Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics

Part III. Human Rights at a Crossroads: Wars, Crimes, and Priorities

Part III Human Rights at a Crossroads: Wars, Crimes, and Priorities In the 1990s, global human rights advocates faced a set of distinct challenges that added urgent agendas to their debates and work at the international , national, and local levels. These new developments became layered onto the existing patterns of rights advocacy and networking that continued to evolve from the past. In this sense, the decade of the 1990s emerges as an important era on its own terms for human rights history. I call it the ‘‘long’’ decade of the 1990s, extending roughly from 1989 to 2005. This dating moves away from a formal decade-driven chronology , as if ten years by themselves have any causative logic. It accommodates , rather, contemporaries’ understanding of events after 1989 and the historians’ retrospective modes of analysis. During the era international attention remained fixed on many of the problems of economic inequality, failed development programs, transnational labor migration challenges, and gender vulnerabilities addressed in Part II. The work of these transnational advocacy networks continued throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium; many of these challenges persist to this day. A focus on continuities, however, should not mask new contexts. After all, the dramatic events of 1989, which in November brought down the Berlin Wall—once a seemingly permanent structure of a divided postwar Europe—turned the Helsinki human rights movements in Soviet-bloc countries into historical monuments. Either disbanded or transformed into ruling political parties, these movements lost their original rationale in the challenging politics of transition to democratic governance and market societies. Continuity in name—the International Helsinki 222 Part III Federation, for example—belies the vastly broadened agenda of the international NGO networks subsumed under its mantle. Similarly, the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the formal end of the antiapartheid movement and its wide transnational coalition of supporters. This movement now, too, has become part of the historical record; a good portion of its archives is on the Web, available for use by human rights activists, academics, and the interested lay public.1 Contemporaries were well aware of the political changes that seemed to be enveloping all regions of the globe, starting in the later 1980s. Subsequently , historians, too, have picked up on this particular global moment of optimism, too easily overlooked in the light of ‘‘ethnic cleansing,’’ genocides, terrorism, and wars that also have left their painful scars on this long decade. But the early optimism was pervasive and extended far beyond the dramatic pictures of Berliners climbing the wall, which were beamed around the world nearly simultaneously; at the time, their meanings required little translation into the vernacular. It seemed as if the end of the Cold War coincided with and, indeed, promoted a wave of ‘‘people power,’’ to borrow the slogan of the movement that had ousted the long-standing dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, in 1986. In the shifting geopolitical climate of the late 1980s, Soviet leaders were either unwilling or unable to enforce their authority. The Cold War political map disappeared in Eastern Europe and fourteen independent countries emerged in its stead. The Soviet Union was dissolved formally in December 1991, leaving a sovereign Russia, nine independent states from former Soviet republics, and a number of disputed territorial borders that contain seeds of future claims and con- flicts, among them the small land of Transnistria, defended by Russia against Moldavia (a new republic), the territory of South Ossetia in Georgia, and the district of Nagorno-Karabakh, claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia, in the Caucasus region.2 Although the political map remained virtually unchanged in Africa, in 1992 the prominent Ghanaian historian and intellectual Adu Boahen captured this moment as many contemporaries understood it. He wrote movingly of a ‘‘powerful democratic wind . . . now raging in the continent of Africa south of the Sahara.’’ It already had ‘‘shaken’’ many regions and he cataloged the push for change in West Africa (in Benin, Togo, and Ghana, among others), in Central Africa (Zaire, Mozambique , Angola, and Gabon) and in Kenya in East Africa. For Boahen, this wind followed popular movements for the restoration of multiparty democracies, although, he warned, the push also was being resisted by ‘‘some African leaders.’’ His 1992 account of appreciable new beginnings also is echoed in Frederick Cooper’s history of Africa since 1940. At a Crossroads 223 Writing more broadly of democratic opposition to...