By Roger P. Winter

Sunday, February 22, 1998; Page C02

Those of us who work as international human rights advocates tend to regard ourselves and our institutions as humanity's conscience and as vigilant protectors of the world's humanitarian ideals. We are fearless in judging others. We should be equally fearless in judging ourselves.

Nowhere are human rights more at risk than in Central Africa, where the past four years have brought genocide, civil wars, assassinations, massive refugee flows and periods of bloody anarchy. Over the past 20 years, I have made dozens of visits to the Central African countries of Rwanda, Congo, Uganda and Burundi, where as many as 1.5 million have been slaughtered during that time. It is a corner of the globe that desperately needs wise human rights advocacy.

But, I am sorry to say, it is a region where human rights activists are playing a potentially damaging role. We in the human rights community are so busy issuing strongly worded reports and ostracizing imperfect new governments that we risk inviting more instability and bloodshed, not less.

Take the case of the 120,000 suspected perpetrators of genocide now in Rwanda's jails. Many have never been formally charged, a fact that most of my colleagues view as an egregious abuse of human rights and proof that Rwanda's leaders lack commitment to basic rules of justice.

I see it differently. I regard their jailing as a human rights victory. Most of the country's judges, attorneys and investigators were killed during the genocide or fled the country, leaving no means of trying these 120,000 prisoners. But they are still alive and awaiting trial. They have not been gunned down or chopped apart in a frenzy of revenge for the genocide many of them committed. Instead, they have remained in jail while the Rwandan government tries to rebuild its judicial system. The detention of suspects for trial indicates a willingness to abide by fundamental human rights principles under difficult circumstances.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, my own U.S. Committee for Refugees and a handful of other organizations have a distinguished history of forcing international attention to the world's injustices. Human rights workers often take great personal risk to document abuses. But condemning governments -- which we do well -- is not enough. At times, we need to adopt a more constructive attitude and intervene directly to improve human rights conditions.

In Rwanda, we could offer training, documentation and other assistance that might help resurrect the country's destroyed judicial system. We should, for example, use our investigative skills to collect evidence that would lead to the prosecution or release of prisoners suspected of genocide. We should alleviate Rwanda's prison overcrowding by lobbying donors for money to expand jails. When we issue reports recommending an end to "arbitrary arrests," we should explain why these arrests occur and suggest how local officials can correct a problem that many of them readily acknowledge.

Having witnessed the work of Zaire's Mobutu, Uganda's Amin and Obote, the oppressive regimes of Burundi and Rwanda's previous genocidal leaders, human rights workers have come to assume that all leaders in the region act with the worst motives -- a presumptuous attitude reminiscent of some missionaries from an earlier era who went forth as agents of culture and empire. For example, many human rights advocates raced to demonize the besieged new leader of Congo, Laurent Kabila, within weeks of his coming to power. Our harsh attacks taught him to dismiss our concerns, no matter how valid they might be.

Let me be clear: I am not questioning the value of established human rights principles, which should remain sacrosanct. Governments all over the world should permit legitimate independent efforts to monitor how they treat their citizens, and human rights workers should continue to document abuses. But perfect leadership and capable governing systems cannot spring forth spontaneously in troubled nations that have known only misrule. Our edicts fall on deaf ears unless we shape our message constructively.

As we in the human rights profession consider how to accomplish our goals in the tinderbox region of Central Africa, we would be wise to acknowledge five hard truths:

The human rights community has serious shortcomings.

The raison d'etre of international human rights organizations formed in the past quarter-century was to prevent a recurrence of the ultimate crime: geno cide. We failed. All our ink, paper, faxes, meetings and lobbying did not make a meaningful difference in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

After the genocide, we failed to push hard enough to expel genocidal killers from refugee camps, and we shrank from the truth that it was worth risking bloodshed to force a separation between killers and legitimate refugees. As the head of a refugee policy agency, I feel this failure acutely. In retrospect, my agency should have made clear to policymakers that military action was worthwhile to resolve the problem.

Inside Rwanda, the international human rights community failed for more than a year to mount an effective human rights monitoring program because we never before had insisted that the U.N. Human Rights Center have real world capabilities beyond issuing occasional reports and ritual condemnations.

The human rights community mistakenly assumes that it alone has the best interests of the population at heart.

Some leaders despise their own citizens. But sometimes governments are more inexperienced than evil. Central Africa's new leaders have the enormous task of reassembling nations that are among the poorest on earth, ethnically divided, riven with corruption and saturated with arms and shadowy groups willing to use those arms to gain power. National armies are usually untrained and unrepresentative, national treasuries are virtually bare and the political systems have limited experience with democracy. The shooting may have stopped, but a practical state of emergency persists.

Many new Congolese government officials I have met possess a credible agenda for their vast country that goes beyond the self-interest and self-enrichment of their predecessors. They appear serious about stamping out corruption and improving the lives of their fellow-citizens, if only they could actually grasp the levers of government.

Rather than blast these officials for their failures, human rights advocates should use their considerable knowledge to suggest how leaders can achieve better human rights despite limited resources and experience. I have found that Congo's new officials are more willing to respond openly about their errors when the discussion is a constructive dialogue rather than a one-sided cataloging of their faults. The military in Rwanda is more willing to listen to criticism if we acknowledge the difficulties they face in waging counterinsurgency wars.

Human rights failures by governments are not always deliberate.

It seems certain that thousands of Rwandan refugees and genocidaires (those who commit genocide) were killed last year during the civil war that brought Congo's new leaders to power. Less certain is whether Kabila and his colleagues actively sought to kill refugees -- or whether the deaths resulted from poor military tactics, lack of troop discipline or the actions of foreign soldiers. A U.N. human rights investigation is examining those questions.

In northwest Rwanda, reports suggest that government troops have killed thousands of people during counterinsurgency operations. What is less clear is the extent to which the killings are intentional massacres, or whether genocidaire insurgents are again using civilian populations as human shields in combat zones.

Those of us engaged in human rights documentation have often seen governments purposely abuse their own people. We should continue to take those governments to task. But we need to understand that "assuming power" in these states is very different from "being in control."

The "rule of law" is the bedrock of human rights, but it can take years to implement after decades of dictatorship, chaos and impunity. In the vast Congo, the phones don't work and the dirt roads lead to nowhere. In Rwanda, events of recent years have left only a thin cadre of experienced government administrators. As many Central African leaders have discovered, governing a country is far more difficult than winning the war.

Seemingly "neutral" human rights reports can have powerful political implications in a politically fragile region.

Many of my colleagues regularly urge that new governments be isolated and deprived of foreign assistance until they prove their fidelity to human rights. Last year, for instance, human rights activists lobbied the State Department to block aid to Congo's months-old government and to reduce assistance to Rwanda while that nation's government struggled to cope with the depredations of genocidaires. As a result, the Congolese government has so far received virtually no direct aid, though assistance to Rwanda wisely continues.

There may come a time when it is appropriate to reduce or eliminate aid to an incorrigible regime, but it is reckless policy to financially starve new governments when they most need assistance and guidance. Human rights activists must face the fact that, in Central Africa, withholding aid to a struggling young government is tantamount to pushing for its collapse -- which may lead to just the kind of mayhem that human rights organizations seek to avoid.

Does this mean that human rights advocates should remain silent? Of course not. But we should be alarmed that Central African leaders have come to see human rights organizations as a threat, and that our reports and policy recommendations put their struggling countries at risk. They have come to perceive us as political enemies -- not because we want to be, but because our tone is relentlessly confrontational and because we seem impatient with anything less than our ideal of human rights perfection and instant political pluralism.

Wartime human rights abuses do not necessarily invalidate the purposes of the war or the legitimacy of the victors.

All human rights activists abhor war. I have seen too many mutilated bodies and burned-out villages in Central Africa and elsewhere over the years. Massacres are never justified, and human rights agencies are correct to document and condemn them, as my own organization regularly does. But war is not clean, and human rights abuses committed in war do not necessarily make the victors unfit to lead after the shooting stops. Not all governments charged with human rights violations are equally guilty or equally irredeemable.

Mobutu's corrupt regime was worth ousting last year in Congo, but he would only relinquish power if defeated in battle, as he ultimately was. Genocidaires still active in Rwanda and eastern Congo were and are worth defeating, but only force of arms will do the job.

Too many human rights activists wrongly assume that all wars are wrong and all combatants must be despicable scoundrels lusting for blood and power. Some enemies are worth taking up arms against, even though innocent people will die in the process. Our own American history should have taught us that.

Human rights organizations do yeoman's work and usually have an unassailable claim to the moral high ground. Central Africa is a place of particularly fragile societies with haunted memories. It is time that we did more than catalog the region's human rights abuses. There is a time to shout and a time to help. If we want our message to be heard, the time to help is now.

Roger Winter is director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a nonprofit humanitarian organization based in Washington.