Eclectic Grounds

Shocking revelations emerged yesterday from an interview with the head of the Israeli forensic institute. In the interview, he admits systematic organ harvest by Israel from dead palestinian bodies (more information here).

The statements were made during an interview with Nancy Sheper-Hughes – a fantastic anthropologist whose work has inspired many (me included) for the field and the ethics of anthropology. She deserves a mention in this debate for her investigations in the global network of organ trafficking.

In years of research, Sheper-Hughes shed light on the global relations of organ donors, smugglers, doctors and recipients. A focus of her work is on global power relations that enable this illegal industry. She writes about the marginalized in the global economy from places like South Asia, Latin America or Eastern Europe, who are willing to sell parts of their body to support their families or simply to be able to afford status symbols and satisfy consumption needs. Many others have their organs removed without consent – the revelations about organ theft in Palestine is a remarkable case there. Sheper-Hughes says:

“I was confused, because there were so many forms of real violence; [...] but what they [people in the community in Brazil] wanted to talk about was their incredible fear that their bodies were at risk, or those of their children, of being kidnapped by an organ mafia.”

Sheper-Hughes traced the path of trafficked organs through places like India, China, South Africa or – prominently – Israel:

“I found out from the transplant surgeons that these weren’t just allegations but that they were true, and that organ trafficking amongst living people was spreading. [...] I began by following the rumours, before I started following the bodies. My primary aim is to disabuse the world of the notion that this is just a rumour.”

At the end of the global “supply chain” or organs are mostly recipients from industrialized parts of the world, usually Europe or the US.

“I worry about the politics, the bio-politics in a global sense, of the people who are resisting the getting of an organ through a waiting list or through friends or family, and would rather get a poor and anonymous person. It’s easier. You don’t have to deal with them after the fact.”

Sheper-Hughes calls her method ‘militant anthropology’, which means that it is prepared to take on a political or moral engagement with its subjects rather than merely engage in academic analysis. In the course of her work, she founded a small NGO called Organs Watch who acts as a pressure group to spread the word, build alliances, and push for legislate response to the injustice.

“Much as I feel for the recipients, for their pain and their suffering, they are represented and visible. They have surplus empathy, they’re in the newspapers and everybody’s heart goes out to them. Nobody’s heart goes out to the sellers, because they’re the riff-raff of society, and not people you naturally want to embrace, but they’re human beings – they need to be represented. Their body is precious to them. We talk about the gift of life. I talk about the gift of the body – instead of ‘I think therefore I am’, you can say ‘I’m embodied therefore I am’. To have to plunge in to yourself and sell that through which you have a personhood, and to think of your only resource as being your organs is so tragic.”

Quotations taken from an interview with Three Monkeys Online.

The notion of a “global war on terror” has always been nonsense. It has manufactured a threatening picture of an alleged global ideology of hatred for the western world. But the “global war” image obscures the fact that every crisis zone has its unique context and that most people who join or support insurgent groups do so for their very personal reasons which are far from ideological.

This still seems to be a perspective shared by but few officials in the US military:

Matthew Hoh, a senior US state department official and former marine who was based until recently in Zabul province [of Afghanistan], explained his resignation on 10 September 2009 by referring to his experiences in the Korengal valley and elsewhere. These, he is reported as saying:

“taught him ‘how localised the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometres away.’ Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases. ‘That’s really what shook me,’ he said. ‘I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism’” (see Karen De Young, “U.S. official resigns over Afghan war“,Washington Post, 27 October 2009).

Found here.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie shares her thoughts about how popular stories may create one-sided, single, images about places and individuals. These ’single stories’, she argues, lead to misunderstanding the complexity of the lives of others; it emphasises difference and robs people of their dignity.

She beautifully illustrates this with stories of her own life and argues that we need a balance of stories between the culturally and economically powerful and those whose stories often remain unheard.

When Barack Obama’s support platform “Change.Gov” asked supporters to submit queries to the new administration, the most popular question turned out to be whether Obama would appoint a special prosecutor to “independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.” Obama’s team ignored answering the question. Obama himself, being forced to respond during a TV interview, said he would rather move forward than look back.

Dealing with the past

It seems widely accepted today that the Bush administration systematically committed war crimes in the “war against terrorism”. “Extraordinary renditions”, the Guantanamo prison, or authorised “enhanced interrogation techniques” speak clearly.

This leads to a wider question: if such an investigation was to find evidence of systematic war crimes, would it makes sense to convict the political leaders responsible? There is a vast amount of information available in the field of peace research on how to deal with crimes committed by states, and on how to best achieve justice and reconciliation concerning human rights abuses by past political regimes. From cases such as post-communist states, authoritarian regimes in Latin America or Europe after WWII, historical patterns have been identified and comparisons have been drawn that may help the US administration to decide whether or not to investigate or even to punish former government officials.

To punish or to pardon?

Many of the 76,000 people who voted for an investigation into war crimes by the Bush administration to be Obama’s top priority were likely guided by a feeling revenge. I can’t say that I don’t feel the same way. After seeing the videos I linked to above, it is hard not to have a sickening feeling. Yet, emotions of this kind aren’t always the best guiding principles for political action.

There are two key questions when addressing state crimes. One is the question of acknowledgement: should past crimes be addressed, or should they rather be swept under the rug for the sake of “moving forward”, as Obama would put it. The second question is the one of accountability: Should sanctions be imposed on perpetrators or not? Here, too, the principle of looking backward or looking forward comes into play, because there is always some trade-off between justice and reconciliation.

Sending Bush and Cheney to prison?

There are some good reasons to punish political leaders if their personal responsibility can be attested. The central one is that it allows for a morally just order to be established. If respect for human rights and the rule of law are basic tenets of a society (as any US American would be eager to assert), then violations against these principles should be punished. A second reason is that punishment for state crimes stands symbolically for a change of regime. Obama based his message of “change” on being different from the Bush regime. A prosecution of Bush’s crimes would consolidate the trust people in the US and internationally have in the new government to embody a genuine break with the past.

It is questionable, however, if the “ghosts of the past” can really be chased away by means of retributive justice. As Raoul Alfonsin, first Argentinian president after the military regime, said: “In the first analysis, punishment is one instrument, but not the sole or even the most important one, for forming the collective moral conscience.” One important element in this is an independent judiciary. Who, after all, will have to sentence former leaders? It can be stated that the democratic principle of the separation of powers suffers when courts are used for political decision-making (and political it would be, considering that Bush has represented one of the two main parties in the US). Seen from that angle, also special prosecutors with the task to “independently investigate” easily become instruments of partisan vengeance.

Generally, punishment is not always a productive or functional way of solving social conflicts, even when justice would require punishment. Where civil society is fractured and divided between supporters of the previous regime and supporters of the new regime, “tolerace” might achieve more for human rights in the long run than further divisiveness. In the US case, Republicans could see it as an attack on their own conservative beliefs. In the worst case, former Bush voters – as well as bureaucrats and other officials – would feel alienated, creating the grounds for a destabilising backlash against the new administration.

The process of collective amnesia

What would an alternative be? Simply moving on? There have been many cases of state crimes where that happened, Spain being one of them (though it may be argued that the collective trauma in Spain after Franco can’t be compared to the US after Bush). For societies with past atrocities, amnesia is a tempting and psychologically almost normal reaction. On a collective level, this may happen unconsciously, like in Spain. But denial may also take an organised form whereby state institutions attempt to rewrite history. The Turkish atrocities against the Armenians are a powerful example of this.

Criminologist Stanley Cohen has identified a pattern of how governments react to allegations of human rights violations. The reactions normally have three elements: 1. Nothing happened (“We did not not torture”). 2. Something happened but it was no human rights violation (“It’s not torture”). 3. What happened was for the morally good (“We saved peoples’ lives with this”). Knowing that, it is worth lhaving another look at the interview with former CIA director Tenet.

To look forward, know about your past

Now there’s a problem with this kind of amnesia, which those who want to reconcile – like Obama – need to have in mind. Without truth-telling, there can’t be reconciliation. It is impossible to achieve reconciliation if parts of society refuse to acknowledge that there was ever anything wrong. Truth is a value in itself that would justify conscious dealing with the past, but there are other reason for this. They have to do with the victims, deterrence and the rebuilding of political structures that facilitated torture, and deterrence for potential perpetrators in the future.

New Yorker’s Lawrence Weschler has argued that torture victims’ demand for truth is usually greater than their demand for justice and punishment. This is mainly due to the “double problem” of torture victims: They are accused of being liars those by who do not want to acknowledge that torture happened (e.g. officials like Tenet). Thereby, their dignity is taken a second time after they have survived torture. Only by acknowledging victims’ suffering they have the chance to regain their dignity. Recognition creates a more positive identity for them: They cease to be victims and now become survivors.

Rebuilding political structures

Truth-telling is a key act of prevention as it may weaken potential support for any future repetition of abuses like torture. Imagine a commission set up by the new US administration to investigate war crimes and human rights abuses. If it described  in detail that atrocities were committed, who was responsible, and that universal principles were breached, then those who did support the Bush regime would likely feel a collective shame. It would make it harder to push an agenda of torture in the foreseeable future. This process would need to include a wider discussion and “moral cleansing” within society, where acts of torture will become clearly outlawed and not secretly tolerated or even admired, e.g. in pop culture.

There is also a need for a more immediate look at structures that facilitated torture. Regimes of torture develop laws, bureaucracy, language, rituals and justification. These structures need to be rebuilt, people involved need to be re-educated. Within the military and the bureaucracy, limits of obedience and the duty to intervene must be established. Social conditions under which crimes of obedience were possible need to be identified and reversed. Truth-telling is integral to mobilise the resources and the political will for this difficult task.

Striking the balance between justice and political prudence

Everyone can agree that crimes should not go unpunished. Still, as I have pointed out, sometimes there are good reasons for not punishing state crimes. The fundamental question is whether a criminal trial is the right legal strategy in the political realm? Here, arguments that warn the state not to ignore its moral principles and issue a blank cheque to future leaders stand against those that caution new regimes not to alienate supporters of the old regime and drive a wedge through society.

This does not mean though that “moving forward” is the right strategy. Dealing with the past is necessary to de-victimise former torture victims, to deter, and to rebuild structures that facilitate torture. The new US administration would be well advised to look into previous crimes in order to make a credible break from the past and make sure that the US will not descent into torture in the future.

The case of the US differs from all previous examples of state crimes in one respect. Here, human rights abuses did not happen within a society. Bush had built up a global system of torture where victims were not US citizens, and “extraordinary” renditions made use of global power to make other countries comply with these policies. Amnesia is tempting for US Americans because victims are far away and not part of their own society; but it’s a prerequisite for renewing American diplomacy. A public investigation into the Bush administration’s war crimes would be the first case of a global process of truth-telling.

For more information see:

The US Institute of Peace
The Project on Justice in Times of Transition
“Transitional Justice” by N. Kritz
“State Crimes of Previous Regimes” by S. Cohen (in Law and Social Inquiry)
“A Miracle, a Universe” by L. Weschler

Over the Christmas holidays, Samuel Huntington died at the age of 81. Huntington, political scientist and US foreign policy advisor, became widely popular with his “clash of civilizations’ thesis. Time to look at the influence Huntington had with his writing, 15 years after the publication of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’.

In a Foreign Affairs article in 1993 and in a subsequent book three years later, Huntington developed the idea that in the post-Cold War world, conflicts will be based on cultural and religious difference. The end of political ideology will not lead to the ‘end of history’, he believed, but rather to a return of age-old ethno-religious conflict. He wrote that:

Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Especially after the 9/11 attacks on the US, Huntington was quoted time and again by political analysts, while some critics also regarded it as self-fulfilling prophecy. American neoconservatives as well as many radical Islamists quoted the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis at the time.

It is hard to judge what extent Huntington’s ideas predicted or influenced events like 9/11 or the Iraq war. Yet to me it seems undeniable that the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ subtly changed the way we perceive culture and the role it plays in world politics and conflict.

In the early 1990s, the time of ‘Great Power’ war was over at last. The idea that powerful states wage war with each other had dominated (Western) perspectives on international relations since since the Thirty Years War. In 1989, there was suddenly but one great power left. At the same time, civil wars plagued societies where post-colonial structures left a power vacuum.

It was tempting to believe in culture and religion to be the determinant of conflicts in the post-Cold War world. But what Huntington made of this idea was a more than questionable primordial view of culture and religion.

Huntington believed in culture and religion as something age-old and fixed. This primordial view stood against most analyses of ethnicity, culture and nationalism. It rejected the possibility that cultures and ‘civilizations’ are constructed by societies in the pursuit of unity, and it denies the option that certain aspects of individuals’ identities – be it religious, cultural, or other – can be emphasized or denied by leaders to rally people behind them or to exclude others.

Civilisations as depicted in Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’:

“The Clash of Civilizations” has entered popular wisdom and with it the belief that cultures and civilizations are static and it that sense irreconcilable. This belief led US neoconservatives into a war in Iraq, it guides Islamic fundamentalist and it informs what most white Europeans believe about Muslim immigrants: that they do not fit in because they are different and will always be.

Edward Said has formulated the most eloquent critique to Huntington in this regard in his essay “Clash of Definitions”. Here is a citation of parts of Said’s original text. It’s worth looking at it if you want to understand what Huntington is missing:

I would go so far as to say that what we today call the rhetoric of identity, by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group puts that group at the centre of the world, derived from [ the] period of imperial competition at the end of the nineteenth century. And this in turn provokes the concept of “worlds at war” that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington’s article. […]

In the related fields of political economy, geography, anthropology, and historiography, the theory that each “world” is self-enclosed, has its own boundaries and special territory, is applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, psychology, ethos, and so on. All these ideas, almost without exception, are based not on the harmony but on the conflict, or clash, between worlds. […]

At precisely the moment in the nineteenth century that a rhetoric of civilizational self-justification began to be widespread among the European and American powers, a responding rhetoric among the colonized peoples develops, one that speaks in terms of African or Asian unity, independence, self-determination. […]

In both the colonial and post-colonial context, therefore, […] civilizations are basically separated from each other. […] People like Huntington are products of that history, and are shaped in their writing by it. […]

Thus to build a conceptual framework around the notion of us-versus-them is in effect to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural – our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange – whereas in fact the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed and situational.

Said goes on describing how culture is defined within societies in a contest between authority and dissenting voices:

Defining a culture, saying what it is for members of the culture, is always a major, and even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. […] The official culture is that of priests, academics, and the state. It provides the definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and what I have called belonging. […] In addition to the mainstream, official, or canonical culture, there are dissenting or alternative unorthodox, heterodox cultures that contain many anti-authoritarian strains that compete with the official culture. […] From the counter-culture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. […] No culture is understandable without some sense of this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund.

In this light it becomes evident what really is the legacy of the “Clash of Civilizations” and how it has shaped our view of culture in the last decade: it leads us to believe in fault lines and values as essential, and makes us think that changing these fault lines is impossible. Dissent to established authority is no option, if we believe Huntington.

Procrastinating with the latest Daily Show episodes, I saw this interview that made me quite curious. Matthew Alexander is a former US military who conducted and administered interrogations with detainees in Iraq and can claim to have collected the necessary information that led to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

As bleak as this might sound, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the man speak.

These are his two main points:

First: Torture is counter-productive and doesn’t yield positive results. In the short run, they bring no reliable information. In the long run, the practice of torture leads to resistance against the US army. While this is not particularly new or daring a statement, it is refreshing to hear it from a US army staff.

Second (and this might seem more surprising): He had more success with a cooperative approach. Supporters of anti-US radicals in Iraq seem to be in the game for rather pragmatic reasons, and not because of a fundamentalist ideology. By finding common ground, he says, he could get detainees on his side.

I don’t yet know what to make of the author personally. Having supervised more than 2,000 interrogations in Iraq, it is hard for me to belief that he did not participate in the misconduct that seems to be common practice. If he did, my sincerest respect. 

But in any case, it’s worth listening to him. What he has to say challenges some beliefs the US and in the West in general holds about Al Qaeda and the supporters of radical Islamic violence. It shows that interpreting fundamentalism and anti-Western radicalism in the Middle East as clash of civilisations or a war of two irreconcilable cultures is fundamentally wrong.

I looked for more by Matthew Alexander and found among other things an opinion piece in the Washington Post and an interview with Anti War Radio, where he elaborates on his interrogations of Al Qaeda supporters.

His description does not at all fit with our idea of these people as fundamentalist Islamic radicals. According to him, supporters who actually believed in Al Qaeda ideology were a “very small minority”. Most most people joined the insurgency for economic reasons, for affiliation by clan or kinship, or for protection by the group from Shiite militant groups.

Most of the people he interrogated had reasons to join the fight that were understandable even to a US soldier. Interrogating Al Qaeda supporters in Iraq, Alexander says, was not much different from interrogating criminals in the US.

This realisation opens a whole new negotiation space based on common sense. Why, after all, would someone make a decision to use torture? Torture only makes sense if the person believes that there is no space for communication and for co-operation. Torture makes sense if there is other way to get information.  

This is the fallacy if we believe in a clash of irreconcilable world views. It removes our ability to communicate. It makes coercion the only possible strategy.

Alexander describes the transformation of his staff when they started to understand the motivations of their detainees. He describes how these beliefs were challenged:

“We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money.”

He calls his interrogation method one based on ingenuity. “It is not about converting, it is not about dominating, it is about negotiating and compromise.”

One might also call it common sense. It’s a “re-humanization” of an enemy who was dehumanized in the process of war, propaganda and ideology. It’s common sense because it is the attempt to understand another person; a person you were told you could not understand.

Once the “enemy” in a conflict is dehumanized, once communication is lost, once coercion is the only means of communication, the conflict gets protracted and violence intensifies.

According to Alexander, “it’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. ”