Personal experience drove crusade for human rights
Payam Akhavan to deliver Massey Lecture in Montreal on The Will to Intervene
“I speak a little English.”
It may seem an odd sentence to start a Massey Lecturer’s book. In fact, Payam Akhavan is quoting himself as a nine-year-old, rehearsing the few stock phrases he memorized before arriving in Toronto from Iran with his family. (“I like Canada” was another.) Forced out of their home country in the lead-up to the Khomeini takeover, their inclusive Bahá’i faith decreed unsound in the rising tide of fundamentalism, the Akhavans escaped a fate that many of their relatives and closest friends did not.
For the young Payam, it was a rupture — and a subsequent series of awful phone calls — that ultimately led to his becoming one of the world’s most respected and influential human rights advocates, his most prominent credit being a crucial role in the founding of the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. It’s a stature that makes his standing as the 2017 Massey Lecturer not only deserved but overdue. The lecture’s companion book, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey (Anansi, 385 pp, $19.95), is more than a treatise on rights: it’s also effectively an autobiography, showing how a crusade with global implications had its roots in personal experience.
“It’s a delicate balance,” Akhavan said of his aims for the book. “You need to show the grim reality of what we’re up against, but not in a way that leaves people despondent. You can only really see the power of the human spirit in the context of suffering. It’s easy to be idealistic when you haven’t been wounded.”
For Akhavan, difficult early adjustments to Canadian life were overcome with application. An LLB from Osgood Hall Law School in Toronto was followed by graduate studies at Harvard, where among his classmates was a young go-getter named Barack Obama. (“He was always an activist, always willing to engage in dialogue even at his most radical. Did I see what was coming for him? No. In 1989, it was unthinkable that an African-American could be president.”) Then, barely out of school, he found himself in Bosnia. While there, his personal philosophy crystallized partly in reaction to an influential text of the time: Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, a book he sees as playing into the hands of cynical leaders looking to create and exploit nationalist mythologies.
“It’s pernicious because it’s a dangerous myth that if repeated enough times becomes reality,” Akhavan said of Huntington’s thesis. “The Cold War had ended, so it was thought that we needed new divisions with which to imagine the world, and those would now be along ethnic and nationalist lines. There was no effort made to imagine the world as one interdependent entity. I read it while I was serving with the UN in Bosnia. I was young, had viewed Huntington with awe as this great Harvard academic, but I realized that what he had written was garbage, totally out of touch with the reality on the ground in Bosnia. Statistically half of all marriages in Bosnia were mixed. Sarajevo was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and had been for centuries. The big irony of what I’ve learned is that it takes much more effort to get people to kill each other than it does to get people to live with each other. In Rwanda, it took tremendous effort not just to incite hatred but to recruit thousands of willing executioners.”
Intervention — when to recognize the need for it, and having the will to act on it — is a crucial idea for Akhavan.
“We don’t take notice (of genocide) until the situation explodes and it becomes headline news,” he said. “Then we shake our
heads and say ‘It’s terrible, those people are killing each other again.’ We don’t want to ask ourselves about the sequence of events and poisonous ideologies that led to it. We need to create just societies, create a culture of empathy and compassion. A genocide is a like a virulent disease that has gone unchecked for too long, leaving the patient at the stage of terminal cancer. We need to measure justice and success in human rights not by what has happened, by what doesn’t happen.”
Akhavan is especially scathing on “slacktivism” — arm’s length measures fostered by social media and what he calls the “Hollywood-ization” of protest. “It creates the illusion of progress where all it really it does is exploit other peoples’ suffering. It’s self-serving and in some ways worse than not doing anything.”
What keeps many people from engaging more fully with calamitous currents in the world is one of the things Akhavan has fought personally.
If ever there was a recipe for compassion fatigue, it would seem he has lived it.
“We’re all created with different capacities,” he said. “Some of us handle things better than others. In my case, I don’t see what I’ve done as a career choice. Things happened to me, and fighting for justice became my only path of redemption. I do it to keep my own sanity. It’s a leap of faith. You throw yourself into the waves not knowing how or where you’re going to come out.”
There was a time, though, when Akhavan found it all too much — living in pre-9/11 New York, practising corporate law during a period of post-Yugoslavia burnout.
“My first child was born, and I looked at the miracle of life and realized I had sunk so low in this dark abyss that I could not be a good father,” he recalled. “It was very humbling, because I had gone into it all with a certain amount of hubris and ended up just wanting to save myself. So you have to understand your own limits.
It has been a very rough ride. It cost me my marriage. I’ve had to pick up the pieces, learn how to bond with my children, how to process everything I’ve gone through. It’s anything but glamorous. But once you’ve gone there, you can’t come back.”
Currently dividing his time between Montreal, where he teaches international law at McGill, and Oxford, where his ex-wife lives with their two teenage children, Akhavan expresses a gratitude bordering on awe at being chosen Massey Lecturer.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so you have to say something that’s worthwhile rather than just recycling the usual liberal clichés,” he said.
“As for that first sentence, I chose it deliberately. This whole experience has been deeply humbling. I see it as a gift of acceptance, part of the work in progress of becoming a Canadian.”