Sun, May 27, 2001 page9

• Amnesty International marks 40 years

  Peter Benenson, the man who founded the organization, nearly ended it when it failed to meet his expectations

  • By Jonathan Power
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  Amnesty International, which celebrates its 40th birthday this month, was the product of the imagination of one man. Peter Benenson, a Catholic lawyer of Jewish descent, born of English and Russian parents, was described by some who knew him as a "visionary," even a saint. According to others, however, at one point he lost faith in the creature he had created and, as a result, he nearly destroyed it.

  Benenson was 40 when the idea for Amnesty came to him, and had been active in the area of human rights for some time. In November 1960, his imagination was fired by a newspaper report about two Portuguese students in Lisbon during the dark days of the Salazar dictatorship. They had been arrested and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom.

  How, Benenson wondered, could the Portuguese authorities be persuaded to release these victims of outrageous oppression? A way must be devised to bombard the Salazar regime with written protests.

  It was, as Martin Ennals, a future Amnesty secretary-general observed later, "an amazing contention that prisoners of conscience could be released by writing letters to governments."

  As Benenson nurtured the idea, it grew roots and branches in his mind. He thought, why have just one campaign for one country, why not a one-year campaign to draw public attention to the plight of political and religious prisoners throughout the world?

  He approached two people in London who he thought would be interested in the idea and whose reputations and contacts would help give it momentum: Eric Barker, a prominent Quaker, and Louis Blom-Cooper, an internationally known lawyer. The three men decided to call the campaign "Appeal for Amnesty, 1961," and it was launched in The Observer newspaper on May 28 that year.

  At Benenson's office in London, they collected and published information on people whom Benenson was later to call "prisoners of conscience." The three men soon had a nucleus of supporters, principally lawyers, journalists, politicians and intellectuals.

  Today, AI's membership stands at more than a million worldwide and is still increasing. It has supporters in over 160 countries and territories. In its 40 years of existence, Amnesty has dealt with the cases of 47,000 prisoners of conscience and other victims of human-rights violation. More than 45,000 of these cases are now closed.

  Thirty years ago, the secretariat employed 19 people and had an annual budget of PND35,000 (US$48,000 at present-day parity). Today, its staff is 357 with an additional 93 volunteers, and it has a budget of PNDS19.5 million (US$27.7 million), none of it sought or accepted from governments.

  When Amnesty was formed, Tribuna, the organ of the central committee of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia, claimed it occupied "a prominent position in the scheme of anti-communist subversion" while in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini denounced it as a "lackey of satanic powers."

  Other detractors over the last four decades have included Uganda's Idi Amin, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Chile's Augusto Pinochet and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

  Many have sought to destroy it. Ironically it was Benenson himself who, inadvertently, inflicted some of the hardest blows when, in 1966, Amnesty produced a report on torture in the British colony of Aden. The Swedish section of Amnesty had carried out an investigation and had found evidence of the use of torture of Arab prisoners by British soldiers. Benenson was convinced, however, that Amnesty International's secretary-general, Robert Swann, was colluding with Britain's foreign ministry in suppressing the report's findings. In the end, Benenson had the report published in Sweden.

  The reaction in Britain was savage. A large section of the British press accused the Swedish section of bias. Benenson was furious and decided to resign as Amnesty's president. After a spell in a Trappist monastery, he withdrew his resignation but the subsequent infighting greatly damaged the organization.

  The group survived, however, and went on to become one of the most influential non-governmental organizations in the world.

  It was Augusto Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973, when the elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown, that gave the biggest boost to Amnesty's campaign. The sense of urgency spilled over into the UN General Assembly, which began its session only days after the coup. At that time most developing countries were highly suspicious of "western" critiques of their human rights records. But they suspected, rightly, that the US was behind Allende's overthrow.

  They willingly made use of Amnesty material in their efforts to blacken Pinochet's name. Communist eastern Europe joined in: Bulgaria singled out a report by Amnesty on Chile and the Soviet Union referred to testimony submitted by Amnesty.

  After a year of lobbying by Amnesty, the Fifth UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders agreed to moving a Declaration Against Torture. Amnesty followed it up with a worldwide campaign to persuade the UN General Assembly to adopt the declaration. On Dec. 9 1973, they succeeded.

  In the first two years of Pinochet's regime, thousands were tortured, murdered and "disappeared." But it wasn't until 1984 that the UN finally approved a legally binding treaty against torture. It came into force three years later. The list of those who fought for it in these years includes the Scandinavian governments and Holland, and most surprisingly the US administration of Ronald Reagan. But it was Amnesty International, with its combination of zeal and attention to detail, that carried the day. Without that degree of energy, the convention would never have been passed -- and Pinochet would never have been arrested in London, because the convention convinced the British law lords that Pinochet could be prosecuted.

  During the hearing at Bow Street magistrates' court in London in October 1999, on whether General Pinochet could be extradited to Spain to stand trial, his lawyer argued in his defense that "There's torture everywhere, including in Britain and Northern Ireland."

  It was true that only the degree was different. If in Chile it was inflicted on a large scale, with bestial methods meant to sexually degrade and physically destroy detainees, in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s it was done, albeit to far lesser numbers of prisoners, still to great effect.

  Amnesty was compelled to campaign in the country which had given it birth. For all Britain's long tradition of free speech and liberal democracy, the government had been able, as late as the 1970s and 1980s, to convince itself that, faced with domestic insurrection, torture was a necessary counter weapon.

  Finally, in 1999, after years of campaigning by Amnesty, the British government set up a Human Rights Commission for Northern Ireland.

  Former prisoner of conscience Julio de Pena Valdez, a trade union leader in the Dominican Republic, has spoken of the impact of an Amnesty letter-writing campaign on his own case.

  "When the 200 letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then the next 200 letters came and the prison director came to see me. When the next pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior.

  "The letters kept coming and coming: 3,000 of them. The president was informed. The letters still kept arriving and the president called the prison and told them to let me go."

  But Amnesty has had some high-profile failures of judgment too: it went to town with a story put out by a US PR firm claiming that Iraqi troops were destroying incubators in hospitals and thereby killing babies. It turned out that the PR firm was acting on behalf of the Kuwaiti government at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Amnesty was forced into a retraction when the story was found to be a fabrication.

  In recent years, some have argued that Amnesty has become respectable, a part of the international establishment. Others claim it has lost its unique profile and has been submerged in a plethora of other human rights groups. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all has been the allegation that Amnesty's publicity campaigns have resulted in the development of even more insidious methods of torture and repression, designed to avoid the calumny of global exposure.

  Unquestionably, there is still work to be done. Last year, 63 countries were known to be holding prisoners of conscience and extra- judicial executions were carried out in 61 countries. People were arbitarily arrested and detained, or in detention without charge or trial, in 78 countries. Armed opposition groups committed serious human rights abuses, such as deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture and hostage-taking, in 42 countries. As for the two Portuguese students, the archetypal prisoners of conscience who sparked the long-running campaign, they were subsequently freed and Amnesty has since lost track of them.

  Peter Benenson, now in his 80s, lives in a cottage outside Oxford, England. He has long been reconciled with the organization he created. At celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of Amnesty, he lit a candle at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in London. His words then are apposite today, on the eve of Amnesty's 40th anniversary: "I have lit this candle, in the words of Shakespeare, `against oblivion' -- so that the forgotten prisoners should always be remembered. We work in Amnesty against oblivion."

  Jonathan Power's book, Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International, is published in the UK by Penguin.
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