Amnesty’s illiberal knee-jerk response

Recently, Amnesty International suspended Gita Sahgal, a senior officer in London who had gone public with her criticism of the organisation. Associating too closely with people like Moazzem Begg – the former Guantanamo Bay detainee known for his sympathy for the Taliban and other Islamist groups – damages the credibility of Amnesty, she had said to a newspaper. Horrified, Amnesty swiftly suspended her.

Not the wisest move for an organisation defending human and civil rights, like the right to freedom of speech. Angry folk, including prominent intellectuals and activists, hit out at Amnesty, siding with Sahgal. “Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates,” said Salman Rushdie. “It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong… It is people like Gita Sahgal who are the true voices of the human rights movement; Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they deserve our contempt.”

Begg, you may recall, is the young British-Pakistani ex-Gitmo captive who shot to stardom after he wrote about his experience in Guantanamo following his release, thanks to untiring campaigning by Amnesty and other organisations. As the hero of the play Guantanamo: Honour-bound to defend freedom, and a busy public speaker supported by Amnesty, Begg quickly became a star. But that doesn’t make him totally innocent. That he was released from Gitmo without being charged proves very little. Besides, Begg himself has written about his admiration for jehadi groups and the Taliban.

Gita Sahgal objects to Amnesty treating Begg – whom she calls “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban” – as a  partner in its fight for human rights and against terror. Apparently Sahgal has been protesting within the organisation for some time, in vain. Things may have come to a head last month, when Begg was part of Amnesty’s delegation that met British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, demanding that Guantanamo be shut down.

So should Amnesty steer clear of Begg because he may have Taliban links? Should it not fight for his right not to be illegally detained and inhumanly tortured? Oh come on, some would say, a terrorist has no rights! Hang these bleeding hearts trying to defend the rights of terrorists! What about the rights of their victims? Why should Amnesty, a charity running largely on public money, care about nasty people?

Well, passion has value, but the logic of human rights is not as rudimentary. As far as I could make out, Sahgal is not  objecting to Amnesty’s taking up the issue of Begg’s human rights. She just wants distance between the matter of fighting for his rights and Amnesty’s fighting for human rights and other issues shoulder to shoulder with him. That continuing close partnership implies a solidarity beyond the limited focus of Begg’s detention. It lends legitimacy to this Taliban
sympathiser and his organisation Cageprisoners, which champions people linked to Al Qaeda. And their views don’t exactly match Amnesty’s human rights agenda or ideology.

Here’s an example. Say you support the right of Nalini, accomplice of Rajiv Gandhi’s killer, not to be tortured in prison. Fine. But if you then become inseparable from Nalini in your public life, people may start to wonder about your ethics and ideology. Sahgal’s warning was similar.

It was a gutsy stand, given the dread of political correctness that cripples our thought and makes us bend over backwards till we almost topple over. Now, Amnesty has a wonderful opportunity to publicly debate issues of race, religion and disparate views. Suspending Sahgal was an illiberal knee-jerk response unbecoming of this cherished human rights organisation. Hopefully, it will rectify it by debating the matter and once again supporting free speech and the right to dissent.