Whereas poverty is widely held to be the biggest problem facing most parts of the world today, relatively few persons recognise how poverty is caused by impunity. The tendency has been to treat impunity as a problem of some importance, but not as a key to unlock the reasons for more serious problems of economic deprivation. Development agencies, most of which are led by persons without backgrounds in human rights or law, often relegate human rights concerns in general “and impunity in particular” to secondary places. The real business, they say, is to alleviate poverty by economic and social measures. This approach is wrong. It has been proven wrong: despite years of such measures, global poverty is increasing. It is also a fact that wherever there is increasing poverty, there is deepening impunity.
The measures to alleviate poverty introduced by development agencies fail because they are mediated via defective institutions. These institutions operate counter-productively because impunity has taken root. Development organisations typically fail to account for these defects and instead pour money into institutions from which it drains out of innumerable holes, rather than reaching its intended recipients. Because they do not direct sufficient attention towards the building of effective institutions for the use of development monies, these agencies are also unable to deal properly with attendant problems arising from institutionalised corruption. Consequently, their work fails. There are numerous examples of this from all over the world; what follows are a few from Asia.
Governments, funding agencies and development banks have put an enormous amount of money and effort into Cambodia. Still, all parties agree that not even minimal levels of accountability needed for a functioning economy and society have been established. The response of many has been simply to pull out and blame the government. However, these organisations have not seriously examined the deficiencies in their own approaches. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodian society suffered one of the greatest tragedies of recent history. The Paris Agreement and period of governance by the United Nations constituted an attempt to restore political and economic stability. What the parties to this effort failed to recognise was that the country’s institutions had been completely erased. What existed in the country prior to 1975 may have been inadequate, but by comparison, at the time the United Nations took over there was nothing at all upon which to build an economy and administration that would offer security to development agencies and investors. Inevitably, with huge funds being pumped into this institutional vacuum, impunity and corruption flourished, leading to the present undesirable situation. Had serious attempts been made from the start to develop the basic institutions required for a functioning society, based upon rule of law principles, the situation would have been very different. Unfortunately, today Cambodia is burdened with a Stone Age legal system. It will not overcome its persistent problems without addressing this reality, no matter how much attention is paid to economic development.
Indonesia is also a case in point. That its future looks bleak is due not only to economic reasons. Over 35 years, Suharto’s ruthless military dictatorship destroyed the basic institutions developing in the country prior to 1964. Corruption became the routine, and it ate away at programmes for national development, causing conflicts that further worsened the situation. Since a social upheaval displaced the dictatorship, the poor have found that they are still getting poorer, and are beset with all the same problems they faced before. Meanwhile, impunity and corruption thrive. However, international agencies are again not directing attention to the need for institutional development as a prerequisite for economic growth and social stability.
In Burma, hunger and deep poverty is inextricably linked to the absolute impunity enjoyed by the military regime there. The People’s Tribunal on Food Scarcity and Militarization in Burma established this in its detailed Voice of the Hungry Nation report, published by the Asian Human Rights Commission in 1999. In that country, starvation deaths are occurring not because of environmental reasons but rather because of the unquestioned authority that the regime exercises. Development agencies operating in that environment have no hope of making genuine progress towards poverty alleviation, because the state institutions are functioning in direct opposition to their aims. The Asian Human Rights Commission has since established a permanent tribunal to continue working on the relationship between denial of the right to food and absence of the rule of law throughout the region.
Recent publications have also pointed to how impunity is causing poverty in India. Unlike the preceding three countries, India claims to have the basic institutions and structure to ensure the rule of law. However, most people in India are still effectively denied legal protection because of thousands of years-old deeply entrenched discriminatory practices. The worst affected persons include Dalits – those once designated as `untouchables’, and ethnic and religious minorities. While laws prohibit discrimination, they are not applied because of widespread impunity. Again, the result is massive, deepening poverty among vast numbers of people across the country. Most international agencies working in India, however, mistakenly believe that these institutions are operating at least to the minimal extent necessary to permit them to carry on with their activities.
Sri Lanka is another example of a country that, with enormous resources and talented people, was once on track for speedy development. The conflicts that then engulfed the country, resulting in massive numbers of extrajudicial killings, acts of torture and disappearances, have made it one of the most violent countries in Asia. Though most of the conflict has been attributed to ethnic hostility, closer examination shows that well-established relations among different groups were severed only because of ruthless practices by the police, military groups, and politicians who safeguarded themselves by ensuring impunity for their actions through a raft of odious security regulations. At present, peace talks between warring groups have reached an impasse for the same reason. So long as politicians and the security forces continue to be guaranteed impunity, these talks will not make progress. Here also, international parties have not attempted to link the civil conflict with the breakdown in the rule of law and attendant impunity. The civil war has been portrayed as the cause of poverty, but what has been forgotten is that without robust institutions for the rule of law and accountability, the economy cannot recover.
So to deal with poverty, one must also address impunity. This requires more complicated approaches to economic and social development than those ordinarily adopted by international agencies. It means spending money on the development and maintenance of legal institutions, apart from directing it toward the poor themselves. It means working with groups in the society keen upon affording themselves and their peers a protective umbrella from beneath which they may direct their energies towards obtaining their basic human rights and alleviating poverty. In the remainder of this essay, that concept is discussed in more detail.
The Asian Human Rights Commission has often described how a protective umbrella is needed for people seeking to defend their rights. This applies equally to those concerned with civil and political rights as those concerned with economic, social and cultural rights. Most development agencies, however, fail to recognise the heavy obstacles placed in the way of people trying to break free from poverty. These obstacles exist because many persons benefit from others living in poverty. For example, in most Asian countries, vegetable growers are among the poorest of the poor. Wholesalers and retailers eat up the profits of their labour. Even after good harvests, many cannot pay back their loans and sometimes suicides result. When these farmers try to improve their access to markets, send their young away for schooling, and otherwise attempt to improve their lot, they often are met with violence. Various pretexts are used to permit the use of threats, killings, torture and disappearances as a means to deny their aspirations. Often the police or armed forces are sent to intimidate and frighten people. Extraordinary laws may be introduced that suspend basic safeguards relating to arrest, detention and prosecution.
Intimidation and fear is usually more widespread in the countryside than in the cities. In urban areas, people have more means to protect themselves, through victim support groups, media coverage, and at least a modicum of legal and judicial support. The rural poor have none of these. This is no accident; it is intended that they lack such avenues for support, so that they remain in poverty. Therefore, any attempt to alleviate rural poverty must include a strategy for protection of those persons seeking to defend their rights. It should include groups engaged in a number of different activities:
- Groups solely dedicated to recording complaints and actively engaged in seeking redress when the police or other state agencies ‘or persons acting on their behalf’ kill, torture, kidnap or commit other acts of violence.
- Groups constantly exposing the violence and intimidation through the local and international media.
- Groups lobbying for legal and institutional reforms to the police and other state agencies responsible for the violence and intimidation. These groups need to operate in a sophisticated manner, with the help of legal and other experts, to receive the necessary attention and get the reforms carried through. Such lobbying can be carried internationally, such as through the various committees and special rapporteurs in the United Nations.
- Groups developing education programmes to accompany the above-mentioned activities, to encourage wider involvement. In this way, those heavily involved in the opening stages of such work gradually prepare people to take responsibility for the defence of their own rights.
In its own work, the Asian Human Rights Commission emphasises protection from torture, and concomitant police reforms. A widespread misbelief is that torture accompanies civil war, and if fighting stops, torture is minimised. In fact, torture is endemic in most parts of Asia, and in most cases is connected not with war but with social control of the rural poor. Torture is routinely used because state agencies deliberately fail to train police in modern methods of criminal investigation, monitor their behaviour via independent bodies and introduce community policing programmes or similar techniques. Police, particularly in rural areas, remain uneducated, unmotivated, and free from strict disciplinary control. As such, the police force constitutes the most effective tool for the spread of intimidation and fear that the majority of governments in Asia have at their disposal.
Therefore, all attempts to alleviate poverty and uplift rural people must be accompanied by strong efforts to eliminate torture and create disciplined government agencies that respect the rule of law. To do this, the four types of groups described above are essential. Poverty can be addressed only when the poor are themselves involved, however, they cannot become involved when subjected to threats of horrendous torture, murder and other methods used to keep them in a state of fear. Thus, poverty, impunity, participation and protection are interlinked.
