Since tomorrow is my last day of volunteering for Amnesty International Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival, I thought I would share my experience in the hope that more people will be encouraged to stand up for human rights and get involved in the Protect the Human initiative. For those of you who feel that a) we should solve the problem of poverty before we care about human political rights; b) human rights is a boring subject; or c) one should not care about anything that is happening outside their city/region or, at most, country; you can still read this piece and see if you are in the majority. Same for you, passionate-yet-inexperienced human rights defender (like me): you assume that everyone cares about human rights and their abuses. Maybe you should also read on and check….
Volunteering for Amnesty is like no other experience I ever had and that is NOT because I haven’t had any interesting stuff happen in my life. It’s amazing because you get to be right in the center of action and not sitting in an office making coffee, photocopying, and answering the phone while being convinced that you are a ‘valuable member of the company which takes interns very seriously’. Yeah, right. Last time I was an intern I spent most of the time begging for something to do and the most I got was the responsibility to google some guy’s name.
There is nothing like this at Amnesty: after a short introductory meeting, we were put in pairs and given an amnesty T-shirt, a camera, a PDA, a placard and a shoulder bag containing lots of leaflets about the various events organized by Amnesty at the Festival. We headed off straight to the Royal Mile and started asking people if they would like to ‘take part in an Amnesty International campaign’ for Dr. Binayak Sen, a medical doctor and human rights defender from India, facing a trial on politically-motivated charges.
A noble cause, indeed, a reputable organization behind it and, a very important thing, a campaign that does not ask for money but for people to take pictures with the placard saying ‘I Demand Justice for Binayak Sen’ and/or sign a postcard. One would think these are the best ingredients to get all the happy festival-goers to support us. Well yes, this is what I thought until I noticed how upon seeing the placard, people were suddenly switching to the other side of the pavement, carefully turning their looks if our glances happened to cross or, would you believe it, shouting that: ‘whoever this is, he should have been hanged!’. Others were ‘milder’, claiming that ‘they cannot support anybody they don’t know personally’ (I wonder how they vote then! I know this is a good come-back line, I just came up with it a few seconds after the old lady who told me this had left!!!). Or, alternatively, I was told that there are so many people who are subjected to human rights violations and since we cannot help all of them we should not bother with individual cases.
Rosy picture, right? I was really getting disappointed. It’s not that I am not used to people contradicting my ideas- this, after all is some sort of a ‘national sport’ in academia- but I never thought that people could be so rude or would not want to be bothered to take part in the campaign. And then – you guessed it- the great moment came when I realized that standing under the Scottish rain giving out leaflets and trying to grab people’s attention is worth it. We got so many people willing to take pictures, happy to learn more about what we were doing and who Binayak Sen was and smiling at us, saying that we should ‘keep up the good work’ and that we are ‘doing a great job: not many people are willing to stand up for causes these days’. Every good word meant so much to us, the volunteers. Do not get me wrong, I am willing to accept that people may have a different point of view: but it would be good if they at least are willing to listen to mine or simply say ‘no, thanks’ rather than avoid me.
So, what do I make out of all this? Well there is some bitterness in my mouth but I haven’t lost my faith in human beings being able to show compassion. Do the latter constitute a majority? I don’t know. Even if they do not right now, I believe that it is worth the effort to keep fighting.
Finally, a big thank you to all the Amnesty people at the Scottish office who made all this happen and, of course, to the Festival volunteers who had to put up with me for 3 weeks 
August 28, 2009 at 2:50 am |
The more publicity the better! Shaming works in the anarchical world, so it should work in other settings too:)