Tag: human rights

Categories
Debatables Personal Experience

In Which a Striking Apparition is Witnessed

By Matt Whiteman

Last night, the UBC Chapter of Engineers Without Borders held a screening of Dr. James Orbinski’s harrowing documentary “Triage“. If you haven’t already seen it, do. To my disappointment, only six or seven people showed up to watch, four of which were members of EWB. Quel dommage.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMPCjy_Arbo[/youtube]

There were indeed many insightful moments, but one in particular stuck out for me that will likely never happen again in quite the same way, so I feel the need to record it here. The film began with Dr. Orbinski explaining the awful process of triage he went through – deciding who lives or dies – during the genocide in Rwanda. This is a process which can only be described as “the ultimate humanitarian nightmare”:

“So we labeled them 1, 2, or 3… put a little piece of tape on their forehead

and ‘1’ meant that they should be treated right away…

a ‘2’ meant that they needed to be treated within 24 hours.

And a ‘3’ meant that even though they were alive, they were irretrievable.”

Imagine this was your decision.

As he spoke, someone in front of me was fiddling with the remote control, trying to bring up subtitles. Immediately after Orbinski said “and a ‘3’”, the picture froze and the words “Cannot Operate” appeared in the centre of the screen.

It was just the DVD player’s way of telling us it didn’t like button-mashing, but there was something hauntingly poetic about this small, perfectly-timed apparition. It wasn’t quite irony; just a simple coincidence with a lump of double entendre. Maybe it’s not even all that interesting. But for me, it set the mood for the rest of the film, which – believe me – was not easy to watch. Even for someone who has never themselves glimpsed the complexity of the things witnessed by Dr. Orbinski, the mood is unmistakably one of pathos.

Among other things, Triage sparks an interesting debate about the role of doctor as political actor. My room mate poignantly noted this morning on the bus that doctors are among the only professionals who are essentially “licensed to be apolitical”. The rest of us aren’t allowed to be, ethically speaking anyway. We have a choice to be apathetic or ignorant, but as human beings, should we be allowed to be?

If you work for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) as a physician, you can’t get involved in the politics of the region. Your job is to treat the sick. Although I am not a doctor, the modern hippocratic oath, along with the spirit of MSF, seem to imply that all human life is equal, and that – like the law – a physician’s compassion should be blind.

Triage examines just how difficult it can be to remain apolitical when the people you are treating are victims of (often infuriating) political circumstance. “Famines,” one man comments “are never simply natural occurrences.” The same truth is reflected in the staggering number of casualties of the recent earthquake in Haiti.

After the genocide in Rwanda ended and 2 million Hutus fled to Uganda and Zaire, the refugee camps were run by the very genocidaires who killed close to a million people.  They appropriated emergency food aid and sold it with a tax markup, allowing them to sustain themselves during a conflict that is ongoing to this day. Humanitarian workers operating in these camps had a choice: work with the genocidaires, or let people starve. But not for Orbinski. MSF had to remain politically neutral, and Orbinski decided that it could not do that while supporting murderers. It left Rwanda in 1997 and has not returned since. The flak that you risk facing in a circumstance like that is that what gets televised is the doctors leaving the camp – not the complex reasons for doing so.

You can just as easily not get involved out of sheer political ignorance too. But the difference between political neutrality and political ignorance is that the former requires a conscious understanding of the politics involved in such a situation so that you can make the right decision. But many physicians, as Ernest Boyer would say, experience a “divorce of conscience from competence” – they retreat into their technical training when they don’t understand a socio-political situation well enough.

This same schism is often characteristic of anyone who wants to help – which is where many of the ethical problems with international engagement begin. I’ve said it so many times I feel almost self-conscious saying it again here, but reliance on good intentions – even with a certain competence – is not enough. Some people have neither conscience nor competence, and yet somehow still show up to “help”.An Imperfect Offering

Sometimes you have to ask tough questions: Are there people who don’t deserve to be helped? It is dilemmas like this that are the subject of Orbinski’s book “An Imperfect Offering”, which Triage documents him writing. The role of doctor as health advocate suggests that physicians must be political creatures, that they must include social and political circumstances in their calculus.

Orbinski understands this and is himself torn by it – he knows that you have to understand the politics before you can step outside them, and that’s why he (representing MSF) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1999.

Categories
Debatables Personal Experience

In which Matt loses an important argument to a bigoted idiot

By Matt Whiteman

I met a xenophobic, racist, white South African man on the plane last Sunday and he said a number of absurd things that I strongly disagreed with but which at the time I was unable to adequately defend against. He came on incredibly forcefully, and I was so stunned by some of his comments that I didn’t know where to begin and I eventually just gave up and left, shaking with rage and muttering to myself.

Here are just a few paraphrased samples from our 3 hour long argument. He actually said these things I promise… you can’t make this stuff up. I apologize if this gets a bit ranty:

Him (fully knowing who Robert Mugabe is…): We have a big problem with refugees crossing into South Africa from Zimbabwe. Why can’t they just go home?

Me: Well I think poverty in general and the situation in Zimbabwe are both pretty complex subjects, and there’s a whole course at UBC on the dynamics of migration and settlement. Plus, how can you even rationalize sending them back to the environment that is responsible for bringing them to be refugees in South Africa in the first place?

Him: Harumph! Complexity-shmomplexity. I don’t like taxes. Out!

***

Him: … okay then, explain to me why Namibia, Botswana and Vietnam went through decades of conflict but are now sporting good economic growth and have their HIV/AIDS problems under control?

Me: I don’t know enough about any of those countries yet to be able to answer you intelligently… and wait, doesn’t Botswana have one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world?

Him: I win!

***

Him (practically yelling at me at this point): France and Germany were completely destroyed after the Second World War, and they rebuilt themselves in a decade. We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on Africa over nearly 60 years, why the hell can’t they get their act together?

Me: Well… you see the thing is… The Marshall Plan, uhh… well you see Europe is… huh.

***

Him: Why do African people keep electing corrupt politicians? I mean how stupid do you have to be? It’s the corrupt politicians that are the reason everybody is poor and dying!

Me: Well what is it that led them to corrupt behaviour? Corruption doesn’t exist in a vacuum. After all, if the politicians are corrupt, then the elections are probably not legitimate in the first place, are they?

Him: But after all this time, they’re still doing it. Have they learned nothing? (I know, this argument got old pretty fast for me too)

Me: Well the colonial governments weren’t exactly run by the Dalai Lama, and nation-states they inherited didn’t exactly run like a rube-goldberg machine. And don’t you think that colonial history still might have something to with it? And there’s this whole thing about dependence and debt, you see… and don’t forget civil conflict and endemic disease and pretty unfortunate geography.

Him: So now you’re reducing it to geographical determinism? What a fool! Well what about in the cases where they are more legitimate than others? They still vote for the personality rather than the policies.

Me: How many degrees do you have?

Him: Two – and I paid for them myself! And that’s another thing, why should my taxes go up in order to subsidize education and services for someone who can’t pay for it themselves?

Me: Easy for you to say. And don’t you think your two degrees might have an effect on your level of political literacy and thus your ability to vote in an informed way?

Him: No, these people have had every opportunity, which they have wasted at every turn. Both big aid and grassroots volunteering are a waste of time. The only solution is to become ENTIRELY uninvolved and let the continent destroy itself.

Me: (twitch)

***

He eventually boiled it all down to a matter of cultural inferiority, and it took every ounce of will-power not to say something truly hurtful or to slug him right there on the plane (I imagine that would not have made me very popular with CATSA). I spent the rest of the day fuming at home, reading and writing down as many counter-arguments as I could come up with.

At some point in the conversation, Shakespeare would have said,  “I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see that you are unarmed!” It did indeed dawn on me that I was losing an argument to a complete idiot, but saying so wouldn’t stop him from being an ignorant racist, so I pressed on.

Now I realize it’s unfair to rant about him without him being here to present his side of the story himself, but I felt it was my responsibility to not let this guy get away with saying these things, and at the time, I’m ashamed to say that I fumbled and felt like I’d forgotten everything I’d learned, and ultimately couldn’t rise to the challenge. Maybe it was because I didn’t know the history  and politics well enough, or maybe because I still haven’t learned how not to default to one-dimensional counter-arguments. Maybe it’s because I was afraid of what would happen if I made a bigger scene by calling him a racist to his face. What made me even more angry was that I had to resort to homogenizing complexity myself to be able to advocate for the continent at all. It left a bad taste in my mouth to even start trying to defend  my position by saying: “well hasn’t there has been a lot of brutal conflict in various parts of the continent that make things like building infrastructure and sustaining trade really difficult?” I can still hear his voice vividly in my head as I write this, and I’ll admit, I feel very small.

I realize now why it became so hard to argue against him – not only because he was so forceful, but because it’s easy to fit a lot of really loaded language and ignorant assumptions into a single, forceful sentence, while it’s much more difficult to unpack all those assumptions and respond thoughtfully and adequately in an equivalent amount of time. So when I would begin to respond, he’d cut me off after my first sentence and immediately retaliate with another insane rebuttal.

I realize also that it’s probably unfair that I portrayed myself as having the last word in most cases. I’m not writing all this because I care who won the argument. I’m not trying to flaunt my “impeccable liberalism” as Binyavanga Wainaina would have it, or my moral or intellectual superiority. But I should remind you that the conversation was 3 hours long, and even though I didn’t have any checked baggage to claim,  I stayed with him by the baggage carousel for 20 minutes after I deplaned before I realized that I could spar with him all day and I would never be able to change his mind. We parted without ever knowing each other’s names. I cannot remember ever being so mad at a complete stranger.

I couldn’t believe there were people like this out there, especially not ones that carry a Canadian passport (by naturalization for him). It scares me that people like him could be teaching kids or managing government programs (although I never asked him his profession).

I write this because I think it’s important to learn how to put people like this in their place; it’s important to remind people that this kind of racism, arrogance and bigotry are real in a big way in Canada. Remember this the next time you refer to Canada as a “developed” nation.

Categories
Debatables

Coolest. Christmas gift. Ever.

By Matt Whiteman

As a non-religious person, I’ve asked myself for a number of years, “what does Christmas even mean to me?” Without putting too fine a point on it, for me, the Christmas tree is a wasteful and empty symbol. I don’t need it to get together with my family, nor to feel festive… and the presents have certainly never needed shelter from the snow. Our decorations are tacky and possess no sentimental value to me, and the decorating process always feels tedious and inevitably sparks petty conflict. None of us have ever practiced religion. But like many Canadian families, we’ve celebrated Christmas every year, and it hasn’t really made sense to me for many years.

Since entering university, the wishlist I send my family every October has been fairly modest, but I couldn’t properly express my discontent for a long time. This year, the thought of a Christmas tree in my house stuffed with gifts felt particularly unpalatable. Without trying to seem pretentious or ungrateful, or to paint myself as a yuppie liberal in sympathetic cahoots with the poor (see the video “How Not to Write About Africa“), I felt our holiday as a whole lacked a level of consciousness that I strive to explore and sustain in the rest of my life.

This year, I asked my family members, as a gift to me, to volunteer a few hours of their time for the United Way. I asked them to offset flights for carbon. I asked them to watch The Girl Effect and consider how they might respond to it (I did also ask for my standard books, socks, and roasted pistachios). All these things I got from one person or another. My parents even surprised me by decorating my mother’s yucca plant before I arrived, rather than getting a tree (oh how I wish I’d remembered to take a photograph!). This was a fair (and hilarious) compromise between my request and the members of my family who do still value the tree.

But the coolest thing I got came from my parents. They live in Gordon O’Connor’s riding in Ottawa. O’Connor voted against Bill C-300, which was tabled to address the irresponsible Canadian mining practices abroad, most notably in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (for the real skinny on this issue, visit our friends over at ACAC).

I asked my parents to write a letter to him, urging him to vote in favour of the Bill at its third reading (can I get a woot! for our prorogued parliament?!).

They did, and here it is.

I was so grateful for this that I was speechless. It is well written. The three of us think that the reply was a wholly inadequate response to a major global challenge. I won’t post the whole thing here; however, it concludes with the following:

“Passing Bill C-300 would represent a step backwards for Corporate Social Responsibility in Canada, and for Canadian business.

While the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development is currently studying the bill, this Government cannot support it because not only are there problems with the legislation, but if passed, Bill C-300 would undermine the competitive position of Canadian companies and potentially render Canada a less attractive jurisdiction for mining investment.”

We are not amused. There’s more, but I’ll leave it at that. The point is that I found a way for Christmas and I to more or less peacefully co-exist.  Yes, UBC, you’ve trained me well, I’m now turning my private family matters into experiments in global citizenship. Little do you know my nefarious plan to turn every holiday into a super social justice extravaganza, mua ha ha ha.

Categories
Debatables

5 Important Questions

By Matt Whiteman

In order to reach as broad an audience as possible (in our humble way…), I’ll re-post 5 questions from the fantastic blog, Wronging Rights. Read them over, tell us how you’d answer the questions, and then read this post… then this one.

1. Is it ever appropriate for foreign citizens, governments, or international institutions to intervene in crises overseas?

2. If the answer to #1 is “yes,” then when is it appropriate?

3. Do we know how to do it? That is, do we understand the technological means that will allow us to accomplish our stated goals?

4. If so, are those means available to us?

5. If they are, are we willing to expend the resources necessary to use those means?

Categories
Poetry

Refugee Blues

by W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

–

While you certainly can’t just remove the bits about the Holocaust and be left with the experiences of contemporary refugees, it’s a poignant lament on the push and pull factors associated with involuntary migration. I especially appreciate that Auden points out the fallacy of equating passport possession with genuine “identity”. Also, the fish metaphor reminds me a bit of Kibera slum – in that stands in stark contrast to the area surrounding it, only ten feet away:

Kibera slum Google Earth

When you think slum, you don’t usually think “golf-related injuries”, do you? I wouldn’t be surprised in this case.

Categories
Debatables

Why the AMS/UN debacle infuriates me (from an EIESL related perspective)

By Trisha Taneja

This afternoon, AMS President Blake Frederick (along with UBC graduate and former AMS VP Administration Tristan Markle) filed a complaint to the United Nations (I kid you not) stating that Canada has engaged  in “a consistent pattern of gross human rights violation” by not ensuring that post-secondary education is accessible to everyone.

According to article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.” Frederick says that since tuition fees have been on the rise and government funding for post-secondary education (both to universities and students through grants and bursaries) in decline, the UN should hold Canada accountable. And this complaint was filed to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

There are so many (oh, so many) issues with this, I don’t even know where to start. Leaving aside the political ramifications and the fact that Frederick has made UBC a national (if not international) laughing stock, let us focus for a moment on this whole human rights business.

Earlier this semester as a part of EIESL we discussed how aid and human rights has become almost a trend. Celebrities from Bono to Oprah Winfrey have been spreading the word and drawing public attention to aid, orphans, human rights violations- you name it. Everything now days is apparently a human rights violation; human rights is the buzzword of the day to draw media attention to whatever cause. And now apparently, it is the media drawing word for the AMS. And make no mistake; this is nothing more than a media-stunt. What can the AMS actually expect from the UN? I mean, let’s have a little perspective- do they even have any idea of what constitutes a human rights violation? Logically, this move by the AMS makes no sense whatsoever.

Let’s consider where we stand in terms of education. Firstly, we are lucky to have public schooling up until post secondary. Secondly, we are lucky to have a fairly low tuition rate as compared to other schools that are internationally competitive. Thirdly, yes, we have been facing tuition hikes. Yes, it is unfair. However, we are still lucky not have suffered Berkeley’s recent 32% hike in tuition. And yes, there have been funding cuts to post secondary education, and to student aid programs. It is, however, a recession and there will be funding cuts. And we are still lucky to have access to a job market on campus as well as student loans. There are many many people who would kill to be in our position.

So the AMS lost perspective…what’s the big deal? The big deal is that our university student union- the people who officially represent the students of UBC are now subscribing to cheap theatrics by using international buzzwords to draw media attention. I would argue that this dilutes the very meaning of human rights. There are several issues that rightfully deserve the tag of human rights violation- you only need to look around campus to see a multitude of groups working on these, or just a bit further to the Downtown East Side. Not to perpetuate stereotypes, but there are people who don’t have money to buy food. As we speak war and extreme gender based violence is in progress. There are people who don’t have access to medicines, people who don’t have access to basic primary education.  There are places where there are no student aid or loan programs whatsoever. The treaty Canada is allegedly violating talks about equally accessible education based on capacity and appropriate means. What gives AMS the right (and the qualifications) to say these means (student loans and such) are not appropriate, and that despite the recession the government has a higher capacity to fund education?

Not only is the AMS misusing the term human rights violation, it is also showcasing itself as culturally insensitive and a ridiculously spoiled brat. By using such a heavy term in such a light handed, media-savvy way, the AMS is being insensitive to all those people at UBC that are from places way less privileged than BC, Canada. This is exactly what we talked about in our dialogue series- a knowledge gap that needs to be addressed.  We cannot be throwing such terms around without fully understanding their implications just to gather attention. Believe it or not, ‘human rights’ does mean something important. If our elected representatives don’t realise that, how can we expect it of our student body?

UBC prides itself on being international. “Protecting Human Rights- from here;” that is part of their new brand isn’t it? The AMS has effectively damaged that with a single thoughtless action. Is the AMS really trying to put increased tuition rates for post secondary education on the same level as lack of access to basic food, shelter, medicines, education, and in some cases even safety? Is it really so desperate for attention that it ignores the cultural sensitivities of this issue and this term on an international campus? Please, don’t get me wrong. I am in no way saying that tuition hikes are not an important issue, or that they do not affect students, or that they do not deserve media attention. Nor am I saying that our AMS exec has not tried their best to lobby both levels of governments. But if you are upset about your tuition you hold protests, lobby the government, write articles, organise a rally. Not working?  Try again, try something else. Maybe on a national scale. Do not, however, use terms such as ‘human rights’ as a buzzword for an issue that is in no way even close to being a human rights violation (that too on the international stage), just to garner attention. It is completely unacceptable and unethical. Like the UN doesn’t have other concerns to deal with.

Frederick claimed to submit this report “on behalf of [the members of the] AMS.” Hopefully, the entire world isn’t thinking that the students of UBC have lost touch with reality, and consider rising tuition costs a “gross violation of human rights.” I assure you, at this point, the AMS does not represent me.

Spam prevention powered by Akismet