Topic: Human Rights Revisited

Panel 3 Human Rights Revisited

Bronislaw Geremek
It would be difficult to discuss problems, the dilemmas of the global coexistence, without discussing human rights. We’ll have as key speaker on this panel on Human Rights Revisited, philosopher André Glucksmann, one of the great figures of intellectual and political life in France.

André Glucksmann
As for human rights, there are certain difficulties that I would like to define. I would like to offer my very broad definition. In my view, human rights are a manner of resisting inhumanity. The embodiment of human rights is, for instance, Anna Politkovskaia, who was murdered the day before yesterday in Moscow. Anna Politkovskaia was my friend and she was the light. She was an extremely honest, transparent human being. She visited Chechnya 50 times, she visited places where the dirtiest wars of this planet take place, she risked her life, and she observed enormous suffering and acts of violence. She received a number of awards from Western media. I told her: “Maybe it would be a good time for you to spend some time abroad, like one year as a visiting professor.” But she said, “No, I have to go back. If it is not me, then they will send young, less experienced journalists who would find it difficult to avoid all the dangers and I couldn’t take it upon my conscience.” So what is at stake is the honour of Russia, not nationalistic, but Russian honour.

So she is dead. She has been murdered – Anna Politkovskaia. She would certainly know how to define human rights, how to refer to them, how to revisit them, as the title of our panel stands. The method of human rights today, the correct method is to face the dramas, to face the crimes, to see them and to have the courage to testify. Anna Politkovskaia did do that. And died for it. She never fought for herself. In her view, the Russian army went from crime to crime.

But, as she was not in a Manichean mood, she objected to every kind of inhumanity, also when hostages were taken in the name of independent Chechnya. Her side was the side of the truth and therefore most of the Chechen civilians loved her and also a part of the population of Russia. She tried to serve as a mediator during the crisis in Beslan. She was poisoned in an airplane when she was given poison in her cup of coffee. She knew what kind of dangers she faced. She knew how costly it was to give lessons in human rights. She said that we couldn’t defend human rights if we do not have the courage to stand up, face to face, to the kind of hell that sometimes people have to live in. She said we have to fight against suppression. She was not an idealist. She tried to produce knowledge of present problems of our civilisation. And, of course, for that, she and we need to reveal the anatomy of inferno, corruption and pestilence before developing the right kind of remedy. She also knew what the catastrophic side of life in Chechnya was also in deep Russia. For her, the first step in human rights was the courage to look – it’s a sort of medical view.

There is a big difference between what we call human rights at the start of the 20th century and today. Anna Politkovskaia was reproached for not trusting the government, for not trusting the sense of history, and she answered very accurately. She said: “If it were not for poverty, alcoholism, war, reproach, scorn for the environment, then the Russians would not be able to live dignified lives.” She said, “I refused to hide, to sit in my kitchen and wait for a better tomorrow.” Her capability of seeing this terrible horizon in front of her -- that was an ability which Anna inherited from all of those who, after World War II, fought for coexistence. During the cold war, a magazine called Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, printed on its cover a clock, and this clock showed the deterrence time-- how many minutes separated us from the atomic midnight, the distance from now and the end of the world. And this ability to realise that there is a looming, an absolute danger to our civilisation -- that is strength, not pessimism. It is the strength of Anna Politkovskaia and her colleagues, her partners, fighters for human rights. That’s the difference compared to human rights proponents from the beginning of the 20th century, when everyone was supposed to know what is good. So the humanist Europe sometimes supported passivism, colonialism, and communism. But today, with our experience of wars, genocides, our approach must be different. We know that the whole world can slip into inhumanity. We don’t know what the supreme good is, but our common sense can tell us what is evil: genocide, ethnic purification, torture. We do not know what pure health is, but we know what a disease is.

This medical view of the world is a Chekhov type of view; remember when Chekhov travelled to Sakharin where damned people were deported. The same, when Malaparte wrote Kaputt and described the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto. The same for Solzhenitsyn, Chalamov and others against the gulag. This anatomic view is the ability to forecast evil - evil can engulf mankind. Against evil we all need courage, friendship, lucidity and, here I will quote the Czech philosopher Patočka, who called the melting pot of these qualities “The solidarity of the shaken”. I believe that human rights means resistance to the inhuman. In this sense, I should speak about negative humanism. The 21st century shows that people were able to fight against evil without an unshaken consensus of the idea of paradise. Face to face with hell, people were capable of uniting. So, Europe reconstituted itself from East Berlin in 1953 up to today’s Ukraine and Georgia. I travelled to Prague during the years of Charter 77 and what was amazing for me about this Charter was the strong unity between opinions so different as supporters of Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov, Christians and agnostics, people from the left, people from the right -- and what united them was the resistance against the totalitarian regime. That’s the strange energy of the “Community of the Shaken”.

This morning, we received two pieces of bad news, which makes us understand that there are still good reasons to unite. The first is the murder of Anna Politkovskaia. This means that it is extremely difficult to speak the truth in and about Russia -- to tell the truth about things which are of concern to us, to speak out against a dirty war. And the second piece of news that we read this morning was the North Korean nuclear test. And these two events draw a picture of a dangerous horizon. In the past, first there was Auschwitz and after that Europe reconstituted itself in the name of the fight against racism. That is one of the basic ideas of the European Union. And second, there was Hiroshima. You know that atomic weapons are not weapons like any other. They are weapons of mass destruction. And today there is terrorism -- not only Islamic terrorism. See what Anna Politkovskaia wrote about the Russian army: Terrorism, which has a fascist mentality, an Auschwitz type mentality and the psychic ability of killing everybody without question.

So, there is a propensity to cause damage by owning atomic weapons, and Korea is an example of being able to cause terrible damage at a relatively small cost. If there is an accident, or if somebody destroys a nuclear power plant, in the best case you have something like Chernobyl; in the worst case, something like Hiroshima. So, people like Anna Politkovskaia are people who must remind us of the two taboos of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. People like Anna serve, and perhaps save, humanity, but they are very, very rare. And rare also are those who listen to them.

Bronislaw Geremek
I’d like to first of all thank Mr. André Glucksmann for his words and I would like to give honour to the murdered Anna Politkovskaia and it’s, of course, even more relevant because we here all know what it means to fight for human rights.

The issue will help us in the debate on this “Human Rights Revisited” panel. Everybody is discussing, thinking of human rights, this very bitter experience coming out of Europe that human rights do not concern other civilisations. Paying a series of official visits to the People’s Republic of China, I always faced discussions on that. We sometimes also have a debate about whether human rights are an issue concerning the daily life of human beings. Is it an issue concerning intellectual and political elites? Does it concern the deep sense of life? I think that is the problem which we approach in some concrete observations and some general debates. Let me resume with the president’s panel in this room in which the observation on human rights in different cultural contexts began by a very interesting presentation by Mr. Sasakawa on the question of lepers. Being a historian of the Middle Ages, I am sensitive to the issue of social exclusion. The social exclusion of lepers, and the social exclusion of the Jews in the Middle Ages began with the thesis that they are not human beings, that these excluded people are not part of mankind – that’s the very problem, the most radical and the most dramatic approach to the question of human rights.

When we debate human rights, it is good to think it is not only the question of the reality of human rights. We have in this room and in the series of these panels, people playing a tremendous role in promoting human rights. Human rights, even in the situation when we see that they are not a social reality, human rights are an ethical reference. When I was one of East Europe’s dissidents, I was a little bit critical of the Helsinki conference, thinking that in such a situation in which we all had been, that’s a very theoretical debate. But I know now that the beginning of the effective struggle against the authoritarian or totalitarian system was connected with the Helsinki conference because we had an ethical and also a legal reference to our fight. So, in this sense, I think that we can consider that our debate matters for the subject of our conference. Going now to our panellists, asking to be brief in this debate, I will give the floor first to Alyaksandar Milinkevich, the leader of the Belorussian democratic opposition. It is extremely important that in this country, being now the last and the only dictatorship on European soil, the democratic opposition has a leader. Alyaksandar Milinkevich, is a professor at the Grodno Yanka Kupala University, specializing in the fields of technology and humanities, and was a candidate for the presidential office in Belarus. The outcome of this campaign is that now Belorussian society is aware that a different regime and a different political situation is possible and it is in the hands of the men and women of Belarus. And I think we are grateful to Alyaksandar Milinkevich and to his friends for this situation. Alyaksandar Milinkevich, you have the floor.

Alyaksandar Milinkevich
This spring in my country presidential elections were held. The government announced that it had won the elections. Is that true? No, not really. The government actually lost a lot of support because of the fact that there were some violent repressions that occurred. Everything was so crystal clear. So did we win? Well no, not really. We did not win. Elections in Belorussia are actually now different. In countries where there is a dictatorship, there are never re-elections -- you can never change the power with elections.

Nevertheless, we won a lot. We won the feeling of the people, and we actually changed the attitudes of people. A number of people were able to overcome their fear -- there is a total fear in Belorussia -- and in this sense we gained a lot. We have also gained some people who are with us now, and while the powers do not refrain from repression, throughout the elections over a thousand of our fellow citizens spent a night imprisoned and there are still ten people who are in prison to this day because of political reasons.

And today, for instance, we meet people who would like to become members of NGOs and they would like to educate others. But then the fact is that there are people who are in prisons, like Pavel Krasovsky, facing the death sentence. Repression is underway against people who were active in the spring and against over 300 students who have been sacked from the university. And on this occasion, I would like to thank those countries, over 10 countries, that have made it possible for those students who have been sacked from our universities, to continue with their studies. It’s not just moral support; it is an efficient model of fighting the fear in my country. And there will be a new generation that won’t have that much fear as the present one.

I’m speaking about fear a lot. What are the causes, the root causes of fear? In my country the causes are very straightforward. Essentially, our economic system is such that we have no private sector in my country. Those who are loyal can work in the official sphere. If you are in the opposition, then you can’t be active in your working life. For instance, you can have only temporary work for two years. If you are in the opposition you immediately lose jour position. And someone who is not clearly against and neither for has only a limited contract. This system works everywhere in the country. Thanks to this system, the government is able to maintain support. To compare it to the democratic movement in Tbilisi, the movement was supported because the interior resources do not exist and so the population had nothing to lose.

What are the present problems of my country? As is typical for all dictatorships, we have a total limitation on information. The government controls all the media. For the past ten years we haven’t had access to electronic media, TV, radio. What we do have is propaganda. The system is the same as in communist and fascist regimes. What we have is the Internet which is very popular and for the moment not controlled. In the big cities about 35 to 40 percent of the population has access. The small villages have illegal magazines. There is a satellite project, which will be launched in the beginning of the year. It is important for us to have satellite television. At school, at the university, we do not have free research; science is influenced by ideology, and the main objective is to make students love the president. He is, of course, not a president, but he calls himself a president. It is a system similar to Stalin’s. The opposition is systematically oppressed. Civil society is a political party. The civil society in our country is well developed, but it works, of course, illegally. Half of the citizens involved have lost their registration. Some of them have been imprisoned. Today we do not fight only for liberty but also for national identity, which was destroyed during the Soviet era. We know that it is our fight and that it is up to us, but we also need your solidarity. Thank you very much.

Bronislaw Geremek
We have an example of what the fight for the dignity of human beings is about, what the right to be informed is about, and what the right to decide who is ruling the country is about. I do believe that Vaclav Havel is happy to see that there is still an engagement in intellectual matters in Europe

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to ask Jacques Rupnik to take the floor. Jacques Rupnik is Central European. He is a French political scientist, professor of political science, sociology and history at Science Po in Paris. The destiny of Central Europe is the subject of his research, but he is at heart a Central European. He understands Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Hungarians. He was in Prague in 1989. He was in the Balkans on the International Commission on the Balkans in the beginning of the 90s; and he is involved in the fight for human rights. Jacques Rupnik, you have the floor.

Jacques Rupnik
I thank you for reminding me of my dual Central European and French identity and also my commitments to the struggles that have been carried on for human rights in this region, and I couldn’t agree more with what my friend André Glucksmann said about what is happening in Russia. I had the feeling, since you referred to Helsinki and the era that was opened with the human rights movement, Charter 77, that perhaps we have come to the end of that cycle of hope in the progress of human rights, which triumphed in 1989 and then was meant to lead to further progress in democracy and human rights. What I would like to do here is not to make another plea for the pursuit of that endeavour; I’m totally committed to it. I would simply like to raise a few questions, a few problems within the human rights movement and the current human rights discussion.

One of them concerns human rights and the quest for victim-hood and reinterpretations of history. Another concerns human rights and the legitimacy of humanitarian interventions and thirdly, some thoughts about democracy promotion and human rights. So, very briefly: the starting point for many of the recent European discussions about human rights was that, after the Cold War, the context was no longer the struggle against communist totalitarianism but against ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in Sarajevo. The basic assumption was that, after what we had been through in the 20th century with the Holocaust and forced population displacements by totalitarian regimes, anything to stop genocide had legitimacy even if it did not always have a legal backing. That is the way many of us have committed ourselves to or supported the international engagement in the Balkans.

What is interesting, if I look back at that period and at what is happening today, is the way different protagonists use the word genocide, either to justify their sometimes violent posture or the way genocide is being used in order to seek international engagement including international military intervention. Because if we are talking about genocide and crimes against humanity, then you are entitled, the argument goes, to military intervention and there is no statute of limitation in terms of prosecuting those who were involved. And since professor Geremek mentioned the International Commission on the Balkans, in which we were both involved 10 years ago, let me recall an important moment of our visit to Sarajevo shortly after Dayton. I remember Simone Weil, former president of the European Parliament and an Auschwitz survivor, being astonished when hearing all the protagonists we met referring to “genocide”. The Serbs considered themselves victims of genocide by the minority in Kosovo. The Kosovars were saying they were victims of genocide by the Serbs, the Bosniak Muslims were victims of genocide. And Simone Weil observed that, although making no moral equivalence between them, they were all using the word genocide as a way of not talking to each other; because you don’t talk to people who commit genocide. You fight them if necessary, preferably with military force. So that is one of the pitfalls that people involved with humanitarian interventions should bear in mind. We have today this debate concerning Africa. Rwanda, no intervention. Dafur – we don’t know yet if it is genocide or not. The President of the United States said it is genocide. If it is genocide, does it follow that there should be an intervention?

This is one issue that I wanted to raise. The competition for victim-hood, status of the ultimate suffering that deserves international intervention. I’ve been more recently involved with another commission, the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, which was chaired by Judge Richard Goldstone. As a member of the South African Constitutional Court he organized a presentation of our conclusions in August 2000 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Nelson Mandela, looking at the conclusions of our report, which were a justification for the international intervention that had taken place a year earlier, said, “Ah, humanitarian intervention. That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “Pity you didn’t think of it before.” That was the first observation. And he added a second observation: “Kosovo, that’s interesting. I understand European concerns, but make sure when you promote this idea of humanitarian intervention to avoid double standards.” He paused and there was no need to spell out the long list of potentially deserving cases. So this is one point I wanted to raise. Yes, human rights should remain a priority. Forms of humanitarian interventions to stop massive violations of human rights remain a possibility but only if the issues raised by Nelson Mandela are properly addressed.

Another argument has recently been put forward: if you really want to promote human rights, the best guarantee is having a democracy. Only democratic regimes would guarantee human rights. So, let’s promote democracy and we will foster the cause of human rights almost automatically. And there we have, I think, a shift from what is an attempt to defend human rights to an attempt to engage in democracy promotion as a cause or perhaps, as some put it, as a crusade. Well, I don’t want to have a long discussion about it. I just want to briefly read on this subject, a quote from one of my favourite authors, Alexis de Tocqueville, who knew a thing or two about democracy and the conditions necessary to sustain it. Here is an excerpt from his second letter on Algeria from 1837: “Suppose, Sir, for a moment, that the emperor of China, landing on the shores of France and at the head of a powerful army, made himself master of our greatest cities and of our capital. And after having destroyed all of the public registers before even having given himself the pain of reading them, destroyed or dispersed all administrators without acquainting himself with their various attributes, he finally rids himself of all state officials from the head of the government to the gardes champêtresat, the peers, the deputies, and in general of the entire ruling class, and that he exiled them all at once to some faraway country. Do you not think that this great prince, in spite of his powerful army, his fortresses and his fortune, would soon find himself rather bothered in administering the conquered land, that his new subjects, bereft of all those who did or could manage political affairs, would be incapable of governing themselves, while he, coming from the opposite side of the Earth, knows neither the religion, nor the language, nor the laws, nor the customs, nor the administrative procedures of the country and who took care to send away all of those who could have instructed him in these matters, will be in no position to rule them? You will therefore have no difficulty in seeing, Sir, that if the regions of France that are effectively occupied by the conqueror were to obey him, the rest of the country would soon be left to an immense anarchy…You will see, Sir, that we have done in Algeria precisely what I supposed the emperor of China would do in France.”

I’ll leave to your meditation the possibility to look for more contemporary illustrations of the paradigm posed by Alexis de Tocqueville… Any people who are seriously committed to the promotion of democracy and human rights and are reluctant to reflect on the ends and the means, would do well to read Tocqueville and ponder his message.

The final point I would like to make is that if “humanitarian imperialism” has obvious limits, I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should turn a blind eye to human rights violations. What is happening in Russia at the moment is of particular concern. But when I asked my friend Grigory Yavlinsky, “What should we do about it?” he doesn’t recommend any sabre rattling. He says: “Just speak the truth.” Putin claims to be a friend of Europe. Well, to friends you owe the truth. And therefore we have to start with speaking the truth beyond diplomatic niceties. The second related aspect is that the credibility of any western attempt to promote democracy and human rights today, after some recent experiences, will depend on the adequacy between the language and the reality, between the rhetoric and the practice, and to put it in a nutshell, any credibility of democracy promotion abroad will depend on our capacity to sustain and defend civic and human rights at home, even under most adverse circumstances. Any democracy promotion always begins at home.

Grigory Yavlinski
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Certainly as a Russian politician, I will start with the assassination that happened in Moscow. I want to tell you that Anna Politovskaya was killed for telling the truth. She was doing so for many years. She was revealing the truth about human rights. In her last days she was preparing a special article about torture, torture in Chechnya. She said that on Thursday, openly to the media, that she was writing it. The most important thing is that she was a political opponent of the system existing in Russia. Her assassination was one hundred percent a political crime. This is a new stage in the development of this system -- murdering political opponents in the middle of the day in the centre of Moscow. So, I think that it would be the right thing to spend one minute in silence in the memory of this woman. Tomorrow there will be a funeral in Moscow, the funeral of the person assassinated by the current political regime. It is a very serious day. I’m asking you for one minute of silence, please.

Thank you very much.

I was preparing the second part of my presentation about Russia and the Russian economy, but I think there is no sense to speak about Russia in the context of what has happened. It’s absolutely clear: we are living inside an authoritarian, nationalistic, corrupted system. That’s what we have. The special story is how it happened, how we got to the situation that we have at the moment.

I want to speak about the issue which is very important to me -- human rights. After the Second World War, the policy of human rights became the cornerstone of all policies in the West. It was extremely important. And, as an economist, I want to tell you that the analysis shows that all world markets, including financial markets, NATO, the European Union, are based on human rights, which are alpha and omega, the alphabet of these international institutions. It is extremely important to understand this, because in the middle of the 90s, or in the beginning of the 90s, a new generation of politicians came to power. And these people neglect, in principle, human rights as a cornerstone of their policies. They are sometimes talking about human rights, but almost all of them are the politicians of “realpolitik,” of gas and oil “realpolitik.”

The 70th birthday of Mr. Havel is the right day to say that the group of politicians like Havel, Walesa, like Gorbachev, like Kohl, like Thatcher, like Mitterand, have changed the world. And the politicians who came later, in the 90s, are the politicians of an absolutely different time. And the crisis, the serious crisis, which we have in the world now, is the consequence of neglecting these most important rules in modern politics.

What is world politics today? It’s personal relations. One week ago, the President of France decorated Mr. Putin with the highest award of the French Republic. Politics and diplomacy, ladies and gentlemen, consist of three major parts at the moment: kisses, sanctions, and war. That’s it. Nothing is in the middle -- no debates, no discussions, no processes, no nuances. Nothing. Only the three aforementioned parts. This situation has very serious consequences. For example: what are the main problems in Europe at the moment? The consequence of these kinds of policies in my country and Europe, from my point of view, is that there is no strategy anymore. The collapse of the Berlin Wall was the end of strategy. It was a successful strategy, but it came to its end. I don’t know if there is an end of history, as Mr. Fukuyama was saying, but it’s clear that the enlargement of Europe and collapse of the Berlin Wall was the end of strategy.

And now we have major problems such as a constitutional crisis in Europe, Euro-Atlantic relations, answering the very sensitive questions about what to do with Ukraine, what will happen with Belorussia, what will happen with Russia. There is no response, because there is no vision, no vision at all for forty, fifty years. The strategy which ended so successfully, started in 1947 when just a day before the French had been killing the Germans and the Germans had been killing the French and everybody had been killing everyone. Half of Europe was under the Stalinist power, but nevertheless that strategy started, and in sixty years it was a success.

At the moment, the lack of strategy is the key problem. In the United States we have a dramatic thing - not simply in the United States. We have a problem with the United States, with the very serious mistakes that have been made for the last five years. Very serious, I must confess. And what is the reason for these mistakes? The misunderstanding of new world realities after the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War there were only two ideologies in the world, only two: the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States created Bin Laden and the Soviet Union created Saddam Hussein. That’s it. No diversity, no other realities, nothing special.

But the Cold War ended, and all the differences of today’s world came to the surface, and they were misunderstood. It was not perceived as a new reality. That’s why the response was given with very big mistakes. It was not understood, from my point of view, at the right moment and has not been understood yet that the world is too different, and there are many things in the world with which we should co-exist even if we don’t like it.

Another thing is that, in today’s world, there is a clear anti-civilization trend. This trend is an enemy, with which any compromise is impossible. We have to consider differences and distinctions of today’s world in order not to make such mistakes as in Iraq and in many other regions. There is a lot of dead loss in world politics. Whatever you take – the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, other regions, you understand that the root of their problems is so- called “realpolitik.”

There is a special effect of “realpolitik” in my country. It is one of the reasons, not the major one, but an important one, why our country, Russia, ended up in the situation which we have at the moment. We have no independent justice, no independent parliament, no independent elections, and no independent economy. This is the summary of what happens with countries in which so-called “realpolitik” exists.

I don’t want you to have any illusions. The Internet will not improve the situation in Russia. A new generation will not improve the situation in Russia either. Even market economy with “Stalin’s face” will not change the situation in Russia for the better. It’s much more important to have real strategies in Europe and in the Western world altogether, which would consider the changes that will happen in the next twenty to twenty-five years.

Mr. Rupnik asked me what the West should do. I want to repeat the answer: the West should be honest, direct and clear and that would be perfectly good enough. But I asked a very high-ranking German politician about this, and he said, “Oh, you ask us to do the thing that we can’t do at all.”

Bronislaw Geremek
Thank you very much, Grigory Yavlinski. We know better now that freedom is a human right, that we need a rule of law as a precondition of a democratic revolution. We have become, in this debate, a little bit too Eurocentric, even in Central and Eastern Europe. With Farhad Kazemi, we will find once more the global dimension of the issue of human rights. He is a professor at New York University, a specialist in Middle East studies, and the author of many books, especially on Iran.

Farhad Kazemi
I have taken Mary Robinson’s comment this morning to heart. She said something to the effect that human rights need to be embedded in local cultures, and gender equality is an essential component of that. My brief remarks, following her lead, will be about human rights in the Muslim world. I’d like to make three basic comments. One has to do with the issue of patriarchy, the other with some legal doctrines that promote inequality among genders, and finally the question of citizen rights in regard to the larger picture of human rights. Let me start with patriarchy. As far as this topic is concerned, its enduring persistence in the Islamic world is a significant human rights problem. Patriarchy is fundamentally an attitudinal issue that is based on beliefs and values learned through the socialization experience of women and gender roles. Patriarchal beliefs have been part and parcel of Muslim history, as they have been in much of the world. Although it is very clear that patriarchal attitudes precede the emergence of Islam, Islamic doctrine and its emphasis on a structure of authority and command have helped to enforce patriarchal attitudes in the Middle East and the Islamic world. The real question for us is not so much the notion of patriarchy’s presence in the Muslim world, but rather what is the best way to correct its negative influence. Unless such a step is taken, the enormously deleterious impact of patriarchy on gender equality and human rights cannot be eradicated easily.

Let me go to the second topic and very briefly. There are certain legal doctrines in Islam, when applied in their pure forms, that are also detrimental to gender and equality. The civil code in Islam, especially personal status laws on marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody, have different ways of treating men and women. In fact, this problem has prompted certain Egyptian feminists to try to devise a rather bold and courageous way to get around the inequality of marriage contract. What they have done is to say that since marriage is basically a legal contract between two parties, why don’t we make this contract completely equal? Of course, no court of law in Egypt has accepted this. But at least it’s an attempt to get away from those personal status laws that promote gender inequality.

The second aspect of the legal doctrines has to do with criminal law in Islam when applied in its basic and unadulterated form. When applied in this fashion, the law has huge problems with gender equality. The Islamic criminal code is based on the biblical concept of talion, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The state is removed as the principal agent in criminal cases and acts as an adjudicator of disputes between parties. Conviction in the case of murder, for example, is based heavily on testimonies of witnesses, an essential component of adjudication. The problem is that a woman’s testimony is worth only half of a man’s. Furthermore, the accused cannot be convicted without a male witness validating the testimony of female witnesses.

Let me now deal with the third issue, the question of citizenship. The current ideas of citizenship in the Islamic world are largely new and are essentially based or borrowed from the West. Prior to the 19th century, the relevant concerns in the Muslim world were group rights, not individual human rights. The emphasis was on duties and obligations in the social system as defined by Islamic law. Specific rights of individual citizens and the necessity of their protection by the state were not a central preoccupation. A key overriding issue in discussing citizenship, whether it’s in the Muslim world or beyond, is how to define the boundary of a political community. Here I quote from distinguished anthropologist and legal scholar, Horowitz, who raises three key questions in this regard: Who is a citizen? Among citizens, who has what privileges? What norms and practices are symbolically aligned with those of the state? To put it differently, this means in Islam, as in other situations, citizenship involves the relationship between the state and society. Clearly, a vibrant society needs the state in order to allow for full participation in public life. It is the state that provides protection, maintains legal order, and safeguards rights of individuals and groups. This is very important because traditionally Islam has been preoccupied with a notion of chaos and the desire to maintain order.

Islam is, in many respects, a highly communitarian religion. Although individual rights are recognized and the sanctity of the private realm is acknowledged, the thrust of Islamic civilization has been essentially on group emphasis, not individual rights. Society is categorized into groups of people with legally differentiated rights. The broadest two categories juxtaposed the two largest communities in the world: the domain of peace that is the Muslims, and the domain of war, which includes the non-Muslims. This pattern of categorization of people with different citizenship rights and duties extend even to Islamic community. For example, minors or those with mental disabilities have different rights than others. There are other divisions in the Islamic world that add to this problem. For example, the radical and the extremist Islamic groups define the norm of citizenship very narrowly and use it as a weapon of exclusion, not inclusion. Although there are clear gradations to Islamist conceptions of citizenship, when it comes to the issue of exclusion of the other, there are many who actively exclude large societal groups. To some of these groups, even monotheistic religious minorities, are basically denied such rights, except as they are granted to them by virtue of benevolence of the Islamists in power.

In other words, the concept of civility, that is acceptance of the other, has no relevance to these extremist groups. In spite of these divisions and differences, the overriding group identity in Islam is again with the community. Islamic history has frequently taken account of this sense of solidarity and group identity, irrespective of time and space. Although the actual operational relevance of group solidarity is subject to dispute, it does serve as a psychological bond that crosses boundaries and historical periods, and brings Muslims together.

Let me conclude by underlining the point that the relationship between Islam and citizenship is complex and even problematic. Although there are evolutionary directions in Islam, especially among the modernists, that have come to accept elements from the Western conception of universal citizenship rights, the term’s meaning is essentially lodged within Islam’s traditional heritage. All that said, there is no necessary reason not to believe that a more modern and positivistic view of citizenship cannot emerge within Muslim jurisprudence.

Bronislaw Geremek
Thank you very much, Farhad Kazemi. We could continue this debate but we must wrap it up. We have the feeling that we can say to Vaclav Havel that our debate concluded that human rights concern all countries and all civilisations and that no country, no civilisation, and first of all Europe, cannot give lessons to others. Europe, being the soil on which two totalitarian regimes were invented and where the Holocaust took place, should be more sensitive to the issue of human rights without giving lessons. We think also that this debate on human rights gives us an approach to present politics, that in politics, as in human life, the notion of good and evil matters. The dignity of humans matters. And maybe our reflection will give some support to people who are fighting for human rights. I’m giving the floor to Jacques Rupnik before conclusive remarks by Vaclav Havel.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Bronislaw. I do not think that after a day like we’ve had today anybody would expect a summary, conclusions, and recipes. Let me just say a few words before asking our host to conclude. Some thirty years ago in this town, a group of courageous men and women, around a well-known but banned playwright, were drafting a document which became known as Charter 77 and which was to put human rights on the European agenda. You could call it a search for a moral minimum or a survival kit under conditions of “unfreedom,” which this part of the world experienced then. Their ideas eventually triumphed in 1989, and we discovered the open, great possibilities that globalization offered. There was a sort of optimistic narrative that prevailed, that greater communication, greater trade was favourable to the expansion of democracy and human rights. And this sort of optimistic version was the context in which the Forum was created ten years ago, but the Forum never succumbed to the facile, theological optimism of the period. I think it has tried to address-- which even then were the most difficult issues-- issues such as human rights and democracy. Do they have the same meaning, the same relevance, the same understanding in different parts of the world, in different cultures, in different religious traditions, etc.? And I think this was a contribution that the Forum had made then, bringing together people from very different parts of the world but also very different walks of life -- statesmen and philosophers, businessmen, opposition activists, religious leaders -- they were all participating in this debate.

I think the context in which we are talking about these issues today has changed. It was reflected in the debates, both because we see the return of power politics, the logic of power is back, and the idea that we use the terms we used ten years ago -- global governance, democracy, human rights -- today we emphasise the return of the logic of power. We see it everywhere. I don’t have to stress that sometimes in the most brutal manner. We were talking then in the context of disappearing borders, of an open world and global communication. We are now living in a context of borders and walls and fences being built again -- a lot, says my friend Grigory Yavlinsky -- between Russia and its southern neighbours, between the United States and Mexico, between Europe and Africa, between Israel and Palestine. Yes, we are building walls and fences and this is a different context, therefore, ten years later, in which we are addressing these issues and I think that context is reflected in the two main and interconnected themes that were addressed today.

The question this morning was about the search, the quest for what Vaclav Havel called a moral minimum in different cultures, different religious traditions, different civilisations, and what it means to search for that common denominator. Is it the search for the lowest common denominator? Or, as one participant said this morning, it was our friend Makiya, who said, “No, we should be much more demanding. What we expect in that kind of search for moral minimum is to bring out the best in each of our traditions.” In other words, there is an attempt to say we don’t need to re-invent the wheel. There is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The law exists. The text exists. What we are talking about is what the necessary conditions are to make them applicable, what the conditions are for sharing a common understanding of these texts, and I think, therefore, that the debate we had this morning about what the meaning of that moral minimum was particularly useful and enlightening to those who perhaps gave greater importance to the connection between religion and the question of rights and the dialogue of cultures and those who emphasise the importance, perhaps, for human rights to prevail, to separate church and state, religion and politics. This is an issue which has obvious political implications where there is, I think, a major debate going on.

On the second issue, that is democracy and human rights, well this is the panel, the two previous panels, which Professor Geremek has just concluded, and I will not try to sum it up. But I think that there is a sobering effect or maybe an attempt to come to terms with the fact that democracy and human rights do not mean exactly the same thing to everybody, but also that they cannot be imposed from outside. They can be encouraged, they can be induced, and you can try to defend and help those who defend human rights under adversity, as is the case today in Russia, as is the case with those who have honesty beyond limits. When I asked Gregory Yavlinsky about Anna Politkovskaia, he said, I think, something which strikes me as very true of all dissidents I know: “She had honesty beyond limits.” Well, the least we can do for people with honesty beyond limits is to share with them, support them and speak the truth.

But here again we are talking about the politics of lesser evil, the politics of resistance, the politics of supporting dissidents. The climate has changed and we haven’t come -- or perhaps while I was away Bronislaw Geremek came -- to a definitive conclusion -- but we have returned. The feeling we are getting is that 30 years after Charter 77 was created, some of the issues we thought were over, were part of our past, are returning to the fore. And of course no one is better equipped to speak about them than our host. If one had to define Forum 2000 in one word, it is not an institution, it is not meant to perpetuate itself, it is a meeting place, but it is mainly a network of people who are connected in one way or another with Vaclav Havel, and we all know that he is now celebrating his 70th birthday and the 30th anniversary of Charter 77. The two are a very good fit, and I therefore give him the floor with our greatest feeling of gratitude for bringing us together.

Václav Havel
Thank you very much, Jacques Rupnik, for your kind words addressed to me. First and foremost, I would like to thank all of you for coming to this 10th Forum and speaking openly about the problems and issues faced by the world today. If you allow me, I would like to, in conclusion, touch upon several specific topics that you have alluded to either in this strong debate or in likewise interesting debates held elsewhere in the foyers or on other premises.

I think it’s very appropriate that the memory of the murdered Anna Politovskaya has been mentioned here, and I think it is significant that the persons who brought it up were Mr. Yavlinsky and Mr. Glucksman. So the memory of Anna Politovskaya was present throughout the whole day. Besides, I think that we all want states and nations to live in friendship, and we also want friendship with Russia. However, friendship requires openness. Without openness, friendship is false. And that’s why I think that we should openly say to Russian leaders that the Soviet Union no longer exists, that they can’t pursue the same policy in Georgia, they can’t continue the war in Chechnya, that they can’t have this policy in the Ukraine, and they can’t blackmail the Ukraine.

And then there is Belorussia and we all should -- and I have heard this reiterated a number of times -- have as much solidarity as we can with those who strive for a democratic and free Belorussia. From our own experience, we know how any help, be it both spiritual and material, any expression of solidarity from abroad is vital and how vital it is for the struggle for a more democratic, more human, more free state of affairs. Nevertheless, it’s not just people in some parts of Europe who suffer, and it’s not just the European continent that we need to consider. For instance, we have His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, present in Prague, and in a debate with His Holiness I have, once again, acknowledged that there is a certain hidden attempt to liquidate the identity of one nation, its history, language, culture, and naturally this has to be a concern to us, as in Cuba. Occasionally we have managed to have a Cuban dissident present in our Forum 2000 conference. The dissidents are always happy for the support expressed, and I think we should keep expressing our solidarity with Cuba dissidents.

Often we hear and speak about Aung San Kuu Kyi. This brave woman still remains home in prison and our unwavering solidarity with her should be something self-evident, something natural for us. Some of you have also expressed concerns for the North Korean regime. I’d like to point out that there are also dissidents in North Korea, there are those who fight for human rights and they, too, need expressions of solidarity. They have a far more difficult struggle compared with other countries. Of course, you need to express even more solidarity with them. The North Korean case actually shows that there is a special ambiguity in modern civilisation. On the one hand, there is a fantastic development of human wisdom and knowledge, and on the other hand, there is an inadequate development of responsibility where there are some countries that fiddle with very sophisticated but very dangerous instruments. These demonstrate that human wisdom has developed, but the more sophisticated the instruments are, the more danger there is that they may be misused. Dear friends, to those of you who could not be present the whole day, I’d like to point out that complete records of the entirety of all the debates will be available, and there will also be extracts from these debates which will be sent out to leaders. Once again, I’d like to thank all of you for your participation and for you presence.