Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch's John Sifton and I met with a nongovernmental organization to discuss options for holding governments accountable for post-9/11 torture. When Sifton said the word "torture" in the course of conversation he clenched his hands and made a twisting motion. "Torture" was taken from the Latin torquere. It means to twist. The hand movement was no coincidence. Sifton is someone who, like his new book, enjoys connecting the past with the present.
Violence All Around (Harvard University Press, 2015) invites readers to see through Sifton's eyes as he wanders through conflict zones investigating human rights abuses asking age old questions: why do we inflict violence on each other, and how can it be stopped, or at least reduced?
Much of the book draws on his time working at Human Rights Watch, where I met him many years ago and established what remains a close friendship, and includes his reflections on the efficacy of what our profession can, and cannot, accomplish.
His book is well-written and provides rich descriptions of what happens before, during, and after violence. It will not take long to determine if human rights work is for you.
Violence All Around is not a Human Rights Watch report though. He wants his audience to think further, not only about an act of violence or its immediate perpetrator. The book, which is introspective of himself and his profession, admits that the human rights community's hallmark tactic of "naming and shaming" has limits. The ever-expanding remoteness of violence through technologies such as drones (or cyber-attacks) makes it especially hard, he points out, to evoke a perpetrator's sympathy with his victim when the two are physically so far apart.
Sifton also focuses on the purposeful mechanics of violence and uses entertaining, and, at times esoteric, historical, religious, and philosophical references to explain how violence works and how to change its course. The book not only illuminates the work of human rights advocacy groups; it seeks to engage human rights professionals with historical contradictions and diverse philosophies of violence and nonviolence.
Early in the book, Sifton portrays violence as something purposeful that results from methodical planning. For two years I documented wanton violence in the Darfur, Sudan. For those crimes to occur someone had to pay the government's Janjaweed militia and arm them; uniforms had to be made and bags of cash dispersed; horses had to be fed and prepared for the sacking of a village; plans for what place and time to attack had to be determined.
Whether calibrating a bomb to detonate on a building's seventh floor and not the second floor, or planning a village raid, violence will always contain overlapping aspects of bedlam and precision. This is an important quality of violence that Sifton takes the time to discuss. In a statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2006, then-CIA director Porter Goss explained that US interrogations were "not a brutality." "It's more of an art or a science that is refined," he said. If science and order is brought to bear on violence, does it really make it more acceptable? Indeed, it was the unfathomable precision with which Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust that gave birth to the modern human rights movement.
Sifton succeeds at convincing his readers that violence, and its symbols, are all around, both in space and time. The Dutch forced slaves to build a wall in what is now downtown Manhattan to defend against Native Americans. That wall is remembered (Wall Street) and new walls have been built by Israel, by the U.S. along its border with Mexico, and elsewhere.
What to make of it? What do all these events, seemingly disconnected by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, have in common?
Sifton never quite says it, possibly to avoid being cliché, but violence is all around because, in large part, we do not learn from our erred ways. While patterns of failure are an easy target for derision, Sifton is also deeply interested in learning from the "successes" and contradictions of violence. What are the implications of developing more precise weapons systems that protect soldiers and reduce civilian casualties? This appears to be a big success, but are there negative consequences too? Will we--and other countries with the same technologies--deploy these new weapons, such as drones, more often than we should, Sifton asks. Yes, it seems. Is that a bad thing? I think he thinks so, because these weapons so severely detach our humanity from the violence they meter out.
Turning attention to his own profession, he questions what costs accrue when human rights groups call on States to act violently to halt ethnic cleansing and genocide. Will humanitarian intervention, as it is called, become a co-opted political tool for regime change? Some say it already has. "Blessed are the peacemakers," is a nice cloak to wrap oneself in, as long as the peace you make holds.
In our modern, ostensibly more humane society, there is almost always a legal component to violence. A human rights law professor once told me that States have one of two responses to torture allegations: We did not do it, or, What we did does not legally constitute torture.
The United State was not shy to use both. It is the second type of denial -- through legal reasoning -- that is the more dangerous though. "The government had possessed not only the detainees but the law too," Sifton says of the U.S.'s post-9/11 contortions of legal definitions, such as "torture." The U.S. also blurred the legal distinction between civilians and combatants. "The idea of a war on terrorism has broken down the whole system." At an even darker moment of self-examination, where Sifton recounts years of trying to expose CIA torture, he says, "We had failed. We hadn't secured any rights or liberties for the detainees... We, the human rights community, had started with nothing and ended with nothing: not the detainees, not the law, and not even the truth."
Maintaining a positive attitude in this work is difficult when immediate results are few. On balance, Sifton admits that human rights work also serves the purpose of gathering evidence with the hope that justice will, one day, be served. This is a quality of the human rights movement that Sifton could have paused to analyze more than he did. Pinochet never thought he would have died on the doorstep of justice. Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in 2005 for the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers. Former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré's trial begins soon in Senegal. These examples are, admittedly, limited; their numbers are also growing.
It is a fool's errand to make violence go away. Vonnegut wrote that war was like an unstoppable glacier. Sifton also knows that violence is inevitable. This does not mean you can't slow down its pace or chip away at it. What matters is finding ways to do so successfully.
Sifton devotes several pages to describing how States use violence, and the fear of violence, to deter future violence--often with counterproductive results. This can happen in any number of ways, through words, laws, courts, police patrols, riot gear and teargas, arrests, war posturing, and, of course, actual war. Gangs, terrorists, rebel groups -- whatever you want to call them -- act in similar ways.
Sifton nearly suffocates the reader with all the violence there is in the world. This is not something to bemoan however. It is something to be aware of if you want to effect change. These examples serve as lessons on how powerful institutions try, and often fail, to alter the course of violence.
After lengthy reflections on these issues and the works of Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Reinhold Niebuhr (Sifton's great grandfather), he ultimately comes to this conclusion: "Better to work with violence and subjugate or redirect it than attempt to wish it away. Violence, like mass and energy in physics, cannot be ignored. It must be met, head on, redirected, or absorbed."
This strikes me as an important admission by a human rights worker, who are too often mislabeled as bleeding hearts. Sifton is an idealist, but he is also a pragmatist. He is not a pacifist for sure. I think this is the lens though which he finds a positive message -- perhaps an overly positive message -- from the Arab Spring, which, he says, despite its problems, demonstrated that persistent human rights advocates can oust intransigent and abusive governments.
This is good news for the human rights community. I am left though wanting him to dissect this conclusion further and reflect more on which parts went well and what went so horribly wrong, especially in Libya and Syria. Even today in Egypt authorities are increasing their pressure on independent organizations the criticize government policies.
At his New York City book launch, a few blocks north of Wall Street, Sifton said he purposefully injected humor in his book to buffer its audience from a sense of doom and gloom. Much of the humor arrives in the form of biting irony. He describes waterboarding as the acting of "intentionally drowning a persons, almost." Elsewhere it is "a method of suffocation-by-water-to-the-very-brink-of death." Waterboarding is not funny. Rather, the humor -- the irony -- lies in the absurdity of a government having the gall to pawn off an almost-killing as anything less than torture. "An art or a science," as Goss put it.
Sifton -- who recalls his humorous emails, phone calls, and Facebook exchanges with his colleagues -- also reminds us that humor is a coping mechanism that human rights and humanitarian workers rely on to relieve ourselves from stressful, depressing, isolating, and dangerous work. It is a humor that addresses the unspeakable, tinkers with inappropriateness, and often crosses lines. It is an uncomfortable laugh, but, like Sifton's book, an important one.