Political Freedom
Partecipazione Politica e Diritti dell’infanzia
Born on October 4, 1942, Kek Galabru received her medical degree in France in 1968. She practiced medicine and conducted research in Phnom Penh from 1968 to 1971, and continued her work in Canada, Brazil, and Angola. In 1987– 88 Galabru played a key role in opening negotiations between Hun Sen, president of the Cambodian Council of Ministers, and Prince Sihanouk of the opposition. That led to peace accords ending the civil war in 1991, and elections held under the auspices of the United Nations. Galabru founded the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) during the United Nations transition period. LICADHO promotes human rights, with a special emphasis on women’s and children’s rights, monitors violations, and disseminates educational information about rights. During the 1993 elections, LICADHO’s 159 staff members taught voting procedures to 16,000 people, trained 775 election observers, and produced and distributed one million voting leaflets. Since then, LICADHO has remained at the forefront of human rights protection efforts in Cambodia by monitoring abuses and providing medical care, legal aid, and advocacy to victims. LICADHO offers direct assistance to victims of human rights violations, especially torture victims, children and women from its headquarters in Phnom Penh and its twelve provincial offices. In 2005, Galabru was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize project.
I Laogai
Brought up as one of eight children of a Shanghai banker, Harry Wu attended a Jesuit school before enrolling in Beijing College of Geology in the late 1950s. In the throes of a Communist purge, his university was given a quota of counterrevolutionary elements, and relegated Wu to nineteen years in the Chinese gulag, known as the laogai. There, he survived physical and psychological torture, living for a time on only ground-up corn husks. In his autobiography Bitter Winds, he describes chasing rats through the fields in order to steal the grains in their nests, or eating snakes. After his release, Wu accepted a position as an unpaid visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving in the United States in 1985 with forty dollars. After ten days of pursuing research by day and sleeping on a park bench by night, he landed a job on the graveyard shift at a doughnut shop where he ate three meals a day and had a place to stay at night. (To date, he cannot touch a doughnut.) Wu returned, or tried to return, to China a total of five times. While there, twice in 1991 and once in 1994, Wu documented conditions in prisons and labor camps for Sixty Minutes and other news programs, and was placed on China’s most wanted list for his exposés. In 1995, on his fifth trip, he was caught. While Wu spent sixty-six days in detention, awaiting news of his fate, a worldwide campaign for his release was launched, including demands that Hillary Clinton boycott the Beijing Summit of Women. China released him, and his return to U.S. soil was celebrated across the country.
Wu frequently testifies on Capitol Hill about the latest abuses he has uncovered—the for-profit selling of executed prisoners’ organs by Chinese officials, the illegal export of prison labor products (such as diesel engines and Chicago Bulls apparel), the frequency of public executions, the unfair restrictions on reproductive rights and their appalling enforcement procedures. The Laogai Research Foundation, which Wu founded and directs, estimates there have been fifty million people incarcerated in the laogai since 1950, and that there are eight million people in forced labor today. In 2004 Harry Wu took part in Speak Truth to Power activities in Rome, Italy. In November 2008, Wu opened the Laogai Museum in Washington D.C., the first museum in the world to exclusively deal with human rights in China. Harry Wu’s self-proclaimed goal is to put the word laogai in every dictionary in the world, and to that end, works eighteen-hour days criss-crossing the country and the globe speaking with student groups and heads of state to make this present-day horror become a past memory.
Equality and Compromise in South Africa
In South Africa, from 1948 until 1994, there was a system of legal racial segregation known as apartheid. Under apartheid, laws stripped black people and other minorities of their rights and dignity. However, in 1994, through the efforts of a reform-minded President Frederik De Klerk and the ANC leader Nelson Mandela they brought an end to apartheid.
De Klerk‘s political career began in 1969, when he was elected to the House of Assembly, one of the houses of Parliament. He quickly moved up in the National Party where he was appointed head of several ministerial divisions including: mines and energy affairs, internal affairs, national education and planning. During this time in his career, de Klerk earned a reputation for supporting segregated universities and was not known to advocate reform.
In February 1989 he was elected head of the National Party. Only seven months later, after president P.W. Botha stepped down due to a stroke, de Klerk became South Africa’s new President. As President, de Klerk committed himself to the reform of the apartheid system. He entered into talks with representatives from four official racial groups (white, black, colored and Indian) to negotiate a post-apartheid constitution. De Klerk ordered the release of political prisoners including anti-apartheid activist and future South African President Nelson Mandela and lifted the ban on political groups such as the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.
In 1991 de Klerk’s efforts culminated in the government’s repeal of the apartheid legislation, which was strongly supported by white voters. De Klerk, Nelson Mandela and several other representatives drafted a new constitution which led to multi-racial national elections resulting in the victory of the ANC and Mandela. In 1993, de Klerk received the Nobel Peace Prize along with Nelson Mandela for their contributions to the establishment of nonracial democracy in South Africa and ending apartheid.
Solidarity
Lech Walesa began his career in Poland’s Gdansk shipyards where his activism and charisma helped push his country to semi-free Parliamentary elections in which he was elected President.
Walesa co-founded Solidarity, the Soviet Bloc’s first independent trade union. He became a symbol of democracy and is widely recognized for leading Poland out of Communism. His actions are viewed as the crucial first step in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Walesa spent his early life as a mechanic and then in the Polish military. When he resigned from the military, Walesa was hired as an electrician at Gdansk shipyards. Troubled by the poor treatment of his fellow workers, he became involved in trade-union activism and quickly rose to prominence after organizing a strike in 1970. His activism garnered the attention of the Polish Government which soon placed him under surveillance. In 1976, he was fired from his position after multiple arrests. Walesa then emerged as a leader of the growing movement calling for better working conditions and the right to free association. In 1980, Walesa played an instrumental role in negotiations of the Gdansk Agreement between the Polish Government and striking workers, an agreement that culminated in the creation of Solidarity.
After the government imposed martial law and outlawed Solidarity, Walesa and his fellow activists were arrested and detained. Upon his release he returned to the docks as an electrician and continued his activism. The leading underground weekly paper featured his motto, “Solidarity will not be divided or destroyed”. His continued dedication led to the 1989 Round Table Agreement which resulted in a Solidarity-led government in which Lech Walesa was elected as President of Poland.
Although his presidency lasted only one term, his administration oversaw the transformation of Poland to a free market economy. After Walesa left office, the Polish economy was among the healthiest in central and eastern Europe. Walesa remains a symbol of hope and has inspired many to pursue similar aspirations of rights and freedoms throughout the world. In 1983, Lech Walesa received the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to human rights and for playing a vital role in shaping Solidarity in his country.
Free Expression, Free Elections, and Democratic Reforms
Born to Russian peasants in 1931, Mikhail Gorbachev quickly ascended the ladder of power in the Soviet Union. In his youth, Gorbachev joined the Komsomol or “Youth Communist League” and drove a combine harvester at a state-run farm in his hometown. Local party officials recognized his promise and sent him to law school at Moscow State University. At university, Gorbachev was an active Communist Party member and, by 1970, first secretary of the regional party committee. Only ten years later, Gorbachev had risen to the youngest full member of the Politburo, which was the highest executive committee in the Soviet Union.
In 1985, after two general secretaries of the Politburo died within a year of each other, the Party was looking for younger leadership. On March 11, 1985, the Politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After his election, Gorbachev set about installing bold reforms. Domestically, he pushed the Soviet bureaucracy to be more efficient, to increase worker production and to rapidly modernize. When his reforms yielded few results, Gorbachev instituted more far-reaching reforms including glasnost, or “openness,” to encourage free expression and information, and perestroika, or “restructuring,” that encouraged democratic processes and free-market ideas to take hold in Soviet economic and political life. He also worked for warmer relations and new trade partners abroad.
In 1987, he and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed an agreement calling for both sides to destroy all of their intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles. In 1989, he openly supported reformist groups in Eastern European Soviet-bloc countries and informed their communist leaders that in the event of a revolution, he would not intervene. As a result, reformist groups overthrew the communist regimes and Gorbachev began withdrawing Soviet troops. By the summer of 1990, he even agreed to a reunification of East and West Germany. As power quickly shifted to new political parties, Gorbachev dismantled large swaths of the political structure throughout the Soviet Union. On December 25, 1991, the day he resigned, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the peace process.
Political Participation
Ethel Kennedy was born into a large Catholic family in Chicago in 1928. A bright and active young woman, Ethel grew up in Connecticut and married Robert F. Kennedy in 1950. Ethel and Bobby would share a passion for politics, service to their country, and social justice that they would pass on to their eleven children. As the wife of a rising political star, Ethel was often at the forefront of many pivotal events in the mid-20th century such as the McCarthy hearings, the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the groundbreaking political elections of the 1960’s, and the battle for labor rights. During this time, she encouraged her children to understand the historical importance of the times and be actively involved in improving the lives of others.
In 1968, while running for president of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Ethel would make it her life’s work to pursue their shared vision, and raise their eleven children to value the gift of a contributory life. In honor of her husband, Ethel, along with friends and family, created the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights to ensure his spirit would live on through supporting individuals, alliances, and organizations dedicated to improving human rights around the world. The Center bolsters the efficacy of human rights defenders, and empowers students worldwide through their human rights education program Speak Truth To Power. The RFK Center also recognizes the work of activists, authors, journalists, and students who have stood up against oppression.
As Ethel became a political force in her own right, she personally tackled human rights issues both at home and abroad. She has marched with Cesar Chavez, sat with Native Americans at Alcatraz, boycotted fast food businesses with the Immokolee Workers, demonstrated outside the South African and Chinese embassies, joined the Global March for Children, pulled tires out of the Anacostia River, trekked up mountainous terrain in Mexico to visit unjustly convicted prisoners, traveled to Haiti to see the effects of the US blocking loans, visited Apartheid era South Africa, ( and 40 years later) , crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge with John Lewis, confronted dictator Arap Moi in Nairobi, filled a 757 with relief supplies for African countries, visited orphanages in Angola and raised millions of dollars for human rights work around the globe.
Ethel continues to be politically and social active and loves spending time with her family which includes 37 grandchildren and one great-grand child. Directed by her daughter Rory, the HBO documentary “Ethel” shares her story, and is an educational tool to help students appreciate the life and times in which she lived.
