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From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Apr 26 2010 - 12:21:05 EDT
A Statement By Gita Sahgal On Leaving Amnesty International
Gita Sahgal
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/22/statement-gita-sahgal-leaving-amnesty-internationa/
Gita Sahgal is a longtime human rights advocate and founder of several women’s rights organizations who joined Amnesty International in 2002. In early February, she was suspended from her job as head of Amnesty’s Gender Unit after giving an interview to the London Sunday Times in which she raised concerns about Amnesty International’s connections with the group called Cageprisoners and its leader, Moazzam Begg. On April 9, Amnesty International formally announced Sahgal’s departure, citing “irreconciliable differences of view over policy.” Following is a statement by Sahgal.
On Friday, April 9, 2010, Amnesty International announced my departure from the organization. The agreed statement said, “Due to irreconcilable differences of view over policy between Gita Sahgal and Amnesty International regarding Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, it has been agreed that Gita will leave Amnesty International.”
I was hired as the head of the Gender Unit as the organization began to develop its Stop Violence Against Women campaign. I leave with great sadness as the campaign is closed. Thousands of activists of Amnesty International enthusiastically joined the campaign. Many hoped that it would induce respect for women’s human rights in every area of social and economic life. Today, there is little ground for optimism.
The senior leadership of Amnesty International chose to answer the questions I posed about Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg by affirming their links with him. Now they have also confirmed that the views of Begg, his associates, and his organization, Cageprisoners, do not trouble them. They have stated that the idea of jihad in self-defense is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim.
I thank the senior leadership for these admissions and for further clarifying that concerns about the legitimization of Begg were longstanding at Amnesty International and that there was strong opposition from the head of the Asia program to a partnership with him. When disagreements are profound, it is best that disputes over matters of fact are reduced.
Unfortunately, their stance has laid waste to every achievement on women’s equality by Amnesty International in recent years and made a mockery of the universality of rights. In fact, the leadership has effectively rejected a belief in universality as an essential basis for partnership.
I extend my sympathies to all who have fought long and hard within Amnesty International to match the movement’s principles with its actions. I know many of you have been bewildered by this dispute and others deeply shamed by what is being done in your name. You may have been told that debate is not possible in the middle of a crisis. I agree that there is indeed a crisis and that the hardest questions are being posed by Amnesty International’s close human rights allies, particularly in areas where jihad supported by Begg’s associates is being waged.
I am now free to offer my help as an external expert with an intimate knowledge of Amnesty International’s processes and policies. I can explain in public debates, both with the leadership and among the staff of its programs, that adherence to violent jihad, even if such ideology indeed rejects the killing of some civilians, is an integral part of a political philosophy that promotes the destruction of human rights generally and contravenes Amnesty International’s specific policies relating to systematic violence and discrimination, particularly against women and minorities.
During these last two months, human rights gains have been made to uphold international laws banning torture and to shame governments that have been complicit in torture through the secret rendition of suspects to countries where torture is carried out. But the specter that arises through the continued promotion of Moazzam Begg as the perfect victim is that Amnesty International is operating its own policies of sanitizing the truth.
So I invite you to join me as I continue to campaign for public accountability at this moment, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organization must ask: If it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others?
A petition to Amnesty International protesting its handling of the concerns raised by Gita Sahgal can be found at www.human-rights-for-all.org.
Joan Smith: Amnesty shouldn't support men like Moazzam Begg
Joan Smith
A prisoner of conscience can turn into an apologist for extremism
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-amnesty-shouldnt-support-men-like-moazzam-begg-1895848.html\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
Thursday, 11 February 2010
One of the things I admire about the British section of Amnesty International is its commitment to opposing violence against women.
In the past, subjects such as domestic violence, rape and sex trafficking were not always regarded as an integral part of the human rights agenda, and Amnesty's decision to highlight them was brave as well as controversial. I am delighted to have been asked to speak at and chair meetings for the human rights organisation, and sorry that I now have to join critics who accuse it of very poor judgement.
Amnesty's mistake is simple and egregious, allowing its name to be associated with an individual who has publicly expressed admiration for an Islamist movement which denies women's rights. It has compounded that error by its treatment of a dissenting member of staff; last weekend, Amnesty's international secretariat suspended the head of its gender unit, Gita Sahgal, after she voiced concern about the British section's links with a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Moazzam Begg. Since his release from Guantanamo, Begg has campaigned forcefully against it. He has written a book about his experiences, speaks fluently on TV and radio, and is a director of an organisation called Cageprisoners Ltd. Sahgal does not deny that Begg and other prisoners were treated dreadfully and she has consistently opposed "the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror".
What worries her is the assumption among some of her Amnesty colleagues that Begg is "not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights" (my italics). Sahgal raised the issue in two memos before her concerns became public at the weekend. But what she has identified is too important to be dismissed as an internal matter, namely an intellectual incoherence which isn't confined to the higher echelons of a single human rights organisation.
The thinking goes like this: someone who has suffered terrible human rights abuses must necessarily be opposed to similar abuses against others. It's a nice idea but history tells us it's wrong; today's prisoners of conscience may turn out on release to be doughty campaigners for human rights, but they might just as easily become tomorrow's apologists for extremism.
Let's return now to Begg. In 2001, he took his wife and children to live in Afghanistan, then under the control of the Taliban. Women scurried from place to place in burkas, risking a beating if a passing Talib spotted an inch of flesh, and could not even speak to a doctor except through a male relative; the horrors of the regime have been brilliantly described in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. In Begg's own book, he describes his interrogation by the CIA who wanted to know why a young man from Birmingham was living in Afghanistan. "I wanted to live in an Islamic state – one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world," was his reply. When they expressed scepticism, he complained: "I knew you wouldn't understand. The Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past 25 years."
Begg's enthusiasm for the Taliban is shared by another British Muslim who went to see the regime for himself: "They were amazing people. People who loved Allah. They were soft, kind and humble to the Muslims, harsh against their enemies. This is how an Islamic state should be."
That is the verdict of Omar Khyam, now serving life for his part in a plot to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub (chosen, don't forget, because it was likely to be full of "slags" enjoying themselves). Khyam appears on the Cageprisoners website, which says it exists "solely to raise awareness of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror". He is in illustrious company: the site also lists Abu Qatada – once described by a Spanish judge as Osama bin Laden's spiritual ambassador to Europe – and the notorious preacher of hate, Abu Hamza.
Amnesty protests that "any suggestion that cooperation with any group or individuals has influenced our work on behalf of victims of religiously inspired abuses and violations is simply false". But that isn't the charge against the organisation. What worries its critics is that Amnesty's name is being used to provide a platform, and legitimacy, for a cause inimical to its core values. Qatada, Hamza and Khyam are not prisoners of conscience. The Taliban isn't a little bit misguided about women's rights. Amnesty should consider its reputation – and keep its distance.