International community `all but failed' people of East Timor

The crisis in East Timor prompted UN human rights commissioner Mrs Mary Robinson to call a special session of the commission, only the fourth in 50 years, which is currently taking place in Geneva.

In a speech in London on Thursday, she said the international community had failed to vindicate the human rights of the Timorese people.

"All of the warning signs were there but the horrors still happened," she maintained. "East Timor was a test of the world's preparedness to translate fine-sounding promises about human rights into action, and it was a test we all but failed. For a time it seemed that the world would turn away altogether from the people of East Timor, turn away from the plain evidence of the brutality, killings and rapes. Action, when it came, was painfully slow; thousands paid for the slow response of the international community with their lives . . .

"It was the tide of public anger which stirred world leaders to intervene, however belatedly, on behalf of the East Timorese people. I was struck by the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, who addressed a protest meeting for East Timor. He said: `Everybody has felt the pity and the terror of the tragedy. But I think that we have also experienced something more revealing, which is a feeling of being called upon, a feeling of being in some way answerable'.

"That feeling `of being answerable' seems to me to go to the heart of the challenge we face in translating the principles of human rights into reality. Some people regard it as naive to believe in universal human rights; I believe, on the contrary, that the growth in the human rights movement is one of the most hopeful, optimistic developments of our time. To the often-repeated quote about human rights being `the major article of faith of a culture which fears it believes in nothing else', I would reply that if people believed in nothing else except universal human rights and put them into practice, the world would be a much better place."

The full text of Mrs Robinson's speech is on The Irish Times website

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