Fast times
By the beginning of the 1990s the question was not whether Amnesty would survive, but whether it could adapt to a changing world. On the economic front, growing disparities of income, the severe impoverishment of a number of countries and the danger of economic collapse in some of the new states of Central and Eastern Europe held the explosive potential for widespread political instability. Armed conflicts in Europe and Africa were seen to be spinning out of control, increasing tensions in the surrounding countries and creating vast refugee populations, while international peace-keeping efforts were often proving impotent. Many observers both inside and outside Amnesty were worried that Amnesty might be becoming overstretched, perhaps even developing a tendency in the face of large-scale atrocities to shoot from the hip.
Some claimed that Amnesty was moving too quickly and merely publishing rumors. Picking up the rumblings, the New York Times charged that there was a new culture in Amnesty which was "a response to CNN-members who see atrocities on television demand to know what Amnesty has to say about them -- and to a growth in the number of rights groups putting out reports in the middle of conflicts.
The mass killings in Rwanda brought the debate to the boil. Pierre Sane, Amnesty's Senegalese-born Secretary-General, determined that the genocide in Rwanda should not engulf the entire region, was passionate.
"The objective of our report is to force governments to conduct their own investigations quickly." He sensed that time was running out in Central Africa. And even without all the research completed, as was the norm in a more slow-moving situation, Amnesty had to fire all its cannons. He was right.
Forty years on Amnesty remains on the front line, the organization that has set the pace in making human rights a central tenet, if not always the practice, of the policy of democratic governments everywhere. Even dictatorships often feel they have to at least take notice of it. Its successes are often no more dramatic than the constant dripping of water on stone. But if Amnesty may not yet have changed the world, it has not left it as it found it either.
Jonathan Powers' book "Like Water on Stone-the story of Amnesty International" will be published by Penguin May 31st
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