To the Editor:
As veterans of Amnesty International—members of a Geneva group for ten years or so—we have encountered many attacks on our impartiality. (An illuminating collection of attacks has been reproduced in AI in Quotes, published in 1976.) These charges, taken all in all, unintentionally testify to our impartiality, since AI has as often been called a tool of the CIA as a tool of Moscow. Critics on either side, however, can never deny AI’s concern for prisoners in countries of opposite ideologies. To get around this problem, Tass, for example, explained away AI’s concern with Chilean prisoners as an effort to blacken the Soviet Union by putting it on a par with a fascist country, while newspapers in rightist dictatorships like to call AI’s reports on Communist countries a mere sham. Only Idi Amin of Uganda has appealed for the solidarity of all governments against AI, as when he told the UN’s General Assembly in 1975 that AI “has blackmailed over 100 nations of the world as violators of human rights.”
Stephen Miller’s attack on AI [“Politics and Amnesty International,” March] distinguishes itself from the others mainly by two facts: first, by being published in COMMENTARY, and second, by developing the notion that the number of paragraphs allotted to each country in AI’s annual report—the more paragraphs, the worse the country—provides a means to measure AI’s partiality.
Mr. Miller seems to imagine the hidden influence of a biased invisible hand (like that of the Elders of Zion?) which has “led to a distortion in AI’s work.” The number of printed lines in the annual report then reflect this distorted rating. Thus, he complains that such a good country as Switzerland “rates two paragraphs for violations of human rights whereas North Korea rates only one.” Yet ten of the twenty lines on Switzerland merely tell the legal reasons why the introduction of a civil service for conscientious objectors cannot be put to a vote before 1980.
Instead of counting paragraphs, Mr. Miller should look at AI’s real life. The work of AI is being done day by day by people who have jobs and families, political and cultural activities, and who not only give their time but also pay most of the expenses they incur in their activities for prisoners. One day, unexpectedly, these people learned about a coup d’etat in Chile and received reports on arrests, killings, torture. Refugees appeared requesting urgent help for families and friends. Governments—such as Switzerland’s—had to be pressed to grant entry visas. Money had to be found for plane tickets, and homes provided for refugees. New arrivals told of new cases and asked for interventions to save the lives of people who otherwise might quietly disappear forever. The work multiplied when thousands of those who apparently had been saved suddenly became victims in Argentina where they had sought refuge. Again, AI people were flooded with appeals—general and personal—to help.
Maybe during this period Mr. Miller could have brought us a balance sheet showing that as much misery, or much more, was being simultaneously produced in Cambodia. At that time, however, little was known about Cambodia. There were sickening rumors, but not even the names of the men in power were known, and postal service had stopped. Would Mr. Miller have suggested that we turn away from the people standing before us pleading for their dearest friends and instead make angry but necessarily empty gestures against the unknown bad men in Cambodia?
Naturally AI’s annual report had to tell more about Chile and Argentina—where we had gotten to know thousands of names of people who had been arrested, tortured, killed, or had “disappeared”—than about Cambodia. Cambodia became a more concrete task only after the annual report had been prepared. Still, everyone who recognizes reality for what it is will admit that less can be done in some cases than in others. Would Mr. Miller suggest giving up our work altogether rather than submitting to imperfection?
In addition to the idea of counting paragraphs, Mr. Miller has brought up another point that shows he has not understood the basic principle of Amnesty International. He complains that AI sometimes makes rightist authoritarian regimes look worse than leftist totalitarian ones, by not taking into account the fact that in some rightist regimes opposition is sometimes possible and therefore very audible to the outside world. He does not see that it is not AI’s endeavor, as it is not its task, to provide a rating of governments. AI is not concerned with forms of governments or with their images. AI is a prisoner-oriented movement. It does not work for or against states or countries. It works for the liberation of prisoners of conscience and against torture and other maltreatment of prisoners. (Capital punishment is a form of torture, as Dostoevsky has shown in The Idiot.) To be sure, there are other human-rights problems one would have to consider if one were judging a country as a whole, but it would be beyond the means of Amnesty International to take up these issues. If it tried to do so, it would not be able to fulfill the task to which it is dedicated. AI works to protect prisoners from the far greater power of governments; it is not concerned with giving governments good or bad marks.
Diana Dodge and Henry Jacoby
Geneva, Switzerland
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Stephen Miller writes:
Several points in Diana Dodge and Henry Jacoby’s letter seem worthy of comment—though their remarks about COMMENTARY and the Elders of Zion are beneath discussion. First, in my article I clearly said that “the number of pages on each country obviously tells only part of the story.” Nevertheless, it still strikes me that something is wrong with the way Amnesty International reports on human-rights violations when Singapore and China get an equal amount of coverage. Second, of course AI should be applauded for aiding refugees who seek its help, no matter what country they come from. My article did not talk about this aspect of its work but about the way in which, for example, AI made great efforts to publicize the goings-on in Chile whereas it talked very softly—and inaccurately—about the situation in Cuba, where there are many more political prisoners. Third, if AI is strictly a prisoner-oriented movement, then why does its newsletter publish misleading and inaccurate political analyses of the authoritarian regimes of Argentina and the Philippines? Fourth, responsible people differ on whether capital punishment should be retained or abolished, but they do not base their arguments on Russian novels. Finally, as I made clear in my closing sentence, AI’s efforts have “brought hope to man.” I do not want AI to give up its work. Rather, I want AI to stick to its original purposes, and be more scrupulous than it appears to have been in bringing to light human-rights violations wherever they occur in the world.
