Attention - Amnesty (updated)

'Read the rest' and 'Read the whole thing' have become repetitive tropes of the blogosphere, and have probably lost much of their force; I ask you anyway, those who haven't already done so, to read this piece by Pavel Litvinov in its entirety. Written by a supporter of Amnesty International, it also shows how that organization is in danger of losing its way:

Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."

"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees."

The word "gulag" was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administration in Stalin's Soviet Union. After publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," it became a symbol for the system of forced-labor camps that have been an integral feature of communist countries. Millions of prisoners confined in the gulag had not been involved in violence or committed any crime - they were there because they belonged to a "wrong" social, national or political group or expressed a "wrong" opinion.

The cruelty and scale of the gulag system are described in numerous books, so there is no need to recount them here. By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system.

These are elementary points and you'd expect those speaking for Amnesty not only to have been aware of them, but also to have been restrained by them from the comparison they chose to offer. Litvinov goes on to make some further elementary points:

Amnesty International, with its fact-based, objective and balanced approach to the defense of human rights, has been a source of hope for dissidents everywhere.
.....
There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk.

Having made the mistake of that comparison, Amnesty should simply have backed off from it with an apology, explained that, in view of the difference of scale and the moral import of that difference, the comparison was ill-judged - a mistake. Instead, over and again we are hearing what Litvinov reports here: the comparison 'attracts attention'. The same thing from would-be supporters of Amnesty, bloggers amongst them: the publicity is sufficient justification and (implicitly or explicitly) the difference of scale therefore doesn't matter. As if one of the greatest atrocities in the history of the human race may just be tossed around freely, and this not by some comments-box crazy but by one of the most widely respected organizations in the world.

Well, if anything matters, a difference of some millions of dead, to say nothing of their torments before and in dying, matters. And those who pretend not to be able to see this merely show a misguided sense of loyalty, one reluctant to find fault with an organization because of the invaluable work it has done; but the proper loyalty to it and to the continuation of that work is to insist that these not be compromised by being confused with something else.

A year ago, Eve Garrard wrote on this blog:

We are being asked by Irene Khan to believe that against the backdrop of forty post-war years of hideous violations of human rights throughout the USSR and its zone of influence, of the auto-genocide in Cambodia, the tortures practised for years in Chile and Argentina, and the 'disappearances' there, ethnic cleansing, torture and murder in former Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda in which nearly a million people died within a few short months, the systematic torture and murder of political opponents for more than two decades in Iraq, including mass slaughters of genocidal proportions against the Kurds and the Shia, the assault against the East Timorese by Indonesia with its thousands upon thousands of victims, the further thousands and thousands gruesomely killed in Algeria, the routine practice of torture in jails in Egypt, Syria, apartheid South Africa, present-day Zimbabwe, and Saudi Arabia, the murderous brutalities of Idi Amin in Uganda, the ferocities of the civil war continuing for years now in Sudan and the practice of slavery there, the nightmare treatment of the populace in the shadowlands of North Korea - we are asked to believe, against this blood-soaked backdrop, that legislative measures taken by America and other liberal democracies since September 2001 in the war against terrorism amount to a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years. The imbalance, the grotesque lack of proportion, in this judgement cries out for explanation itself, which explanation is perhaps to be found in the influence of political considerations which are outwith AI's proper (and irreplaceably important) remit.

The most recent episode - the Guantanamo/Gulag comparison - is out of the same book. Just like the statement Eve was taking issue with, it risks damaging the reputation and authority of Amnesty International by losing it within a contemporary left-liberal consensus which has an unbalanced view about America and its role in the world.

Update at 9.40 PM: A reader draws my attention to these lines by Christopher Hitchens:

About Amnesty International's disgraceful performance... The founding statutes were quite clear: An Amnesty local was to adopt three "prisoners of conscience," one from either side of the Cold War and one from a "neutral" state. Letters were to be written to the relevant governments and to newspapers in free countries. Though physical torture and capital punishment were opposed in all cases, no overt political position was to be taken. (I remember there was quite a row when an Amnesty "country report" on Argentina went so far as to describe a guerrilla raid as "daring.") By adhering to these rules, AI became a credible worldwide group to which even the most repressive governments sometimes had to pay attention. All honor to its founder Peter Benenson, who died earlier this year.

And now look... Amnesty... finds its voice by describing [Guantanamo] as "the gulag of our times." No need to waste words here: Not everyone in the gulag was a "prisoner of conscience"... But if an organization that ostensibly protects the rights of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and arbitrary detention - replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal execution - then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair.

I hope he's wrong about 'beyond repair'; but the point seemingly lost on those who have defended Amnesty for this statement, as well on the organization itself, is that its reputation rested and rests on its political neutrality, something that it puts in question by drawing analogies worthy of a fresh-faced recruit to the Socialist Workers Party. (Hat tip: FJ.)