States cannot fight terror through repression: this is the lesson the West has not yet learnt, writes Ayman El-Amir* Elected governments representing peoples and their countries are usually entitled to a certain measure of secrecy in the conduct of state affairs. They may hold in privacy sensitive information, inter-state exchanges, military plans or actions against hostile powers that threaten their security. The assumption is that government and state agents act to protect the interests of the nation and the state from mostly external dangers and not against individuals of the country who have, presumably, given them the power of government. In war situations, the world has come a long way from the 13th century atrocities of the Mongols, although some powers still practise them under a cloak of secrecy, and against the rules of international law. Autocratic regimes, police states and military juntas that rule by emergency laws have carried exceptional measures to new extremes, including extended detention, torture, extorted confessions, involuntary disappearances and summary executions. Since secrecy is sometimes dictated by the foul or illegal nature of the action, whether in regard to other states or individuals who are in opposition to the government in power, it has become the responsibility of conscientious individuals and organisations to bring such abuses to international public attention. This is what Wikileaks has done by publishing the Iraq War Log recently and what national and international human rights organisations do to document and publicise violations of human rights and war crimes. Like the Afghanistan war documents before it, the 400,000-document Iraqi War Log was shocking but not unprecedented. The logs were preceded by the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison torture and prisoner abuse scandal and, four decades ago, by crimes during the Vietnam War that were never investigated. War is usually a state of mayhem and little attention is paid to what constitutes a war crime that is punishable by international law. Such crimes are usually committed with a sense of impunity and in the belief that either they will not come to light or, if they do, will not come to justice. Despite the establishment of the International Criminal Court, the international system of criminal justice has so far proved to be grossly inadequate. War crimes and violation of human rights incriminate state actors. The motivation to cover up is therefore standard policy supported by a selective international system of accountability. This is how Israel, a war crime state par excellence, gets away with crimes that would make its leaders prosecutable even before the Nuremberg Tribunal if it was not protected by the United States. And that is how Myanmar has languished under a brutal military dictatorship for nearly half a century in the tolerant bosom of China and India. The Wikileaks war logs on Afghanistan and Iraq are a reminder of the 1971 revelation of the secret Pentagon Papers compiled and leaked to The New York Times and other newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He was a former US Marine who later worked as a military analyst at the RAND Corporation that serves the US Department of Defense. The publication of the Pentagon Papers exposed the US's secret plans to invade Vietnam, the escalation of the war on false pretexts, the atrocities committed and the lies circulated by both the Democratic administration of President Lyndon B Johnson and the Republican one of Richard Nixon. It led to the disenchantment of the American public and loss of support for the war, including young Americans' revolt against the draft. In the opinion of some experts, it also led to the Nixon administration's misguided action of "plumbing" the leaks by illegal tactics, such as wiretapping and character assassination. These became the precursor to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of president Nixon in the face of charges of lying to the nation and obstruction of justice. Leaking secret government documents or illegal actions has turned into a self-defence mechanism by individuals and non-governmental organisations against the tyranny of state actors, particularly in autocracies. NGOs that picked up the practice concern themselves with abuse of human rights and violation of fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of expression. These abuses are usually committed when a country falls into the hands of a military government. Such was the case in some South American countries, most prominent of which are Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay during the era of dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Chile pursued legal action against its former military dictator Augusto Pinochet and came very close to prosecuting him for torture, fraud, corruption and forced disappearances during his rule from 1973 to 1990. He died in 2006. Military rule in Argentina ended in 1983 after thousands of dissidents had been abducted, tortured and killed by the security forces. However, Argentina continued to chase the perpetrators and bring them to justice until 2005. Arab countries are no exception to clandestine actions and abuse of individuals and dissidents, which continue unabated. One of the most notorious cases that are still shrouded in secrecy is the abduction, torture and murder in France in 1965 of Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka. The failure, after 45 years of investigation and requests by his family to declassify documents relevant to his disappearance, to locate his body strongly confirms suspicions that Moroccan and French state actors, at the highest level, were involved in whatever happened to him. Speculation is still rife about the disappearance of Lebanese Shia leader Moussa Al-Sadr in Libya in 1979, and of former Libyan foreign minister Mansour Kekhya from Egypt in the mid-1980s. A more recent practice is the rendition of suspects involved in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, or with the Taliban in the Afghanistan war, for interrogation in Arab countries notorious for their extortion of confession methods, and scant regard for human rights. Clandestine operations against perceived enemies, inhuman and cruel treatment and illegal detention are practiced as a way of combating terrorism. But they seem to have had little effect on the growing phenomenon. US President Barrack Obama, now in the second year of his term, has yet to deliver on his promise to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention and interrogation centre within a year of his presidency. There seems to be a mutually inclusive relationship between the rise of terrorism and the brutal practices of dictatorship. In these circumstances, NGOs are acquiring a higher profile in exposing human rights abuses and war crimes. Autocracies that are usually impervious to accountability react in the only way they know: harassing NGOs and blocking their freedom of access and action. In liberal democracies, NGOs usually face manoeuvres and delay tactics but they have brave individuals, the free press and the legal system as allies. They foster alliances with NGOs in countries where such freedoms are restricted and bring gross abuses and violations to the attention of politicians, legislators and government officials and pressure them for action. The problem is that inter-governmental interests and alliances stand in the way of enforcing accountability. This is no more evident than in the Middle East, where the pursuit of Western interests have compromised the ideals of democracy and human rights that have long been proclaimed as the highest standards of a civilised society. The US-led Western alliance has not yet absorbed the lesson of the interrelationship between autocratic rule that violates fundamental human rights and freedoms and the mushrooming of terrorism. It is a battle the West cannot win by any number of military invasions, as Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
