Amnesty loses the run of itself by smearing Bush with Stalin’s brush

CAFÉ MAO is the name of not one, but two, restaurants in Dublin. This column does not review restaurants, however, and I will confine my comments to the strange choice of name.

Would you name a restaurant after Hitler or Stalin and, if you did, would people think it acceptable? Probably not.

So how is it OK to invoke the leader of the Chinese communist revolution, the man who killed many more people than Hitler and Stalin combined?

Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was an attempt to make China one of the most advanced and prosperous countries in the world. Mao envisaged the banishment of millions of peasants from the land, even though the sudden shortage of food would mean that “half of China may well have to die.” The resulting famine killed 38 million people in four years.

Not many people know that, of course.

At least, not as many as know that Hitler killed six million Jews and Stalin banished millions more to Siberia.

Hopefully, the new biography of Mao by Jung Chang, author of the bestselling Wild Swans, will rectify matters. Meanwhile, Café Mao is an interesting example of how words lose their proper meaning when people lose their sense of history.

It doesn’t matter very much when you’re only talking about a restaurant.

But it’s a more serious matter when one of the world’s foremost defenders of human rights develops historical amnesia.

Some weeks back, Amnesty International caused uproar when its 2005 report accused the US of “war crimes” in its treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

Launching the report, Amnesty’s secretary-general, Irene Khan, referred to Guantanamo as the “Gulag of our times” - a reference to Stalin’s forced labour camps. This was the last straw for many commentators in the US - even some normally supportive of Amnesty. The Gulags were a million miles from anything that is happening in Guantanamo Bay.

They consisted of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of forced labour camps, created after the Russian revolution and lasting up to the time of Gorbachev. In these places, up to the 25 million Soviet citizens were housed in barracks and given barely enough nourishment to survive. They propped up the Soviet empire by performing slave labour in its mines, forests and farms. Millions of people died from starvation, cold, exhaustion, disease and physical abuse.

Is it legitimate to compare this with what the US is doing in its war on terror? Since the war began, the US has detained about 68,000 people as possible enemy combatants or terrorists. About 325 have formally claimed a degree of abuse. So far, about 100 American personnel found guilty have been punished.

A certain number of detainees have died during captivity, it is reported, and there are concerns about interrogation techniques being used by the US in Guantanamo. But there is no evidence that the 600 or so people there are being starved - on the contrary, their nutritional needs and religious beliefs at least appear to be provided for, and more than 100 have been released after some months in the camp. Some former detainees even say they were well treated.

The purpose of the Gulags was to prop up a totalitarian economy, and its inhabitants were picked up from apartments, homes and street corners in the Soviet Union. Guantanamo’s function, on the other hand, is to glean intelligence about terrorist activities against the United State, and its inmates were picked up on battlefield sites in Afghanistan and Iraq in the midst of a war.

The US refuses to deal with terrorism as a criminal matter to be investigated in the normal way, with all the protection for suspects which the average criminal justice system provides. Under the laws of war, the Americans argue, they are entitled to detain enemy combatants until hostilities conclude.

The right to detain, they say, is the happy alternative to killing people outright on the battlefield.

Amnesty is right, of course, to say that prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq must be investigated. Any abuse 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.

It’s worrying, too, that the US would use the offshore status of Guantanamo to get around the human rights standards that would be required on US soil, and that there is no independent investigator of the detention centres.

If Amnesty had more credibility it could fulfil this role. But by engaging in unhinged political rhetoric, it has burned its bridges with the Bush administration.

THIS is an incalculable loss because for over 40 years Amnesty was a courageous defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left-wing and right-wing dictators alike. Amnesty still keeps track of the world’s political prisoners and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. “But lately the organisation has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world’s dictators but for the United States,” lamented the normally supportive Washington Post.

“It’s always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse.”

The Post has put its finger on the problem. Amnesty, like other human rights watchers, has come to be dominated by people with a left-wing view of the world. Such people are prone to complete irrationality where George W Bush is concerned. But there is also the problem of a certain hectoring style which some human rights campaigners tend to adopt.

You may remember that a few years ago, Amnesty International Ireland ran a controversial anti-racism campaign featuring posters depicting Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and the then Justice Minister, John O’Donoghue. “Some say they’re involved in racism, others say they’re doing nothing about it,” ran the headline.

Like Amnesty’s latest ‘Gulag’ comment, the posters got lots of attention which, no doubt, their publicity people counted as a success. But all the campaign really did was annoy the political leaders involved - and send out the message that the people at the helm of Amnesty were confrontational, extreme and a little bit loopy.

Amnesty - both in the US and in Ireland - might learn a lesson from Bono who has come to believe name-calling and castigation of people as ‘right-wing’ is of no use in promoting his causes of debt relief and solidarity with the poor. Recently, he praised the conservative US Senator Jesse Helms, who backed his campaign to combat the global AIDS emergency.

“This is happening to me a lot. I am discovering how much respect I have for people who stay true to their convictions, no matter how unpopular. As you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes. Don’t respond to caricature - the left, the right, the progressives, the reactionary,” says Bono, in a message that could surely be of benefit to Amnesty.

“Don’t take people on rumour. Find the light in them because that will further your cause.”