Last month, the Nation published an article by Guttenplan and Margaronis which sought to examine the Gita Sahgal-Amnesty-Moazzam Begg controversy. The problem with the article was that it was little more than a puff piece on Begg which is bad enough. But worse, it glibly skipped over any mention of Amnesty, excluding the organisation at the heart of this issue from its analysis completely.
The Nation has now published letters in response to the article. I urge you to read them all, but one in particular pinpoints the fetish which afflicts many well-meaning liberals; of making Islamists out to be the primary heroic victims, while ignoring their crimes and the human rights of their (often, muslim) victims:
I wish it were true that Amnesty International defended human rights for all. But in my experience as an Algerian, especially during the 1990s when the GIA (Islamic Armed Groups) terrorized and slaughtered the population of Algeria, AI defended the rights of fundamentalists, rather than the rights of their victims. During this period that counted about 200.000 victims, women have been threatened, disappeared, killed, tortured, mutilated, raped, burnt and forced into domestic and sexual slavery in the guerrilla camps of the GIA.
I can testify to the fact that we repeatedly called on members of the AI senior staff and urged them to reconsider their policies. We pointed to the imbalance in their reports on Algeria, which focused almost exclusively on state violations of human rights and grossly underestimated fundamentalist violations. We expressed concern about the way they portrayed fundamentalists solely as victims of state repression when they were also perpetrators of violence. We were appalled by the way victims of fundamentalists were ignored, while supporters of fundamentalists were invited to AI functions–as Moazzam Begg is now–where they used Amnesty’s platform not just to denounce violations that states committed against them but to voice their political analysis. Similarly, the lawyer for the FIS (the Islamic Salvation Front, which posted lists of individuals to be killed) was repeatedly invited to AI functions where he was introduced as “a human rights lawyer” without any reference to the fact that he defended only fundamentalists, not their victims. All this helped fundamentalists who fled the country win political asylum in Europe, while their victims had nowhere to escape.
This policy led to a hierarchy among victims in Algeria, in which fundamentalists were privileged as victims of the state, while women–who were in their vast majority victims of fundamentalists–were made invisible and so were the violations committed against them. It also set up a hierarchy of rights, in which minority rights, cultural rights, religious rights (a fundamentalist interpretation of these rights) came first and women’s rights last.
In all the years since, there has been no accountability. Our demands were filed and ignored. Internal dissent in Amnesty was suppressed: the three founding members of AI in Algeria were expelled from the organization for having written a private letter to the AI general secretary saying these policies were damaging the organization.
I am grateful to Gita Sahgal. Thanks to her, the debate over AI’s relationship with fundamentalists has become public.
MARIEME HELIE LUCAS
Montpellier, Herault, France03/23/2010 @ 05:39am
One Comment
Wow. Just, wow.