The torturable and the untorturable

Interestingly, the Urabi Revolt (see my previous post) was preceded by a period which saw a great increase in literacy and a raising of public political consciousness in Egypt. Attention is often drawn to the political satire newspaper Abu Nazzara Zarqa (The Man in the Blue Spectacles, 1877, pictured right). It was published by Ya'qub Sanu', an Egyptian of Jewish background; and written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic rather than classical Arabic, so as to be understandable to all. It's lampooning of the establishment and of European control greatly annoyed the authorities. Sanu's printing operations were frequently interfered with.


Something similar has happened in our time, though on a gigantic scale. The internet has come to Egypt. Egypt now has 160,000 bloggers in Arabic and other languages, some of whom have been arrested and detained by Mubarak's government for their dissenting views, as Wikileaks revealed on Friday 28th January 2011. The American Embassy's leaked report emphasised the role of blogs in opening up public discussion on previously taboo subjects:

"One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality, to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses... Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly."

This morning on the way to work, I was reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. The British spy protagonist, Mr Wormold, is playing a game of checkers with the Havana Chief of Police, Captain Segura. Segura is in charge of torturing prisoners at the police station: if you will, a small-time equivalent of Egypt's newly appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, left (kudos to Jane Mayer for flagging up his role in the US's rendition to torture programme in the New Yorker). Segura proposes that there are two classes of people: the torturable, and the untorturable:

'Did you torture him?'
Captain Segura laughed. 'No. He doesn't belong to the torturable class.'

'I didn't know there were class-distictions in torture.'

'Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea... Dr Hasselbacher does not be long to the torturable class.'

'Who does?'
'The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable... One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don't recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons... I see that you have enlarged your staff.'
'I need someone to superintend accounts. Lopez is reliable.'
'Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.'
They laughed, drinking daiquiries. It was easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.

I would suggest that what makes the poor torturable is their inability to communicate and publicise their grievances to a community that would come to their aid. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect to their lack of power. Unlike in earlier, more brutal periods of history, as a rule torture does not occur in public, but hidden away in dark underground chambers and the like. This tendency declares just as strongly as article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that torture is no longer commonly considered acceptable. The nations who claim to be good humanists can only accept its perpetuation by themselves or those over whom they have influence if they are credibly able to claim ignorance of it. And surely, on a human level, few would be comfortable with the routine rape and brutalisation of other human beings, if they were baldly confronted with it?

Internet access has changed this. Easy access to means of communication has meant that the torturable are able to publicise their plight. Fewer people are able to ignore it, but not only that: evidence of injustice can reach those who oppose it easily. The same free communication furthermore allows those interested groups to rally together to take action.

Anyone who cares to can now read about the "literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone" in this leaked American cable. The case of bus-driver Imad El-Kebir, who was beaten and raped by police, "became notorious" after cell-phone footage of his assault was posted on YouTube. This was, the cable reads "a turning point in influencing the government to permit the sentencing of police officers".

The picture on the right is of a young businessman named Khaled Said. He was (allegedly) beaten to death by police officers in Alexandria this summer (extremely gruesome photographs of what happened to him are easily discoverable online - be warned, these cannot be unseen). He has become a rallying figure in the Egyptian uprising: cartoons circulate on Twitter portraying the protests as his revenge: January 25th would have been his 29th birthday. As Newsweek has pointed out, Iran's internet martyr was a young woman named Neda; Tunisia's was Mohamed Bouazizi.

That is why the Mubarak regime unplugged the internet when the unrest started. They knew very well what was catalysing the unrest. But their plan actually backfired: with no Twitter feed to follow, people got out onto the streets to find out what was going on. It's not enough to simply blog about injustices. To force change, the people have to actually go out and agitate for it, like they're doing right now in Tahrir Square.