Back in 2003, when Steven Den Beste was cranking out 5,000+ word blog posts on a daily basis, he wrote a powerful essay on Amnesty International’s post-9/11 credibility gap. Six years later, based on their apparent kowtowing to Muammar Gaddafi in the wake of Libyan dissident Fathi Eljahmi’s death, it appears little has changed within the organization.
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Over to him …
The letter from Fathi Eljahmi’s brother evokes sympathy, but it’s not clear what, exactly, his complaint is. And the self-righteous finger-pointing of the right wing makes (characteristically) even less sense.
Eljahmi was arrested several times and eventually imprisoned on trumped-up charges, in violation of basic rights. Somehow he died in custody, though even his brother does not directly accuse the Libyan government of murder. None of this is justifiable, and his family would understandably be anguished by it. But no one explains how this is Amnesty International’s fault.
Michael Rubin pens an oh-so-worldly and entirely speculative tale of how everyone but him is too afraid to confront repressive regimes. Mohammed Eljahmi complains that Amnesty let his brother down in some way. But what did either of them expect Amnesty could have done in this situation? Why is the right wing – usually so eager to heap abuse on Libya – now laying the crimes of that regime at, of all places, Amnesty International‘s door?
Amnesty had been monitoring Eljahmi’s case since his first arrest. They and others lobbied on his behalf. It had some effect at first, but not enough in the end. That seems rather obviously to be the responsibility of the government that arrested him and let him die, not of those who worked to get him freed. Does anybody think Amnesty had it in their power to simply order his release?
Mohammed Eljahmi notes, in his own letter of complaint, that they attempted to intervene – his complaint seems to be just that they didn’t devote enough time or attention to this one case. He quotes an Amnesty official who notes that there was a lot of attention paid to Eljahmi and that they had many thousands of other cases to work on, but he is still not satisfied, and the right wing, with a convenient lack of critical appraisal, takes that at face value as proof that Amnesty deliberately abandoned someone they did not have the power to save in the first place.
We can be sympathetic that Mohammed Eljahmi wanted more for his own brother, but how does that translate into a moral obligation on Amnesty’s part to accept his personal priorities as their own? What level of effort, in addition to the years of effort they did provide, would have been enough, and why is the victim’s brother – again, a sympathetic figure, but likely not someone who can view the issue dispassionately – the right person to decide that? If Amnesty had done as he asked, and diverted resources from the thousands who have no one to speak for them to one person who had, in addition to Amnesty themselves, the US Secretary of State, would the families of those others in need have no grounds for complaint? When, inevitably, one of them wrote their own bitter letter to Amnesty, complaining that their family member had been abandoned at the insistence of a better-connected darling of the right wing, would National Review also take that as evidence of Amnesty’s perfidy? Does Michael Rubin have a list of the people he would like Amnesty to ignore in favor of the ones he reserves his sympathy for, and would he get off their case if they complied – or simply find a new reason to criticize the people who take on this massive and thankless burden because they did no better than Condoleeza Rice was able to, in her official capacity, in the same cause?
Mohammed Eljahmi and his family – not least his deceased brother – are victims of a terrible tragedy. But to take their anguish and dissatisfaction as proof that the people who tried to help them, and not the people who committed this crime, are responsible for the outcome is just another cynical right-wing hack job.