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46
You know, we received the message, as so many parents do, and
we know they are inspired by the police, that our son was killed on
the borders. But, two years later, we learned from friends that they
had seen an interview with him on Dutch television, but we have not
seen him since that July in 1980.
We remember how our 20~year-old daughter was taken in the
middle of the night by the security police and how we searched for
months to try to find out where she was held in solitary confinement.
My wife has been arrested for protesting against detention without
charge or trial. We have seen the suffering of our younger daughter
who was held under the state of emergency and for whom we had to
seek psychological help.
~ can remember the shock on the faces of my 1~ and 12-year-old
children when the police came in the middle of the night to arrest me
for treason. Those two children have experienced what thousands of
other children live through every day, seeing armed police invading
their homes and holding them, 1~ and 11-year-olds, at the point of
a gun.
How can we ever forget our colleagues who have been assas-
sinated and murdered? ~ mention a few names quickly: Griffith
Mxenge and his wife, our attorney, Victoria. ~ mention my friends
that ~ worked with, Dr. and Mrs. Ribeirro, Norman Manuphotho, the
parents of my coaccused Thozamile Gqweta, whose shack was locked
and set alight while they were inside. These are the monstrous deeds
of apartheid.
On December 19 we were told, while we were out, that we should
not return home. In the middle of the night we went sneaking into
our home and collected some of our clothes, because it seemed clear
that I was no longer safe there, and we left South Africa on December
20, 1986. Thank you.
COMMENTS
Robert W. liates
It Is difficult to follow that recitation. It also brings back our own
history here. When you were arrested in 1976, our committee had
just begun its work. We had just been through a very difficult period
of trying to decide how to proceed, what kinds of cases, there was so
much injustice, so much torture, so many terrible things happening
in the world. Whom should we defend? Should we defend only
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4/
scientists? Didn't shoemakers have as many rights as scientists for
defense? All these questions, so difficult to try to sort out.
Then we learned of your case and it helped to crystallize and
make our task easier, and it set us on the road that we have continued
on to this day. We have never met before, until a little while ago. It
is a very special occasion to be on the program with you.
It was also soon after that time, in 1978, in trying to defend the
role of the committee against some of the criticism that we had re-
ceived, particularly from the Third World and from Eastern Europe,
writing on behalf of the Committee on Human Rights in Science
magazine, ~ described a serious flaw in Western efforts to enhance
human rights and one repeatedly emphasized by those sceptical of
our role and our moral stance. ~ cited several examples of this cri-
tique, one of which, almost 10 years later, could easily still be written
today. The then-Iranian representative to the World Bank wrote in
The New York Times:
In spite of some 30 years of debate over this complex issue Human
rights] in the United Nations, American and Western libertarian
philosophy still regards 'human rights' in a very narrow context:
as essentially political, universal, and timeless.
But as far as the third world is concerned they are largely
one-sided, passive and abstract. They redect political rights
for the redress of grievances, personal immunity from unlawful
or unnecessary search and seizure, habeus corpus privileges, due
process of law for incarceration or imposition of fines, the absence
of cruel and inhuman punishment, and a host of other individual
freedoms of action.
But they are silent about the society obligation toward the
individual; they say little about the right to employment, the
right to obtain a meaningful education, the right to enjoy a
minimum of life's amenities. These 'active' and 'positive' sides
(that is, society's obligations) are either ignored or considered as
secondary in the roster of Western 'human rights.'i2
Today, at this celebration of the steadfast and persistent academy
effort to free the imprisoned and to alleviate the plight of the perse-
cuted, we are still as distant from confronting rights to life as well as
rights to liberty. It has never been better said:
i2Jahangir Amuzegar, Wrights and Wrongs, The Now York Times, January
29, 1978, Section IV, p. 17.
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so
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness.
And that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted
some 172 years later, would also declare that "everyone has the
right to life . . .~ (Article 3) and that "everyone has the right to a
standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself
and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care
and necessary social services (Article 25, par. 1) is little satisfaction
for how long we have failed to equalize the emphasis on life as well
as liberty. This is not to say that the pursuit of or the right to work
should be equated today in this country with the right to r~revent
abortion or to refuse to pay union dues.
~.
There is of course one set of rights to life that are honored with
deep concern in the Western world. On the individual level, this
is the literal right to life, the most prominent concern being with
capital punishment. Few Americans realize how rare in the West is
our national acceptance of capital punishment until a country such
as Germany refuses to extradite a terrorist unless we promise not to
ask for the death penalty.
This concern with the sanctity of life is amplified in the great
efforts to stave off the nuclear holocaust and to sustain life on earth.
But setting aside these notable examples, for this discussion, ~ pose
the contrast between rights of life and rights of liberty as the contrast
between social and economic rights and civil and political ones.
~ have neither the tune nor possess the scholarship to speculate
on how the trinity of rights became so narrowed, although ~ would
welcome your thoughts on this point. Rather, ~ want to explore how
we in the West, and particularly we scientists, may begin to redress
the historic balance. In so doing, ~ will try to illustrate some of
the difficulties in choosing which rights to life to assert, and then
conclude with a suggestion for a modest beginning.
In the developed world, in industrialized countries, in both East
and West, a starting point for rights to life as opposed to rights to
liberty usually begins with rights to health, welfare, and employment.
In a rough approximation, there appears to be a preference order
between health, welfare, and employment. And in particular there
is almost a trade-off between welfare and employment as welfare
becomes more generous and assured, unemployment has become
more acceptable.
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~ -
The normality of what constitutes acceptable unemployment
continues to edge upwards, not only in the United States but also
even more dramatically in Western Europe, and just recently in
Japan. While in the socialist world, where there is great pride in the
priority given to the right to work, the heavy burden of providing the
right, indeed the duty to work, has led to a vast apparatus of make-
work jobs and low productivity, combined with moonlighting and an
expanding underground economy. Thus, in industrialized societies of
both West and East, the debate as to basic rights, stripped of their
rhetoric, often appears as a debate about means relative levels and
ways of implementation-rather than of the ends, themselves.
~ might note still another complication in affirming rights to
life as well as liberty, there is the interaction between them. In
both the industrialized Soviet Union and developing China, efforts
to improve economic development appear to be slowed by the absence
of at least some political rights. Ironically, this seems especially so
in centrally planned societies where market signals are frequently
absent. Recent experience has shown that economic development in
market-dominated societies may happily coexist with authoritarian
regimes, as, for example, in South Korea, Taiwan, or Brazil under
the military.
But if we would begin to address basic social and economic
rights, it is the crise de conscience of the Third World that ~ find
most compelling, just as in asserting civil and political rights we ithe
Committee on Human Rights] found the plight of the imprisoned
most compelling, despite many other existing injustices. To illustrate
let me draw from my own concern with hunger.
In the latest authoritative effort to describe hunger in Amer-
ica, the Physician's Task Force estimated in 1985 that there were
approximately 20 million hungry Americans, of whom 75 percent
live below the poverty line (8 percent of the population) and receive
no supplemental food stamp benefits. The poverty line used to de-
fine hunger in this study was set at $10-for a family of four. Let
me compare this to a recently published study from Kenya which,
although using decade-old data, well illustrates a fundamental dif-
ference. There, among the smallholder farm community (70 percent
of Kenya's population) almost 40 percent fell below the poverty line,
defined as caloric need for energy, with a comparable income for a
family of seven of $310.
But while the enormous differences in poverty and sustenance
suggest that the assertion of rights to life might well begin with
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the poorest of the poor, even the best-intentioned will find some
confusion in assertions of which rights to claim as fundamental. One
might begin with the basic human needs framework, on occasion
popular among aid givers and specialized UN agencies, if less so
among the underdeveloped countries themselves. The lists of needs
sometimes vary, but water, food, shelter, health and education are
found on most of them. Which of these would qualify as human
rights? The right to water, YES; to food, YES; to shelter, YES; to
health, YES; but to education, maybe.
For those of us who were given the mandate of the academy to
organize an appropriate effort on human rights a decade ago, this
painful moral selectivity in the face of enormous injustice and need is
reminiscent of our early struggles to selectively focus our own modest
efforts on where they were to be most effective and most needed. Our
policy then frustrated, and still continues to frustrate, even some of
our own members who are deeply committed to other human rights
issues beyond the fate of the imprisoned that we chose to focus on.
Nonetheless, our policy has been effective and it was a beginning.
Today, ~ suggest another modest beginning, to assert the right
of all of human kind to be free from hunger. ~ do so for four reasons.
Food sufficiency is an objective human need, undeniably necessary
to the right to life. Freedom from hunger is a right whose time has
come. The persistence of hunger in a world of plenty is unnecessary
and an affront to conscience as well as creativity. And ending hunger
is one of the most ancient and sustained applications of science and
technology.
For the specialists in nutrition and economics, perhaps for the
members of our own Food and Nutrition Board, the quantification
of hunger is always in doubt. Nonetheless, that there are somewhere
between half a billion to a billion-plus hungry people in the world
is widely accepted. And within a 25 percent variance, the standard
need for energy and protein for growth and activity is well recog-
nized. Indeed it has been so for mania, as the rations adopted
in Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago fit well the current standards of
FAD-WHO diets for the Near East.
One way of describing the history and prehistory of humankind
is in terms of its definition and extension of "kind." With many
fits and starts and great retreats, over time our concept of whom we
define as human, as similar to us, as brother to keep, expands. It does
so sometimes in surprising ways as we link hands across America or
rock for Africans on Chinese television. In retrospect, these recent
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~1
expressions may prove to be just more fits and starts, but ~ prefer to
think of them as harbingers of a popular consensus to end hunger, to
see hungry Africans or landless South Asians as an extension of our
kind, a consensus and an extension that must underlie all assertions
of universal rights.
There is no more profound nor poignant paradox than the per-
sistence of hunger in a world of plenty. To know that there may be as
many as a billion hungry people in the world is deeply troubling and
frustrating, when, at the same time, mountains of butter in Europe
and overflowing granaries in North America threaten the agricultural
economy of the industrialized world. Thus, the persistence of hunger
is an affront to our conscience and a deep challenge to our science.
To free the world from hunger, not only for the five billion now,
but also for the ten billion of the future, will call for our conscience
and for our creativity. We will need the best of our science, not
merely in the obvious applications of technology to productivity,
but even more importantly in the social understanding of how to
increase productivity without increasing the misery of the needy. We
will also need to know how to sustain agriculture and to distribute
its products in that crowded, warmer world toward which we move.
It is no easier now to know how to begin confronting hunger than
it was 10 years ago to confront torture and imprisonment. Perhaps
we might begin with the extremes. In a modest way, we might speak
out when people, particularly civilian populations, are intentionally
deprived of food, usually in the midst of conflict, held as hostage
to their hunger to press for an advantage or to punish for their
allegiance. There are far too many recent examples, whether they
be refugee camps in Lebanon, disputed provinces in Ethiopia, mined
harbors in Nicaragua, or scorched fields in Afghanistan.
As a second step, we can encourage adherence to and U.S. rati-
fication of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights, with its twin rights to both adequate
food and the "rights of everyone to be free from hunger" (Article 11~.
This covenant has been ratified by 88 nations. (While the United
States has signed this covenant as well as the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights, it has ratified neither.)
At the same time, and for more lasting impact, we can examine
our own science and our own activities in the National Research
Council. If we do so, in a searching way, ~ am sure that we will
find a great deal of complexity and conflicting opinions as to how to
end hunger and even some questions as to whether we are part of
.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
political rights
