John Ashcroft
05-07-2004, 11:00 PM
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/historic/c&gs/images/theb2930.jpg
"Malmedy Massacre" - approximately 70 members of Battery B killed after captured . Fair J. Bryant was travelling with Battery A of 285th at time of massacre. Occurred at beginning of Battle of the Bulge
http://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/photo/wlc/image/19/19558.jpg
Soviet prisoners of war in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, January 1942.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/images/_39166_ditch.jpg
Between December 1937 and March 1938 one of the worst massacres in modern times took place. Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanking and embarked on a campaign of murder, rape and looting.
Historian Iris Chang describes the horrors of "one of the great atrocities of world history"
Based on estimates made by historians and charity organisations in the city at the time, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children. The number of women raped was said by Westerners who were there to be 20,000, and there were widespread accounts of civilians being hacked to death.
Yet, many Japanese officials and historians deny that there was a massacre on such a scale. They admit that deaths and rapes did occur, but say they were on a much smaller scale than reported. And in any case, they argue, these things happen in times of war.
Yeah, but what does the United States do about it when their countrymen partake?
http://www.atlanticfleet.navy.mil/tr-senmccain.jpg
CBS) For prisoners of war, the first 24 hours are the most dangerous, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.
His remarks come one day after Pfc. Jessica Lynch was rescued by commandos in Iraq where she was being held as a prisoner of war. Joy over her recovery has been tempered by the discovery of 11 bodies at the hospital where she was found and the belief that some of the remains may be Americans.
“One of the reasons why it's the toughest, and was in '91," says McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam for five years, "is because you're not in the hands of the authorities who at least are somewhat inclined to observe their rules of war. So that's very dangerous."
Of his imprisonment in Vietnam, three years of which were spent in isolation, McCain said, "Most of the POWs we lost in Vietnam were being transported right after capture to Hanoi. So that part of it is dangerous. It's a shock to your system, obviously, and usually in these situations you're wounded or injured in some way.”
McCcain favors sending a clear message to Iraq. “The point here, Harry, is that we tell the Iraqis that we don't know exactly what they've done to our prisoners, but if they have harmed them, we will track them down, and we will hold them responsible. They'll lose this war. We will find them wherever they are. Unless they treat those prisoners according to the Geneva conventions,” he says.
While in captivity, McCain says, he dreamed of being rescued. “Two things I dreamed of. One was being rescued. And the other one was that I would escape and get to the Swedish embassy in Hanoi and they would take care of me for the rest of the conflict.
"In fact, we would have plans to escape, and as you know, there was a daring raid made on a camp outside of Hanoi, which frankly although there was no POWs there, was a tremendous lift to our morale and spirits when we heard about it,” he recalls.
Watching video of the rescue of Lynch and hearing reports that she fought fiercely and shot several Iraqi soldiers before her capture, McCain says, "I don't think there are too many Americans that are familiar with the military that don't recognize that women are superb. They're fighter pilots, they're wonderful contributions. It's a sign of the contribution that all Americans will make to our military and can and do.”
McCain's assessment of the war is that it is going well. “If two weeks ago you'd have told me that we'd be on the outskirts of Baghdad, I'd say that it's certainly a successful operation. I think that's an obvious answer,” he says but offers a word of caution for the challenges ahead.
“The weapons of mass destruction, and whether they will be used or not. Will the Republican Guard fight inside Baghdad? How long will it take us to pacify towns like Basra, cities, which still remain not totally in our control? What's going to happen to the oil wells in the north? So there are a lot of unanswered questions. But I think overall we can be proud,” he says.
He says that succcess is based on “incredible technological capability, but also the superb young men and women that perform so magnificently.”
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/RM1.STALIN.KILL.JPG
Stalin is responsible for the murder of about 43,000,000 people, 1929-1953. I could find virtually no photos of these dead on the internet, except for the exhumed skeletons of his victims shown here and some photos of Ukrainians he murdered by starvation.
Torture in Castro's Cuba
Summary: I recall when the kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
(Address of Ambassador Armando Valladares', Chief of the United State's Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights' Commission. Geneva, Switzerland, February 23, 1988)
Mr. Chairman, I am not a career diplomat, and I am not an expert on the technical aspects of this organism. I will not speak in a detailed manner on the reports and topics submitted under point 10. There will be other interventions during which we will listen to opinions on those important matters.
Mr. Chairman, today I want to speak about torture, about what it means for a human being to be tortured, to be humiliated, or what may be even worse, to watch a friend, a companion, or a relative being tortured.
As many of you know, I spent twenty-two years in prison for political reasons. Perhaps, I am the only delegate in this Commission who has spent such a long time in prison, although there are several persons here who have known in their own flesh the meaning of torture. I do not care about their political ideology, and I offer to you my embrace of solidarity, from tortured to tortured.
I had many friends in prison. One of them, Roberto López Chávez, was just a kid. He went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water, Roberto lay on the floor of his punishment cell, agonizing, deliriously asking for water. water… The soldiers came in and asked him: "Do you want water?"… The they took out their members and urinated in his mouth, on his face… He died the following day. We were cellmates; when he died I felt something wither inside me.
I recall when they kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
Mr. Chairman, I know the taste of the urine and the excrement of other men… that practice does not leave marks; marks are left by beatings with steel rods and by bayonet thrusts. My head is still covered with scars and you can feel the cracks.
But, what can inflict more damage to human dignity, the urine and excrements thrown all over your face or a bayonet's blow? Which is the appropriate article for the discussion of this subject? Under which technical point does it fall? Under what batch of papers, numbers, lines and bars should we include this trampling of human dignity?
For me, and for innumerable other human beings around the world. The violation of human rights was not a matter of reports, of negotiated resolutions, of elegant and diplomatic rhetoric, for us was a daily suffering.
For me (it meant) eight thousand days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement, of cells with steel-planked windows and doors, of solitude.
Eight thousand days of struggling to prove that I was a human being. Eight thousand days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain. Eight thousand days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart [Editor's Note: Atheism has nothing to do with torture -- as evidence the Inquisition by the Church]. Eight thousand days of struggling so that I would not become like them, rejecting torture as a mean to fight, forcing myself to forgive, rejecting the thoughts of revenge, reprisal and cruelty.
And when cruelty is extended to one's family, does not it become a means of torture? My father is an elderly man, he is very ill; he too suffered political imprisonment. Because he is my father he is not allowed to leave the country. For two years now, the authorities are preying on him as reprisal for my activities. They do not beat him, but they tell him that he will be leaving the country on the following day. My father travels to the Capital full of illusions. And when he is about to board the plane, they tell him that it was a bureaucratic error that he most goes back to his hometown. They do this to him every two or five weeks. They are damaging his mind, in the same manner that they destroyed my sister's, who is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment.
Occasionally, the world of the grieving has poetic traits. I think it was a book by Victor Frankel, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, where I read that in the midst of the total disheartenment in which they lived, they were kept alive by a violinist. A fellow prisoner invariably played a classical piece on his violin at sundown and they all turned silent to listen him. That violin, pulling notes from its strings in the midst of their suffering was a secret ray of hope.
Bertold Brecht, the German playwright, tells a similar story in a moving monologue. It tells of two Jewish teenagers imprisoned at a hard-labor camp. They are a girl and a boy, and a fence keeps them apart. They have never spoken but their eyes crossed and they are in love. Daily, at the fence that separates them, each one leaves a flower pulled among the weeds as a testimony of their love. One day, her flower is missing. The following day his is gone. Hopelessness killed them both.
The arbitrariness of tyrants reduces their victims to the condition of mere beasts… dehumanizes them. In the same manner that animals are tied down, locked up or beaten without explanation, totalitarian regimes treat their adversaries as beasts. And there are times, when one is being treated like a beast, that the only thing that saves us from the most degrading humiliation, the only thing that keeps us firm, is to know that somewhere else there is another soul that loves us, that respect us and that is fighting for the return of the dignity that has been snatched from us.
I had the luck, Mr. Chairman, of having people who was fighting for my freedom, and of having my wife who went from country to country, knocking on every door and on every conscience, on people and governments, pressuring them for my freedom. But the majority of those who suffer the violation of their human rights have one sole hope the international community. Against all hope, they only think of you, they only hope in you.
Unfortunately, I have some first-hand experience on these grieves. Many years, maybe twenty years ago, a political prisoner named Fernando López Toro came near my cell and told me in a disheartened voice that what hurt him the most about our torments, the beatings inflicted upon us, the hunger we suffered, was to think that our sacrifice was useless. Fernando was not broken by the pain but by the futility of the pain. I tried to explain to him that in the face of total ignorance and indifference from the rest of the world, our suffering still had an ethical sense and carried valuable transcendence, but I think I did not get through to him. A few years later, prisons apart, I heard that Fernando could not hold on any longer and took his own life.
Months later I learned the details. Because of other inmates in his cell were too weak and distraught, and practically annihilated because of the physical cruelties inflicted upon them, they stood motionless, and Fernando was able to climb up on his bunk bed, wrap a dirty rag around his neck, cut it open with a piece of sharpened metal, with his fingers feeling for the jugular vein; then with one stroke, slashed it. He died within minutes.
It is always said that his jailers were directly responsible for his death, but I know that Fernando was also the victim of general apathy and lack of solidarity, of silence, of that terrible soundless universe where so many worthy men and women continue to die in this century of horrors and tramplings.
Torture and violations of human rights, come from where might, are an aggression against all mankind and we must fight back with all our strength. There lies, precisely, the efficacy of our message.
International denouncements achieve their objective. They are the only means of pressuring the torturers, the only means to force them to free prisoners for the sake of public image, to save face, to be more careful, to transgressing less.
Denouncing the criminal does not guarantee his punishment but it may deter him from continuing the practice. We must raise our voices without fear and use all resources available to defend the persecuted, the tortured of the world. We must shout their suffering for them and fearlessly denounce their henchmen.
We must enter the cell of every Fernando López del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity and tell them to their faces, "do not take your life, there are men of good will who are standing by you, your dignity as a human being will prevail. In remembrance, there will always be a flower, the notes of a violin, the saddened voice of the so-called brothers who grief with you and defend you. Look, you are not a beast. Do not take your life. Freedom will never disappear from the face of the Earth."
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
About the Author: Armando Valladares, is a Cuban poet released (because of international pressure) from Castro's political dungeons in 1982 after serving 22 years of a 30 year sentence for publicly opposing the Communist take over of the Cuban Revolution. President Reagan
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families:
[ Stories From Rwanda ]
Rwanda is spectacular to behold. Throughout its center, a winding succession of steep, tightly terraced slopes radiates out from small roadside settlements and solitary compounds. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. On the theme of hills, Rwanda produces countless variations: jagged rain forests, round-shouldered buttes, undulating moors, broad swells of savanna, volcanic peaks sharp as filed teeth. During the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, mists cling in highland hollows, lightning flickers through the nights, and by day the land is lustrous. After the rains, the skies lift, the terrain takes on a ragged look beneath the flat unvarying haze of the dry season, and in the savannas of the Akagera Park wildfire blackens the hills.
One day, when I was returning to Kigali from the south, the car mounted a rise between two winding valleys, the windshield filled with purple-bellied clouds, and I asked Joseph, the man who was giving me a ride, whether Rwandans realize what a beautiful country they have. "Beautiful?" he said. "You think so? After the things that happened here? The people aren't good. If the people were good, the country might be OK." Joseph told me that his brother and sister had been killed, and he made a soft hissing click with his tongue against his teeth. "The country is empty," he said. "Empty! "
It was not just the dead who were missing. The genocide had been brought to a halt by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Tutsi refugees from past persecutions, and as the RPF advanced through the country in the summer of 1994, some two million Hutus had fled into exile at the behest of the same leaders who had urged them to kill. Yet except in some rural areas in the south, where the desertion of Hutus had left nothing but bush to reclaim the fields around crumbling adobe houses, I, as a newcomer, could not see the emptiness that blinded Joseph to Rwanda's beauty. Yes, there were grenade-flattened buildings, burnt homesteads, shot-up facades, and mortar-pitted roads. But these were the ravages of war, not of genocide, and by the summer of 1995, most of the dead had been buried. Fifteen months earlier, Rwanda had been the most densely populated country in Africa. Now the work of the killers looked just as they had intended: invisible.
From time to time, mass graves were discovered and excavated, and the remains would be transferred to new, properly consecrated mass graves. Yet even the occasionally exposed bones, the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deforming scars, and the superabundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened to Rwanda was an attempt to eliminate a people. There were only people's stories.
"Every survivor wonders why he is alive," Abbé Modeste, a priest at the cathedral in Butare, Rwanda's second-largest city, told me. Abbé Modeste had hidden for weeks in his sacristy, eating communion wafers, before moving under the desk in his study, and finally into the rafters at the home of some neighboring nuns. The obvious explanation of his survival was that the RPF had come to the rescue. But the RPF didn't reach Butare till early July, and roughly seventy-five percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed by early May. In this regard, at least, the genocide had been entirely successful: to those who were targeted, it was not death but life that seemed an accident of fate.
"I had eighteen people killed at my house," said Etienne Niyonzima, a former businessman who had become a deputy in the National Assembly. "Everything was totally destroyed -- a place of fifty-five meters by fifty meters. In my neighborhood they killed six hundred and forty-seven people. They tortured them, too. You had to see how they killed them. They had the number of everyone's house, and they went through with red paint and marked the homes of all the Tutsis and of the Hutu moderates. My wife was at a friend's, shot with two bullets. She is still alive, only" -- he fell quiet for a moment -- "she has no arms. The others with her were killed. The militia left her for dead. Her whole family of sixty-five in Gitarama were killed." Niyonzima was in hiding at the time. Only after he had been separated from his wife for three months did he learn that she and four of their children had survived. "Well," he said, "one son was cut in the head with a machete. I don't know where he went." His voice weakened, and caught. "He disappeared." Niyonzima clicked his tongue, and said, "But the others are still alive. Quite honestly, I don't understand at all how I was saved."
Laurent Nkongoli attributed his survival to "Providence, and also good neighbors, an old woman who said, 'Run away, we don't want to see your corpse.'" Nkongoli, a lawyer, who had become the vice president of the National Assembly after the genocide, was a robust man, with a taste for double-breasted suit jackets and lively ties, and he moved, as he spoke, with a brisk determination. But before taking his neighbor's advice, and fleeing Kigali in late April of 1994, he said, "I had accepted death. At a certain moment this happens. One hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway. Not death by machete, one hopes, but with a bullet. If you were willing to pay for it, you could often ask for a bullet. Death was more or less normal, a resignation. You lose the will to fight. There were four thousand Tutsis killed here at Kacyiru" -- a neighborhood of Kigali. "The soldiers brought them here, and told them to sit down because they were going to throw grenades. And they sat.
"Rwandan culture is a culture of fear," Nkongoli went on. "I remember what people said." He adopted a pipey voice, and his face took on a look of disgust: "'Just let us pray, then kill us,' or 'I don't want to die in the street, I want to die at home.'" He resumed his normal voice. "When you're that resigned and oppressed you're already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victirns of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were being killed for so long that they were already dead."
I reminded Nkongoli that, for all his hatred of fear, he had himself accepted death before his neighbor urged him to run away. "Yes," he said. "I got tired in the genocide. You struggle so long, then you get tired."
Every Rwandan I spoke with seemed to have a favorite, unanswerable question. For Nkongoli, it was how so many Tutsis had allowed themselves to be killed. For François Xavier Nkurunziza, a Kigali lawyer, whose father was Hutu and whose mother and wife were Tutsi, the question was how so many Hutus had allowed themselves to kill. Nkurunziza had escaped death only by chance as he moved around the country from one hiding place to another, and he had lost many family members. "Conformity is very deep, very developed here," he told me. "In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn't enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, 'It's yours. Kill.' They'll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence, or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn't kill because they didn't take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And, in Rwanda, an order can be given very quietly."
As I traveled around the country, collecting accounts of the killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the masu -- a club studded with nails -- a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts of automatic-rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made the neutron bomb obsolete.
"Everyone was called to hunt the enemy," said Theodore Nyilinkwaya, a survivor of the massacres in his home village of Kimbogo, in the southwestern province of Cyangugu. "But let's say someone is reluctant. Say that guy comes with a stick. They tell him, 'No, get a masu.' So, OK, he does, and he runs along with the rest, but he doesn't kill. They say, 'Hey, he might denounce us later. He must kill. Everyone must help to kill at least one person.' So this person who is not a killer is made to do it. And the next day it's become a game for him. You don't need to keep pushing him."
At Nyarubuye, even the little terracotta votive statues in the sacristy had been methodically decapitated. "They were associated with Tutsis," Sergeant Francis explained.
SALON | Dec. 21, 1998
Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a contributing editor at the Forward. He has reported from Africa, Asia and Europe for a number of magazines, including Granta, Harper's and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.
"Malmedy Massacre" - approximately 70 members of Battery B killed after captured . Fair J. Bryant was travelling with Battery A of 285th at time of massacre. Occurred at beginning of Battle of the Bulge
http://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/photo/wlc/image/19/19558.jpg
Soviet prisoners of war in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, January 1942.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/images/_39166_ditch.jpg
Between December 1937 and March 1938 one of the worst massacres in modern times took place. Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanking and embarked on a campaign of murder, rape and looting.
Historian Iris Chang describes the horrors of "one of the great atrocities of world history"
Based on estimates made by historians and charity organisations in the city at the time, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children. The number of women raped was said by Westerners who were there to be 20,000, and there were widespread accounts of civilians being hacked to death.
Yet, many Japanese officials and historians deny that there was a massacre on such a scale. They admit that deaths and rapes did occur, but say they were on a much smaller scale than reported. And in any case, they argue, these things happen in times of war.
Yeah, but what does the United States do about it when their countrymen partake?
http://www.atlanticfleet.navy.mil/tr-senmccain.jpg
CBS) For prisoners of war, the first 24 hours are the most dangerous, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.
His remarks come one day after Pfc. Jessica Lynch was rescued by commandos in Iraq where she was being held as a prisoner of war. Joy over her recovery has been tempered by the discovery of 11 bodies at the hospital where she was found and the belief that some of the remains may be Americans.
“One of the reasons why it's the toughest, and was in '91," says McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam for five years, "is because you're not in the hands of the authorities who at least are somewhat inclined to observe their rules of war. So that's very dangerous."
Of his imprisonment in Vietnam, three years of which were spent in isolation, McCain said, "Most of the POWs we lost in Vietnam were being transported right after capture to Hanoi. So that part of it is dangerous. It's a shock to your system, obviously, and usually in these situations you're wounded or injured in some way.”
McCcain favors sending a clear message to Iraq. “The point here, Harry, is that we tell the Iraqis that we don't know exactly what they've done to our prisoners, but if they have harmed them, we will track them down, and we will hold them responsible. They'll lose this war. We will find them wherever they are. Unless they treat those prisoners according to the Geneva conventions,” he says.
While in captivity, McCain says, he dreamed of being rescued. “Two things I dreamed of. One was being rescued. And the other one was that I would escape and get to the Swedish embassy in Hanoi and they would take care of me for the rest of the conflict.
"In fact, we would have plans to escape, and as you know, there was a daring raid made on a camp outside of Hanoi, which frankly although there was no POWs there, was a tremendous lift to our morale and spirits when we heard about it,” he recalls.
Watching video of the rescue of Lynch and hearing reports that she fought fiercely and shot several Iraqi soldiers before her capture, McCain says, "I don't think there are too many Americans that are familiar with the military that don't recognize that women are superb. They're fighter pilots, they're wonderful contributions. It's a sign of the contribution that all Americans will make to our military and can and do.”
McCain's assessment of the war is that it is going well. “If two weeks ago you'd have told me that we'd be on the outskirts of Baghdad, I'd say that it's certainly a successful operation. I think that's an obvious answer,” he says but offers a word of caution for the challenges ahead.
“The weapons of mass destruction, and whether they will be used or not. Will the Republican Guard fight inside Baghdad? How long will it take us to pacify towns like Basra, cities, which still remain not totally in our control? What's going to happen to the oil wells in the north? So there are a lot of unanswered questions. But I think overall we can be proud,” he says.
He says that succcess is based on “incredible technological capability, but also the superb young men and women that perform so magnificently.”
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/RM1.STALIN.KILL.JPG
Stalin is responsible for the murder of about 43,000,000 people, 1929-1953. I could find virtually no photos of these dead on the internet, except for the exhumed skeletons of his victims shown here and some photos of Ukrainians he murdered by starvation.
Torture in Castro's Cuba
Summary: I recall when the kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
(Address of Ambassador Armando Valladares', Chief of the United State's Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights' Commission. Geneva, Switzerland, February 23, 1988)
Mr. Chairman, I am not a career diplomat, and I am not an expert on the technical aspects of this organism. I will not speak in a detailed manner on the reports and topics submitted under point 10. There will be other interventions during which we will listen to opinions on those important matters.
Mr. Chairman, today I want to speak about torture, about what it means for a human being to be tortured, to be humiliated, or what may be even worse, to watch a friend, a companion, or a relative being tortured.
As many of you know, I spent twenty-two years in prison for political reasons. Perhaps, I am the only delegate in this Commission who has spent such a long time in prison, although there are several persons here who have known in their own flesh the meaning of torture. I do not care about their political ideology, and I offer to you my embrace of solidarity, from tortured to tortured.
I had many friends in prison. One of them, Roberto López Chávez, was just a kid. He went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water, Roberto lay on the floor of his punishment cell, agonizing, deliriously asking for water. water… The soldiers came in and asked him: "Do you want water?"… The they took out their members and urinated in his mouth, on his face… He died the following day. We were cellmates; when he died I felt something wither inside me.
I recall when they kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
Mr. Chairman, I know the taste of the urine and the excrement of other men… that practice does not leave marks; marks are left by beatings with steel rods and by bayonet thrusts. My head is still covered with scars and you can feel the cracks.
But, what can inflict more damage to human dignity, the urine and excrements thrown all over your face or a bayonet's blow? Which is the appropriate article for the discussion of this subject? Under which technical point does it fall? Under what batch of papers, numbers, lines and bars should we include this trampling of human dignity?
For me, and for innumerable other human beings around the world. The violation of human rights was not a matter of reports, of negotiated resolutions, of elegant and diplomatic rhetoric, for us was a daily suffering.
For me (it meant) eight thousand days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement, of cells with steel-planked windows and doors, of solitude.
Eight thousand days of struggling to prove that I was a human being. Eight thousand days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain. Eight thousand days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart [Editor's Note: Atheism has nothing to do with torture -- as evidence the Inquisition by the Church]. Eight thousand days of struggling so that I would not become like them, rejecting torture as a mean to fight, forcing myself to forgive, rejecting the thoughts of revenge, reprisal and cruelty.
And when cruelty is extended to one's family, does not it become a means of torture? My father is an elderly man, he is very ill; he too suffered political imprisonment. Because he is my father he is not allowed to leave the country. For two years now, the authorities are preying on him as reprisal for my activities. They do not beat him, but they tell him that he will be leaving the country on the following day. My father travels to the Capital full of illusions. And when he is about to board the plane, they tell him that it was a bureaucratic error that he most goes back to his hometown. They do this to him every two or five weeks. They are damaging his mind, in the same manner that they destroyed my sister's, who is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment.
Occasionally, the world of the grieving has poetic traits. I think it was a book by Victor Frankel, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, where I read that in the midst of the total disheartenment in which they lived, they were kept alive by a violinist. A fellow prisoner invariably played a classical piece on his violin at sundown and they all turned silent to listen him. That violin, pulling notes from its strings in the midst of their suffering was a secret ray of hope.
Bertold Brecht, the German playwright, tells a similar story in a moving monologue. It tells of two Jewish teenagers imprisoned at a hard-labor camp. They are a girl and a boy, and a fence keeps them apart. They have never spoken but their eyes crossed and they are in love. Daily, at the fence that separates them, each one leaves a flower pulled among the weeds as a testimony of their love. One day, her flower is missing. The following day his is gone. Hopelessness killed them both.
The arbitrariness of tyrants reduces their victims to the condition of mere beasts… dehumanizes them. In the same manner that animals are tied down, locked up or beaten without explanation, totalitarian regimes treat their adversaries as beasts. And there are times, when one is being treated like a beast, that the only thing that saves us from the most degrading humiliation, the only thing that keeps us firm, is to know that somewhere else there is another soul that loves us, that respect us and that is fighting for the return of the dignity that has been snatched from us.
I had the luck, Mr. Chairman, of having people who was fighting for my freedom, and of having my wife who went from country to country, knocking on every door and on every conscience, on people and governments, pressuring them for my freedom. But the majority of those who suffer the violation of their human rights have one sole hope the international community. Against all hope, they only think of you, they only hope in you.
Unfortunately, I have some first-hand experience on these grieves. Many years, maybe twenty years ago, a political prisoner named Fernando López Toro came near my cell and told me in a disheartened voice that what hurt him the most about our torments, the beatings inflicted upon us, the hunger we suffered, was to think that our sacrifice was useless. Fernando was not broken by the pain but by the futility of the pain. I tried to explain to him that in the face of total ignorance and indifference from the rest of the world, our suffering still had an ethical sense and carried valuable transcendence, but I think I did not get through to him. A few years later, prisons apart, I heard that Fernando could not hold on any longer and took his own life.
Months later I learned the details. Because of other inmates in his cell were too weak and distraught, and practically annihilated because of the physical cruelties inflicted upon them, they stood motionless, and Fernando was able to climb up on his bunk bed, wrap a dirty rag around his neck, cut it open with a piece of sharpened metal, with his fingers feeling for the jugular vein; then with one stroke, slashed it. He died within minutes.
It is always said that his jailers were directly responsible for his death, but I know that Fernando was also the victim of general apathy and lack of solidarity, of silence, of that terrible soundless universe where so many worthy men and women continue to die in this century of horrors and tramplings.
Torture and violations of human rights, come from where might, are an aggression against all mankind and we must fight back with all our strength. There lies, precisely, the efficacy of our message.
International denouncements achieve their objective. They are the only means of pressuring the torturers, the only means to force them to free prisoners for the sake of public image, to save face, to be more careful, to transgressing less.
Denouncing the criminal does not guarantee his punishment but it may deter him from continuing the practice. We must raise our voices without fear and use all resources available to defend the persecuted, the tortured of the world. We must shout their suffering for them and fearlessly denounce their henchmen.
We must enter the cell of every Fernando López del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity and tell them to their faces, "do not take your life, there are men of good will who are standing by you, your dignity as a human being will prevail. In remembrance, there will always be a flower, the notes of a violin, the saddened voice of the so-called brothers who grief with you and defend you. Look, you are not a beast. Do not take your life. Freedom will never disappear from the face of the Earth."
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
About the Author: Armando Valladares, is a Cuban poet released (because of international pressure) from Castro's political dungeons in 1982 after serving 22 years of a 30 year sentence for publicly opposing the Communist take over of the Cuban Revolution. President Reagan
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families:
[ Stories From Rwanda ]
Rwanda is spectacular to behold. Throughout its center, a winding succession of steep, tightly terraced slopes radiates out from small roadside settlements and solitary compounds. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. On the theme of hills, Rwanda produces countless variations: jagged rain forests, round-shouldered buttes, undulating moors, broad swells of savanna, volcanic peaks sharp as filed teeth. During the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, mists cling in highland hollows, lightning flickers through the nights, and by day the land is lustrous. After the rains, the skies lift, the terrain takes on a ragged look beneath the flat unvarying haze of the dry season, and in the savannas of the Akagera Park wildfire blackens the hills.
One day, when I was returning to Kigali from the south, the car mounted a rise between two winding valleys, the windshield filled with purple-bellied clouds, and I asked Joseph, the man who was giving me a ride, whether Rwandans realize what a beautiful country they have. "Beautiful?" he said. "You think so? After the things that happened here? The people aren't good. If the people were good, the country might be OK." Joseph told me that his brother and sister had been killed, and he made a soft hissing click with his tongue against his teeth. "The country is empty," he said. "Empty! "
It was not just the dead who were missing. The genocide had been brought to a halt by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Tutsi refugees from past persecutions, and as the RPF advanced through the country in the summer of 1994, some two million Hutus had fled into exile at the behest of the same leaders who had urged them to kill. Yet except in some rural areas in the south, where the desertion of Hutus had left nothing but bush to reclaim the fields around crumbling adobe houses, I, as a newcomer, could not see the emptiness that blinded Joseph to Rwanda's beauty. Yes, there were grenade-flattened buildings, burnt homesteads, shot-up facades, and mortar-pitted roads. But these were the ravages of war, not of genocide, and by the summer of 1995, most of the dead had been buried. Fifteen months earlier, Rwanda had been the most densely populated country in Africa. Now the work of the killers looked just as they had intended: invisible.
From time to time, mass graves were discovered and excavated, and the remains would be transferred to new, properly consecrated mass graves. Yet even the occasionally exposed bones, the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deforming scars, and the superabundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened to Rwanda was an attempt to eliminate a people. There were only people's stories.
"Every survivor wonders why he is alive," Abbé Modeste, a priest at the cathedral in Butare, Rwanda's second-largest city, told me. Abbé Modeste had hidden for weeks in his sacristy, eating communion wafers, before moving under the desk in his study, and finally into the rafters at the home of some neighboring nuns. The obvious explanation of his survival was that the RPF had come to the rescue. But the RPF didn't reach Butare till early July, and roughly seventy-five percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed by early May. In this regard, at least, the genocide had been entirely successful: to those who were targeted, it was not death but life that seemed an accident of fate.
"I had eighteen people killed at my house," said Etienne Niyonzima, a former businessman who had become a deputy in the National Assembly. "Everything was totally destroyed -- a place of fifty-five meters by fifty meters. In my neighborhood they killed six hundred and forty-seven people. They tortured them, too. You had to see how they killed them. They had the number of everyone's house, and they went through with red paint and marked the homes of all the Tutsis and of the Hutu moderates. My wife was at a friend's, shot with two bullets. She is still alive, only" -- he fell quiet for a moment -- "she has no arms. The others with her were killed. The militia left her for dead. Her whole family of sixty-five in Gitarama were killed." Niyonzima was in hiding at the time. Only after he had been separated from his wife for three months did he learn that she and four of their children had survived. "Well," he said, "one son was cut in the head with a machete. I don't know where he went." His voice weakened, and caught. "He disappeared." Niyonzima clicked his tongue, and said, "But the others are still alive. Quite honestly, I don't understand at all how I was saved."
Laurent Nkongoli attributed his survival to "Providence, and also good neighbors, an old woman who said, 'Run away, we don't want to see your corpse.'" Nkongoli, a lawyer, who had become the vice president of the National Assembly after the genocide, was a robust man, with a taste for double-breasted suit jackets and lively ties, and he moved, as he spoke, with a brisk determination. But before taking his neighbor's advice, and fleeing Kigali in late April of 1994, he said, "I had accepted death. At a certain moment this happens. One hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway. Not death by machete, one hopes, but with a bullet. If you were willing to pay for it, you could often ask for a bullet. Death was more or less normal, a resignation. You lose the will to fight. There were four thousand Tutsis killed here at Kacyiru" -- a neighborhood of Kigali. "The soldiers brought them here, and told them to sit down because they were going to throw grenades. And they sat.
"Rwandan culture is a culture of fear," Nkongoli went on. "I remember what people said." He adopted a pipey voice, and his face took on a look of disgust: "'Just let us pray, then kill us,' or 'I don't want to die in the street, I want to die at home.'" He resumed his normal voice. "When you're that resigned and oppressed you're already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victirns of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were being killed for so long that they were already dead."
I reminded Nkongoli that, for all his hatred of fear, he had himself accepted death before his neighbor urged him to run away. "Yes," he said. "I got tired in the genocide. You struggle so long, then you get tired."
Every Rwandan I spoke with seemed to have a favorite, unanswerable question. For Nkongoli, it was how so many Tutsis had allowed themselves to be killed. For François Xavier Nkurunziza, a Kigali lawyer, whose father was Hutu and whose mother and wife were Tutsi, the question was how so many Hutus had allowed themselves to kill. Nkurunziza had escaped death only by chance as he moved around the country from one hiding place to another, and he had lost many family members. "Conformity is very deep, very developed here," he told me. "In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn't enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, 'It's yours. Kill.' They'll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence, or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn't kill because they didn't take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And, in Rwanda, an order can be given very quietly."
As I traveled around the country, collecting accounts of the killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the masu -- a club studded with nails -- a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts of automatic-rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made the neutron bomb obsolete.
"Everyone was called to hunt the enemy," said Theodore Nyilinkwaya, a survivor of the massacres in his home village of Kimbogo, in the southwestern province of Cyangugu. "But let's say someone is reluctant. Say that guy comes with a stick. They tell him, 'No, get a masu.' So, OK, he does, and he runs along with the rest, but he doesn't kill. They say, 'Hey, he might denounce us later. He must kill. Everyone must help to kill at least one person.' So this person who is not a killer is made to do it. And the next day it's become a game for him. You don't need to keep pushing him."
At Nyarubuye, even the little terracotta votive statues in the sacristy had been methodically decapitated. "They were associated with Tutsis," Sergeant Francis explained.
SALON | Dec. 21, 1998
Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a contributing editor at the Forward. He has reported from Africa, Asia and Europe for a number of magazines, including Granta, Harper's and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.