Here's a paraphrase of Shakespeare: Some men seek suffering, as do Ascetes to whom it is an instrument of veneration; others are born to suffering, as are the Untouchables to whom it is not a matter of choice but fate; still others have suffering thrust upon them, as have Arabs for quite some time now.
In its most unspeakable expression, suffering inflicted on human beings is known as torture.
And last week the revelations of its practice by officials of the Iraqi government were particularly disturbing: Scores of detainees, most of them reportedly Sunnis and many of them held for months in a secret Interior Ministry bunker, had been tortured and starved. Accounts given by the captives, who were discovered by American soldiers, indicate that they were subjected to bloody beatings and torture with electric shock. A US television journalist said he saw “emaciated men” being taken from the center with their skin stripped off.
Iraqi security forces hold prisoners in at least 1,100 sites across the country.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who directs 100,000 police and intelligence officers, denied allegations of widespread abuse of prisoners, calling them “untrue and inaccurate.” And in a bizarre display of convoluted semantics, reminiscent of that put on by Saddam Hussein’s information minister — dubbed by Western journalists as Comical Ali — Jabr thundred at a news conference, as he waved a sheaf of what appeared to be passports: “Those who were held inside the center were some of the most dangerous criminal terrorists of various Arab nationalities. Let me tell you, those who were inside the shelter home were Arab killers, and here are their passports. They are Arabs and some of the most dangerous terrorists.”
However repugnant torture may appear to us today, as revelations about its practice in the new Iraq are made, one very sad truth must be borne in mind: It is widely practiced in detention centers and prisons in many countries in the Arab world. The problem is further compounded by the fact that, after generations of oppression, Arab society has become so broken in spirit that ordinary Arabs now not only accept torture as the norm in their political lives, but accept the moral authority of their torturers.
Outrage at the practice in our part of the world is rare, and Arabs, whether ordinary citizens or engaged commentators, avoid expressing their visceral anger at it partly because they see the effort either as futile or dangerous. They live in a world that affords them no freedom to make moral choices, or removes from their lives the burdens of anxiety at making those choices.
We are quick to get on our high horse in criticizing the United States for its practices at, say, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And that’s all well and good. But when agents of the US government “render” Arab suspects to Arab countries to be tortured by Arab interrogators in order to extract information from them, we, in a hypocritical twist, condemn dastardly Americans for the rendering, but turn a blind eye to the torturing by diligent Arab intelligence services.
Look, torture is not a new phenomenon in the world. It was legal for many centuries, and formed a part of most legal codes in Europe and elsewhere. The techniques of torture ranged from the “rack,” that stretched the victim’s body from either end, to the “thumbscrew,” where thumbs or fingers were placed between metal bars that then screwed tighter and tighter, and, with the advent of the new technologies in the 20th century, from the electrode to hallucinogens.
Colonial overlords used torture against us when we were their “subjugated people.” The French Army, for example, used it extensively during the Algerian war of independence, and the Israeli Army used it in the Palestinian war of independence in our time.
But whereas these oppressors have now abjured torture, it became common practice again in Algeria after the country gained its independence in 1962 and in Palestine after the PA took control of the autonomous zones in the West Bank and Gaza in 1994.
With society being a human community, it is predictably heir to all the contradictions that define human nature. There will always be, in other words, malcontents, idealists and activists, along with other adversarial voices, in our midst ready to express what may appear to us as eccentric or subversive views.
To silence, incarcerate or torture these individuals because we disagree with their views is to pay tribute — a sinister tribute, to be exact, but tribute nevertheless — to the power that ideas wield in our lives. And there will always be in that human society what Franz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” men who feel that their authority figures have not lived up to their obligation to take care of them, that they have oppressed and plundered where they should have cherished and protected. Invariably those are the men, more likely and more often than others, who will sooner or later get to hear that midnight knock on the door.
We have become so passive in our part of the world about the issue of torture — the torture of Arabs by Arabs — and so socialized to accept it that, when we hear the news of our fellow citizens being abused in a torture chamber, we feel that somehow those individuals must have brought it on themselves, they must be evil or criminal or dangerous; or, in a resigned view of our political reality, that they should suffer because some higher cause is being served.
Iraqi authorities have promised to “pursue and prosecute” the torturers at that dreadful prison compound discovered last week. Yeah, sure! Let’s face it, torturers, anywhere in the world, are rarely punished. After all, how do you mount an effective prosecution against people who tortured you in a closed room, while you were blindfolded, and single out the one interrogator who attached the electrode, whipped you till your skin peeled off, performed the rape, the near drowning or the severe beating? State-sanctioned torture is the perfect crime.
Torturers are rarely punished, and on those rare occasions where they are, the punishment rarely fits the crime.
