Theatre

When free speech and foreign journalists are banned, who makes sure stories are heard? The world has changed a lot in the 30 years that the campaigning NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been around. Back in 1978, East-West détente had opened up the first chinks in the Iron Curtain.

Helsinki Watch (as it was then called) was founded to monitor the eastern bloc’s implementation of the Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviet Union signed up to human rights assurances in exchange for recognition of its borders. These days, monitoring what goes on in Russia is no longer such a challenge, and HRW has gone global, scrutinising everything from citizenship tests in the Netherlands to US incarceration of juveniles, to government repression in Afghanistan. Its purpose is to expose human rights abuses wherever they occur and – in countries such as Zimbabwe, where foreign journalists are banned – to provide the world with binoculars. Feature continues

Antony Sher is the co-patron of ‘Cries from the Heart’, a forthcoming evening of words and music at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, presented by HRW, which aims to raise awareness of the organisation’s work while giving a voice to those who have to deal with tyranny in their daily lives. ‘You can be given endless stats, but when you hear someone’s voice it’s shocking and moving,’ he says.

One of the main activities of HRW is to collect and verify personal testimonies from victims of human rights abuses. And some of these testimonies, narrated by performers including Juliet Stevenson, will form the core of the show (other highlights include a specially written piece by Ariel Dorfman, music from Patti Smith and Patrick Stewart reprising parts of his award-winning Stalinist Macbeth).

HRW exposes human rights abuses regardless of their scope, from resistance to civil partnerships in the UK to the harassment of health workers in Jamaica accused of helping ‘batty men’ by handing out condoms. Tyranny, Sher argues, encompasses ‘not only public tyranny, like dictators from Hitler to Mugabe, but also private tyrannies, like homophobia or misogyny’. Sher himself, ‘as a white, gay, Jewish South African’, has ‘all sorts of viewpoints on human rights abuses, from both sides’. His own experience – progressing from being ‘a gay teenager who thought he was the only person in South Africa with this terrible condition’ to tying the knot with his partner at Islington Town Hall in December 2005, in one of the UK’s first civil partnership ceremonies – is encouraging. So, too, he argues, are ‘Mandela’s achievements in South Africa: a shining example of how fast progress can be made without violence.’

Watching, recording and scrutinising is itself a sign of progress. ‘We watch now, and that’s the difference,’ argues Sher, who will perform part of his stage adaptation of Primo Levi’s ‘If This is a Man’, one of the most eloquent and sustained witness statements ever published. ‘Levi, writing about a [Nazi] concentration camp, talks again and again of the terrible feeling of isolation that victims are suffering, and how no one knows or cares.’

Acknowledging the pain felt by thousands of men and women who cannot speak for themselves, HRW disseminates their testimonies, uniquely bearing witness to their suffering. Zimbabwe is a case in point. Tiseke Kasambala, HRW’s field-researcher in Zimbabwe, stresses the vital importance of ‘bringing the story out’. She’s currently investigating the violence in the aftermath of the March 29 elections which, according to Zimbabwe’s electoral commission, may have been won by Zimbabwe’s opposition party, the MDC.

‘In Zimbabwe, where foreign journalists are banned,’ Kasambala explains, ‘we’ve been the only international organisation reporting on the ground.’ In the run-up to the presidential run-offs, which are scheduled for June 27, potential MDC voters have been terrorised. Kasambala has interviewed more than 50 victims who have been ‘beaten brutally and tortured by the ruling party’. She explains that while Zimbabwean civil-society groups are ‘very strong and very good’, an NGO with an international human rights perspective ‘lends credibility’, because it has no agenda apart from investigating human rights violations.

Some of the stories Kasambala has helped bring to light are, she says, ‘too horrific to print’. HRW verifies them by cross-checking testimonies with witnesses, medical reports and, in some cases, post mortems. Victims remain nameless, for fear of reprisals. ‘One 18-year-old girl I interviewed had been called to a general meeting by ruling party officials,’ relates Kasambala. ‘The official told them they had been called because substantial numbers had voted MDC, and the time had come to re-educate them. They were stripped, tied with wire and handcuffs and beaten on their backs, buttocks and legs by youths with sticks.’

When Kasamabala interviewed the girl she was in hospital, waiting in vain for a blood transfusion and for news of her eight-month-old baby, whom she had left with her grandmother. Owing to the economic situation (inflation is around 160,000 per cent) and the fact that she had a rare blood type, a transfusion was unavailable. Her wounds are now septic, and if she has not already died she is likely to do so slowly and in great pain. HRW could do nothing to save her life. But by sharing her story with the world, and by mobilising the international community, it hopes to help prevent others from sharing her fate.

‘Cries from the Heart’ is on Jun 8 at Theatre Royal Haymarket. Adm from £37.50 (concs £20).
For info and tickets see www.criesfromtheheart.co.uk.