Abe Osheroff and Gunnel Clark Endowed Human Rights Fund for Students
 

Abe Osheroff (1915-2008) dedicated his life to the pursuit of social justice. As a young man, Abe was active in community organizing efforts in his native Brooklyn. At the age of 20, he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of U.S. volunteers who fought alongside the Spanish Republican forces in an effort to stave off the fascist Franco regime. It was in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War that Abe’s deep commitment took shape: although he was wounded in battle, and Franco’s forces went on to install a fascist dictatorship that ruled Spain for 36 years, Abe’s willingness to put his life on the line for justice was not vanquished.

Back in the United States, Abe went on to participate in political organizing and social activism. He returned to military service, signing up for the US Army to fight against Hitler once the US entered the war. In the United States, too, his work required courage and commitment. As a labor union organizer working among coal miners in Pennsylvania and Ohio, for example, he was repeatedly threatened for his work. Similarly, when Abe participated in the civil rights movement, building a community center with residents of Holmes County, Mississippi during the famed Freedom Summer of 1964, his car was firebombed and he was threatened by police because he was working with African-Americans. His efforts later took him to Central America and led him to be a vocal critic of the war in Vietnam. Abe also returned to Spain in the early 1970s, where he produced a documentary film, Dreams and Nightmares, which exposed the US government’s support of the Franco dictatorship. For Abe, it was an outrage and injustice that his own government would lend support to a fascist regime, and particularly important that American citizens demand accountability for what was done in their name.

Within these movements for social change, Abe was known as not only a talented and courageous organizer, but a critical thinker. Once a member of the Communist Party -- and persecuted under McCarthyism for his affiliation – Abe publicly renounced the American Communist Party when he learned of the horrific abuses committed under Stalin. And although Abe travelled to Nicaragua to help provide poor peasants with decent living conditions, and was deeply critical of US intervention there, he also spoke out against corruption and abuses of power under the Sandinistas. For Abe, no cause was more important than that of basic human decency, and the defense of the vulnerable against abuses of power – what Abe called “radical humanism.”

Later in life, Abe and his wife, Gunnel Clark, settled in Seattle, where they were active participants in movements opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abe also engaged in many efforts to share his energies with young people, among them teaching at the University of Washington.

The Abe Osheroff and Gunnel Clark Fund provides financial resources for undergraduate and graduate students to support human rights projects that promote social change through direct action and adhere to the principles that guided Abe’s lifelong activism.

For more about Abe Osheroff, please visit the following websites:
www.seattlepi.com/local/156359_osheroff13.html
www.abeosheroff.org
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html
 

2012 Award Recipients

Katherine (“Katy”) Lundgren is an Honors student in her third year of undergraduate studies at the University of Washington, double majoring in Geography and Comparative Religion. She has been involved with United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) for two years, participating in at least two key efforts. First, she helped lead direct action, including three sit-ins which resulted in the arrest of 50 students, to insist that the University reconsider its business relationship with food service provider Sodexo, accused of multiple labor rights violations in its operations around the world. These efforts were ultimately successful when the University decided not to continue its business relationship with Sodexo.

More recently, Katy has been active in USAS’ efforts to promote implementation of the Designated Suppliers Program, an innovative approach to apparel production that would require brands to commit to producing all of their collegiate apparel in factories in which workers have fair pay and representation. Rather than the “race to the bottom” typical of the global apparel industry – in which factories compete to attract brand orders based on low prices and quick turnaround, often at the expense of workers’ rights – the DSP attempts to establish an incentive for brands to build sustainable relationships with factories who take workers’ rights seriously.

This past February, Katy served on a USAS delegation to Honduras, where she visited with unionized apparel workers and learned about their struggles. This summer, with support from the Osheroff-Clark Fund, she will travel to Nicaragua, and from there to El Salvador to further relationships with workers on the ground. As Katy wrote in her application, “With apparel brands moving much of their production back to Central America, the unions with whom we partner have been emboldened by recent successes to move forward with creating DSP compliant factories. This summer I [will participatie in an] eight-week internship, partnering with the Solidarity Center and United Students Against Sweatshops to help this project move forward with constant communication between USAS and unions. I will be placed in Managua, Nicaragua, where I will partner with local organizers to support strategic organizing in apparel factories there. I will be one of six students interning in key countries to facilitate communication between USAS and unions, support organizing efforts by unions, and document working conditions in potential DSP factories.”

Janey Greenstein and Mina Manuchehri are two graduating seniors in international studies whose records reflect deep commitments to social justice through different activities: Janey, for example, is active with the campus chapter of Students for Choice, and Mina conducted research last year as part of a Center for Human Rights project investigating corporate practices contributing to human rights violations in the production of bananas and palm oil in Guatemala. They are also both outstanding scholars, and have been working under Prof. Godoy’s supervision for the past 3 months on a project examining declassified US government documents pertaining to the Salvadoran civil war from 1980-1992.

The Center for Human Rights has been working in partnership with a Salvadoran association of victims of torture and other crimes against humanity from civil-war era El Salvador, seeking truth, justice, and reparations. This year, our collaboration has deepened as we have moved to select and document a number of paradigmatic cases of crimes against humanity committed during this period, to present before the Salvadoran and international courts. Our partners in El Salvador have been visiting survivors and family members of the disappeared, and gathering evidence on the ground, as our team in Seattle has delved into the declassified documents in search of clues that may be pertinent to these specific cases. Janey and Mina are among a team of 6 who have undertaken the tireless and unglamorous work amidst these documents; there are thousands of pages to be read, and only a few contain information relevant to these cases, so the work has a “needle in the haystack” quality to it. But it’s vitally important; their efforts have uncovered important clues which we’ve been able to share with our project partners in El Salvador, leading to real breakthroughs in concrete cases. Both of them had the opportunity to travel to El Salvador this February, and to meet some of the beneficiaries of this research, an experience that moved them and inspired them to deepen their commitment to the work.

This summer, Janey and Mina will travel to Washington DC to continue their research in the US declassified documents pertaining to El Salvador, through an unpaid internship with the National Security Archive. Although some of the declassified documents relevant to El Salvador have been digitized, and are therefore available for us to consult in Seattle, thousands more are available only in hardcopy form. So Mina and Janey will be working in the Library of Congress and National Archives, both examining the documents that are available, and making note of those that aren’t, to fuel future Freedom of Information Act requests. We hope that through their efforts, we might continue to dig up vital information that can be shared with survivors of violence in El Salvador who are still searching for justice some twenty years after the war.

As Mina and Janey wrote in their joint application for the Osheroff-Clark Award, “The research we will be conducting this summer through the National Security Archive will play a key role in documenting government-sponsored repression during the Salvadoran Civil War. Given that the U.S. was heavily involved in shaping Salvadoran governmental policy throughout this period by aggressively pursuing its own Cold War policy interests, our research directly seeks to investigate the lack of accountability demonstrated by U.S. policymakers in failing to act upon knowledge of flagrant human rights abuses committed by the Salvadoran government. Thus, our work in collecting declassified documents will promote greater accountability for U.S. institutions as a part of a larger effort to produce a detailed, evidence-based account of a past act of U.S. intervention that prioritized the elimination of perceived insurgents at the expense of countless civilians.

In upholding the spirit of Abe Osheroff and Gunnel Clark’s commitment to fostering respect for human rights, our work is driven by the recognition that while the human rights abuses committed during the war are acts of the past, they nonetheless carry their impact into the future. The legacies of such abuses are evident in the continued efforts by family members of the “disappeared” victims to search for information about their loved ones, as well as victims of torture who continue to seek justice for the egregious human rights abuses they were subjected to by Salvadoran military personnel.

Further reinforcing the urgency and importance of our work in collecting documentation of the relationship between the U.S. and El Salvador governments during the Civil War is the country’s recent shift towards its authoritarian past in appointing a former military general as the head of the National Civilian Police in January 2012. As the citizen security crisis in El Salvador continues to escalate, the need to document the explicit role played by Salvadoran and U.S. military institutions in past human rights abuses is becoming increasingly important in gaining public support for reducing rather than expanding military involvement in domestic policing. Furthermore, public awareness is also necessary in urging U.S. policymakers to adopt more accountable foreign policy measures that humanize populations rather than treat them as a means to achieve U.S. interests.”

2011 Award Recipients

Ana Lottis ~ Ana traveled to El Salvador for two weeks, to work with COPPES, CHR's project partners in the El Salvador History, Memory, and Justice Project, and create an initial inventory of the documents in their possession.  She scanned and translated some preliminary samples of what the project's full archive will later contain. In this sense, Ana's work is one piece of a larger institutional effort, but a vital one in helping launch what we hope will be an important collaboration.

Geoff Morgan ~ Purchased new equipment and conducted water quality testing aimed at pinpointing the source of water contamination as part of the the CHR's Human Rights and Natural Resource Management Project in Guatemala.  Through this work, Geoff helped establish the specific responsibility of agroindustrial corporations.  

2010 Award Recipients

Erin Murphy ~ Collaborated with Ngecha Artists Association, Kenya, on art as a medium for promoting dialogue about human rights

Peter Morris ~ Completed a project in conjunction with Japanese NGO, Human Rights Now, to provide legal assistance to Burmese migrants in Thailand