Patrick Stawski, human rights archivist for Duke University Libraries, thumbed through a stack of 1997 snapshots of a village in Burma: The charred ruins of homes and buildings; a group of villagers survey the wreckage; a woman holds a bloody bandage to her forehead.
The next photo revealed a dead man, sprawled face down next to an open car door, blood spreading out from under his body. Next, an anonymous black-haired woman, her unmarked face white in death, lies still on a dirty cot.
The photos were taken by staff members of the International Monitor Institute, and have a permanent home at Duke's Archive for Human Rights, part of the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library.
Patrick Stawski goes through the files for Norris Taylor, who died of natural causes on North Carolina's death row in 2006. Inactive files from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation have recently been added to Duke's Human Rights Archive. (Photo by John Strange)
"This work is central to human rights work," said Stawski, who joined Duke Libraries nearly a year ago as its first human rights archivist. "It gives voices to people who don't have voices, gathers testimony of things that will otherwise go unseen or invisible and goes in when the government has destroyed records and tries to create the testimony."
The stories told in the archive also enhance human rights education and research at Duke, faculty and library officials said.
"The archive reflects the fact that the human rights movement has come of age and has a large body of original and valuable materials," said Robin Kirk, director of the Duke Human Rights Center. "To know where we are going, we have to have an understanding of where we have come from. At a time when human rights have become a critical and hotly debated issue, Duke is investing in a resource that will both feed academic inquiry and enrich our understanding of this vital topic."
University Librarian Deborah Jakubs said the archive ensures that these important stories can be told through primary sources.
"Duke's human rights archive brings history into sharp focus through primary sources that document society at its best and its worst, the horrors of the abuse of the most basic rights contrasted with the heroic efforts of those who have worked to counteract those abuses," Jakubs said. "Reminding us of these events, recovering and preserving the memory of the victims of abuse, are all part of the responsibility of a serious archive."
Recent additions to the young collection include the inactive records from Durham's Center for Death Penalty Litigation and documents from Student Action with Farmworkers; Global Rights, an international human rights advocacy group; and Coletta Youngers, senior fellow with the Washington Office on Latin America.
Already in the collection are the papers of Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a noted human rights activist who worked against the military government of Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s; and Peter Storey, professor emeritus of Duke Divinity School and a former Methodist bishop who worked closely with Archbishop Desmond Tutu against apartheid in South Africa.
Plans for the archive originated four years ago when Duke attempted to acquire the records of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The records ended up at Columbia University, but the experience made Duke leaders realize that a new human rights archive was necessary.
The archive is intended to be international in scope, but one current focus is human rights in the United States and American human rights groups that have international offices. Stawski said he is especially interested in the historical connection between human rights and civil rights.
"People usually think of human rights of something outside the United States," but questions of immigration, the death penalty and prison conditions, the working conditions of farm workers, clearly are part of the human rights discourse, he said.
"We seem to have problems reflecting on ourselves in a human rights view," Stawski said.
Stawski himself is a lifelong student of human rights abuses. A native Argentinean, he and his family left the country in 1974, "just before the worst of the Dirty War," referring to Argentina's military government-sponsored violence against citizens from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
That campaign is an important part of the Marshall Meyer papers. The collection includes a list of 40,000 people who were "disappeared" in Argentina. The papers include the testimony of parents and family members, "in their own handwriting, dated, stamped. It's very powerful material," Stawski said.
Stawski said he also finds the inactive files from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, containing criminal records and testimony and personal correspondence of now-dead inmates who were on North Carolina's death row, to be compelling. In one letter to his attorneys, an inmate wrote about receiving new medication to help with the voices he hears in his head. He said he hoped he'll be able to sleep, but he doubted that the voices would ever go away.
These archives can "bring you directly to a close connection to what actually happened, to these people's experiences and how they existed within these events," Stawski said. "They give you firsthand experience you don't get in books."
Stawski said his priority, and that of Duke Libraries, is to make the archives accessible to the public. For example, the Holocaust Museum has been using the archives to research contemporary examples of genocide.
"Duke is a great place for this archive," he said. "We're not interested in gaining a trophy collection and locking it away.
"There's a huge emphasis here on bringing classes and students in to work with the material and on publicizing our collections and on making them available as much as possible," Stawski said. "These records have very powerful stories to tell, and it's our responsibility to make sure they keep telling those stories."