, only their own powerlessness prevented them from instituting the norms and regulations of human rights as the main politics in their own society. In the presence of Václav Havel, I here recall his words from the end of the 1980s, when he told his fellow citizens and by proxy, all the rest of us in the East: “The power of the powerful comes from the powerlessness of the powerless.” And for those of us who wanted to be emancipated, it really was political powerlessness, and not a different political culture, as our rulers wanted to make us believe in their own interest. And now we have all seen that these fortunate changes have occurred through peaceful revolutions, the content of which was a liberal, Western-style legal state.
This was successfully accomplished from the political point of view. At the same time, I am observing in my own country a loss of identity in response to the internalization of these free political ways of life. An incessant struggle exists in the culture, and the places that once brought about the feeling of intimate familiarity now cause feelings of estrangement. It sounds strange, but the empire of freedom, longed for by the people who lived in oppression, also comes to them as an unknown empire, as a world where one does not only win but where one can also lose, where a person needs to define his or her own existence, where it is necessary to present oneself with a confidence that one has never practiced before. People wished for all that, but at the same time they were not prepared and it was not in their blood, a person has what he or she longed for, but still partly feels that he or she lives in a foreign world, like a foreigner in a world that he or she in fact wished to have. That which oppressed me, oppressed me in my own language. That which I have felt as an oppressed individual, I fatally shared with other oppressed individuals, who in my language, my religion and in my way either protested, or, like Prague’s citizen Sweik, reacted by assimilating. An individual is, in fact, shaped in a definitive manner by circumstances that a part of our character may reject, but which nevertheless shape us. And if we have now lost those political circumstances that we have rejected, does this not simultaneously mean that we should now be filled with joy and enjoy the happiness of freedom? Yet, many of us react aggressively to the foreign, unknown situation. This is a short description of the feelings of people at the end of a dictatorship.

If we examine political history, we will find something similar on an international scale as well. When, after the French Revolution, the French exported the ideas of freedom, equality and brotherhood to the surrounding countries, our ancestors in both my native Germany and in Spain embraced the civil liberties. Yet at the same time those liberties were partly imported to the countries by people who wished to rule. And so there arose a strange dilemma — on the one hand, explosive, war-like clashes aimed against occupation; and on the other, a longing for liberal free rights. Civil liberties are becoming a reality, yet the hastiness with which individual freedom was imposed upon the fortunate countries by foreign masters and armies, and its foreign character created massive resistance movements based on national or religious sentiments. The one who brought freedom often also brought oppression of the nation. In fact, even the mother country of European revolutions, France, saw that large groups of farmers were very skeptical about the happiness of freedom, because they were supposed to give up the familiar form of religion and instead celebrate the religion of freedom.
We encounter such elements of progress and foreign domination in Asia and Africa in the form of many types of colonizers. Some of the nations on these continents experience the same storms of freedom as France did. In some cultures, progress follows, as the most recent Nobel laureate Francis Fukuyama already mentioned. He pointed out that, for example, the British installed a legal code in the territories they occupied, which was completely new and quite important for the oppressed classes. And still, this progress in the area of legal code, for example, was not considered to be a fortunate one for the whole nation in the occupied territories. The opening contribution was concerned with the role of political enlightenment, and the West was presented as a product of the modern era. Long struggles within the Western countries between traditionalists, and the fact that neither monarchist nor religious ideals were conducive to societal progress, were brought up. This means that when we observe the global conflict today, then we in Europe see our own struggles, historical eras and the large amounts of blood. I am thankful that the speaker before me mentioned the Thirty Years War, which had a catastrophic impact on Europe but also a large influence. It is possible to say, after all, that in these countries we have achieved a certain luxury — which are equal rights for all citizens.
But this luxury has also often been accompanied by a certain loss. An example of such a loss is an insufficient knowledge of the environment, so that during the consolidation of large states, people’s home countries are sometimes lost. For example, the German people, following one of the few victories in their history in 1871, had immediately become a part of a large empire, the German Empire, but many of them were unhappy because they had to give up their regional identities. And this is occurring again, which means that progress is connected to the submission of mentality. Recently I have read an article by Benasir Bhutto, who demanded for her Islamic world a certain kind of reformation, and who, in relation to this, specifically mentioned a man whose political work was quite important for my political life, Martin Luther. She expressed the opinion that in the Islamic world, where Benasir Bhutto is at home, these differences, of course, exist and that we can already observe them among scientists, intellectuals, citizens, who have already adopted human rights and who already practice a proto-step of a modern, enlightened religiosity. And with much tension, I shall await whether that which occurred in the past in my own church, and which keeps occurring again when fundamentalist movements take the stage, will create some commotion in the part of the world that I do not know. Above all, we must differentiate between the feeling of estrangement that occurs when we lose familiar things, regardless of whether they are good or bad, and which goes hand in hand with progressive enlightenment, from the feeling of estrangement that is not unconditionally necessary when a modern governing power replaces powerlessness that outlived itself.
And I am very grateful to the speaker before me who emphasized that a change of perspective is the precondition for a positive attitude toward human rights. I am more or less convinced that the oppressed of this world, regardless of what form their oppression takes, considered the definition of universal human rights as progress for them personally, for their countries and for their cultures. And so it is possible to put a small experience, which I have had in my own little part of Europe, in connection with the repeated reminders of the basic values of the democracy project in Europe and North America. It is important that this project is not credited to one culture only,
but for the sake of freeing the oppressed, it is necessary to emphasize the universality of human rights. And if there is such thing as a clash of civilizations, then it should be a clash between the enlightened debate of the democracy project and the proto-step of enlightened political attitudes. The West must, however, insist on its values and must not pretend as if it were only a question of cultural indifference. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much Mr. Gauck. You’ve raised a number of important issues, including the one to which I’m sure we will return, that is, can human rights be exported? If the French Revolution shows the limits of the exercise, one could argue, of course, that at least part of Germany after World War II, is the example of the opposite. Our next speaker is Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, a Cuban human rights activist, Chairman of the Board of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. I’m particularly struck with this combination: human rights and national reconciliation. We are very much looking forward to hearing you. The floor is yours.

Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz
First of all, I have to emphasize that this is the first time that one of us Cuban human rights activists is participating in these very important talks of the Forum 2000. During the previous years the Cuban government either blocked this opportunity or used delaying maneuvers to make participation impossible.
I came from Cuba, which, like every other country, has its special circumstances, primarily cultural ones. Even though at times, especially on our island, the government confuses our minds, because in its official rhetoric it speaks of certain principles and rights, which all of us present here believe in, as if they were the principles of visions of the West. And then, many of us ask ourselves, where on Earth do we Cubans find ourselves if not in the very heart of the West? I came to you from the only closed society in the Western hemisphere, from the streets of our country and from the prison of our country. At the moment, we are experiencing a situation similar to the one that many of those present here such as Havel, Michnik, Kovalyov and others have experienced, because unfortunately, a totalitarian system of government prevails in my country, which is very sad.
Except for certain historical and geopolitical factors, which should not be disregarded, such as the enmity between the governments of Washington, D.C. and Havana – an enmity, which, by the way, has nothing to do with the actual interests of people of the United States and Cuba – it remains beyond any rational doubt that Cuba is the only closed society of the Western hemisphere. In this respect, I should present one explanation: due to the small amount of understanding of the Cuban reality, there is confusion about certain domains. We have witnessed demonstrations of such misunderstanding in the realm of left-wing politics, specifically in Latin America and Europe. In this respect, I would like to emphasize the following: there is no doubt that in January 1959, a victorious revolution took place in Cuba, one that at the time was supported by practically every Cuban citizen, including the one who is speaking to you now and who was then a student. This revolution awakened the hopes of Cubans as well as those of millions of Latin Americans and other regions. But as Mexican General Pancho Villa would say, the situation in Cuba got complicated as the revolution began to transform itself into a government. The enormous reformative power of the 1959 revolution, but also the acceptance of the totalitarian Soviet model and substantial economic support offered by Eastern Europe and — most importantly — the non-nonexistent Soviet Union, led to the growth of wide-ranging social and cultural programs; and similar to East Germany or Bulgaria prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to give an example, for decades, the Cuban children had and have their place in schools, or, if someone falls ill, he or she has the opportunity to be treated by a doctor without having to directly pay for the service. Even though it has to be said that following the collapse of the Soviet Union as a political entity, the educational, medical and hygienic material in Cuba began to gradually and dramatically fall, as this entire system was based on enormous material help that the Soviet Union sent to the Cuban government.
The situation of human rights in Cuba, and here I would like to talk about what we Cubans have in front of us as our goal, at least in my opinion, may be characterized by very visible contrasts, much like it was in Central and Eastern Europe and still is in Northern Korea, and to some extent, in China. As far as social and cultural rights are concerned, those are thus far quite positive, even though they have worsened to a degree during the past decade. And so the status attained in this area by Cubans remains a major goal in many Latin American countries and in some southern regions till this day. In the area of civil, political, and economic rights, however, the situation is entirely different, because nearly all of these are systematically and institutionally violated. It is basically the same as in Central and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I will not speak on this issue for long, because this is my first time at an event like this, so I should rather learn than present ideas that will not be that original anyway.
But inspired by the words of Elie Wiesel, Mr. Havel, but also by other people who spoke before me such as Mr. Fukuyama, I will, in the name of my colleagues who fight for human rights in Cuba, mention something that will be quite obvious to all present: the fact that recently, we have had to rediscover, or rather deepen, our conviction, especially following the disgusting crime against the people of the United States on the 11th of September, that there exists a direct connection between human rights and terrorism. I cannot present here some discovered theory on this topic, because in Cuba, we live as if we were on the bottom of a well. This is because one of
the most systematically violated rights by Cuban government is the right to information. Cuba is the only country in the Western hemisphere where the Internet is banned from public use, and where only the government or foreign diplomats or businessmen have access to it, and so it is very hard for an average Cuban like me to find out about what is happening, or about the mainstreams of international thinking. But despite this lack of information, during current discussions with my colleagues under the conditions of virtual illegality, because we are under the direct supervision of our own Stasi, something that Mr. Gauck knows very well.
We are under the very careful supervision of a powerful, secret police, which is the main instrument of civil and political rights violations in my country. Despite this situation, we have had a lively discussion on this topic in Havana, and we were interested in the fact that those places that suffer from the greatest problems with human rights violations are the main sources of terrorism and of guilt for this terrorism. This is why it is necessary to keep stepping up our fight for human rights, because this fight will also become an effective instrument in the fight against terrorism and other plagues that fall on the world community, such as extreme poverty. I believe that statesmen and international nongovernmental organizations ought to multiply their effort in fighting for human rights, seeing that they are evidently connected with the problem of terrorism. In this respect it suffices to look at the reports of Amnesty International, the UN Commission for Human Rights, or those of other organizations, and observe the situation in places where terrorists congregate, and from which their main political and financial support originates, and where terrorists, people who are undoubtedly doing evil, are hidden. And it does not matter what philosophical or religious arguments they are using in defense of their acts, even in contradiction to these doctrines. As far as I know, Islam, to mention at least one religion, but also the others, strives to improve the conditions of human existence, of the civilization as a whole, and tries to better individual human beings.
To conclude, I would like to say, in my name and in the name of my colleagues, that we are all convinced of the universality of human rights, basic rights of the human being, and so we pay no attention to statements about their relative nature. Thank you very much.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you, thank you very much, Mr. Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz. We are very fortunate to have you among us. Our next speaker is Teofisto Guingona. He’s Vice President of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the Philippines. He has also been a senator since 1987. His name is associated in his country with the peace talks he carried under the Aquino administration, and particularly with the struggle against corruption. I will ask you to speak and perhaps not go beyond the ten minutes. I am very liberal, I certainly wouldn’t want to infringe on the human rights to speak of all of the panelists, but simply to preserve the rights of the discussion after. I would ask you to stick to the ten minutes. Thank you very much.

Teofisto T. Guingona
Thank you. President Havel, Excellencies, distinguished personalities, ladies and gentlemen. The attacks in New York and Washington on September 11th constitute a severe and shocking violation of human rights. The victims had a right to live, they had a right to work, to promote life, to enrich values, to happiness, moved by their own visions. All these were stifled in a matter of minutes. All shattered in the senseless wake of death and destruction. Explanations have been made for the hatred that drove more than a dozen suicide terrorists to do what they did. But none can justify. For the right to life and all other rights that flow therefrom do not stem from tradition or agreements alone. The right to life, whether of diverse religions or ethnicity, comes from the human character of man himself. He has mind and reason, spirit and substance, and the collective conscience of mankind tells us that the human right is a reality that must be respected. The right to life negates the act to kill. The right to work negates the act to suppress. The right to worship his own god negates the right to suppress. Most of these rights have been enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Man. And although some basic debates concerning powers of government versus rights of individuals still persist, the general mandate seems generally accepted and the command to respect human rights is directed not only to persons alone, but also to governments and multinational entities, in the wake of globalization.
The attacks by the coalition led by the United States and Great Britain on Afghanistan started on October 8. Let us all hope that the fighting will not unduly escalate, will not unduly kill innocent civilians needlessly and will not result in further degradation of human rights. Let us all hope that the blessings of justice and peace and respect for human rights will eventually result and arise out of the chaos of war. But the main challenge is: Will the war escalate or not? There exist speculations that the military attacks will escalate based on the premise that there exist more than twenty terrorist organizations in several countries, and that in order to stifle these organizations, the coalition is left with no other recourse but to go against them wherever they are, in whatever land and country.
Take the Philippines. We have a rich land, but our people are poor. We have about seven million Muslim brothers and sisters living the southern Philippines, out of a population of about seventy-five million. I had the privilege of being brought up living with our brother Muslims in the southern part of the Philippines. Before the war, as a young boy, I grew up with them. I lived with them, studied with them, played basketball with them, and there was no talk of any strife then between Muslims and Christians. No talk of sharia being invoked against the Constitution. We lived in peace and harmony. But then after the war, there were some abuses, and certain officials came who declared the imposition of martial rule and therefore the abuses became more dominant. And disregard for human rights more eminent. Because of that, there were two, or three organizations that arose in Muslim Mindanao. The MNLF, or the Moral National Liberation Army, with whom we had a peace accord in 1996, led by Nur Misuari. The second one, the MILF, the Moral Islamic National Liberation, led by Salamat Hashim, with whom we are at present having an agreement of cease fire and negotiating a meaningful peace. And a third group, which is a bandit organization, the Abu Sayyaf, headed by Abu Sabaya, whose intent is to kidnap people and ask for ransom, have been denounced by even the most Muslim fundamentalists as mere bandits, and their acts as un-Islamic. We have today, our forces in the Philippines, engaged in battle not only to rescue the hostages, but also to eradicate this bandit group. And we are doing it on our own. Only last week, there was a major battle where twenty Abu Sayyafs were killed and about seventeen soldiers critically wounded.
But we will handle them and eventually lift the sufferings of people there. But if the coalition attacks because the Abu Sayyaf is linked with Osama bin Laden, then I do not know what the reaction of the Muslim population in Mindanao will be. I do not know what the reaction of the Muslims in our neighboring countries, Indonesia to the right, Malaysia to the left, will be. But if the attack comes, the war in that part of the globe will surely escalate and it may duplicate in other parts of the world. For the escalation will take place and then we will see another Holocaust — perhaps the clash of civilizations that was disputed here. Perhaps the confrontation of cultures. Perhaps the conflagration that we do not want to happen, will happen. And so, therefore, that kind of escalation will breed more violations of human rights. The fleeing refugees, the specter of a young man, a boy, hungry, unable to sleep in the night. The tortures that will come up because of a desire to get information. The killings that will ensue because of a desire to attain a strategic victory in a certain place.
And, therefore, I hope that this scenario will not happen. And perhaps the United Nations at the appropriate time can come in, because the United Nations is the respected body, after all, mandated to maintain the peace wherever it can. It is respected by both cultures. It is respected by many countries around the world. And I hope that the United Nations, at the appropriate time, can come in to prevent the escalation of war. But Mr. President, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, while that specter, that possibility, should be prevented at all costs, we should concentrate against a violation of human rights. Because today, even in nations which subscribe to respect for human rights, wanton violations are committed every day. Perhaps not as damaging or shocking as the tragedies of September 11th, but collectively as eroding and debilitating to the human soul and spirit. I speak of real happenings. As I said, I come from the Philippines where many of our people are poor, and poverty invites exploitation in many forms. In our country, because of poverty, many, numbering more than seven million, have gone abroad to distant places to seek a better life. Workers, nurses, doctors, domestics. And when they go to a different land, they meet a clash of cultures in some instances. Some local recruiters in our country connive with foreign exploiters of migrant labor. They go to the countryside, to the provinces, to offer innocent women the prospect of good employment as waitresses, singers,
bartenders, with good pay. And many in poverty accept.
One such woman, a minor, barely sixteen years old, became an innocent victim when the offer came. She told her unsuspecting father about the prospect, who willingly sold the family caribou for several thousand pesos needed to send the daughter to Manila, to prepare her for the journey abroad. The recruiters brought her to Manila, to a safe house for a few days while the papers were being processed. And then when everything was ready, the girl departed with no one to say goodbye except a friend from the province. Upon reaching the destination, the girl knew no one, she did not speak the language, had no known contact with anyone whatsoever and when they arrived, what appeared to be an officer asked her for her travel documents. Her papers, her passports, her visa, her entry statement. The poor victim did not know any better, and in her innocence she gave everything away, all the documents. And then she was asked to ride a small bus. She was brought to a faraway place, not to a restaurant or an entertainment place, in a rural area. And when they arrived at the remote house, she was brought upstairs, doors and windows closed, and then a man entered and locked the door. No ceremonies, no other things except that the man gruffly grabbed her, told her to undress, and when she hesitated he started ripping. He placed a pillow unto her face, and he started ripping apart her clothes and then raped her. A useless cry of pain for her. Agony, tears, and then after the man sated his lust, he left. The victim, after he left, thought her agony was over, only to be confronted soon by another man. Again he ravished her, again like an enraged animal in the forest, this was repeated not twice but thrice and in a sordid deed, when she was lapsing into a coma, the man administered drugs to her prostrate and broken figure in order to stimulate her and then he ravished her anew. And after the third abuser had left, still wobbly, but stimulated by hate and fear, she desperately broke the windows, squeezed through and jumped. She gasped for breath, stood shakily and began to walk. Not knowing where to go, as long as she left. She did not know for how long she had trodded. But perhaps by the grace of God, two women from a charitable institution met her. They took her to their home, nursed her so she would take appropriate action against the culprits in that foreign land. All to no avail. She could not locate the house, she could not identify the perpetrators, could not describe the person who drove the bus.
Yet trafficking of women and children is an international crime that cries to the heavens for remedy. Again, may I ask, can we not prevent this kind of violation of human rights? Can we not hasten the demand to treat this as an offense beyond borders, obligating governments to help prosecute, whether at the situs of the offense or in the country of the offended party, where she has returned. Permit me to quote from the remarks of President Václav Havel, who said, and I quote, “I am convinced that the deepest roots of that which we now call human rights lies somewhere beyond us, above us, somewhere deeper than the world of human covenants. In a realm that I would, for simplicity’s sake, describe as metaphysical. Although they may fail to realize this, human beings are the only creatures who are fully aware of their own being, and of their own mortality and who perceive their surroundings as a world and have an inner relationship to that world, derive their dignity as well as their responsibility from the world as a whole. That is from that in which they see the world’s central theme, its back- bone, its order, its direction, its essence, its soul. Name it as you will. Christians say it simply - man is here in the image of God.”
Sometimes violations of human rights spring from diverse cultures and religion, different laws, different legal systems, peculiarities in race and ethnic traits. When a Filipino migrant goes to another country, he remains a Filipino. He wants to worship God on Sundays, he wants to hear a priest or a pastor, where available, and he cannot understand why he is forbidden to do so under pain of punishment. If he does these under charges that he is fomenting another religion, he cannot understand. And yet cultural peculiarities are, at most variations, an expression of universal principles, because when the nationals who prohibit go to our country, they certainly are not prevented in any form from fully expressing or exercising their religion. As a matter of fact, many hotels and public inns have space precisely for ecumenical service, for those who desire services according to their own faith. Let, therefore, the fundamental commonality of people, embodied in man’s inherent nature, be he from any part of the world, render possible the tolerance of man’s right to practice his religion and give recognition to such as a respected human right. Pope John Paul II stresses that, and I quote, “transcending all differences which distinguish individuals and peoples, there is a distinguishing commonality, a fundamental commonality. For different cultures have different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. And it is precisely here that we find one source of the respect that is due to every culture and every nation. Every culture is an effort to ponder the mystery of the world and, in particular, of the human person. It is a way of expressing, a way of giving expression, to the transcendent dimension of human life.” I close quote.
Finally, permit me to comment on globalization in relation to human rights. Ladies and gentleman, just as a house divided cannot stand, so will a world divided continue to be a world of strife. Seared in blood by national and regional and world wars, now a new dimension in terrorism has set in. Yet the response to terrorism is intended to eradicate it by reviewing the root causes of the great divide. One of these root causes is the disregard for human rights, which embodies the respect for another life, another religion, another race, a culture, unity in equality as human beings. Unity as men and
women before God. Unity and diversity. I therefore salute your President, renowned playwright and fighter for human rights, and we pray together and act together to ensure human rights. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you, thank you very much to the Vice President of the Philippines for his words. We particularly hope that the pessimistic scenario he has outlined will not materialize. Our last speaker in this morning’s panel, before the break, is Kelly Cristine Ribeiro. She took part in the Students’ Forum 2000. She’s a delegate from Brazil, working in the field of informal education, mainly in the areas of social management and sustainable development. Please, and I would implore you to stick to the time limit. We are slightly behind schedule. Thank you very much for your understanding.

Kelly Cristine Ribeiro
Thank you. Good morning, dearest ladies and gentlemen. It’s really a great pleasure to be here among you. I‘d like to congratulate Forum 2000 Foundation for this so inspiring event, and also a special thank you to Students’ Forum 2000. I have learned a lot with you in the last month. I’m sure that I don’t have anything really new to say to you. Nothing that you hadn’t thinking before. But anyway, I’d like to speak about a really strong feeling that I have about human rights and about the theme of this morning. I was thinking to myself, in which extent the perspective of human rights really can change from culture to culture. What is really different from culture to culture, and what is really important about human rights. Not to try to answer this question, of course, but only trying to reflect on this theme. I think that it’s really important that we distinguish between the shape and the essence. The shape, the form, that each culture and individual gives to their necessities of love, security, freedom, wisdom and much more. And the needs in themselves. What is essential to each human being of this Earth. In the conference in July, we spent some time just discussing the different concepts of human rights from culture to culture, and it was really interesting when in the end we just discovered that we had a lot in common. Problems, solutions, feelings, and so on. I think that the first step to walking in the direction of a better world is really to recognize this common base that we have as human rights. And so in the second step, to use our different backgrounds, our diversity as a knowledge that belongs to the Earth, to the entire humanity. This perspective — in what ways we are similar, in what we have in common, our base, our essence, common feelings that we can share — could be used with the whole knowledge that we are able to generate, that it’s in our hands.
I see all you, and I think here there are a lot of people with a lot of knowledge and backgrounds and I really would like to see this spreading throughout the entire humanity. I really would like to see a more integrated view and holistic view, that I can see here, in this moment, spreading across the entire world. The day after what happened in the USA, I was in a community of Brazil, called Pai Pedro, that means “Father Peter”. It’s a really small city with less than six thousand inhabitants, and according to the United Nations, the city is below the poverty line. And over two days, I was talking with young people and it was really interesting to realize their perplexity in being, dealing with miserable people. The sense that I saw there, and that I can see everywhere, is that people want a present, a future, of love and of life. Just to finish, I really pray and I hope that this integrated view can be in all our discussions and actions. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
I think a number of issues have been raised by the opening speakers, by Elie Wiesel, by Professor Fukuyama, in particular, who gave us really a very interesting, very remarkable introduction to our discussion, and I hope that we can return to some of the points he has raised. I have as the first speaker, who has asked to intervene, is Mr. Al-Khoei, from the Al-Khoei Foundation in London. Mr. Al-Khoei, please, the floor is yours.

Discussion

Yousif al-Khoei
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
As a Muslim, I’m quite horrified, like I’m sure, as are the overwhelming majority of the Muslims around the world, by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. For three reasons. First, obviously, the loss of so many innocent lives, which is utterly condemned in the holy book of Koran. The loss of one innocent life equals the loss of the whole humanity in the Koran. And, also, let us not forget that many of the victims in those terrorist attacks, some thousands of them, were of the Muslim faith. And this is largely ignored by the media. Secondly, I am sad because the great faith of Islam, which is encompassed by one-fifth of humanity, has become the main victim of this tragedy with very, very serious consequences for the future. The third reason why I’m sad is because the children in our schools — we have Islamic schools in London and New York — have to face constant harassment, a barrage of intimidation and racism of no fault of their own. And there is a very strong possibility, that, if this kind of language, some of which we heard this morning, continues, these children will develop a siege mentality with very, very serious consequences for generations to come. It is quite ironic, actually, as a lot of our children, actually have fled as a result of being persecuted by the Taliban. And these very, very victims in the eyes of many — I have to say not so many — but the few racists, have become themselves disliked. On the question of clash of civilizations, between the civilized and uncivilized worlds, and the use of terms such as “Islamic terrorism” and so forth, we have to be very careful not to turn the theory of clash of civilizations into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is no civilized and uncivilized world. There is only one world, and the evils of terrorism. Terrorism is terrorism. There is no Islamic, Jewish, or Christian terrorism.
My final point is to do with regards to — a point raised by Mr. Rupnik — the clash between fundamentalist Islam and human rights. I would say, if you actually go back to the fundamentals of Islam, the very early days of Islam, it’s actually extremely progressive. It emphasizes the respect for life and property. It talks about dialogue with other faiths. There’s a whole chapter in the Koran about Mary and Jesus. There is freedom of worship, lakum deenakum waliya deen, which means: “You have your religion, I have mine”. There are a lot of verses empowering women. Islam, don’t forget, gave women a legal personality some 1400 years ago when Europe was living in the Dark Ages. Islam worked hard to abolish slavery. Islam spoke about respect for the environment. I think it’s really all our duty to encounter these profound explorations of the tradition and tolerance within each religion — it’s not just Islam, but within each religion — and not allow the bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins of today to hijack the Islamic agenda. Thank you very much.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Mr. Al-Khoei, for your comments. Our next speaker is someone well-known in this country because he’s the former American Ambassador to the Czech Republic, John Shattuck. Mr. Shattuck, please.

John Shattuck
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for this opportunity to intervene at this moment in this conference which has such power and meaning, I think, to all of us at this moment of great difficulty in the world and certainly, as an American, I am very gratified for the expressions of concern that have been offered by many here at this conference regarding the events of September 11th.
I just want to make a very brief comment following on the last intervention and picking up on the challenge that you, Jacques Rupnik and Francis Fukuyama, also, gave to us regarding the question of universality of human rights. I think in the context of September 11th, perhaps the most important way to look at this question of universality, is to look at what it is that human kind needs above all at this moment. And I would say that what we need, in the context of these very different values and civilizations and cultures that we have in the world, while at the same time this humanness that has been expressed by several speakers as the core of universality, what we need is tolerance. What we need is tolerance and understanding of each others’ cultures, particularly each others’ religions. Because it is not only a moral value, it is a strategic value. We will not survive as a civilization unless — and when I say a civilization I mean a human civilization of those core values, there are of course many civilizations — tolerance of different approaches is fully embraced. And I think what that means is very similar to what, I believe it was Mr. Sasakawa, who last night in his speech referred to what we in Christianity call the golden rule, but also Confucius and Hillel and other great traditions of the world, religious traditions, have also expressed, which is certainly we need to do unto others as we would do unto ourselves, but we also need to be sure that we understand that what is good for us is not necessarily always what is good for others. That is the heart of tolerance. And tolerance is in many ways, at this moment, the ultimate human right. The right to live in a world which tolerates difference, difference of value. Because that toleration of difference of value is not relativity, it is in fact the ultimate underlying human quality that we all share. And if we do not tolerate each other, we are going in the wrong direction, and September 11th is a terrible, terrible sign of where we are headed.
But I believe the universal values of human rights, boiled down to the principle of tolerance, captured in the golden rule and the rule of all the great religions in the world, in fact points us in the other direction. And, so, as we begin this conference, Mr. Chairman, I would just make that observation. That is the, at least in my view, underlying universal principle of human rights at this moment, as we start the twenty-first century, after the terrible events of September 11th. Thank you very much.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you, thank you very much, Ambassador Shattuck. I’m sure that this, you’ve really pointed to the spirit in which these, our discussions are carried out, and I immediately give the floor to His Eminence Sheikh Ali, who asked to speak. The floor is yours.

Sheikh Mohammed Mohammed Ali
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
I have two comments of the speeches this morning. The first comment, that human rights is indeed universal in theory. However, in its applicability, it requires flexibility and consideration of particular national and cultural identities, without losing the spirit behind these concepts of human rights. The second comment, I think perceiving the current situation as a clash of civilizations is not useful and will not create the proper environment for advancing global human rights. We should view the universality of human rights in the context of shared civilization. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much for your comments. The next speaker is Adam Michnik, who I think doesn’t need any introduction in this room. He is nevertheless the publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza, the leading Polish daily. Adam.

Adam Michnik
I would like to ask one question regarding the clash of civilizations: Was the clash between Nazism and democracy a clash of civilizations or not? Because I am certain that it is not a clash of civilizations in the way that Huntington sees it. But do we think that there exist totalitarian civilizations of Christian origin, Marxist-Leninist origin, or Muslim origin, and that the conflict between totalitarian utopia and totalitarian politics — such as terror — is a clash of civilizations or not? This is my question. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you, Adam Michnik, for your very interesting and important question. I wish I had heard also elements of the answer to it from you, but maybe that will come in the discussion. The next, I think, Elie Weisel wanted to respond to some of the comments made.

Elie Wiesel
Mainly two remarks. First, Mr. Al-Khoei, I, too, deplore anything that has been done as a consequence of September 11th to Islamic people, to Muslims anywhere. It happened in our country as well. Not many occurrences, but even one would be too many. I do not believe in collective guilt. And, therefore, we have no right to assault, to offend, to humiliate, to wound, to shame simply a person because he or she is Muslim or Buddhist or Christian or any other, of any other religions. They are human beings, in our country they are citizens of our country, but even if they were not, we should never, never attack them and make them responsible for what the terrorists have done, to us first, human beings, and to Islam, but first of all the major victims were human beings.
Second, I don’t like a word that has been used today, with very good intentions. I don’t like the word tolerance. Tolerance is in a way, I don’t know, it’s degrading. Who am I to tolerate you? You are a free person. I would rather replace it with respect. We should fight for respect. I must respect other religions, I must respect other political theories, unless they become murderous. But in general it is the key word, at least, that should govern these discussions and perhaps our lives. Thank you.

Edith Awino
Thank you very much. My name is Edith Awino, Kenyan delegate for the Students’ Forum. I would just like to make a brief comment about the whole question of language. I’m shifting, of course, a little bit of the focus here from September 11th. But I would like to say that a lot of times we use language that is very contradictory to the whole issues for which we argue. We say when we argue for the whole universality of human rights, that it is not Western imposition, while we still continue to use topologies such as traditional society, vis-a-vis Western, or modern societies. If we sit here today and argue that we believe that human rights are universal, we have to shift focus and move away from placing communities and people into topologies and little boxes that describe them. Thank you.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, perhaps I could respond to Adam Michnik’s question about whether fascism or the struggle against fascism constituted a clash of civilizations. I suppose because fascism did not pretend to be, or at least German fascism did not, pretend to be universal, that you could subsume it into some different category. It wasn’t really a child of the enlightenment, it was, a much more reactionary kind of movement. On the other hand, there was a modern element to fascism because the national identity to which national socialism aspired was a utopian one that never existed. They didn’t want to go back to these German tribes living in the woods. It was some combination of German identity plus, modern, in fact, socialist institutions. And in that sense, it was quite utopian; and in that sense, it was I think a kind of modern phenomenon. And so I think it’s not something that’s usefully understood in the context of a clash of civilizations, which I think really refers back to religion and, cultural values that were longer standing than those that the fascists tried to create.

Comment from audience

I just want to say, the problem is not so much whether there is clash of civilizations, or human rights is universal or cultural. I don’t actually believe that the deep root of it is even religious. What you do actually see is two worlds, if you like, to call it the North and the South, and it so happens that much of the Muslim world is the underdeveloped world, is economically impoverished. You look at Afghanistan, ninety-five percent illiteracy rate, I mean, what do you expect better than that? And, unfortunately, some of the great and good in the world have sometimes found it easier to invest in arms and support the bin Ladens of today than to spend that money on education and development of these people. And I think as long as this gap stays there, and it is being widened, you will have all the problems, not just terrorism, the problems of population movements from South to North, the problems of people being angry, people being jealous, call it what you like. But I think the root problem is some, if you like, superpowers of all kinds have found it easier also to use human rights and its universality as a stick against the powers which they don’t particularly like. And there is a genuine mood amongst most people, and I think it’s very deep-rooted and very genuine, of double standards. I personally believe some of the terrorism you have seen today has come from countries which are Islamic, which are not very human rights-friendly, but they happen to be friends of the West, and they have, by and large, managed to have big transfers of money and checked and this is what you get. So I think the West should seriously reexamine, critically look at its policy, and not just use the rhetoric of human rights to advance its causes. Thank you very much.

Albert Friedlander
Yes. I think our problem is very much bound up in language. Several people have already indicated that, particularly, our paradigms of thought have shattered over these past decades. After Auschwitz, theology changed — had to change. After the eleventh of September, again within theology, but not only in theology, but also in terms of politics, even economics. We come into a situation where we have to start using different language. Language is becoming more inclusive even in prayer. It still remains exclusive when it comes to the fact that very often there is a concordat between religion and the state. And the state utilizes religion or religion uses the power of the state to enforce old, outmoded creeds and patterns of life that exclude large members of society from the benefits that are to be accrued by the society in which we live. We speak of universal values and they are valid to us, must be valid. And as it has been said, it is in the attempt to realize them that we encounter different patterns of life, different cultures, different ways of thinking. And until, really, religion and other areas that are represented here today come to recognize that they have to move into totally new patterns of appreciation of both themselves, society and of their vision of the ultimate, of the divine, they cannot really come into a true dialogue with each other. And this to me is one of the basic aspects of our coming together today.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. The next speaker is Jostein Gaarder, the author of
Sophie’s World. Maybe he will tell us how he would have explained to Sophie
what the universality of human rights are.

Jostein Gaarder
Well, maybe by these few words. You know, it feels almost like a taboo to ask what role religion may play for terrorism, and I’m not suggesting that the attacks against the United States were inspired by true Islam. But the terrorists themselves say so. I would rather plead that terrorism in the name of God is blasphemous to Islam. In a totally intolerable way, the terrorists put God’s rights above international institutions and human rights, and they are definitely not the first in history to do so. Now, I would say to Sophie that human rights and international conventions are to a wide extent based on ethics and commandments for human conduct that was first expressed within a religious frame or context. Many of the basic principles of human rights and human responsibility are thus in harmony, with the very essence of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. There is a core of human rights and humanism in all world religions. The ethics of different religions have more in common than they are in conflict, or differ. Compassion with people and strong commitment for justice in the world community is often inspired by religious experience and practice. Nevertheless, through history and in the world today, we also see severe violations of human rights in the name of God. We have repeatedly seen how human rights have been replaced by God’s rights, more or less in the same way as human rights have often been replaced by the higher order of ideological, revolutionary or ethnic rights. So exactly where can we draw the borders between tolerable religious differences and intolerable fanaticism? Now, my point is, in the first book of the Bible or the Torah, we read about Abraham, who obeyed God’s demand and was willing to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, in the middle of the nineteenth century, has analyzed this drama and calls it a religious suspension of ethics. The ethical notion for Abraham’s act is that he was willing to murder Isaac. The religious notion is that he was about to sacrifice him. Abraham exceeded human and ethical principles in regard of a higher purpose or service. Kierkegaard explains that the conception of coherence between the universal, or human, and the religious, or divine, is a relatively new invention. So are the universal declarations of human rights. This stumbling block of God’s demand is a common inheritance for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is, of course, contradictory to many other and later aspects of the three religions, but it has through history been revived again and again. So, I think this is a paradox, if we look back on history all the big three monotheistic religions share. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. The next speaker is Mr. de Klerk, former President of
South Africa.

Frederik Willem De Klerk
I was intrigued by some aspects of the debate so far. Somehow or another I would just like to remind all the panelists that, while we are all of us — in a state of shock about what has happened in New York — joined in our common view that terrorism should be rooted out wherever it occurs. What I want to remind everybody of, is that this should not cloud also our memory on the terrible abuse of human rights which occurs beyond the realms of terrorism. We should not forget the millions of people who are dying in civil wars. We should not forget the millions of children who are dying of hunger. If we ask of them or those around them, what is the main problem affecting your life? What is robbing you of all human dignity? It is poverty in many cases. It is an absolute lack of opportunity in many cases. If you analyze Africa, the main problem in Africa, underlying all the conflicts, can be related to two main causes. The one is, failure to manage diversity. It’s a clash of cultures. And there I disagree with Professor Fukuyama. We should not be forced to make choices and say this is a primary right and this is a secondary right. If people kill each other, because there isn’t a system in place which can make people live peacefully together in the same country, then the underlying cause of the abuse of human rights is failure to accommodate cultural differences. I don’t think we should seek in this debate for an absolute truth. If I can, on the issue of identity, just say, all of us, none of us, just have one common identity and that is that we’re human beings. Let me take me and President Mandela. Yes, we’re human beings. We were born in the same country. We love the same country. We are both advocates of peace. We have many things in common. But to him, as well as to me, it’s important that he’s a Xhosa and I’m an Afrikaaner. To him, as well as to me, it’s important that, apart from being Xhosa and Afrikaaner, we’re South Africans, which brings us together again. To both of us it’s important that we’re Africans. We come from a continent. So all us have many facets. A Basque is a Basque, he’s a Spaniard, he’s a European, he’s a human being. And of the twenty-seven most serious conflicts across the world, only two are between countries. Twenty-five take place between people living in the same country. And this brings me just to a point where I feel — while I agree in general that the concept social rights has been misused — that in the name of social rights, fascism, tyranny has flourished. I agree with that. But I think individual human rights should also, with regard to certain aspects of life form, find a place in a concept such as, let’s call it community rights, or collective rights. Let’s just look at linguistic groups. To say to an individual, you have a right that your language should be respected and you have a right in this country because it’s one of, as in our case, eleven official languages, to use it. What can the individual do if he doesn’t get that respect? But if you impose a duty on the state to say there is eleven linguistic communities in this country and legislation should take that into account, and education should create room and space for these linguistic communities to be themselves, then you, yet then you prepare what Elie Wiesel has called a culture of mutual respect. And without mutual respect we will not resolve the many conflicts which go on all around the world. I therefore make a plea, not for relativism, but for realism within our debate. And the realism that I am seeking lies in the fact that we must look also in the coming days at all the causes for the abuses or the absence of human rights. And we must move from the important philosophical discussion, which focuses our minds on a framework of belief, to action plans as to how to, in a constructive manner, apart from also in a reactive manner, but in a constructive manner, prepare the grounds for universal human rights to be established and to succeed against the evil of terror, against the evil of misuse, against the evil of tyranny, against the evil of suppression, against the evil of prejudice. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, President de Klerk. The next speaker is Dani Karavan,
a sculptor from Tel Aviv, Israel.

Dani Karavan
It’s very difficult to talk after you, de Klerk. Because, first of all, we owe you a lot. Because you did something that we should, all of us, learn from you, what should be done in a conflict. To solve the conflict by negotiation and by peaceful result. But if I knew that I will talk after him maybe I would not ask to say something. Because I wanted to say something about the story in the Bible about Abraham and Isaac and Ismael. There’s a very beautiful explanation by Rashi. Why did he say three times, “take your son, your unique son, your beloved son”? Why? Because Abraham told him, “I have two sons. Both of them are unique for me. Both of them are beloved by me.” So then God said, “Isaac” –and this is very important to us to know today that God had to say to Abraham — “which son would you like to be a kind of sacrifice for me?”. Why am I putting this story here on the table? Because he shows that the Bible and Abraham, two sons for him have been equal. Ismael, the Islam, while Isaac is the Jewish tradition. And another story about the same is in Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the year of Jewish people. In the synagogue, one of the prayers is the prayer of Ismael to God when he was sent to the desert by Abraham and Sarah. So this is the prayer that Jews are praying as a kind of respect, as a kind of excuse, to the evil that has been done to Ismael. I wanted to show these things here, that between beliefs and religion there’s a lot of common between Islam and Judaism and Christianity, as well as a lot of conflict. By extremists who use in those beliefs the wrong things, and to get by that, the right to kill the other. We should point, more and more, to the positive things in different beliefs to create more understanding between people and religions. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. The next speaker is Meena Krishnamoorthy, a Students’ Forum delegate from Australia.

Meena Krishnamoorthy
Thank you, Chairperson, and I’d like to also say thank you to Mr. de Klerk for
talking about social rights. And also I wanted to talk about the idea of the fact that a lot of civil wars are occurring in the world. I’m actually ethnically Tamil and partly Sinhalese, and if anyone knows about the Sri Lankan conflict, which I’m sure a lot of you all do, there is the terrorist organization which has been called, the Tamil Tigers, which have been referred to as a terrorist organization. And I’m aware of the fact that the Tamil Tigers have committed some atrocities that are rightfully called terrorist, and they are unacceptable. However, I’d also like to bring some attention to the movie, The Terrorist, which was made by an Indian choreographer. In the movie, it was about the psyche of a suicide bomber and how they are trying to progress towards actually committing the act of killing a VIP member of the government. And that movie has been known to, it’s said to have given a human face to terrorism. And I’m not trying to suggest that it’s right, but I’m just bringing forth that, this may seem incorrect at this moment, especially as the September 11 attack occurred, but I don’t think we should forget that terrorism has existed for a long time. Human rights abuses have existed for a long time. And that if we are going to deal with terrorism, we have to also remember that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And this is something we have to deal with. And also to keep in mind that behind the reason why some people see them as freedom fighters has to do with the situation they’re in within the global context. Thank you.

Sheikh Mohammed Mohammed Ali
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, we are in the forum of human rights. I want to raise this comment. I say the best ways to advance the principles of human rights is to promote social welfare, combat economic poverty and encourage education. It is no accident that it is the poorest nations which have the worst human rights record. Putting this in mind, let us call for investment on people. I repeat, investment on people instead of concentrating on economical investment. This will reduce terrorism. Thank you.

Elie Wiesel
Just to say one word to my young, gifted colleague, on Abraham. Having written so much about Abraham, I cannot not tell you that. In our tradition, God tested Abraham. He didn’t want Abraham to kill his son. Furthermore, I believe, that Abraham wasn’t going to kill his son anyway. It was a double test. God tested Abraham and Abraham tested God, saying let’s see if you really want me to go through with it. Therefore, in the very same text, when finally Abraham was told not to kill his son, it was not God, but an angel who told Abraham don’t kill. The question is, why an angel, why not God? Because God was embarrassed.

Jostein Gaarder
I think that maybe God really had a reason to feel embarrassed. But, and again of course, he was stopped by an angel, but he was in the first place, actually obeying God and I think that this religious extension of ethics is a worldwide, all through history, very well-known phenomenon. And by the way, just to be a little rude, and I’m not accusing Judaism at all, Christianity and Islam as well. You know, also I would say, in parentheses, God’s own behavior just before Israel’s exodus from Egypt, God’s actions, they were not particularly impressive either, according to the universal standards of human rights. I have in mind these nine plagues brought upon the Egyptian people. Now, Israel’s God was powerful. Or, as the Greek historian, Thucydides puts it, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, he says, right as the world goes is only in question between equals in power. While the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Which of course is not a particularly high standard of ethics, either. But I suppose the world has changed during 2500 years. Has it? Has it changed?

Elie Wiesel
What a marvelous conference this is, really. That we are here to discuss human rights issues and now we are dealing with God’s rights. However, one thing is, something you must, I’m sure you know. When Abraham was asked by his son, where are we going, Abraham used a plural, we shall come back together. He knew already then, he and his son will come back together alive. See, God is not so terrible.

Jacques Rupnik
Who can follow on that one? That was not meant to be intimidating. Yes, it is
the speaker at the end, Mr. Al-Khoei.

Yousif al-Khoei
I agree with one of the speakers. I think if you want to be literalist and dig into religious sources, you could really find what you want. It’s a double- edged sword, and in every faith, I think this is true, and how you interpret it, or how you choose to interpret it. You certainly find that within Islam, within Christianity and Judaism. But I think the problem is, if you have in each tradition, what in Islam we call ijtihad, the ability to reinterpret the text to suit your time and place, that is really, you also need to have a holistic view of religion, rather than concentrate on particular story, or particular text. And this is how some of the extremists, especially within the world of Islam, they certainly quote text from the Koran, which is taken out of context. With maybe a text which came down maybe during a war situation, and they generalize it. And some even go to extremes that they think time stopped 1400 years ago. I mean, they want to wear the same things as some of the early warriors of Islam did. But I think the challenge is to try to encourage the progressive side of the faith and try to have a meaningful dialogue between the adherents of various faiths to do that. Otherwise, I think religion obviously has sustained itself for so many centuries. You cannot demonize a particular faith or religion. And that’s the best we could do to promote human rights within faith traditions. Thank you.
Comment from audience
Excuse me for interrupting your very nice discussions. But I would like to ask you one very important question for me. Yesterday, in the evening, when I was preparing for this conference I asked for seven questions, but now I would like to ask only one. Is there any possibility to start, let’s say, like a very common dialogue between the churches, or religions, all over the world because, I guess, that the base for the further development is to find the common values coming from all the religions and churches, all over the world. Is there any chance to open like a United Nations of Religions or something like that? A round table, where people from different religions would sit down for a long time, for a lot of time to talk about these things. Thank you very much.

Jacques Rupnik
Well, last year we certainly had a discussion here. We had representatives of all the major religions represented here last year. And there is also some- thing called the World Council of Churches, a number of places for such a dialogue, and the United Nations also provides a forum. But I’m sure more can be done in this respect. Sheikh Ali, please.

Sheikh Mohammed Mohammed Ali
Well, I attended some of these dialogues. But the important things, I think the statements and the conclusions, they are not well practiced. We should make them practice on people. And that’s why I call investors to invest on people. To invest on these statements, to be practiced on the human being. And if I want to add to what Mr. Al-Khoei said, I think that those cult extremists, I call them cult, they are not belonging to any religion, I think in Islam, in the Koran, we have several texts. For example, in Arabic, we say, “Oh mankind, we have created you from male and female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may get to know each other” (verse 13:49). That means that God creates us human beings, man and woman. We are different tribes and different nations and we should cooperate together, we should work together. That is what the Koran said to us. And then the Koran said la ikraha fil deen, which means: “there is no compulsion in religion” (verse 256:2). There is no force to take Islam. You are free, you have freedom to take those religions which we said, all religion is from God. So we should concentrate on the practical things. We should take the text, for example, in the Koran, to take them as a package. Not to quote some certain text which comes, for example, during the wars, which comes during some conflicts, and say, well, this is Islam, or this is Christianity, or this is what the Jews say. We should take the religion as a package so that we can judge all those extremists or those fanatic people that belong to this religion or to that religion. Thank you.

Dani Karavan
I think that what you said, it’s very important, and we have a lot of examples in the history of humankind of cooperation between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. And one of the most beautiful periods is in Spain, we call it the “Era of Gold”, when Jews and Muslims and Christians created a beautiful culture together. But I want to point another point, which wasn’t raised till now. What about the media? What is the role of media in terrorism? The last event, terrible event in New York, reminds me Hollywood films. Reminds me a lot of things that young people are watching on television. Would it not be important for us to raise a voice against it? Against what’s going on in television and in movies, in the world. What kind of culture are our children getting from childhood? How many killings have they seen from the time they started to look at television till they become adult? I think this is one of the very important points, main, not less, than religion to be discussed, and to find practical way to fault it. Thank you.

Anwei Law
I very much agree with the statements about investing in people. And I also agree with comments about the media. Coming from the United States, the images that I think don’t appear as much are the images of the people in New York City, which were referred to earlier. The images of people helping each other, and the strength of New York City, based on its diversity. Instead of showing these things, on the covers of the national magazines, are pictures of people who represent terrorism. People tell us that’s what the media says we want. I don’t think we want that. I think we want the images of people who have responded to bad things by doing good things. We can’t always change the other person, but we have control over what we do ourselves. Our experience has come from dealing with people who have had leprosy, which we will talk about later. We spent a long time trying to change people’s attitudes about leprosy, and finally realized, this is very difficult. And so we started investing in people themselves who had leprosy. Because then we’re reinforcing the positive, not giving attention to the negative. Thank you.

José Ramos-Horta
I want to bring a new element to the debate. In my comments Wednesday I will address other issues that I feel strongly about, such as world poverty and external debt of the impoverished countries. But at this point I want only to touch on an issue that seldom do people have the courage to talk about. And that is the transfer of small arms, conventional weapons, from weapons-producing countries to poor countries. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize, former President of Costa Rica, Elie Wiesel, myself, and I believe all the other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, have signed up to a draft proposal, a convention, for a code of conduct to control, to restrict weapons transfer to Third-World countries. Of course, some arguments, particularly in the United States — where weapons proliferate, where almost everyone has a gun, where you can almost buy a gun in a supermarket, not so literally, but that’s how free it is — claim that weapons don’t kill, people kill. But if you put weapons in the hands of people, and it ranges from small arms to machine guns and mortars and so on, of course the scale of the destruction is much, much greater. A few, two, three years ago, I was traveling somewhere in the U.S., and I was reading a story in the New York Times quoting President Clinton, in which he expressed his outrage at foreign weapons imported into the U.S. Six hundred thousand of them that kill innocent Americans, in schools. And I felt coming from a country, very, very small, in the Far East, called East Timor, that was at the receiving end at that time of violence, the result of weapons rich countries transferred to poor countries, I wonder whether you know that sense of outrage at the importation of weapons. He was referring particularly to Chinese-made assault rifles, Six hundred thousand of them apparently imported in to the U.S. from China alone. I wonder whether the U.S. itself and other Western countries, motivated by that feeling of outrage, caused by weapons, would begin to restrict export of weapons to poor countries. Because we can find arguments, explanations for many of the existing conflicts today, interstate, intrastate, some motivated by border disputes, but the reality is that a lot of these conflicts are exacerbated because of the indiscriminate sale of weapons to poor countries. We can also argue, say well, it is not only the rich countries that can control it, the poor countries buy them. Well, I would say also for the same reason then we would say, well, drugs that are consumed in the United States come from Columbia, from Burma and a few other countries — and who is to blame? The consumers or the producing countries? Well, both sides. The campaign has to be on both sides to stop consumption of drugs. You stop consumption of drugs, you stop the export of drugs. And the same, the rich countries that produce weapons must realize that in the end these weapons turn against them. One of the most deadly, fearsome pieces of equipment today in Afghanistan that American helicopters are going to have to deal with are the Stinger missiles. But who made them, and who brought them to Afghanistan? So, I’m not saying that in criticism of anyone, of any particular country. These are real dilemma, real problems that we all face. How are we going to address some of the legacies of the Cold War? How are we going to address some of the
consequences of this parity? And so on. I conclude by saying, so that I’m not mistaken, that no cause, no matter how noble it is, no religion, no matter how divine it is, no grievance, no matter how well founded it is, justify the use of violence against civilians. And my point is, that in my country where we fought for twenty-four years for independence, we had an armed resistance. Never once, was one single Indonesian civilian killed. Since our liberation, in the last two years, not one Indonesian who decided to stay was killed. We had ninety-eight percent Catholics, and only two weeks ago we swore in a new Cabinet. Ninety-eight percent Catholics; Muslims now are only about one thousand, and our chief minister is a Muslim.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Mr. Ramos-Horta. I should have mentioned that you are now the Minister of Foreign Affairs of East Timor. The next speaker is Professor Tomáš Halík, the President of the Czech Christian Academy.

Tomáš Halík
Just a short answer to the gentleman from the audience. These remarks concerning on the necessity of deeper cooperation between religions. There are many attempts all over the world, for inter-religious cooperation. Many dimensions, many forms. But I must keep the secret, but please come tomorrow night to the Cathedral, for our inter-religious gathering. Maybe there will be done another little step, another little impulse in this short history of the inter-religious cooperation. That’s the only thing I can say now — sorry for being a little mysterious.

Jacques Rupnik
We all love mysteries and we will wait for tomorrow. Our discussion has so far avoided one area in particular which I think raises the question of the universality of human rights, and that is East Asia, where there has been a strong current which has argued that there are other ways of development and there is a specificity of Asian values. And I was wondering whether one of the members of this panel here, particularly from Asia, might want to address this question. For obvious reasons, we have focused on the Christian-Muslim, or Jewish dialogue, that is obviously the main agenda for today, but I was wondering if this Asian dimension can be brought in. Yes, please. Unfortunately you’re too far and I cannot see your name.
Comment from audience
I’m neither Christian nor Muslim. I’m neither an imposer of narrowly defined human rights emerging from a narrowly defined West that excluded its women, that excluded all the multiple cultures of the West itself, including the Native American culture. When we talk about the West we never bring in indigenous Americans, as the American view. I am also not part of that part of Asia which hides behind authoritarian regimes and defines that to be the Asian value. That is not my Asian value. Asia is too large, too diverse to have one value in any case. We are the home of every religion of the world, every major religion of the world. And I think we need to transform the debate on Asian values and the engagement with the human rights discourse as well as the issue that came from the floor, about a multi-religious discourse, and to really redefining our presence on this planet. And as the President had mentioned, probably, our search for being human will come from the Earth beneath us, our links to the cosmic order and the right way of living within the limits and duties that that order places on us, and that, in different ways, different religions have articulated, from there we will find our commonality. But rushing through a mimicking of the global market on the basis of the exploitation of labor, on the denial of human rights, is not an Asian value and I think we should put that debate to rest. It’s irrelevant to the future of humanity.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. Well, I see I was right to ask the question and got a
very interesting answer. Elie Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel
I would like just to say one word: Tibet. The Dalai Lama is not here. He’s a friend of ours, he has been here with us from the very beginning and the fact is that Tibet is suffering, Tibet is oppressed and its human rights have been violated by a great nation. I, to this day, don’t understand why China, which is a huge continent, a huge nation, may be proud of its many, many cultures in plural, why China is not giving Tibet its deserved right to be, to practice an autonomous religion which is one of the most secret and most beautiful religions is beyond me. But since nobody has mentioned Tibet, I felt I should at least say Tibet.

Min Zin
My name is Min Zin, I am from Burma. I used to be a student activist inside Burma, and then I fled to the Thai/Burma border less than three years ago. So since Mr. Wiesel mentioned Tibet, I would like to also put the Aung San Suu Kyi name on the table. Aung San Suu Kyi is from Burma she has been under house arrest for many years. Actually I would like to take part in the discussion of Asian values, because it has a huge impact on Burma. Because many Asian countries try to embrace Burma’s military regimes by arguing that Asian countries hold the Asian values principle. This means, practically, noninterference into the other countries’ internal affairs. So, actually the Asian values concept has been under serious challenge, because we need to question what is the Asian uniqueness. The Mahathir Mohammad, the strong defender of the Asian value, recently defended Burma’s military regime. In Burma, there has been the widespread practice of forced labor but Burma’s military government always argues against that accusation. They say that this is not forced labor, this is traditional form of labor donation. So whenever I accuse Burma’s government of practicing forced labor, it is not forced labor, it is labor donation. So Mahathir Mohammad defends this is as an Asian value, not forced labor. Drug lords, like Lo Hsing Han and Steven Law, all are not allowed to enter the USA because of their involvement in drug trafficking. But the Singapore government, Lee Kuan Yew, and others like Mahathir Mohammad, as well as businessmen, are working with all these drug lords in Singapore and Burma. So my point is, the real question in Asian values is, who holds the power to define the values and culture? When you look at the society where the power relation has been determining who holds the power and who defines the culture. I think it‘s not reasonable to promote Asian values without mentioning Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi. When you only talk about Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir Mohammad, it’s not enough. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, you have raised an important point: Who has the power to define the values, to shape the discourse including on human rights. The last speaker this morning will be Sheikh Mohammed Ali.

Sheikh Mohammed Mohammed Ali
Thank you Mr. Chairman. Well I just want to add something to what one member of the audience, or a colleague, from India, I think, said about the values. Although I am a Muslim, I put here what the great humanist Mr. Mahatma Gandhi said. He said, on being asked about his belief and his respect of others and their religions, he said, “I am a humanist. I am a Hindu, but I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Farsi, a Jew.” Well, putting this in mind, I think the values of all the people in the world, they are shared with the religions and all of the values. Because we are at the human rights conference, I think we should share the values of all the nations and all the people in the world. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Well I think this quotation provides a fitting conclusion for our panel this morning. We have heard, I think, a very interesting discussion, emphasis on a culture of tolerance, or mutual respect as was mentioned by Ambassador Shattuck, Elie Wiesel. The need to accommodate cultural differences, as President de Klerk put it. My old Harvard teacher, Martin Walser, used to distinguish between the thick and the thin. There is the thin common denominator, including references to human rights and there is the thick, the different historical cultural context, in which human rights are defined interpreted and implemented. The aim of our discussion is to modestly contribute to make the thin common denominator a little bit thicker. We shall resume at 13:30.
Thank you very much for your participation.