[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:16751] Guantánamo Bay no Gulag, but Cuban Prisons...

[Alfred Kagan]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Diane Smith <dianesimth at yahoo.com>
> Date: May 26, 2005 12:44:51 PM CDT
> To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
> Subject: [SRRTAC-L:16751] Guantánamo Bay no Gulag, but Cuban Prisons...
> Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>
> Amnesty International secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. 
> detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our 
> times."  What a ridiculous statement.  An excellent source on the 
> Soviet Gulag is "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum.  Diane
>
> 'American Gulag'
>
> Thursday, May 26, 2005; Washington Post Page A26
>
> IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its 
> bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for 
> political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is 
> Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, 
> single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a 
> scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty 
> continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has 
> always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights 
> information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most 
> vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the 
> United States.
>
> That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference 
> held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the 
> organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. 
> detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our 
> times." In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also 
> mentioned only two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, 
> the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," which 
> "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights."
>
> Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner 
> abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so 
> not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but 
> also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse 
> to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and 
> because it damages the U.S. government's ability to promote human 
> rights.
>
> But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the 
> implication that the United States has somehow become the modern 
> equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc 
> creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. 
> Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- 
> have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a 
> still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was 
> a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of 
> concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more 
> than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose 
> existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern 
> equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where 
> Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience 
> reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on 
> Stalinist lines; !  or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't 
> even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
>
> Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it 
> is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for 
> Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate 
> criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its 
> investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives 
> the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its 
> policies as "hysterical."
>
> On 5/26/05 Kathleen de la Peña McCook <kmccook at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>> From the 2005 Amnesty International Report:
>> http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/index-eng
>> ===================
>>
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Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801

tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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