Measuring civilization.

• Author: Lattimer, Mark
• Position: Essay - Minority rights - Related article: United Nations Year for Cultural Heritage symbol

Gandhi famously remarked that the way in which we treat minorities is the measure of civilization in a society. In differing ways, we have all failed Gandhi's test. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities; yet, for all its fine words, the last decade has been marked by ethnic killings in every continent. Minorities have been the deliberate targets of campaigns of slaughter.

The events of September 11 have highlighted the global security threat posed by fragmented States and at the same time have led to the danger of renewed religious intolerance and the repression of Muslim minorities. But despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the position of minorities is now indelibly associated with conflict in the world, many politicians or policy makers are still reluctant to draw the necessary connection between minority rights and conflict prevention.

To understand this link, we need to go behind the immediate causes of war and look at the conditions that make war possible, just as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has done with the other great human scourge--famine. Sen showed that the best insurance against famine was a democratic political system, with politicians reliant on popular support and monitored by a free press. For example, in contrast to the great famine in Bengal, India in 1943, which occurred during an economic boom, there has never been a major famine in that country since its independence in 1947. And just as the support and encouragement of democracy is a keystone in the fight against famine, so too does minority rights constitute a vital but often overlooked tool in the elusive search for peace.

Most modern wars take the form of internal conflicts and are fought not on battlefields but across the lands and homes of the civilian population. Securing the support of the local population, often by coercion, becomes a key aim of the parties to the conflict, whether they are State security forces or armed opposition groups. In this situation, members of minority communities are the first to have their loyalty called into question by the State or politicians from the majority community. Minority leaders seeking peaceful solutions are placed in an impossible situation as State security measures tighten, violations of minority rights rise, and a growing climate of fear makes community members see armed...