A Walk In ‘American Shoes’

By Malinda Seneviratne -April 25, 2013 

Malinda Seneviratne

Every culture has its own repositories of wisdom, embedded in sacred text or even in folk lore. Every culture has idioms and fables that are prescriptive or at least of a nature that calls for deep reflection.

There’s a proverb sourced to the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans, given life by Harper Lee’s celebrated novel ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ that goes like this: ‘Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes’.

The world has been ‘globalized’ to such an extent that the human race is constantly forced to encounter difference, in people and ideas, political preferences and ideological bent, ethnic identity and religious persuasion. It is perhaps a sign of a fundamental species flaw that human tend to link ‘difference’ to ‘enmity’. We perceive difference first, commonality later (if at all). If first impressions count then this can be perhaps the main reason for intolerance, fear, hatred and violence.

Last week the United States of America was set ablaze; first in Boston and then in Texas (fertilizer plant). There was also a mysterious substance enclosed in an envelope sent to US President Barack Obama, rekindling anxieties first produced over a decade ago with the deadly Anthrax ‘posts’. The USA has known violence. Almost 3000 people died in the 9/11 attacks. The Oklahoma bomb (1994) killed 168. A year before, and exactly 20 years to the day before the Texas explosion (April 19) when 14 died, 76 men, women and children were killed in a standoff between the FBI and a Protestant Sect, Branch Davidians (breakaway group of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church) where the tactics used make US allegations regarding how Sri Lanka dealt with terrorists in rescuing over 200,000 hostages laughable.

Does the world understand the sorrow, horror and perhaps anger of the USA? Has the world walked the required distance in ‘American Shoes’ to fully empathize? Well, the rest of the world has had more than its fair share of Bostons, Oklahomas, Wacos and Twin Towers. Marathons too. Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, a minister was one of 14 victims of an LTTE bomb-attack at an Avurudu Marathon event. It can be safely said, then, that the US is now being forced to walk in non-US shoes. Not out of choice, of course.

What is ironic about all this is that some of those ‘non-US shoes’ were actually US-made or else US-marketed. It is no secret that Washington, as per ‘strategic needs’ (economic and military) has not just fuelled terrorism but indeed has manufactured dissent and violence, causing immeasurable harm to peoples all over the world.

The search for those responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings ended on Friday in a shootout where one of the suspects was killed and the other, his brother, injured and subsequently arrested. Boston came to a stop. Trains and buses didn’t run. Offices and schools were shut. Residents were advised to stay home with doors and windows locked. Compare this to Sri Lanka where for more than two decades a bomb explosion could be expected any second and one concludes that the USA is not ready to live with terrorism. It is not a ‘reality’ that anyone should wish on anyone else of course, but it does not hurt to suggest to the good people of that country to walk in the shoes of people from less fortunate countries.

If a couple of bombs saw the USA rush home and lock itself inside, Americans of that country can easily imagine why Sri Lanka, for example, is wary of anyone and anything associated with the LTTE, and why those who re-mouth the uttering of LTTE proxies, sympathizers, operatives and apologists are treated with suspicion. When one of the suspects was finally apprehended, there was cheering. No one called it ‘Triumphalism’, one notes. Having walked in the shoes that the US has been forced to wear, Sri Lanka understands.

President Obama said the attackers had chosen the wrong city to bomb. Is there a ‘right’ city, though? Will Obama at least now have the humility to wear those other shoes and walk the requisite distances? Will some of the empathy of the world rub off on the USA? Time will tell.

*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of ‘The Nation’ and his articles can be found at www.malindawords.blogspot.com

America cannot assert moral authority while Guantánamo remains open

Editorial-Sunday 21 April 2013

For those not charged with any offence, their long detention is a most serious stain on the human rights record of the US

In 2009, defending the promise he made to close Guantánamo Bay, President Barack Obama insisted: "The existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained."

This weekend, the case for the closure of Guantánamo Bay, promised by Obama on his second day in office, has never been more compelling. A hunger strike by the camp's inmates, half of whom had been cleared for release, has underlined the growing desperation of those 166 still detained. Of that number, some 86 had been approved for transfer (while the rest had been earmarked for trial) but have become stuck in a political and legal limbo that has seen such transfers almost completely halted in the last two-and-a-half years. A recent report by a bipartisan panel of experts has condemned both the conditions there and the use of abusive interrogation techniques.

One of those trapped in this Kafkaesque nightmare is Briton Shaker Aamer. As the Observer reports today, despite a skeleton deal that could pave the way for his release to Saudi Arabia, Aamer rightly insists he should be allowed to return to the UK to rejoin his family.

After 11 years, it is hard to see the rationale for keeping Guantánamo open. It is a fundamental principle of open and democratic societies that those accused or suspected of serious crimes should be submitted to due legal process within a reasonable time period. Indefinite detention of those cleared of any crime, or if those authorities have insufficient evidence to prosecute, is a gross violation of human rights.

The US government's decision last month that Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and an al-Qaida spokesman, should be tried in a federal court rather than before a military commission at Guantánamo has underlined the principle that domestic courts are the best place to try terrorism suspects. Indeed, as Human Rights Watch has pointed out, military commissions in Guantánamo have been proved unreliable, unable to deliver real justice and subject to changes in rules and bogged down in procedure.

For those who have not been charged with any offence, their long detention has come to be one of the most serious stains on the human rights record of the US, amounting to open-ended and indefinite incarceration without charge or due process. As David Ignatius argued compellingly in the Washington Post yesterday, there are strong arguments, too, for releasing and transferring Taliban detainees back to Afghanistan. The CIA's assessment is that even if those individuals returned to the battlefield, it would have no net impact on the military situation, while it might provide impetus in talks with the Taliban.

The reason that Guantánamo remains operational, and with so many stuck within it, has nothing to do with practical issues concerning release or transfer or how some should be tried. Instead, those trapped in Guantánamo are the victims of a political conflict, specifically between Congress and the White House over plans to house and try alleged terrorists in the US. Congress cut off funds to move accused men to the US for detention and insisted on onerous conditions for the transfer of those remaining out of the US, including elaborate arrangements for monitoring.

Obama too must be held responsible for this continuing disgrace. It was the president, after all, who signed into law the National Defence Authorisation Act, jeopardising his ability to close Guantánamo after threatening to veto it.

As Amnesty International and others have pointed out, despite the ban on US funds for transfers contained in the NDAA, another clause, Section 1028, does give Obama the broad right to resolve some cases – such as Shaker Aamer's – whose return has been requested by the UK government. The resolution of the Shaker Aamer case, as Amnesty argued earlier this year, would be a symbolic step that would demonstrate that Obama has not abandoned his commitment to close Guantánamo.

The well-documented deployment of sustained and abusive interrogation techniques, sexual humiliation and extreme violence in Guantánamo is something that demeans America. That an American president has allowed these depraved practices to continue on his watch is more shocking still. Until America closes Guantánamo Bay, it cannot, as it likes to, assert its moral authority over the rest of the world.