The sweet sound of the familiar wafts out of the new Obama administration.  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, in her recent trip to China states that human rights must not get in the way of dealing with the economic crisis.  Although President Obama will be closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he has decided to continue to support the policy of extraordinary rendition which is the practice of having others do your torture for you.  I have more respect for the torturer than the sanctimonious hypocrite. 

But I guess change and a new approach don’t last as long as they used to.  A nation wept with joy and expectation as the first Black man was inaugurated as president of the United States, a country with a horrific history of civil and human  rights abuses.  The hope and the promise was that this would be a new dawning of the American dream; that all humans would be treated equally and with respect and dignity.  How could it be otherwise?  How could a Black man in the United States turn his back on civil and human rights?  How could he compare himself to Abraham Lincoln and use slavery as a backdrop for the significance of his presidency while blindly ignoring slavery in those countries he interacts with?  It seems absurd but few are questioning him on it.  Those who try are pushed to the side by the ‘mainstream Left’ who are gushing like schoolgirls in the glow of the new messiah. 

The masses that enjoy the opulence and relative ease of our society have no stomach for a debate on human rights.  I guess the condition is that rights are good as long as they don’t affect our lifestyle.  For years the United States and its industrialized friends have chided China for its human rights record at Hollywood fundraising events or at galas with other progressive groups while conducting business as usual in the corridors of power.  It is a metaphor for our time.  The ultimate Potemkin Village.  While we swim in the filth of reality we see only the crystal waters of our self-induced mirage.  So who can we really blame, the politicians that encourage our delusion or ourselves for knowingly embracing it?  What is the fear?  Could it be that we know that our society is as cold and uncaring towards us, its own members, as it is toward those who suffer the indignity every day of not being considered fully human? 

I wonder.

Daily we hear accounts coming to us from Congo, Georgia, Darfur, Palestine and the list goes on.  Scarcely a region of the world is without its own special nightmare.  At Nuremberg and Tokyo the perpetrators of the crimes of World War Two were brought to account for their decisions and actions.  It was easy then.  They had been vanquished and we held their collective fate in our hands.  Then it was about seeking justice through the use of a court.  Today it is more complex.  There are no white knights in shining armour claiming victory for god and the right.  Actually there never were. 

Many of today’s conflicts more closely resemble the wars of medieval Europe than the 2 world wars.  Feudal warlords with private armies roaming freely creating mayhem wherever they go.  Instant states built on ethnic homogeneity leave out the possibility of peace.  The solutions become more complex along with the conflicts.  The line is blurred between criminal and victim.  Hell, it is obfuscated.  In the former Yugoslavia the Serbs were villianized for good reason but our simplistic approach of assuming that the other ethnic groups were mere victims has created more suffering as our ‘friends,’ particularly the Kosovar Albanians, have used the umbrella of our protection for ethnic cleansing and worse of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo.  In Rwanda the criminals were clearly marked ethnically; Hutu evil, Tutsi good; Hutu criminal, Tutsi victim.  But has that solved anything.  How many of us here in the West understand the history of the situation in the Great Lakes region of Africa.  Hell how many of us really understand Africa at all or have even tried.  So called ‘African’ Americans like Oprah Winfrey meddle in the continent.  What they forget is that first and foremost they are Americans, not Africans.  Transplanting American values and demeaning African civilizations as primitive and backward is not helping Africans.  But this is grist for another article. 

One method of dealing with these conflicts, pioneered by South Africa in the years following the dismantling of the apartheid system, is the truth and reconciliation commission.  Unlike a court, no sanction is applied to perpetrators other than the social stygma of standing before the world an admitted murderer, rapist, child abuser.  For truth you receive reconciliation.  It is a noble thought reminiscent in some ways of the confessional.  Except in this case it is not god that is giving absolution but the society in hopes of putting the past behind them and moving forward.  In the short term it seems to have worked well in South Africa.  But it is less than two decades since the apartheid system came down.  More time is needed before we celebrate the success of this approach.  And are there limits?  Are there some things that are so atrocious, so repugnant that even confession should not absolve the perpetrator from legal sanction?  Take the case of Milton Blahyi in Liberia who admitted before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission dealing with that troubled country’s civil war that he had engaged in human sacrifice.  Children would be sacrificed, their heart removed and then cut up and consumed.  Yes eaten.  He also owned to the deaths of approximately 20,000 people by soldiers under his command.  Should he just walk away?  If ever there was an atrocity this is it. 

How do we deal with cases like this and the many similar ones?  The goal of the truth and reconciliation process is to create a new beginning for a lasting peace.  If that goal is achieved, allowing men like Blahyi to walk free will be worth it.  We can rationalize that those who perished so brutally are martyrs to freedom and peace.  If the process fails we may only have created more fuel for hatred by confirming what had only been believed.  We must wait and see is the only answer for now but it feels so inadequate.