WHILE Mary Robinson has been praised internationally as President of Ireland, it can be confidently predicted that she would be internationally reviled if she were to be equally effective as UN Human Rights Commissioner.
Where major economic and political interests are at stake, almost every state will employ any sophistry to justify the infringement of human rights.
As Salman Rushdie wrote recently in a reference to the Irish EU presidency: "EU leaders pay lip service to the great European ideals - free expression, human rights, the Enlightenment, the right to dissent, the importance of the separation of church and state.
"But when these ideals come up against the powerful banalities of what is called `reality' - trade, money, guns, power - then it's freedom that takes a dive. When it's Danish feta cheese or Irish halal beef against the European Convention on Human Rights, don't expect free expression to win."
The examples are legion in Europe and elsewhere. Consider the recent refusal of such countries as Germany and France to endorse EU censure of China's human rights record because of commercial considerations. Consider the US's dismissal of the International Court's condemnation of its placement of mines in Nicaraguan territorial waters; the Scott report's findings on the British government's involvement in arms sales to Iraq in defiance of its own sanctions; Australia's refusal to condemn outright the illegal Indonesian invasion of East Timor; the Chinese government's illegal invasion and occupation of Tibet, etc.
ONE of the most pertinent and revealing examples of the difference between international rhetoric and reality is the present situation in Bosnia. It is remarkable how many of those who have worked for human rights in Bosnia on behalf of the international community have despaired of any effective action.
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, former Prime Minister of Poland and Special Rapporteur to the European Commission on Human Rights, resigned after the massacre of Srebrenica in disgust at the failure to protect the innocent in Bosnia. He said: "When one is confronted with the lack of consistency and courage displayed by the international community and its leaders ... [one] cannot continue to participate in the pretence of the protection of human rights."
Similarly, Judge Goldstone, former chief prosecutor for the international Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal, left office almost totally disillusioned with western leaders' failure to support the tribunal. He said "a great injustice" had been done to the victims of genocide in Bosnia.
Most recently Manfred Nowak, former chairman of the UN working group on enforced disappearances, resigned. "My resignation," he wrote, "is based on the experience that there is not sufficient political will to establish the fate of the missing by all possible means."
Louise Arbour, the current chief prosecutor in The Hague for both the Yugoslav and Rwandan war crimes tribunals, has also warned of the consequences of fragile support for the tribunals.
It is worth recalling that the Bosnian government agreed to the painful partition of its country, and to other major sacrifices, on the promise that war criminals would be arrested and that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons would be allowed to return to their homes. They were given to understand that the US and the EU would support these measures. The reality is that not a single indicted war criminal has been arrested by Ifor forces. Nor has there been any military support for refugees wishing to return home.
FOR over three years the Bosnian people felt abandoned and betrayed by the West while genocide and ethnic cleansing proceeded. They hoped that the Dayton Agreement would be the beginning of a secure peace, with the punishment of those responsible for war crimes. The failure to implement Dayton has reached the point where President Clinton announced recently that effectively Ifor troops will not arrest war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal.
The UN's material commitment to the enforcement of peace in Bosnia is perhaps the largest investment ever in international peacekeeping. With thousands of Ifor troops still there and given the failure to implement fundamental aspects of the Dayton Agreement, it must be asked what its long term value represents.
As Marshall Freeman Harris, executive director of the Balkan Institute in Washington, has written: "The Dayton Accords were a triumph of American and European policy and of Serbian and Croatian intimidation. Serbian forces retained control of over half of Bosnia, and Bosnian Croat separatists were left with another quarter of the country. The Clinton administration may have stopped the fighting, but ethnic supremacists were allowed to continue the war by other means."
It in unimaginable that the Bosnian people will accept permanent ethnic cleansing and the loss of so much of their country. It may be asked what future historians will say about the West's failure to confront genocide in Bosnia and its subsequent failure to implement the Dayton Agreement, which gave some minimal hope of avoiding a renewal of the war.
The division that emerged among European states on the condemnation of human rights in China shows the complexity of political responses to this issue. Clearly individual states have to weigh up many factors in deciding where they stand and what they say if good relations are to be maintained.
But human rights abuses on the scale that have occurred in Bosnia, Rwanda, Tibet, Burma and East Timor, for example, are such that normal considerations of trade and diplomatic friendship must be set aside.
In her possible future role as UN Commissioner for Human Rights, President Robinson will be freed from her present diplomatic constraints and concerns never to embarrass the Irish Government. Her greatest contribution and highest responsibility will be to speak the full truth about human rights abuses, regardless of the country or institution involved.
The consequences of such direct and honest speech may well be as frustrating as was the experience of Tadeusz Mazowiecki when he chose to resign from his human rights portfolio in Bosnia. But we need only recall Mary Robinson's persistence in advocating rights in Ireland, despite a measure of hostility, to predict that she will not quit her possible post because of international criticism.
On her recent visit to Sweden, the President said the challenge was "to bring the full richness of European civilisation in all its diversity, yet bound together by fundamental democratic values, to bear on our political order." The practical construction of such a civilised order will always attract short term unpopularity. But it is an end which transcends considerations of personal or political popularity and will in time earn its appropriate recognition.
