Social Torture. Chris Dolan
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draw attention away from the systemic dimensions and linkages of today's conflicts and violence, and the consequent involvement of multiple actors at all levels. It reinforces the importance of building a picture both of local involvement, and of the true extent of external involvement in supposedly internal dynamics. There is considerable power in the different ways in which Mamdani, Zur and Gilligan are all able to integrate historical, economic, political and socio-psychological factors into their analyses. These readings also underline the value of taking a ‘bottom up’ starting point which ensures that the subjectivities which are silenced by mainstream discourses are heard and inform the counter-narrative.
It was such ‘bottom up’ views which ultimately prompted me to explore the relationships between the situation in northern Uganda and the literature on torture. I was repeatedly struck while working there by how often people referred to what was happening to them as ‘torture’, and as a form of persecution. Many would describe the ‘protected villages’ as ‘concentration camps’, and even talk of a ‘genocide’. Equally, it was very common for people to say ‘we are all traumatised’, and this language of ‘trauma’ had become common currency by the time I was in northern Uganda. UNOCHA, for example, argued that the LRA's practice of abduction had ‘profoundly traumatized the entire population’ (Weeks, 2002: 28), and a consultancy report for NURP II reported that:
…the districts of Gulu and Kitgum were found to be the most affected…It was established that there was only a variation of intensity, otherwise in one way or the other, everybody was found to be traumatised (COWI, 1999; 68).
Initially I dismissed such usages, thinking they were due to English being a second language, or to rhetorical exaggeration in the interests of making a political point. After all, there is nothing unusual about the use of protected villages as a counter-insurgency strategy. Similar strategies were used by the Sandinistas in the mountains of northern Nicaragua, by FRELIMO in the fight against RENAMO in Mozambique, and perhaps most uncomfortably as a point of comparison, by Ian Smith in Rhodesia.3 Moreover, when I asked what people meant by this use of ‘torture’, it turned out to refer to anything from various degrees of beating through being unlawfully detained under gruelling circumstances, to extreme violations such as the mutilations of the LRA. Effectively a whole range of abusive behaviours were being put under the rubric of torture. There seemed little connection between this broad picture of torture, much of which could be seen happening to the population at large in their daily lives, and the more conventional notions of torture as something which sets out to destroy targeted individuals in places well-hidden from the public gaze. And, given that there were instances of abuse which clearly did qualify as torture,4 it seemed there was a danger of diluting the force of the term by seeking to apply it more broadly.
Article 1 of The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, defines torture as
any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.5
Although this definition puts an explicit emphasis on the intentionality of perpetrators, and appears to narrow the possible range of perpetrators to public officials or other persons acting in official capacity, it is in many other respects a broad and wide-reaching one. The phrase ‘for such purposes as’ suggests that while obtaining information, punishment, intimidation and coercion are major objectives of torture, they are not exclusive. The inclusion of suffering ‘for any reason based on discrimination of any kind’ makes the possibilities even broader. And while Article 1 talks of pain or suffering inflicted ‘on a person’ by ‘a public official or other person acting in an official capacity’, in other words implies a focus on individuals, Article 3 of the Convention, which prohibits the refoulement of an asylum seeker ‘where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture’, defines substantial grounds as including ‘flagrant or mass violations of human rights’ (emphasis added).
I therefore increasingly wondered if there were indeed parallels to be drawn between what happens to individuals in torture chambers and what was happening to the population living in the war zone, especially but not exclusively to those people living in the ‘protected villages’. There is nothing in the convention definition which excludes the mass violations of human rights entailed in the forcible displacement of populations, or in the failure to provide physical security and access to basic education and health care, as described in Chapter 5. If these failings could potentially be considered a form of torture, this raised questions around who the actors might be, and how they could have organised and legitimised torture on such a grand scale. It also began to suggest that the protected villages, despite failing in the stated objectives of protection of civilians and counter-insurgency, might be serving a function after all.
When I then turned to the literature on torture I found analyses which, rather than privileging individual intention above all else, incorporated and integrated multiple elements, not least the impacts on victims but also the multiple actors and their roles, the benefits and functions of torture, and the mechanisms used to justify it. As such there were direct conceptual links to some of the ‘building blocks’ of a counter-narrative outlined above, indicating that a non-legal model of torture could and should incorporate elements from the existing literature on today's wars, not least considerations of political economy, social psychology, and discourse analysis.
In seeking to create a counter-narrative which would make explicit these linkages I initially focused on what the literature suggested about the following four elements: impacts of torture, actors, benefits and functions, and justificatory mechanisms.
Impacts
As Melamed et al. point out (1990), ‘Torture is defined not only by the acts committed, but also by the individual's response to these acts’. In other words, it is not always necessary to know who the torturer was, how exactly they did it, or what their precise intentions were, in order to be able to diagnose a victim of torture. In asylum determination procedures, for example, medical examination to corroborate the claims of torture victims may count for more than the account of torture itself.
Diagram 1.1 Key Elements in Identifying Torture
Some of the key states to be found in victims of torture, as summarised by Suedfeld (1990: 3), include debilitation, dependency, dread and disorientation.
Debilitation is the result of the captor deliberately inducing physical and mental weakness. The elements identified by Suedfeld as key to debilitating torture victims are ‘Hunger, fatigue, lack of medical attention, lack of shelter from the elements, lack of sleep, beatings’. Linked to debilitation is a strong element of enforced dependency, both material and psychological. The former arises when victims are unable to meet their own needs, and Suedfeld describes how psychological dependency is created when ‘friendships and lines of authority among prisoners are destroyed, and the prisoner is stripped of status and dignity’. Dread is described by Suedfeld as the state of mind induced in a victim who is kept ‘in a constant state of fear and anxiety’, and a key tactic in this is ‘keeping the prisoner in doubt as to when if ever he or she will be released’. Disorientation is induced by removing the victim's sense of control by making events unpredictable and incomprehensible, a process which seriously hinders the victims’ capacity to develop coping mechanisms (Suedfeld 1990, Melamed et al. 1990: 16). The main tactic to achieve this is to change the treatment of the victim ‘in unpredictable fashion’ (Suedfeld, 1990:3).
While debilitation, dependency, dread and disorientation are the states which torturers seek to induce, evidence of torture can also be found in symptoms