5 tears have soaked that ground, how many sufferings have hundreds of families had to endure in such places! How many shrieks have pierced the sky! There is nothing external to remind us of that pain (...). In those places humanity has suffered as nowhere else. We have seen children begging, covered in disgrace. We have witnessed great humiliations. We have seen highhandedness dominate unhindered. We have been present when legions of the poor have been debased to death by shame. Who will get to know about this? Who will bear witness to it? (...) The poorest often tell us: it is not just to go hungry or not to be able to read, not even to be out of work, which is the worse misfortune that can befall man, the most terrible thing is to know that we do not count at all, to the point that our suffering itself is unknown. The worst thing is to be scorned by our fellow citizens. Because it is such scorn that leaves us out of every right, that makes people reject us, and bars us from being recognized as worthy and capable of responsibilities. The greater misfortune of extreme poverty is to be some kind of living dead during all our existence. "18. 13. The indigenous peoples continue to fight desperately to preserve, not only their culture, but their own history. And there is a great wisdom in this the irritating “moderns” no longer have and the even more irritating “post-moderns” have still less. In his little known pieces on the Greek Herostratus and the Quest for Immortality and Non-permanence (circa 1927), the great universal writer Fernando Pessoa accurately judged that the man who does not know his environment and his past is a “barbarian”, that is to say a “totally modern” man, with no notion of the civilization which preceded and formed him, and who limits himself to find pleasure in “novelty”; but true and lasting innovation, he added, "is that which has taken all the threads of tradition and woven them again into a pattern tradition could not have followed.”19 III. Forced Internal Displacement as a Matter of Human Rights. 14. The problem of internally displaced people, of which the instant case of the Sawhoyamaxa Indigenous Community is a case in point, is actually a human rights problem. Displaced people are in a vulnerable situation precisely because of the fact they are under the jurisdiction of the State20 (their own State) that did not adopt enough measures to avoid or prevent the situation of virtual desertion they came to suffer. The situation of the internally displaced people may perfectly be —and should be— resolved in the light of the rules in the human rights treaties such as the InterAmerican Convention. As I pointed out in my Separate Opinion (para. 17) in the case of the Moiwana Community v. Surinam (Judgment on the merits of June 15, 2005), the 1998 United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement referred to, determine that the displacement cannot take place in a way that violates the rights to life, to dignity, to freedom and security of the affected persons; they also assert other rights, such as the right to respect for family life, the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to equality under the law, the right to education. The basic idea underlying the whole document is in the sense that the internally 18 . Cit. in: J. Tonglet, "Tienen Historia los Pobres?", in Por Qué Recordar? - Foro Internacional "Memoria e Historia" (UNESCO/La Sorbonne, marzo de 1998, ed. F. Barret-Ducroq), Barcelona, Granica, 2002, pages 51-52 and 54-55. 19 . F. Pessoa, Eróstrato y la Búsqueda de la Inmortalidad, Buenos Aires, Emecé Ed., 2001 [reed.], pages 21-22. 20 . M. Stavropoulou, "Searching for Human Security and Dignity: Human Rights, Refugees, and the Internally Displaced", in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Fifty Years and Beyond (eds. Y. Danieli, E. Stamatopoulou and C.J. Dias), Amityville/N.Y., Baywood Publ. Co., 1999, pages 181-182.