A is for Amnesty

I might turn these into an "alphabet of Decency" or I might not. Even if I do it will not appear in alphabetical order or a timely manner, because at present all I can thinkof is "C is for Chalabi" and "V is for Vietnam".

As the name change above suggests, we are a) no longer following Nick Cohen in the kind of comprehensive manner of the recent past and b) taking on a wider role with respect to the "Wide World Of Decency". We are therefore giving ourselves an "amnesty" on writing a full review of the book. I still quite honestly can't read it; it really is like being cornered in a bar by someone who feels himself to have been poorly treated in a dispute with his neighbour over the location of a fence. I'm dipping in, taking subjects from the index to see if they've been treated well.

I think that the treatment of Amnesty International has to be considered a touchstone for whether this is an honest book (and more widely, whether the Euston Manifesto[1] movement is an honest movement). Amnesty International is a really very honest and small 'd' decent organisation, and if you're trying to screw Amnesty International, then in my view there is by that token something wrong with you.

Specifically, it has to be counted a test of Nick's sincerity, because Amnesty International has specifically done what Nick claimed the "liberal left" ought to do. Ever since the war, Amnesty has been supporting human rights in Iraq. They are specifically campaigning for prosecutions to be brought against Baathist torturers and killers. Amnesty has led the way in supporting civil rights and the rights of women in the Islamic world. Nick has himself used Amnesty as a source in the last two years, for a 2005 piece on striking Iranian bus drivers. So, in other words, they have clearly not "gone berserk" in Nick's sense. They opposed the war and they strongly criticise the human rights abuses of the war on terror, but they also criticise Islamic regimes and they cannot possible be interpreted as supporting the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgents.

So what kind of a writeup do they get?

They are mentioned on 8 pages of the book. I might as well enumerate rather than summarise:

P52: "Human Rights Watch established itself as an alternative to Amnesty International on the strength of its investigations into Iraq". Basically a passing mention.

P312: "The non-governmental organisations the liberals most admired - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres - had successfully raged against oppression and mass suffering and become 'players' in global politics." Neutral to negative - the context is that human rights had become the language of international relations, but it is leading into Nick trying to suggest that a concern with human rights would :per se make you a supporter of the Iraq War.

P314: "Saddam Hussein was against everything represented by Amnesty International" context is mildly negative; recognising the importance of Amnesty as a moral standard for the Left, but preparatory to accusing them of hypocrisy.

P321: Not actually mentioned on this page, but it's the start of a five page passage that mentions them a few times.

P322: "Five years ago, if you could have asked journalists, diplomats, academics and victims of oppression themselves who they would have trusted above all others to stay sober in a crisis my guess is that they would have nominated Amnesty International" (and other mentions within the same paragraph). An introductory passage to the main theme …

P323: "Strictly speaking, Amnesty should have kept its mouth shut". Context is Tony Blair quoting Amnesty's dossier on Iraq in 2002 and Amnesty complaining about "opportunistic and selective" use. Amnesty has no right to a privileged interpretation of its own work, it means whatever a reader says it means, apparently.

"So in true Virginia Woolf style, Amnesty […] pretended that both sides were equally bad" This is the introduction to the "gulag" quote posted below, which continues onto page 324.

P324: "Irene Khan, Amnesty's Secretary General, showed that a twenty-first century cultural relativism could be as condescending [as colonialists - bb] when she told the Financial Times that 'if you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job, human rights mean nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues'". Nick gives no context to this remark and indeed allows the impression that it was a general statement of Amnesty's views. Actually, Ms Khan was at the time talking about why Amnesty had joined the Make Poverty History campaign. On p325, Nick claims that "I don't know what went through the minds of Amnesty's officers" and surmises that "You can blame Bush and Blair for creating a mental climate were even Amnesty International thought that human rights don't mean very much if you wish …". In fact the context was crystal clear in the original FT interview, although not in the extracts published on Normblog and Harry's Place at the time.

P325: "Human Rights Watch, which made its name as a rival Amnesty with its investigations into Iraq: No real mention of Amnesty here, although this bit is where Nick lays into HRW for writing the document "Iraq: Not A Humanitarian Intervention".

And that's it. Despite the fact that Nick knew that Amnesty had continued to stand up for human rights against Islamist oppression, because he had quoted them in the Iranian bus drivers piece, if you read "What's Left", you would get the impression that they had lost their minds in 2003 and given up on human rights ever since. I therefore conclude that Nick's claim that he is not merely having a go at people for being right on Iraq when he was wrong, is false, because his claim that he does not have a quarrel with leftists who opposed the war but who have demonstrably continued to show concern for the oppressed in Islamic totalitarian states is falsified by his extremely negative and in my opinion unfair treatment of Amnesty International.


[1] I am now drawing a distinction, because I think that Decentism is a wider political movement incorporating mangerialism, social-authoritarianism, and other things that Aaro believes in. The specific project of being a cunt about the war is not one that I think can be pinned on DA himself, albeit that this is largely because he has shut up about it, and with the qualification that his writings on the Lebanese war last year were pretty damn bloodthirsty.