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March 25, 2002
Democracy is fragile in Nigeria. Democratic governance has crumbled under
the burden of ethnic divisiveness three times in the past forty years;
the current democratically elected, civilian regime came to power in 1999,
after fifteen years of military rule. The frequency of violent clashes
between various religious, ethnic, and geographic communities and their
potential destructive impact on the national government have made peace
work a necessity for a wide range of local civil society groups.
Since the end of military rule, human rights groups have been reassessing
their mode of operation. They hope to establish themselves as a constructive
element in the consolidation of democracy. This is a departure from the
past, when they were uncompromising critics of the government. As the
executive director of the Lagos-based Constitutional Rights Project, Clement
Nwankwo, sees it, “Targeting the civilian, democratic government
as a human rights offender could be counterproductive, even dangerous
and destructive; human rights work now should seek to uphold the government,
not overturn it.” In a country where democratic governments have
been too weak to sustain themselves in power for longer than a couple
of years, such a claim seems valid.
As a result, human rights groups have adopted a multidisciplinary approach
to conflict, combining the methodology and perspectives of the human rights
field with those of the conflict resolution field. This confluence of
approaches has so far evolved only within certain human rights
organizations; as yet, no long-term cooperation has been established between
the human rights and conflict resolution organizations.
Human rights organizations like the Constitutional Rights Project began
to infuse their human rights advocacy with conflict resolution work for
several reasons. First, human rights violations are often the root cause
of conflicts, and thus the protection of human rights becomes an integral
part of peace processes. The involvement of human rights organizations
in conflicts can ensure that human rights issues are addressed in a timely
and effective manner. Second, the magnitude and scope of conflicts expose
the inadequacy of traditional, community-based conflict resolution methods.
Conflicts in which communities turn against each other require strategies
tailored to the complexities of the particular conflict, in addition to
the traditional approach of identifying and exposing culprits. Human rights
groups have thus begun their own conflict resolution trainings and negotiation
sessions for the warring communities. Finally, the reconciliatory character
of the conflict resolution field appeals strongly to human rights organizations
seeking the middle ground in the work of advocating the protection of
human rights, without undermining the legitimacy of Nigeria’s fledgling
democracy. Thus, unlike human rights organizations elsewhere that emphasize
uncompromising justice as a precondition for lasting peace, some human
rights groups in Nigeria have made reconciliation and dialogue the basis
of their work.
That human rights are an indispensable part of peace processes is best
exemplified in the oil-producing Niger Delta. Here, conflict resolution
methods alone are plainly inadequate for a number of reasons. Most important,
they fail to address the real source of conflict in the Delta: unresolved
human rights claims by the local communities. Economic and political marginalization,
merciless environmental exploitation, and the destruction of traditional
indigenous structures are only some of the most frequently cited reasons
communities turn against each other. The government’s tactic of
forcefully pacifying the communities under the guise of resolving intercommunal
violence has exacerbated the situation; for example, the government killed
and displaced thousands of members of the Ogoni and Odi communities in
several brutal military interventions in the 1990s. The human rights community
is adamant that halting government brutality is an essential prerequisite
for lasting peace. Since human rights groups typically have targeted the
government, warring communities perceive them as more neutral; human rights
groups have been better able to negotiate the tense security situation
an address intercommunal violence. Because conflict resolution methodologies
rely heavily on viable social structures and institutions, human rights
methodologies have proved better suited to situations where traditional
social structures and institutions have been seriously eroded.
The frequency and devastating extent of violent intercommunal conflicts
have shown that a traditional human rights approach alone is also insufficient.
While lobbying, disseminating information, and exposing the government’s
activities all aim to remove the source of the conflicts, these activities
do little to repair damaged relationships between warring communities
in other regions. In response, human rights organizations are beginning
to organize their own conflict resolution workshops for the warring communities.
Some of them—for example, the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian
Law in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta—have made it obligatory
for their staff to take conflict resolution training. And they are becoming
involved in peace processes through supervising the conflict resolution
procedures set up by the government, overseeing the government’s
analyses of conflicts, and supervising its execution of a peace process.
How to give human rights activism a more constructive role in society
and promote a dialogue with the ruling regime is on the mind of every
human rights worker in Nigeria. They all acknowledge that the field needs
to use its expertise and experience to bring together different actors
in conflicts. In the Niger Delta, for instance, a dialogue can be initiated
that includes multiple communities, the oil companies, and the government.
Some steps in this direction have been taken already. Some human rights
groups have started doing their own independent studies of the conflicts,
mediating meetings between the parties, and working to involve the government
in the process. Others are working together with the government to instigate
official inquiries and set up strategies for resolving the conflicts.
All of this marks a significant change in the work of Nigerian human
rights groups. They have become more involved in aspects of conflict extending
beyond human rights issues, thus making themselves a more relevant and
more visible element of Nigerian civil society. And, whereas some human
rights groups still see their role as primarily adversarial, most have
opted for a more cooperative stance. Although some have questioned
whether such a stance undermines the neutrality of the human rights field,
this redefined position of the human rights groups might be just the type
of support Nigeria needs at this moment.
Response
Bonny Ibhawoh
The role of human rights, Richard Wilson argues, is to create
the bedrock of accountability on which democratic legitimacy can be built.
But need this be the sole function of human rights? Beyond accountability
and retributive justice, is it valid to deploy human rights discourses
for the larger ends of social stability and peace building? Today, human
rights have become too important to be limited to their legalistic foundations.
Beyond law and the quest for retributive justice, there is much that the
legitimizing language of human rights can bring to our quest for peace
and social stability, as Ivana Vuco’s essay suggests.
In highlighting the limitations of supposedly traditional African models
of conflict resolution and restorative justice, the essays by Wilson and
Vuco address a growing concern with the construction of localized narratives,
which draw on culture and tradition, in human rights and peace work. Much
of this concern springs from the old debate over the universality and
cultural relativism of human rights, which in recent years has shifted
toward a discourse on legitimizing universal human rights and making them
relevant to local sociopolitical contexts. The debate reflects the tension
between the universal and the local, and the ways in which the language
of human rights has been deployed to further nation-building agendas.
When former archbishop Desmond Tutu used the African concept of ubuntu
to justify the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s
emphasis on restorative justice and social stability rather than retributive
justice, he was following in a tradition of African leaders and intellectuals
who have articulated distinct cultural interpretations of human rights
to meet local political exigencies. In the 1960s, Tanzania’s president
Julius K. Nyerere articulated a socialist-oriented concept of human rights,
which prioritized social and economic rights over civil and political
rights. Like Tutu’s ubuntu, Nyerere’s ujamaa
(African socialism) was an attempt to manufacture legitimacy for state
institutions using a combination of the language of contemporary human
rights and perceived African traditions of communalist/restorative justice.
Although such appeals to African traditions are often idealistic, they
represent an attempt to legitimize nation-building agendas with the language
of human rights.
Wilson clearly does not think that the compromised, nonlegal/juridical
use of rights language can ultimately serve the ends of justice, human
rights, and peace. He argues that regimes should seek legitimacy not
through efforts to forge moral unity and communitarian discourses
but, instead, on the basis of justice defined as proportional retribution
and fairness. In contrast, Vuco understands the appeal that conflict resolution
has to some Nigerian human rights organizations, which are employing the
language of human rights as “an indispensable part of peace processes.”
These organizations are seeking the middle ground in the work of advocating
for the protection of human rights without undermining the legitimacy
of the country’s fledgling democracy. In many other African countries,
human rights groups have found it useful to draw on traditional community-based
resolution methods, with their emphasis on securing consensus and on the
reciprocal relationship between rights and social responsibilities, in
their conflict resolution work.
The concern about detaching human rights from their legal foundation
when they are deployed to legitimize nation-building agendas is a valid
one. As Wilson rightly points out, the risk in this approach to human
rights is that it obscures accountability and does not particularly serve
to promote the rule of law. However, while legal enforcement founded on
accountability and retributive justice is a core part of contemporary
human rights, the normative traditions on which human rights are built
are not solely legal. They are also moral, religious, and philosophical.
The language of human rights can contribute a great deal more to efforts
to secure peace and social stability when the breadth of its basis is
recognized.
The tide of global justice is turning in favor of legality, prosecution,
and punishment rather than reconciliation and forgiveness. The TRC represented
a shift from this dominant paradigm of retributive justice. But rather
than being a deviation from a supposedly global ideal, the TRC in its
emphasis on reconciliation and restorative justice might in fact represent
an African-inspired normative contribution to the universal human rights
corpus. The move by Nigerian human rights groups from human rights advocacy
to conflict resolution represents a similar paradigmatic shift. As Vuco
notes, by making this shift, they have become more involved in aspects
of conflict that extend beyond traditional human rights issues.
This is significant because one of the major challenges of human rights
discourse in Africa (at both academic and policy levels) has been the
need to legitimize universal human rights within local contexts. One way
of doing this is by articulating a sense of human rights informed by local
exigencies and perspectives, which the rest of the international community
can also use. With the sanctity of the legalistic/individualist paradigm
of human rights being increasingly questioned, an African sense of community
obligation that goes beyond retribution can serve to strengthen the cross-cultural
legitimacy of universal human rights. This may be the most significant
impact of the South African TRC and the conflict resolution work of Nigerian
human rights groups.
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