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CHAPTER 1
Tales of Terrorism and Torture: The Soft Vengeance of Justice
Albie Sachs
Sometimes a small shock can be greatly educative. Arriving late at the conference on torture at the University of Chicago, my major preoccupation was to slip into a seat without disturbing the speaker. Then, as his words came through to me, I felt impelled to get up and walk out, as quietly as I had come in, but angrily. The shock came not from the manner of presentation — the reasoning was calm and precise — but from its content. The professor was applying cost-benefit analysis to the use of torture! I was stunned, and revolted. It was like weighing up the pluses and minuses of slavery or blackmail or child abuse ... my mind rang up a quick list of social activities regarded as so intrinsically abominable in their totality as not to merit anything good at all to be said about their details. Then I recalled Shakespeare's words said to the bewildered Olivia in Twelfth Night, "This is Illyria, Lady." This was America, man. A debate on the pluses and minuses of torture could never have been held in Chile or Argentina or South Africa or Zimbabwe, where at different times torture had been used in devastating manner by state authorities and impinged severely on the national psyche.
It made me think why certain issues could not legitimately be debated in the USA today, while others could. Thus, I could not imagine anyone now being invited in the USA to do a cost-benefit analysis of slavery or segregation or sterilization eugenics, though once the pros and cons of all these practices had been "scientifically" discussed by scholars. The national consensus on these issues would be so powerful as to prevent such an invitation being given. Could it be — my mind speculated impulsively — that the academic imagination would be revolted only if torture was a now-repudiated practice being applied by Americans to Americans, and not an approved mechanism being applied by Americans to foreigners? The international consensus, as evidenced by the Convention against Torture, indicated that torture was universally regarded as an undoubted and unqualified evil. The fact that torture in America did not evoke a spontaneous response of civilized horror was more telling in itself than the content of the paper. Then I try to tell myself that the very point of cost-benefit analysis is to exclude what is regarded as extrinsic moralism from the inquiry ... but my brain answers that what is at stake is precisely the deep morality of the society and the role that respect for human dignity plays at its foundation, and that if respect for human dignity has a price beyond rubies, then the scales of any balancing process could never come down on the side of torture.
But soon it would be my turn to speak. Should I make my point by walking out? The only way I could calm my racing brain was to apply cost-benefit analysis to my participation in a debate with people using cost-benefit analysis to justify torture. I had to accept that you took conferences as they came, that this was where the debate happened to be in the USA, and that it was particularly important for perspectives from other countries to be introduced. Rather than suffer the awkwardness of a departure without speaking, I could let the shock I had undergone give a special rhetorical edge to my presentation. So, shortly afterward I went to the podium and gave my presentation as planned, emphasizing rather more strongly than I otherwise might have done that torture has to be looked at from the point of view not only of what it does to the victims but of what it does to the torturers.
I had given similar talks in many countries to many different audiences. By the time I received the transcript from Chicago I was working on a book dealing with how my subjective life experiences had later entered into objective reasoning as a judge on South Africa's Constitutional Court. I adapted the presentation for the book, adding extra material drawn from judgments (opinions) in which I had been involved. What follows below is a revised copy of the speech in the form I made it at the University of Chicago and then published as chapter 1 of The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Given its provenance, Oxford University Press, the publishers of that book, have kindly agreed to the publication of this slightly edited version here.
1. My experience as a "terrorist" and torture survivor
I was thirty-nine years old, quietly teaching law in exile at Southampton University, when I discovered I was a terrorist. I had been invited to attend a conference at Yale University's Contemporary History Department. But I could not get a visa. Why? Because I was a member of the ANC, the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, who had been commander in chief of Umkhonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), set up to help overthrow apartheid in South Africa. And although I was simply earning my living as a rather innocuous law teacher in England, as a member of the ANC I was a terrorist. Happily, a few months later the political lobby group in Washington which backed the ANC turned out to be stronger than the group hired to promote the interests of the South African government. The State Department policy changed, and I was no longer a terrorist.
It was not simply the ignoble label of "terrorist" that was so objectionable. In South Africa, being treated as terrorists had brought enormous and terrible consequences for thousands and thousands of us. As terrorists, we could be detained without trial and subject to solitary confinement with no access to family, to lawyers, to anybody. Because? Because the authorities were combating "terrorism," fighting against what they called the total onslaught against South Africa. And they would bring in the threat of the Soviet Union, and a whole series of perils, the Black Peril, the Red Peril, and, when China became more powerful, the Yellow Peril, to justify what they called self-defense against terroristic acts. And we were arbitrarily plucked from our homes and our workplaces and found ourselves in jail.
How difficult it was to be brave! Before it happens, you think that when you are locked up you simply bare your chest, retain belief in your cause, and hold out forever. The reality is totally different. You are living in a little concrete cube. You stare at your toes, you stare at the wall. Your toes, the wall, your toes, the wall, you do not know how long it is going to last. There is nothing to do. There is no one to speak to. It is an inhuman existence. Human beings live in communities, they live with other people. There might be a few individuals who test their spiritual steadfastness by sitting alone on a column for years. I have a friend who is a Buddhist nun; she is silent for a month, for two months. She is in control, it is her choice. Solitary confinement is a nonchosen state, designed not to exalt your spirit through meditation but to break it down through isolation.
I can still remember how I would try to occupy myself and feel like a valid human being with an active brain and regular emotion. I would try to remember all the states of the United States of America. I think I once got up to forty-seven, but I could not write them down, so after slowly working my way through the alphabet, I would not be sure how many I had counted. I had two arms then, so at least I could get up to J. And then I started singing songs, once more going through the alphabet: "Always," "Because," "Charmaine"— quite an interesting profile of the hit tunes of 1963. (I mention in passing that the whole world knew when President Kennedy had been assassinated, except for one person: me. For about a week I had not even an inkling, I was kept in a world without news, until a security officer could not resist the urge to tell someone who still had not heard.) I would sing, trying to feel like a human being, a person living in the world:
I'll be living here, always, year after year, always. In this little cell that I know so well. I'll be living swell, always ...
and I would be amused that I was using Noel Coward's upper-middle-class version of an Irving Berlin tune to keep my spirits up:
I'll be staying in, always, keeping up my chin, always. Not for but an hour, not for but a week, not for 90 days, but always.
I was being held under what was called the 90-day law, which allowed suspects to be locked up in solitary confinement for 90 days without charge. After 90 days of scratching a mark on the wall like a good prisoner, it's the 90th day. I am released, I am given my tie back, my suit is returned — the one that I had worn when I was arrested entering my advocate's chambers — my watch is returned to me, and I say, "I'm free, I'm free." And as I am walking out to the street, a sergeant comes up to me — he actually shakes my hand — and says, "I am placing you under arrest." And I am on my way back in again, giving up my watch, tie, and suit once more. Ninety days could become another 90 days and another 90 days and another 90 days.
Once you open that door to diminishing respect for the rule of law, you close the door to the rule of law, to habeas corpus, to standards of fair interrogation, to the right to a fair trial; the opening or the closing is never enough for the security people. Under pressure to get results, they always want more, and so they ask for 90 days, then 180 days, and eventually for endless detention. That was my first detention, for 90 days and then another 78 days, never knowing when it was going to end.
Two years later (and you don't get stronger each time you are detained), I was detained again and subjected to what I call torture by sleep deprivation. Keeping me up through the day, through the night, with a team of interrogators shouting at me, banging the table for ten minutes, total silence for ten minutes, replacing each other, rotating all the time. When I asked for some food, they seemed delighted and smirked as they set a plate in front of me: I was pretty sure there was some drug in the food. And the next morning my body is fighting my will, my mind. The desire to sleep, to collapse, is just overwhelming. I knew of people who had held out for four days, for five days or seven days, and the longer they had held out, the more they had ultimately broken. They had lost all control whatsoever. I feared ending up like them. The theory was that you should hold out for thirty-six hours so that your colleagues could escape. But I had no one to protect; my information was two years old.
And this battle was not even about information. It was about breaking me. It was about showing that they were stronger, that they were more powerful. I was not thinking of Jean Paul Sartre at the time, but later I recalled his writing about torture in Algeria, and his pointing out that the objective of the relevant sections of the French military was not only to get information, it was to destroy the will, the confidence, the self-esteem of the people in captivity. There was a powerful racist dimension. They sought to dehumanize the people they were torturing by the very act of treating them in a subhuman way. They felt they were not only entitled to do what they were doing, they were obliged to do it because they were combating evil, crushing an inferior, threatening creature. And in the eyes of the interrogators I was in some ways even more terrible than the black people to whom racist ill-treatment had been historically applied. I was the pernicious white mastermind who was stirring up innocent souls, telling them they had grievances when in fact they were grateful to this government for making them better off than their counterparts in other parts of Africa.
It was the worst, worst moment of my life. It was not a hypothetical situation of the kind that some academics conjure up when discussing the costs and benefits of the government using torture. And, as in 99.9 percent of cases where forms of torture are used, there was no ticking bomb nearby when I collapsed on the floor, they poured water on me, and they lifted me up. I still remember those thick, heavy fingers prying my eyes open. I collapsed again, more water, the shoes shuffling around me, some brown, some black, and their sense of quiet, methodical urgency, the muted triumph as they were now breaking through my resistance. Any information I had at that stage was stale. Possibly they wanted to get me to be a witness against somebody who had also been in the resistance. That would have been a double triumph, because I could then have been projected as a traitor, as an instrument of the very state I had been opposing. They wanted hegemony, dominance, power, control, mastery. The practice was systematic, it was organized, it was condoned, it was part of policy. And it was integral to the whole system of white supremacy in our country, of retaining an unjust system by using methods which were so ugly and awful that even in apartheid South Africa they were hidden and denied. The rotten apples were at the top of the barrel, not the bottom. Six months, a year, or two years later, the torturers would come to court and deny that these things had happened. The judges would look at the witnesses who alleged torture and would not see blood flowing or broken bones or burnt skin. They would just see a pale, nervous, stuttering accused person claiming abuse and go on to accept the confident counterassertions of the security police, who, after all, were claiming to protect the judges and their families from terrorist attacks. To their credit, there were judges who showed that even in the direst of situations, space existed for the exercise of independent judicial conscience. But sadly they were few in number.
2. The power of justice in the face of torture and terrorism
I remember early on in my first detention thinking to myself that if ever one day I would be in a position of power and authority, I would never do this to another human being. When you are totally powerless, you try to imagine yourself in a situation of command in relation to those who are humiliating you. And what is the greatest power you can exert? It is not to do unto them what they are doing unto you. You are so weak that it is not even feasible, not even imaginable, that you can invert the power relationship. It is more emotionally credible to say to yourself, though I am hurting terribly, I remain superior to them — my standards and values are better than theirs, I have beliefs that are too deep for them to reach, I am a human being, I am fighting for justice, and I am struggling for freedom, I will never be like them. Somehow the strength of that belief, of being able to cling to a vision of a world based on magnanimity rather than on brutal tit-for-tat, gave me a sense of moral triumph that was extremely resilient. Years later when I was writing about the experience of being the target of a car bomb and losing an arm, I found myself repeatedly using the phrase "and that would be my soft vengeance": if the person accused in a Mozambique court of being responsible for placing the bomb in my car is put on trial and the evidence is insufficient and he is acquitted — I wrote — that will be my soft vengeance, because we will be living under the rule of law. To gain freedom was a much more powerful vengeance than to impose solitary confinement and torture on the people who had done these things to us. To repay them in kind would have meant that we had become like them, that we had become gangsters and crooks and thugs — for a morenoble cause to be sure, but in the end no different from them, only stronger. Our souls would be like their souls, and our inhumanity would be inseparable from their inhumanity.
What made it particularly ironical that we should be punished as terrorists, and in some ways made it especially dreadful, was the fact we were actually strongly against terrorism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were "isms" all over the place. Capitalism, socialism, imperialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism — only social democracy didn't fit into the "isms." And one of the "isms" that we had denounced on principle in our movement was terrorism. To respond in kind to the violence of apartheid was just wrong. Terrorism was based on the use of indiscriminate violence, directed at civilian people because they happened to belong to a particular group, race, or community. It was totally lacking in political intelligence. It was completely antithetical to our ideals. We were fighting for justice against the system of white supremacy, not against a race. And this lesson was repeated on all our platforms and in all our literature; I would not say ad nauseam, but endlessly, as a kind of a mantra of our struggle. For years we believed in the strategy of nonviolence. This was partly to avoid an ultimate racial bloodbath from which we might never recover; you can rebuild destroyed buildings, but it is far more difficult to repair damaged minds seething with hatred passed from generation to generation. So even when every avenue of peaceful protest was proscribed and our movement eventually embarked on armed resistance, we still denounced any resort to terrorism.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Confronting Torture"
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