ROCK AND RIGHTS THE CONCERT CRUSADERS

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL'S WORLDWIDE TOUR, HAMMERING HOME A MESSAGE

Logistically, it's the most ambitious rock tour ever assembled.

Not so much in terms of stages and stars, though with Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and Senegal's Youssou N'Dour, "Human Rights Now!" may be the most distinguished multiact event to hit the road. But the schedule is even more awesome. In six weeks, the tour will cover 35,000 miles, touching down in 13 countries on five continents.

Where earlier cause concerts like Live Aid and its progeny have been concentrated in the United States and England, this tour has a larger reach, going into Eastern Europe (Hungary), South America (Brazil and Argentina), and most importantly, to the Third World (Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, India and Costa Rica).

What really sets it apart, though, is an ambitious agenda that has turned a concert tour into a crusade.

"We're trying to take this message to the world: You have a right not to be tortured; you have the right to a trial; you have a right not to be murdered," as Sting puts it. "This is not a given in most of the world."

Tomorrow, the tour pulls into Philadelphia's JFK Stadium, the first of three American stops. Human Rights Now! -- which kicked off Sept. 2 at London's Wembley Stadium and concludes Oct. 15 in Buenos Aires -- is designed to promote awareness of Amnesty International and to mark the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations. That declaration proclaims the rights and fundamental freedoms of all human beings and calls for them to be respected by all peoples and governments.

AI -- the international human rights organization that seeks the release of prisoners of conscience, regardless of ideology; fair and prompt trials for all political prisoners; and an end to torture and executions -- was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a decade ago for its efforts to promote the 30th anniversary of the declaration. AI also organized the 1986 Conspiracy of Hope tour in North America, but Human Rights Now! dwarfs that effort.

According to Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. and executive producer of both the 1986 and 1988 tours, "the only way to show that the declaration is everybody in the world's document was to play the world and not just do the West."

"It's fundamental that we include all parts of the world," says Peter Gabriel. "We can be very insular in the West -- we talk about 'many years without war' and there are 10, 20 wars going on around other parts of the world without us being directly involved, though in many ways we are."

To be sure, Gabriel concedes, he and the other stars are "far better known in the U.S. and Europe than we are in some of the countries we're playing." But just going to these places, he says, "will hopefully get us a large amount of media noise in promoting the Universal Declaration."

Media noise. Rock stars promoting social idealism and dispensing practical information though grand events, grand gestures and television hookups. It's been an increasingly common formula since July 1985, when 150,000 fans packed Wembley and JFK stadiums for Live Aid. An estimated billion people tuned in to a sudden global jukebox focused on the horrors of famine in East and Central Africa, in the process raising a hundred million dollars and many more consciences. Since then, we've had several Farm Aids, Ferry Aid (for victims of the British ferry disaster), Self-Aid (for the unemployed in Ireland), Hands Across America, Artists Against Apartheid, Greenpeace concerts, AIDS events, the annual British benefit concert Prince's Trust, all rooted in pop music, most disseminated by radio and television.

In June there was the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Salute from Wembley, another sellout crowd and another billion viewers around the world focused on a pop event that in turn focused on the imprisoned South African leader. More than a million people will catch the Human Rights Now! tour live, and the global jukebox will again engage its billion or so on Dec. 10 -- the actual anniversary of the signing of the declaration -- when HBO broadcasts and syndicates to the world a three-hour concert-documentary chronicling the tour.

Like the Mandela concert, Human Rights Now! is not about fund raising. In London before the kickoff concert, Healey noted that "this tour is not about charity, it's about justice. It's time to turn down the volume of pain in this world of ours. Our goals are simple -- to turn governmental promises into governmental guarantees, to take our candles and turn them into flames, and to take our voices and turn them into thunder."

More specifically, Healey hopes that the current tour will be about membership.

"In the year after the Conspiracy of Hope tour, we got 100,000 new members," he notes. "Much of our {700,000-member} organization was post-40 and most of the people we picked up were young people, which will balance us and give us a future human rights generation.

"One idea that I've talked over with the musicians is that half the world is under 25 and most of that world is poor and has never had the opportunity to read and write. They too should be able to participate in the human rights movement ... and the only way to get to them is not through Amnesty's endless reports and thick volumes of documentation, but through music."

"I wouldn't want to take it too far," Gabriel says, but "in some ways I think we have the trust of the people we play to." Rock is "a language through which young people communicate all over the world and that's a historical precedent in many ways. Not to say that it has enormous direct power -- I don't think it does -- but its indirect influence is very strong. It helps to shape the way people think about things ... To have that prominence in a culture and not use it for disseminating ideas and information would be an incredible abuse."

Sting points out that the Conspiracy tour not only brought in new members and raised several million dollars, but "a couple of people we focused on were freed. I can't think of a more successful enterprise that I've been involved with. The rewards that we received are 10 times what we put in, meeting people who'd been freed, people who'd been tortured.

"It's an ultra-reality, if you like, and, being a rock star, I live in a world that isn't real. Meeting someone like that puts your life in perspective."

Asked whether the new Amnesty constituency generated by the first tour represented more than a moment's passion, Healey says that the attrition rate is roughly the same as that of AI members joining any other time. "But there's depth: We now have 1,000 high schools that work with us -- we send them information, they gather signatures. We never had a high school with us before the Conspiracy of Hope tour. We're on 500 college campuses across the country -- it used to be around 250 -- and they do actions, campaigns, prisoner work."

"You're planting seeds down the line," says Gabriel. "Young people come to see you and 10 years down the line those people are going to have power."

"Young people need to realize the power they can have over the future and over their own destiny. If you follow the line of the cynics on compassion fatigue, you end up with a world that doesn't care, that feels impotent, that is unable to voice its feelings or to have any influence over its own life, and that's very self-destructive."

Rights and Reeboks Like the Mandela concert in June, the Human Rights Now! tour is quite different from the three-year-old granddaddy of cause events. In retrospect, Live Aid has assumed mythological proportions, but it should be remembered that the 1985 production had many advantages besides being first, biggest and probably the best. For one thing, it was a humanitarian telethon inspiring universal instincts through haunting images of starving, dying children. Live Aid was devoid of specific political content; Ethiopia's Marxist dictatorship was never taken to task. And ripples of increased awareness were being felt long after the last call to an 800 number.

All the subsequent cause events have offered variations on the Live Aid process. The Mandela concert, for instance, was the most specifically political -- and not surprisingly, the most controversial. In the United States, critics accused the Fox network (which carried six of the 11 hours broadcast by the BBC) of trivializing the event by editing out much of its context and spirit, turning it into nothing more than an all-star pop gathering (Fox even changed the name to "A Concert for the Freedom of the World").

The BBC came in for its share of criticism from the right, which accused it of being "hijacked by left-wing extremists," and from the left, which accused it of not being political enough. Government-regulated, the BBC had to ensure that the Mandela concert did not become a political platform, warning artists to guard their tongues, threatening cutaways if anyone spoke out too harshly -- and then instituting a seven-second delay as insurance. And while many of the dozens of artists chose songs that made clear their positions on apartheid and South Africa, and some made comments that the BBC made no effort to stifle, the experience with Fox gave organizers pause.

Still, "it shouldn't be forgotten," as Gabriel notes, "that 10 years ago such a concert would have happened in a small theater with one or two radicals and a couple of hundred people."

One thing Healey says organizers learned was not to clutter up the show with a multitude of acts, but instead to create a situation where participants "can do as close to a full set as they can. That was the first lesson -- to give back a quality show by the artists.

"Second," he continues, "be careful about television. Things can be trivialized by cameras, so the issue is how to contain that. No one has messed with our message, but with the Mandela concert, we were reminded of that caution."

Corporate backing was another concern. Many people were surprised when AI announced that Reebok International would underwrite much of the Human Rights Now! tour and would be its sole sponsor (no pun intended). Although tickets in the West will average $35, they will cost as little as $1 on the Third World stops. With total costs somewhere between $20 million and $25 million, the Reebok commitment -- which could be as high as $10 million -- was essential.

"It's an unusual contribution," Healey believes. "They're an underwriter with no hooks into the tour or the musicians, so it's as unique a contribution as the musicians' contributions."

All of those musicians have long histories of resisting corporate ties, and fears that Springsteen would end up prancing around in the latest Reebok gear were not taken too seriously. "We're not selling shoes," says Healey with a laugh. "If Reebok ever tried anything, which they did not and would not, the musicians would burn the materials."

(According to Reebok President C. Joseph LaBonte, "Amnesty's objectives dovetailed with our corporate philosophy about the right for freedom of expression ... We would like to see more people -- and especially young people -- interested and active in the human rights issue.")

The issue "was thorny for a lot artists," Gabriel says, but "the more we discussed it, the more we realized we couldn't reach a lot of the countries that we thought were critical unless we had commercial help." Some potential sponsors were turned down, and Reebok was agreed upon only after a lengthy examination of the company's business practices and the adoption of strict guidelines about its involvement.

Reebok won't be offering promotional merchandise; concert goers will have to make do with a "Passport to Human Rights," a pocket-size replica of the declaration, available in 58 languages. The company has set up its own annual human rights awards, $50,000 apiece given to two young individuals -- one male, one female -- who have significantly raised awareness of human rights and exercised freedom of expression.

A Glut on the Morality Market? With the Mandela and AI concerts scheduled so close to each other, one might assume a subtle competition for media attention, for public support and even for exposure, since appearances at such events have boosted careers and sales. Not so, Healey avers.

"In our work we don't worry about other events, we cheer," he says. "We deal with South Africa every day so we know the need for a Mandela concert, and that it needs as much coverage as it can get." Competition does mean "I have to push the agenda when these managers start talking about fatigue." But "it just means they're tired -- it doesn't mean I'm tired, it doesn't mean the human rights movement is tired, or hunger issues are tired."

As for the agenda he's pushing: "Amnesty's always a critic of governments and we're not giving that up, but on this 40th anniversary, we're saying, 'Let's take a pause and let the people know what their rights are by giving them the declaration and demand of their governments these rights ...' We're saying their governments should look at themselves and see if they're fulfilling the declaration."

Governments, in this case, means all governments. "The rich countries of the world are abusing human rights just as much as anyone," Gabriel asserts. "We should put those issues of the homeless, the mentally ill, the unemployed onto the platform of human rights and not just single out the Third World ...

"Part of what's fascinating about the Universal Declaration," he adds, "is that it doesn't just deal with the political areas of human rights which people normally associate with Amnesty International -- prisoners of conscience, torture, executions, protest, labor rights -- but it goes into the social and economic aspects, saying that if you're born on the planet, you ought to have enough to eat, you ought to have shelter, you ought to have medical care if you need it, you ought to have free education to the secondary level, you ought to have a job, you ought to have the freedom to get information about what your government is doing.

"It's a far-reaching document that all these governments have happily adopted and yet don't expect it to have teeth," Gabriel says. But "given teeth through popular support" it can be "pushed slowly into the legal frameworks of the countries that have adopted it, affecting the lives of millions."

It affects the lives of the dozens, as well. Gabriel and Sting are longtime AI members, and have been fundraisers for it as well as for other causes. Less publicly, Springsteen has contributed enormous sums of money to food banks, the homeless and struggling unions, getting, according to Healey, "a great sense of inspiration from the people he met with."

And while most of the artists involved concede that their audience may confuse message and messengers, they say such confusion is ultimately irrelevent.

Is the audience drawn by big-name marketability or the big names' morality? Can you sell human rights to young people through music? "Anybody who sat through Peter Gabriel's 'Biko' knows it can be done," Healey says. "It was the emotional heart of the last tour. Everybody knew what they were there for. They may not have done something about it, but we reached the people we needed to reach and I hope this time the same thing will happen."

It won't be the last time, he's quite sure.

"It's our business in the nonprofit world to press these people -- because they make so much money, they have so much power -- to see if we can create a coalition that can do some good," he says. "I think we ought to keep after it and keep doing it.

"The day will never leave us where the free can't help the unfree, or the wealthy can't help the poor. Robin Hood is our job."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.