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How can I explain this to my Russian friends?
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By Cynthia Annett | May 28, 2004
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I still have not gotten over the shock of seeing photos of Iraqi
prisoners being abused by American military personnel. It was a real
blow. I was returning from my latest trip (the 19th I have made) to
Russia when I learned of the news coming out of Abu Ghraib prison. By
the time I got to my seat on the plane from Moscow to New York I was
already exhausted by the hard three-day trip from Siberia. When the
flight attendant came up behind me and asked a question I was slow to
respond—I actually don't remember responding at all. But as she passed
by she tossed a copy of USA Today in my lap. And immediately I wished
she hadn't. Staring at me from the front page was a picture of an
American woman in military fatigues holding onto a leash strapped
around a naked man's neck. I stared at it. I was sickened by what I
saw. But it got worse; inside was a photo of the same woman with
another soldier, smiling and giving a "thumbs up" sign behind a pile of
human bodies. What a horrible way to be welcomed home.
I've been back for two weeks now and during that time we have learned
that this wasn't an isolated event, and that it wasn't limited to a
group of untrained and unsupervised reservists. It is something that
was rooted in the policies of the Bush administration and something
that reflects very badly on the state of our democracy.
In
the early 90's, during the first Bush administration, I was sent to
Siberia for the first time to run programs promoting democratization
and the development of civil society. The Russians I met universally
considered America to be "The" model society governed by the rule of
law, respect for human rights, and the balance of power—an ideal they
had long dreamed of for their own country. We Americans had the moral
high ground when the Soviet Union collapsed. Fledgling democracies
throughout Eastern Europe and Eurasia scrambled to make themselves over
in our image.
But events during the second Bush
administration seem to contradict everything we once represented to the
world. Americans now seem willing to dispose of their democratic
institutions as if they meant nothing. What happened? What changed? How
have we come to a point where the second Bush administration was able
to maneuver around the bedrock of international human rights, the
Geneva Conventions? How have we allowed this second Bush administration
to engage in unprovoked warfare based on falsified evidence? How have
we allowed ourselves to be forced to give up fundamental rights in this
country? And why have we allowed our government to repeatedly violate
human rights internationally? How is it that we aren't rising up to
defend our democracy? Have we forgotten the importance of the balance
of power and the rule of law? Have we forgotten what a democracy
actually is?
We seem to have forgotten something very
important: there is a line that cannot be crossed. There is a baseline
below which we cannot go—that line demarcates what it is to be a member
of humanity. The basic truth is that once we engage in the process of
dehumanizing a person through torture and humiliation we not only
destroy their humanity, we give up our own humanity in the process.
That is the line. I am not speaking here of abstract ethical concepts,
I am speaking as someone who just returned from Siberia. Yes, from
Siberia, a place that is synonymous in most American's minds with
torture and political repression. The place where the infamous Gulag
Archipelago taught us what happens to a society that dehumanizes its
people.
In the two weeks since I took that long trip home
from Siberia I have felt as if my world has somehow been turned upside
down. I have had to face the fact that torture and political violence
are now seen to be acceptable to my own government. The repression that
we have been working all these years to fight internationally seems to
be taking hold at home.
While I was in Siberia last month I
was surrounded by people actively engaged in the hard work of building
local democratic institutions. For fifteen years now I have watched as
they emerged from the repression of the Soviet period and worked
steadily to create an atmosphere of freedom and institute the reforms
necessary to nurture democratic institutions at the local level. They
have remained on the long hard road to democratic reform. Is my own
country now on the opposite trajectory?
I wish I could say
that those photos were nothing more than an inexplicable aberration and
that Americans would never engage in something so horrid. But I
remember the discussions in the media when the Bush administration
began "floating" the idea that there may be circumstances where torture
would be an appropriate tool for information gathering. And I remember
the reports that we allowed (asked?) other countries to do
interrogations for us using torture. I remember the repeated reports
from Guantanamo Bay about abuse. And we have all seen the humiliating
photographs of prisoners from Afghanistan having their beards shaved
while being forced to kneel with their hands tied. And we have heard
rumors of dozens of prisoners dying during interrogation. This has been
building for a long time. And now we learn that what was created in
Afghanistan has been exported to Iraq. What should never have happened
under any circumstances, anywhere, has become administration "policy";
America can now count itself amongst those nations who engage in state
sponsored torture.
Despite what our President says, this is
not a matter for "damage control". This is not about needing to improve
"America's image". This is not about "image", as if the images in those
photos were created by an ad executive or a Hollywood movie director
and could be combated by producing another set of "images". These are
pictures of real people. Those naked bodies piled up in that photo are
human beings. These are people who have been stripped of their humanity
and treated as despised objects.
A couple of weeks ago I
stood in front of a room full of Siberian college students talking
about what it meant to live in a country with a free press. One of the
students interrupted to ask how Americans define democracy. Another
built on the question by asking whether America had changed its
definition of democracy and now considered bombing a country to be the
right way to instill democracy. For young Siberians growing up with the
promise that everything would be better now that they were themselves a
democracy, these were important questions. But my answer was probably
not what they expected. I said that America is like Russia; it is a
huge country, it is a powerful country, and it is a diverse country.
There are many different kinds of people, and the differences between
people aren't just racial or cultural, the differences also concern the
type of politics people engage in and their definitions of democracy. I
said that in America, like in Russia, there are people with very
different concepts of what they call "democracy". I told them that what
they were witnessing right now was a struggle in my country over what
"democracy" was and what our democracy would become. I told them that
for myself, my understanding of democracy was what was done between us,
all of us in the room, together. It was about how we decided to treat
each other, what process we used to make decisions, how open we were
when we talked to each other, it was about our ability to think about
what we do to each other, and it was about how fair we were in the way
we dealt with each other. Democracy was not something you did with
armies and tanks and bombs, it was what we did together, what was done
between human beings. I was surprised to see heads nod all around the
room.
I hope that I would have seen a similar response from
American students their age, but I don't know; we have heard so much
jingoism during the past three years that it is hard to tell how much
my fellow Americans are actually thinking about what they are doing. I
don't know what young Americans would say about an answer like
that—maybe they would have preferred an answer that included tanks and
armies and blowing things up.
Which brings me back to those
horrible images; photographs of an American woman barely older than the
Siberian students I had spoken to. How would the young woman in those
photographs have responded to my answer? Would she have nodded her head
along with the young Siberians? Would she have thought that democracy
was "what is done between us in the room together"? When I looked at
the grin on her face as she stood next to that pile of human bodies,
humans that she was treating as mere objects with no humanity, I had my
doubts. The smile on her face gave me doubts about whether she
understood democracy as I did. Or whether she understood humanity as I
did.
"Following orders" is no defense for the soldiers who
perpetrated these crimes against humanity. And it is not a valid
defense for officers and administration officials who claim to be
innocent because they are buffered from the crimes by the chain of
command. Neither the soldiers nor the officials can get off so easily.
It is the soldier's duty to refuse to participate in acts against
prisoners that violate basic human rights. The soldiers who exposed the
abuses are a courageous example of appropriate behavior under the
circumstances. And it is the duty of the commanding officers and
responsible administration officials to be aware of what is happening
under their command. It is hard for me to believe that the very same
officials who once floated the idea of using torture when interviewed
on the evening news are surprised that torture has occurred under their
command. Or that the administration that announced to the world that
prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were not protected by the Geneva
Conventions was unaware that the Geneva Conventions had been violated.
Do they really expect us to believe that they knew nothing of the level
of abuse happening in the prisons they set up? Isn't this exactly what
they were telling us they were planning to do?
There are
ideas that should never be unleashed on the world. The idea that
torture can be justified is one of the most obvious. That is an idea
that should have died in American society long ago. After all, we are a
democracy.
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