Ordinary torture

By Hani Shukrallah *

This "qualified" exception notwithstanding, since all the world's "civilisations" can boast a high incidence of torture and horrific physical abuse in their cultural heritage, the mere fact that torture, though widely practiced, is almost universally denied seems to underline the fact that moral development that is human, rather than culture-bound, does exist -- in other words, that there is such a thing as a human cultural and moral development.

But how do we explain torturers? Few would disagree that torturers are monsters, but how do you create a monster? How does a human being lose his inherent human capacity for empathy, the ability to identify with the pain of others, which can and does extend even to members of other species? More perplexing still is the fact that most torturers are selective monsters. Thoroughly evil human monsters are few and far between. Even Hitler liked cats, or dogs, or something.

One can possibly understand, although never fully, how a deeply brutalised person can become brutal himself. But how about normal, everyday people who have led fairly privileged lives? Ironically, most of today's torturers seem to be drawn from that category of people. Thus, we have the normal, everyday people who order the torture -- for them, it's a matter of expediency; they are not required to see it, or even to know about it in any great detail. Then, there are the normal, everyday people who know that it takes place and fail to be horrified by it. It never ceases to amaze me how many such people there are.

Finally, and most perplexing of all, there are the normal, everyday people who conduct the torture themselves. How do you become a young Israeli soldier who is capable of pulling the arm of a Palestinian child taut, hoisting a stone and shattering the child's elbow with it? What about the American police officers who were videotaped beating to death a young black man? What about our own young officers who carry out the endless and brutal raids on "terrorist hideouts" in villages and impoverished urban quarters?

And what of the interrogators? This brand of homo sapiens does not have the admittedly flimsy excuse of the blood-frenzy that accompanies mass violence, even when conducted by a heavily armed force against an unarmed population; there is no fear of reprisal or resistance. Here is a person who has another human being totally at his mercy, tied up and often blindfolded. Brutality under these conditions is deliberate, reasoned, almost relaxed. From the stories one hears, this kind of exercise can be accompanied by cups of coffee or tea, jokes and the odd personal telephone call -- to wife, fiancée or girlfriend -- to discuss such mundane matters as who's coming to dinner, how the kids are doing at school, a date.

The arm breaker, the anti-terrorism raider, the deliberate interrogator -- what do they all feel when they hear their victims' screams of pain? Sure, some of them may be the kind of dehumanised freaks who revel in the power to wield pain and death over others, whoever they may be, deriving pleasure from others' pain. But what of normal, everyday people, not "Son of Sam" types, but ordinary young men who will eventually return home to wife and children, friends and loved ones, even pets?

All this brings to mind a story told to me a couple of months ago by an official of the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch. In horrified tones, he recounted a discussion he had had with the ambassador of an important European country, who opined that Egyptians "expected" to be mistreated by the police, and hence did not really object to it. We should be thankful, perhaps, that no Egyptian security official would dare make a similar claim. Besides being a racist, the important ambassador is, of course, ignorant. This latter fact is made stark by numerous recent incidents, most notably in the Delta town of Bilqas, where reports of police abuse of suspects triggered wide-scale protest action. On several occasions this led to the security bodies' acknowledging that abuse had taken place and initiating procedures to punish the culprits.

The story, however, is interesting in that it provides a key of sorts to understanding the making of the "ordinary" torturer. It is, of course, "otherness". The human capacity for empathy can be stalled, selectively blinded, with respect to certain categories of people by virtue of their being constructed as something less than human: Egyptians in the good ambassador's case, Palestinian Arabs in the case of the Israeli soldiers and Constitutional Court judges, blacks in the case of the white American police officers.

Dehumanised otherness is, of course, a necessary precondition of all structures of oppression. It varies widely in degree, shape and mode of expression, but, throughout history, "nice", normal, everyday people have owned slaves, conducted vicious wars, taken others' land by force, bombed, pillaged, raped, killed and tortured. They continue to do so.

Does the construction of otherness, on racial, ethnic, religious, political or class grounds, suffice to explain the existence of the "ordinary torturer"? I don't know. I remain, perhaps thankfully, incapable of understanding.

*The writer is the managing editor of Al-Ahram Weekly.