Human Rights: A Gift Denied

A Study Paper of the Lutheran Church in America (no date)

Introduction
Human rights are a gift of God to all of humankind. They establish an entitlement to justice that transcends the laws and customs of particular societies - an entitlement arising from our Christian belief that "persons . . . are of equal worth before God . . . equally entitled to the things and protections they need to live in meaningful relation to God and neighbor." *
* LCA Social Statement, Human Rights: Doing Justice in God's World

Over the years, individuals, groups and nations have sought to protect and preserve their human rights in many different ways. In modern times these efforts have included making governments responsible for the protection of the human rights of their citizens. Indeed, one of the most powerful and eloquent assertions of human rights can be found in our own Declaration of Independence, which simply states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The first such worldwide standard was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. That declaration contains what is still the most widely accepted list of human rights, including the right to life, liberty and security of persons, the right to participate in government, and the right to an adequate standard of living.

Despite the U.N. declaration - now almost 40 years old - human rights continue to be violated in many places throughout the world. Today the governments of 98 countries use or tolerate torture. Torture is used to extract information from individuals, to punish dissenters and to intimidate the general populace. Through the use of drugs, electric shock and other technological refinements, torture has become more sinister than ever before.

Torture is not the only form of human rights abuse that we witness today. People are jailed for speaking, writing and practicing their religious faith. Nations are ruled against their will by military governments and foreign powers. People die for want of food, shelter and medical care. Although every country may have its own human rights issues and problems, the concern for human rights transcends national and ideological boundaries.

Christians and Human Rights
Christians have a unique understanding of human rights, believing that all people are created in God's image and that each person is someone for whom Christ died. Human dignity, therefore, is God-given, and human rights express that dignity. When humans oppress each other they bruise God's creation, scorn Christ's love, and impede the work of the spirit.

In 1978, the Lutheran Church in America adopted the social statement "Human Rights: Doing Justice in God's World." The statement says that "both within our own countries * and around the world we have the God-given responsibility to contribute to a powerful and effective community of caring for all who suffer injustice. We are especially called to work for the rights of those `forgotten ones' who are otherwise without voice or power." The statement calls on Christians and others to learn more about human rights and to work for justice - God's intention for all creation.
* The United States and Canada

Soviet Union: Anna Chertkova's Ordeal of Faith
Anna Chertkova was imprisoned in a Soviet psychiatric hospital in 1973. Her crime: refusing to accept communism, believing in God and belonging to a Baptist congregation not registered with the government. Today Anna Chertkova is still confined. Many religious believers in the USSR, of many faiths, are committed to special psychiatric hospitals operated by a branch of the secret police. There government officials and psychiatrists try to persuade them that religious belief is a symptom of mental disease.

But Soviet citizens can be sent to special psychiatric hospitals for almost any nonconformist behavior, such as distributing religious leaflets, joining a human rights monitoring group, or protesting government policies. Unlike prisoners in labor camps, those confined in psychiatric hospitals are imprisoned indefinitely. They cannot look forward to release.

Confined without trial - and often without psychiatric examination - these prisoners are cut off from the outside world. Visits with family members are routinely denied. All correspondence is censored. Prisoners may be isolated or forced to live with inmates who are criminally insane. To subdue and punish nonconformists, hospital staff frequently give their "patients" drugs that produce severe pain, fevers, chills and disorientation.

The use of psychiatry for political purposes was condemned by the World Psychiatric Association in 1977, but the practice continues unabated in the USSR. Although the Soviet government has tried to suppress the evidence, former prisoners now living in the West, psychiatrists who have visited Soviet mental institutions, underground human rights groups and some Soviet doctors have given ample testimony that the practice continues. Despite claims that there is no religious persecution in the USSR, anyone who tries to practice freedom of religion and other basic individual rights risks not only imprisonment but physical and psychological torture.

Guatemala: Silent Deaths of "The Disappeared"
The most basic human right is the right to life itself - the right not to be killed, tortured or deprived of basic necessities. But recent history in the Central American country of Guatemala demonstrates that people there have not had even this, the most fundamental of rights. For although the civilian government that replaced a military dictatorship in 1985 has attempted to improve the lives of the people, the army still retains ultimate power in Guatemala - power that it holds through the use of terror.

Specific groups have been singled out for persecution by the army. Indian peoples, who constitute 40 percent of the population, are one such group. Since 1979, the army has destroyed entire Indian villages and murdered untold numbers of people. At least 74,000 Indians have been forced into "model villages" operated by the army, where they live under the most restrictive of conditions. An estimated 150,000 Guatemalans have fled into neighboring Mexico and other countries to escape the terror. Thousands more have abandoned their destroyed crops and homes and moved to Guatemala's wretched urban slums, where they eke out an impoverished and desperate existence.

In the cities, the violence has been more limited, directed at carefully selected individuals. Persons who show the potential for community leadership, and thus may pose a threat to the power of the military, often vanish. These victims, "the disappeared," come from all walks of life. They are Catholic priests and catechists, professors, students, doctors, trade unionists - even the mothers and children of those who have somehow displeased the authorities.

Some of the disappeared are killed shortly after abduction, and their mutilated bodies are found by the roadside. Others are held in secret detention centers where they are tortured and denied basic necessities. Their families do not know whether they are dead or alive and there is usually little hope for them. In the face of such repression, Guatemalans formed Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), an organization of family and friends of the disappeared who work together to locate their incarcerated loved ones, and publicize the conditions of their arrest and final disposition. But in the spring of 1985 two leaders of GAM were tortured and killed - among the 40,000-60,000 Guatemalans the Washington Office on Latin America estimates have been murdered since 1978.

Today the number of killings has dropped from the staggering levels of a few years ago, not because the military has been curbed by the civilian government, but because it is no longer necessary to murder as many people to maintain the required level of fear. Guatemala remains a land of terror for many of its citizens, while much of the world remains unaware of their plight.

Namibia: The Agony of Nahas Ndevahoma
On July 29, 1985, Nahas Mukaita Ndevahoma was arrested at his home in northern Namibia by soldiers of South Africa's occupation army. Mr. Ndevahoma, a high school principal and member of Namibia's Evangelical Lutheran Church, was accused of aiding guerrilla fighters belonging to Namibia's liberation movement SWAPO.* The South African soldiers, who are in Namibia to enforce their country's illegal colonial administration of this United Nations Trust Territory, offered no evidence for their charges. Nor was Mr. Ndevahoma, who like the overwhelming majority of Namibia's citizens is Black, brought before a court of law or charged with any crime.
* South West Africa Peoples Organization

Instead, during a week in detention at a nearby army base, he was brutally tortured: "I was continuously beaten. [At one point] three sacks were tied around my neck covering my head and water . . . was forced into my nostrils and through my mouth. While this was being done I was kicked in the stomach."

During the torture session the soldiers produced a man who claimed he witnessed Ndevahoma delivering food to the guerrillas - an accusation the principal strongly denies. "This man I have never seen in my life. All his testifications were completely untrue."

Ndevahoma was finally released on August 5, but not before he was forced to pose for a photo with a soldier extending a handful of money. The reason for the picture, he was told, "was for propaganda purposes. They will publish it showing me receiving money from them and say I was providing them with information."

Nahas Ndevahoma's arrest and torture may have been in retaliation for a complaint of theft he lodged against soldiers suspected of stealing food from the school. But he was not an exception. Each year hundreds of Namibians are arrested for violations of South Africa's draconian security laws. Many, like Mr. Ndevahoma, are never charged with a crime and never appear before a judge - they are simply taken away and held for weeks or even months in secret prisons. There, deprived of the protection of the courts and doctors, and denied access to attorneys, family and clergy, many detainees are tortured or killed - the victims of a racist system that denies Namibia's Black people even the hope of justice.

For there can be no human rights without government institutions, including the courts, the police and the constitution, to protect them. By denying the Namibian people their inalienable right to choose their own forms of government and establish their own institutions, South Africa can violate the rights of individuals with impunity. That is why the United Nations, including the United States, Canada and the other Western democracies, has condemned South African colonial rule of Namibia as illegal and reaffirmed the fundamental human right of the Namibian people to political self-determination and independence.

But until the international community succeeds in forcing South Africa to leave Namibia and allows Namibians to exercise their rights, Nahas Ndevahoma and his people will suffer more beatings, more torture, and more murder.

United States: Liberty and Justice for Some
Many Americans find it easy to see and condemn human rights abuses in other countries, but what about abuses here at home? Does the United States systematically violate the human rights of some of its citizens?

Most people would probably say no, that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights guarantee and protect our rights, and provide legal remedies for individual injustices. But David Sohappy, a 61-year-old Native American religious elder, and member of the Yakima Indian Nation in Washington State, would tell a different story. In August 1986, Sohappy was ordered to begin a five-year prison sentence for "poaching" salmon from the Columbia River, even though the United States had guaranteed the Yakima people fishing rights on the river "for as long as the sun shines, as long as the mountains stand and the rivers run."

Had David Sohappy been white, he could only have been fined for his alleged crime. But under a special federal law applicable only to Native American reservations, he was convicted of criminal charges, and taken 2,000 miles away from the river he and his people have fished for the past 12,000 years. Yet his story is not unique. Today only 1.5 million Native Americans survive in the United States, a mute testament to 400 years of neglect and brutality by the conquering whites. Although bound by treaty to respect Native American land rights and provide health, housing, education and other services, the United States continues to ignore both its treaty obligations and Native American human rights. By virtually every measure they are among the poorest and most desperate of our people.

Slavery has left another bitter legacy of human rights abuses, one that haunts this country more than a century after its final abolition. For if the shackles of slavery are now broken, the bonds of racism and grinding poverty remain. Twenty years after the last racist laws were removed from the nation's statute books as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, more than one third of Black Americans are officially classified as poor. Nearly half of America's Black families struggle to survive on incomes that average less than a third that of whites, and levels of Black employment, education and health are significantly lower than those of the white majority.

Other human rights abuses know no color, but emerge from economic trends and government policy. Take, for example, the plight of the homeless. Estimates of Americans without shelter range from a low of 250,000 to as high as three million, and there is little doubt that their numbers are growing. Many of the homeless are mentally ill, many are aged and infirm - unable to pay rising rents on fixed incomes. Others are simply too poor to pay soaring housing costs. Shelter is a basic human right, yet these most-vulnerable people now constitute an army of despair in the parks and sidewalks of our major cities - victims of government policies that put profits and "urban renewal" ahead of human needs, and even human lives. A 1986 study of homeless people in one "welfare hotel" in New York found infant mortality rates higher than those in Costa Rica and other underdeveloped countries.

As Christians we are called upon to oppose injustice and defend human rights wherever we find oppression. But human beings have rights that go beyond such precious civil liberties as the freedom of speech and the right to vote. All persons have a basic human right to decent housing and education, to an adequate diet and health care, to employment or a minimum income, and to equality of opportunity and fair treatment regardless of race, sex, religion or cultural background. When denial of these rights results in hunger, misery and perennial poverty, then social and economic differences among individuals become violations of human rights. In the midst of our affluent and democratic society such misery is a fact of life for millions of people. It is a fact that we dare not ignore.

What You Can Do
Learn More About Human Rights
Study the LCA social statement "Human Rights: Doing Justice in God's World," available from the Division for Mission in North America, LCA. Contact human rights organizations for information about human rights abuses in different countries. Some names and addresses appear below.

Become a Human Rights Advocate

- Join or form a branch of Amnesty International in your community.
- Ask your synod and/or your Lutheran state public policy advocacy office (currently in 18 states) about ways of working with other concerned Lutherans on human rights issues.
- Write to your local, state and national elected officials about your concern for human rights, urging them to support legislation that promotes and protects human rights in this country and around the world.
- Participate with others in activities that promote respect for human rights, including letter-writing campaigns, letters to the editors of local newspapers, and prayer, vigils and marches for human rights.

Inform Others

- Regularly include victims of human rights abuses in your prayer petitions during Sunday worship.
- Encourage local television stations and newspapers to provide greater coverage of human rights issues.
- Work with other members of your congregation and community to sponsor speakers, films and forums about human rights abuses.
- Set aside a special day, or days, to demonstrate concern for the victims of human rights abuses. Consider December 10, recognized by the United Nations as International Human Rights Day; Central America Week and Native American Sunday, both in March; Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, January 15. But remember, any day is a good day to pray and advocate for human rights, because for countless numbers of God's people around the world, every day is another day of oppression, suffering and terror.