Ending the nightmare.

Darwin's Nightmare

Written and Directed by Hubert Sauper

(2004, Documentary, France/Austria/Belgium); 107min. Now screening on the Sundance Channel. U.S. DVD release pending (www.darwinsnightmare.com).

DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE is an Oscar nominated documentary that examines life and death issues in Tanzania. The movie's story line can be summarized as follows: European concerns remove tons of Nile Perch from Lake Victoria each day and ship this fish to restaurants back home. This goes on at the same time as a severe famine ravages Tanzania--although no one seems to make any connection between these two events. It is unclear how long these trading practices will continue because the Nile Perch are so aggressive that they are eating every other kind of fish, which is having the effect of killing the lake itself. Finally, towards the end of the movie, the viewer learns that perhaps the airplanes flying to Tanzania from Europe aren't arriving empty after all, but are bringing small arms used to fight the various wars that afflict the African continent.

As one might imagine, Darwin's Nightmare is a stunning and distressing movie. It is stunning and distressing for its scenes of children sniffing glue and sleeping on the streets, attempting to unconsciously live through horrors that couldn't be imagined by those of us living on this side of the world. But the movie is even more stunning and distressing in that it shows, quite clearly, that Western people aren't the innocents they think themselves to be. Rather, Westerners are implicated in many of the human rights abuses that take place in areas of the globe that aren't nearly as distant as they have led themselves to believe.

But what should be equally bothersome about the movie is that it is by no means clear that anyone has done anything wrong or illegal, at least under present international law. Take the shipping of arms to Africa: of all the things that Africans need--food, books, medicine, clothing, roads, condoms, building materials, and so on--the very last thing should be guns and grenades that will only continue to fuel the incredible levels of violence that already exist. The states sending the arms--and here it has to be said that the biggest sellers of military weapons are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council--most certainly know this.

But the Western states also know there is nothing illegal about selling weapons to another government, even if the sending state is fully aware that these weapons will be used to target civilians or to commit widespread human rights violations. In the parlance of international law, this is known as the "law on state responsibility." However, it should be clear that what we are really speaking about is the law on state (non)responsibility.

The same can be said for taking food away from Tanzanians, or at least most of the food. In that regard, some of the most wrenching scenes from Darwin's Nightmare are those showing local people trying to scavenge something--anything--from the fish skeletons that are thrown away and left behind. Under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, states obligate themselves (morally but legally as well) to "take steps, individually and through international assistance and cooperation," to achieve "progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant." However, the only "international assistance and cooperation" shown in the movie is that which deprives Tanzanians of their human rights.

The lament of those who watch Darwin's Nightmare will be that something has to be done about this. Invariably, this "something" will be a call for our compassion and our money. These responses are fine but they don't take us nearly far enough. Money is always in short supply, and our compassion has a funny way of eventually deserting other people. What really needs is to be done is change international law itself.

The first step is to add some responsibility to the "law on state responsibility." The law doesn't recognize what in a domestic setting would constitute "aiding and abetting" a criminal act. Thus, states are only responsible for acts that they have committed within their own territorial borders, but are seldom (if ever) responsible for any of their actions that affect people in other lands. By this means, states are given legal license to provide all sorts of weapons and to prop up the most brutal dictatorships and yet, somehow, not to have committed an internationally wrongful and illegal act in so doing.

The second step is to admit that all the human rights laws in the world will remain cruelly meaningless unless and until the international community creates mechanisms to enforce them. Several years ago I promoted the idea of creating an International Civil Court that would complement the new International Criminal Court. The idea behind this proposal is that it would empower individuals to enforce their own human rights by allowing victims to sue those states that violated them. In the context of Darwin's Nightmare, this would include the Tanzanian government, which isn't meeting the subsistence rights of its citizens, and it would also include Western states, which show no indication of meeting their own obligations under the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Another idea is to employ domestic courts of other states for enforcement purposes. The way the system is set up now, the state that violates human rights is expected to enforce human rights protection--against itself. The problem is that this enforcement hasn't worked nor will it ever.

Though all of us will say we want to wake up from Darwin's Nightmare, our actions--and our laws as well--indicate something much different.

Mark Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. His latest book is Five Uneasy Pieces: American Ethics in a Globalized World (2005).