openDemocracy has performed a valuable service by publishing a series of articles and analyses about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal from a variety of perspectives including first reactions by Maï Ghoussoub, Douglas Murray, and Laila Kazmi, an examination of the roots of torture by Isabel Hilton, and the recent series of articles written by John Packer, Hazel Carby, Rouzbeh Pirouz, Max Gordon, and Allen Feldman.
In understanding the full range of meanings generated by Abu Ghraib, however, one important perspective needs to be included: how the events appear to ordinary Arab citizens. For them, the horrors inflicted in the prison are not primarily about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. They are, rather, about autocratic power structures that have controlled, humiliated, and ultimately dehumanised Arab citizens for most of the past century of modern statehood whether those powers were European colonial administrations, indigenous Arab elites, occupying Israeli forces, or the current AngloAmerican managers of Iraq. As such, a comprehensive and honest analysis of the Abu Ghraib scandal should address a wider set of issues than has so far been the case in the international media and political institutions.
openDemocracy writers examine the multiple dimensions of the Abu Ghraib horror from a variety of perspectives: race, pornography, history, geopolitics, torture, and the impact on the Arab world. For our full debate, click here
The American, Arab and international debate about the scandal has been conducted along two dimensions: militarylegal and politicalhistorical. The first addresses the issues of how American soldiers, national guards, prison officers and security forces are trained; how oversight and responsibility along the armed forces chain of command works; and what appropriate accountability and punishment measures should operate in cases of abuse. The second examines broader politicalhistorical issues of Americas tradition of racism at home and abroad, and its rather novel neocolonial adventure in Iraq today.
These two dimensions have generated important insights and understandings, extensive (though far from complete) official investigations, and a limited number of prosecutions of lowerranking personnel. But this still leaves two significant issues out of the debate, each deserving of more attention by Arabs and Americans alike: universality and power.
A dehumanising history
The first issue relates to the very root of the moral and political values that have caused such widespread shock at the behaviour of the American personnel at Abu Ghraib. The fact is that the incidence of abuse of Arab, Iranian, Turkish and other middleeastern citizens by their compatriots, under various political regimes, is far greater than that by foreign jailers. Thus, Abu Ghraib raises the question of the criteria of judgment of such abuse.
In short, the standards of what is considered acceptable or criminal behaviour must be the same in all cases, and these standards must be applied equally and diligently to prisons and their guards in Arab and other middle eastern countries. Otherwise, Arabs and others in the region run the moral and political risk of ignoring or even inadvertently legitimising the same sort of whimsical, discriminating, and self servingly selective behaviour for which we have so passionately and correctly criticised the United States, Great Britain, Israel and others for decades.
In recent decades, middle eastern and international human rights organisations have documented atrocious conditions and violations of prisoners at facilities throughout the region. These include innumerable cases of torture, death and disappearance. The abuse of power at Abu Ghraib, which some suggest is an aberration of American procedures and values, is the norm in many middleeastern prisons. Yet rarely, if ever, are (for example) Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, or Pakistani military and police authorities held accountable for the regular abuse, injury or death of prisoners in their charge. The very few cases when such charges are made and investigations carried out are the exceptions that verify the rule.
This contrasts with the lone positive element in the Abu Ghraib incidents, namely the continuing investigation, trial, and punishment of those Americans who have been accused of direct responsibility for the offensive deeds. The mechanisms of formal accountability that have been here applied by the American political and legal system are after the fact correctives for racist and criminal behaviour, and they do not always catch or punish all the guilty parties. But even such formal mechanisms, let alone their practical implementation, are largely absent in most Arab and middle eastern lands.
The conclusion is plain: we in the middle east are fully entitled vehemently to admonish Americans, Britons, Israelis and others for their misconduct, but we are also challenged to redress the gross deficiencies of our own political culture.
The second neglected issue is what Abu Ghraib reveals about the regional political and power context in the middle east. Poor prison conditions, human rights abuses, and associated deficiencies in the administration of justice and due process reflect a problem that goes far wider than the conditions inside prisons or the conduct of their guards: the distribution of power and the lack of political accountability throughout most of the middle east.
In this light, Abu Ghraib perpetuates a tradition of heavy handed power structures that routinely control, constrain and ultimately humiliate the average Arab citizen. Such abuse of state power in the hands of small elites can be analysed within the contexts of racism, colonialism, imperialism, oligarchy, petty tyranny, Orientalism or similar painful paradigms; but its ultimate impact is to make ordinary citizens feel marginalised in the face of the governing structures of their own lands, and even more helpless in relation to foreign authorities that have influence in the region.
Also in openDemocracy, Martin Matutík reflects on the moral dilemmas raised by the United Statess new kind of engagement with the world; see Americas prayer (June 2004)
America and Israel: a pattern of oppression
It is noteworthy that throughout the Arab world a common, almost instantly reflexive reaction to the Abu Ghraib revelations was to refract the images through awareness of how Palestinians in Israeli jails are also routinely abused and humiliated. The specifics of the sexual depravities and use of dogs, for example, may not be identical in Abu Ghraib and, say, the Maskobiya prison in West Jerusalem where many Palestinians are held by Israeli authorities; but the Abu Ghraib scandal has reinforced the broad tendency to see the systematic degradation, demeaning and shaming of Arab prisoners as a common feature of both Israeli and American behaviour in the region.
The prevalent Arab tendency to connect and strongly to oppose American and Israeli conduct is a vital key in understanding the deeper mindset that drives many aspects of mass political attitudes and conduct throughout the Arab world. Abu Ghraib, in the final analysis, is for most Arabs not only about American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners; it is a symbol of the much wider, older abuse of Arab citizens as a whole by power structures dominated by western armies, Israeli occupiers, and indigenous Arab dictators and of their own sense of themselves as disempowered, colonised subjects.
The increasingly frequent analogies between the Abu Ghraib incidents and the lynching of American black people over the last century explored in openDemocracy by Hazel Carby are apt at the level of victimhood, for there are indeed powerful parallels between the mindsets of many Arabs today and those of American blacks in the 1950s.
The general sense of helplessness, powerlessness and dehumanisation among ordinary Arabs is almost a perfect reflection of the Invisible Man of Ralph Ellisons classic 1952 novel which depicted the anguish of American blacks whose lives were invisible to the white society that dominated them. Like American blacks in the pre civil rights era, Arabs trace a consistent thread of racism in their adversaries: from the heavyhanded attitudes in evidence at Abu Ghraib, through the brutal force Israelis have used against Palestinians since 1948, to assaults rained down by American forces against Iraqi citizens in Fallujah, Samarra, and other Iraqi cities today.
The road beyond Abu Ghraib
The antidote to racism and occupation is the same as it has always been: resistance that aims for liberation. It is not surprising, therefore, that most Arabs silently cheer the armed resistance against the Anglo American occupying forces in Iraq and against Israeli occupying forces in the West Bank and Gaza; nor that politically Islamist and other non violent opposition movements that challenge existing Arab regimes attract large followings in their own societies.
It is not even surprising that a small number of Arabs who have been utterly dehumanised by their modern experience have reacted in inhuman and criminal ways. This is the larger, uglier, mutually demeaning context of Abu Ghraib. American soldiers have replaced Iraqi wardens in an Arab jail where prisoner abuse had been common for decades; in reply, some enraged Arabs in Iraq have killed and decapitated American citizens and those of other nationalities.
The antidote to this horrendous cycle of racism, violence, degradation and murderous revenge can only be to replace the rule of the gun with the rule of law and systems of political and personal accountability equally applied to all: in Palestine, Iraq and all other middleeastern countries.
