Untitled Document

Events >> The Democracy Award >> 1995 Democracy Award

The Endowment presented its 1995 Democracy Award to four activists selected by the NED Board of Directors in recognition of their contributions to the cause of democracy. Recipients were: Sergio Aquayo Quezada, co-founder of the Civic Alliance in Mexico; Monique Mujawamariya, Rwandan human rights activist; Elena Bonner, chairman of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation; and Sergei Kovalev, human right commissioner.
Sergio Aquayo Quezada In 1994 an unprecedented civic movement emerged in Mexico committed to insuring the integrity and transparency of the national elections. Called the Civic Alliance, this movement was founded by human rights and civic activists who took on the daunting task of mobilizing Mexican citizens to monitor a process most had come to view as hopelessly corrupt. Yet in just a few months the Civic Alliance grew into a coalition of more than 400 organizations and thousands of citizens. Together they conducted civic education campaigns throughout the country, urging people at the grassroots level to defend their rights as citizens by resisting corrupt and unlawful practices. For the first time, the Mexican political process was subjected to the scrutiny of civil society. Rallying people with the demand for a "jeugo limpio" (clean game), the Civic Alliance democratized election technology and information, giving previously passive local groups the ability to perform very sophisticated monitoring processes. They conducted opinion surveys, exposed biased media coverage of the campaign, documented cases of vote-buying and other forms of abuse, and hosted hundreds of international visitors who came to observe the voting. On election day they deployed more than 12,000 trained election observers at some 7,000 polling places and were able to conduct their own independent "quick count" which served as a powerful deterrent to ballot-stuffing and tampering with the results. The Civic Alliance not only opened the electoral system, but it empowered Mexican citizens as never before. With its broad base and nonpartisanship, it functioned as an authentic representative of Mexican society - a society newly insistent on openness and fairness, and armed with the knowledge and technical skills that enabled it to act effectively. As such, the Civic Alliance has been able to build on the foundation laid in 1994 to become an enduring force for honesty and accountability in public life: a watchdog against corruption and a spur to the democratic transformation of the country. Sergio Aguayo would be the first to say that it is the Civic Alliance and not himself that should be honored. But more than any single individual, he became its voice and its Leader. Threatened with assassination, often reviled as a radical, he pressed forward patiently and quietly to build the Alliance and to fulfill its mission, which was to foster the discovery by Mexicans of their rights as citizens.
Monique Mujawamariya The genocide carried out in the spring of 1994 against the Tutsi minority of Rwanda is a sobering reminder that, a half-century after the Nazi holocaust and only a few years after the fall of Soviet communism, mankind's capacity for inhumanity remains undiminished. While the hundreds of thousands killed in this tragedy cannot be brought back to life, it may be possible to find in the courage of one survivor a foundation upon which to rebuild a broken society and a source of hope and inspiration for the world. Monique Mujawamariya is such a person. The story of her miraculous from Kigali, when her friends in America and Europe thought she had been killed has become well known. But it is her role before and after the holocaust in Rwanda that demonstrates the full extent of her devotion to the cause of human rights and democracy. The daughter of a Hutu father and Tutsi mother, Monique founded the Rwandan Association for the Defense of Human Rights and Public Liberties in 1990 at a moment when ethnic tensions, which had led to mass killings a generation earlier, had begun to swell once again. Convinced that such tensions were being stirred and exploited by power-hungry politicians, in particular by the dictatorial regime of Juvenal Habyarimana, the new Association committed itself to the defense of individual rights, irrespective of ethnic identity. Monique's effectiveness in strengthening coordination among Rwandan activists as well as an-tong American and European rights groups working in the country made her a target of the Habyarimana regime. A victim of an assassination attempt in 1992 which left her face scarred, she was subsequently warned by a military officer suspected of torture that she would be killed if his name appeared in a human rights report that was to be prepared by an international commission. When asked by a member of the commission what to do, she responded, "Why print it, of course." The death threats continued, and in the weeks preceding the outbreak of the holocaust in April 1994, the regime's hate radio called her "a bad person who deserved to die." Yet she remained in Rwanda, providing Western human rights groups with regular reports on the deteriorating situation. Owing to her own resourcefulness, help from her Western friends who worked tirelessly to get her name on an evacuation list, and more than a little luck, Monique escaped the slaughter in Kigali. But soon after the fall of the Habyarimana regime in July, she returned to Rwanda to reactivate her human rights association, whose ranks had been decimated, and to prepare a report on steps that needed to be taken to document the genocide, to avoid new bloodshed, and to make possible the rebirth of the country. In few countries have people suffered as much as they have in Rwanda, or are conditions less ripe for peace and reconciliation. Yet from the ashes of this inhumanity there has emerged an individual whose immense courage and idealism should serve as a lesson and an inspiration to us all. However distant democracy may seem as a goal, it is not unreachable as long as there is someone like Monique Mujawamariya whose belief in freedom and the dignity of all human beings can be neither repressed nor denied.
Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev bridge two eras in the struggle for Russian democracy: the heroic era of dissent against Soviet totalitarianism and the more ambiguous era of transition to a different system, the nature of which remains uncertain. They alone among the heroes of the first era have become leaders in the second. Together they refute the notion that the politics of truth are anachronistic in the era of politics. The moral authority and unswerving commitment to human rights, which they exemplified as dissidents, are attributes Russia sorely needs if the current transition is to lead to democracy and not to some new form of autocracy. Kovalev and Bonner each played a distinctive role in the human rights movement, which emerged as a significant force in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. Kovalev was a founder in 1969 of the first human rights association, the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, and later became the principal link to the dissident movement in Lithuania- He was arrested in 1975 and tried in Vilnius on the charge of participation in the publication of both the Moscow-based Chronicle of Current Events and the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. He served seven years in a labor camp and three years in internal exile. Elena Bonner was of course chiefly known in this period as the wife, chief of staff, and ambassador to the world at large of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Laureate recognized as the father of the Soviet dissident movement. She represented him at the Nobel ceremony in Oslo in 1975 and, following his internal exile in 1980, was his sole link to Moscow and the West until May 1984 when she, too, was barred from leaving Gorky. Their exile in Gorky (described in her book Alone Together) - and the era of Soviet dissent - came to an end in December 1986 with Gorbachev's famous call to Dr. Sakharov inviting him to return to Moscow to participate in changing Soviet society. After Andrei Sakharov's death in December 1989, Elena Bonner continued the campaign for democracy and human rights in Russia. She joined the defenders of the Russian parliament during the attempted coup of August 1991 and tent her support to Yeltsin during the constitutional crisis in early 1993. During this period she also established the Sakharov Archives to preserve the legacy of the man who remains the most powerful symbol of democracy in post Soviet Russia. The turning point for Elena Bonner came in December 1994 with the Russian war in Chechnya and the massive civilian casualties caused by indiscriminate bombing of Grozny, the capital city. She resigned from President Yeltsin's Human Rights Commission and warned of a reversion back to autocracy. The war in Chechnya also brought Sergei Kovalev to the forefront of the debate over the future of Russia. In his capacity as both Chairman of the President's Human Rights Commission and human rights commissioner for the Russian parliament, he traveled to Grozny and, at great personal risk, gave personal witness to the destruction taking place there. His daily reports via telephone and Russian television galvanized Russian public opinion against the war. While his outspokenness and independence aroused his opponents - in March he was removed by the Russian Duma from his position as human rights commissioner - Izvestia hailed him in the following terms as its Man of the Year: "Just when the bomb blasts from Chechnya seemed to be drowning out even the strongest protests, all the world suddenly heard the quiet, Sakharov-like voice of this man from the very epicenter of events." The qualities exemplified by Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev -courage, independence, honesty and commitment to principle- fit uneasily into the current turmoil of Russian politics. But if Russia, with its long history of tragedy and heroism, is to move from totalitarianism to democracy, these are the virtues that must be nurtured and reinforced. No one in Russia today can do more to bring this about than these two brave individuals, who bring a special moral authority to the struggle for Russian democracy.