Editorial
Sunday’s police excesses betray
govt’s apathy to public concern
WE ARE at a loss for words to condemn the atrocities that the police perpetrated on Sunday on a small band of young men and women protesting in front of the Indian High Commission in the capital Dhaka against New Delhi’s plan to construct dam/s on the river Barak at Tipaimukh. According to reports in the media, about 100 policemen in riot gears swooped on the group of 17, who are members of a left-leaning study circle, tore off the dresses of some of them, and even clubbed and stamped some female protesters. Rallies in front of a diplomatic establishment are universally accepted norms of protest. Indeed, the law enforcements agencies are within their right to make sure that any protest march, be it in front of a foreign mission or anywhere in the country, does not spiral into violence and vandalism. However, the media reports on Sunday’s incident do not indicate that there was either any provocation from the protesters or any sign that the demonstration might turn violent. The police’s action against an apparently peaceful demonstration becomes all the more questionable, given the allegation levelled by some readymade garment and knitting factory owners that the law enforcers played a passive bystander when some compliant factories were vandalised during the recent unrest in the RMG sector. This is where the suspicion of the government’s tacit endorsement to the police action comes into play.
Ever since the Indian high commissioner, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, informed the government of New Delhi’s plan to go ahead with the controversial twin dam project, a section of the Awami League-led administration has displayed inexplicable intolerance to any opinion that contradicts its Indian counterpart’s assurance that the project will not harm Bangladesh in any way. Such opinions, needless to say, have been voiced by experts and environmentalists not only of Bangladesh alone but India as well and, that too, quite fervently and frequently. While this particular section of the government has not even hesitated to question the professional and personal integrity of these experts and environmentalists, it has not for once deemed it necessary to even point out to New Delhi that, according to the resolution of a Joint Rivers Commission meeting, India is obliged to consult with Bangladesh before commissioning any project that involves 54 rivers that the two countries share. Worse still, when Chakravarty branded the opponents of the Tipaimukh project as ‘so-called experts’ out to make a political mileage out of the debate and after the foreign minister admitted that the diplomat ‘might have stepped out of line in his remarks’, the government not only refused to take up the issue with New Delhi and demand his recall but at least one of its key members went out in public to defend Chakravarty.
In light of such a sequence of events, the police atrocities on the anti-Tipaimukh campaigners on Sunday can only be construed as its inherent apathy to people’s aspiration and antipathy to dissenting views, both of which, needless to say, are unfortunate and unacceptable. Hence, we demand that the government find out, and make public, as who authorised the police action on Sunday and bring the person/s responsible to task immediately.
Int’l community needs to stand
by people of Myanmar
THE military junta of Myanmar has, once again, displayed its complete disregard for world opinion by refusing to let the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, meet the country’s Nobel Peace Prize winning pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. According to the international news agency Agence France-Presse, Ban did press the top general Than Shwe for a meeting with Suu Kyi and but was told off on the ground that she was on trial. While the UN secretary general said he was ‘deeply disappointed’, the military junta’s response to his request was hardly surprising; after all, the regime has never allowed the international community’s concern to get in the way of how it runs the country in general and how it treats Suu Kyi and her politics in particular.
Intriguingly, the international community’s response to the military regime’s repeated refusal to fall in line has been somewhat scrappy. While the United States and the European Union have pushed for tougher punitive measures under the UN umbrella, their efforts have more often than not been torpedoed by the veto-wielding China and Russia. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, formed in 1967 to promote political and economic cooperation in the region and of which Myanmar became a member in 1997, has, meanwhile, remained steadfast in its opposition to any interference in domestic Myanmar politics, which it says would be undesirable and unjustified. The US and the EU do have in place a range of trade and economic sanctions on Myanmar; however, these actions do not seem to have any discernible impact on the content or intent of the isolationist regime. Worse even, the people of Myanmar have borne the brunt of these sanctions, and their misery could further worsen if the British prime minister’s call for further sanctions translates into reality.
It should be clear to everyone that the military junta is not unduly worried about either diplomatic norms or democratic governance, and that it will maintain its vice-like grip on state power as long as it can afford to. With the traditional powerhouses inexorably divided over possible ways and means to make Myanmar’s autocratic regime accountable to both its people and the international community, the possibility of democracy dawning on the country in foreseeable future looks as remote as ever.
Hence, mere commiseration with the misery of the people of Myanmar and salutation to the unyielding spirit of Suu Kyi and her comrades in arms do not absolve the international community of its responsibility to do their bits towards bringing a qualitative change in governance and politics in the isolationist country. The international community of nations needs to make the military regime in Myanmar understand that it cannot carry on with its autocratic ways for ever. To do that, however, it needs to work out the difference among them first.
Racism, torture and the truth:
a tribute to Frantz Fanon
by Salimullah Khan
Torture is an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship.
Frantz Fanon
I DON’T know just how but the other day Dhaka’s living not-so-well photocopy industry kicked up my desk a not-so-little not-so-recent book of a philosopher’s. His tome, characteristically named ‘In defense of lost causes’, takes up an interesting episode from the warlike annals of our times. That brings me straight to my subject.
Recent US practice of torturing suspected ‘terrorist’ prisoners – ‘bad people’ as torturers call them – has for some time been well known. Even the most unwilling of subjects also know the United States torture. Some worry about it. Others think it represents a moral progress: ‘if anything, we have less hypocrisy now.’ Don’t mess it up as ‘amoral’, it is moral progress. We have always been doing it. Progress is what progress does. We now (half-) openly admit it.
In November 2005 a vice-president said, defeating terrorists mean that ‘we also have to work’ ‘sort of the dark side’. It is one Dick Cheney: ‘A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.’ If a senior say as much, it gets to the guts: ‘Why, then, are they telling us this?’ Why don’t they just silently go on doing this, as they did up to now?
I
LET me then begin at the beginning.
As Thomas Jefferson’s nice little philosophy, known as the Declaration of Independence, drafted after British troops opened fire on colonial Minutemen at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, has it there in the second para, there are certain ‘self-evident truths’ to hold, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’
Their Creator knows they have always been pursuing Happiness, even if under another name – property – and torture when necessary haven’t you? What is for example lynching, if not the pursuit of happiness, sort of the dark side? If they are anyway doing it sans admission, why are they admitting it now? In other words, why are they lying? Why are you saying it publicly? Such admissions, Žižek suspects, usually say more. It spells ‘moral corruption’. We the public that is informed of this are the greatest victims of this (publicly admitted) torture. The problem, in other words, is not in torture per se but in the public admission of it.
‘We should all be aware,’ laments this western man from a not-so-western Europe, ‘that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.’
Remember that old Jewish ‘witz’ (‘joke’) of Freud’s? Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asks one. ‘To Cracow,’ answers the other. ‘What a liar you are!’ breaks out the first. ‘If you say you are going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’
What’s the US doing here, by Freud?
He, the torturer, believes he is doing it for the good of all. The problem, however, is that it all too often brings in the opposite effect. Once in a while there appears one individual (or may be two) who thinks it is not for her good. What is good for all is not good for one. How could that be? It looks like a formal contradiction in logic, doesn’t it?
Not so long ago, in mid-March 2007, confessions of a certain suspected ‘terrorist’ named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dominated the headlines. Some people did doubt the value of such confessions elicited under torture. What attracted much less attention, to go by Žižek, was the simple fact that, for the first time, torture was normalised, presented as something acceptable. ‘The ethical and legal consequences of it’, adds our philosopher, ‘are something to think about.’
I have my doubts if it is ‘for the first time’ indeed. I wish the philosopher Žižek devoted less time for books and talks and more to homework. If he did he would see that it is not ‘for the first time’ at all. There were more firsts before the first. Besides, moral consequences on the soul of whom are we talking about?
And let us give the philosopher his due. I will be right back to the theme.
With all that sound and fury about the horror of his crimes, Žižek writes, ‘very little was heard about the fate our societies reserve for the hardest criminals – to be judged and severely punished.’ It is as if he is not entitled to the same treatment as even the most depraved murderer of children, namely ‘to be tried and punished accordingly.’ Because of the nature of his acts, that is. As if the treatment meted out by the US can justify itself.
So, what place on earth is the (assumed) terrorist’s? It puts him almost literally into the position of the living dead, legally dead (no determinate status in law) while biologically still alive. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian, has a name for him: homo sacer.
What about the US which treats him this way? Isn’t she too in the same dirt, that in-between and indeterminate locus? She too is sharing it with her victim. US authorities are acting as a legal power; their acts are nonetheless not covered by any law, not even rules of warfare. What morale then at the end of the day? A grim tale: the US, itself a homo sacer, sustained by force but no longer a legal power.
The same old story, then! Governments among ‘Men’ are instituted to secure the ‘unalienable’ rights of ‘Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness’, or so reads the Declaration of 1776, ‘deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.’
But what are these creatures, or ‘Men’ so-called, anyway?
II
WHATSOEVER it meant, the Declaration of Independence certainly didn’t hold ‘Indians’, ‘Slaves’, and ‘Women’ in the field of that united circle of interest drawn by the word ‘Men’. A paragraph of the Declaration actually charges the King of England with playing the Indian card. ‘He has excited domestic rebellions amongst us [the Declaration complains] and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’
Signor Beccaria, the enlightened Italian nobleman whose name is associated with abolition of torture in Europe and who openly condemned its practice in the name of civilisation probably unwittingly approved of torture only for a sub-humanity of cannibals and slaves. ‘Such are the evil consequences of adopting this spurious test of truth, but a test worthy of a cannibal, that the ancient Romans, for all their barbarity on many other counts, reserved only for their slaves, the victims of a fierce and overrated virtue.’
So, who are you kidding, Slavoj Žižek, when you say for the first time? Do you mean you made lots of secular moral progress so far and weep because you see moral regression for the first time? How about a circle or two or a flow of sine waves, in any case? ‘If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape,’ you wrote, ‘it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him – he should simply appear ridiculous.’ ‘And the same should hold for torture,’ you add. There is a sure sign of moral progress in our societies, after all. But is there any, or only cover-ups?
Let us take a leaf out of our own Franz Fanon. Rape of little Algerian girls are not just rapes, but are ‘so many acts of devotion to duty, even of heroism’. The French first denied the existence of torture in Algeria. Later, after having admitted the fact, they used a double lie. Didn’t they?
First of all, they claimed, cases of torture were exceptions. This was the first lie.
The second lie was tout court a fraud. The government declared sanctions against the torturers, but also demanded that one must not make the stories public. ‘The most serious abdication of the French intellectuals is,’ as Fanon writes in 1957, ‘having tolerated this lie.’ ‘As though the torture of a man or an organized massacre,’ wonders our writer, ‘did not both come under public criminal law.’ ‘The passion for truth and justice,’ he warns, ‘cannot, without challenge, accept such fraud.’
Some thinkers think that ‘in a way, those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it.’ That this outrage is also a paradox escapes this grand man.
Frantz Fanon notes it. When French intellectuals, such as a certain M Mattei [writing for the radical Les Temps Modernes, July-August 1957], repeat in chorus that ‘that there is at the present time a vast campaign of dehumanization of French youth,’ or deplore the fact that French recruits ‘are learning fascism,’ one cannot fail to note that only moral consequences of these crimes on the soul of the French are of concern to these humanists. Gravity of tortures and horror of rapes are perceived ‘because their existence threatens a certain idea of French honour’. What does racism look like by the side of this kind of benign humanism?
Such attitudes, ‘such shutting out of the Algerian, such ignoring of the tortured man or of the massacred family,’ remarks Fanon, ‘constitute a wholly original phenomenon.’ ‘It belongs to that form of egocentric, socio-centric thinking which,’ he adds, ‘has become the characteristic of the French.’ The Americans today are only following trails fully blazed by their old champions and themselves in Indo-China. Patents for water-boarding and other third degree innovations in industrial design could be billed as genuine discoveries of the French savants.
Roger Wuillaume, the French police-boss in Algiers, was assigned in 1955 an official report. He actually admitted that allegations of torture were true, but asserted at the same time that they were only ‘forms of violence’ long used by the police. They were indeed ‘well-established practice’. These forms included beatings, submersion in water, electric shocks, filling the stomach with water through a pipe, and prolonged imprisonment. He was speaking the truth.
Wuillaume proposed that some methods, the most brutal ones, be abandoned, though he qualified this by adding that ‘reports of the results are magnificent’. Appreciating the results as well and would not ‘cast aspersions on a body of civil servants who can, in their defence, point to so many acts of devotion to duty, even heroism’. He even proposed ‘rewards or letters of congratulations’ for the torturers before prohibiting their more brutal techniques while retaining the less brutal ones. Wuillaume saw that ‘there was a need for various forms of violence ... if the police are to do their job satisfactorily.’
Let my third chapter open on that note.
III
IN THE ‘West’ it is widely held that abolition of torture, a landmark of the Enlightenment, marks the passage from superstition to reason. Michel Foucault holds that torture got even inefficient, hence unnecessary by the eighteenth century. As Foucault’s thesis conceived not real long after the Algerian war has it, modern technologies of power rely on controlling the mind rather than the body, which betrays his own glaucoma to the problem of racism, and colonial wars.
Equally widely held is the other tenet. The torturer is only an aberrant individual or a rogue regime, ‘mostly in far-away places’, or that torture itself ‘lies at best only just below the surface of everyday police and custodial practice.’ Just as most prisoners in any criminal justice system are from the most marginal of social groups, legally condemned, morally cast out, socially isolated and politically inconsequential so are, in this perspective, victims of torture, nations and individuals alike.
But, never mind. In Foucault, for all his human rights stuff, what we hear is no less a voice of the torturers, alive and kicking up my desk. The same old torturer, yes, it is he we hear so much in the discourse of ‘human rights’. The United Nations, for example, reserves a day of solidarity with victims of torture but finds herself miserably wretched, impotent in calling torture by its proper name, that is a crime against humanity. How would it recognise it as a ‘crime under public criminal law’?
Didn’t Frantz Fanon say, in those wild days of anti-colonialism half a century ago, that ‘torture is inherent in the whole colonialist configuration’? ‘Torture in Algeria,’ he wrote, ‘is not an accident, or an error, or a fault. Colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing, of violating, or of massacring.’ ‘Torture,’ in Fanon’s true words, ‘is an expression and a means [une modalité] of the occupant-occupied relationship.’ It is a pity that the philosopher, just as the torturer, doesn’t read Fanon. They call him a prophet of violence.
Isn’t it this uncompromising man of a ‘prophet’ who reiterates the truth that one cannot, without contradicting himself, both be in favour of maintaining colonial rule and be at the same time opposed to the means that this maintenance makes necessary? Just as some police agents felt there was no necessity to legitimise their practice, so thought the Algerian revolutionary it is no longer necessary to appeal to human rights. Torture and human rights are two sides of the same coin.
The Algerian people, Fanon asserted, were not unaware of the fact that colonial structures rest on the necessity of torture, rape and massacre. The Algerian people were not fighting for a kinder, gentler, more humane colonialism. They were fighting for national liberation, total and unconditional. Whatever happened to national liberation!
The wily Algerians, they were not fighting against tortures, against rape of little girls, or collective murders. Sadistic police agents who lost sleep or torturing soldiers who ran ‘the danger of turning into fascists’ had presented for Algerians,’ Fanon wrote, ‘a precise problem.’ It was demanding the demand they actually advanced – liberation of the nation, ‘total and absolute’.
As for some of the worries the western man cannot keep away from, I can do no better then suggest he read Fanon. In reality, Fanon knew it right, fear of a moral (or whatsoever) contamination was quite unfounded. Sick police agents, he knew, were not tormented by their consciences. ‘If they continue their professional practices outside their offices or their workshops – which happen to be torture rooms – it is because,’ Fanon quipped, ‘they are victims of overwork’.
‘What these police agents were looking for was not so much a moral assuagement as the possibility of resuming the tortures.’ As for the rest, let me say caveat emptor.
The myth of a true opposition between those in power and the public in general, ‘the public that is informed about torture’, was ‘shaken to its foundation’ in the crucible of the savage war. Enthusiasm displayed by most workers and peasants in France for a predatory re-conquest and a fortiori for the practice of torture was unparalleled. They were for not just brutality in general but for ‘sometimes truly bloody’ savagery. The real contradiction could not be dodged.
The entire French ‘Nation’, save a few individuals, was – what a shame – involved in the crime. As one prime minister of France said, ‘the Nation has identified itself with its army fighting in Algeria’. That such a war may turn a whole nation into a nation of regular mercenaries was for some philosophers, circa 1957, ‘the most distressing thing’.
It looks as if it still is for some, our Slovene philosopher, for instance.
References
1. Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, Alberto Burgio, ed., 3rd ed. (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2007); On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, R Bellamy ed., 4th print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. MD Evans and R Morgan, Preventing Torture: A study of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
3. Frantz Fanon, Pour la révolution africaine: Écrits politiques (Paris: La Découverte, 2006); Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, H Chevalier, trans., reprint (New York: Grove Press, 1988).
4. Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6 (London, 1940); Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, James Strachey, trans. (New York: Norton, 1960); see also, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, Joyce Crick, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492—Present, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
6. Slavoj Žižek, In defense of lost causes (London: Verso, 2008).
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