Page 50 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Third World: Thailand, the new Siam, included. As we all know, it is all in
the Westphalia-styled arrangement forcefully and arbitrarily imposed by
the imperial West. There followed the regime of nation state, sovereignty,
and the “mapping” of state boundaries. Historically, all this was instrumental
in establishing peace and order in disorderly and anarchical Europe. But
also significantly, it comes to serve as the sole criterion lawfully set for
membership status in the so-called community of nations. It means that
only the voice of entity as nation states could be effectively heard in all
international dealings, such as in day-to-day activities under the current
United Nations. In actuality, it is the exclusive voice of the powerful, and
more often than not anathema to the minorities’ rights to exert their self-
identity and self-determination. This is indeed the crux of the whole matter, in
spite of all the talk about democratic process. Indeed, in spite of all the
international Declarations.
As has been observed nowadays, there is a kind of built-in
exclusiveness and absolutism in the concept and practice of state
sovereignty itself that needs to be looked into. While it has been serving
the purpose of state security fairly well, perhaps all too well, it has
obviously become one most serious threat to human rights and security.
Minorities, among all other under-privileged peoples the world over, become
the exclusive victims. In fact, quite a few of them could very well be qualified
as nations in terms of size, number, and social and political structure. Of
course, all this does not at all mean that the state of human rights fared
any better in the pre-modern Third World. In mainland Southeast Asia,
as elsewhere, there were plenty of wars of aggression and all kinds of
oppression, and even subjugation. But then at the very least, the indigenous
peoples and communities were allowed to look after themselves and thus
enjoy a degree of traditional autonomy. That was how their self-identities
and ethnicity were preserved in practically all aspects of life: religions,
beliefs, cultures, languages, as well as traditional knowledge and creativity.
This last but not least, traditional knowledge and creativity, has particular

44 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND