Helping the torture victims heal

How many people have been victim to the practice of torture inside the
United States’ global gulag, and what do they need in order to heal?

Answer to that first question: an assessment urgently needs to be carried
out.

Answer to the second question: let’s start with–

Definition of torture given in Article 1 of the UN’s 1985 Convention Against
Torture, which was ratified by the US Congress in 1994:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which
severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted
on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information
or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or
a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with
the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting
in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only
from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Okay, what do victims/survivors of torture need, if they and the communities
of which they are a part are to heal the many wounds inflicted through this
experience?

The veterans in the western world in terms of working with victims/survivors
of torture at rehabilitation are undoubtedly the good people at the Copenhagen-based
International Rehabilitation
Council for Torture Victims
(IRCT), who have been doing this work since 1974 and has been running
a specialized Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (
RCT
) was in Copenhagen since 1982. (Check out their very impressive
English-language website for more details of their work.)

In 1993, I had the good fortune to be involved in organizing a conference
in Spain of human-rights activists from Palestine, Israel, Turkey, and a
number of other countries where one of the main items on the agenda was the
establishment of a Middle-East-wide campaign against torture. One of
the participants there was a doctor from the IRCT who emphasized that, “in
general, the aim of the torturers is to destroy the independent, democratic
personality.” (We also had two great participants who were Turkish
doctors affiliated with Human
Rights Foundation of Turkey
, which provides rehabilitative services inside Turkey to victims/survivors
of their own country’s military.)

The broader point that the Danish physician was making is that torture
leaves many, many scars that beyond the more easily treatable physical one.
The whole personality of the victim needs to be healed from the assaults
visited upon it. If that doesn’t happen, then that person can carry
his psychological wounds with him for the rest of his life; and they effect
not only him, but also all those around him.

I know a little about this. In the early 1980s, in the context of
the break-up of my first marriage, I got into a relationship with someone
who was a survivor of torture inside the prison-system in Nasser’s Egypt.
Sometimes at night, he would start screaming–bellowing, more like–while
he was still completely asleep. I would wake him… “What’s the mattter?”
“The prison, the prison… “

When he drank, he himself became very violent. Almost as if he was
possessed by a demonic force. After a while, to save myself and my
two kids, I exited the relationship. (I was lucky to be able to do
so, I know. Many women remain trapped forever inside such relationships.)

My point here is that this person’s torture had occurred some 25 years
before he and I ever got together… But the after-effects had
lasted that long. Oh yes, perhaps there had been other stressing things
that had happened to him in the meantime that accounted for some of his “disorder”.
But what he mentioned specifically had been his experiences inside
the prison a quarter-century before…

So, what are we–as Americans or just as concerned citizens of the world–
going to do to help heal the multiple wounds of the hundreds or possibly
thousands of victims/survivors of the abuses inside the present US gulag?

Some people have talked of cash reparations. (And some US Congressmen,
unbelievably, have even challenged that notion.) Cash: well, maybe
it’s a symbolic thing and maybe it could help them a bit… But still,
these people need a lot more true REPARATION (= repairing) than just
a bunch of greenbacks.

Maybe some people want to bring them to the two dozen or so torture rehab
centers established in the US in recent years? By and large, that might
not be the best approach… Nearly all the research shows that rehabilitation
is necessarily a family- and community-based affair, and is best undertaken
within the person’s home community if at all possible. I’m just trying
to imagine how an Iraqi mother would feel if we go up to her and say, “Oh
we’re so sorry about taking your son away from you for six months last year
for no particular reason and for the damage our soldiers did to him during
that time. So now, we’re going to take him to the United States to be
made well again… ” (Oh and yes, while he’s there he’ll be dealing
with a totally foreign culture, one in which images of sex and violence are
very common indeed… Just the thing for him…)

No. Maybe the better thing to do would be to urgently seek the establishment,
within each of Iraq and Afghanistan, of a network of community-based
treatment centers for victims/survivors of torture. I don’t know
if any such facility exists in either place. A quick web search for
Iraq found a
reference
to a plan by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development
to try to set up a project in Iraq, “both for the current victims of torture
and those who suffered under the old regime.”

That link, by the way, is to an informative story in Deutsche Welle
(English) that featured interviews with people at Berlin’s Center for the
Treatment of Torture Victims (BFZO), a place that treats a number of victims
of Saddam-era torture in Iraq. Here’s a small excerpt from it:

“The photographs flashed on television and in newspapers have awakened sad
and shameful memories for many of our patients,” Salah Ahmad, a therapist
at the BFZO told DW-WORLD. “Especially for Iraqi patients, the images have
triggered memories of the old regime — they are shocked that these things
are still happening,” he said.

“A 73-year-old patient of ours from Kirkuk, Iraq, who had witnessed
a young boy being forced to strip naked and being beaten while in prison under
Saddam’s regime, was absolutely traumatized by the photographs — he’s started
having the same nightmare over and over again,” added Ahmad.

Ahmad is also quoted as saying there that the plans to establish a treatment
center inside Iraq was “hobbled by a major lack of funds.”

As for any treatment facilities in Afghanistan, I just searched ICRT’s
website to see what they had for “Asia” in their global directory. They
listed 17 centers, in countries like India, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia,
Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. But nothing for Afghanistan…

And then, there’s Gitmo. Where or how should those hundreds of detainees
receive rehabilitation? Well there, as in the other branches of the
gulag, the first item on the agenda is to stop the current tortures and
abuses, and to have each of the detainees have their full rights–either
as POWs or as prisoners within a US prison system– restored to them. And
then, their phsyical and psychic rehabilitation needs to be an urgent matter
of business. Perferably, within their own home communities…

When, oh when, will US lawmakers start to make these things happen?