HUMAN RIGHTS FOREVER ON THE AGENDA

My current reading matter is interesting in the light of events in two parts of the world during the week. Archbishop Desmond Tutu announced his retirement from public life on Thursday on his 79^th birthday, and while I’m only half way through his biography Rabble Rouser for Peace by John Allen, it was interesting to hear him respond in an interview that he wondered whether he would have been able to achieve more if he had been less strident, as he put it.

I very much doubt it, for without his combination of compassion, strong moral stance and a voice which would not be silent, advocating for the rights of black South Africans suffering under the oppressive Apartheid regime, I wonder how we’d be viewing South Africa’s more recent history and current state. Truth, justice, reconciliation, mercy, compassion have always been uppermost for him as he has lived out his Christian faith in a very public arena where he had little choice but to be involved in the sphere of politics if he was to be true to what he believed.

And on the other side of the globe, jailed human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, much to the ire of the Chinese government. Coming under the government’s watchful eye since the Tiananmen Square student pro-democracy movement was dramatically crushed in 1989, Liu was jailed in December last year and faces an eleven year jail term for writing a manifesto calling for free speech and multi party elections.

Have just read The Vagrants by Yiyun Li, her debut novel set in Communist China during 1979. Mao Tse Tung’s decade long Cultural Revolution has run its course, Mao has died, but the country is firmly in the grip of Communist rule. Counter revolutionaries, or those deemed to be so, are frequently arrested, jailed, tried and denounced in a very public display, and many executed.

Set in a provincial town, news starts to leak through of the Democracy Wall in Beijing, an actual wall which from Dec 78 to Dec 79 was made available for people to post criticisms of previous leaders and failed government policies. Under the government’s policy of finding the truth through facts, the venture obviously backfired as the government found itself increasingly under attack. The wall where poets, writers, dissidents and human rights activists alike had felt free to have their say, was subsequently removed and relocated to a place where people had to sign in to use it, therefore suppressing any form of free political speech.

Li’s novel is set amid this turbulence, the main characters working through their reactions to the execution of a young woman disenchanted with the Communist government who has been in jail for ten years because of her outspoken views.

The general population were in a quandary as to how to react to the protest, which side to take. Offices became minefields where one had to watch out for oneself, constantly defining and redefining friends, enemies, and chameleons who could morph from friends to enemies and then back again. With their fates and their families’ futures in their hands, these people sleepwalked by day and shuddered by night.

Through the actions of the characters following the execution we get a glimpse of life under an oppressive regime, how power and order and obedience are maintained through fear and terror, suppression and deprivation. From reading not only these two books, I have the overwhelming sense both in Communist China and South Africa under Apartheid, of a vast population of the living dead or the walking wounded, people going through the motions of daily life, trying desperately to hang on to their personal dignity and integrity while suffering the indignities of rulers who deem their individual rights to be of little consequence.

Even the executed woman’s father couldn’t bring himself to protest. He tried not to think about what had happened outside his home – the only way to live on, he had known for most of his adulthood, was to focus on the small patch of life in front of one’s eyes.

Thank God there are those who are still prepared to look beyond that patch in front of their eyes and put their welfare at risk by taking on the governments and dictators and regimes which deny their people the basic right to be and become what they choose. Where there's no freedom there can be no trust. Where there’s no trust, there’s no freedom.