MGG Pillai Commentary View

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'The object of torture is torture'

WHEN THE UNITED STATES adopted, in the wake of the jet plane attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on Sept 11, 2001, detentions without trial for those suspected of terrorist attacks, the then Malaysian prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, was ecstatic.

Now that Washington adapted it with alacrity, it proved that Malaysia had been right all along to have detentions without trial with interrogations and investigations in secret. It would put the fear of God into the terrorists, it would give the authorities the right to nip conspiracies and anti-national threats in the bud. All it ensured, in the light of the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison scandals, was that it was a licence to make torture an important 'persuader' in the investigations.

When human beings have control of their fellow men and women without recourse to law and oversight, torture is inevitable. It does not matter which country it is, communist or non-communist, democratic or undemocratic, dictatorship or democracy, torture is routine in investigations. Torture is a dirty word, so weasel words are found to replace it. The authorities use torture in the physical sense: that the prisoners are not beaten up or otherwise physically attacked. But torture comes in many forms, sizes and shapes.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and the Foreign Minister, Dato' Seri Syed Hamid Albar, insist there is no torture of ISA detainees. The deputy Internal Security Minister, Dato' Noh Omar, says he has visited the detainees, and they all told him that they have repented, and want nothing more than be reunited with their families. He says the recent allegation by suspected Islamic terrorists of torture is a desperate attempt to link their plight with those in Iraq and Afghanistan subject to brutal torture.

But can such allegations be brushed away so cavalierly as the authorities have done? Talk to the hundreds of Malaysians detained under the ISA, many who went on to high positions in public life, and in private they would tell you of the horrific treatment they got in the first 60 days of their incarceration, when they had no access to the outside world, kept in shabby and unhygienic conditions, ill-treated, humiliated, and otherwise made to remember that if they did not co-operate, there would be hell to pay. They are told what to say when they meet their families, or cabinet ministers or human rights organisations. If they did not, they would have to answer for it when they returned to their cells.

Humanising elements withdrawn

The British formally introduced torture in the Emergency Regulations of 1948, the forerunner of the Internal Security Act. Once, those detained had civic rights, could challenge their detention in the courts, even force the authorities to answer to charges of torture.

But in independent Malaysia, the humanising elements of an otherwise unconscionable law is progressively withdrawn so that one detained under the ISA has no rights whatsoever. He is at the mercy of his captors. It gets worse by the year. It is only the ministers who insist that this gratuitous violence does not exist. How could the Inspector-General of Police no less take the law into his own hands, and beat the manacled and blindfolded just detained former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim to an inch of his life. The police then insisted he was well. It took a royal commission to reveal the torture inflicted on him.

Dr Mahathir even suggested that Anwar could well have inflicted the damage upon himself to draw attention to himself! If the police and the government can lie when a high profile detainee is involved, why would it not if lesser people are involved?

The object of torture is to break an individual down, humiliate him, make him lose his self-respect, so that when he is released he is a shadow of his own self. His self-respect makes him forget the humiliations and nastiness he suffered, indeed demands it.

I have not met a single ISA detainee who was not tortured in detention. When one is detained under the ISA, one is not going on a holiday. One is about to be broken down. The aim soon becomes not to find out what one knows, but so he would remember the nastiness done to him so that he would think twice before he challenged the government on his release.

I know one man, a reporter now in well-deserved retirement, who on his release from detention made it a point to call on his tormentors in detention during the Ramadan festival. They would dread his coming, for when he is asked who he is, he would point to the host and say he was tortured by him.

The Portuguese, during the military government in the 1970s, would break their detainees such that when they are released, they would not return to their families, but disappear to start a new life if they could, so humiliating had been their experience.

Soften up detainees

The Malaysian government insists it does not employ torture, but only such techniques as sleep deprivation, interrogation at all hours of the day and night, and other tactics to soften up the detainees. But in the modern definition, they come under the classification of torture. It has been used over the ages in forms so brutal that it would churn one's stomach and as refined as modern psychological methods that leaves no physical scars, but with the mind scarred for life.

If you take the Malaysian government at its word, you come to one inescapable conclusion: that every other country in the world uses torture in the course of interrogation; Malaysia alone does not. This is laughable. Especially when policemen use third degree methods when they arrest suspects involved in a crime.

A friend's son on a trip to Genting was offered a sports car at a quarter of its value. Deals like this are common there. He bought it. It turned out to have been a stolen car. He was arrested, bastinadoed before they learnt he was telling the truth. He was released without even an apology.

So, why is the Malaysian government so upset at this allegations of torture? The government is embarrassed at this linkage with Abu Ghraib. No government has yet learnt how to deal with embarrassment. Not the United States. Not Britain. Certainly not Malaysia. And it shows. But make no mistake about it: The object of torture is torture, as George Orwell, said in his book "1984".

[This is my Chiaroscuro column today, 26 May 2004, in malaysiakini]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com