Cruelty or Humanity. Rees, Stuart

not-so-subtle differences in cruelty is lost. Instead there emerges a stark, almost universal picture of human rights being derided and any respect for a common humanity thrown on a bonfire, literally in some cases. That trend shows the danger of not paying serious attention to cruelty as policy.

      Chapter 8, ‘A language for humanity’, carries a final message. Seizing the opportunities to remove cruelties depends on enthusiasm for a revived democratic politics, plus facility in language to reinterpret human rights, advocate UN peace-keeping responsibilities and promote the principles of humane governance.

1

       Perpetrators and victims

      The men in power are convinced that it is only violence that moves and guides men, and they do so boldly use violence for the maintenance of the present order of things. But the existing order is not maintained through violence but through public opinion, the effect of which is impaired by violence. Thus, the activity of violence weakens and impairs precisely what it intends to maintain. (Leo Tolstoy)¹

This century is possessed

       In its forehead, nail and sign,

       A fixed idea burns: each day it serves us

       The same platter of blood.

       On some corner he waits

       – Pious, omniscient, and armed –

       The dogmatist with no face, no name.

      (Octavio Paz)²

       A malignancy

      Joy Gardner was born in 1963 in Jamaica to a 15-year-old mother. She never knew her father. When she was seven, her mother moved to the UK to work. Joy would not follow her mother until 1987, by which time she had a grown-up daughter of her own and was pregnant with her son. She had the boy, Graham, while in Britain and sought leave to remain to be with her mother but was refused. Although her mother was British, rule changes meant her adult offspring had no right to remain. A team of police and immigration officers arrived at her north London home on 28 July 1993 with instructions to deport her and her son to Jamaica. She was bound, gagged and restrained with a body belt. She collapsed, fell into a coma and died of asphyxiation.³

      In October 2005, Otto Ondawame from West Papua knocked on my office door. He was on the run from the Indonesian army’s special forces unit Kopassus. Otto had protested the 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’ when 1,026 West Papuans were held at gunpoint and ordered to vote for integration with Indonesia.⁴ Ondawame had committed a serious crime by raising the flag of his country and in 2001 had protested when the West Papuan leader Theys Eluay was found with his throat cut. Together with colleagues, I protected Otto during his years of exile and study in Australia. The Australian Department of Immigration eventually deported him to Vanuatu, where he died in 2014.

      Around the globe, cruelty seems endemic. In common with others the sadism of Saudi Arabia’s rulers astounded me when, in 2012, their courts sentenced Raif Badawi, a brave blogger for free speech, to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in jail. In October 2018, in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Istanbul, a 15-member Saudi hit team allegedly strangled the Saudi/American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered his body and disposed of it. Khashoggi’s columns for the Washington Post had been critical of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia.⁵

      On 27 August 2017 in Gaza City, 53-year-old Howayda lay on a sofa in extreme pain. The medication to relieve her suffering was not available. She lived in a city which had been under siege for 10 years, where clean water was in short supply, electricity only available for two hours per day. On 7 September the mother of five died. Her eldest daughter, Sameeha, told me, ‘I am at comfort that my mother is no longer in pain and that she won’t be stopped at a checkpoint or won’t be asked for permits anymore.’

      For over four years, from 2013 to 2017, the Australian government contained 1,500 asylum seekers, men, women and children, in detention centres on remote Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. They were kept there at immense humanitarian cost.⁶ Against the rules of international law, left with no hope of freedom, in the short term the asylum seekers were offered the choice of accepting their fate or returning to the countries from which they had fled.

      By February 2018, 700,000 Rohingya people had been driven from their homes in Myanmar in a military operation which the UN described as textbook ethnic cleansing. On muddy, almost treeless hillsides, with little shelter, neither ample food nor clean water, the newly arrived refugees found temporary refuge in Bangladesh.

      In October 2017, a young Rohingya refugee fleeing Myanmar told a New York Times journalist, Jeffrey Gettleman, that after she was raped by government soldiers, her baby son was snatched from her arms and thrown screaming into a fire, burning to his death. Gettleman recorded that other eyewitnesses confirmed what happened.⁷

      Between 5 May and 9 June 2018, US Customs and Immigration officials stationed at the US Mexican border separated over 2,300 children from parents who had been arrested for alleged illegal entry into the US. Mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the children were sent to one of more than 100 US government-contracted detention facilities spread over 17 states. Pictures of bewildered, traumatized children torn from their parents, and statements from families saying they had no idea where their children were, provoked public outrage at President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policies. The President insisted that he was protecting Americans from undocumented migrants whom Democrats wanted ‘to pour into and infest our country’. Pope Francis said the order to separate children from parents was immoral. Confronted by overwhelming opposition, even from previously supportive Republicans, on 20 June the President reversed the order.

      Acts of gratuitous cruelty by individuals may not appear to be in the same league as the abuses just described, but even passing cruelties merit attention. They can be the thin end of a wedge. One act becomes a potential habit, subsequently justified.

      In September 2014, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s father died. During her prime ministership Gillard had been derided by an influential radio journalist, Alan Jones. The broadcaster seldom missed an opportunity to ridicule Gillard, her gender and her policies. He said she was a liar, that it would be beneficial if she was dumped at sea in a chaff bag. On the death of Gillard’s father, Jones commented, ‘the old man died of shame’.

      In April 2017, 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails began a hunger strike to protest degrading conditions and to seek an easing of restrictions on visiting rights. Soon after the strike began, Israeli settlers set up barbeques outside the jail. They aimed to ridicule the prisoners. Reporters said that the settlers wanted the smell of meat to waft into the prison.

      In each of these events, in the first seven examples and the last two, individuals lived in contexts of discrimination and violence. Political forces, government policies and cultural influences prepared the stage and built the contexts. For example, behind successive British governments’ image of adherence to due process in the administration of justice, conduct hidden from public view now reveals powerless people treated cruelly.

      In relation to the plight of Indigenous West Papuans, influential politicians in Britain and Indonesia had promoted the idea that such people were primitive and did not deserve to be independent.

      Gaza under siege imprisons almost two million people. Howayda’s painful death is one example of a policy of denying basic healthcare to stigmatized people.

      Under the guise of a policy called border protection, Australian governments had for years stifled the rights of asylum seekers who had attempted to escape to Australia by boat.

      By the end of 2017, reports continued of atrocities committed by Myanmar forces against Rohingya refugees.

      In Saudi Arabia’s response to dissidents,