Conducted by Sumita S. Chakravarty
A former cartoonist and two-time Emmy-award winning writer for the Children’s Television Workshop flagship show, Sesame Street, Christian Clark works for the United Nations where he has more than 25 years of experience in communications, advocacy and public information, leading campaigns for the BBC and the UN in North America, Asia, Africa and the Balkans. In the Rwanda crisis, he worked with refugees when millions of Hutus crossed the border in Goma, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1994 after the Rwanda Genocide. He also worked in Pakistan after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following 9/11 and is an advocacy focal point for internally displaced people for OCHA (the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). In the early 1990s, Christian was in charge of the Meena Project, an animated series addressing the status of girl children in South Asia.
He has also written and/or illustrated three previous graphic novels, including one for UNICEF and in 2017 the book, UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (illustrated under his pen name Krishna).
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Christian Clark is an alumnus of the Media Studies program at the New School.
I caught up with Christian after many years, and wanted to learn of his experiences, not only of living in various conflict zones around the world, but also of the turn he would like his career to take in the years ahead, as he transitions to being more of an educator of young people for social justice.
SC: You wear many hats, Christian, and I’m fascinated by the way in which you have brought the creative, the activist, the institutional or policy-oriented, and the academic or research mindset together. How has that experience been, and what have been the challenges or opportunities in crossing borders in this way?
CC: I chalk it all up to passion, determination, idealism and accident! There was a great New Yorker cartoon where a depressed white guy is looking out his living room window and it is raining and his wife says to her friend, “Ed used to be an incurable optimist, but now he’s cured!” I love that cartoon. For whatever reason I am an incurable optimist. When I graduated from McGill University (Canada), I worked as a free-lance cartoonist with my cartoons appearing in a wide variety of publications, including the Guardian and the Washington Post. I was also a writer for Sesame Street and it was at Sesame Street where I learned the importance of research and strong curriculum development for any educational project. I then joined the UN and was a UNICEF spokesperson in many of the world’s worst emergencies, from Somalia – after the “Blackhawk Down period,” to Rwanda after the genocide, Kosovo in 1999 and Pakistan after 9/11. In those places I saw the terrible effects of human rights violations and displacement. With the Meena project, before I started, they did formative research with more than 20,000 people in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. UNICEF, like Sesame Street, recognizes the power mass media can have in providing a catalyst for social change. Meena is an example of an “enter-education” strategy, which seeks to harness the drawing power of popular entertainment to convey educational messages. It illustrates how creative and exciting stories can be used to promote social issues in an appealing and provocative way. Meena became a household name and a popular icon on the tube in many homes in South Asia. In December 1995, she was identified by Newsweek Magazine as “one of the actors to emerge on the world’s stage in 1996.” It has also been incredible to live and work across cultures with the UN. But I think it’s only honest to say – lots of challenges but lots of opportunities using cartoons for social change.
SC: What gave you the impetus to present history through graphic novels or texts?
CC: As far as the book project on human rights goes, I think there is a critical need. The world recently commemorated the 70th anniversary of the iconic 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But we are also all witnessing a seemingly unprecedented assault on the very concept of human rights, as understood in the post-World War Two context. As has been noted, in part, due to concerns over the effects of globalization, increasing inequality and immigration, a surge of authoritarian populists in the global north and south have been elected on platforms of demonizing minorities, attacking human rights principles, and fueling distrust of democratic institutions. If left unchecked, this trend could well see decades of progress on the common values of inclusivity, tolerance, and respect that lie at the heart of human rights undermined. Arguably, the human rights movement, like the world it monitors, is in crisis. As the debate rages around the relevance of human rights in the 21st century, this book and associated human rights education programs will seek to address, head on, the issues concerning the current crisis of human rights. This will ideally be issued as a graphic history aimed at an academic and human rights advocacy audience; but also for a younger demographic of 13 – 23 year olds, in high schools and beyond, as part of an innovative and targeted global human rights education program.
SC: A fellow Canadian, the actor Jim Carrey, also uses cartoons for highly political subjects. Have you had any interactions with him or his work?
CC: Nope!
SC: You say above that you were a witness to some of the worst emergencies of recent times — in Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Pakistan. For most people, these have only been known through movies and other media accounts. What were those experiences like?
CC: Growing up in a suburb of Montreal, I always wanted to travel the world. My dad was an airline pilot and my mom an artist, so I think this was an influence. I backpacked around the world and spent months abroad in my youth. But it was only having joined the UN and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall that I saw, and the world saw, some of the worst crimes against humanity since World War II. The start or worsening of civil wars from Somalia to Rwanda for example. I was sent to be the spokesperson for UNICEF in Mogadishu a few months after the 1993 Blackhawk Down fiasco in Somalia and was in Goma, Zaire with a group of UNICEF staff working with other humanitarians in July 1994 trying to help the over two million Rwandans who fled their country in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Many of the refugees in fact were Hutu ethnics fleeing the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had gained control of the country at the end of the genocide. It was really tough, as the humanitarian relief effort was vastly compromised by the presence among the refugees of many of the Interahamwe and government officials who carried out the genocide, who some said, would use the refugee camps as bases to launch attacks against the new government.
The aid workers there saw thousands of people die from a cholera epidemic, bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. It really affected me as it did others. It took a long time for me to talk about it. My kids’ godfather was a US soldier who liberated a concentration camp in Germany at the end of World War II. He asked me about my experiences when I returned home. I told him I simply could not talk about it. He said it was the same way with him in 1945.
But like Victor Frankel noted, when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. There are two things above all I learned from working in war zones from Rwanda to Somalia, from Kosovo in 1999 to Pakistan after 9/11.
One – it is the local communities inside and outside a country which typically provide much if not most of the aid and comfort to those displaced – not necessarily the aid workers parachuted in. Look at Syria. Millions of Syrians have escaped across borders, fleeing the bombs and bullets that have devastated their homes.
According to UNHCR, Turkey hosts the largest number of registered Syrian refugees – currently 3.6 million. In Lebanon, life is a daily struggle for more than a million Syrian refugees, who have little or no financial resources. Around 70 per cent live below the poverty line. In Jordan, over 655,000 men, women and children are currently trapped in exile. Approximately 80 percent of them live outside camps. It is estimated that 93 percent of refugees in Jordan live below the poverty line. Even Iraq is seeing a growing number of Syrians arriving, hosting more than 246,000, while in Egypt UNHCR provides protection and assistance to more than 126,000.
According to 2018 Pew Research Center estimates since the start of the conflict, only an estimated 52,000 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada and another 21,000 have resettled in the United States. It is shameful, in my view.
The second thing is what I said earlier – no justice, no peace. Now that I have kids of my own, I think I would have had a nervous breakdown had I known what it was like to be a parent and witness what I saw in Somalia or Rwanda. To see your kids shot, raped or starving. I don’t think I could ever forgive anyone who touched a hair on my children’s head. But almost 25 years ago in South Africa they had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, inspiring other similar efforts around the world. It opened a way to talk about the individual and systemic wrongs committed under 43 years of apartheid. Over seven years, from 1996, some 2,000 people, perpetrators, and victims told their stories of what they’d done or what had been done to them, under apartheid. But that was just a drop in the bucket.
Today in most post-conflict countries, murderous perpetrators have gotten away with the worst of crimes. This is, sadly, the norm.
After World War II, the United Nations was created to try to stop massive violations of human rights, including genocide. It has not worked out so well, not for the people of Rwanda and certainly not for the 8,000 Bosniaks, mainly men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica who were massacred during the Bosnian War in 1995.
The human rights project I am working on is in part my attempt to make sense of what I saw and try to honor the memory of those whose lives were ruined by war. The project basically says, listen, everyone’s life is as valuable as each other’s no matter where you live, no matter how rich you are, no matter the color of your skin, or whom you worship.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 probably could not be agreed upon today in the current political environment. The declaration, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, was the result of the experience of the Second World War. With the end of that war, and the creation of the United Nations, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.
I love what Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Chair of the United Nations Commission that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 wrote about in response to the question “Where Do Universal Rights Begin?” She wrote: “In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
SC: Can you briefly describe the book project that you are currently working on? Who are your partners in moving this vision forward?
CC: As you can infer, my first great love has always been cartoons, and using art for social change. If it all comes together, I will get permission to work on the project – a graphic history of human rights. I will illustrate the book and be project manager for the project. It’s all in the preliminary planning stages – I have a writer and a research and curriculum team on board. Currently. I also am in discussion with several eminent persons who can serve as content advisors – including hopefully, the UN High Commission for Human Rights, a professor of human rights at Yale, Amnesty International (we will soon start testing the concept through their education project which reaches some 1 million people) and the School of Oriental and African Studies’ charity PositiveNegatives (positivenegatives.org).
Partnerships with human rights groups globally will be critical for the project – I don’t intend for this to be a “Western” project!
SC: We are living through unprecedented times, not only because of the global pandemic, but in terms of the fight for racial, economic, and social justice, issues clearly close to your heart. As someone who witnessed upheavals in the past related to group violence, what lessons do you think we can take away from those events?
CC: No justice, no peace. I saw in so many emergencies unless there is justice in a post-conflict situation there will not be a lasting peace. I think what is happening today is a good thing – we need to recognize past injustice but work together for an inclusive future. I hope the project I am working on can contribute in some small way. From Dalit lives matter in South Asia to Black lives matter in the US, the struggle is the same everywhere – it just differs in intensity.
SC: What do you consider some of the key intersections between the movement of peoples and recent developments in media technologies, particularly the widespread use of social media? I suppose I’m asking what drives cultural conflicts between ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’ in certain situations (as in the current U.S.) and whether social media platforms amplify or reduce these conflicts.
CC: One thing I did at the UN I am particularly proud of is helping pilot globally a Communications with Communities (CwC) project. It has yet to reach its full potential but in my view it is an incredibly important emerging field of humanitarian response that helps to meet the information and communications needs of people affected by crisis.
CwC is based on the principle that information and communications are critical forms of aid, without which disaster survivors cannot access services or make the best decisions for themselves and their communities. People working on CwC help disaster survivors to access the information they need and communicate with people assisting them. CwC is an operational field of work distinct from conventional public information/advocacy.
Communication is a two-way process, and effective CwC strategies facilitate dialogue between survivors and responders, both local and international. CwC projects establish ways disaster survivors can source the information they need and ensure their voices are heard by responding agencies. For example, CwC projects have included humanitarian radio programs and newsletters. CwC work utilises all available communications channels, including newsletters, mass media, SMS and face-to-face conversations. CwC is a philosophy and an approach, the principles of which are applicable across the humanitarian program cycle, from preparedness (such as early warning systems) to program implementation, and monitoring and evaluation (such as including affected communities’ perspectives in evaluations).
CwC is also an essential element in ensuring accountability and transparency, which require the effective exchange of information between disaster survivors and responders.
In the case of self-help information—such as advice on treating diseases at home, especially for those who cannot be reached by conventional aid—CwC delivers information as a form of life-saving assistance.
This CWC work is only really possible and scalable because of new media technologies, particularly social media – of course there are huge big data and privacy issues but it does help people most in need of information – though it does not admittedly mitigate cultural conflicts between ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’ in most situations – these two examples are very interesting:
https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories/syrian-refugee-google-map-perspective
The planned human rights education (HRE) program is intended to use these same technologies and new media to bring activists and young people together from around the world to share and discuss tactics and strategies. The envisaged curriculum would be built around each of the proposed six chapters of the book, which address the six distinct eras from ancient times to today, utilizing for discussion and reflection the summation discussion at the end of each chapter.
We are currently working with Amnesty International for testing the concept through their education project which reaches some 1 million people to be sure that cartoons are the medium to educate and then to ask respondents how they want to receive our information. That will be fascinating and innovative. There is also growing interest in cartoons by academic institutions. Oxford University for instance has done some really interesting analysis on this field (see https://torch.ox.ac.uk/comics). As they note, comics and graphic narratives, a form long under-recognised by mainstream publishers and academic institutions alike, have in recent years begun to receive the critical attention they deserve. Although the use of comics to tell a story extends back to the nineteenth century, inspired by the works of now canonised comics artists such as Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, comics are now deployed across a range of genres tackling more issues and contexts than ever. Since the publication of “Maus” in 1980, comics and graphic narratives have melded a dizzying array of different artistic and literary techniques addressing critical cultural, humanitarian, social and political issues.
I was inspired in the early stages of developing my concept by the work of Professor Micheline R. Ishay, a Professor and Director of the International Human Rights Program at the University of Denver who has developed a body of critical work that has been used predominantly by University teachers and students for over two decades. Her books include Internationalism and Its Betrayal as author, and The Human Rights Reader and The Nationalism Reader as an editor.
Professor Ishay’s most influential work is arguably The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. This groundbreaking treatise has proven invaluable for countless scholars and students, as well as human rights advocates, seeking a deeper understanding of the historical foundations of modern human rights. The book recounts the dramatic struggle for human rights across the ages and, as importantly, sought to give context and contribute to the tumultuous and highly controversial human rights discourse following the end of the cold war.
While I am still firming up the final elements of the book project, it will include high quality photographs, cartoons and illustrations on every page. It will seek, like Micheline’s original book, in an amusing and often irreverent way, to trace the complex intellectual history of human rights and chronicle the clash over the last 2,000 years of social movements, ideas, and armies that have played a part in the struggle for human rights. The book will illustrate, above all, no matter how dire the situation might be at any given time, the human rights movement has always evolved and progressed from one era to another, albeit in fits and starts.
The book will address thorny and thought-provoking questions that have shaped human rights debate and scholarship including: Are human rights Western impositions or universal values? Why did the European vision of human rights triumph? Does globalization advance or undermine human rights? Do human rights originate in or constrain religion? Has socialism made a lasting contribution to the legacy of human rights? Did the anti-colonial movement respond to repression or simply shift its source? Are human rights universal or culturally bound? Must human rights be sacrificed for national security? Is there a future of human rights in today’s world?
As the narrative unfolds, however, we will see those who were denied rights in one historical period were able to claim them in the next. This is the case because, albeit slowly, the history of human rights shows a clear dimension of progress.
SC: How do you see your current projects as affecting school curricula in a positive way?
CC: A key proposed partner of the project for the high school audience component globally is the UK based Why Comics?, an education NGO which brings contemporary humanitarian and social issues into the classroom in the form of literary comics. To date, they have disseminated free interactive educational resources to over 650 schools in 27 countries and their materials are currently available to over 27,000 teachers worldwide. The book will be made available, in part through their new website, as part of their free KS2-5 interactive comic books and national-curriculum lesson plans for multiple subjects. We would explore other avenues for getting the project into schools.
The NGO is an amazing one. It is based at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and has been producing literary comics about contemporary social and human rights issues for over four years. They combine ethnographic research with illustration and photography, adapting personal testimonies into art, advocacy and education materials. PositiveNegatives has worked extensively with a range of organisations such as The Guardian, Open Society Foundations (OSF), BBC, The Nobel Peace Centre, Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the United Nations (UN), and with leading academic institutions such as Harvard South Asia Center, SOAS and University of Sussex.
I am looking forward to identifying partners and amplifiers like them to explore new ways to bring new ideas and programs into schools whether in North or South!
SC: You have given us so much to think about, Christian. Thank you! I wish your project every success. And we will follow its progress over the coming months and years.
