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t was a moment of “sheer terror” – a heart-stopping moment that longtime human rights activist Jane T. Olson (B.A. ’64) said she will never forget. It happened on a foggy, drizzly morning in the autumn of 1992 ... while the former UNL journalism major and two other American women from the New York City-based International Rescue Committee (IRC) drove along a muddy road that ran across the war-torn landscape of rural Bosnia. As representatives of a global humanitarian organization dedicated to protecting wartime refugees, the three American women were headed toward a series of makeshift camps near the border between Bosnia and Croatia. On that chilly morning 17 years ago, the Bosnian refugee camps were jammed with desperate Muslim women, children and the elderly ... all of whom were in flight from the Serbian artillery shells that were rapidly destroying their world. Astonishingly brutal, the ethnic fighting around them had been triggered by the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and was now raging across the Balkans. Bosnia in the early 1990s was “hell on earth,” according to later United Nations reports that described mass killings and rapes there, and at least half a million mothers and their children had been driven out of their towns and villages into a series of filthy, ramshackle settlements ... where they were being ground to pieces by malnutrition, psychological trauma and spreading disease.
During her 30 years as a human rights activist who has traveled the globe to defend refugees in flight from war, Jane Olson has never stopped believing in “the basic goodness of the human heart.” Today, at 67, she chairs the board of trustees of the global Human Rights Watch – where she works daily to promote “the kind of world in which innocent people will no longer be held hostage to the cruelties and abuse of warfare.” By Tom Nugent
30 fall2009
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Olson pauses on “Sniper Alley” - the road to Sarajevo - in March 2003. (Courtesy photo).
An Azeri refugee woman kneads bread in a tent. (Photo by Jane Olson.)
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The situation in Bosnia and Croatia was deteriorating by the hour when Olson arrived there – and yet the suffering caused by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees was taking place beneath a cloak of international silence. In an effort to break that destructive silence and tell the world about the unspeakable suffering of the refugees, Olson and her female companions had flown to the Croatian city of Zagreb, then set out in a pale-gray, four-door sedan for nearby Bosnia. There they intended to visit several refugee camps just across the border from Croatia. With them was an interpreter, a young Croatian woman who spoke fluent English. Within three hours of their departure from Zagreb, however, the four women found themselves in life-threatening danger. Although the human rights activists had been warned to travel only on secondary back roads in order to avoid trigger-happy Serbian military patrols, they were impatient to reach the refugee camps. After crossing the Bosnian border around mid-morning, they made what Olson later call “a foolish mistake” by deciding to drive along a major highway through the region. It was shortly before noon when they came around a sharp bend and suddenly found themselves confronting a roadblock manned by soldiers. Beside a wooden guard shack, a Serbian militiaman in mud-stained camouflage dungarees stood holding a machine gun. Beside him, three other soldiers brandished automatic rifles. While they looked on menacingly, the man with the dark-snouted machine gun was pointing its barrel at the car and barking a steady stream of commands in indecipherable Serbo-Croatian. “They took our passports and it was absolutely terrifying,” said Olson, while recalling how the helpless women spent the next hour and a half sitting motionless beneath the guns of the Serbs. “We looked at each other, and we listened to the guard screaming stuff at us. Then he got on a walkie-talkie and started calling around, obviously looking for instructions on what to do. “We were pretty scared, because we’d already heard a lot of stories about how brutal the Serbs could be, if they thought you might be helping the other side. And we were especially frightened for our interpreter. She was Croatian ... and we knew that if the guards discovered that fact, her life would be in real danger. Fortunately, we’d supplied her with a [fake] passport – and for the next 90 minutes or so, all four of us pretended to speak only English. We told the guards that we were simply American tourists who wanted to visit some of the towns and villages in Bosnia, and then we waited to see what would happen next.” The next hour and a half was hellish, said Olson. “We just sat there in the car, waiting. Fortunately, I’d already been through a few tight spots in Nicaragua and El Salvador, during earlier peace missions, and I knew how important it was to remain calm. If you react from fear in that kind of situation, you’re gonna make mistakes – and they can be deadly.” But how do you remain calm when you’re looking into the barrel of a nearby machine gun? In order to calm herself, the then-50-year-old human rights activist resorted to a familiar, soothing activity. “Throughout the entire ordeal, I sat on the backseat and knitted!” she said with a chuckle, while vividly recalling the incident. “I was making a sweater for my son in Pasadena, you know, and I just kept on telling myself: ‘They’ve got machine guns, but I’ve got knitting needles. Where am I going to aim these?’ “I’m joking now, but it was quite scary at the time.” After what seemed like an eternity, the soldier with the M-60 suddenly lowered the barrel, returned the passports and waved them on. “We could hardly believe our eyes,” said Olson. “But there was no time to celebrate our good fortune – because we were already wondering: How long before we hit the next roadblock?”
In spite of that continuing danger, however, the wandering peace activists and the interpreter eventually made their way across the war-ravaged landscape and began to investigate conditions in the makeshift camps. Several years later, during a speech to a California civic group, Olson described a young Muslim woman she had met in one such desperate settlement, during one of her four subsequent trips to the former Yugoslavia. In doing so, she would also be describing why she has spent the past 30 years working tirelessly for human rights all around the globe. Fatima was less than 30 years old, about the age of my daughters at the time. Her experiences were some of the worst I had heard. She had witnessed the killings of her father, brothers and her husband. She fled across the mountains with her mother and young son but was captured by Serbian militia and separated from her mother. Fatima and her four-year-old son were taken to a school building which was being used to hold attractive young women in a virtual “rape camp.” She lost a five-month pregnancy from the violent abuse but finally escaped with her son and ended up at the refugee center, where I met her months later. She had not seen her mother again. Rather than being angry, bitter and depressed, as she clearly deserved to be, Fatima had a great spirit. She was a true survivor and leader. Within the refugee community, she formed the Society for Women Survivors of War Crimes. She emphasized the word “survivor,” not the word “victim.” ... At Fatima’s insistence, the society embraced women of all ethnicities, Serb, Croat and Muslim. “We are first of all women who have suffered,” she said. “We are much more alike than different.” All members had to pledge that they would forgive those who had violated them, and they would teach their children not to seek revenge, so that the cycle of violence could be ended. I learned so much from Fatima’s example. She reminded me – a human rights advocate – of the error of stereotyping people, of lumping people into any group or category based on race, religion, ethnicity or nationality. My friend Fatima was a very kind and very wise human being ... and I am a much better person today for having known her.
A Malawi mother and her twins visit an HIV/AIDS clinic. (Photo by Jane Olson)
A Helpful Suggestion From De an Copple
Jane Olson grew up in “Donna Reed’s hometown” of Denison, Iowa, as the daughter of a hard-working, third-generation Dutch-American poultry farmer named Lester Tenhulzen. Ask her to remember that early world of small-town Iowa, and she won’t pull her punches. “Those were very tough times for my parents,” she said with a smile of gentle nostalgia. “My dad was from Firth and Holland, Nebraska, and he’d come up during the Great Depression. There was no money at all, so he couldn’t go to college. And his life was pretty grueling, for the most part. As a youngster, he often spent the entire day picking bugs off corn and wheat plants. And when he would finally manage to fill up a big quart jar with the bugs – a process that took hours and hours – he’d get a nickel for it. “He was very poor and he was forced to work very hard. But he was also very smart and creative; he invented several new methods for raising chickens, and they really paid off on our farm. My dad was a highly intelligent man and a World War II Navy vet who would have made a marvelous architect or engineer. He was also very honest and independent-minded ... and to this day, I honor him for all the good things he taught me about being open-minded, hard-working and true to yourself in everything you do.”
Olson visits a remote village in nothern Ghana. (Courtesy photo.)
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Azerbaijan refugee families live in railroad cars beside a fertilizer plant. (Photo by Jane Olson.)
Blessed from birth with her own “independent streak,” she said, Jane grew up as a “tomboy who was crazy about horses” and who “often stood up my boyfriends because I was off galloping around in the cornfields.” But she also spent a lot of time in the Denison Carnegie Library, thanks to the influence of her mother (nee Lorraine Lister), who “played the pipe organ at the local Presbyterian Church, taught piano lessons and insisted we spend as much time reading as possible. She also regretted having been too poor to attend college and educated herself.” Encouraged by both her parents, Jane wound up following her sister Judy (B.A. ’63) to UNL in the fall of 1960. Within a few days, she and her loyal sis (who’d already been on campus a year) were both members of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and Jane was already launched on her undergraduate career as a double-major in journalism and history. “I’d already spent a couple of summers working part time on the newspaper in Denison,” she recalls, “and I loved everything about journalism. And as luck would have it, I wound up taking a course in investigative reporting from Neale Copple [the late UNL professor and Dean of Journalism R. Neale Copple, who died in 2003] – and he outfitted me with many of the reporting skills I would use later in my international volunteer work for human rights.” Describing Professor Copple’s “huge gift” for teaching students the craft of reporting, Olson recalled a project in which she was assigned to write about the history of different ethnic groups in the state of Nebraska. “I did a lot of reporting on that story,” she remembered, “but when it came to writing my ‘lead,’ I was stumped. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to begin that story! Finally, in desperation, I went to Professor Copple and told him my problem. “He thought about it for a few seconds, and then he asked: ‘Jane, can you tell me the names of the people in [reporting] class?’ And as I rattled the names off – German names, and Dutch, and Czech, and all the rest – I realized that our class, itself, was a terrific example of diversity in Nebraska! “After that, the job was easy,” said Olson, who was also the editor of the UNL yearbook during her senior year. “I wrote that lead in less than an hour and the project was off and running. And I never forgot the investigative reporting techniques he taught me. Years later, when I was interviewing refugees in Bosnia, Azerbaijan and Armenia – or tracking down reports of arms smuggling in Nicaragua and land mines in Colombia – I often relied on the principles of reporting he’d given us in that amazing class. “I’ve also been able to use my photographic training extensively since leaving UNL.”
Tr avels With A Joyful Desmond Tutu
Olson spoke in New York City on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Courtesy photo.)
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Only one week after nailing down her journalism degree at UNL, Jane Tenhulzen married the love of her life, attorney Ronald L. Olson. During 45 years of wedded bliss (“The first 40 years are the hardest,” she said jokingly; “after that, it’s a breeze!”), the two of them raised three kids ... even as Ron’s career took off and he became one of California’s most successful corporate lawyers. Olson spent a decade or so as a homemaker, although she said she often served as a volunteer in local organizations involving her children. But then one day in 1979 the telephone rang at her home in Pasadena ... and the caller turned out to be the rector of Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church. The Reverend George Regas, a veteran peace-and-justice activist, was planning a major two-day ecumenical conference called “Reversing The Arms Race” to push for a nuclear weapons freeze and promote cultural exchanges between U.S. and Soviet citizens. Would Jane Olson be interested in coordinating the conference? “My life changed as a result of that call,” said Olson. “I plunged into peace and justice volunteer work, and I never looked back.”
After helping to found the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race and working on California’s highly effective Nuclear Freeze Campaign during the early 1980s, Olson spent eight years directing the center. “After that, I was totally hooked on human rights work,” she said. “As my kids were growing up and finishing high school, I had been asking myself: What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Suddenly, I had my answer. Within a few years, I was traveling back and forth to the Soviet Union, and then to war zones in Europe and Latin America. And with each day I became more passionately interested in the continuing effort to protect women and children from the devastating impact of armed conflict.” For more than 10 years, Olson has chaired the board of the Landmine Survivors Network (now called “Survivor Corps”), which runs programs in heavily mined countries such as Bosnia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Jordan, El Salvador, Colombia and Vietnam. She also co-founded and served as the co-chair of the California Committee of Human Rights Watch from 1989 until 2000, and since 1992 has worked with the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children – an internationally recognized champion of human rights for which she traveled to Bosnia, the Caucasus and other conflict zones on many different occasions in order to call attention to the plight of suffering refugees. But her most significant role has surely been her leadership of Human Rights Watch, where she has served for 15 years on the board of directors and is now completing her sixth year as the third board-chair in the history of the 30-year-old humanitarian organization. Four years ago, Olson received the first-ever Eleanor Roosevelt Award from Feminist Majority for her continuing advocacy of human rights, all around the world. In recent years, she’s also been given a dozen other regional and national awards for her volunteer work. Yet she’s quick to insist that such recognition actually embarrasses her. “This work is not about me,” she will tell you bluntly, when you ask her to describe how it felt to receive the Eleanor Roosevelt medal. “I haven’t done anything special, and I do not want to be painted as some sort of heroic figure.” Added the laughter-loving and gung-ho grandmother of eight frisky boys: “I’ve had a very good life, with endless opportunities and with people who helped me every step of the way. All I’ve tried to do is to give some of that back – by finding ways to help other people become human rights supporters who could lend their voices to the cause of freedom and justice. “I don’t see my work as a burden or a struggle, not at all. For me, working on human rights issues is a joyful opportunity to celebrate the best that’s in all of us, and after 30 years, I’m more excited than ever about the future that awaits all of us.” She paused for a moment, and then her eyes gleamed with the memory of a significant encounter that she said had taught her a great deal. “I met [South African] Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu,” she said with a fond smile, “and I asked him how he had kept his spirits up during the difficult years of apartheid in his country. “You know what he told me? He said: ‘I really didn’t have a choice in the matter, you see? It’s just my nature to be hopeful, no matter what happens, and I’ve gotten so used to it over the years that I’ve simply come to think of myself as the Prisoner of Hope!’”
Olson and an Army engineer walk a landmine field in the Jordan Valley in October 2002. (Courtesy photo.)
A young boy puts a face on hunger in a refugee settlement. (Photo by Jane Olson.)
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A Terrifying Moment In N ic ar agu a
The terror struck on a bright summer morning, a few miles from Managua, Nicaragua, as human rights activist Jane Olson jogged along a country road. “Three other peace activists and I had gone to Nicaragua in the summer of 1984 in order to study the continuing violence between the U.S.-backed Contras and the forces of the leftist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega,” Olson recalled. “We had been hearing a lot from the U.S. State Department about how President Ortega was trying to export communism all over the region … and our study group from All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena wanted to see for ourselves what was really occurring on the ground in Central America.” On her first morning in the country, Olson rose early and set off on her usual three-mile jog. Clad in shorts and a T-shirt, she was satisfying her “California obsession” with jogging by trotting along a dirt road that flanked a huge banana plantation. “I was loping along quite contentedly,” she remembers, “and then all at once I spotted a group of men headed toward me. They were all swinging machetes, and I thought: Oh my God, they’re coming after me! I was scared to death – but as I got in closer, I tried to smile, and I kept on telling them in my very limited Spanish: ‘Hola! Como esta?’ “Well, they all started smiling and laughing. They were actually quite cheerful and friendly ... and I soon realized that they were simply headed off to work in the nearby banana plantation.” For Olson, who went on to make dozens of international human rights fact-finding trips (to the Soviet Union, to Latin America and to the Balkan countries that had been part of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, among others) after that 1984 visit to Nicaragua, the incident with the “swinging machetes” was the beginning of a new understanding about the “innate kindness” of people everywhere. “I learned something very important that morning,” she said with a quiet smile. “I learned that no matter where you go in the world, people are people. Most of the time, they’re kind and helpful, and if you’re friendly, they’ll usually respond with friendliness of their own. “After that experience in Nicaragua, I felt much less fear whenever I traveled abroad in support of human rights. I was always careful and cautious – but I was never really afraid again, after that frightening moment in Managua.”
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