Dr Stephen Hopgood, Are there any circumstances where you would condone violence being used to restore human rights - I'm thinking here about the violence being used by organisations such as the PKK and the Tamil Tigers?
Asked by bonzo1 on Nov 16 2007 1:12:14 PM and supported by 21 members
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The short answer to that I think is yes, but I'm going to make a distinction between what we might call political rights and human rights.
We can all think of circumstances under which we think that violence is justified, unless we are thoroughgoing pacifists. And many pacifists have famously recanted at some point when they realised the horrors that we're facing.
The argument that the Tamil Tigers and the PKK would both make at some level is that this is self-defence for them as an ethnic or religious group. What they’re after, both of those organisations, is a state. Within a state they think that they can defend themselves. That state can then guarantee political rights for its citizens.
So what they would argue, undoubtedly, is - once we've got a state rights really begin to matter because rights are then enforceable, and there is a legal recourse if those rights are trampled upon. Human rights that exist in a more rhetorical realm don't do any good for the Tamil Tigers when they're being carpet-bombed or the PKK when they're being attacked by the Turks.
There are the words restore human rights in the question, I think what they would argue is in order to get anything approximating rights you need a mechanism of self defence, you need a state, and when you are trying to fight for that state against an existing state which is already heavily armed, there is no alternative.
What if we replace PKK with Nelson Mandela and the ANC? At some point Nelson Mandela made a very conscious decision that he and the ANC would have to resort to armed violence. This in a sense is a ‘cuddlier’ example of the use of violence to restore human rights If you imagine that we didn't condone violence in the ANC case we would basically have an endless continuation of apartheid. So I think a blanket ban on violence, really, risks freezing a form of injustice.