The Perils of Indifference

The Perils of Indifference by most famous holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has many resonances for us Cambodians. The title says it all - in light of our Khmer Rouge history and the KR mentality of fear and intimidation which continues to exist to this day, as well as human rights abuses of land evictions, using the court as a political tool etc. The middle way does not work in this case: you are either for justice or injustice; you either care or are indifferent. Omission is as much a sin as commission. You cannot be a bystander in life to abuses and still call yourself "moral" or free of guilt. The choice is yours: do you stand on the side of justice or injustice? Simply put, justice is not neutral. It stands on the side of the poor and the oppressed. -- www.thearyseng.com

Elie Wiesel
delivered 12 April 1999, Washington, D.C.

Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends:

Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know -- that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.

And now, I stand before you, Mr. President -- Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others -- and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. "Gratitude" is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary, or Mrs. Clinton, for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.

We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.

Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the "Muselmanner," as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were -- strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.

Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God -- not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.

And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.

And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader -- and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945. So he is very much present to me and to us. No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history -- I must say it -- his image in Jewish history is flawed.


The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo -- nearly 1,000 Jews -- was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people -- in America, the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don't understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?

But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we call the "Righteous Gentiles," whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America's largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler's Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?

And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.

And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man, whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity.

But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.

Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today's justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents, be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?

What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.

Some of them -- so many of them -- could be saved.

And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.

Rare protest made at the UNHRC session

September 18, 2008
By Basil Fernando
UPI Asia Online

Column: Burning Points

Hong Kong, China — The protest made by Professor Yash Ghai in his written statement to the 9th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council is an eye-opener. He spoke of the rude insults meted to him by the Cambodian government and their failure to cooperate with his mandate.

His comments demonstrate the serious decline in the cooperation of a number of states with authoritarian regimes that are actively undermining the work of the United Nations. These states resist issues related to the development of the rule of law, independence of the judiciary and the protection of human rights. Professor Ghai also complained about the inadequate backing he received from the relevant U.N. agencies and the international community for his work.

The mandate for a special representative for human rights in Cambodia was created in 1993 and in the subsequent 15 years several special representatives held this post. They all maintained contact with the government, civil society organisations, international human rights organisations and the Cambodian Office for Human Rights, established after the U.N. sponsored elections in 1993.

Commenting on the recommendations of his predecessors, Ghai stated that he had reviewed the recommendations made previously and had repeatedly endorsed them. These repeated endorsements included the recommendations of the very first representative appointed in 1993. In simple terms this implies that none of the recommendations have ever been implemented. Perhaps the professor would have realized the wisdom of Einstein who once said that madness means repeatedly doing the same thing, expecting a different result. Perhaps the 15 years that the U.N spent making recommendation to the Cambodian government has proved that the only reaction of the Cambodian government is to ignore them.

Professor Ghai also mentioned that he was repeatedly insulted by Prime Minister Hun Sen and the government spokesman and information minister, Khieu Kanharith. He said that the prime minister referred to him as a deranged person, a tourist and a lazy person, while Khieu Kanharith referred to him and human rights organisations as animals. The spokesman also attacked the professor on racial grounds by referring to his nationality and said that Kenyans are savages who did not know the ways of the Aryans.

Such personal attacks and slurs on the basis of race are increasingly used as a method adopted by authoritarian regimes to attack U.N. officers dealing with human rights issues. Some countries also attack such officers on the basis that they are white westerners who suffer from the Anglo Saxon complex of wanting to dominate the world. The essence of such attacks is a loud cry which states clearly that “we do not want any exposure and criticisms of our human rights record. It is our business.” This means that the absence of the rule of law, exploitation of the weak by the powerful because the weak do not have the means to protect them, the stealing of their land and its distribution to the rich patrons of powerful politicians and the use of the police to harass and to intimidate the people are all local matters and should not be commented upon by the United Nations.

The debate on Cambodia shows that some countries call upon the United Nations to support only those issues, which their government wants to address. For example, if U.N. agencies observe that law institutions are weak in the country and request the government to act on the matter, the government may say that they do not need the assistance of the U.N. on that matter but rather on some other issues like medical infrastructure or training the police etc. They attempt to demand that the U.N. accept the country’s denial of rights by repression as a matter that should be left to the government and the international discourse on these matters should be of no concern to the United Nations. Often this approach is aimed at requesting the United Nations for technical assistance while denying the U.N. a role in monitoring the actual human rights situation faced by the people.

Thus, there is a strong attempt to change the very discourse on human rights. Ever since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there has been a global discourse to improve human rights standards for the benefit of all people in all countries. The adoption of the Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was a further step taken to improve the global concern for human rights. This was followed by a large number of other covenants relating to various specific aspects of human rights such as the elimination of torture, extrajudicial killings, discrimination against women, equality before law, children’s rights and a vast number of other concerns. Now, a considerable number of countries with authoritarian regimes have formed themselves into a strong lobby to resist the influence of the human rights discourse.

Professor Ghai also mentioned that he did not receive adequate backing when he was being undermined and insulted by the Cambodian regime. He said that when the Cambodian prime minister mentioned that he was carrying out his mandate only to make money, the relevant U.N. agencies did not make a public statement to say that the mandate was carried out voluntarily and that no payment of money was involved in his work. Therefore, he had to make such a statement himself to counteract the false allegations.

This aspect of understanding and supporting the work of U.N. officers dealing with difficult situations has become a matter of serious concern in recent times. Such governments are increasingly alienating themselves from the relevant U.N. agencies and the various mandate holders tasked with handling the grave situation of human rights. Perhaps the international anti-terrorism drive has undermined the international will to protect and promote human rights.

Professor Ghai’s protests are courageous, frank and rare in present day international diplomacy and have to be appreciated. There are lessons need to be learned from such protests, which are eye-openers to the severe problems affecting the movements for human rights and democracy globally.
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(Basil Fernando is director of the Asian Human Rights Commission based in Hong Kong. He is a Sri Lankan lawyer who has also been a senior U.N. human rights officer in Cambodia. He has published several books and written extensively on human rights issues in Asia.)