As a studious, idealistic teenager, living with her family in Dhaka, Irene Khan witnessed conflict first-hand: bloodied bodies in the street, indiscriminate violence, boys just a few years older than herself heading into the fray. This was 1971, as East and West Pakistan slid into the war that would eventually create an independent Bangladesh. The school Khan attended was quickly closed, and from then on she and her two sisters stayed home together, day after day. They saw corpses just outside their windows - the same windows that shattered as stray bullets flew through. "For a 13-year-old," says Khan, "it was like living through a war movie." She and her sisters heard the terrible stories of rape, of soldiers marching from house to house, brutalizing whoever happened to be inside. "I remember the three of us talking about what would happen if the army actually came," she says. "I had figured out that there was a place up in the roof where I could hide behind a water tank, and if they found me, I could jump from there."
Khan had already decided to follow in the footsteps of her barrister grandfather, but what she saw in those months helped her decide how she wanted to practice law, and what she wanted to achieve. "Of course, I was at a very impressionable age," she says, "and what I saw I still remember very vividly. It shaped my approach to law as a means of protecting people's rights, rather than a means of protecting powerful interests."
Khan's concern for human rights has proven persistent. She has been secretary general of the human rights organization Amnesty International for the past seven years, leading a campaign group consisting of 2.2 million worldwide members. This soft-spoken, careful woman presides over a brief that takes in every country, and every manner of abuse, from stoning in Iran ("a particularly heinous way of punishing anyone"), to waterboarding by the US, unlawful killings in Kenya and the "disappearing" of political activists in Libya. And it brings her nose-to-nose with powerful opponents on a daily basis.
PHOTO: AFP
Amnesty began in 1961, with an article in the London-based Observer by British lawyer Peter Benenson calling for people to start taking action on human rights and freedom of expression, and specifically to speak for the rights of prisoners of conscience. In the early 1970s, the group published their first report on torture, which showed that it was more widespread than once thought.
There followed decades of successful campaigning - of the 6,000 prisoners that Amnesty campaigned for between 1972 and 1975, for instance, 3,000 were released in that period.
In fact, the campaigns were so successful that when Khan took up the Amnesty post in August 2001, it seemed that arguments about the use of torture had become obsolete in the West, and beyond. A month later, when two planes flew into the World Trade Center, all that changed. The torture debate was open for business, with prominent figures, including the leading American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, suggesting that in the case of a "ticking bomb" scenario, countries would have to reconsider their stance. Dershowitz suggested that a "torture warrant" could be issued by a judge "based on the absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives," although these warrants "would limit the torture to non-lethal means, such as sterile needles being inserted beneath the nails to cause excruciating pain without endangering life."
Was Khan surprised by how quickly the arguments for repressive, even violent, measures snowballed after Sept. 11? She shakes her head.
"I think that they came out of fear, which politicians sometimes manipulate. There's this sense that if we reduce the human rights safeguards that we have - whether through prolonged detention, or detention without charge, or torture - that somehow we will be able to improve security ... ." She believes that the change to British law in 2006, which allowed for detention for 28 days without charge, was pushed through after political leaders created "a sense that you have to sacrifice your liberty in order to gain greater security.
Along with tracking British human rights infractions, Amnesty collects human rights data globally, even from countries that, like Sudan, Iran and China, will not allow Amnesty delegates direct access. ("In today's world, thanks to information technology," Khan says with a smile, "physical access is not the only means of gaining information.")
One country that has always kept Amnesty busy is Iraq, and during Saddam Hussein's regime the organization collected a glut of information, with the 2002 report noting that methods of physical torture in the country included "pulling out of fingernails, rape, [and] long periods of suspension by the limbs from either a rotating fan in the ceiling or from a horizontal pole."
Some of Amnesty's information was used in the British Foreign Office's dossier Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses. As soon as it was published in December 2002, Amnesty hit out against their report's findings being used for propaganda purposes, with Khan stating that the references were "nothing but a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists." Supporters of military action quickly responded, including the Times columnist (and now opposition Conservative MP) Michael Gove, who described her as part of "that unhappy section of the British left whose antipathy to western policy makes them Saddam's useful idiots."
It was a pointed lesson in that strange contradiction - the way that human rights information can be used to erode human rights. Just how frustrating was it for the organization? "Well, you know," says Khan, "it is always frustrating for us when the information that we provide is then misused or twisted to promote particular policies. What we want to see is governments being consistent in their application of human rights information - not using it at the moment when they want to invade a particular country, but when they are seeking to open relations with a country. When [in 1988] we published the reports about Saddam's gassing of Kurds, that's when we would have liked to have seen governments raise it with the Saddam regime."
After the human rights abuses that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Iraq war brought along a massive new wave of infractions. Was Khan surprised by the recent admission by CIA officials, for instance, that waterboarding - simulated drowning - had been used in the interrogation of suspects? "No, we were not surprised," Khan says emphatically. "We have interviewed people who were in Guantanamo or in Bagram, and we therefore had testimony from people to suggest that the CIA were using such methods ... . What is appalling, of course, is that it should [be carried out] by US officials, and that it should happen with official approval."
Amnesty's opposition to Guantanamo has been longstanding and vociferous, with Khan causing a storm in 2005 with her description of the prison as "the gulag of our time." Responding to this description, Bush referred to it four times in one news conference as "absurd" and said that he felt that Amnesty "based some of their decisions on the word of, and the allegations by, people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people who have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not to tell the truth." (He is thought to have meant "dissemble.")
Amnesty's choice of targets in the past few years has inevitably led to claims that the organization is prejudiced against the US. Khan insists, however, that the group is neither anti- nor pro-American, and that it addresses human rights abuses by the US "in the same way that we condemn what happens in Sudan or Iran or Saudi Arabia." What has happened, she says, is that the so-called war on terror has brought "a real backlash on human rights, setting back progress for decades. It's not only what the US has done - it's the message that has gone to others, who have used it as a license to continue setting back human rights.
Khan had a distinctly political upbringing. She stayed in Bangladesh with her doctor father and full-time mother until 1973, when she left to study abroad. The education system in Bangladesh had crumbled after the war, so when some foreign friends who were part of the relief effort suggested that the teenager might do better elsewhere, her parents agreed. They didn't realize quite what was involved in sending her to Northern Ireland, however.
"My parents had never been outside the Indian subcontinent," says Khan, "and they had no idea what was happening in Northern Ireland. It was quite amusing when I arrived there [in Kilkeel, County Down], because the violence was of a lower level than what I had come through. There were bombs, and IRA attacks and so on, but I remember commenting that in Bangladesh there was no tradition of a bomb being planted and then someone phoning in to say that there was a bomb ... . Of course, the situation in Northern Ireland was actually terrible at that time - this was 1973 to 1975. I went from one war of liberation, to another war, a civil war ... . I saw what war does to people, to human beings, and how it divides communities."
Khan went on to study law at Manchester University and Harvard before working for the International Commission of Jurists and the UN High Commission for Refugees, where she spent 20 years. She now lives in London.
She describes a meeting, last November, with a Japanese woman who had been a "comfort woman" - forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the second world war - and who took Khan's hand "and said that the most important thing for her was that what she had suffered was being acknowledged now. Even decades later. This business about justice being acknowledged, or suffering being acknowledged," says Khan, "is really very important''
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