The Right To Live A Dignified Life

It has been one long celebration starting from October - Deepavali, Hari Raya, Christmas and then New Year. And it has not ended yet. Come Jan 22, the “Monkey” will take over the reign for the Lunar New Year and we, Malaysians, will go through another round of balik kampung, open houses and other typical festive season merriment.

Couple with the school holidays and payment of year-end bonuses, I venture the opinion that this period of the year is indeed a happy one for most people, when “all my (our) troubles seemed so far away” (apologies to Lennon/McCartney).

This blogger, too, were caught up in the spirit of the season, so to speak. Though at his age, celebrations were a far cry from those in the heady days of the sixties. But reading the newspapers yesterday about Suhakam’s media statement on the publication of their report “Accessibility to Basic Needs” was indeed sobering.

It brought me down to earth. While we are celebrating, there are these “vulnerable groups in several areas” in Malaysia whose basic need for work, food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education are found wanting. The Suhakam statement referred to above named these groups as covering 198,300 and 69600 poor households in the rural and urban areas respectively, indigenous people, single mothers and the aged.

What hit me most was this paragraph – “Guided by Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human rights (UDHR), SUHAKAM is of the view that the right to live a dignified life cannot be achieved unless the basic necessities of life are adequately and equitably available to everyone.”

We Malaysians talk (and I include myself) frequently of freedom of speech, freedom of publication, freedom of peaceful assembly, this freedom and that freedom, or collectively Civil and Political rights. And some of us are prepared even for physical confrontation to achieve these rights.

But what right can be more important, for a human being, than the RIGHT TO LIVE A DIGNIFIED LIFE.

What is the use of being able to attend a political assembly and when it ends, while others make their way home, you do not have a proper roof over your head. What is the use of a free press when you cannot read because you never had the opportunity to attend school. Not because you don’t want to but because you were too occupied thinking of where your next meal would come from and would it ever come at all. Until the basic right has been attained, all the other rights are a luxury you can live without.

I really wonder whether the Government, the Opposition, the Activists, the Journalists, the Bloggers et al are serious about Human Rights. If so, why is that the basic right, human dignity, has not been articulated and fought for strongly all these years.