Comment

Gita Sahgal had to leave Amnesty International last week after questioning its association with a former detainee of Guantanamo Bay. Now, in an exclusive article for DNA, Sahgal asks human rights groups to introspect about the dangers of legitimising a violent ideology in their eagerness to find poster boys for their campaigns.

For the past two months, the concerns that I expressed publicly about Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg have received attention in the world’s media and sparked discussion wherever human rights people gather, from board meetings to coffee shops. In some parts of the world, there is bewilderment — who is this Gita Sahgal who suddenly criticised her employer? And who is Moazzam Begg?

But in the one organisation where debate should be most vigorous, that is in Amnesty International itself, there appears to be total silence. This could be due to apathy towards the key questions of the day: what does the universality of rights mean? And who controls its meaning?

Unlike many NGOs, Amnesty International is a membership organisation with a direct role for ordinary members — not only to take action to address human rights abuses but also to be able to consider some of the great issues of the day and have some say in what stands should be taken.

Today, I speak to Amnesty International members and supporters as an outsider; to ask you to do for yourselves what you have so often done for others. You need to call for public accountability. You need to start asking clear questions on how the relationship with Moazzam Begg grew until he was regarded as an indispensable advocate. And whether, as I and others have alleged, there were indeed grounds for concern and that the link with Begg should be ended.

Platform for jihadism
One of the issues at stake is whether there is any evidence. Indeed, the whole debate calls into question the nature of what constitutes evidence. Amnesty International’s senior leadership at first refused to say whether he was a human rights advocate, in spite of the fact that the organisation had been closely associated with him. Now, shockingly, they defend his views as well as his presence on Amnesty’s platforms.

Moazzam Begg is a British citizen who went to Afghanistan during the Taliban regime. But long before he went, he was under scrutiny by the British authorities. Just as his detention without trial in Guantanamo was not justified, his politics and the dangers of legitimising him by giving him greater visibility and respectability should not be justified either.

His links with Amnesty International seem to have been developed through the Counter Terror With Justice campaign to close Guantanamo, in the face of strong advice not to develop such strong links with him. Even today, after months of intense media scrutiny, the nature and extent of the links have not really been established and ordinary members and section staff of Amnesty International need to look carefully at what they know about Begg and the organisation he represents, Cageprisoners.

Have you helped to legitimise Cageprisoners by naming it a leading human rights organisation as several sections have done? This is a major accolade and a global platform for what would otherwise have been an obscure outfit devoted to the promotion of those detainees and convicted prisoners from groups that are associated with al-Qaeda and other exponents of the ideology that is known as salafi jihadism.

The perfect victim
As far back as 2008, I had prepared a note on Begg to assist a discussion at a board meeting. It was my view that Begg should never have been invited to be a speaker on an Amnesty platform in the first place, but I was not asked for my opinion. Instead, the only thing that I was asked to do was to provide information that could serve to contextualise him more honestly.

Even those of my colleagues who were raising questions were far too hesitant to ask for anything other than a more honest introduction which did not simply paint Begg as a charity worker in Afghanistan at the time of 9/11. Begg had become a hero of the Amnesty movement. It was dangerous to challenge his status as a perfect victim. And far too dangerous to demand that he be stood down as a speaker.

None of the information in the note I prepared came from Amnesty sources, as they have done little work on the kinds of individuals and networks involved. No Amnesty International report exists on European and North American radicalisation of young Muslims. No information was drawn from any source where duress of any kind was even a possibility.

My own opposition to torture, quite apart from Amnesty International’s policy, would have made this abhorrent. I did not read the central section of Begg’s book, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey To Guantanamo And Back, because I was not seeking in any way to challenge his account of his experiences in Guantanamo.

Instead, I tried to create a careful picture drawing from the work of two experts on salafi-jihadi politics and practice — who were known to Amnesty International, having spoken at a closed meeting on terrorism, in 2007. The note also quoted heavily from a document called ‘Key Tendencies of the Islamic Right’ in Britain published by Awaaz: South Asia Watch.