Some
troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent
defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization
during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and
more concerned with the dignity of the US and UK’s image in the
world.
by
Alexander Rubinstein
Part
3 - Letting politics creep into mission
In 1966,
an Amnesty report on the British colony of Aden, a port city in
present-day Yemen, detailed the British government’s torture of
detainees at the Ras Morbut interrogation center.
Prisoners
there were stripped naked during interrogations, were forced to sit
on poles that entered their anus, had their genitals twisted,
cigarettes burned on their face, and were kept in cells where feces
and urine covered the floor.
The
report was never released, however. Benenson said that Amnesty
general secretary Robert Swann had censored it to please the Foreign
Office, but Amnesty co-founder Eric Baker said Benenson and Swann had
met with the Foreign Office and agreed to keep the report under wraps
in exchange for reforms.
At the
time, Lord Chancellor Gerald Gardiner wrote to Prime Minister Harold
Wilson that “Amnesty held the [report] as long as they could
simply because Peter Benenson did not want to do anything to hurt a
Labour government.”
Then
something changed. Benenson went to Aden and was horrified by what he
found, writing “I never came upon an uglier picture than that
which met my eyes in Aden,” despite his “many years spent
in the personal investigation of repression.”
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