Multimedia: An End To Torture: Strategies for its Eradication
Authors: Derek Summerfield
Journal: BMJ (1999)

Ed B Duner


St Martin’s Press, £15.95, pp 256 




ISBN 1 85649 622 8

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Rating: ★★

Torture has a venerable history, documented back to the rule of Ramses II around 1200 bc. In the Middle Ages in Europe it was esteemed as the high road to confessed truth, and even salvation, yet by 1800 judicial codes were casting it as a thing of the past and the last resort of the barbarian. No such fastidiousness attends the present day, with torture used regularly in at least 90 countries. People think of torture as a kind of Gothic horror story, wherein unspeakable things are inflicted in secret dungeons to extract information. This happens, of course, but most torture worldwide is designed for information to flow the other way. On the bodies of its victims the state inscribes its power, a lesson to them but especially to the rest of society. This is torture as public performance, as political theatre.

This book, edited by the head of the Human Rights Programme of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, joins a burgeoning literature. It is best on the international scene. The 36 pages on international rules and procedures reminds one of how much is honoured more in the breach than the observance, and why on a bad day it can seem that scoring human rights points is not impossible, merely useless.

The Western-led political and economic order is more part of the problem than the solution: torture and worse is condoned in states that are geopolitically useful or good for business (not least arms sales). Torture has been institutionalised since Ottoman times in Turkey, and, since the mid-1980s, the army has waged a terrorising war against grassroots Kurdish life in the south east—3000 villages destroyed and 30 000 civilians dead. All this has evoked token murmurs at best, for Turkey is a loyal member of NATO and this is what counts. Half of the 60 vetoes cast by the United States in the United Nations Security Council between 1970 and 1993 were to shield Israel, the only country in the world where torture is legal.

The chapters on torture as individual experience are more problematic. Firstly, torture is not a clear cut entity. Just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s torture will be another’s heroic struggle. Several contributors portray torture as the explanation of everything that follows, yet for many survivors it is just one of a catalogue of trials, losses, and upheavals lived through. At the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture research on Iraqi asylum seekers showed that poor social supports in exile had a closer relation to depressed mood than did a history of torture.

Statements like “torture victims try to suppress their anxiety but are seldom successful” and “almost always suffer from a severe feeling of guilt” stick in the throat: they are dubious as generalisations and potentially stigmatising. Such assumptions held by health professionals, who are opinion formers, may contribute to the powerlessness of victims, who are implicitly cast as damaged or diminished and in need of others to speak for them. Similarly, to simply cast psychotherapy as an antidote is to ignore how alien this is in the non-Western cultures from which most victims come. It does no service to the vast majority to write as if the experience of torture is reducible to a medical condition or a matter of mental health.