Rex Bloomstein
Human Rights: Does Anyone Care?
Rex Bloomstein - Human Rights: Does Anyone Care?
- Well, good evening, everybody. I’ve called, “Human Rights: Does Anyone Care?” And there are painfully many in this world who do not care about human rights and thankfully, many who do. I’m one of them, which is why violations of human rights have been the subject of a number of films and programmes I’ve made over the years. And what greater contemporary example of gross violations are those we’ve been witnessing day after day by the people of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin despises human rights as have so many dictators and elites, which is why I believe the importance of human rights must be taught in the classroom, in the university, in civil society, all over the world. For me, as a filmmaker, I came to believe that I should find ways to bring the subject of human rights to a mass television audience. So I thought it might be of interest to share with you some examples of the work I’ve done over the years in trying to meet this charge. The subject of human rights can be arcane, legalistic, stuffed full of the language of diplomacy, which is often intended to obfuscate and mire debates in UN speak. Attend a session of the UN Commission of Human Rights as I’ve done, and you’ll know what I mean. There are exceptions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified in 1948, and a magnificent document. Its articles formed the basis of many subsequent international covenants, conventions, and treaties. Here are some of the articles of the Declaration. Article three, everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
Article four, no one should be held in slavery or servitude. Slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. Article 19, everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. It’s been said that human rights are the idea of our time, but every day we see and hear evidence that suggests these dense but valiant attempts to bind nations to codes of conduct in the treatment of their citizens And the citizens of other countries in peace and war are sometimes blatantly ignored, despite advances in international human rights machinery, such as the creation of the international criminal court. The effect can be one of despair and cynicism of the gulf between intention and reality. A gulf then in the extreme can have terrible consequences. For instance, when a minority or a majority often led by dedicated elite turns upon their fellow countrymen or the people of another country in a series of steps that could lead to gross violations of human rights. The first step, denigration and vilification, a process that leads to dehumanisation. They’re no longer human, like you or I. Then economic and social isolation. Then hopefully capitalising on the rest of the world’s ignorance and potential indifference. The final step, extermination, genocide. So violations of human rights, wherever they may be, whatever they may be, are ignored at our peril. The rule of law is crucial in any debate or analysis, historical or contemporary, regarding human rights. I’d like in this first excerpt to show what I believe is a devastating example of the law being suborn to the interests of the state. The country is Hitler’s Germany.
The situation, the trials of the men who plotted to overthrow the furor in their failed attempted assassination of the 20th of July, 1944, Goebbels, the Reich minister of information, ordered the trials of the leading plotters to be filmed. I obtained several hither to unknown hours of this original footage from a German archive, and from those fragments put together the story of the July plot to make a film broadcast by the BBC in 1979. I tend to explore this film in more detail, in a later lecture on the same day in July of this year, for those of you who may be interested. So here is an excerpt from “Traitors to Hitler.”
[Narrator] The president of the People’s Court is the infamous, Roland Freisler. Hitler said that the traitors should not be allowed to make long speeches, that Freisler, Andrey Vyshinsky, would see to that. Vyshinsky was Stalin’s notorious prosecutor in the Russian treason trials in the 1930s, Hitler added that these traitors should suffer death by slow hanging within two hours of the sentence being passed.
[Narrator] What better man to avenge this attempt on the life of the furor than the cruel, cynical, and eloquent, Roland Freisler. Thwarted in his ambition to become minister of Justice, from 1937 to 1944, he sentenced over 5,000 people to death as the red robed president of the People’s Court. He subordinated all human feeling to the dogma of national socialism and vehemently followed the line that individuals must not only be punished for treasonable acts, but also for seditious thoughts. He became known as the Robespierre of the Nazi Revolution.
Most of the conspirators were tortured and hanged on the same day. The torturer remains a man about time. Article five of the universal Declaration says, no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. So if the torturer is a recognisable human being, how is he able to torture the defenceless man or woman in front of him? How do you become a torturer? The awful truth is that one does not have to be a sadist or a psychopath to become one. Usually such men, and they are mainly men, are weeded out as too unpredictable. Torture occurs mostly in non-democratic countries, but it can certainly occur and does in democratic ones, as we know from Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, there is now disturbing evidence of the justification by the Bush administration of the use of torture and the practise of rendition in the war against terror. I’ve explored theme of torture in several films and programmes and because of that experience became part of a group in the mid 1980s who formed the medical foundation for the care of victims of torture. It’s now called Freedom From Torture and well worth supporting. The excerpt I would like to show now is from a three-part series I made for channel four in 1997 called “The Roots of Evil.” The team and I making this series found a man called Michael Soufis, who told us he was conscripted into the Turkish army and found himself seconded to a special unit in the war against the Kurdish minority. He began his apprenticeship as a torturer.
The first two days they tortured us physically, and psychologically. So we became so scared that we, after two days, we had torturing practise and we didn’t hesitate to do it because we were afraid to be tortured ourself. So one of the torture techniques, the most, one of the first ones was a falaka. The falaka is, take a shirt like this. We put the victim on the floor, on his back with his head on this side. And we put the shirt like that. We take his slacks and we put it between. We enter it here. It becomes, his feet’s coming here. Somebody’s sitting on his feet here and the victim is still downstairs. So when somebody sits here, he cannot move because he will break his legs with all the pressure on. So then we had to give him, we had to give him each 10 bastinado, beats on his feet, on the back, what can lead to amputation of the feet. And I saw from the feet from that old man from 60 years old, was one of the first victims. I saw meat going away from his feet. The seventh day, something happened that changed completely my life. We enter in that room again and we had a child before us. That child had to have something between eight and 12-years-old, not older, was very little. The blue punch on his head, was already beaten before coming to us. And he was a terrorist. He told us he was some thief and some bad Kurdish little boy. Then he had brought to . They told us that this child had to be brought to but before going, we had to torture the child and Villa choose me out to give the child 10 bastinado on the feet of the child. The falaka, I told you earlier. That moment changed something in my mind. I don’t know what happened there, but I saw that child. I saw my colleagues. I saw I was looking in the eyes of everybody, and I just put that bastinado on the floor and I say, do it yourself. So I changed completely what I was told all these days that people were bad and terrorists and changed in my mind when I saw the child, couldn’t be a terrorist. That child even couldn’t have a gun in his hand because too heavy for carrying it. So after I was beat completely, I was kicked, I was put knockout. The last thing I remember was that Villa was giving me kicks with his hands and with punches and everything. If that child maybe came two weeks later, the child came after seven days. If that child maybe came after a couple of more sessions, maybe I’d torture that child, maybe they brought that child too fast to me. So that child, when I saw that child, eight-years-old, I told directly, this child cannot be a terrorist. This child cannot be bad. It’s a child that’s doesn’t deserve to get tortured. So after all this brainwash completely disappeared and I refused to torture them…
[Interviewer] But in fact, if they hadn’t brought that child at that moment, you might have continued?
Yeah, maybe I was still there. Torturing other children, woman. Turkey, you have no limits for the tortures. Once you, in Turkey, they torture anything. They torture. I know cases from women, pregnant, children, everything, innocent people, old men, 80-years-old, there’s no age. So, and people, I think when you start, when come to, you don’t think anymore. You become a machine, you become something cold, you become something without feelings. You don’t have friends anymore. You don’t have a good heart anymore. Just that bad thing that’s in you and you say torture. It’s your job. It’s your function for your country. But that child changed my mind, saved my life, maybe, but maybe not his life, whatever.
It was in the late 1980s that I noted a column in the Times newspaper called “Prisoners of Conscience.” It was written by the journalist, Caroline Moorehead. It struck me and I could do the same thing, namely highlighting an individual case of an innocent person, unjustifiably imprisoned, but this time do it for television. Of course, the concept of prisoners of conscience had been developed by Amnesty International. We first went to channel four to understand. We then persuaded the BBC that we should produce ten five minute programmes over two weeks, Monday to Friday around December 10th, which is actually Human Rights Day. And how many of us know that? We wanted the audience not only to watch such a series, but to get actually involved in trying to secure the release of an innocent person, to do what human rights organisations all over the world were doing in bringing attention to the often appalling conditions of treatment such prisoners endured. I further decided that we should get high profile and distinguished people to present the programmes to get as much attention as possible. The presenters eventually included two former prime ministers, distinguished scientists, famous sportsmen, provocative journalists, controversial writers, eminent actors and actresses and rock stars. So here’s Sting, who presented the first programme we ever did, in our “Prisoner of Conscience” series in December, 1988.
♪ The rain will fall ♪ ♪ Like tears from a star ♪ ♪ Like tears from a star ♪ ♪ On and on the rain will say ♪ ♪ How fragile we are ♪ ♪ How fragile we are ♪ ♪ How fragile we are ♪
- Song-man is a South Korean who has been held in Taejon prison?, south of the capitol, Seoul, for the last 17 years. He’s known to have been tortured into making a false confession and to have tried to commit suicide to avoid further questioning. During his suicide attempt in custody, he set fire to his own body. Song-man was born in Kyoto in Japan on April the third, 1945. After graduating from Tokyo University, he went to South Korea to study at the School of Sociology in Seoul. There he joined his younger brother, Song-Jon-Shik, who was already a student at the faculty of law. In the spring of 1971, there were widespread student demonstrations in the Capitol against the way the presidential elections were being conducted. In March, after taking part in one of these demonstrations, Song-man was picked up by the Army Security Command. He was released only to be rearrested a month later. This time, he was charged with spying for North Korea and with organising student demonstrations against the South Korean government. His brother was arrested with him. The two young men admitted that they had taken part in the demonstrations, but absolutely denied inciting other students. As to the charge of spying, Song-man agreed that he had travelled to North Korea, but explained that as a second generation Korean living in Japan, he’d become interested in the idea of reuniting the two halves of Korea by peaceful means. He insisted that his visits had nothing to do with espionage. But in South Korea, all travel to the north is forbidden and punishable under the national security law.
After two weeks in custody, Song-man confessed to having collected national secrets about South Korea and to having passed them on to the north. He admitted to organising underground student communist groups in the south. But in fact, he was only able to sign this so-called confession six weeks later, for by then he was in a hospital recovering from the extensive burns of his suicide attempt. He signed the only way he could, with the imprint of his big toe. Later at his trial, he told his judges that he tried to commit suicide because, quote, “He could not endure the mental and physical pains during interrogation.” Nevertheless, the court still accepted Song-man’s confession as primary evidence of his guilt and remained convinced that he was a communist spy. He was sentenced to death by the Seoul district court. A year later, this was reduced to life imprisonment. His brother, Song-Jon-Shik, was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, reduced to seven on appeal. In the years that followed, the boy’s mother, Ogi Song, and their sister, Young Sil, travelled to South Korea from Japan to visit them as often as they could. On May the 27th, 1978, the day Kim-Song’s brother was due to be released, their mother waited for him outside his detention centre. He never came out. She died in 1980 at the age of only 59. In July, 1985, after 14 years in prison, Kim-song rebelled against the conditions under which he was kept, and in particular, against the long periods of isolation. As a punishment, he was tied with rope, hung from the ceiling and beaten. Later he was put in a windowless cell measuring three feet by six feet. Other political prisoners held in Korean jails have spoken of being tortured by electric shocks, starvation, suffocation, and having their heads immersed in water. Kim-Song is still in prison. He is now 43. He met his brother for the first time in 17 years a few months ago. They were allowed just 50 minutes together. Kim-Song is now a middle-aged man and facing the rest of his life in isolation. He is so badly scarred and disfigured that he believes that the authorities will never dare to release him. If you would like more information about Kim-Song, send a stamped addressed envelope to Prisoners of Conscience. BBC Television, London W12 8QT or telephone this number now, 01580444.
Well, Amnesty International was the main NGO that we used to find cases, which of course there were hundreds at any one time like Kim-Song. We also had the help of Human Rights Watch and other human rights organisations in finding people imprisoned by their government or regime. So how did we go about making a selection from literally hundreds of cases? Well, there had to be from all corners of the world to reflect “Prisoners of Conscience” as a global phenomenon. There should be a mix of men, women, and even children from a variety of backgrounds, doctors, housewives, students, opposition figures, artists. We needed visuals such as newsreel footage illustrating the ongoing repression in that particular country, pictures of the prisoner and his family, the prison where he or she was kept. Sometimes visuals were hard to get. I remember then in one or two cases, we only had one photograph. An average of some 10,000 people either wrote or rang the BBC for an information pack after each programme. I gave details of how and where to write on behalf of the prisoner. Amnesty volunteers staffed phones to take calls from a telephone number highlighted on the screen. I do remember doing that myself. It’s quite remarkable when you talk to people like that. Of the 64 prisoners of conscience featured over those five years, between ‘88 and 1993, at least over 40 have been freed. I think we might lay claim that our series was perhaps directly responsible for two or three of those releases. But who knows? Here’s another of the programmes, which may be of particular interest. It’s presented by Yehudi Menuhin.
The story I’m about to tell you would be an indictment of the human race at any time. Perhaps you will understand why as an old Jew, it saddens me, particularly. Dr. Jad Ishaq is a Palestinian and the former dean of the Faculty of Science at Bethlehem University on the West Bank. He has a PhD from the University of East Anglia. This summer on the 8th of July, he was arrested by Israeli soldiers and given a six month detention order. He’s now in ANSAR III, a military prison camp in the Negev Desert, together with at least 2,600 Palestinian detainees. Dr. Ishaq has a house just outside Bethlehem in the village of Beit Sahour. In March, the Palestinian uprising, the Antifa, was at its most violent to date, and the Army curfews had made fruit and vegetables very scarce. So Dr. Ishaq and three friends raised 1000 pounds and started a small market garden. On an acre of land belonging to friend, they planted cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, and corn. From a small shed. Dr. Ishaq gave advice about how to grow crops and vegetables, especially to the people who were out of work. However, his village, Beit Sahour, has been increasingly active in a campaign of civil disobedience. Residents have been boycotting Israeli goods and shopkeepers have refused to pay their taxes. Shortly after the market garden opened, Dr. Ishaq found himself subjected to growing military harassment. His phone was cut off. Soldiers parked their Jeeps outside his house and spent the night revving their engines and sounding their horns. They shoned powerful flashlights into his bedroom window. His wife, Garda, describes how their five-year-old daughter’s hair turned partially grey. Eventually, under this pressure, he closed down his business. On July the seventh, soldiers broke into people’s houses and confiscated identity cards, money, gold, and video recorders. Residents were told that they would retrieve their possessions only if they pay their taxes. They gathered in the streets to protest. Dr. Ishaq, who was at the university that morning, was not among those who had withheld their taxes. It didn’t matter. He went back to his village to calm people’s fears, but was arrested. Since that day, he has been in custody.
He has had no proper trial and is held under a six month administrative detention order, which can be renewed over and over again. ANSAR III, where he had been sent, is the largest of the Israeli prison camps. It consists of tents surrounded by wire fences, and guarded by soldiers. Prisoners spent their days sitting on thin foam mattresses trying to keep out of the often intense desert sun. They’re not allowed to close the flaps against the dust or sandstorms. Three or four times a day, they’re forced out to stand in the sun and be counted. They’re deliberately degraded and humiliated. Dr. Ishaq is not a man of politics. He’s middle-aged, married with four children, and likes to play bridge with his neighbours. From his prison camp, he wrote a letter on September 7th. “I believe that I do not deserve this punishment, and I pray to God that what I went through during these last three months will have no effect on my desire and aspiration for peace. I should always try to forgive those who made this mistake against me.” Dr. Jad Ishaq is obviously a man of peace, but strangely, men of peace are often feared.
If I may share a to that programme. A few years ago, I presented “Prisoners of Conscience Revisited” for BBC’s radio “Archive On 4” series where we trace some of the people featured in these programmes. If you recall, Kim-Song, the prisoner in Sting’s programme. Well, he more than survived. He’s now a professor of human rights law teaching at a university in Japan and how good it was to talk to him. He said to me, “Human rights belongs to those who demand it. It’s like air or water. Where it’s in abundance, you don’t even think about it.” It was equally good to track down Dr. Jad Ishaq, a former prisoner that Yehudi Menuhin talked about. Interestingly, he told me that during his forced detention, he came to realise the gap between the world of the university and life in the street. On his release, Dr. Ishaq moved away from academia, dedicating his life to researching water, environment and agriculture for the Palestinian people. He believes his peaceful protests were in direct reply to those in Israel who label all Palestinians as potential terrorists. Well, you have on the screen, Kim-Song and I’ve just spoken about him. And there is Dr. Ishaq. I must say, it was very powerful talking to them and I felt strongly that this man was not anywhere near the world of terrorism. And that he’d turned away from bitterness and the cruelties he suffered. He’d sort of got on with his life, And I was very touched that he wanted to do what he wanted to do. Anyway… I’d like to go on from these stills and back to my presentation. After five years of these programmes, it became obvious that the numbers of “Prisoners of Conscience” were declining. I felt that we should expand the five minute slot to give more context to our chosen subjects. Time to change. So I devised a new format. This time, the programme would last 10 minutes, not five. The presenter would focus on different subjects such as genocide, censorship, slavery, child labour. And again, interwoven with personal stories to help us understand the human impact. As before, we built this week of programmes around Human Rights Day in December. Again, the public were asked to phone or write for an information pack. This new series, which began in 1994, was called “Human Rights, Human Wrongs.” Here’s the actor Anthony Hopkins on disappearance, people who’ve been disappeared. ♪ They dance alone ♪ ♪ They dance alone ♪
Disappearance is one of the most sinister and terrifying forms of modern political repression. These three Iraqis, all brothers, Ackmed, Hussein and Mohammed Rita were last seen alive in a prison camp called Nugrat Al-Salman, in the desert near the border with Saudi Arabia in the spring of 1985. The temperature was about 40 degrees centigrade. That day, their sister found them healthy and in good spirits. But on her next visit, a month later, she turned up to find them gone. Thousands of prisoners had vanished. A policeman told her they had been moved. But to where? No one could say. In Iraq, several hundred thousand people have vanished during the 1980s. Probably the largest number of disappeared people in the world today. Though Iraqi Kurds and Shia Muslims suffered the most, everyone was at risk. Sunni Muslims, Turkmens, Assyrians, men, women and children, clerics, scientists and teachers, members of banned political parties or just people suspected of being critical of Saddam Hussein’s form of government. In 1988, in what amounted to a planned and systematic mass murder of the entire rural Kurdish population, Operation An-Far resulted in the disappearance of at least 100,000 people, some say as many as 180,000 people. Old villages were exterminated. The people gassed, shot and tipped into pits. These men, women, and children are showing with their fingers how many relations they have lost. The Iraqi regime’s contempt for human rights is shown by making Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, Barzan Tikriti, head of their delegation to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
He is called “The Butcher of Baghdad,” the man who personally supervised the roundup of 8,000 Kurds who have never been seen again. Disappearance entered the vocabulary of human rights in World War II. In occupied France, the German field Marshall, Wilhelm Keitel, issued the infamous Night and Fog Decree to curb the French resistance. Suspects were shipped by the Nazis to Germany by night and in secret. Keitel had perceived that disappearance would cause more terror than open execution. Disappearance emerged again towards the end of the 1960s when the military government of Guatemalan Central America decided to get rid of its dissidents secretly. In the 1980s, the United Nations investigated over 15,000 cases of disappearance in 40 countries. Among those who vanished in Latin America are tens of thousands of indigenous people who opposed the landowners and the developers. In Argentina alone, thousands of students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and journalists disappeared within the period of six years. To this day, the mothers of the disappeared gather every week in the Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, carrying photographs of their missing children and grandchildren. Supposedly democratic regimes are now turning to disappearance as a way of disposing of troublesome political opponents. Over the 24 countries accused by Amnesty International of systematically dissipating people, only four could be said to be real dictatorships. The other 20, countries like Venezuela, Turkey, and Columbia claim to abide by the rule of law. A country that has persistently disappeared people is Morocco. Since the 1960s, men and women have been seized and held for years in secret detention centres, in villas, camps, isolated farms and old forts like this one called Tazmamart, from which 34 men recently emerged. Their health broken but still alive after 19 years held in total darkness. They include Ali Bourequat and his two brothers.
My brothers and I, we were disappeared in Morocco during 18 and a half years. After a few time, my brother, Mithat, he sat down and he didn’t get up and he can’t get up. His spine curve very, very strong. And he lost about between 20 and 25 centimetres of his height. And Bayazit, two years after him, he fall down and he can’t move anymore. So he stay like that, five years, five years until the end of 1991. Disappeared, it’s something like dying because we know people after a while, they said maybe it’s they die and nobody think about us. That was very, very difficult for us because every day passed, we was saying, maybe we are going to be, to be forgotten.
The brothers survived. But there are many other Moroccans still missing. Is this man, for instance, still alive? He’s a trade unionist called Abdel Hadacrusi, who has been missing for 29 years. His family believed he may still return to them. Morocco, however, is exceptional. Those who disappear, at least sometimes return. But in countries such as Iraq, to disappear is almost invariably to die. Most of the hundreds of thousands of vanished people in the last 10 years have probably had their lives ended by summary execution at the hands of soldiers and paramilitary death squads, their bodies buried, unmarked in mass graves. This may be the fate of the Marsh Arabs whose entire culture and environment are in the process of being disappeared. Since 1991, the Iraqi government has been destroying the marshes of southern Iraq, home to an ancient Arab people for thousands of years. They’ve been attacked with bombs, starved out of their villages, poisoned by contaminated water and killed by concealed mines laid among the weeds. In September of this year, canisters of poison gas were exploded and fell in clouds over the marshes. The bodies of the villages changed colour to yellow and orange. So how long can Saddam Hussein afford to remain indifferent to world outrage and world pressure?
Indeed. We did a further five years of “Human Rights, Human Wrongs,” and a record number of calls. This were a programme presented by Whoopi Goldberg on violence against women in the early 2000. Audiences averaged almost a million. One final variation occurred during those years. The BBC planned a human rights season in 1998 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration. So instead of continuing with “Human Rights, Human Wrongs,” we created a special new series as our contribution to the special season. I’ve been much impressed by Amnesty’s worldwide “Urgent Action” campaigns to alert amnesty groups to the plight of people facing imminent life-threatening danger or torture. So in discussion with Amnesty, we chose 10 individual stories that demanded “Urgent Action”. This became the title of a series of five minute films, but this time without presenters. We created a website, automated answering system, giving names and numbers of ambassadors and embassies. Viewers were given a number on screen and urged to protest about the situation facing our subject. I couldn’t film personally in all the 10 countries featured, but instead, commissioned BBC correspondents or stringers, human rights groups, and in one case, charity, to do filming for us. We then edited the material in London. Here’s the “Urgent Action” programme we made on China’s Uyghurs minority and how relevant it appears today.
[Narrator] Chu Hailan is fighting for her husband’s freedom from a Chinese labour camp. She constantly challenges the authorities and risks arrest herself. The most recent example of this was in September during the visit to China of Mary Robinson, the UN high Commissioner for human rights. Chu Hailan was dragged away and beaten when she tried to present the commissioner with the petition.
[Translator] Every day, they’re out there watching me. Whenever I go out, they follow me. They have even kidnapped me, used force to take me away and detain me.
[Narrator] Her, husband Lu, has not broken any law. He is simply accused of calling for a spirit of tolerance in Chinese political life. For this, he is serving three years, hard labour, with no formal charge or trial. Liu Nianchun is held here in Tuanhe Labour Camp where prisoners are organised in military style battalions and farm cotton and fruit. Conditions in these camps are brutal with beatings to force detainees to meet quotas. According to official figures, there are almost a quarter of a million people in nearly 300 such camps throughout China.
It’s called reeducation instead of labour camp. But actually, there was no reeducation at all. It’s just a labour, labour, labour. They’re not treated as a human being. They’re treated as an animal, like a working machine. And just for the benefit of the government. It’s totally horrendous, very gruesome system.
[Narrator] Liu Nianchun, who is 50, is a veteran human rights campaigner. He was part of the democracy war movement of the late 1970s and has been in trouble with the authorities ever since. Over the years, his so-called crimes have included publishing banned journals, signing petitions, and trying to set up an independent trade union. Like the ill treatment of this prisoner in a Shanghai jail, Liu Nianchun has endured beatings, unemployment, prison, and solitary confinement. He went into a labour camp, a healthy man. He now suffers from hypertension, severe stomach pains, and a tumour of the throat. When he began a hunger strike to protest against his treatment, he was tortured with electric batons, deprived of water and put into a small dark cell. In May, 1998, his wife, Chu Hailan, and his 82-year-old mother, Wu Huifen, visited him in Tuanhe. They found him in great pain and hardly able to speak. That evening, they staged a silent protest before The Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Increasingly, the international community is tending to prefer what they call quiet diplomacy, to open confrontation, when challenging China’s appalling human rights record. For Chu Hailan, this is not nearly enough. What she feared most has happened. When Liu Nianchun’s sentence expired in May, he was given another 14 months for showing no signs of repentance. His health is deteriorating and Chu Hailan is frightened that her husband could die at any time. If you want to protest against Liu Nianchun’s continuing detention, please ring this number now.
Well, a total of 17,000 people rang the BBC during the series. Some 25,000 contacted the BBC’s website. Several ambassadors were not pleased by what they saw, they were very unhappy, indeed. The programme that got the most response in our “Urgent Action” series was “Women Under the Taliban.” Some 7,000 people rang and 3000 got through. Here it is, and again, how poignant it seems, all these years later.
[Narrator] The Taliban are the only regime in the world to turn half of its population into shadows. Afghan women today are forbidden to work outside their homes, forbidden to leave their houses unless accompanied by a husband, father, brother, or son, and forbidden to go to school. The role they once played in their country’s economic life is over. It was in 1994 that a group of fighters calling themselves the Taliban emerged as a military and political force in the long-running civil war in Afghanistan. They now control 90% of the country. In the name of restoring peace and security, they are creating what they call a pure Islamic state. What they have done is to impose a code of behaviour which profoundly discriminates against women. It is too dangerous for any woman who has the courage to speak out to be identified. We cannot show you faces or mention names.
[Translator] I was ready to graduate last year. The oncologist for girls were shut down. I’m not even allowed to live in my house. The war has ruined our country, but the Taliban have destroyed our society. They have made living impossible for us. I have no hope for the future. No education, no job, no money, no food, no freedom, no voice to speak up. What is there to live for?
[Narrator] In public, women must be totally covered by a burqa which has only a mesh opening through which to breathe and see. And if they are too poor to buy one, they never go out. Women may not wear white socks, the colour of the Taliban flag or shoes that make any sound. Afghanistan today is one of the poorest countries in the world. Kabul, which was almost totally destroyed in the bombing, has over 30,000 widows, many of whom are reduced to begging in order to feed their children. The general climate of cruelty and abuse has had a terrible effect on women’s health.
[Translator] I have developed a stomach ulcer, insomnia, dizziness, anaemia. I went to a doctor at a hospital that accepts women. Since there are no men left in my family, I took my little sister along with me. In front of the hospital, I was short of breath and lifted my burqa. Two Taliban policemen saw me. We started to run. One of them ran after us. He said he was going to shoot. We were both terrified. We screamed. He hit me with the chain on my legs. It hurt so much.
[Narrator] Under the Taliban, there is no constitution and no independent judiciary. They are imposing Sharia law, which includes public floggings, amputations and executions. Crowds flocked to the stadium to watch a young woman being flogged for an alleged affair. Despite fears of the religious police, a hundred women walked through the streets to attend this secret sewing class. If the teacher were caught, she in turn could face flogging or even stoning. This woman was once a nurse. She has six daughters.
[Translator] We have nothing against modest clothing and covering our heads, but we can’t take lack of education. Why should women sit at home and do nothing? This is not Islam. Our people are being driven insane. Most women are afraid to speak up. But I’m not afraid anymore. I want a school. I want education. I want work. I want food for my people.
[Narrator] Well, fashion has changed. New BBC programme controllers came in and the BBC’s editorial policy department insisted I could no longer ask our audience to protest, use the word protest about these injustices 'cause we were crossing the line. And so it was in 1999 that our last series of “Human Rights, Human Wrongs” was made. In all, we did five years of these programmes and together with our series of “Prisoners of Conscience” and “Urgent Action”, 11 years altogether. I’d hope that the series format might be replicated in other countries. As far as I’m aware, that never happened. It was the hope of the world that we would learn from the horrors of the Second World War, that nations would draw closer together and correspondingly be less violent towards fellow states as well as their own citizens, in the light of such tragic events, that this fantastic communications revolution will be the engine of tolerance. But knowing more doesn’t necessarily bring understanding and acceptance of others. Indeed, attacks on freedom of expression have increased. Worldwide technologies such as the internet and social media have advanced in extraordinary rate. Yet groups, regimes, governments continue to inflict brutalities on their citizens and the citizens of other countries, often using international terror. Think of the attacks in Paris, in London and Manchester, and now, of course, Ukraine. It’s my contention that societies must heed the UN’s call and at the very least, must embed human rights education and develop continuing moral and practical responses to abuses of human rights with social and economic as well as civil and political. To answer the question, “Human Rights, Does Anyone Care?”, with a resounding yes. As the lawyer, Philippe Sand, said to me in the Radio four programme, “Why should people care about this?” Because human rights touches each and every person, in direct and indirect ways. We began this talk with acknowledging the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in the UN in 1948. Since then, it’s inspired over , domestic and international. So I’d like to end by focusing on one of them, the rights of the child. And here this theme is dealt with in another programme from the “Urgent Action” series, an example of the challenges we continue to face.
[Narrator] There are more than three million children like Sabia in Pakistan who get up in the morning not to go to school, but to go to work. Sabia is eight. She lives with her family in this village in central Punjab. They and other families are trapped for generations working to pay off loans so that when parents die or become too old to work, the debt is passed on to the children. Children can even be sold to other employers. Sabia’s family makes 1000 bricks a day. She is a virtual slave.
[Translator] If the children work, we get more money. If they don’t, we make less bricks and get less money. Of course, the work affects the health of the children. The dust and dirt get into their lungs and they keep getting sick. They cough. The children shouldn’t work, but we have no choice. If they don’t work, we can’t survive.
[Narrator] Families working in the brick kiln industry all day under the hot sun are often ill. Temperatures by day can reach 45 degrees centigrade. Many have skin problems, jaundice, stomach ailments and TB. By two o'clock every day, Sabia and her family are at home in the house provided by the kiln owner. They are bonded labourers and have no home of their own. There is no heating, no electricity, no running water, no sewage. Sabia works at least six days a week. She has no rights. Yet, Pakistan has ratified the UN convention on the rights of the child, which forbids heavy, dangerous work. Sabia does not go to school and her health may be permanently affected. Yet, Pakistan has passed an act abolishing bonded labour, making it illegal. Unless these commitments are honoured, Sabia will grow up knowing no other life.
Thank you for watching. Do ask any questions, if you so wish. Maybe I should have said at the beginning, it was very strong material, but you can’t hide these things and I never did in all these years. So I hope I haven’t confronted you with too painful material, but painful it is.
[Host] We certainly have quite a few questions.
Rex, I just wanted to say thank you very much for that really, honestly, it was shocking. Your presentation was excellent, but the content’s absolutely shocking and thought-provoking and overwhelming. So thank you for being with us and I’m going to hand you over for questions. Thanks.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Host] All right, our first question is, why can’t Russia be ousted from the Security Council because it is ignoring any international laws of non-aversion against an independent country?
A - Immensely difficult thing to do, isn’t it? I mean, the ramifications from that, the amount of politicking that will have to go on. But of course, it is a route for the world community to consider when you consider the violations that are going on. I personally would want that, that action to be initiated. But you know, it’s tremendously difficult. But an important question.
Q - [Host] Another question. Which countries are members of the UN’s Human Rights Commission?
A - Ah, I can’t tell you now. Probably 50 or 60 are represented, if I remember from my time doing those films. And of course, there are some grotesque examples of governments, you know, having representatives there who are violators of the first order. We saw that example from Saddam’s Day. It’s a battleground, but human rights is crucial, absolutely crucial. And it’s the standards with which we must aspire to that gives our world a chance to really deal with so many of these abuses.
Q - [Host] We’re getting a few questions on the subject of Amnesty International. People are generally asking, how do you reconcile the work that Amnesty International does with their anti-Israel stance in both the UN and internationally? And what do you think of all of that?
A - Right. Does Amnesty have an anti-Israel stance? Is there an insinuation that there are anti-Semites running Amnesty? I’d be very surprised by that. I mean, antisemitism, I made probably the first major, one of the first major series of antisemitism, which I should be talking about later in the year. I don’t believe that’s true. I think this is a very important discussion, isn’t it? About criticising a country which all of us should do and making, you know, racist or anti or comments about Jewish people. I’m for freedom of expression and I’m for criticising the government of Israel for many of its cruelties. I’m also bitterly opposed to anti-Semitism, will fight it and have done it. It’s a difficult one. I don’t believe there are anti-Semites running Amnesty, but I do believe it’s a very sensitive and difficult area. I certainly recognise that, but I think, and I show it myself as I will do in a later lecture. We cannot ignore what is happening in Israel. If there are violations of human rights, we cannot ignore that. It’s entirely immortal in my view. But we have to balance that with, you know, vicious attacks on the right of Jewish people to self-determination. So it’s a massive subject. I think it’s one that we must come back to. And I know, surely, knockdown, we’ll come back to this time and again, but I don’t believe Amnesty is run by anti-Semites. I believe there’s legitimate criticism of Israel. There must be. There’s some terrible cruelties that are taking place, but also it’s a massively difficult and complex subject in terms of the pain and fear that exists amongst Israelis. But rather than really tackle that now, I’ll just make those few comments. But thanks for the question.
Q - [Host] We’ve got a question. Somebody is asking, why did you show the segment of the Palestinian man being arrested by Israel? It seems to be less egregious than the other stories of torture and mass murder. I’m wondering why you chose that one in particular.
A - Well, I was interested because there’s a predominantly Jewish audience for lockdown. There’s a lot of Jewish people watching. I myself am, as you’ve obviously recognised. I thought it was interesting that someone like Yehudi Menuhin, a man of genuine peace and understanding would take . And then precisely why, in terms of relation to my other comments, I think we mustn’t be afraid of pointing out these abuses and there are abuses all around the world. But I thought that was a particular interest and I make no apology for that. I think Yehudi was genuinely committed and outraged by what had happened to Jad Ishaq. And I think there were a number of violations taking place in terms of law by the Israelis at that time. And, you know, torture I suspect still exists and I should be looking at that as well in Israel as it is in many countries of the world. And frankly, we must stand against that, particularly if we’re Jewish and particularly if we feel for Israel. It mustn’t go down those paths. And if it does, we must criticise, openly, honestly, and clearly.
Q - [Host] Another question along those lines. Someone is asking why is there no international pressure on Israel for the human rights violations against the Palestinians that have gone on such large scale for many years?
A - I think there are. I think there are. I mean, Israel is bitterly criticised all over the world. In a sense, it’s its own worst enemy. It’s a public relation disaster a lot of the time. No, I think that’s, you know, there’s a lot of criticism and a lot of attention. As whether the new Israeli government , well, what is going to happen? Are these violations going to be tackled? And you know, the discrimination against Palestinians cannot be justified. This is part of the ongoing challenge for the future of Israel. And I think it’s vitally important for all of us. The human rights standards are kept up.
Q - [Host] Another question, is any country really doing anything about human rights abuse? Is this not just geopolitics as usual? And why are so many leaders afraid to really confront this?
A - Yeah. Indeed. Good point. Interesting, isn’t it? The elites, the dictatorships, democratic governments turning a blind eye to human rights violations. It’s real politic, isn’t it? It’s votes, it’s money. It’s fascism. I think that’s alive and well, I’m afraid, in the world. And I think it’s a constant struggle for all of us to confront this. And don’t forget, in societies like this, we saw it in that clip from “Traitors to Hitler,” but perhaps you might remember at the beginning, if the law is suborn to the state, if there’s no independence, if there’s no scrutiny, if there’s no accountability, we’re in trouble. And this is a struggle that we face all the time, every day. And I think we should have been part of that struggle.
Q - [Host] Someone’s asking if any of these movies are shown to high school students?
A - No, I put this compilation together. They went out on television. I dunno how many people, I will never know, were inspired to join a human rights movement, to join Amnesty, to get involved and be aware. I think that’s part of the excitement of doing these programmes, is you can bring people aware or bring to their attention the importance of these subjects to our lives, to the way we live life and how vital human rights is. And therefore, part of the pleasure of putting this, pleasure, I say “pleasure”, in quotes, is that I hope it points to the importance of educating people, of them thinking about it and being part of what the UN actually says that all states should do, which is to teach and be concerned with your . And that our kids and our grandkids are aware how vital they’re to our lives. They’re crucial.
Q - [Host] I was asking, comparing with 1999, what makes you most optimistic about the present day and what makes you the most pessimistic?
A - An interesting question, isn’t it? I believe in people’s capacity to do great things. I’ve seen many examples of it, you know? Fighting for human rights, fighting to bring attention to what’s going on. So I think that, and we can see it every day in Ukraine, you know, such courage and bravery. It’s all there in the world. But alongside that is the darkness, the darkness in human beings through fear, anxiety, greed, cruelty. I’m afraid we have to come to terms with our ability to reframe society the way that we want to see it. And that’s why I think two things are crucial to me, and they give me optimism and despair: accountability and scrutiny. If a society has accountability, if a society maintains an independent scrutiny, then I think we can do great things. Without them, the darkness prevails. And that’s what’s happening in Putin’s Russia.
Q - [Host] Should Britain pay reparations to the countries in the Caribbean because of the slave trade?
A - I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand.
Q - [Host] Oh, sorry. Should Britain pay reparations to the countries in the Caribbean because of the slave trade?
A - I think they should, you know, these histories don’t go away and they’ve affected people’s lives in tremendous, tremendous ways. No, I’m with those people. Yes, I do.
Q - [Host] And one last question. How diligent are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in criticising human rights violations done by the Palestinian authorities?
A - I hope they’re just as diligent and I hope they’re just as scrupulous and they must be. We can’t just focus on one side. That’s grossly unfair. And there’ve been, and I’ve documented it. There are examples of torture in the Palestinian territories and there’s some very, you know, human rights abuses, wherever they are, have got to be scrutinised and looked at. And I would be seriously critical of Amnesty, or any of the human rights groups if they weren’t applying the same standards as they do to Israel. That would be quite wrong.
[Host] Well, I think that’s it for questions. So thank you so much, Rex. Another deeply profound lecture.
Thank you very much. Thanks to all those who watched. Some dark stuff, but I hope… I hope it revealed how human rights, how important it’s to us. Thanks.
[Host] Thank you. We will see you again later on. Have a great night, everyone. Thank you so much for joining.
[Rex] Thank you.