Читать книгу Cruelty or Humanity - Rees Stuart - Страница 12

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Perpetrators and victims

The men in power are convinced that it is only violence that moves and guides men, and they do so boldly use violence for the maintenance of the present order of things. But the existing order is not maintained through violence but through public opinion, the effect of which is impaired by violence. Thus, the activity of violence weakens and impairs precisely what it intends to maintain. (Leo Tolstoy)¹

This century is possessed

In its forehead, nail and sign,

A fixed idea burns: each day it serves us

The same platter of blood.

On some corner he waits

– Pious, omniscient, and armed –

The dogmatist with no face, no name.

(Octavio Paz)²

A malignancy

Joy Gardner was born in 1963 in Jamaica to a 15-year-old mother. She never knew her father. When she was seven, her mother moved to the UK to work. Joy would not follow her mother until 1987, by which time she had a grown-up daughter of her own and was pregnant with her son. She had the boy, Graham, while in Britain and sought leave to remain to be with her mother but was refused. Although her mother was British, rule changes meant her adult offspring had no right to remain. A team of police and immigration officers arrived at her north London home on 28 July 1993 with instructions to deport her and her son to Jamaica. She was bound, gagged and restrained with a body belt. She collapsed, fell into a coma and died of asphyxiation.³

In October 2005, Otto Ondawame from West Papua knocked on my office door. He was on the run from the Indonesian army’s special forces unit Kopassus. Otto had protested the 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’ when 1,026 West Papuans were held at gunpoint and ordered to vote for integration with Indonesia.⁴ Ondawame had committed a serious crime by raising the flag of his country and in 2001 had protested when the West Papuan leader Theys Eluay was found with his throat cut. Together with colleagues, I protected Otto during his years of exile and study in Australia. The Australian Department of Immigration eventually deported him to Vanuatu, where he died in 2014.

Around the globe, cruelty seems endemic. In common with others the sadism of Saudi Arabia’s rulers astounded me when, in 2012, their courts sentenced Raif Badawi, a brave blogger for free speech, to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in jail. In October 2018, in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Istanbul, a 15-member Saudi hit team allegedly strangled the Saudi/American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered his body and disposed of it. Khashoggi’s columns for the Washington Post had been critical of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia.⁵

On 27 August 2017 in Gaza City, 53-year-old Howayda lay on a sofa in extreme pain. The medication to relieve her suffering was not available. She lived in a city which had been under siege for 10 years, where clean water was in short supply, electricity only available for two hours per day. On 7 September the mother of five died. Her eldest daughter, Sameeha, told me, ‘I am at comfort that my mother is no longer in pain and that she won’t be stopped at a checkpoint or won’t be asked for permits anymore.’

For over four years, from 2013 to 2017, the Australian government contained 1,500 asylum seekers, men, women and children, in detention centres on remote Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. They were kept there at immense humanitarian cost.⁶ Against the rules of international law, left with no hope of freedom, in the short term the asylum seekers were offered the choice of accepting their fate or returning to the countries from which they had fled.

By February 2018, 700,000 Rohingya people had been driven from their homes in Myanmar in a military operation which the UN described as textbook ethnic cleansing. On muddy, almost treeless hillsides, with little shelter, neither ample food nor clean water, the newly arrived refugees found temporary refuge in Bangladesh.

In October 2017, a young Rohingya refugee fleeing Myanmar told a New York Times journalist, Jeffrey Gettleman, that after she was raped by government soldiers, her baby son was snatched from her arms and thrown screaming into a fire, burning to his death. Gettleman recorded that other eyewitnesses confirmed what happened.⁷

Between 5 May and 9 June 2018, US Customs and Immigration officials stationed at the US Mexican border separated over 2,300 children from parents who had been arrested for alleged illegal entry into the US. Mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the children were sent to one of more than 100 US government-contracted detention facilities spread over 17 states. Pictures of bewildered, traumatized children torn from their parents, and statements from families saying they had no idea where their children were, provoked public outrage at President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policies. The President insisted that he was protecting Americans from undocumented migrants whom Democrats wanted ‘to pour into and infest our country’. Pope Francis said the order to separate children from parents was immoral. Confronted by overwhelming opposition, even from previously supportive Republicans, on 20 June the President reversed the order.

Acts of gratuitous cruelty by individuals may not appear to be in the same league as the abuses just described, but even passing cruelties merit attention. They can be the thin end of a wedge. One act becomes a potential habit, subsequently justified.

In September 2014, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s father died. During her prime ministership Gillard had been derided by an influential radio journalist, Alan Jones. The broadcaster seldom missed an opportunity to ridicule Gillard, her gender and her policies. He said she was a liar, that it would be beneficial if she was dumped at sea in a chaff bag. On the death of Gillard’s father, Jones commented, ‘the old man died of shame’.

In April 2017, 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails began a hunger strike to protest degrading conditions and to seek an easing of restrictions on visiting rights. Soon after the strike began, Israeli settlers set up barbeques outside the jail. They aimed to ridicule the prisoners. Reporters said that the settlers wanted the smell of meat to waft into the prison.

In each of these events, in the first seven examples and the last two, individuals lived in contexts of discrimination and violence. Political forces, government policies and cultural influences prepared the stage and built the contexts. For example, behind successive British governments’ image of adherence to due process in the administration of justice, conduct hidden from public view now reveals powerless people treated cruelly.

In relation to the plight of Indigenous West Papuans, influential politicians in Britain and Indonesia had promoted the idea that such people were primitive and did not deserve to be independent.

Gaza under siege imprisons almost two million people. Howayda’s painful death is one example of a policy of denying basic healthcare to stigmatized people.

Under the guise of a policy called border protection, Australian governments had for years stifled the rights of asylum seekers who had attempted to escape to Australia by boat.

By the end of 2017, reports continued of atrocities committed by Myanmar forces against Rohingya refugees.

In Saudi Arabia’s response to dissidents, vicious punishments are an apparent cultural and policy norm.

Policies influenced and reinforced by cultural norms are not confined to Saudi Arabia. That country’s close ally, the ‘make America great again’ Trump White House, had US culture in mind when the President boasted about sovereignty, protecting borders and showing zero tolerance to the unwanted and vulnerable. In the Mexican border controversy, many of the victims were toddlers, small children and teenagers.

In relation to the two incidents of cruelty by individuals, cultures which encouraged stigmatizing had sent a message: the stage is set, if you have a grievance against those you don’t like or even hate, now’s your chance, play your roles, act out your script. A Sydney radio station had fed listeners a diet of derision, yet still obtained popular ratings. In response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, the international community had refused to oppose decades of serious human rights abuses.

Twentieth-century genocides and mass murders

A reminder about the mass murders of the 20th century, several of which are counted as genocides, illustrates precedents to current cruelties. Despite the ‘never again’ motives of those who crafted the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the small print of the Geneva Conventions, those genocides gave momentum to cruelty which has not been easy to stop.

Between the Northern spring of 1915 and the autumn of 1916, with a view to solidifying Muslim dominance, Ottoman-Turkish authorities, including military forces and civilians, engaged in mass shootings and mass deportations of ethnic Christian Armenians. Survivors of the shootings, elderly men, women and children, were marched in convoys to holding camps, but on the way hundreds of thousands died as a result of dehydration, exposure, disease and attacks from local officials, nomadic and criminal gangs. The violence included robbery, rape, abduction of young women and girls, extortion, torture and murder. As many as 1.2 million people died.⁸ The US Ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Snr, wrote in his memoirs, ‘When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race, they understood this well.’⁹

Between 1932 and 1933, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin’s forced famines are calculated to have killed over seven million Ukrainians. In the late 1930s, during the time of The Terror, Stalin ordered the mass execution of millions of his own citizens whom he considered ‘socially harmful elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’.

In relation to that terror, in her poem Requiem, crafted over three decades, 1935–61, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote,

No, it wasn’t under a foreign heaven,

It wasn’t under the wing of a foreign power, –

I was there among my countrymen

I was where my people, unfortunately, were. ¹⁰

In the years immediately preceding the Second World War and despite a 1925 Geneva protocol banning ‘bacteriological methods of warfare’, the US and Japan generously funded the scientific investigation of the possibilities of biological warfare. Such investigations soon realized not just a potential weapon but a lethal form of cruelty. Michael Pembroke reports that by the end of the Korean war, in one secret biological warfare site the US employed over 3,800 personnel. Another classified site was nicknamed ‘Fort Doom’.¹¹ But it was Japanese enthusiasm for biological weapons that showed sadism without limits, a promotion of evils which probably surpassed in cruelty even Joseph Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz. In Manchuria, a Japanese unit called 731 developed macabre trials to expose human beings, mostly Chinese prisoners, to lethal bacteria. Pembroke’s analysis merits rereading and repeating. In one of his most disturbing passages he writes, ‘The process was unfathomable – a phantasmagorical nightmare in which Japanese medical scientists infected helpless prisoners with anthrax, plague, cholera, typhus, dysentery, botulism, brucellosis, tularaemia, meningitis and smallpox while monitoring and meticulously recording the effects on their vital organs as they slowly expired.’¹² In these experiments, over 10,000 prisoners are estimated to have died.

In the Holocaust, 1941–45, Nazi Germany murdered six million European Jews, as many as 20 million victims in total, including Romanies, people with disabilities, ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and individuals labelled communist or socialist. Based on racist beliefs that Germans were superior people and that others, in particular Jews, were racially, biologically and socially unfit, extermination of the inferior by gassing in concentration camps became the brutal ‘final solution’.¹³

The administration of extermination needed cruel leaders in a society conditioned to accept that state bureaucracies should operate in the service of a politics of militarism and racial purification. With the wisdom of hindsight, that fascist culture gives clues about the persistence of cruelty: a banality of evil, faceless compliance in bureaucracies and the sadistic character of those who gave and carried out orders.

Almost in anticipation of the Holocaust, in 1939 the English poet W.H. Auden wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant.

Perfection of a kind was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly impressed in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter

And when he cried the little children died in the streets. ¹⁴

While the Holocaust was under way in Europe over three million Bengalis were starving to death, a result not just of a poor rice harvest but because British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to the already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain, in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia.

Shashi Tharoor reveals how Australian ships laden with wheat were docking in Calcutta but were instructed not to unload their cargo but to sail on to Europe.¹⁵ In a forensic analysis of the Bengali famine, in what she titles Churchill’s Secret War, Madhusree Mukerjee documents the racism inherent in classifying some people as worthy and others of no consequence. Bread rationing in wartime Britain was regarded as an intolerable deprivation, but famine in India could be tolerated. Regarding those policies, Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India, commented that the British government treated Indians with neglect, even sometimes with hostility and contempt. Mukerjee quotes Churchill, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.’¹⁶

The greatest mass murderer in history is considered to have been Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. From 1958 to 1962, during a policy named The Great Leap Forward, designed as an effort to catch up with Western economies, 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death.¹⁷ That period of mass killings had been preceded, in the 1940s and 1950s, by the elimination of landlords, peasants and anyone who dared to challenge the social and economic transformation ordered by Mao.

There’s an irony in these killings. Records were carefully kept by China’s Public Security Bureau, but were secret. Keeping the records of cruelty secret enabled subsequent denials that such action occurred. That’s a process we’ll see again and again.

British 1950s governments’ administration of their disappearing colonial empires, as in their response to the Mau Mau rebellions in Kenya, included officially sanctioned cruelties, ‘a tale of systematic cruelties and high-level cover ups’, as in the use of concentration camps comparable to those used by Nazi Germany and in Stalin’s gulags.¹⁸ The Mau Mau who rebelled against British settlers and colonial rule are estimated to have murdered as many as 50 settlers, but thousands of their own Kikuyu people. In response the British are reported to have crammed up to one million people into heavily guarded camps, killed unknown numbers by beatings, starvation and torture and hanged up to 800, a majority for offences other than murder. At the height of the emergency as many as 50 hangings took place each month.¹⁹ Details of British fascination with violence as the means of governance are discussed in the next chapter, ‘Values, attitudes, behaviour’.

Less than 10 years after the British brutalities in Kenya, between October 1965 and March 1966, anyone suspected of being a member of the Indonesian Communist Party was hunted down and murdered. Published estimates indicate that between 500,000 and one million Indonesians were killed by the Indonesian Army, who were aided by civilian militias mostly from Islamic groups.²⁰

The record of this mass murder and incarceration of Indonesians displays a couple of issues. For decades, information about the massacres, and about the roles played by the US, Britain and other major powers, was suppressed. Detailed analyses are now coming to light.²¹

Between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia, with the objective of establishing the Khmer Rouge version of agrarian socialism under the leadership of Pol Pot, 3,314,768 people died, an estimated 25% of the population. The deaths were caused by several factors: forced relocation from urban centres, torture, mass executions, forced labour and malnutrition.²²

In 1975, with the connivance of Western powers such as Australia and the US, Indonesian forces invaded East Timor and occupied the country for the following 24 years. In 2002, the Timorese Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation estimated that during the years of occupation, and in excess of normal rates of mortality, well over 100,000 Timorese died from starvation and deprivation, five times higher than the number of targeted killings and disappearances, estimated to be at least 18,000. The Truth Commission found that by formulating policies to cause mass starvation and death, members of the Indonesian armed forces and government officials committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.²³ The Department of Demography and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that even with the most conservative assumptions, the total number of excess deaths in East Timor during the entire Indonesian occupation ranged from 150,000 to 200,000. Those estimates included the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre of 271 protesting civilians. In 1999, after the Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, pro-Indonesian militia killed an estimated 1,000 supporters of independence. One quarter of a million East Timorese fled to West Timor, and in their final scorched earth policy the Indonesians destroyed more than 70% of East Timorese housing.

In 1988, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwah for the killing of prisoners identified as intellectuals, students, left wingers, members of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, of ethnic and religious minorities, many of whom had been sentenced for non-violent offences, such as taking part in demonstrations and collecting funds for prisoners.²⁴ The people charged appeared before summary Islamic courts to answer questions ‘Are you a Muslim?’, ‘Do you pray?’, ‘Do you recant your beliefs and political activities?’ If the answers were judged insufficient, they were sent for execution. In June 2012, a London Tribunal estimated that as many as 5,000 prisoners were executed. The prisoners, including women and teenagers, ‘were loaded onto forklift trucks and at half hour intervals were hanged from cranes and beams in groups of five or six’.

In 2011, barrister Geoffrey Robertson reported on ‘The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran, 1988’. Following a detailed inquiry, he concluded that the state of Iran had broken the rules of international law, and had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. His account of breath-taking brutality in the name of a religion reveals an unrelenting sadism, an issue explored in Chapter 3. Robertson’s conclusions exposed Iran’s ‘policy of systematic denial, historical falsification and destruction of evidence of the mass executions’.²⁵

A year after the mass graves of Iranian victims had been covered and concealed, in June 1989, thousands of young Chinese democracy protesters set up camp in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. As many as 10,000 Chinese troops moved in and massacred large numbers of protesters. The exact number of deaths is unknown. Since that time, Chinese authorities have censored information about the massacre. Such suppression links cruelty to denial. In his poem Tiananmen, written less than two weeks after the massacre, James Fenton conveys the suppression of a story.

Tiananmen

Is broad and clean

and you can’t tell

where the dead have been

and you can’t tell

what happened then

and you can’t speak

of Tiananmen.

You must not speak.

You must not think.

You must not dip

your brush in ink.

You must not say

what happened then,

what happened there

in Tiananmen. ²⁶

Between April and July 1994 in Rwanda, mass slaughter occurred in 100 days. The violence emerged from a century or more of injustice and brutality from both the Hutu majority and the minority Tutsis. Following the shooting down of a Hutu President, and with a view to hanging on to power, extremist Hutus acted to wipe out the Tutsi completely. The genocidal slaughter of the Tutsi people by members of the Hutu majority claimed up to one million victims, including moderate Hutus.²⁷

In 1995, in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, over 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were murdered by forces under the command of Serb General Ratko Mladic. Despite overwhelming evidence about the victims and the perpetrators, the atrocities have been denied by Serbian leaders. A group of 200 ‘Srebrenica Mothers’ continue to fight the official silence and denials.

In a resolution passed by the General Assembly of the UN, these killings were judged to be a genocide, part of an ethnic cleansing which targeted Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The ‘cleansing’ included murder, rape, torture, beatings and other inhumane treatment of civilians.²⁸

In 2003, in Darfur, the western region of Sudan, government armed and funded Arab militias, the Janjaweed, ‘devils on horseback’, burned villages, polluted water supplies, murdered, raped and tortured civilians. An estimated 500,000 were killed and up to 2.8 million people displaced.

In March 2009, as a result of the Darfur atrocities, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity. A year later Bashir was charged with genocide. His oppressive rule continued. In 2019, in response to protests about the cost of living, corruption and mismanagement of the economy, protesters demanded Bashir’s resignation. In response the President quoted verses from the Quran to justify the killing of protesters, dissolved the government and appointed military and security officials to run Sudan’s 18 states.²⁹ In May 2019, following massive public protests seeking democracy, Bashir was overthrown, his regime replaced by a Military Council but not by civilian rule.

In all these slaughters, the perpetrators were leaders of governments, politicians, military and religious personnel, self-appointed vigilantes and diverse groups usually referred to as rebels or terrorists. This gruesome list does not return to the days of the Inquisition, to the enslavement of 20 million Africans, to the slaughter of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Australia and the Indian sub-continent, a consequence of violent colonial invasions and economic domination of a black and brown world, but there has to be a time limit to the examples. Hereafter, with a few dips into earlier decades, examples will come mostly from events in the last part of the 20th century and from 2000 to 2020.

Silence and denial

From 2000, participants in cruelty could include media personnel poised with their microphones or sitting upright at their keyboards. They may say or write nothing about inhumanities presented to them. They can enable the public to remain ignorant or indifferent to suffering.

Citizens who stay silent about cruelty may be as responsible as the leaders of governments, as responsible as the members of police forces and military who obey politicians’ orders. Influential citizens represent an establishment, the taken-for-granted opinion makers, such as public servants, university managers, journalists, academics, business executives, the leaders of NGOs or even the organizers of writers’ festivals. Despite publicity about cruelties, their silence can be deafening.

This may sound like charges against those who act cruelly and those who stay passive because they want to get on with their lives. The charges should be made. This is also advocacy for humanitarianism to become centre stage in citizens’ thinking and actions, a humanitarianism characterized by creative, non-destructive exercise of power. Such conduct would include kindness, generosity, love and hospitality plus creativity in others’ interests, respect for all living things and for every individual’s dignity, as illustrated in all 30 clauses of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That last example emphasizes the universality of humanitarianism, across countries and cultures, even within the policies of diverse governments. That is the optimistic side of the argument, a healing story.

Such a story has been told by the late Stéphane Hessel, French resistance fighter, survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, a contributor to the committee which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and author of Time For Outrage (2010). In gratitude to Hessel, the first verse of Thanks to Stéphane says,

Thank you for your courage

in insisting on equality

by speaking as an ageless sage

on human needs for dignity:

‘Please never sit upon a fence,

your outrage makes a difference.’ ³⁰

Outrage is never sufficient to end cruelties. The UN’s September 2017 condemnation of Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence over the killings and expulsion of Rohingyas had no effect on the Myanmar military’s attitudes and policies. UN resolutions condemning Israeli settlements as illegal appear to have been an incentive to build more settlements and to boast the irrelevance of international law.

Hessel insisted that if people were not outraged by injustice, they would lose touch with their own humanity.³¹ He appealed specifically to the younger generations to be outraged and involved, to challenge official denials of inhumanities.

Two names, Potemkin and Katyn, each related to Russian politics and policies, convey the significance of pretence and denial by governments. In 1787, in the government of the Empress Catherine, Minister Grigory Potemkin created fake villages in order to fool Catherine about a growing population. Whether or not the story is a myth, the point is that ‘Potemkin pretence’ appears to have grown as a principle of government.

In 1940, in the Polish Katyn Forest and surrounding areas, Soviet secret police, the NKVD, under Stalin’s orders, murdered 22,000 Polish nationals, mostly military officers and lower ranks. Until 1989, when President Gorbachev admitted Soviet responsibility for the atrocities, the Soviets had attributed the blame to the Nazis.

Pretence that all is well is a Potemkin phenomenon. Denial of atrocities is the Katyn practice that enables cruelties to proceed unhindered. As an elaboration of Potemkin/Katyn practices, George Orwell, in his depiction of ‘Newspeak’, reminded readers of the infinite capacity of powerful people to deceive even themselves.

In the March/April 2018 ‘March of Return’ protests staged by thousands of Gazans at the Israel/Gaza border, Israeli snipers killed over 100, many shot in the back. By December 2018, up to 200 had been killed, an estimated 20,000 were maimed, many made cripples for life.³²

As part of an exercise in justifying virtues despite evidence to the contrary, an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson said that his soldiers knew where their bullets went and he repeated the well-rehearsed claim that Israel had the most moral, the most humane army in the world.³³

To highlight states’ reliance on duplicity and denial as a means of government, it is necessary to recall not only the claims of IDF personnel, those made by the regime of a Russian Empress or a Nazi dictatorship. Justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq depended on US, British and Australian governments’ careful and vigorously presented deceit and denial. Referring to risks to London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that Iraq possessed and could dispatch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. On both sides of the Atlantic, that claim was supported by dossiers riddled with lies, and with assertions about the benefits of regime change. The cruelties of the invading allies competed with the sadism of Saddam. A ‘Coalition of the Willing’, the US and its allies, invaded Iraq, destroyed the country, killed up to one million Iraqis and spawned the extremist Islamic force ISIS.

Official denials, often bare-faced lying, are just one of the dominant themes in accounts of cruelties. Individuals are stigmatized by being labelled unworthy or faceless, of little consequence, barely human. Asylum seekers are called illegals and potential terrorists. Reliance on force in domestic policies, in times of war and as a cue for state and non-state terrorists, gives rise to a chemistry of cruelty, each act as inventive and gruesome as the next.

Life-enhancing, health-promoting, non-violent alternatives to cruelty are cherished by citizens and can be promoted by politicians. Ideals for a common humanity can be formulated in the minds of politicians, civil servants, journalists and in states’ policies. Such ideals already occur in the visions of poets, in challenges from classical composers and through appeals by singers of songs of protest.