Amnesty International staffer Gita Sahgal says that a former prisoner from Guantanamo, Begg whose case was taken up by AI had advocated jihad as a personal obligation to fight war and supported fundamentalists who denied women's rights. This undermined Amnesty's work upholding universality and the rule of law.
I was asked to sign a petition on behalf of a suspended Amnesty International staff person, Gita Sahgal, who had complained internally in her organization about what she saw as a troubling tendency not to distinguish between the need to defend someone's civil rights, as part of the organization's mandate, and the requirement to disassociate the organization from a victim's own views, which may be antithetical to human rights. The Amnesty leadership explained that she was suspended during the controversy so that it was clear that she did not speak on behalf of the organization, while they investigated the issue.
In this case, the victim involved, Moazzam Begg, an inmate in Guantanamo released to the UK, formed an organization Cageprisoners to raise ongoing concerns about Guantanamo. The AI staffer felt that the former prisoner held views counter to human rights, as can be seen in the video above. As one petition leader Meredith Tax has pointed out, in Begg's own book, he discusses his combat in the war in Afghanistan and his belief that Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban.
Says the petition:
We come from communities that recognize and appreciate the work of Amnesty International in defending human rights and women’s rights around the world. Many of us work closely with Amnesty International in their campaigns at various levels.
We believe that Gita Sahgal has raised a fundamental point of principle which is “about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination”
Gita went to the Sunday Times with the story; that seems to be the AI gender expert's greatest offense to some, ostensibly putting the discussion into a polarized political space where the organization -- and by extension the international human rights movement -- could be attacked and undermined.
I read through the materials and decided to sign the petition for a number of reasons. I realized that doing so might bring charges of "breaking the 11th commandment" ("thou shalt never criticize a fellow NGO or victim of human rights abuse") but increasingly, I think this must be done and more space created for vigorous debate on the ethical and moral dimensions of an issue all too often seen in purely legalistic terms -- the violation of Art. 30: "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."
I think it's important to point out that this is not a global Skokie, exactly. It's not a case of wavering in "Defending My Enemy" as some are seeing it or standing up for all civil rights, even when the victims of suppression of civil rights are odious and their speech or assemblies are unpleasant and hateful. It's not about "getting it" that if we don't defend rights for all, our rights are undermined too. It's about imagining if you had to campaign further to get these rights, and not only to go to Washington to speak on a platform with that KKK member whose march permit you urged to be issued, or even went to Moscow with him them in your delegation. It's not just about speech, it's about the moral consequences of solidarity with people whose own rights are violated, who are not only talking about violating other people's rights, but violating them too.
The debate has taken the form of asking whether you can "share a platform" with a jihadist for the principle of denouncing the use of torture but it must be seen in broader terms. It's about building a global movement for human rights affirming universality of all human rights for all as distinguished from building an internationalist movement for social justice. They are different.
"NOT USE OR ADVOCATE VIOLENCE"
There was a mantra that used to be repeated constantly by Amnesty International itself 20 and even 10 years ago, that in order to obtain prisoner of conscience (POC) status, a prisoner "could not use or advocate violence". In fact, this mantra has now fallen by the wayside at AI and other groups; the very institution of the POC has also largely been retired at AI, with only some strategic cases emblematic of larger issues kept, and the old networks of defending massive numbers of prisoners all over the world with this status has been dismantled, in favour of a different organizing principle around thematic campaigns.
In fact, so far gone is the old constraints against the idea "not to use or advocate violence" that in defending Amnesty's position on Gita's case and the partnership with Begg, Claudio Cordone says casually:
Now, Moazzam Begg and others in his group Cageprisoners also hold other views which they have clearly stated, for example on whether one should talk to the Taleban or on the role of jihad in self-defence. Are such views antithetical to human rights? Our answer is no, even if we may disagree with them – and indeed those of us working to close Guantánamo have a range of beliefs about religion, secularism, armed struggle, peace and negotiations. I am afraid that the rest of what we have heard against Moazzam Begg include many distortions, innuendos, and “guilt by association” to which he has responded for himself.
Naturally, this has caused a storm of criticism and protest as well as defensive re-interpretation. [UPDATE: The letter also disappeared from its original page on an Indonesian human rights group's site, which I and others linked to, so I've updated the link to archive.org where you can still find it, and have saved a PDF if you want to request it.]
What I think Claudio is saying is that *Begg's right to speak of jihad in self-defense* isn't itself a violation of human rights (in the U.S. we would say it is not yet "incitement to imminent violence"). But...since when did Amnesty International members develop a "range of views" about armed struggle? That doesn't sound like the Amnesty I remember from college days or even 15 years ago when we so intensively worked on POCs from Latin America to the Soviet Union -- when there was a clear-cut mandate for the Prisoner of Conscience as a person who "did not use or advocate violence" that would never have been undone in the Secretariat by having staffers who "have a range of beliefs about...armed struggle".
That means a hugely important educational tool as well as transformative method in social movement organization, a by-product of the AI chapters' work, has been lost. In the old days, you could tell groups in another country that they had to be careful not to include anyone who had used or advocated violence in their lists of "political prisoners" or Amnesty could not accept their case -- it was a kind of "EU accession" process for political prisoners all over the world to make that grade -- and for civic groups organizing to start to *make the distinction between non-violence and violent struggle and which form of struggle gained international solidarity, and which did not*. That didn't mean that you couldn't do anything about people who suffered from lack of due process or were tortured or sentenced to the death penalty but had used or advocated violence -- all of those single issues and the cases that illustrated them could still be invoked under the other human rights parts of Amnesty's mandate -- but at that time, not in the personalized way that a POC could.
[UPDATE: Those who were upset about Amnesty lending its platform to Begg and ruining its credibility felt vindicated when he was arrested in the UK on terrorism charges -- this, after being released from Guantanamo and permitted to return to the UK and remain at large for some years. He was charged with making contact with ISIS in Syria and helping terrorists. Then the case fell apart again, and he was freed again, though his ties to extremist movements do not appear to be disputed, nor his views. There are many, many articles by and about Begg online -- go and Google them. It is a complicated case with many issues so let's try to keep a focus here. The pertinent larger issue is not whether Begg is a victim of human rights violation by the US and UK -- he is. He has been compensated officially as such. The issue isn't that he has secretly aided ISIS -- his elaborate and nuanced story is on the record and his libel cases back this up. There is voluminous discussion about the horrors of Guantanamo, America's war on terror and rampant human rights violations. It's more difficult to find any clear statement affirming women's rights and non-violence as a value for social movements. As with many topics in our time, there is reluctance to even discuss this because any criticism leads to accusations that you are soft on states' harming of human rights in their quest for terrorists who at times seem dubious. He and his organization sue those who misrepresent them. And here I'd point you again to a post I did at that time, Islamist Extremists Might Be Human Rights Victims; They Aren't Human Rights Defenders, citing an essay by Mona Kareem. The issue is whether he represents non-violence as a cause -- he does not. And whether Amnesty is consistent and clear in its upholding of non-violence as the gold standard -- it is not.]
The concept of not using or advocating violence is a very good one to have in any movement, specifically devoted to human rights or to political change, but it was one in which the international movement has began to suffer some moral backsliding with the Kosovo independence movement and the intifada in Palestine among other social struggles. I have written about Durban where there was a shocking disregard for the ethical problem posed by groups that justified armed struggle or violent direct action in the belief that their justice cause was so imperative that some slack had to be cut them in the struggle, and the issue of their violence not pressed.
In Durban, international NGOs were pointedly reminded that Amnesty hadn't taken up Nelson Mandela's case back in the day because the ANC had accepted violence as a means of struggle, and that failure to solidarize in this fashion with Mandela has cost the Northern human rights groups their credibility. Put into a guilt-inducing difficult position of this sort, Westerners had a hard time being able to stand firm, look a black African colleague squarely in the eye, and continue to say: "But violence is wrong". The still, small voices of some who kept saying this anyway were drowned out in a louder, more raucous message coming from some social groups of this type: "but structural violence is built into international financial and econonomic systems" or "neoliberal policies are a form of violence" -- a decidedly Marxist and extremist point of view denying qualitative differences between countries with the rule of law and without it, and in any event, an analysis that led you away from the struggle for universality and human rights, and toward political struggle and armed insurrection.
When groups claimed to see violence everywhere in every structure, it became harder to admit that its presence in the midst of their own social movements was wrong, too. When an ill-advised World Bank program to build a dam could be theorized into a hysterical rant about "structuralized violence," a man with a gun even committing armed insurrection or terrorist acts could be theorized up into merely acting in "self-defense". It also became harder for people to see how they could solve social justice problems by human rights alone. Therefore the violence of this or that group, compared to abuses of large systems like "globalization" or "transnational corporations" seemed trivial indeed to such extreme thinkers. That Gandhi or Marin Luther King, Jr. or the Dalai Lama or even Nelson Mandela himself after he was released from prison did not speak in these terms but urged their followers to refrain from violence was not seen as the inspiring model of civic action it once was.
Today, in the absence of a new generation of moral giants like those figures, the work of parsing rights and incitement to violence falls to Amnesty staffers, in an environment of states' "war on terror". Yet somehow, even in an age when anybody can become a newspaper or a television station out of their mobile phone and i-pad, we aren't creating the substrate of an ethical, peaceful international citizens' movement that fosters a climate where violence is not acceptable, and where the patient work "by human rights alone" rather than armed struggle is embraced.
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