csua.org/u/cez -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/17/AR2005061701218.html
More No American 'Gulag' By Pavel Litvinov Saturday, June 18, 2005; Page A19 Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a form er Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantan amo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time." "Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees." The word "gulag" was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administr ation in Stalin's Soviet Union. After publication of Alexander Solzhenit syn's "The Gulag Archipelago," it became a symbol for the system of forc ed-labor camps that have been an integral feature of communist countries . Millions of prisoners confined in the gulag had not been involved in v iolence or committed any crime -- they were there because they belonged to a "wrong" social, national or political group or expressed a "wrong" opinion. The cruelty and scale of the gulag system are described in numerous books , so there is no need to recount them here. By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their con ditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system. For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by US personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not br ought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They w ere supplied by the US administration -- in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiratio n for their violent hatred of the United States. By contrast, Russian author Andrei Sinyavsky, who was sentenced in 1966 t o seven years' forced labor for his writing, was approached one evening soon after his arrival in a labor camp by a prisoner who quietly asked S inyavsky whether he wanted to listen to a recital of the biblical accoun t of the apocalypse. In the light of the furnace flame, one of the men got up and started to recite the biblical passages by heart. When he stopped, the stoker, an old man, said: "And now you, Fyodor, continue." The whole text of the Bible was distributed among these prisoners, ordinary Russians who were spending 10 to 25 years in the gulag for their religio us beliefs. They knew the texts by heart and met regularly to repeat the m so that they would not forget. And this happened in 1967, when the gul ag had become smaller and the Soviet regime milder than it had been unde r Stalin. Amnesty International, with its fact-based, objective and balanced approa ch to the defense of human rights, has been a source of hope for disside nts everywhere. A central idea of Amnesty has been the concept of prison er of conscience as a person who neither uses nor advocates political vi olence. Just to know that you have been adopted as a prisoner of conscie nce, that somewhere in the world there are people who know your name and are working for your release, gives a prisoner hope. When I arrived in the United States after serving my term in Siberian exi le, I met hundreds of dedicated Amnesty activists throughout the country who wrote letters to leaders of world governments demanding the release of prisoners of conscience. This activity created a special solidarity of human rights activists across national borders. Naturally, communist leaders denounced Amnesty as a CIA front, and right-wing dictators dismi ssed its members as communist plotters. It was only natural that Amnesty flourished in the United States and in W estern Europe, where human rights are taken seriously and their defense became an official part of US foreign policy, largely due to the effor ts of President Jimmy Carter. There were heroic attempts to create Amnes ty groups in countries with dictatorial regimes, including the Soviet Un ion, but most of those attempts were crushed by arrests and forced emigr ation. There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain US actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive r egimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its a uthority at risk. US human rights violations seem almost trifling in c omparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi A rabia. The most effective way to criticize US behavior is to frankly acknowled ge that this country should be held to a higher standard based on its ow n Constitution, laws and traditions. We cannot fulfill our responsibilit ies as the world's only superpower without being perceived as a moral au thority. Despite the risks posed by terrorism, the United States cannot indefinitely detain people considered dangerous without appropriate safe guards for their conditions of detention and periodic review of their st atus. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word "gulag" to descr ibe US human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty's credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically bias ed leaders. The writer, who was a dissident active in human rights causes in the Sovi et Union, now lives in the United States.
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