Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights

Roland Burke

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205329
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the decades following the triumphant proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the UN General Assembly was transformed by the arrival of newly independent states from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This diverse constellation of states introduced new ideas, methods, and priorities to the human rights program. Their influence was magnified by the highly effective nature of Asian, Arab, and African diplomacy in the UN human rights bodies and the sheer numerical superiority of the so-called Afro-Asian bloc. Owing to the nature of General Assembly procedure, the Third World states dominated the human rights agenda, and enthusiastic support for universal human rights was replaced by decades of authoritarianism and an increasingly strident rejection of the ideas laid out in the Universal Declaration.In Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, Roland Burke explores the changing impact of decolonization on the UN human rights program. By recovering the contributions of those Asian, African, and Arab voices that joined the global rights debate, Burke demonstrates the central importance of Third World influence across the most pivotal battles in the United Nations, from those that secured the principle of universality, to the passage of the first binding human rights treaties, to the flawed but radical step of studying individual pleas for help. The very presence of so many independent voices from outside the West, and the often defensive nature of Western interventions, complicates the common presumption that the postwar human rights project was driven by Europe and the United States. Drawing on UN transcripts, archives, and the personal papers of key historical actors, this book challenges the notion that the international rights order was imposed on an unwilling and marginalized Third World. Far from being excluded, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern diplomats were powerful agents in both advancing and later obstructing the promotion of human rights.

Chapter 1

Human Rights and the Birth of the Third World: The Bandung Conference

At Bandung something unexpected happened. The voices of freedom spoke clearly and decisively.

—Carlos Peña Romulo, Philippine delegate, 1956

I understand the chief objective of this Conference is to promote neighborly amity and mutual understanding among the peoples of the Asian-African region…. This objective tallies exactly with the aim of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calculated to preserve peace, freedom and justice. It will, I trust, appeal to all men and women who have at their hearts the progress of mankind.

—Tasunosuke Takosake, Japanese delegate, address to the opening session of the Asian-African Conference, April 1955

The 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia was a landmark in the emergence of the non-aligned movement and the birth of the Third World.¹ Celebrated as a turning point in international affairs, its participants included the six independent states of Africa, along with virtually all of Asia. The meeting at Bandung, which was so vital to the later development of ideas of non-alignment and Afro-Asian solidarity, also served as a key point of origin for the human rights agenda that would be pursued by the decolonized states in the General Assembly. Just as importantly, its proceedings revealed the prevailing attitude toward human rights amongst the leaders of the nascent Third World. Their speeches at Bandung marked out many of the basic contours that came to define key UN human rights battles, such as that on self-determination.

While the implications of the Asian-African Conference for international relations have been widely acknowledged, little scholarship has been devoted to conference's significance for human rights. Given the considerable prominence of human rights at the conference, its virtual absence from most accounts is surprising. Mary Ann Glendon, in her pioneering history of the founding years of the UN human rights regime, has offered a brief, generally negative assessment. Glendon argued that the conference's significance lay predominantly in its latent anti-Western dimension. The conference “signaled trouble ahead,” despite the affirmation of universality contained in the Final Communiqué.² Initial opposition to the recognition of the Universal Declaration by the Chinese presaged future struggles over the universality of human rights.³ Unity at Bandung was achieved, in Glendon's view, “through shared resentment of the dominance of a few rich and powerful countries.”⁴ This anti-Western “mood” at Bandung very quickly found expression “in characterizations of the Declaration as an instrument of neocolonialism and in attacks on its universality in the name of cultural integrity, self-determination of peoples, or national sovereignty.”⁵

Paul Gordon Lauren, another leading historian on the early foundations of the human rights movement, has presented a more positive interpretation, but has simplified the dynamics of the conference debate.⁶ According to his account, the conference provided “unparalleled inspiration and self-confidence for Asians and Africans,” an outlet for “pent-up frustrations,” and “release from the psychological chains of presumed inferiority.”⁷ Its significance was, for Lauren, primarily in its effects on the shape of the international system and the mindset of colonial peoples. In particular, he lauds the recognition of the Universal Declaration by the delegates.⁸ However, he is too sanguine on the role played by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, and neglects to mention the divide between communist China and the smaller states on the question of human rights. Closer examination of the conference record reveals that Zhou was certainly not among the gallery of Third World heroes Lauren has praised for “advancing the cause of international human rights” at Bandung.⁹

Contrary to the accounts of both Glendon and Lauren, this chapter argues that the legacy of the Bandung Conference contained a distinctive mixture of both positive and negative possibilities for the evolution of the international human rights project at the UN. It will show that while the human rights objectives of anticolonialism and antiracism, so energetically pursued by the Afro-Asian states in the 1960s and 1970s, were indeed established as priority concerns at Bandung, they coexisted with a more general concern for civil and political rights, one that extended to situations all over the world. Anticolonialism was in part conceived of as a struggle for human rights, the two concepts proceeding together in the campaign for freedom and independence. The conference marked a high point in support for the universality of human rights among the Third World states. On the Bandung agenda, support for rights was balanced, albeit precariously, with the intense desire for national liberation. That fragile arrangement would later collapse, but it had yet to do so when the conference opened in April 1955.

Bandung as History: Assembling the Third World, April 1955

The Bandung Conference was held at a moment when the Cold War had become an established feature in the world system. Collective defense arrangements continued to proliferate throughout the world, ossifying power alignments and formalizing the polarization between East and West. This geographical extension of the Cold War was symbolized by the Baghdad Pact (later CENTO), which was agreed only months before the conference opened. Hostilities appeared possible in North Asia, the Korean War had ended in a precarious armistice, and negotiations for a permanent settlement had failed in Geneva in 1954. There was escalating tension over Formosa, which became a major discussion point for the delegates at Bandung. Most of Asia was now independent, but the decolonization process had yet to transform the African colonies, with only Ghana and Sudan close to achieving full sovereignty. Armed campaigns for independence continued in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Kenya. The ANC was resurgent in South Africa, pushed by the more activist leadership of the Youth League.

At the United Nations, the human rights project had entered a transitional phase, with the West ceding its early dominance. States that had been independent for less than a decade, like the Philippines and India, were beginning to play a major role in the absence of U.S. leadership. During the 1955 session of the Commission on Human Rights at the UN, the few Third World delegates present were some of the most active and committed. John Humphrey, first director of the UN Human Rights Division, would later comment that “the delegations with the strongest positive convictions were now without any doubt those which represented the Third World” and observed “the growing importance of issues like the self-determination of peoples and racial discrimination” in the Commission.¹⁰ These topics would only gain momentum in the wake of the conference, becoming nothing less than the annual mainstays of the UN agenda.

Bandung assembled the most influential anticolonial politicians of the era. One of the principal organizers, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, had been imprisoned seven times by the British in his agitation for independence. Nehru was an unyielding defender of human rights and democratic society, having endorsed the Sankey Declaration of Human Rights of 1940. He had framed much of his opposition to British rule in democratic terms. Nehru would become the leading exponent of non-alignment as a political philosophy, an idea that developed into a formal coalition of states in 1961.

Co-founder of the non-aligned movement Gamal Abdel Nasser was another prominent nationalist figure at Bandung. Nasser established the modern, independent Egyptian republic, leading the Free Officers movement that deposed King Farouk in July 1952. A strong opponent of colonialism, Nasser had successfully negotiated an agreement with the British in October 1954 that removed British troops from Egypt, ending a seventy-two-year presence. Ever confident, charismatic, and aggressive, Nasser advocated pan-Arab unity as the solution to both conventional imperialist domination and the plight of the Palestinian people.¹¹ An iconic figure for much of the Arab world, he would become the most durable leader of the region, his appeal surviving the disastrous Six Day War of 1967 and years of domestic authoritarianism.

While markedly different from these nationalist heroes, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was nonetheless one of the most outspoken critics of colonialism, having witnessed the effects of imperial power both in his homeland and during his travels in colonial Asia. He elevated anticolonialism and Afro-Asian friendship to major objectives of China's foreign policy, and in December 1963 would embark on a tour of thirteen Asian and African countries, attempting to rally support for a second Asian-African Conference. Like Nehru and Nasser, Zhou stood out as an impressive and threatening new voice from a region that had finally begun to find self-expression.

Despite attracting a diverse range of states, including many with conflicting ideological positions, few at Bandung were in doubt of the meeting's historic character. Communist and non-aligned leaders were enthusiastic about the prospect of a new and independent bloc reshaping the international system. Communist Zhou nominated it an event of “important historic significance,” one that had “inspired all oppressed peoples and nations.”¹² Chief exponent of non-alignment, Nehru, claimed that Bandung marked “the political emergence in world affairs of over half the world's population…a great movement in human history.”¹³ Nehru's neutralist counterpart, Indonesian President Ahmed Sukarno, announced that it was “a new departure in the history of the world,” with the African and Asian leaders meeting for the first time as the representatives of “free, sovereign and independent” peoples.¹⁴

Leaders from the pro-Western contingent of states were similarly convinced of the conference's importance. Philippine delegate Carlos Peña Romulo, already a stand-out figure in both the Commission on Human Rights and the General Assembly, described his delegation and Nehru as being on “opposite sides of the fence.”¹⁵ He nevertheless celebrated the gathering in Bandung as “the coming of age of Asia and Africa” and a moment of “historical exuberance.”¹⁶ Ceylonese Prime Minister Sir John Kotelawala, who launched a scathing attack on ‘communist colonialism' at the conference, nominated it as a “critical juncture…not only in the history of the Asian-African region but in the history of mankind.”¹⁷ Charles Malik, part of the Lebanese delegation and a major contributor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was another fierce opponent of both communist totalitarianism and the neutralist doctrine. Yet he was equally effusive on the significance of the conference, noting that while “the word ‘historic' is often used about all sorts of things…in the case of the Bandung Conference, it is fully justified.”¹⁸

The enthusiasm across Asia and Africa was matched with an equivalent alarm in Western political circles, which anticipated the birth of an anti-Western bloc.¹⁹ U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that the conference would diminish Western influence in the former colonies and encourage “communist engulfment” of the emerging postcolonial world. This would, he feared, lead to the creation of “a very solid block of anti-Western votes in the United Nations” as the new states were progressively admitted to the international body.²⁰ Dulles argued that if the Bandung Conference could be stopped “without strong-arm methods” the “US would welcome such [an] outcome,” though open opposition was not advisable because such a course “would probably bring a bad reaction” from the countries involved.²¹ European colonial powers such as the Netherlands, Britain, and France were concerned about the evolution of a communist-backed “antiwhite” coalition of Afro-Asian states united by racial solidarity and anticolonialism.²² Much of this anxious speculation would later seem prescient, though the immediate outcomes of the conference bore only vague resemblance to the prophecies of Dulles and his European counterparts. Preoccupied with near tectonic realignments in international relations, few of the Western policy makers devoted much space to pondering the question of what Bandung would mean for human rights. For the participants themselves, though, human rights were not pushed aside by the exuberance of national liberation.

Human Rights at Bandung: From Absolute Monarchies to Arab Nationalisms

Even before the conference began, human rights were highlighted as a central issue for discussion in an appeal from Mahmoud Aboul Fath, an Egyptian senator who was living in exile after his newspaper had been suppressed by Nasser.²³ In his letter to the Bandung delegates, Fath exhorted the conference not to ignore human rights in the clamor to condemn colonialism:

How can you ask colonialist and imperialist countries to put an end to the ruthless methods they employ in Africa and Asia, to restore freedoms and human rights to peoples under their influence when some of you treat their [your] own peoples in a worse way? Such a call will sound weak and lack some sincerity unless your courage will know no bounds or limits when conditions represented in your own congress are concerned…. The violation of human rights is certainly bad and intolerable when committed by imperialists against peoples on whom they force their authority but it is also worse and more obnoxious [when] committed by a few nationals against their own people.²⁴

The extent to which the conference truly lived up to Fath's ambitious standard is open to debate. Few of the states represented at Bandung could plausibly claim to have impeccable human rights records. However, human rights were central to the political debate at Bandung, and provided much of the lexicon for the articulation of grievances and aspirations by the assembled nationalist leaders. Militant anticolonialists were comfortable with professing their support for a set of universal claims.

Interest in human rights was a distinctive feature of the optimistic atmosphere that characterized the dawn of the postcolonial era. Rights were incessantly invoked in speeches to the conference, with only the related but more immediate preoccupations of racism and colonialism featuring more prominently. The president of the Conference, Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo, lamented in his opening speech that the world was “still a long way off” from both racial equality and “respect for human rights.”²⁵ Of the twenty-five delegates who gave addresses in the opening session on 18 April 1955, no fewer than eleven invoked human rights. The speeches came from an extraordinarily diverse collection of states, and encompassed the full spectrum of political systems in attendance. The speakers ranged from His Royal Highness, Foreign Minister Sardar Mohammed Naim of Afghanistan, an absolute monarchy, to Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of communist China, and included such ideologically disparate regimes as Egypt, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, South Vietnam, and Yemen.²⁶

Human rights were again a major feature of the closing session, when four delegations nominated their recognition as one of the achievements of the conference. Afghan representative Sardar praised the conference for proving “that all of us, from different parts of Asia and Africa, have felt and acted as one, for the achievement of our common desire…the protection of human rights.”²⁷ Nasser of Egypt endorsed it as “a tremendous success,” not least because of the “deep concern and full support which all the Asiatic and African countries have shown with regard to questions of human rights.”²⁸ His views were echoed by Prime Minister Mohammed Ali, head of the Pakistani delegation, who extolled human rights as one of the core beliefs that defined the Asian-African attitude toward world affairs. Ali pronounced that, among other things, “the peoples of Asia and Africa…stand for the fundamental principles of human rights and self-determination.”²⁹

Eloquent endorsements for universality rang out alongside the abundant rhetoric on Afro-Asian distinctiveness. Speakers embraced both the Universal Declaration and the Draft Covenants on Human Rights, weaving universality with national and cultural particularity. Prince Wan of Thailand, for instance, asserted a common basis for rights. Western and Eastern religions, he argued, “all teach the same lesson—the dignity and worth of man, faith in fundamental human rights, and respect for fundamental freedom for all without distinction as to creed, color or race.”³⁰ Given the bitter debates of the 1990s on cultural specificity and “Asian Values,” the language of the Final Communiqué of the conference, which declared “full support” for the “fundamental principles of Human Rights,” is stunning. The Bandung states, a number of which would go on to lead the “Asian Values” crusade, recognized the Universal Declaration as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” just as the General Assembly had done seven years previously.³¹ Endorsement of the Universal Declaration as a valid normative standard for all was perhaps the most promising development for human rights at Ban-dung. At least in principle, the delegates agreed that human rights were universal. This was not the case two decades later.

Philippine representative Romulo, who had been heavil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Politics of Decolonization and the Evolution of the International Human Rights Project
• 1. Human Rights and the Birth of the Third World: The Bandung Conference
• 2. “Transforming the End into the Means”: The Third World and the Right to Self-Determination
• 3. Putting the Stamps Back On: Apartheid, Anticolonialism, and the Accidental Birth of a Universal Right to Petition
• 4. “It Is Very Fitting”: Celebrating Freedom in the Shah's Iran, the First World Conference on Human Rights, Tehran 1968
• 5. “According to Their Own Norms of Civilization”: The Rise of Cultural Relativism and the Decline of Human Rights
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments