June 23, 2015

Human rights: The last remaining utopia

editor:	Murat Suner

Last week a 34-year-old woman was buried in a Berlin cemetery, far away from her former home in Syria. Like thousands struggling to reach Europe’s southern and eastern borders, she was on her way to the Italian cost. She died at sea, her youngest child, a 2-year-old, is believed to have also perished at sea - its body was never found.

The woman stands for the world's biggest refugee crisis after WWII: about 55 million people are currently on the run, 220,000 attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea, more than 25,000 people died while trying since the year 2000.

With her family’s permission, her body was exhumed in Sicily and buried in a Berlin cemetery as part of a political demonstration called “The Dead are Coming”. The Centre for Political beauty organized the ceremony, reacting on the European government's failure to carry out a human refugee policy.

Philipp Ruch, the founder of the Centre for Political Beauty said: “Our aim is to honor the dead by bringing them here and giving them a proper burial.” According to him the ceremony was also a political act in order to display a “parallel foreign policy for Germany.”

The reburial became a prelude and also a blueprint to several independently organized protest activities across Europe - all of them to generate attention and pressure leaders to deal with a growing humanitarian crisis.

As the New York Times points out, "critics, including many on social media, said the project was in bad taste and disrespectful to the dead, others questioned the premise of using the corpses for performance art."

However, "if humanism needs to be declared as art in order to be accepted by society, then our society is running on empty," said Philipp Ruch.

On last Sunday the activities culminated in a protest march through the heart of Germany's capital to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s doorstep. And just there, on the lawn of Germany's parliament, 5,000 protesters built numerous symbolic tombs on the lawn.

The Centre for Political Beauty considers this sort of civil disobedience "Aggressive Humanism". As they say in an article on Medium, after the disappearance of all 20th century "-isms" (except capitalism), the idea of human rights remains the last utopia.

Image: Nick Jaussi, Facebook page of Centre for Political Beauty