Amnesty International: The Human Rights Crusade
There are 10,000 political prisoners in Russia, according to Amnesty International. There are 5000 in Chile, 4000 in Argentina, 5000 in Cuba, 5000 in Uruguay. There are 100,000 political prisoners in Indonesia, some of them in jail since 1965. There are untold thousands in Cambodia, where as much as a quarter of the entire population has been murdered since the Khmer Rouge took over two years ago. There are prisoners throughout Vietnam, in black, white and Arab Africa. There are prisoners in Syria and Israel, Czechoslovakia and both Chinas, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. A good guess would be 500,000 political prisoners throughout the world – far too many to keep track of, too many to care about, too many to help.
So start with one. Zinovy Krasivski, poet and Ukrainian nationalist, probably in his mid-40s, now in his tenth year as a political prisoner. His parents are dead, perhaps killed during the war, no one is quite sure. He has no brothers or sisters, at least none are known. A member of the Ukrainian community in New York says his wife wants nothing to do with him. She is reported to have denounced him at a factory meeting.
Krasivski was convicted of violating a law which proscribes anti-Soviet agitation or propaganda. That was back in 1967. In 1971, apparently while in the Perm labor camp in the Ural Mountains, Krasivski further angered the authorities and they transferred him to a prison psychiatric hospital. He did not prosper there. A year ago a member of the Ukrainian community in New York learned that he was sufficiently weak, depressed and ill to justify alarm for his life. The Soviet authorities, who are not indifferent to their international reputation, transferred Krasivski again, this time to an ordinary psychiatric hospital in Lviv in the Ukraine. He is still there, a perfectly sane man incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for a “crime” which, stripped of all legal persiflage, boils down to the writing of inconvenient poems.
The facts about Krasivski, fragmentary as they are, come from Yadja Zeltman, a 32-year-old woman who helped form an Amnesty International adoption group in New York five years ago. Amnesty’s International Secretariat in London assigned Krasivski – then little more than a name – to Zeltman’s group late last summer. Since then the group has been trying to contact Krasivski and interest people in his case. Ultimately they hope to free him.
The theory behind Amnesty International’s work for political prisoners is simple: you start with a name. Amnesty people are not innocents. They know that political oppression is as old as history; that there is not much to choose between left- and right-wing regimes where the taking of political prisoners is concerned; that almost every country in the world is guilty of political oppression and those which aren’t at the moment probably soon will be; that the hearts of officials are never harder than where political enemies are concerned. Amnesty people have their moments of cold despondency when it seems men never learn, things never change, oppression is eternal. But in the years since Amnesty was founded in Britain in 1961 the organization has learned there is a great deal in a name.
If a small group of people, say a dozen or so, can learn the name of a prisoner, the place where he is held, the addresses of relatives, the names and addresses of officials who might be cajoled or pressured into intervening on his behalf, then they can do a great deal for that individual. Occasionally they can even get him out of prison, but it takes imagination, perseverance and the discipline to write endless “courteously worded letters,” in Amnesty’s phrase, to officials as responsible for the crimes in their countries as Eichmann was for the crimes in his. Some Amnesty people grow to find this uncongenial and drop out. But the rest have learned to neglect broad questions of culpability to concentrate on the plight of specific individuals, and they are the ones who write letters, sign petitions, demonstrate in front of embassies, send care packages and, from time to time, actually get someone freed.
It is the individual volunteers in adoption groups who form the bedrock which supports Amnesty’s pyramidal structure. The adoption groups are organized into national sections, which in turn report to Amnesty’s International Secretariat in London. The organization’s roughly $1 million annual budget is provided by the national sections, each of which is assessed a fixed sum based on the number of its adoption groups. The national sections raise funds in much the same way from adoption groups and individual contributors.
Amnesty’s work with prisoners begins with the meticulous documentation of individual cases by the 80-person research section in London. In most cases two separate confirmations are required before the researchers will consider a case established, and their reputation for credibility is so solid that many governments, including this country’s, depend on Amnesty for most of what they know about human rights violations throughout the world. Documenting cases is relatively easy in partially open societies such as Chile and all but impossible in North Korea or Cambodia, which means that relatively few of the world’s half-million political prisoners are likely to get help from Amnesty. From its files of documented cases the International Secretariat assigns three prisoners to each of Amnesty’s 1600 adoption groups, generally choosing one from a Western country, one from a Soviet bloc country and one from a country in the Third World. The reason for this self-conscious balance is to emphasize the need for accepted minimum standards of political behavior whatever the system.
Amnesty is committed solely to the premise that human rights should not be subject to the whims or exigencies of the state. In this light the single Amnesty adoption group in Russia is not a failure although its members are harassed, one of its leaders is in Siberia, and it has failed to free its adopted prisoners in Mexico, Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka. Instead, its very existence proves Amnesty is not “anti-Soviet” or “procommunist” as embarrassed governments of the right or left variously try to claim. Amnesty tries to wean the world’s conscience from the ancient notion that certain sorts of governments–those which must deal with “exceptional circumstances” or are confronted with particularly numerous “enemies” – deserve “understanding” and “sympathy.”
That is twaddle, of course, but it is twaddle with deep roots. Leftist regimes cite their ruthless “class enemies” and the exigent demands of revolution, etc. etc. Fidel Castro, for example, imprisoned a disenchanted former lieutenant named Huber Matos in 1959, originally for slandering his government by calling it “communist.”
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