SPECIAL REPORT / ON THE STATE OF HUMAN RIGHTS : The Two Sides of Humanity : Defining Heroes and Villains in a World That’s Shaded in Gray

WASHINGTON —  It took 172 years for the governments of the world to acknowledge, if only through the formality of a United Nations declaration, the “truths” that the United States of America held at its birth to be “self-evident”--that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

In the four decades following the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the life and liberty of all humankind were hostage to the threat of annihilation by the ultimate weapon of war.

Today, the superpowers are at peace, but humankind is even further from securing its rights. Millions are being denied their right to exist; millions more are losing their right to subsist. For some, the villain wears a human face; for others it is the unfathomabel force of technology or economics. In our time, as everbefore, the progress of history liberates some while leaving others ground beneath its wheels.

In this special report, we take stock of the state of human rights, measuring the situation in 1993 against the idealism and optimism of 1948, when the triumph of Good over Evil seemed certain. *

In histories of the Modern Age, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will almost certainly be recorded as one of the defining events. Pushed through in 1948 by an indefatigable Eleanor Roosevelt, whose persistence at the United Nations finally wore down Soviet intransi gence, the declaration codified freedom globally for the first time. For most parts of the world, it also expanded freedom’s meaning in sweeping new ways.

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” the declaration proclaims. It covers everything from the right to opinion, privacy, education, security, judicial recourse, migration, employment and fair wages to the right to leisure and marriage by choice, while it condemns abuses ranging from slavery and torture to discrimination based on language, sex, religion, opinion, origin and race.

For almost half a century since the declaration was adopted, human rights has been the official barometer of political progress around the world.

Until now.

Despite vast improvements since 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall energized scores of democratic upheavals, the percentage of people living in free societies has actually declined over the past decade. Freedom House, the New York-based monitoring group, reports that in January, 1993, 25% of the world population lived in free societies, down from 36% in 1983. The slide represents population growth as well as political change.

Some 2.4 billion people, or 44% of the world population, live in partly free countries, and another 1.7 billion live under totalitarian dictators, feudal kings and military regimes. By the guidelines established in the declaration, some 75% now live under governments that seriously and regularly violate human rights.

And even democracies are not necessarily guarantors of human rights. One of the biggest problems now, according to the Freedom House survey, is the “proliferation of hybrid regimes combining elements of market economies with partially democratic governments controlled by the old authoritarian elites.”

The survey identifies 31 democracies, including countries such as India and Guatemala, that engage in substantial human-rights violations daily.

“These nationalist, populist regimes are authoritarian at their core,” said R. Bruce McColm, executive director of Freedom House. “But they were elected, so they have some legitimacy, and now the West is more reluctant to challenge their human-rights records.”

The standards haven’t changed. The magnitude of the problem now seems overwhelming because human rights, like everything else, has been democratized. Its parameters are now expanding beyond the Cold War context to simmering but long-neglected peoples and places.

“We always thought that once we got rid of communism, it’d be a nice world,” said John G. Healey, executive director of Amnesty International. “But instead, things are worse. Human rights remains a daily struggle in every country in the world, including this one.”

Fostering and improving human rights clearly remains the ideal--and a goal even more universal than when the declaration was adopted, because communications have standardized the concept and content of rights in disparate parts of the world. Yet the process is undeniably being devalued or demoted in practice.

Indeed, one of the many ironies of this so-called New World is that the principles so instrumental in achieving historic change are now being undermined--and potentially even undone--by those changes.

The declaration emerged in the aftermath of authoritarian atrocities against humankind before and during World War II. It was then most actively applied to the world’s dominant strategic rivalry. Its past and contemporary context made its goals obvious, the determination of abuses and abusers straightforward.

But in the absence of a bipolar world and its hot conflicts or cold wars, specific violations and villains are more difficult to determine. With the proliferation of self-determination for minorities, human rights is no longer a straightforward campaign for the underdog. Indeed, just determining who is the underdog can be tricky.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, for example, Russians in the Baltic states are now a minority demanding rights and protection. South African whites, for so long ostracized by the outside world, will soon lose political dominance and take their place as just 14% of the population.

But “minorities” are no longer automatically people on the fringe, or numerically smaller groups. As assimilation, or the melting pot, is abandoned as a premise of societies or states, “virtually everyone becomes a minority,” said Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

And human rights becomes inexorably complicated.

As Yugoslavia’s disintegration has proved, adjudicating rights among nationalities, ethnic and religious groups, subnationalities and indigenous peoples, or between historic ties and current claims to land, may be even harder in a freer world.

And the global situation is likely to get messier during the so-called second tier of decolonization, the widely anticipated redrawing of borders imposed artificially by colonial masters over the past two centuries. That process would rearrange peoples, reclassify identity groups--and potentially unleash dozens of volatile new disputes over rival rights.

Minorities are also no longer necessarily the innocents. “In some cases, we’re finding that a minority group may be more of an oppressor than their original oppressor,” said Freedom House’s McColm.

The arena for human-rights activity is also now more difficult to discern, as are priorities.

During the Cold War, human rights was a tangible issue--the persecution of Jews and intellectuals in the Soviet Union--over which a conflict between ideologies played out. It was also one of the few non-lethal weapons the superpowers could use against each other and to rally support for themselves. The offensives weren’t one-sided. Communist propaganda effectively exploited the problems of urban homelessness, rural poverty, unemployment and racism in the world’s wealthiest capitalist state.

With the end of the Cold War, human rights can now be demanded more rigorously, rather than sacrificed in the name of strategic alliances. The problem is where to begin, for almost every country is now a candidate for indictment.

Unfortunately, at a time of finite and increasingly strained resources, the world cannot now provide, much less sustain, all of the rights the declaration guaranteed a half century ago.

Operation Restore Hope, a turning point in the evolution of human rights, is illustrative. In Somalia, the international community acknowledged that people had a right not to starve--and that the world was obliged to share its resources, skills and muscle to prevent millions from perishing.

Yet, Somalia is likely to be “the exception rather than the rule,” said Mohammed Sahnoun, the brave former U.N. envoy to Somalia who lost his job after criticizing the world body and its leadership for inadequate action in East Africa.

Somalia’s location, population size and accessibility made a military rescue operation feasible. But few of the many other candidates for similar emergency aid are likely to receive anything comparable.

In the end, the world doesn’t have the money, the staying power and, finally, the will for frequent repeat performances. So future reactions to chronic crises are likely to be “highly selective,” whatever the victims’ rights, Sahnoun said. “There’s already a tendency to close one’s eyes or to explain human-rights abuses by linking them to social and economic differences or to the stage of political evolution.”

Economic limitations are all the more tragic because human rights has been redefined in many parts of the democratizing world. The most sought-after right today is not the freedom to participate in political systems, but the freedom to prosper. In many of these countries, the failure to thrive economically carries with it dire consequences for democracy.

Meanwhile, as economic strength replaces military might as the barometer of national security, human rights is also becoming a victim of financial expediency. Many standard-bearing democratic states are unwilling to pressure violators if profits are jeopardized.

The selectivity is most visible in attitudes toward Confucian and Islamic countries, the new East in the East-West divide and as much of a human-rights challenge to the international community as the old East Bloc. Although neither culture is incompatible with political pluralism and basic freedoms, both have been dominated historically by authoritarian or totalitarian elites. More than half of the totalitarian states in Freedom House’s latest survey are traditionally Confucian or Islamic countries.

Yet, the outside world has been reluctant to push for human rights in many of these Asian and African lands. Action against China, for example, for its clampdown on pro-democracy forces has been limited in large part because Beijing has engaged in economic reforms that are opening up vast new market possibilities for the outside world.

“We would defeat our (human rights) objectives by adopting a policy of isolation or confrontation to influence China’s behavior,” said Arnold Kanter, State Department undersecretary for political affairs, on the declaration’s 44th anniversary last December.

Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich feudal Persian Gulf sheikdoms are also under only token pressure to introduce democracy, in no small part because of fears that political change might produce new leaders and systems less cooperative, compliant or dependent on industrialized Western states.

But Kanter also said, “Human rights is no longer perceived as a luxury only affordable to the rich or valued in the West.”

In principle, that is true. Since the demise of communism four years ago, 42 of the world’s 190 countries have made full or partial shifts toward democracy. Yet, with the Cold War’s end, the premium on human rights and the urgency to act have diminished. Despite the promise, the challenges are even greater.