LOS ANGELES, April 28 -- The global activist organization Witness provides video cameras to human rights groups to document abuses, so it was fitting that rocker Rod Stewart launched Sunday's 'VH1 Honors' benefit concert with a raucous performance of 'Every Picture Tells A Story.' The two-hour concert at the Universal Ampitheater in Los Angeles, televised live on VH1, focused on the work of Witness and other groups and individuals who have brought human rights issues to light through photojournalism and other visual mediums. 'A government that beats up on its own people can deny a story, but it can't deny a picture,' said actor-director Tim Robbins, a high- profile Hollywood activist who emceed the third annual event sponsored by the cable music channel. The concert featured a veritable honor roll of cause-mongers from the entertainment world, with performances by Witness co-founder Peter Gabriel, Bryan Adams, Don Henley, R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe (also a Witness co-founder), Natalie Merchant, Gloria Estefan and Pete Townshend. Celebrity presenters included Academy Award-winning actress (and Robbins mate) Susan Sarandon, 'ER' star Anthony Edwards, Jimmy Smits of 'NYPD Blue,' director Oliver Stone and, fresh from his wedding to actress Robin Wright the day before, actor-director Sean Penn. In a building brimming with rock stars, the popular but notoriously contrary Penn may have received the most rock-starish welcome of all (at least until Townshend delivered a blistering version of the Who classic 'Won't Get Fooled Again'). But Penn was all business as he paid tribute to Belfast documentarian Martin O'Brien, who works in Northern Ireland to ensure suspect rights regardless of religious or political background.
The concert raised $350,000 for Witness, formed in 1992 by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in partnership with Gabriel, Stipe and the Reebok Foundation. Along with cameras, the organization provides fax machines to 75 groups in 50 countries so that photographs and other information can be transmitted around the world. Gabriel said Witness enables activists to 'take cameras out into the street not only to record violence, but to deter it.' Tributes also were paid to Bruce Harris, for his work with street children in Guatemala; Lyndal Barry, for his advocacy of displaced people in Myanmar; Natasha Dudinski, who videotaped abuses in Bosnian concentration camps; and Salma Sobhan, who produced a documentary about women in Bangladesh. Stone memorialized the late Haing Ngor, the Cambodian doctor, activist and actor whose story was told in the film 'The Killing Fields,' in which he co-starred and for which he won an Oscar. Ngor was murdered during an apparent robbery earlier this year in Los Angeles. And actor Laurence Fishburne memorialized Iqbal Masih, who escaped out of child slavery in Pakistan at age 10 and became a human rights symbol. Masih was killed by an unknown gunman in Pakistan at age 12. Backstage, the stars pushed their various concerns to reporters and, in some cases, tried to illuminate the roots of their activism. Estefan said her spark came from her father, who was a political prisoner in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion; Merchant recalled seeing television footage at age 8 of children in Northern Ireland being fired on with rubber bullets. 'That's when my awareness of the world around me really began, I think,' Merchant said. Stone, who arguably produces Hollywood's most politicized films ('Platoon,' 'JFK,' 'Nixon,' 'Born On The Fourth Of July'), said he had just returned from visiting human rights activists in Mexico and had been thinking about the advocacy roles celebrities often play. 'It may be because performers tend to come from these classes of people who start out poor and see these kinds of things,' he said. 'They become successful and they remember. They don't tend to get rich and forget.'
