Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, pages 22, 87

Special Report

U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson Latest Casualty of Mideast Conflict

By Ian Williams

There have been many casualties of the Middle East conflict—and not just Arabs and Israelis. They include Swedish aristocrats like Count Folke Bernadotte, congressmen from Alabama like Earl Hilliard, and now a former president of Ireland. In June 1997 Mary Robinson resigned as Irish president to become the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights. This year, after heavy American pressure, her contract was not renewed. Ominously, she clears out her desk on Sept. 11. She will be replaced by Brazilian U.N. official Sergio Vieira de Mello, who has just returned from heading the U.N. mission in East Timor.

I asked Commissioner Robinson if she agreed that it was her stand on the Middle East that lost her the job. “Indeed,” she replied. “It’s ironic in a way, because the issue I’m most committed to is the integrity of the Human Rights agenda, and shaping it so it’s not politicized. I applied that faithfully to addressing the problems both in the occupied Palestinian Territory and in Israel, and I have mentally, emotionally and intellectually tried to be bound by it.

“It was very interesting to me that it is not so perceived on the Israeli side,” she added. “It may be because I’ve been over-appreciated on the Palestinian side. But I have unequivocally condemned suicide bombing, reiterated the need for human security in Israel, for political debate.”

The day before we spoke, the Quartet, meeting in New York, had compromised on calling for PA reforms rather than the outright ouster of Arafat. It was with a wry smile, then, that Robinson pointed out, “I took up the need for reform with the Palestinian Authority when I went there in November 2000. Then I was the one pressing the points about the Authority that are now becoming fashionable.

“They didn’t appreciate it,” she continued. “They said, ‘But we’ve got other problems,’ and I said, ‘No, we’ve been working from our office here in the territories, trying to have more transparency, strengthening the administration of justice, and we’re not making much progress.”

Even two years ago, she recalled, “It was very evident that the occupation is at the root of many of the human rights problems, and the intifada, which had started then, was only at the stage of stone-throwing and young people being killed. Since then, we have drive-by shootings and suicide bombing, which is, of course, appalling and cannot be condemned strongly enough, certainly not justified by any cause—but the Israeli responses are also excessive.”

It was statements like that which made Robinson “difficult to work with,” as the Bush administration said when seeking her removal. Confessed Robinson, “It worries me that in this great country [the U.S.] that’s not the perception: they don’t see the suffering of the Palestinian people; they don’t see the impact of collective punishment. They do immediately see and empathize—and rightly so—with the suffering of Israeli civilians who are killed, or injured, or just frightened...But I find it very disheartening that there is not more understanding here of the appalling suffering of the Palestinian population, nor appreciation that this is not going to lead to a secure future. It’s going to lead to greater hatred and desperation of further suicide bombings.”

Robinson acknowledged that the other factor that irked the U.S. was the Durban conference against racism, where, of course, once again the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the hot-button issue. “I urged and begged the U.S. and Israel to stay,” she recalled. “I told them that all the draft language, which was unacceptable, would be taken out—and it was. But once they left, there are those who refuse now to accept that any good came out of Durban. I’m not defensive about my record on the Middle East or the Durban conference. I think we achieved an extraordinary breakthrough in Durban, against all the odds.”

Robinson also claimed “some credit” for, what she accurately described as a “dramatic shift in the developing world’s attitude to human rights.”

“When I started back in September of 1997,” she explained, “I was quite taken aback by how many leaders of developing countries told me, ‘Don’t you know human rights is just a Western stick to beat us with? It is politicized, nothing to do with real concern about human rights.’

“There was an element of truth in that,” she admitted, “and so I found it necessary to find first of all the true agenda of human rights at the international level. That is to be strong in civil liberties, in the protection and promotion of civil and political rights, and strong in the protection and promotion of economic, social and cultural rights, and to fulfill the express vision in the mandate of the establishment of the High Commissioner’s office, which was to seek consensus on the right to development...

“That led to more linkage being made by leaders of developing countries between human rights and economic and social development. They began to realize that if you got your human rights right, you accelerated human development, economic development.”

Robinson sees the UNDP’s recent Arab Human Development Report (see story p. 44) as a sign of this: “a very valuable document had all the more credibility because its authors were Arab experts from within the region,” she pointed out.

The outgoing commissioner has regretted publicly that Sept. 11 has been used to “clamp down on Human Rights and freedom of expression,” citing “branding human rights defenders as terrorists: the harsh climate for asylum seekers and refugees. The worrying thing is that secure democracies such as the U.S. are not holding the standards properly. Just look at the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, even more so those who have been arrested under immigration laws with no access to lawyers and no information.”

As the coiner of the phrase “the cycle of impunity,” Robinson thinks the International Criminal Court “is an extraordinary step forward, a very important institution, a way of symbolizing we are going to end impunity for egregious Human Rights violations.”

On the other hand, she deplored the “the unsigning of the Statute by the United States,” pointing out that “what the U.S. has done is to create uncertainty…Now if other countries are under pressure on Human Rights instruments they’ve signed, they may say ‘Well the U.S. can unsign a treaty, then so can we.’”

Robinson is philosophical about losing her “day job.” Other people lose their lives for defending Human Rights,” she said. “I just risked being criticized in parliaments or the press. I came into this position to do a job, not try to keep a job. I got very wise advice from a friend of mine when I started: ‘Mary, remember if you get too popular in that job, it means that you’re not doing a good job.’

“So,” she concluded, “I didn’t actively seek to be unpopular, but I knew that to do the job well and bring out what is really the culture of Human Rights, you have to stand up to bullies, you’ve got to be prepared to criticize both developed and developing countries.”

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.