UPR: FAC DE INGENIERÍA

“[The] understanding of protection means that humanitarian work is as much about ensuring respect for international humanitarian and human rights norms as it is about giving aid… This is why we have dug wells and lobbied governments at the same time, provided food aid and educated soldiers on humanitarian law, vaccinated children and reported abuses they have suffered.”43

The “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence Campaign” begins on the 25th November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and ends on December 10th_{, International Human Rights Day.}44 _{The goal of the campaign is to bring attention} to violence against women as a human rights abuse. In Nyarugusu camp, the campaign was being run by a handful of aid organizations and refugee volunteer workers. A makeshift pavilion was set up in front of a big clay field, with neatly arranged chairs and banners bearing slogans                                                                                                                

43 _{Hugo and Luis Enrique Eguren Slim, Humanitarian Protection: A Guidance Booklet (Active Learning Network}

for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action, 2004). pp. 21.

44 _{This campaign was initiated by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University in New Jersey.}

The center also coordinated the campaign “Women’s rights ARE human rights” at the 1993 2nd World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. For a history of organizing, see: Bunch and Reilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights.

against violence against women. Just outside of the pavilion, a band played, and school children were marching past, jaunty in their bright white and blue uniforms, each parade carrying a thin, wonky, handmade sign relating to the campaign. On the far perimeter of the field, other camp dwellers, mostly children, sat watching, unprotected from the heat and sun. As the music played, the atmosphere became cheerier, and kids broke out of their parades to show off their dance moves to the “honoured guests.” Refugee volunteer health workers at the Tanzanian Red Cross performed a song and dance. A group of school girls stood nearby, giggling and speculating about me; they burst into embarrassed laughter when I addressed them. “Kiduku!,” they screamed, cheering on the men.45 Finally, the performances were over, and official matters began. The Camp Commandant – a Tanzanian government official responsible for overseeing the entire camp - stepped up to the microphone, and began a speech urging everyone to respect women’s rights. He yelled about child compensation, violence against women, and ending AIDS. He warned that “fidia za watoto” – the practice of giving up a female child in compensation for a debt - must stop, and warned that if people thought they could come and make claims about it and get resettlement they were sorely mistaken.

After the merriment and the speech there were a few races: one each for girls, boys, old people and disabled people, followed by a women’s football match, then a men’s football match between the sungu sungu (community police officers – clearly much more well outfitted) and

baiskeli (bicycle taxi drivers) teams. The disabled race was painful, almost farcical to watch, and

everyone seemed highly aware of this. By now we’d been standing for almost four hours.

Suddenly, the sky broke. It was pouring rain and thundering, and while the footballers were playing on, the audience took shelter under the pavilion, the holes in its plastic cover and thatched roof making it completely inadequate shelter. Everyone howled with laughter when a player slipped and fell, and cowered momentarily when thunder and lightning made their way across the skies. I had an umbrella, and huddled under it, shivering, with some children and a lawyer from one of the aid organizations. Looking across the field I wondered how the thatched roofs could possibly protect from this much rain, much less days of it.

The winners of the football match received a live goat, with much fanfare and picture taking. As I stepped to the front to get a better view, spattering myself with mud in the process, someone shouted at me to take a picture, assuming that I would have a camera. The rain had let up, but the lawyer and I knew what would happen next. “They will all get sick,” she said, shaking her head.46

  Figure 2: Winners of the 16 Day Match. Photo by author.

Life in Nyarugusu was punctuated by events like this, most, if not all, with a focus on human rights and violence against women and children. In this chapter, I will examine humanitarian interventions to alleviate the suffering of women under the auspices of human rights. Drawing on interviews and observations in the Nyarugusu refugee camp, I examine what I call “human rights aid,” which attempts to correct undesirable behavior by “teaching” human rights. Human rights are taught qua women’s rights and the rights of children. Under the umbrella of “protection,” humanitarianism has shifted from emphasizing immediate and bodily necessities to alleviate suffering to a more complicated form of moral care for its suffering objects expressed in and through the language of human rights.

Recent writing on humanitarianism has linked it to problems of biopower, the transformation of sovereignty, and global governance. Humanitarianism, taken as a whole, is

“characterized by the mobilization of moral sentiments in the political sphere,” and the depoliticization of suffering and history.47 _{Human rights, by circumscribing injury and} delineating human wrongs are guilty of the same; the increased appearance and influence of rights is tied to the expansion and entrenchment of neoliberal market philosophies.48 There was

47 _{Nicolas Guilhot, "The Anthropologist as Witness: Humanitarianism between Ethnography and Critique,"}

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3.1 (2012). pp. 84 On humanitarianism, see also: Adam Branch, Displacing Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Miriam Ticktin, "Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France," American Ethnologist 33.1 (2006), David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2003), Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid and Transformation in Western Tanzania, Julian Reid, "The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post- Interventionary Societies," Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4.4 (2010), Didier Fassin, "Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life. ," Public Culture 19.3 (2007), Peter Piot, Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Chandler, "The Road to Military Humanitarianism: How the Human Rights Ngos Shaped a New Humanitarian Agenda.", Manuel Schwab, "Speculative Humanitarianism; Political Economies of Aid and Disputed Notions of Crisis," Columbia University, 2013, Michael Barnett and Thomas G Weiss, Humanitarianism Contested: Where Angels Fear to Tread, vol. 51 (Routledge, 2013), Michael Barnett and Thomas G Weiss, Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Cornell University Press, 2008), Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes : Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), Eyal Weizmann, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London and New York: Verso, 2012), Fassin, ed., Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, Didier Fassin, and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), Barbara Harrell-Bond, and Guglielmo Verdirame, with Zachary Lomo and Hannah Garry, Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. João Biehl, "The Activist State: Global Pharmaceuticals, Aids, and Citizenship in Brazil. ," Social Text 80 (2004), Jean Comaroff, "Beyond Bare Life: Aids, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order. ," Public Culture 19.1 ( 2007), Ilana Feldman, and Miriam Ticktin ed., In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. (Durham , NC: Duke University Press., 2010), Ramah McKay, "Afterlives: Humanitarian Histories and Critical Subjects in Mozambique," Cultural Anthropology 27.2 (2012). For an overview, see Miriam Ticktin, "Transnational Humanitarianism," Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014).

48 _{Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Righting Wrongs," The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2 (2004). On limiting human}

rights to bodily injury, see: Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). The connection between neoliberalism and human rights has been an oft-repeated, if ill- substantiated refrain in the scholarship on rights; see Samuel Moyn, Theses on the Philosophy of Human Rights History, 2015, Available: http://humanityjournal.org/blog/theses-on-the-philosophy-of-human-rights-history/. Last accessed October 12, 2015. For other critiques of rights, see: Branch, Displacing Human Rights, Jennifer Curtis, Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Harri Englund, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Jacques Ranciere, "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?," South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2-3 (2004), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), Issa Shivji, The Concept of Human Rights in Africa (Oxford: African Books Collective, 2007), Shivji, The Concept of Human Rights in Africa. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," (1844). For a problematization of human rights as imperialist and anti-political, see Talal Asad, "What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry," Theory and Event 4.4 (2000).; Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.; Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Though not critical, Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005)., shows the entanglement of discourses of rights with those of security and the ethical bases

also the matter of where human rights actually came from, and whether they could or should be genuinely universal. Josiah Cobbah argues that scholarship on human rights in Africa tends to interrogate whether human rights is an inherently Western concept and/or show that the concept of human rights (or human dignity) exists in Africa. Through examining human rights through natural rights, he argues that it “denies culture in a very fundamental sense,” and thus, we should talk about rights in cultural contexts and in a manner informed by an “Africentric conception of human dignity.”49 _{grounded in a “communal structure whereby a person’s dignity and honor} flow from his or her transcendental role as a cultural being,” rather than the individualist framework underpinning the concept of natural rights; this would give rise to “authentic international human rights norms.”50

For the philosopher Paulin Hountoundji, the fact of struggling in the face of oppression meant that one could interpret human rights as a universal concept; “Europe certainly did not

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      of military and economic interventionism. On the paradoxes of rights and the subjects of rights, see: Wendy Brown, States of Injury : Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Wendy Brown, "Suffering Rights as Paradoxes," Constellations 7.2 (2000), Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 ), Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

49  _{Josiah AM Cobbah, "African Values and the Human Rights Debate: An African Perspective," Human Rights} Quarterly 9.3 (1987). pp. 309-310

50 _{Cobbah, "African Values and the Human Rights Debate: An African Perspective." pp. 331. See also Josiah}

Cobbah and Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, "The Human Rights Literature on Africa: A Bibliography," Human Rights Quarterly 8.1 (1986). For more on the debate on cultural relativism and universalism, see Part 1 of Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Philp J. McConnaughay, ed., Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

invent human rights, any more than it invented the idea of human dignity.”51 Drawing our attention to the history of violence and oppression in Europe, Hountondji writes that the only real foundation for rights are human beings “who for millennia have suffered at the hands of human beings, in all countries, and throughout all cultures.”52 Mahmood Mamdani has argued that human rights are not simply Western but a “contested terrain.” The real force of rights lay in achieving a meaningful definition of their agenda and the injustices they were to address. This would be done by adequately conceptualizing the issues leading to suffering in Africa.53 _Issa Shivji argued that human rights needed to be revolutionized and expanded keeping in mind the struggles of the working class.54

Wamba dia Wamba, on the other hand, had written that though the expansion of human rights may be positive, he remained skeptical given that the precursors to this “modern global consciousness” saw the world in racializing and dehumanizing terms.55 The answer to contemporary challenges of inequality lay in true, global, democracy, not only influenced by Western concepts, but inflected by local needs and concepts. He writes “The deminoritisation of peoples, groups and the recognition of full individual rights is ultimately a form of emancipatory politics against the submissive consciousness of accommodation to the violation of human rights

51 _{Paulin J. Hountondji, "The Master's Voice—Remarks on the Problem of Human Rights in Africa," Philosophical}

Foundations of Human Rights, ed. Alwin Diemer (Paris: UNESCO, 1986). pp. 323  

52 _{Hountondji, "The Master's Voice—Remarks on the Problem of Human Rights in Africa." Pp. 325}

53 _{Mahmood Mamdani, "Social Movements and Constitutionalism : The African Context," Constitutionalism and}

Democracy: Transitions in the Contemporary World, ed. Stanley N. Katz Douglas Greenberg, Melanie Beth Oliviero, Steven C. Wheatley (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Pp. 172-176

54 _{Shivji, The Concept of Human Rights in Africa.}

55 _{Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, "Pan Africanism, Democracy, Social Movements and Mass Struggles," African}

world-wide. PanAfricanism must internalise these gains to be able to become a truly emancipatory political movement.”56 _{Other scholars attempted to reformulate a notion of rights} drawing on an alternative heritage. Kwasi Wiredu drew on the Akan notion of personhood to articulate an indigenous notion of rights.57 An Afrocentric conception of human rights too, was possible, and need not be in conflict with universal human rights.58

Writing about this internationalization of women’s rights as human rights, Oloka- Onyango and Tamale pose the question of whether Western feminism determines women’s human rights.59 They are interested in the dialectic between the local and the global, and, like intersectional feminists of color, argue that “third world feminism must confront directly and become engaged in the formulation of any international women’s human rights agenda and the elaboration of a cogent theory or theories in the area.”60 _{Feminism must recognize the socio-} political structures that affect African women; “the failure to fully integrate third world perspectives into theoretical analyses of international feminism will lead only to partial solutions to the problem of the universal marginalization of women.”61 They believe that “that there are also common aspects to the phenomenon [of human rights] that transcend all cultures                                                                                                                

56_{Wamba, "Pan Africanism, Democracy, Social Movements and Mass Struggles." pp. 15. See also Akwasi Aidoo,}

"Africa: Democracy without Human Rights?," Human Rights Quarterly 15.4 (1993).  

57 _{Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars., Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, "A Rights-Centred Critique of African}

Philosophy in the Context of Development," African Human Rights Law Journal 5.2 (2005).

58 _{Bonny Ibhawoh, "Cultural Relativism and Human Rights: Reconsidering the Africanist Discourse," Netherlands}

Quarterly of Human Rights 19.1 (2001).

59 _{Sylvia Tamale and Joseph Oloka-Onyango, "" The Personal Is Political," or Why Women's Rights Are Indeed}

Human Rights: An African Perspective on International Feminism," Human Rights Quarterly 17.4 (1995). Pp. 693

60 _{Tamale and Oloka-Onyango, "" The Personal Is Political," or Why Women's Rights Are Indeed Human Rights:}

An African Perspective on International Feminism." 699-700  

61 _{Tamale and Oloka-Onyango, "" The Personal Is Political," or Why Women's Rights Are Indeed Human Rights:}

and all societies” and that one should endeavor to “achieve genuine universality” by sustained cross-cultural dialogue.62 _{In other words, feminism that takes accounts of differing global} perspectives can actually achieve a human rights that is truly universal. More recently, critiquing human rights as an alien imposition, Makau Mutua insists that it needs to be multicultural, inclusive, and assume that all cultures are morally equivalent.63 In the same vein as Hountondji, some argue that we need a more solid ground for human rights than culture - the idea of basic dignity.64

Souleymane Bachir Diagne poses the question of whether an “African philosophy of what it means to be human, and as such, to have rights be caught up in a communitarian approach?” For him, the answer is a resounding no.65 He looks to the Oath of Manden (“perhaps the most important and ancient documents on human rights in Africa”) and Wiredu’s Akan concept of personhood (which Diagne reads as the process of becoming a person in society but nevertheless always remaining an individual).66 These are to inform the important task at hand, which is “critically elaborating a Charter of Human Rights by which Africa recognizes the

62 _{Tamale and Oloka-Onyango, "" The Personal Is Political," or Why Women's Rights Are Indeed Human Rights:}

An African Perspective on International Feminism." 708

63 _{Makau Mutua, "Savages, Victims, and Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights," Harvard International Law}

Journal 42.1 (2001). pp. 207-208. On human rights in East Africa, see Makau Mutua, Human Rights Ngos in East Africa: Political and Normative Tensions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

64 _{Simeon O. Ilesanmi, Universalism and Relativism in Human Rights Debate in Africa: A Critique of Cultural}

Essentialism (Talk given at a gathering of Wake Forest University Endowed Professors, November 4: 2009).

65 _{Souleymane Bachir Diagne, "Individual, Community, and Human Rights: A Lesson from Kwasi Wiredu's}

Philosophy of Personhood," Transition.101 (2009). pp. 12

66 _{Diagne, "Individual, Community, and Human Rights: A Lesson from Kwasi Wiredu's Philosophy of Personhood."}

universal and herself as a part of it. More generally, we need to create a global public square founded on public reasoning and our common humanity.”67

Notwithstanding the critique to be made of reading human rights into history where there were none in more than one of the critiques described above, what strikes me about Diagne’s call to action is that it still insists on the need for a “charter of human rights,” i.e. the problem is not with human rights (as tied to law, legality, and legal instruments like charters – leaving aside their effectiveness) itself as a concept, but of an impoverished human rights that isn’t properly articulated or draws on a fallacious sort of communitarianism. While foregrounding the notion of “becoming-person” within society is compelling, I remain unconvinced that such a task – including the task of articulating any kind of common humanity without undoing or redressing the historical un-humaning of large swaths of the world’s population – remains possible. Arguments like those of Cobbah, Oloka-Onyango and Tamale espouse the notion that by incorporating all perspectives adequately, a truly universal human rights could be achieved. But this would not help us get out of the conundrum we currently find ourselves in with regards to the aporias and paradoxes of human rights; a better version of human rights would still be human rights.

Humanitarianism and human rights have always been linked to ideas of progress. Humaneness – the underlying principle of humanitarian struggles – was seen as a marker of evolution; humanitarian endeavors were to bring those lower on the hierarchy of development up

67 _{Diagne, "Individual, Community, and Human Rights: A Lesson from Kwasi Wiredu's Philosophy of Personhood."}

to speed.68 Liberal ideas of rights and self-determination legitimized imperial endeavors and civilizing missions.69 _{The continuing drive to “modernize” non-European locales under the}