By Ron Meshberg
Cover photo and photo above, left © ROMANO/Stolen Childhood

China Keitetsi was 8-years-old when she was abducted from her home in Uganda by rebel soldiers of the National Resistance Army.

For more than 10 years, her captors forced her to fight against the regime of Milton Obote.

During that time she witnessed countless atrocities and was subjected to sexual abuse.

She gave birth to her first child at age 14 and, she admits, killed so many people she lost count.

“I would like to share with you how sad it is when one feels very old and yet feels like a child,” Keitetsi told students and faculty at the UConn Student Union Theater last October.

“How we struggle every day to learn to live with the loss of our childhood, how we struggle to love our bodies and live with virtually no sense of dignity because of the abuses we endured, and how it feels to never have a proper sense of belonging.”

There are an estimated 300,000 children serving in armies in more than a dozen countries in Africa and Asia.

At right, China Keitetsi discussing her experience as a child soldier in Uganda during a human rights conference last year at the Student Union. At left, the cover of the book she wrote, Child Soldier, which details her life.
Photo, right, by Dan Buttrey

Keitetsi is luckier than most. At age 19, after being accused of treason for refusing the sexual advances of a senior officer, she successfully fled the country.

Keitetsi’s visit to UConn for a human rights conference was part of a broad example of the University’s commitment to the issue that is recognized as unique among human rights programs in higher education because of its interdisciplinary approach and scope. Human rights can be viewed from many perspectives — personal stories, media reports, artistic expression or academic studies.

Ordinarily, universities present human rights as legal or political issues with a focus on international laws, norms and institutions such as the Geneva Convention.

At UConn there is a heavy contribution from the humanities, and a vast array of programs dedicated to the subject have been developed.

The multi-layered foundation for this unique approach includes the UConn Human Rights Institute, the UNESCO Chair & Institute of Comparative Human Rights, dedicated archives of historic documents in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Human Rights Gallery in the William Benton Museum of Art.

“The humanities add to the study of human rights by involving scholars who appreciate its social and cultural dimensions as expressed in literature, art, philosophy and history,” says Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History and director of the UConn Humanities Institute.

An interdisciplinary approach responds to significant demands by students to understand the problems of human rights.

In fact, UConn’s undergraduate minor in human rights within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is one of only three at public universities in the nation.

There are no undergraduate major programs in U.S. public universities.

“[UConn] does this in an inclusive way,” says Paul Martin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.

“By reaching out to students in different fields, it encourages them to learn more about the ways in which other disciplines interpret the problems of social justice in the world.”

The academic center of UConn’s human rights programs is the Human Rights Institute (HRI), which oversees an estimated 1,000 students who choose classes from among 41 courses, which run the gamut from “Economics of Poverty” to “Anthropological Perspectives on Women.”

A new concentration in labor rights was recently added to the human rights minor.

Jeffrey Smith ’03 (CLAS), who majored in political science with a minor in human rights as a undergraduate, says the interdisciplinary approach to human rights provided a wealth of learning opportunities even as he now integrates his interests in his graduate program.

“A lot of times the same disciplines talk past each other. I’m trying to find common ground among subfields,” says Smith, who is completing a UConn master’s degree in political science.

“You get a much different perspective on issues. I can synthesize the different views I hear in political science, anthropology, sociology and history. You see all sides of the issues rather than focusing on mainstream thoughts.”

Meanwhile, as the state of Connecticut makes available $100 million for research in genetic and stem cell technology, HRI is launching a Science of Human Rights program dealing with bio-ethics issues.

“As forum for discussion, we’re going to have a real impact on how the debate on stem cell ethics develops in Connecticut and beyond,” says Richard Wilson, Gladstein Chair of Human Rights and director of HRI.

“There are very few, if any, ethical guidelines on stem cell research and we’re hoping to produce them at UConn.” (Story on ethics and stem cell research)

Since its inception, HRI has held several conferences that bring together lawyers, policy makers, advocates and scholars.

The most recent conference, titled “Humanitarian Narratives of Inflicted Suffering,” examined why some forms of suffering spark global reaction while others do not.

Five million people died in the Congo in the last five years, yet few know about it or seem to care, says Wilson.

This phenomenon occurs even with intense media coverage.

“The media gave quite a bit of attention to the problems in Darfur,” says Wilson, “still, there hasn’t been a great deal of response. At the same time, there was a huge international response to the tsunami in Indonesia. Part of the reason is that victims of natural disasters are seen as more innocent than victims of political conflict.”

Another of the pillars of the UConn program is the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Chair & Institute of Comparative Human Rights, which serves as a laboratory for ideas, training and research.

The Chair at UConn, an arm of the United Nations, is one of 60 worldwide and the first in the United States.

“To ensure a brighter future, we need to capture the hearts and minds of young people,” says Amii Omara-Otunnu, a professor of history and UNESCO Chair in Comparative Human Rights.

The UNESCO Chair provides, among other things, an outreach for the university, such as sponsorship of programs like its seventh annual conference held last fall.

The conference’s theme focused on the “Rights and Plights of Women and Children,” where Keitetsi, along with an international group of activists and policy makers, addressed an audience that included members of the UConn community and high school students from throughout the northeastern United States.

The Chair offices also oversees training for 20 UConn undergraduates to develop human rights action plans.

In addition, Omara-Otunnu serves as executive director of the UConn African National Congress (ANC) Partnership, which chronicles major human rights struggles by gathering oral histories and archiving materials from South Africa, home to the ANC.

Valerie Love, archivist at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, reviews materials that are part of the African National Congress Partnership collection.

Photo by Peter Morenus

The ANC materials are housed at the Dodd Research Center, which serves as the official repository of all ANC material in North America and contains about 30,000 volumes of documents on human rights issues that are the focus of the research component of human rights programs at the University.

Among those materials are more than 100 boxes of photographs, documents and witness transcripts that are part of the archival documents of Thomas J. Dodd, who represented Connecticut in both Houses of Congress and was a prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials after World War II.

Human rights archival materials in the Dodd Center include papers of activists, photographs and newsletters from human rights organizations, as well as alternative press sources that are part of UConn’s Alternative Press Collection, one of the nation’s top archives, that addresses topics ranging from women’s and gay rights to civil rights.

Recently, the Dodd Center received a donation of documents from the Human Rights Internet, a network of international groups sharing resources, says Thomas Wilsted, director of the Dodd Center.

This new archive is largely “gray literature,” materials barely published but circulated and communicated, much of it the only existing copies in the world, he adds.

Another aspect of the Dodd Center is the Dodd Prize, which is awarded for outstanding work in the field of human rights and international justice. It has recognized such world figures as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Ireland Prime Minister Bertie Ahern for their roles in advancing the Northern Ireland peace process.

The next Dodd Prize will be awarded this fall.

A uniquely artistic foundation of UConn’s effort to address human rights issues is the Human Rights Gallery, which opened in 2005 as part of the Benton Museum of Art.

The Human Rights Gallery has presented multimedia exhibitions, including a video documentary depicting efforts to rid Belarus of land mines left behind by the former Soviet Union, photographs capturing the suffering of maimed victims from both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the post-World War I prints and photographs of German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz.

The Kollwitz exhibit continues through May 6, and a new exhibition, “Arpilleras: Women’s Protest Tapestries from Chile,” opens May 22 and continues through Aug. 5.

“The visual arts can be very powerful,” says Steven Kern, director of the Benton Museum.

“A visual image can affect change or the way people think. We plan to use historic art to explore contemporary themes of human rights.”

UConn’s graduate schools also address human rights concerns as part of their academic programs as they relate to their disciplines.

The Asylum and Human Rights Clinic at the UConn School of Law provides opportunities for law students to represent refugees who have fled from persecution in their home countries and are seeking asylum in the United States.

The Center for International Social Work Studies at UConn’s Greater Hartford Campus convened a conference on“Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery” which included remarks by Micheline Slattery, a victim of international trafficking who became a slave in her native Haiti at age 5 before being forced into servitude as a domestic in Darien, Conn.

Slattery and China Keitetsi’s experiences might have shocked their audiences, but they are only two people out of millions of human rights victims in the world today.

UConn has made core questions of human dignity and the institutions and policies designed to promote and protect that dignity a major part of its educational mission that includes serving as the home of The Journal of Human Rights, an international publication that has been based in Storrs since last year.

Richard Hiskes, a professor of political science, is editor of the journal and Wilson is associate editor.

“With the level of activity one sees here,” says Wilson, “we can substantiate being one of the top human rights programs in the U.S. and the world.”