Human Rights Activists

"Physical violence happened to me, and also living with HIV as a result of that, it’s something I will never forget—that will never go anywhere, that I have to live with."

"The paintings express aspects of genocide like betrayal of relatives, negligence of the church and community leaders, and issues related to the horrors which visited the local people."

"It takes a long time to express how we feel. I am trying to show the other survivors that we need to express that pain we have."

"“I wanted to be in a place where I can start a new life, I needed to start a new life in a place where I’ve never experienced what I’ve experienced. At that time, it was for me to start a new life, through a journey of healing. Leaving Rwanda was easy for me because of the trauma experiences I have had. So I felt like I needed to be in a different place. It happened to be that I came to America because my cousin was here."

"I am part of making people be aware of how genocide can happen, so. And if we are aware, we can make sure we prevent that from happening again."

"Genocide doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. There are so many stages."

"The Portuguese and British or any other oppressive invaders did us Ijaws and the people of the geographical location today known as either Niger Delta or South-South a great injustice, what is happening today is as a result of that evil."

"You cannot restore what does not exist as the eastern region was defunct the day Rivers State was created. Nigeria was the northern region, western region & eastern region, whose idea was it not to create southern Nigeria and why? This was to keep us from our wealth and freedom."

"Our freedom is our ethnic identity and our ethnic identity is Kalabari Ijaw, not Biafra."

"There is a lot of misinformation in the land. We must be determined to save ourselves from the grip of those who hate us. There must be a time we must sit down and work out a way to drive this unification project."

"Restructuring is the only medicine for Nigeria if the desire of Nigerians is to remain as a country as the NDSDM believes we must work with our (Niger Delta) governors to achieve what is in the very best interest of Niger Delta."

"My lesson to all is that no matter what horrible circumstance we may face in our lives, we must never lose hope, for losing hope is the beginning of our own self defeat."

"Rape is a weapon of the genocide."

"In our culture, we don’t talk a lot about experiences."

"Our traducers not only balkanized the former Eastern Region, but also injected false and jaundiced propaganda that has effectively left us where are today."

"I have some days where I just sit down and cry. It’s not like everything is perfect all the time."

"Before us is a nation at war with itself but in denial because an inept government refuses to take responsibility for governance."

"Herdsmen occupation of peoples ancestral lands is deliberate land grabbing agenda carefully orchestrated by foes of Nigeria who, we suspect, have tacit support of the present government."

"Nigeria is majorly Islam and Christianity, so why could somebody now want to impose one religion on the other."

"For over 50 years nobody has used the resources from the Niger Delta to the interest of the region. It is high time we understood that we cannot sustain Nigeria on the back of the Niger Delta."

"Nigeria is on a high speed train that will soon hit the highest speed limit going down a slippery slope."

"Please, don’t forget the Rwandans who are left behind."

"When the events in Rwanda in April 1994 plunged toward genocide, I was really discouraged and despairing, because I found that universal rights were a real issue."

"(fr) Quand les événements au Rwanda en avril 1994 se sont précipités vers le génocide, j’étais vraiment découragée, désespérée, parce que je trouvais que l’universalité des droits c’était une topique réelle."

"(fr) En tant qu’humains, nous ne valons pas grand-chose, car nous n’avons pas de grandes richesses au sous-sol que les grandes puissances convoitent, qu’on n’a pas réellement une valeur marchande."

"Concerning Rwanda, I realized that someone who comes from a poor country has no rights, from the point of view of humanity, of society, of the international community, because all the interventions, all hopes of aid were based on [national] interests, not on human compassion."

"Human compassion has been replaced by commercial value, and Rwanda was abandoned because the country had no commercial value."

"(fr) Concernant Rwanda, je me suis rendu compte que quand on vient d’un pays pauvre, on n’a aucun droit au point de vue de l’humanité, de la société, de la communauté internationale, parce que toutes les interventions, tous les espoirs d’être aidé sont guidés par des intérêts, mais pas par l’humanité."

"(fr) L’humanité a été remplacée par une valeur marchande et Rwanda a été abandonné parce qu’il n’avait pas de valeur marchande."

"As human beings, we [Rwandans] are not worth much, because we have under our soil no great wealth that the great powers covet, so we do not have commercial value."

"We had a sign up saying, End the occupation, and someone came up and said, “I don’t respect you, I don’t respect you.’ I said, ‘Let’s have a conversation, stop screaming and we’ll talk.’ She said, ‘You should be out there talking about our boys.’ All you have to say is “our boys,” and that’s the end of any argument. My response was “bye bye.” That infuriated her. But I believe people go home and no matter what we say or what they say, they have a picture in their minds of some Jews who don’t agree with Israel. Somewhere along the line, someone will remember, we were out there, and we refused to go along. Maybe we will have planted a seed and someone will realize we are right. That gives me intense satisfaction. I look in the mirror and say you did a mitzvah today...We acted like mensches. We were human beings, and we refused to be stampeded by so-called group loyalty or blindness to Israel. We acted the way people should have acted toward us."

"It’s the struggle that counts. You have to be willing to struggle."

"one big thing I learned is, you can’t predict what will happen. The week before the sit-ins started on February 1, 1960, if you had asked people whether in a week, a huge movement was about to start, people would have looked at you like you were nuts. These things had been brewing a long time, but nobody predicted it, and even when it happened, no one predicted it would spread like wildfire. Within weeks there were 100s and 100s of students in every southern state sitting in and demonstrating, and thousands and thousands of local people participating. All over the south."

"That’s the lesson of the civil rights movement. All the earlier struggles, the Montgomery bus movement, the Brown v Board of Education decision led up to it. And what we see in the history books is a pallid imitation of what it was really like."

"When I grew up, the great heroes of my teenage life were the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and I used to– as a young teenager, I imagined what would happen if the Nazis were marching up Second Avenue? Would I go on the roof and be a sniper? Well that’s romantic. But I thought, What’s wrong with that? But if you’re challenging me on this social justice tradition, and saying that’s just romanticism, you’re exaggerating it, I say no, I’m not exaggerating it. It was real. I don’t feel that’s romantic."

"it is our tradition: we were slaves in Egypt, we were victims, we learned the hard way what happens when you stand around doing nothing. At least half of the lawyers who went south during the civil rights movement were Jewish. At least half of the Americans who went to Spain to fight were Jewish. That comes out of a deeply held social justice movement."

"I am a critic of Zionism. The more I read about it the more critical I am of it."

"I was seven years old when World War II ended...The lesson was horrible things happen when people stand around watching and no one does anything. That is what impelled me into the civil rights movement."

"I didn’t define myself then and I often don’t now as an anti-Zionist or a non-Zionist. I define myself as a person who has spent her life working with civil rights and human rights, and I was being told by the government of Israel that they spoke for me, and I had actually seen with my own eyes the oppression of the Palestinians. And relying on Jewish tradition, I felt that I could not stand idly by."

"I do not think that states that privilege one group over another are viable states. And this comes from my intensive schooling as a civil rights activist. I could not– 50 years ago, I could not work to make sure that black people in Mississippi had the right to vote and then turn around and be supportive of a state where every citizen does not have equal rights before the law."

"Remember, it’s not because of our failure that we’re being attacked, but because of our success."

"When I was in the south in the 60s, the white people didn’t really curse you out, they just tried to kill you. And this abuse is nothing compared to that...On the other hand, I have not seen this level of hysteria before. I haven’t. Ever since I got involved 12 years ago, it has been increasing. And it hasn’t leveled off. Even some of the attack dogs are being attacked. Did you see them going after Dershowitz? It’s very unusual for him, to get some of his medicine back. He was bitten and he was kind of shocked."

"White people who opposed segregation publicly were shut down or arrested or threatened and so forth."

"I have yet to meet one single human being who has been to Israel and Palestine, who has not had their entire life changed, and they can call you all kinds of names, anti-Semite and self-hating Jews. But we have actually seen the Israeli policies and in some cases we have been the victims of them. We have seen Palestinians herded like cattle through these institutionalized checkpoints, that are like mini prisons. I am totally confident that people understanding the facts will change their behavior."

"what’s going on in the campuses is truly amazing to me. I think I realized that we were going to win when the first Open Hillel was created on campus [at Swarthmore last December]. Because this is a sea change: the Israeli government policy is built on relying on the Jews in the Diaspora to be either completely convinced of the efficacy of the Jewish state or else bludgeoned into supporting the Jewish state as it exists now...what these students did this was earthshaking because it means that they want to think. They don’t want anyone else to think for them anymore, and they know about the abuse they will get, and they are willing to take the abuse, it’s not going to come as a shock to them."

"When I was in the south in the 60s, the white people didn’t really curse you out, they just tried to kill you."

"The incident that to me typifies my emotional reaction occurred on my first trip in the winter of 2002-2003 several months after the horrible Israeli invasion in the second intifada. I was in the Deheisheh refugee camp in front of the Ibda’a House and I was talking to people and right across the way I could see the wall, the barbed wire on the wall, and the guard tower on top of the wall, and all these images flooded back to me from World War II, and I thought of my father, how relieved I was that he was dead and didn’t have to see this because flying over the guard tower was the flag with the Jewish star on it, and I completely broke down. I just sobbed, and during that trip I cried every day. My traveling companions were so annoyed with me, I was over the top. But I don’t have to explain to you the significance of those images."

"What propelled me into the civil rights movement in the first place as a young woman was the exhortation I had received from my secular Jewish progressive parents: that it is unethical to stand idly by while people are oppressed and suffering."

"what, in my opinion, is the “root cause” of all the death and destruction in the Middle East? It isn’t Hamas, it isn’t who sent the rockets first, who killed which teenager first, and it isn’t who broke which ceasefire first. The underlying cause flows from the injustice of one group controlling the lives and future of another group. As long as Israel occupies Palestine, and as long as Palestinians resist (which, according to International human rights law, they have the right to do), confrontations and death will result. The root cause is the occupation, which itself flows from the previous dispossession of Palestinians from the land they inhabited for generations."

"As a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, I hope this year's Martin Luther King Day will be more than the usual constant repetition of his “I have a dream” speech. This has flattened the very essence of the movement, which was the vastness and the vibrancy of hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” people who wouldn’t and couldn’t stand for any more indignities and any more insults. I know because I was in Georgia, Virginia and Mississippi as a staffer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; I spent two years in Atlanta. This great movement of African-American civilians and their white allies lacked an army or air force, yet we imprinted our freedom demands on the national consciousness for the following decades and presumably, for decades to come...It may surprise people to know that Palestinians read Dr. King's words and call his name and study the American civil rights movement, among other histories of other peoples, for ways to bring to the attention of the world the fact that little by little, their land is disappearing along with their rights."