Meredith Tax: Gitagate, Two Years After // Gita Sahgal vindicated in her battle with Amnesty // Amnesty International and jihad - A reputation at risk
Amnesty International is the world’s biggest human rights
organization. Its prestige is enormous and its budget is larger than the
budgets of some states. So it matters a lot which organizations Amnesty
promotes as its partners; if they are not in fact reliable human rights groups,
but pro-jihadi or other armed struggle organizations, not only Amnesty’s
reputation but the moral authority of the entire human rights movement is on
the line. For this reason, the story of Gita Sahgal’s 2010 battle with the leadership
of Amnesty International—or Gitagate, as it was called around AI’s London
office—should be better known outside the UK.
Though it happened two years ago, the controversy raised
issues that remain current, like the tendency of human rights organizations to
put the rights of women and sexual and religious minorities into silos that do
not affect their work on counter-terrorism, thus enabling them to claim
universality while endorsing ideas and organizations of the Muslim Right. This
tendency was the subject of a recent debate in the New
York Review of Books, when an international group of women’s human
rights advocates (including Gita Sahgal and this writer) challenged a call by
the director of Human Rights Watch to support the electoral victories of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia and Egypt, rather than advocate continued
expansion of the democratic process and guarantees of fundamental rights. “Like
you,” their open letter said, “we support calls to dismantle the security state
and to promote the rule of law. But we do not see that one set of autocratic structures
should be replaced by another which claims divine sanction.”
Gita Sahgal is well known as a writer, filmmaker, and human
rights campaigner in both India and the UK. (Full disclosure: she is also the
Executive Director of the Centre for Secular Space, of which I am U.S.
Director.) She has been a board member of Southall Black Sisters, a West London
group that reshaped the UK feminist movement through its work against domestic
abuse and racism; AWAAZ – South Asia Watch, a group primarily known for its
opposition to Hindutva; and Women Against Fundamentalism, founded in response
to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Her award winning film The War Crimes
File documented atrocities committed by members of the Islamist party
Jamaat-e-Islami during the 1971 Bangladeshi liberation struggle. She was the
first person hired to lead Amnesty’s Gender Unit, and was among the architects
of its campaign on violence against women, as well as one of its internal
experts on both the Hindu and Muslim Right. By January, 2010, she had been
expressing concern about Amnesty’s relationship with Moazzam Begg for two
years.
Moazzam Begg is a British citizen and jihadi sympathizer who
took his family to live in Afghanistan in 2001 because he supported the
Taliban. After 9/11, he was kidnapped from his home in Kabul by Pakistani and
U.S. security forces and held for a year in Bagram prison and two more in
Guantánamo without being charged. In 2005 he and other British citizens were
released from Guantánamo as a favor to Tony Blair; with the aid of former Guardian journalist
Victoria Brittain, Begg then wrote an account of his life called Enemy
Combatant. He is now the director of Cageprisoners, a London-based
organization for the defense of “prisoners of the war on terror” that purports to
be a human rights organization. Because of his high profile and fluency in
English, Amnesty-UK eagerly took him on as a partner in its “Counter Terror
With Justice” campaign, aimed at closing Guantánamo. Amnesty International USA
and the Center for Constitutional Rights also partnered with Begg in this
campaign.
According to his book Enemy Combatant, Begg
first went to Afghanistan in 1993, when he met with mujahadeen fighting the
Soviets and visited a Jamaat training camp. Inspired by these dedicated warriors,
he made a number of trips to Bosnia and tried to join the struggle in Chechnya
but was unable to get a visa. He then returned to Birmingham and founded a
bookstore called Maktabah al Ansaar, which became a gathering place for people
interested in jihad and a strategic node for dissemination of works by, among
others, Abdullah Azzam and Osama Bin Laden, the founders of al-Qaeda, and Ayman
al Zawahiri, its current leader. While Begg was in charge, Maktabah al Ansaar
commissioned and published The Army of Madinah in Kashmir, by
Dhiren Barot, who is considered the most significant al-Qaeda figure captured
in the UK. The book, which uses the term “defensive jihad,” contains
instructions on how to find jihadi camps, and justifications for carrying out
acts of terrorism in the West.
Though it was obvious to Gita Sahgal that Amnesty was right
to defend Moazzam Begg against rendition and imprisonment without trial, she
felt that someone with his history of support for the Taliban and involvement
in publishing and distributing works by al-Qaeda was not a suitable partner for
a human rights organization. On January 30, 2010, in despair over her failure
to get senior management to listen, she wrote a last-ditch memo about the
“Counter Terror With Justice” campaign:
I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty
International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human
rights. To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of
the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of
judgment….fatally blurring the distinction between defending the rights of the
individual and creating a narrative of innocence to suit our campaigning. This
is a very old problem but it has currently reached its apotheosis in the
decision to take Begg to Downing Street and to tour with him across Europe.
The “very old problem” of portraying anyone who is
persecuted by the state as a human rights defender, including members of armed
groups that violate the rights of others, goes back at least as far as the
Algerian civil war of the 1990s, when members of Islamic armed groups and their
lawyers were defended by human rights organizations and received asylum in the
West, even while their groups continued to murder civilians, especially women
and schoolgirls. Their victims couldn’t
get redress from anyone. A few days after Sahgal submitted her internal memo she was
called by a reporter from the Sunday Times, and on February 7, 2010
she gave the paper an interview,
hoping in this way to get Amnesty to take the problem seriously. Three hours
after the article appeared, Sahgal was suspended from her job.
Her suspension became an international cause célèbre,
featured on the BBC, CBC, NPR, in all the major British newspapers, and
reflected widely in the blogosphere. A Facebook group called “Reinstate Gita
Sahgal, You Bloody Hypocrites” debated the issues. A supporter in India put up
a website, “Human Rights for All,” which became a repository for documentation
of the affair. And on February 13, three South Asian feminists—Amrita Chhachhi,
Sara Hossain, and Sunila Abeysekera, all human rights activists who worked with
Amnesty locally—wrote a global petition saying
Amnesty had to maintain “an objective distance” from salafi-jihadis:
This issue of principle is critical at the present
moment, with the United States led “War on Terror” leading to the suspension of
human rights and increased surveillance over individuals and the body politic.
Ironically, the language of human rights and human rights defenders is being
taken over by the US/NATO alliance in its efforts to legitimize a re-born
imperialism. Equally disturbingly, this language is also being hijacked by
organizations that espouse extremist and violent forms of identity-based politics.
The space for a position that challenges both these is shrinking, and human
rights are becoming hostage to broader authoritarian political agendas, whether
from states or communities. In this context, it is crucial for human rights
defenders and organizations to clearly define principles and core values that
are non-negotiable.
But Amnesty’s leaders seemed unable to take this step.
Claudio Cordone, its interim director, said the organization had investigated
Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners and found nothing wrong with either from a human
rights standpoint. He did not, however, make this investigation public, beyond
the fact that Begg had said he was not in favor of killing civilians. In his
response to the authors of the global petition, Cordone also seemed to
be fine with the concept of “defensive jihad”:
Moazzam Begg is one of the first detainees to have been
released from Guantánamo and to disclose information when much of what was
going on in the camp was shrouded in secrecy. He speaks powerfully from
personal experience about the abuses there. He advocates effectively detainees’
rights to due process, and does so within the same framework of universal human
rights standards that we are promoting. All good reasons, we think, to be on
the same platform when speaking about Guantánamo.
Now, Moazzam Begg and others in his group Cageprisoners
also hold other views which they have clearly stated, for example on whether
one should talk to the Taliban or on the role of jihad in self-defense. Are
such views antithetical to human rights? Our answer is no, even if we may
disagree with them—and indeed those of us working to close Guantánamo have a
range of beliefs about religion, secularism, armed struggle, peace and
negotiations.
The doctrine of “defensive jihad” was spelled out by
Abdullah Assam, a key figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and mentor of Osama bin
Laden, in a 1979 fatwa entitledDefense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation
after Faith, which called upon all Muslims to fight the Soviets in
Afghanistan. Now the leader of an international human rights organization
appeared to be supporting this idea. The three women who had initiated the
petition wrote
him again, protesting his endorsement of the term:
The call for “defensive jihad” is a thread running
through many fundamentalist and specifically “salafi-jihadi” texts. It is mentioned
by Abdullah Azzam, mentor of Osama bin Laden, and founder of Lashkar e Tayyaba.
It is the argument of “defensive jihad” that the Taliban uses to legitimize its
anti human rights actions such as the beheading of dissidents, including
members of minority communities, and the public lashing of women….It has been
shown that “defensive jihad” results in indiscriminate attacks on civilians,
attacks which are disproportionate and attacks which are targeted for the
purpose of discrimination such as those on schools, shrines and religious
processions. As you know, international humanitarian law prohibits all such
attacks under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Given this it is
shocking to us that in your letter you appear to endorse “defensive jihad” as a
public position of Amnesty International.
Cordone responded a
week later, repeating that he had not seen any evidence that Moazzam Begg or
Cageprisoners endorsed attacks on civilians, although they “have spoken and
written about jihad in self-defense,” and further stating:
Amnesty International does not take a position on the
particular justification for using force put forward by individuals, groups or
states, irrespective of whether such use of force is termed jihad, or “war of
national liberation,” a “just war,” or something else. We do not take sides in
a conflict, as has been the case throughout our history. We remain independent
of any government, political faction or ideology.
But in fact, by declaring that jihad in “self-defense is not
antithetical to human rights,” he had just taken a position that contravened
this long-standing policy, giving the Amnesty seal of approval to a doctrine
that says all Muslims everywhere have an obligation to make war on any state
that invades or oppresses “Muslim lands.”
On April 9, 2010, after negotiations, Amnesty issued a
statement saying that “due to irreconcilable differences of view over policy
between Gita Sahgal and Amnesty International regarding Amnesty International’s
relationship with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners it has been agreed that Gita
will leave Amnesty International on 9 April 2010.” Sahgal responded with
her own statement:
The senior leadership of Amnesty International chose to
answer the questions I posed about Amnesty International’s relationship with
Moazzam Begg by affirming their links with him….Unfortunately, their stance has
laid waste every achievement on women’s equality and made a mockery of the
universality of rights….adherence to violent jihad even if it indeed rejects
the killing of some civilians, is an integral part of a political philosophy
that promotes the destruction of human rights generally and contravenes Amnesty
International’s specific policies relating to systematic violence and
discrimination, particularly against women and minorities.
In the prevailing climate of xenophobic attacks on Muslims
by the Christian Right, it has become difficult for the U.S. left, the anti-war
movement, or human rights organizations to discuss the beliefs or human rights
violations of salafi-jihadis; indeed, anyone who brings the question up runs
the risk of being called Islamophobic. Meanwhile, the mainstream press, the
State Department, and Human
Rights Watch are busy promoting “moderate Islamists” who have the same
goals as salafi-jihadis but are willing to achieve them through elections.
According to a report by
NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, the Obama administration’s
new “Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent
Violent Extremism” (SIP) is modeled on the “Prevent” strategy of Tony Blair,
which was severely criticized in a 2011
report by Lord Carlile. Prevent combined “hard” and “soft”
counter-terrorism by promoting organizations that were fronts for the Muslim
Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, in the belief that such “nonviolent
extremists” would capture the hearts of the young and keep them from becoming
jihadis.
In response to the Prevent policy, AWAAZ, a group of
British-South Asian activists who came together to oppose the Hindu Right,
produced a pioneering piece of research titled “The
Islamic Right—Key Tendencies,” spelling out the implications of an alliance
between the neoliberal state and “moderate Islamists,” in which the state
showed itself willing to overlook systematized discrimination against women and
gays as long as nobody set off bombs in the subway:
…terms such as “moderate,” “mainstream,” “representative”
are used by government, media and various political tendencies in deceptive
ways….the popular conflation of “violent” with “terrorism” can mean that the
forms of systematic, legalised gender-based violence (such
as hudud punishments) promoted by various political Islamists can be
ignored by governments and other official bodies who wish to work with them.
The UK government operates a dual strategy of, on the one hand, weakening human
rights and civil liberties in the name of the so-called “war on terror” and, on
the other…the systematic and sustained promotion of the Islamic Right in the
UK.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, no U.S. left-wing or human
rights group is doing research on the Muslim Right comparable to that done by
AWAAZ. The Christian Right and neocons dive into the subject and draw their own
bizarre and racist conclusions; the subject also interests national security
experts, who are principally concerned with state security and unlikely to
foreground questions of human rights. But the knowledge base of feminists, the
human rights movement, and the American Left is minimal when it comes to how
the Muslim Right organizes in the United States. Can we really afford to leave
an area of such importance to national security experts and conservative
ideologues?
Meanwhile, back in London, Amnesty International has yet to
disavow its partnership with Cageprisoners or its statements on “defensive
jihad,” even while it continues to defend the rights of women and sexual
minorities in other contexts. Until the question of human rights violations by
people who may themselves be victims of counter-terrorist abuse is openly and
honestly addressed, it will remain corrosive to the human rights movement. When
major human rights groups are entangled with the Muslim Right, who will blow
the whistle when similar alliances are made by the state?
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Amnesty International coming under pressure to cut its ties
with Cage. A former employee urged the charity to stop treating the group
as human rights defenders and heroes. Gita Sahgal, a former head of
Amnesty International’s gender unit, was forced out of the organisation in 2010
after describing Cage as jihadis and questioning the championing of former
Guantanamo inmates. ‘Immense damage has been done to Amnesty, not least
because they won’t come clean about their association with Cage,’ she told the
BBC. ‘They say various things like, they don’t work with them, they have
never worked with them, or they are in a loose coalition with them. ‘But
the point is, whether they are in a tight embrace or a loose coalition, they
have taken their research from them, they have shared logos with them, they
have produced briefing papers together, they have signed letters to the
Government together, that is working with the organisation.’ She described
Cage’s current director, former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Moazzam Begg, as
‘Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban’.
Miss Sahgal said she had never argued Guantanamo prisoners
‘shouldn’t be defended’, but that they ‘shouldn’t be treated as heroes and
human rights defenders’. She added: ‘The prisoners they were defending in
this case were not prisoners of conscience ... what they did was create a
narrative of innocence around them.’ Steve Crawshaw, of the office of the
secretary general at Amnesty, admitted yesterday it was ‘highly unlikely’ they
would work with Cage again. Asked if Amnesty had played to a ‘myth’ of
victimisation, Mr Crawshaw added: ‘I don’t think we have played to anybody’s
myth. I can’t condemn strongly enough anybody, in any context who seeks to find
some justification somehow for how they can justify killing
civilians. ‘Our colleagues there (in Iraq) are risking lives in order to
document the terrible crimes of IS and therefore to hear somehow that we are
turning away from those things, I do think is quite extraordinary.’ Amnesty
International was forced yesterday to admit that it worked alongside Cage as
recently as October.
Amnesty International and jihad - A reputation at risk
REPORTS that “Jihadi John”, a particularly ghastly member of the Islamic State who has been identified as the beheader of at least five Western hostages in Syria, is a Briton named Mohammed Emwazi embarrassed several outfits. One of them was MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, which had apparently interviewed him but then let him slip out of Britain. Another was Cage, a British Islamist outfit which had warm relations with Mr Emwazi. But the twitchiest reaction was at Amnesty International.
In the 1970s it was called ‘Radical Chic’: the toe-curling
tendency of well-heeled liberals to consort with revolutionaries in the hope
that the glamour of violence would rub off. The phrase was coined by the
journalist Tom Wolfe in a
satirical article he wrote for New York magazine about
a fundraising party hosted for the Black Panthers by composer Leonard
Bernstein. Cage, the Islamic-focussed advocacy organisation, is the
new equivalent of the Black Panthers and, for years celebrities, journalist,
politicians and human rights organisations have been happy to assuage their
liberal guilt and bask in the reflected glory of the Guys from Guantanamo.
Vanessa Redgrave, Victoria Brittain, Peter Oborne and Sadiq Khan have all at
some time done their piece of endorsing Cage: often making legitimate points
about the mistreatment of terrorist suspects just as Bernstein raised the
pressing issue of police harassment of black people in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the
Roddick Foundation gave it the funding and legitimacy it needed to function.
Amnesty International, in turn, provided the human rights cover. If any of the
individuals choosing to consort with Cage had read Wolfe’s essay, they had
certainly not taken it to heart. What Wolfe recognised was that, in reality,
such posturing challenges nothing. As he wrote in 1970: ‘Radical Chic,
after all, is only radical in style; in its heart it is part of society and its
traditions.’
Five years ago Gita Sahgal, head of Amnesty’s gender
unit, raised
her concerns about the organisation’s relationship with Cage Prisoners, as
the group was then known. In an episode that demonstrates how far the
organisation had drifted from its founding principles, she was first told to
shut up and then drummed out of Amnesty altogether. On the Today programme this
week, while discussing Cage’s links to Mohammed Emwazi, Amnesty’s
Steve Crawshaw simply had no answer to Sahgal’s central criticism: that the
human rights group had crossed a crucial line. Amnesty had been right
to highlight the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, but it should not have
stood shoulder to shoulder with the ideologues of Cage. In the end, he was
forced to admit that Amnesty would not make the same mistake again. It
must have looked different back then. On one side stood a group of charismatic
revolutionaries with wild beards and wilder opinions, who had suffered at the
hands of the Americans and on the other, a quietly spoken feminist with years
of experience of highlighting
the abuse of women around the world. Amnesty chose Radical Chic against
principle. I bet they are regretting it now.
See also
