June 26: International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Tarek Fatah spoke about the intersections of war, terrorism and torture. He shared the story of his first exposure to a victim of torture when he was a 20-year old student in Pakistan's prison system as a "guest".
On his first day, next to a barracks, he saw 4 middle-aged men playing cards. Three men were sitting, while the fourth was standing, always perched on his front toes. After a week, he managed to speak to them - they were long-term political prisoners and were not supposed to be communicated with. The men were supposedly Indian prisoners held under Pakistan's state security laws as Indian spies. Fatah also found out why the fourth man was perched on his front toes. He had been tortured with nails driven into his heels, becoming permanently disabled and was never able to walk straight again.
Fatah found this a horrendous sight. However, the elderly gentleman accepted this. It was also intriguing that the man would never sit with the other three. During interrogation, he was asked if he was Hindu or Moslem. He was actually a Moslem from the Indian side, which the interrogators refused to believe and so they tortured him to make him confess that he was Hindu. The others admitted being Hindu and weren't tortured. He was not permitted to sit because, as a Moslem, he was seen as beneath the Hindus - a victim of torture was not allowed to share the space with people who were not tortured. What was striking about this was that all of the men there accepted the notion that torture was a very likely outcome and therefore, somehow making it acceptable.
Fatah's main point was to emphasize that if we do not address where torture comes from, we are not addressing the real issues that allow it to happen. It stems from the notion that it is acceptable to inflict this torture if someone is the "other" - a different race, religion or tribal origin. There is an acceptance by victims of torture that this will happen to them in many parts of the world, which Fatah finds shocking, but is deeply related to notions of authoritarianism in politics, States, countries and in family life. Unless and until we address that notion, he said, and that civic society adheres to democratic norms with independent bodies governing the practice of democracy, there is "no hope in hell" of trying to eliminate torture.
He pointed out that almost every State who signed the 1948 Declaration was committing torture to its own citizens or adversaries as part of a practice of regulating authority on top of a ruled people. A movement to talk about the elimination of torture can only be successful if it is also a widespread movement where authoritarianism is addressed, and we confront the situation where torture is condemned against one's own community but is accepted for the other, the enemy.
Fatah believes that we need to focus more on establishing functioning democracies in nation states overseas and implement independent bodies where authoritarianism comes in, whether in the Toronto police force of in the home of a family. We need to go a step further that identifying torture as absolute and then confronting it. That will not succeed unless we address the larger issue: that do we accept race, religion and ethnicity to determine who is the other?
As long as we maintain those divisions, in ourselves, our culture, language and narrative, Fatah maintains that we don't have a chance in succeeding in the fight against torture.
