interviews
Nobel Peace Laureate
Rigoberta Menchú Tum
A plea for global education
Rigoberta Menchú Tum was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. She is a Quiché (Maya) human rights activist from Guatemala and the author of I, Rigoberta Menchú (London & New York: Verso, 1984). After fleeing the violence of her native country, she became an eloquent defender of indigenous peoples and other victims of government oppression around the world.
She was the official spokesperson for the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2003).
Rigoberta Menchú left Guatemala after her father, her mother and a brother were killed by Government soldiers. Her 16-year-old brother Petrocinio was kidnapped, tortured and burned alive in 1979. When her mother demanded an explanation, soldiers abducted her mother, raped her repeatedly, cut off her ears, tortured and mutilated her, and left her to be consumed by maggots, vultures, and dogs.
Her father was killed when the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City, in which he and other leaders of the country's main peasant opposition group had protested human rights violations, was set on fire.
The Maya were the most advanced urban civilisation in the pre-Columbian Americas. They invented the concept of "zero" centuries before it was independently formulated in India, and measured the solar year with an error of only 17.28 seconds. Having flourished for two millennia in an area of 3,255,000 sq.km, they were first invaded by Spain in 1527, but put up such fierce resistance that the capital of their last kingdom to fall, Itza at Nojpeten, was not captured until 1697. Had the Maya not been decimated by European diseases such as chicken pox and measles, some historians believe the Spanish conquest might have ended in total defeat. According to Roderick Conway Morris, "One of the greatest crimes perpetrated against the Maya was the destruction of their thousands of books, spearheaded by the Franciscans, who – while preaching harmony and brotherly love – presided over a scorched-earth policy, backed up by the threat of the physical extinction of any who dared to resist it. So complete was the friars' success that only four books in Maya script survived."
Civil war broke out in Guatemala when the CIA toppled the democratically-elected government in 1954. The US-backed right-wing military juntas which followed have had one of the worst records of political repression, human rights abuses, and atrocities in recorded history. After opposition groups began organising among Indians in the countryside, the military responded with death squads and a scorched-earth "counterinsurgency" strategy that destroyed over four hundred ancient Mayan villages, displaced one million people, and left a hundred thousand unarmed Indians dead. Hundreds of mass graves across the country contain the remains of massacred civilians. At the time of this interview in 1993, Ms. Menchú was living in exile in Mexico, where she had worked with the Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC), a Guatemalan human rights advocacy group. She is now the Director of the Riboberta Menchú Tum Foundation.
In announcing the Nobel Prize in Oslo, the Nobel Committee said Ms. Menchú "stands out as a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation across ethnic, cultural and social dividing lines" in Guatemala and abroad. At the invitation of the Earth Society Foundation, she flew to New York to ring the Peace Bell at the United Nations Earth Day ceremony on March 20, 1993. The event, held annually at the precise moment of the Spring Equinox, was attended by a small crowd including the Director-General of the UN Economic and Social Council, the Ambassador of Norway, and a special representative of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. What follows is the transcript, translated from the original Spanish, of a video interview of Ms. Menchú made by Global Vision Director Michael O'Callaghan shortly afterwards in her hotel. Explaining that she felt intimidated by our television camera, Ms. Menchú picked a bright blue-and-yellow iris from a bouquet she was given at the United Nations ceremony, and held onto it throughout the interview. She said "flowers give me a peaceful feeling."
Michael O'Callaghan shot this video interview in New York in 1993.
© 1993 Global Vision - all rights reserved.
This video is not available online.
What is your message to Humankind?
We are living in a troubled world, in a time of great uncertainty. It's a time to reflect about many things, especially about humankind as a whole, and the balance between collective values and individual values.
The world right now is preoccupied with business, buying and selling and making money. But solutions can be found in our community, among the indigenous peoples who are the victims of terrible repression and violations of the law in many parts of the world. You can find experience, self-educated people, and a whole side of science which is not well known.
There is a big change going on in the way people see the world: change in the concept of development, in the way people live together. But for this change to bear fruit, we need education on a global scale. Humankind will not recover from its mistakes without global education. The United Nations, human rights organisations, indigenous peoples, and all the countries of the world should concentrate their efforts on education. Solutions will come when the world becomes educated about global values, the common values of its inhabitants and communities.
We have to focus on solutions in this time of great challenges. If we just wait around, the problems will overwhelm us. We need to take the initiative, to launch local, regional and global projects, to unite our efforts, and really listen to indigenous peoples. We have to listen to people to find out what they want, to discover the solutions they have to offer for the future.
What should be done to protect indigenous peoples?
It is very important to understand that we indigenous peoples don't need "protection." What we do need is simply to be allowed to exist, to live, to let our own culture develop, and to recover the meaning of our own history. Indigenous peoples have always depended on their traditional wisdom and culture. Our cosmological vision, our way of thinking, our lifestyle have empowered us to survive through many difficult times in the past. Now that we stand at the close of the twentieth century, this fact should send a very clear message to the conscience of the world. We indigenous people reaffirm our struggle to survive!
To me, the most important thing is that indigenous people still possess a balance, an equilibrium with Mother Nature, a balance between human life and the earth itself. For us, the Earth is the source of knowledge, of historical memory, of life! But the rest of the world does not share this vision, and so they keep on destroying Mother Earth. Indigenous people aren't strange. We may be special, but we are also part of the modern world in which we all live. We are part of the diversity of cultures, the plurality of races, the mixture of societies on all the continents where we live today. Indigenous people are not some myth from the past, a myth that survives only in legends and in ruins!
You should find out what indigenous people can contribute toward a global vision, a vision of nature, of development, of community based on the oral transmission of our ancestors' knowledge from generation to generation. You should also look at the way we think about nature. Around the world, there have been many struggles in which indigenous peoples have played an important role. But their names are never mentioned, their contributions have been ignored. Others have given new names to these concerns which indigenous peoples have always cared about.
The fact that indigenous people are among the most marginalised of the marginalised people on Earth, among those whose rights have been violated for so long, is a call to conscience. I hope this call will be answered in the new millennium which now awaits us.
The time has come now to stop feeling sorry for all the wrongs that have been done to indigenous people. The time has come to go beyond blame, beyond sympathy with our cause, beyond identifying with our world-view. It's time to implement programmes – alternative projects and technologies that combine the benefits of science and the benefits of nature, that respect the traditional ethno-botanical knowledge of peasants and the age-old experience through which they have survived – and to combine these with the advances of technology and science. We indigenous peoples have nothing against the innovations of technology and science when they are shown to be appropriate. But we are against such innovations if they are applied in opposition to the values which indigenous people protect, which are those of life, nature, and historical memory.
No people can flourish who do not know their own past. The past is a good foundation for the present, and an inspiration for the future. People owe it to history and to the present to prepare for the future. Finally, I sincerely hope that now, at the end of the twentieth century, indigenous people will never again be forced into extinction on the face of this Earth. We need international law, national legislation, the legal protection of our human rights, as well as the respect and acceptance of society in general, in order to face the future.
To listen to indigenous peoples is to listen to the women and to those who know how to love this earth. We may be only a small grain of sand, but it is one which will prove important for the challenges Humankind must face in the next millennium.
What do you feel about human rights?
Among the nations which have suffered the most widespread human rights abuses, unpunished atrocities, murders, terror and fear, is Guatemala. The recent historical events in Guatemala have fragmented the culture of the Mayas in many places. Displacement, refuge, exile are daily facts of life in my country. However, these things have also allowed us to learn something more in our experience of the world. In Guatemala today, there are some very courageous women who are making a stand, indigenous women, who are leading the struggle! We believe the war in Guatemala is no disgrace for the Mayas. It's a disgrace for the people of Guatemala...
Unfortunately, the rest of the world has turned a blind eye on the situation. Atrocities still go unpunished, and many governments have helped to cover up the problem. I think it's important to say this, because the Guatemalan people know it, and we feel offended again and again when we realise that our country has been silenced. This has also made us aware of the plight of other people. Solidarity between nations must be militant, constant, and continuous. There is a need for international organisations to which the victims can turn for help, to which people can go to defend their lives and to protect their human rights.
Finally, I believe that peace in Guatemala is not a myth. Peace in Guatemala is not a myth, neither is it a myth for Central America, or for the people of this continent or other continents. Rather, it is a process which requires effort and consciousness-raising around the world, especially among those in governments and in large organisations who have the power to make important decisions.
Peace requires work in the heart of the small society that is Guatemala. But Guatemala is also part of Humankind, and what has been going on in Guatemala is a very bad example for the world and for future generations. I hope that the world will one day acknowledge its responsibility and will not be indifferent to any war, no matter where it happens, or to any violation of human rights, no matter where it may occur, because the massacre in the Quiché is a wound in the heart of Humankind.
What is going on in Guatemala now? [i.e. March 1993]
It's a very complex situation. The war is officially over, yet there are continuous assassinations, enormous suffering and grinding poverty. But the greatest problem in Guatemala is that most people cannot participate in the political negotiations, because they don't speak Spanish! An emergency parliament needs to be formed immediately to address the problem. Blatant disregard for the law is rampant. We must put an end not only to these violations of law, but also to the suppression of truth, to the repression and persecution of over a million civilians who take part in our self-defence patrols.
About a million people have been displaced within the country. Some have sought refuge in the mountains, where they suffer a great deal of bombing. Over two hundred thousand Guatemalans are refugees. Many people have been forced to permanently abandon their farms or leave their towns. In other words, the war is not just the armed conflict which occurs every day, but it's also the general persecution which afflicts the whole economy and society, and which also – as a routine matter – limits our freedom of speech. In the end, the people of Guatemala are paying a very high price for all of this. If we don't recognise the magnitude of the problem in Guatemala, we will never come to grips with the whole issue of development both in Central America and throughout the continent. Guatemala has suffered a lot of repression, and especially, many unpunished crimes. I would say that ninety percent of the people who suffer from the war, the widows and the orphaned children in the streets, are indigenous people. This is a fact. It's not only a racial issue; it is just a reality which happens to fall on the heads of the indigenous people.
