IT HAS now been five decades since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published, in a wave of post-war optimism. We now talk about human rights, we hold symposiums, conferences and workshops on human rights. We prepare reports on human rights. We have websites dedicated to human rights. We even have a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
We also have 840 million people who go hungry every day. We have 1 billion people who have no access to clean drinking water. So who are we trying to fool? Millions do not even have the most basic human right, the right to life. All we have, after 50 years, is lip service to human rights.
It is not difficult to measure the misery in which half of the planet struggle to survive. The statistics are there, supplied by international agencies who do little but gather information. So we know that 7 million babies die of malnutrition every year, that 100 million children live on the streets of the developing world, that 4 million children have died in conflict over the past decade, that 250,000 children are fighting as soldiers in the armies of the Third World. We can bore ourselves to death with statistics. We can reiterate our commitment to the Rights of the Child. We can announce the International Year of the Child. But while our most precious commodity, the children of the world, are still without food and security, we are only paying lip service to human rights.
Why, in God's name, can something not be done? The will is certainly there among the ordinary people of Ireland. Every day in the GOAL office, we see that will arriving in the form of carefully folded five pound notes, credit card donations, personal cheques made out for thousands of pounds. But even the greatest efforts of the Irish public can only serve as a thumb in the dam of Third World poverty. It is only at an international level that something meaningful and substantial can be done to make inroads into those terrible statistics of hunger, thirst and death. And at an international level, the will is noticeably and shamefully absent.
Sadly the international community is actively contributing to a worsening of the situation for the poorest of the poor. The western arms industry thrives on the sale of guns to dictators in the Third World who then turn them on their own people, or on the beleaguered people of neighbouring countries. War strips people of their livelihood, pushing a population to the very edge of survival. We have seen it time and time again, in Cambodia, in Somalia and now in Sudan.
The world economic system balances on the poverty of the southern hemisphere. The West trades with the Third World by taking their raw materials and converting them into profit. We encourage them to produce cash crops so that they can pay off their debts to us while their population starves. The people of the Third World are being devastated by war and by a grossly unfair economic system. And it is we in the West who are turning the screws.
When disaster strikes in the Third World, as it invariably does, two essentials are missing. There is no international logistical force to co-ordinate aid operations. Instead it is the Irish nun, or the small aid agency, which must try to throw itself between a whole population and wholesale starvation. Nor is there an international standing army to protect civilians and their livelihoods from the devastation of war. The onus is on the United States, who may or may not want to intervene. In Somalia they did. In Bosnia they did, in the end. In Sudan, nobody has. We should not be relying on one nation, no matter how powerful, to protect the civilian populations of the world. It is an unfair position to put the United States in - and it is a horrendous position to put an endangered population in.
Two concrete measures, the establishment of an international standing army and the creation of an international logistical force would do more to erode the terrible poverty of the Third World than 50 years of rhetoric about human rights. Instead of celebrating 50 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, let's start at the beginning again. A human being's life is precious. Let's protect it.