The battle lines are drawn. On the one side is the secular Western as materialist and amoral, exploitative and expansionist; and on the other is the traditional South: spiritual and moral, exploited but passive and polite. It is a clear case of them and “us”.
A new polarity is emerging or being manufactured to replace the old Cold War. With the collapse of communism, the West – dominated by the U-A. Needs a new enemy to justify the billions of dollars it spends on its military-industrial complex.
The focus has shifted to the South and Islam in particular is being portrayed by most of the Western media as presenting the same threat to “freedom” and “human rights that communism once did. At the same time democracy is hailed as the victor in the Cold War, together with its stalemate, the free market This partnership is being promoted globally as the winning formula for all countries whatever their situation
However, this mantra is being challenged by the new dynamic countries in Asia, which demand greater voice in global affairs. Western models of democracy, they say, do not take into account different cultural and political traditions. The community, not the individual, is at the heart of Asian and Islamic societies, they argue.
Ai a recent conference in Malaysia, “Rethinking Human Rights,” more than 300 delegates, representing 60 countries, heard distinguished international speakers argue for a widening of the debate on human rights 10 include the means to live with dignity.
The conference was held by the Malaysian non-governmental organization Just World Trust, which promotes the need for alternative ways to create a fairer world. While Asians accept the Westcm respect for individual political and civil rights, they argue that economic and cultural rights also need to be taken into account.
And a spiritual dimension that is missing in the Western discourse on human rights, drawing on traditions of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, needs to be added if the future of all humanity has to be safeguarded. Asia has ideas to offer.
As Chandra Muzaffer, Director of Just World Trust, reminded the conference, it was an Asian country. India, which chose universal suffrage at independence in 1947. Poor and uneducated Indians could exercise their franchise, one of the most fundamental human rights, while African Americans, in the land of the free, were effectively denied the vote until the 1960s, when they were registered
The 1989 violence in Tiananmen Square looms large in every human rights report on China, but not the fact that communist China was the first country to provide the right to food to its billion plus population. Another Asian country. Malaysia has shown how cultural rights of its ethnically diverse population can be guaranteed.
Criticism of the West’s record on human rights was a running theme of the conference. Passionate demands were made for reparations for 500 years of European exploitation of the rest of the world – the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. enslavement of Africans and colonial exploitation of Asia and Africa.
Speakers pointed out that although colonialism has ended, the control and dominance of the West continue in more insidious forms. At the same time as promoting democracy, Western-controlled international organizations like the World Bank and the IMF are undermining elected governments with imposed economic programs.
Multi-party elections are seen as the universal panacea for peace but if the outcome is inconvenient for the West then democracy can be set aside. The US refusal to recognize the elected government in Angola helped cause the slide back into civil war. And the Algerian government was applauded for thwarting the electoral victory of revivalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in 1991.
The United Nations Security Council, the world’s most powerful political body, remains profoundly undemocratic, rubber stamping Washington’s dictates.
If the West is the problem not the solution, then the answer, some suggested at the conference, is to delink from the West and everything they claim it stands for individualism competition, spiritual and moral bankruptcy.
But things are not so clear cut. The terms “West” and “South” are a shorthand that hides a more complex reality.
As Indian sociologist Ashish Nandy argues, in the South there is also “a West within us.” The ruling elites in many developing countries look to the West and ignore the needs of their own populations, buying up arms instead of spending their limited resources on health and education,
Who benefits from advanced technology transfers? Who visits McDonald’s and watches MTV and CNN? Not the ordinary people struggling to cam a living but the “Westernized” middle class. Moreover, the South is not a homogeneous group. There is a world of difference between, for example, Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries, and Singapore, one of its richest but technically’ Third World” nation.
The term Third World itself is of Western origin, coined by the French writer Alfred Sauvy in 1952. It referred to those countries that belonged neither to the capitalist First nor communist Second worlds. Now that the “Second World” is no more, it is even less appropriate to use “Third World.”
Talk of “Third World solidarity” and greater South-South cooperation sounds hollow at a time when organizations such as the Nonalignod Movement have lost much ground in the post-Cold War world.
India, one of the founder members of the Movement, is now undertaking joint military exercises with the USA, which has become the biggest foreign investor in the country
Neither does the West have the monopoly on exploitation of other peoples. Violations of human rights by Southern governments are not uncommon. East Timor, Tibet, Afghanistan, Somalia, Turkey, Iraq. Liberia, Rwanda and Sudan are prime examples. Such and other thorny questions need to be addressed if a genuine dialogue with the West is to achieve universal respect for human rights, in its widest sense,
As the Just Warld Trust says: “It is a task that transcends ethnic and religious affinities national and regional boundaries. It is a challenge that goes beyond the North-South divide, the First World-Third World dichotomy.”
But that the conference, the first of its kind was ostracized by Western human rights groups and by most of the international press which refused to attend, unfortunately indicates that the West may not be interested.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 27, 1995
