Democracy and human rights

Democracy

Democracy comes from two Greek words 'demos' meaning 'people and 'kratos' meaning 'power' i.e. rule of the people. In ancient Greece this had some real meaning for all free men, ancient 10,000 in all, who could ne city special flat piece abod called the Pynx, outside the city of Athens to discust Greece except that lands and to vote on them the women and slaves cus made up the majority of the population, were not allowe Roman democracy was similar to that of the Greeks limited it to native citizens while the Gred citizenship and voting rigthough selected non- grantans. The Roman government though was in some Ways like our own. There was a parliament (the Senatellof wayut 600 nobles chosen for life, but the country was run by two consuls who were elected for one year by all the free men. There were lesser elected officials to do the day-to-day running of such things as markets, streets, law and order, etc.

When Pakistan became independent, its leaders were determined to make it a democratic country. But for most of them democracy meant the system in the West. It should be noted that in England, this had taken over 700 years to emerge. The religious differences (Catholic and Protestant) had to be solved, which was done in stages over two to three centuries, in Europe and the UK: the ultimate authority of the ruler, monarch, or parliament was controlled, as by the civil war in the UK (1648-60) and finally the power of the monarch and the nobles was also restricted (through revolution in France, 1789-93). The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century had made many ordinary people very rich and powerful, but it was World War I that destroyed much of the power of the nobles: in the trenches, an aristocratic officer was killed as easily by an enemy bullet as the humblest worker. This had a great levelling effect.

Thus, democracy slowly evolved over the centuries, Pakistan has had to introduce it in much less time so it is not surprising that it has been a great problem.

Some of the aspects of democracy

Government chosen by the people through voting Equal rights for everyone Rule of law and order The same justice for everyone The judiciary (judges) to be separate from the executive (government) Freedom of speech, religion, and meeting

Some of the conditions for democracy to flourish

Stability:the country should be free from deep and bitter divisions ethnic, racial, religious, or other ones. People should respect others' beliefs and attitudes.

The country should be as free as possible from deep economic differences If there are people who are desperately poor and others extremely rich, there is always the danger of trouble.

The people should have at least a minimum of education-reading and numbers.

People should be responsible and be prepared to exercise the democratic rights, such as voting in elections.

Great humanitarians

The world today is a much fairer and more just place than it was in the are still areas of injustice, prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination. whose lives work is From time to time there appear great people to change all of th of these and to bring justice to all people. A few of the human rights leaders of the 20th-lut centuries are discussed below .

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Mandela was a black African lawyer, politician, and statesman who brought independence to the black people of South Africa. After World War I the government of South Africa was in the hands After white Boers, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, who set abthe making the black people, who outnumbered them four to one little more than slaves.

After World War II, the pressure intensified with the introduction of the policy of apartheid apartness, or separate developmention of were passed forcing black people to live in settlements outside the white towns. The black people had to carry a special pass otherwise they were arrested and banished to the poor tribal lands, or in many cases, to work as slaves for the white farmers. Black people were not allowed to use the same buses, trains, or cafes as the whites; their schools were pathetic without books and equipment, with one poorly-trained teacher for every 80 pupils, they were banned from all skilled work, and in the places where they were doing the same jobs as whites, they were paid much less .

Not much could be done politically: four million whites elected 165 white MPS, while thirteen million blacks could choose only three (white) MPS to represent them and even these were abolished in 1959. The black people under Mandela and a few others formed a political party, the African National Congress (INC), but this was almost immediately banned. To be a member meant imprisonment, Mandela and his companions were charged with treason in 1956, but found not guilty five years later. In 1962 Mandela made a secret trip to Algeria and then to London; on his return he was arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the prison on Robben Island but he managed, even from his cell, to exert a great influence on the black freedom movement.

In 1976, the Boer government ordered all black schools to teach Afrikaans, the South African Dutch language. This sparked rebellions, the most serious in Soweto where police killed several hundred black people.

Presidents changed, each more extreme than the previous one. The United Nations passed many resolutions that were ignored, adding to the tension in the country. In 1989, a more liberal president was elected F. W. de Klerk. He immediately lifted the ban on the ANC and released Mandela and many other political prisoners. He repealed the last of the apartheid laws (1992), and organized elections for 1994, with blacks able to vote in members of parliament. The result was as expected: the ANC won with a massive majority.

Mandela was elected president, with de Klerk as vice president. Now began Mandela's greatest hour: after half a century of violent oppression and cruelty, one might have expected revenge by the black people, but Mandela, with sheer force of personality and supported by people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, made the transfer of power completely peaceful. There were immense problems of trying to right the previous fifty years of wrong, but slowly conditions improved. Things have still a long way to go, but life is immeasurably better in South Africa.

Nelson Mandela resigned as president in 1999, but his influence throughout Africa and the world, was as strong as ever. He was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki, who resigned in 2008 after controversies, and the current president, since 2009, is Jacob Zuma Mandela continued to support the cause of the downtrodden and the poor. He died on 5 December 2013 and was widely mourned across the world.

Dr Ruth Pfau (1929-2017)

Dr Ruth Pay is a well-known name across Pakistan. This remarkable German lady became famous for her s Pakistanete and untiring effort Brau stoppend cure people suffer brave, sincere, in 1960, Dr Ruth Pets Coped in Pakistan on her ering from lepo, but her visit to the Lepers Colony in Karachi changed ay further sast decided to stay on to treat as well as rehabilitate thoses mind she on this disease. Her service in this field attracted ostuneeringnd doctors like Dr Zarina Fazelbhoy and Dr I K Gill.

Dr Pfau set up and managed the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre in Karachi in 1962. She travelled all over pakistan for diagnosis and treatment of leprosy. Proper records of the patients were kept, which helped in setting up the National Programme for Eradication of Leprosy in Pakistan. She also went to Afghanistan from where leprosy patients, rejected by their families, came for treatment. In 1988, the Pakistan Government awarded Pakistani citizenship to Dr Pfau in recognition of her services. In 1996, the World Health Organization declared Pakistan a leprosy-free country, the first in Asia. Besides this, Dr Pfau also did a lot of humanitarian work and was awarded the Hilal-e-Pakistan, Hilal-e-Imtiaz, Sitara-e-Quaid-e-Azam, Sitara-e- Pakistan, the Ramon Magsaysay Award (Philippines) and the Staufer Medal (Germany) for her services to humanity.

Dr Ruth Pfau died in Karachi on 10 August 2017, at the age of 88, and was given a state funeral attended by the President of Pakistan, the Armed Forces' heads, ambassadors, and a huge number of her patients and supporters. The Civil Hospital in Karachi has been renamed Dr Ruth Pfau Hospital in her memory.

Dr Adib Rizvi (1938-)

The Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, SIUT, is an eight- storey, 1500-bed hospital, located in the heart of Karachi-the result of one man's single-minded effort to provide treatment for those who cannot afford it otherwise, and the man is Dr Adib Rizvi, His philosophy is that every human being has the right to healthcare and a dignified life. On completion of his education in medicine, in Pakistan and then the UK, Dr Adib Rizvi returned to Pakistan and, in 1970, set up clinic in an eight-bed ward in the Civil Hospital (now renamed after late Dr Ruth Pfau) in Karachi. Poor patients from the city as well as the interior received free treatment, including surgery. Gradually, the facility grew clinically and spatially, and in 1974 became an institute. In 2005, the SIUT Charitable Trust was created; it is funded partly by the government but largely by donations. To date. 3600 kidney transplants and hundreds of thousands of dialysis sessions have been performed at SIUT, at no cost to the patients.

The sing to night, supported by his eple by all agested and well. moned team; his patients include people of adlages and all social traine In order to extend SIUT's services, Dr Adib Rizvi set up nine centres in Karachi and one in Sukkur and recently inaugurated SIUT branch in Larkana. Dr. Adib Rizvi's services to humanity nave been recognized internationally. In 1998, he was given the Ramon Magsaysay Award (Philippines); in 2015, he received the Lifetime American doctors, and in 2016 from the American College of Surgeons, USA. He is certainly a role model for his profession as well as all others.

Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938)

Ataturk was a soldier, nationalist, and statesman who created, the modern Turkey from the remains of the old Ottoman Empire, He was born in Greece, the son of a minor official, and went to military academies (1899-1905). He graduated as a captain, but as he had sympathies with the Young Turks (a group which wanted to reform the old crumbling Turkish Empire he was sent to the distant outpost of Syria. He fought against the Italians invading Libya, but his major military triumph was the defeat of the British, French, and Australian forces at Gallipoli in World War I in 1915. The Western Allies thought they could land on the beaches of Gallipoli and strike at the heart of Germany's ally, Turkey.

In 1919 Greece invaded the defeated Turkey. As the Turkish government signed away parts of their country, Ataturk set up a rival provisional government in the village of Ankara in the north. He then reorganized the army, and attacked and defeated the invading Greeks. The old sultanate was, crumbling, and in 1922 Ataturk abolished it, setting up a republic( He was elected president in 1923, and now began the enormous task of turning a backward country, in many ways still in the Middle Ages, into a modern western state.

He was faced by many people in power who looked back at the old comfortable ways, but Ataturk realised that he must be ruthless in his efforts to modernize Turkey. He abolished the religious power of the sultanate, declaring Turkey a secular state, making religious schools and courts illegal. He banned the wearing of the fez-the red brimless hat that was characteristic of the country-and encouraged the wearing of western style dress for both men and women. Compulsory head covering for women was abolished, and the western calendar introduced to replace the complicated one already in use . He saw that education was the keystone of his reforms, and made schooling compulsory, at the same time replacing the Arabic script that was in use with the Latin alphabet (the same as used in this book). Kemal Ataturk, important though he was as president, himself went from village to village with chalk, teaching the people.

He abolished Islamic law, and substituted codes based on those in Europe: for civil law marriage, wills, and family business) he used Swiss law; for criminal law he used an Italian model, and for commercial law (business, contracts, etc.) he copied the German code. Both marriage and divorce became civil law. He was particularly interested in the position of women, which had been under the sultanate, vote.

Although Ataturk ruled autocratically (i.e. by himself) his government was an alliance of a number of parties. He can be compared to M. A. Jinnah, as a person weby sheer strength of will and unbelievable effort, created on who by modern state.

Martin Luther King (1929-68)

He was a black Baptist minister who became the leader of the civil rights movement to fight for justice for coloured people in the USA. Until the 1960s, the black people in many states of the US, especially in the south, were rigidly segregated: they were not allowed to go to the same restaurants, shops, and schools as the white people. They had separate buses and railway coaches, or at least separate parts of these. They could not use the same park benches or drinking fountains as whites. The black schools were overcrowded and badly equipped. In the all-white run courts, black people were more severely treated than whites.

King's aim was to abolish all forms of discrimination. On a visit to India, he was strongly influenced by the peaceful protests of Gandhi, and determined that his campaign would be the same. In 1953 the US government banned segregation in education, but many cities tried to find ways round this. The first black student to go to college, for example in one town, had to be accompanied by a troop of soldiers to protect him. It was a small step, but still segregation continued in many ways. In 1955 in the city of Montgomery, Alabama-a centre of racism-two black women, in separate incidents, refused but were forced to give up their seats in desegregated buses so that a white person could sit down. There after a trial lasting over a year, was eventually acquitted. King now acquired nationwide fame.

In 1963 he led a peaceful protest march in Birmingham, Alabama which was broken up by police with dogs and fire hoses . King was again imprisoned, but released after his passionate Letter from Birmingham Jail which called for all segregation to be ended The Civil Rights Movement swept across the country, and later in 1963 he led a march of a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Here he made his famous I have a dream... speech, in which he set out what he hoped would happen in the USA.

In 1964, Dr King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In April 1968 he was assassinated by a white ex-convict while making a speech in Memphis, Tennessee. The same year, largely due to his efforts, a major civil rights bill was passed by the federal government giving at least in theory, equal rights to all people.

Yasser Arafat (1929-2004)

Yasser Arafat's name is synonymous with Palestine. Guerrilla leader, politician, and statesman, he struggled for much of his life to set up an independent Palestinian state and, in turn, used confrontation, peace, and diplomacy to try to achieve his goal.

He trained in Cairo as an engineer and then worked in Kuwait, where in 1958 he created Al-Fatah, an underground movement. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), comprising various resistance groups, was set up in 1964 by the Arab League; however, after the Six Days War in 1967, Arafat's Al-Fatah emerged as the most organized group and he was elected its chairman, a post he kept until his death. In 1988 Arafat spoke at the United Nations to renounce terrorism, saying that peace and security were the way forward for the Palestinian people. In 1993 Arafat and Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, signed the Oslo Peace Accord, placing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under Palestinian rule-the beginning of the Palestinian state. In July 1994, Arafat set foot on Palestinian soil for the first time in 26 years. In December 1994, Arafat and Rabin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. From December 2001, Arafat stayed in Ramallah, his headquarters, under virtual arrest. In October 2004 he was taken seriously ill and was flown to a military hospital in Paris. But it was too late: he died on 11 November 2004-he dic not live to see his struggle bear fruit.

Today, the humanitarian issues are so complex and vast that it increasingly difficult for a single person to do much about them though there are exceptions such as Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. Because the problems are so great, they have been largely taken over by agencies of the United Nations and a few international organizations.

The main United Nations agencies concerned with humanitarian issues, apart from UNICEF, UNESCO, FAO, and WHO, are

United Nations Institute for the Advancement of Women (UNIFEM) United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Red Crescent and Red Cross

The Red Cross was founded in the mid-19th century to negotiate between warring countries and to develop cooperation in providing relief to victims of war and natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. They are active in caring for refugees, whether created by war, natural disasters, or political upheavals. The Red Cross Crescent are very concerned with the treatment of prisoners of war and detainees to ensure that they get humane treatment.

Medicines and Frontieres

This is a voluntary association of international doctors, nurses, and other medical staff who travel wherever there is war or natural disaster, such as epidemics or earthquakes, to do what they can to help the sick or wounded.

Charity organizations

There are many charity organizations such as OXFAM, other non- governmental organizations (NGOs), and some groups belonging to religious bodies which try to help solve humanitarian problems, especially with diseases and natural disasters such as droughts or floods which destroy agriculture. They are not usually rich enough to provide long-term solutions, but can offer temporary help with shelter in tents, food, and some health care.