What has been made outstandingly clear in Amnesty International’s latest report into human rights abuses throughout the world is that terror cannot be fought with terror. It points out that despite the US-led crackdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq and despite the Russian crackdown in Chechnya, armed groups have continued to carry out appalling acts of violence. Indeed, because of the injustices inherent in these heavy-handed responses, the terrorists have probably been strengthened, rather than weakened.
What seems to be missing in the minds of those who sanction the use of torture, imprisonment without trial and wholesale assaults upon ordinary communities in which terrorists might be hiding is a notion of proportionality. The more dangerous a terrorist group may be, the more prepared world leaders are to throw aside the rule of law and abandon moral principles. Perhaps they have been seduced by the word “counterterrorism” into believing that it means that they can answer one evil with another.
Amnesty makes the telling observation that because the Bush administration clearly endorses the use of torture (despite its protestations to the contrary) as well as violence against suspects and suspect communities, other governments who perhaps have always had fewer scruples, are taking Washington’s approach as a green light for their own use of similar deplorable tactics. The Americans have thus sold the pass. Human rights are only for those whom they regard as friends and allies. An enemy has no rights. Maybe by an extension of this fearful, stampeded thinking, to Americans a terrorist enemy is not human either. It was the Nazis’ ability to blot out the humanity of their Jewish, gypsy and Slavic victims that allowed them to abandon all moral constraints and behave with odious barbarity which the Americans were the first to condemn at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
Amnesty wants a sober reappraisal of the tarnished notion of human rights and is looking to the UN to reaffirm that it is a base for our common security and not a barrier to it. The lead in this, however, must come from the Americans. President Bush has to be persuaded of the danger and shortsightedness of his view and that in circumstances of particular wickedness, people can place themselves beyond humane and moral treatment, let alone the rule of law on which the US believes that it has built itself.
There can be no pragmatism in human rights. They are absolute. Either they exist or they do not. By trying to pretend otherwise, the most influential global power is setting the tone for an unpleasant period all over the world. Governments will murder, maim and torture their opponents without fear of retribution or international protest. Washington will grumble of course but no one will believe that it is really angry. There is an irony here: Terrorists seek to destroy societies that stand in their way. To do this they will use any means. When a targeted society responds in the same coin and abandons its core values, it does not defeat the terrorists. It defeats itself.
