Human losses could not fully be quantified; the Soviet Union alone lost over twenty million human beings.

The loss was so high that the country had a shortage of males in the immediate post war era. The rest of humanity lost over thirty million poeple and some twenty-five million human beings became refugees.

Both sides did not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants, military bases and civilian targets, boys and girls, women and men, adults and infants. All were fair game; anybody  on the other side had to be despatched to hell.

The most infamous of the attrocities was the systematic extermination of gypsies, gays and Jews. One German concentration camp, the Auschwitz alone had the capacity to cremate 1.1 million bodies annually. By the time the war ended, some six million Jews had been gassed, cremated or starved to death.

The intensity and hatred could also be gauged by particular incidents. When Japan invaded the American military base, Pearl Habour, in two hours it destroyed 350 aircraft, 5 battle ships and sent 3,700 men to early graves.

Civilian populated cities were deliberately targeted. The Germans consistently bombed cities like London. The Allies targeted populations like those in Tokyo. In one infamous case, the Allies completely wiped out a heavily populated German city, Dresden that was of no  economic, military or strategic value.

The war was rounded off in August, 1945 with the Americans dropping  the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, which wiped out 60% of the city and killed 84,000 human beings.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped in Nagasaki which killed 40,000 people.
This was the height of bestiality, and humanity in taking stock decided that never again will human beings be allowed to degenerate to such levels.

The United Nations  (UN) Economic and Social Council met in 1946 to create a Human Rights Commission.

The Commission’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights draft was presented to the UN General Assembly in September 1948 and was adopted on December 10, 1948.

So on Wednesday, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be exactly sixty years in existence.

Eighteen years after its adoption, the UN adopted two international convenants; the International Convenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights ,and the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The Declaration and Convenants became known as the International Bill of Human Rights. In 1976, an Optional Protocol empowered individuals in subscribing countries to petition the UN on rights violations.

The first sentence in the Declaration states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The rights guaranteed include those to life, liberty and security of person. Also included are freedom from slavery and servitude, torture, cruel and degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest, detention or exile and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Other rights include, freedom of speech, opinion, belief, movement, asylum, family and freedom to association and assembly.

On the economic,social and cultural levels, the Declaration proclaimed the right to social security, work and free choice of employment ,equal pay for equal work, freedom to unionise, education and participation in the cultural life of one’s community.

With these rights, nobody, authority or country is allowed to act as it pleases. Ordinarily, it means that the Age of inpunity is gone; that the Age of Right is Might would no longer  be tolerated.

Doubtlessly, in the sixty years of the Declaration, the world has become a safer, better place. But we have not fully emerged from the state of nature. The Declaration is a red card to oppressors, a vow by humanity to maintain a standard.

It has become a declaration of defiance and a weapon against oppression. It is a battle cry and a rallying force where the might of humanity can be collectively deplored against those who want to drag us back to the Second World War horrors.

In the last six decades, the world has witnessed the rise of butchers like Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Idi Amin in Uganda, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and Mobutu Seseseko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo)

But we have also witnessed the rise of men and women who fought tenaciously against oppression. Humanity produced Martin Luther King Jnr  and Malcolm X in the United States, Kwame Nkrumah and Franz Fanon in Africa and Ernesto Che Guevera in the Americas.

The Second World War partially had its causes in the rise of an ideology of race superiority called Nazism. Unfortunately the last sixty years has produced another variant called Zionism.It is an ideology in which later generations of Jews who were the single main victims of Nazism, claim race superiority over their Palestinian and Arab neighbours.

Another variant of Nazism, Apartheid, arose sixty years ago. But it had its grave diggers in people like Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Nelson Mandela, Lilian Ngoyi, Miriam Makeba Albertina Sisulu, Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.

Humanity had vowed that no longer will massacres and genocide be tolerated. Unfortunately after the Declaration, we continue to witness these as were the cases of the Americans in Vietnam,Iraq and Afghanistan, the Soviets in Hungary and Poland, the Khemer Rouge in Cambodia, the Serbs in the defunct Yugoslavia, the Hutus in Rwanda and the Arabs in Darfur.

In the last sixty years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is 30 Articles have held the best prospect in ensuring that humanity will never again degenerate to the level of beasts. Its success lies in our hands.

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