The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents

1. Human Rights History from the Ground Up: The Case of East Timor

Part I Who Makes Human Rights?  In the past few years, standard accounts of the history of human rights have been subjected to serious critique and revision . As part of that effort, a handful of historians have advanced provocative and insightful new accounts of the origins and development of human rights, the relationship between individual and collective rights, the role of human rights in struggles for decolonization, and the relationship between international and local movements for the advancement of rights (Burke 2010; Goedde et al. 2012; Hoffmann 2011; Moyn 2010; Weitz 2008). In the hope of contributing in some way to this encouraging trend, I want to share here some observations based on my experience working for, and writing about, human rights in the former Portuguese colony of East Timor—a tiny half-island that experienced invasion, unlawful occupation, genocide, and armed humanitarian intervention, all in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Quite apart from its intrinsic interest I believe a careful, historical analysis of a nontypical case like East Timor’s can illustrate how distinctively universal human rights ideals and norms play out in different local contexts. I also hope that a closegrained account of this kind might serve to underscore how important, and intellectually rewarding, it can be to take seriously the experiences of people 31 1 Human Rights History from the Ground Up The Case of East Timor geoffrey robinson  whose lives are actually affected by human rights violations, and whose actions and ideals are so vital in shaping the movements to end them. East Timor is promising terrain for such an exploration, not only because its history has been so profoundly shaped by human rights but also because the movement for human rights there was rather different from many others of the same era, especially those that have formed the empirical basis for much of the theorizing, old and new, about human rights history.1 Perhaps most importantly , East Timor’s human rights movement was inextricably linked to the struggle for self-determination—or more precisely, national liberation. In that sense, it was more similar to the anticolonial struggles of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s than to the human rights movements of the late twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Like those earlier anticolonial liberation struggles, too, it was an inescapably political movement, in the sense that it explicitly challenged state power from the moment of Indonesia’s invasion in December 1975 until the overwhelming vote for independence in August 1999. In marked contrast to those movements, however, East Timor’s anticolonial movement continued beyond the end of the Cold War, a matter of timing that arguably enhanced the political significance of human rights in the movement after 1989 and contributed substantially to the achievement of independence some ten years later. Against this backdrop, I examine more closely a number of claims in the recent literature, which strike me as important but are also open to question on both empirical and analytical grounds. The first of these is related to the difficult subject of origins and turning points in the history of human rights. Much of the new work quite sensibly takes aim at conventional treatments that trace the origins of the contemporary human rights idea and movement to some more or less distant starting point. Hoffmann, Weitz, and others have criticized what they see as the heroic or triumphalist character of standard human rights narratives, insisting instead on the highly contingent and contested quality of that history. Samuel Moyn takes particular issue with the oft-repeated claim that the human rights discourse of the late twentieth century can be traced to the debates and mentalities of the European Enlightenment. Moyn is perhaps even more dismissive of the view that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 marks a critical turning point in the modern history of human rights. Describing such standard accounts as teleological, and as little more than “church” history, he insists that the true point of origin is 1977, the year in which he claims human rights finally took hold in the popular imagination. A number of the new historians have likewise questioned the significance for the modern human rights movement of the United Nations and the body of human rights covenants and institutions it has spawned since 1945. Against the grain of most standard accounts, they characterize the UN and its 32 G e o f f r e...