“Our objective should be to give capacity to civil society groups, especially women’s organizations,” Dr. Razmik Panossian, director of policy, programs, and planning at Rights and Democracy in Montreal and instructor at the London School of Economics told students gathered at Hart House last Thursday.
Panties for Peace, a women’s advocacy group pushing for reform in Burma, is one such organization. Women’s movements are often at the forefront of combating dictatorships, a speaker at Hart House told students yesterday. The Panties for Peace campaign taunts the Burmese leadership on its superstitious belief that contact with a woman’s underpants will rob a man of his power. The group asks women around the world to mail their panties to Burmese embassies to protest the regime’s gross violations of human rights, especially offences committed against Burma’s women.
Razmik outlined a strategy of non-violent resistance in ending dictatorships. He emphasized the crucial role of citizen groups in finding points of oppression in the systems and pushing through them.
For anyone who has grappled with the question of what Canada can do to help end the tyranny of dictators like Robert Mugabe and the Burmese junta, the Hart House talk on Thursday evening offered a place to entertain the question.
In collaboration with the Canadian International Council, the Hart House debate club hosted a panel of three experts, each bringing a different perspective to human rights issues.
In contrast to Dr. Panossian’s citizen-group approach, Dr. Rhoda Howard-Hassman, Canada’s Research Chair in International Human Rights at Wilfred Laurier University and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Governance and Innovation, advocated increased scope for military intervention in combating dictatorships in the Zimbabwe.
The first problem, according to Howard–Hassman, is that “We don’t have a name for what is going on in Zimbabwe—there is no ethnic cleaning through violence to speak of. International law and international practice have not caught up with the many ways that a government can systematically cause its people to die and suffer.”
The Genocide Convention of 1984 refers to national, ethnic, religious or racial groups, but does not consider what some scholars are calling politicide and genocide by attrition. Even if the Genocide Convention was amended to include politicide and state-induced famine, the international community is not required to intervene militarily to enforce its mandate. This is the second obstacle to ending the crisis in Zimbabwe, she argued.
The final panelist, Judy Jackson, an award-winning social justice documentary filmmaker, spoke emotionally of her experience as a journalist in Chile during the rule of Augusto Pinochet. She described the psychological importance for victims to see their oppressors put to justice, and of her incredulity at how little is being done for the people of Zimbabwe.
“It is extremely important that whenever a person stands up to speak of an experience of personal suffering, that it is acknowledged and validated by those listening,” said Howard-Hassman. “It takes tremendous courage for a person who has suffered extreme persecution to speak to strangers about it. Often when they speak and no one says anything they go home. They think that nobody cares about them or understands them. That they made fools of themselves.”
