Human Rights Profiles
With a legacy of more than 80 recipients from nearly 40 countries, the Reebok Human Rights Award seeks to illuminate the work of dedicated activists.
Shining a Light on Stigmatization: Li Dan
During his astrophysics studies in Beijing, Li Dan explored the properties of the sun: solar luminosity, coronal mass ejections, sunspot cycles. Yet at the same time he studied the brightest object in view, he felt his attention pulling to the shadows, where he knew hundreds of thousands of his fellow Chinese were suffering the stigma of AIDS.
For years China had resisted acknowledging the magnitude of its growing HIV epidemic. The cost of this reluctance became most obvious in the province of Henan, where the unhygienic practices of government-sanctioned blood collection centers exposed as many as one million people—most of them impoverished farmers—to HIV.
When Li learned about the crisis, he traveled to Henan to see how he could help. There he met an elderly man whose son had died of AIDS. Fearing contamination, villagers had pressured the father to bury his son immediately, with neither a coffin nor funeral rites. So the father wrapped his son’s body in a bamboo mat, hoisted the sad burden onto his back, and trudged to his watermelon field. There he dug a hole, lowered his only child into it, and heaped yellowish brown earth over the body.
“I feel heartbroken whenever I look at a photo of that haphazard grave,” Li said. “When that young man was alive he was treated with no respect, and now that he’s dead he’s treated with so little dignity.”
The more Li learned about the plight of infected people in Henan, the less important his doctoral program in astrophysics seemed. So he abandoned his studies and made fighting for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS his mission.
First he filmed a documentary and shared the footage with the health ministry and journalists, raising awareness of Henan’s crisis both in China and internationally. Then he adopted the goal of helping Henan’s more than 100,000 AIDS orphans, many of whom face rejection by their communities and schools. Li opened the Dongzhen (Eastern Treasure) School for AIDS Orphans, but local officials pressured him to close it down. After he appeared on a popular news show to discuss AIDS and the orphanage, police detained and beat him.
Undeterred, Li continues to provide support for AIDS orphans and to lobby the Chinese government to respond to the country’s rapidly escalating HIV epidemic.
“I used to be an ordinary person living in Beijing, feeling that the world is beautiful and life is hopeful,” the 27-year-old recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award said. “But I have since witnessed the suffering of people who have lost their entire families to this virus—and their sense of personal safety to the stigma—and I am no longer one of those Beijing people.”
An Awakening to AIDS: Olayinka Jegede-Ekpe
The day she learned she was infected with HIV, Olayinka Jegede-Ekpe took to her bed and eventually fell into a troubled sleep, never expecting to awaken. The images she knew of AIDS had come from television and newspaper stories that used skeletons and skulls as illustrations. The behavior of the doctors and nurses earlier that day only confirmed her fears: They had stared at her as if she were a living corpse. When they broke the news, she expected death to be instantaneous.
The next morning, though, she did wake up. “There, in the mirror,” she says, “I looked just the same. I realized I wasn’t dying immediately, so I thought, what should I do?”
It was 1997, and, like many of her fellow Nigerians, Jegede-Ekpe didn’t fully grasp what it meant to be infected with HIV. Her country was still in denial about its growing epidemic, and the stigmatization of AIDS could sometimes be as deadly as the virus itself. One woman inadvertently betrayed her seropositive status on national television. Although the television producers had masked the woman’s face, her clothes betrayed her identity. Her neighbors later stoned her to death.
Jegede-Ekpe feared similar retribution. Even more, though, she feared for the future of her country. So she decided to take her diagnosis public.
“I was afraid,” she says. “But I knew that Nigerian youth needed to hear about AIDS, that we were all vulnerable. I knew if I didn’t speak out, millions of young people would soon be infected with HIV. And when I came forward, others would be willing to come forward.”
The reactions were swift. Members of her church choir asked her to stop singing with them. The principal of her nursing school tried to expel her, and her fellow students shunned her. The administration installed a lock on the door to the women’s bathroom in her dormitory and refused to give her a key. Yet Jegede-Ekpe fought for her rights, completed her training, and received her nursing degree.
The early stigmatization and discrimination she endured only fueled her determination to act on behalf of those infected. With a small group of activists, she helped establish the AIDS Alliance in Nigeria, the country’s first organization for people living with HIV/AIDS. When she discovered she had been infected through the poor hygienic practices of her dentist, she demanded that he change those practices.
As a prominent member of the National Action Committee on AIDS, Jegede-Ekpe became active in helping to implement the country’s HIV prevention policies. Her work with the Civil Society Consultative Group on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria and other organizations contributed to the adoption, by the federal government and several state governments, of the principle of “greater involvement of persons living with HIV/AIDS” in policy making and program development.
When Jegede-Ekpe realized that women’s concerns were being neglected, she founded the Nigerian Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (NWC+). Now, as executive director of the organization, she tries to empower women infected with HIV by teaching them their rights and providing them with gender-specific information about HIV/AIDS. Also through NWC+, she works to link together support groups of women living with HIV/AIDS across Nigeria and to empower others to become advocates for the human rights of women affected by AIDS.
Through this work, Jegede-Ekpe has lent a powerful voice to the large, growing, and often voiceless population of African women living with HIV/AIDS. Of the estimated 25 million HIV-infected people in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly 57 percent are women and girls.
“Many more African women than men are infected with HIV,” she says. “Women have a biological vulnerability to HIV, as well as an economic one, and many cultural factors contribute to the high rates of infection among women in Africa. So I started focusing my attention on women because we are the ones who will be dying at home or caring for people who are sick and dying of AIDS.”
For her advocacy of people living with HIV/AIDS, Jegede-Ekpe was named a recipient of the prestigious Reebok Human Rights Award in 2004. She has used the grant that accompanies the award to bolster the work of NWC+. Her organization has since established an educational trust fund for orphans and a crisis fund for women.
“Until women are seen as equal partners,” she says, “all the science in the world will not solve the AIDS crisis.”
From the Pain Come the Dream: Iqbal Masih
He squats on the long edge of a wooden platform, his eyes inches away from the intricate floral pattern he’s weaving. His breathing is raspy from inhaled wool fibers, and his fingers throb with early arthritis. Just as he raises his knife to trim a row of knotted threads, his leg twitches in its shackle, and the blade slices his skin. He twitches now with fear—of his blood splashing the flowers, of his debt growing, of another beating. He is five years old.
When Iqbal Masih was four, his father sold him into slavery for 600 rupees, the equivalent of 12 dollars, to pay for the wedding of an older son. For the next six years, Iqbal was shackled to a loom in a small carpet factory for up to 15 hours a day. When fatigue slowed his fingers, he received lashes on his back and head. Once, when he tried to defy his owner’s orders to work through the night, he was thrown into a dark closet, where he was tied at the knees and hung upside down.
The years spent hunched over a loom, inhaling lint and eating barely enough to survive, had bowed Iqbal’s spine, weakened his lungs, and stunted his growth. By the time he turned 10, he was still the size of a child half his age.
And while Iqbal’s bones stopped growing, his debt did not. He was charged for his training, his tools, and his scant meals. He was fined for making mistakes, for asking questions, and even for being sick. By the time he had been weaving carpets for six years, his pay had risen to 20 rupees a day, yet his debt had spiraled to an insurmountable 13,000 rupees. And Iqbal’s plight was not unusual. He was one of millions of Pakistani children in bonded labor. Across the country—and across the region—boys and girls were spending their childhoods tying knots in carpets, stitching soccer balls, crushing stones, rolling cheap cigarettes called beedis, soldering delicate silver flowers to jewelry, or shaping wet clay into bricks.
One day, Iqbal heard whispers about a freedom rally staged by the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF). It was 1993, a year after the Pakistani parliament had passed the Bonded Labor Act, which not only abolished the debt labor system but also canceled all previous debts that enslaved laborers had owed their masters. Risking yet another beating, Iqbal snuck away from the factory and crept into the gathering. There he was shocked to learn that his family’s debt to his owner had been cancelled a year—and several million agonizing knots—earlier.
During the rally, Eshan Ullah Khan, the founder of BLLF, noticed the shy, diminutive boy. “He sat cowering in a corner, emaciated and wheezing like an old man,” Khan says. “It was like he was trying to hide himself, to disappear, he was so frightened. But I felt there was something in this boy, that he had a strong will.”
Iqbal’s will was indeed stronger than his fear. After the meeting, he refused to resume his worn spot on the long wooden platform. A BLLF lawyer helped him obtain a freedom letter and, with the support of BLLF staff workers, he triumphantly returned to the carpet factory to declare his freedom. There he called to the other boys to join him. At the age of 10, he was finally free—free to reclaim his lost childhood, to learn to read and write, to play cricket with his friends, to watch kung fu movies.
Yet Iqbal declared he could not be free until all children were free. From his pain came a dream. He became a spokesperson for BLLF, traveling to Europe and the United States to call for an end to child labor and a boycott of Pakistan’s carpet industry, where most of the laborers were children. His activism helped free thousands of children from bonded labor, and Pakistani carpet sales began to fall. His outspokenness led to death threats, yet he remained undaunted.
In 1994, Reebok celebrated Iqbal’s heroism with its Youth in Action Award. During his trip to accept the award, he was offered a chance to attend college in the United States, a generosity he gladly accepted for the future. While in Massachusetts, he also visited Broad Meadows Middle School, where his life story shocked and outraged the students. They began an intensive campaign that resulted in hundreds of letters being sent to the leaders of countries where child-bonded labor persists.
Then one balmy spring evening, less than six months later, Iqbal perched on the crossbar of a bicycle. He was riding with a cousin and a friend, along a remote and dusty road, on his way to take dinner to his uncle. Suddenly, dozens of pellets of buckshot ripped into his flesh, killing him on the spot. Many blamed the carpet industry mafia for his death. Years later, the motive for his murder is still in contention, but the result is not: A young boy was shot down early in his ministry of fighting for justice for children.
Iqbal’s good work did not end with his death. From his pain came other dreams. When Broad Meadows Middle School students learned of Iqbal’s murder, for example, they launched a campaign to raise money for a school to educate poor Pakistani children in Iqbal’s hometown. They requested donations of 12 dollars because Iqbal had been sold for 12 dollars, he was 12 when they met him, and he was 12 when he was killed. The Broad Meadows Middle School raised more than $140,000 for the school, which opened two years after Iqbal’s death. There children are allowed to learn rather than just labor; there children are allowed to hope.
The story of Iqbal’s short life also inspired 12-year-old Craig Kielburger to join with friends to form Free the Children, a nonprofit youth organization that campaigns against child labor. Yet Craig felt he needed to witness the working conditions of South Asian children firsthand.
Although he was not even allowed to take the subway alone, Craig convinced his parents to allow him to fly halfway around the world. For seven weeks, he accompanied a human rights worker on a horrifying journey through the slums, sweatshops, and back alleys where so many children live as near captives. The tour completed Craig’s transformation from a middle-class Canadian student into an international activist.
Under Craig’s leadership, Free the Children has grown into an influential movement of young people around the world speaking out on behalf of exploited children. Like the small boy who had inspired them, Craig and the Broad Meadows Middle School students received Reebok’s Youth in Action Award for their advocacy of children.
Many centuries ago, and a continent away from the tragedy of Iqbal Masih’s murder, the poet Dante wrote that from a tiny spark may burst a mighty flame. Iqbal’s life may have been snuffed out early, but his memory has ignited people around the world, and his mighty flame continues to burn.
Lyrics from singer/songwriter Peter Gabriel—From the pain come the dream / From the dream come the vision / From the vision come the people / From the people come the power / From this power come the change—inspired the title of this essay and the book it introduces, From the Pain Come the Dream: The Recipients of the Reebok Human Rights Award. Gabriel served as a Reebok Human Rights Award Foundation board member.